Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  Dima lost paradise when he was drafted into the army. But even during his two years of service, he continued his explorations. He even began writing a novel, “The Brothers Kaganovich.” The book was based on a well-known incident in Lazar Kaganovich’s life. One day Stalin told Kaganovich that there was evidence against Mikhail, Kaganovich’s older brother and the head of the defense industry. Lazar Moiseyevich did not hesitate. “What has to be done must be done,” he said. Mikhail Kaganovich was arrested. He killed himself in his jail cell.

  Late at night, Dima read parts of his manuscript of “The Brothers Kaganovich” to his buddies. A few days later, he discovered the manuscript was missing from his drawer. His officers had confiscated the papers. The next morning he was accused of “insulting Soviet power,” a charge, the officers said, that could lead to a trial and a prison term. Never mind that it had been more than a decade since Kaganovich had been thrown out of the leadership by Khrushchev and reduced to running a concrete factory in the provinces. Never mind that the story of the two brothers was based on fact. These were facts that a young soldier like Private Yurasov had no business knowing. They were, for him, nonfacts. The only way out, the officers said, was to write a letter admitting guilt and begging forgiveness. The Soviet system’s lust for confession had not changed much since the days of the Terror. Dima wrote the letter and considered himself lucky that the incident ended there.

  Back in Moscow, it was not easy at first finding a job once more in the archives. The officials at the Historical Archives Institute never actually accused Dima of a crime or wrongdoing, but they had their suspicions. Dima knew he could not go back there and be allowed access to the spetskhran—the restricted archives. But friends tipped him off to an opening at the archive of the Supreme Court. Somehow, because the secret police apparatus was never quite as efficient as it seemed, he got the job. It was a trove of information that only the highest officials—and the archive workers—could see. In the basements of the Supreme Court were files on two and a half million criminal cases after 1924. Most of the files had not been touched since the moment they had first been shelved.

  “This was it!” Dima said. “These documents were the only proof that a man or a woman had died or lived!”

  Dima worked mainly in a room designed to prevent just the sort of research he had in mind. There were four desks crammed into a tiny office all facing one another; that way no one could do anything without three other people seeing. But still, Dima tried. He accumulated names, facts, the fates of thousands of the lost. After eighteen months he had accumulated 100,000 cards and established a standardized form:

  1. Last name

  2. First name

  3. Middle name

  4. Year of birth

  5. Year of death

  6. Nationality

  7. Party status

  8. Social background

  9. Education

  10. Last place of work and status before arrest

  11. Facts of arrest, repression

  12. Facts of rehabilitation

  But the workplace system of stukachi—informers—finally caught up to Dima. One of the bosses found a book of lists in his desk, and there was a search. Once more, Yurasov’s quest to recover the lost names of history was over. He was fired.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE RETURN OF HISTORY

  Dima had good reason to worry. The new Soviet leadership did not come into power with much public daring.

  Two months after Mikhail Gorbachev took office in March 1985, he delivered a speech celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany. There he proclaimed that “the gigantic work at the front and in the rear was led by the Party, its Central Committee, and the State Defense Committee headed by the General Secretary … Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin.” This passage inspired ringing applause from the members of the Central Committee. In February 1986, Gorbachev told the French newspaper L’Humanité that “Stalinism is a concept made up by opponents of Communism and used on a large scale to smear the Soviet Union and socialism as a whole.” The Party, Gorbachev assured L’Humanité, “had already drawn the proper conclusions from the past.” And finally, in a meeting with Soviet writers in June 1986, Gorbachev said, “If we start trying to deal with the past, we’ll lose all our energy. It would be like hitting people over the head. And we have to go forward. We’ll sort out the past. We’ll put everything in its place. But right now we have to direct our energy forward.”

  Communist Party officials across the country were simply in no mood for full disclosure, even if Gorbachev was. In mid-1987, the local Communist Party boss in Magadan, a city that was once the gateway to the notorious Kolyma labor camps in the far east, told a group of visiting Western reporters that the issue of the Stalinist purges “does not exist here for us. There is no such question.”

  “We lived through that period, and this page in history has been turned,” the official, Aleksandr Bogdanov, said. “It’s not necessary to speak constantly about that.” Nearly three million people were killed in Kolyma alone.

  Gorbachev, who grew up inside the Party bureaucracy, knew well that to lose completely the support of such dinosaurs as Bogdanov—to say nothing of the dinosaurs of the Central Committee, the KGB, the military, and the police—would have meant an immediate end to his leadership. Years later, the liberal mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak, wrote, “A totalitarian system leaves behind it a minefield built into both the country’s social structure and the individual psychology of its citizens. And mines explode each time the system faces the danger of being dismantled and the country sees the prospect of genuine renewal.”

  Whether he relished the task or not, Gorbachev was acting as the keeper of the secrets, the chief curator of the Party’s criminal history. Just as the Soviet regime combined brutality and the technology of the totalitarian state to leave behind tens of millions of corpses and a perverse social order, it also used the completeness of the state, the pervasiveness of every institution from the kindergartens to the secret police, to put an end to historical inquiry. Stalin was not the first leader to enforce a myth of history, only the most successful. As the scholar Walter Laqueur points out, modern historiography, with its demands of integrity and evidence, is less than two hundred years old. Pariscop Villas of the Incan Empire was perhaps the first of many to assemble an official state history on the order of his dictator. In Russia, Nicholas I not only crushed the uprising of the Decembrists, he also tried, with some success, to expunge the threat to his authority from the history books.

  Stalin inherited the tradition of manipulating human memory, and came closest to perfecting it. For the first ten years after the Bolshevik Revolution, there had been a degree of coexistence among historians, a debate between orthodox Marxists and their “bourgeois” opponents. That all came to an end at the first—and last—All-Union Conference of Marxist Historians held in 1928, the same year that Stalin became the unchallenged leader of the Bolshevik state. As the conference made clear, Stalin’s consolidation of power gave him absolute control over history. In 1934, the Communist Party Central Committee issued a decree calling for a strict ideological version of history to become doctrine in all textbooks, schools, universities, and institutes. Stalin himself supervised the writing and publication in a run of fifty million copies of the famous Short Course, an angry ideological tract that was, in the words of historian Genrikh Joffe, “like a hammer pounding nails of falsehood into every schoolboy’s and schoolgirl’s brain.” The Short Course was a textbook of determinist history with all events leading, necessarily, inexorably, to a glorious conclusion: the rightness and might of the present regime. In such a text, history is free of inner struggles, of ambiguity and choice, of absurdity and tragedy. The Big Lie always has an unfailing internal logic. Opponents are revealed as enemies of the state, slaughter as necessity. All is clear, all is expressed in the language of myth and epithet. Stalin’s rivals for power—Bukharin, Trotsky, and the rest—were �
�White Guard pygmies whose strength was no more than that of a gnat.” This was how history—the only history—of the regime was handed down to its subjects. An entire people’s understanding of themselves was meant to dwell within this text. To question or defy the dogma was to admit guilt before the criminal code.

  After Stalin’s death in 1953 and the start of Khrushchev’s attacks on the “personality cult,” The Short Course was no longer the catechism. There was a new text, the revised History of the Communist Party, which made sure to play down the titanic role Stalin had assigned himself. A few historians even seized on the thaw as an opportunity to write more open appraisals of the crimes that Khrushchev had only touched upon. Viktor Danilov, for one, went ahead with work on a pioneering study of the collectivization campaign.

  But when Brezhnev overthrew Khrushchev in 1964 and slowly began to institute a neo-Stalinist movement, the “gray cardinal” of ideology, Mikhail Suslov, turned his attention to history. The pendulum swung hard once more to dogma. Brezhnev and Suslov appointed Sergei Trapeznikov, a Party historian-apparatchik, as the head of the Central Committee’s Department of Science and Educational Establishments, putting him in charge, in effect, of every history textbook and school lesson from Estonia to Sakhalin Island. To make sure the “thaw” had been thoroughly eliminated from historical studies, Trapeznikov banned Danilov’s study of collectivization from publication. In the true Stalinist tradition, Trapeznikov saw collectivization as necessary and just. Trapeznikov decided that the glory of collectivization required a responsible historian. He appointed himself.

  So complete was the Communist Party’s hold over the study of history that nearly all the historical works of any value written in the Soviet Union were by dissidents: Roy Medvedev’s Marxist study of Stalin, Let History Judge; Mikhail Gefter’s essays on Stalinism; and, far greater, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “literary investigation” of the camps in The Gulag Archipelago. Medvedev and Gefter, despite their devotion to the Revolution and Lenin, were cast to the margins of Soviet society and put under constant watch by the KGB. Brezhnev’s attempt to return to Stalin a measure of his former stature would not tolerate apostasy. Solzhenitsyn’s trespasses were far greater. He exposed the inherent illegitimacy of the regime and every Soviet leader including Lenin. This could not be tolerated. In 1974, Solzhenitsyn became the first man forcibly exiled from the country since Trotsky.

  The repression of dissident writing and study was but a small part of the state apparatus that controlled history. Trapeznikov made sure that the Academy of Sciences, the Institute of History, the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, the universities, the journals, and the schools were all free of “other-thinking people.” Balts or Uzbeks or Ukrainians could not dare suggest that their histories or cultures were somehow different from Russian and Soviet history. That would undermine the myth of a common Soviet fate and Soviet man. All potentially explosive issues, from Lenin’s dissolution of the popularly elected Constituent Assembly just after the Revolution to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, required a stock fairy tale and a neutralized nonlanguage to prevent even the hint of debate or “other thinking.” When it came to the invasion of Afghanistan, for instance, historians wrote of “internationalist duty” and the “invitation” from “socialist brethren”—or they did not write at all.

  “Only a fool or an ideologue would even think about making the study of Soviet history his profession,” said Sergei Ivanov, the Byzantine scholar. “Anyone with a genuine interest in history and a sense of honesty made sure to stay as far away from the Soviet period as possible. That’s why the only hints of criticism you could read in our scholarship were analogies or metaphors, historians writing about the fall of Constantinople or the French Revolution or the rise of fascism and at the same time providing a subtle undertone that maybe a few people would understand. But if you really made Soviet history your field, you were sure to lose—one way or another.” Small wonder then that the most effective spokesman, later on, for a radical reform in the study of Soviet history would be Yuri Afanasyev, who had been schooled almost too well in Party politics but whose specialty had been the history of France.

  Moscow was home to many scholars of the Soviet period—not only Medvedev and Gefter and Afanasyev, but also professional ideologues, cynics, and liars. I spent an astonishing evening at Moscow State University with the head of the history department, Yuri Kukushkin. For hours, Kukushkin, one of the most celebrated time-servers in his profession, a man with close connections to the Central Committee and unusual access to Western books and Soviet archives, went on about how he had had “absolutely no idea” that Stalin’s collectivization campaign had been so “costly.” Everything in his voice and manner appealed for sympathy, as if he, too, had somehow been a closet dissident.

  “I am afraid if I try to speak about what I feel inside, I will fail,” Kukushkin said. “Bitterness prevails. If only one man could do it all. If we had access to the documents. We worked in a situation that was like a chemist assigned to make a discovery, cure a disease, but he is only allowed to use the chemicals assigned to him by the keeper of the laboratory. The truth is, I didn’t know anyone who knew the real facts and consciously twisted them.”

  But for all his righteous desire to do the right thing, Kukushkin still wanted controls, he wanted the “right people” to do the scholarly work. “Of course we need balance in our studies, but now we are pouring nothing but sewage on Lenin’s bald head,” he said. “I am sure our state will survive this. I’m sure Lenin will, too. But if a people no longer believe in the future, if they can only see darkness in their common past, then they will go into a state of spiritual dystrophy, and I am not sure we can cure this. In order to inspire faith, we have to show not only the filth and the crime and the blood in our history, but also what there was to be proud of. We are a great and mighty state. We repelled foreign assailants. We must be proud of this. As a man and as a historian, I am concerned that we do not annihilate ourselves spiritually.”

  Courtesy of Trapeznikov, the academies and universities had been stocked with countless Kukushkins. But there were also men and women like Genrikh Joffe, who saw themselves somehow as honest though they knew all too well that the system was too strong, that it mocked their petty attempts to undermine or fool it. Joffe, the author of many books about the February Revolution and the Romanov dynasty, was in his early sixties, “so I was too young to have suffered through the worst, deadly assaults on historians under Stalin.” But he did receive the standard Stalinist education, the endless drilling in The Short Course by scared and ignorant teachers.

  “That was our world, the structure we lived in,” he said one afternoon. “There was a slight euphoria in the postwar years, a slight thaw, but in 1949, 1950, they accused me of being a ‘preacher of bourgeois ideology.’ Whatever that meant. It turned out that two friends of mine—friends!—had stolen a couple of my notebooks. And in my notes on some lecture, I had written in the margin saying, ‘They must think we are idiots to believe all this.’ Nothing more. Just a private moment of frustration and doubt. Later on, I couldn’t find my notebooks and thought I’d probably lost them somewhere. I didn’t pay it much mind. But the next time I saw them was when I had to appear at a public meeting in front of one hundred people, students and friends at the university, the Komsomol committee people and all the rest. All my so-called friends were suddenly avoiding me as we walked into the hall. And then, from the podium, the Communist Party secretary pointed at me and cried out, ‘Look who sits here before us! Joffe! He thinks you are all idiots!’ ”

  For his sin, Joffe paid a relatively small price. He was sent to teach in the provincial city of Kostroma until after Stalin’s death.

  Back in Moscow, Joffe worked at the Lenin Library and began working on his books. “There were certain small things you could do to make yourself feel at least a little honest,” he said. “One technique was to introduce foreign sources and then make sure you criticized the ‘bourgeois f
alsifiers.’ I am not sure now that I am ashamed of that. I did manage to amass a lot of material on the February Revolution. Maybe, if I’m very lucky, some readers might have gotten the sense that there was more to the February Revolution than just being an opening act for the October Revolution. Maybe they got the sense that it was the moment that overthrew the monarchy and flirted with a kind of democracy, however weak. But I doubt it.

  “Unfortunately, I compromised too much, and this is hard to bear now. Truthfully, I don’t know if the way I negotiated my way through life was a completely conscious choice. I think it was just my nature. By nature I am a man of compromise, not an extremist. I am not a young man, and to live through these changes, this flood of information, is not easy. I sometimes feel guilty for changing my view of history so quickly. But how can it be otherwise? How can one fail to see what’s what? Should I ignore it all for some sort of foolish consistency? I remember the historian Eduard Burdzhalov, who had been perhaps the most important historian on the liberal side of things when Khrushchev made his revelations about Stalin in 1956. Before that, Burdzhalov had been an inveterate Stalinist, the editor of Culture and Life, which had attacked the Jews, the so-called cosmopolitans. I asked him, ‘How was it possible for a Stalinist, a party careerist, to turn around and change so abruptly?’ He couldn’t answer at first. But then he said, ‘If someone has the chance finally to express himself, to speak the truth, why should he miss the opportunity?’ ”

  The return of history first began with Khrushchev’s “secret speech” denouncing Stalin in 1956. But the “thaw” was extremely limited and, as it turned out, reversible. Without a full and careful assessment of the past, one that could not be crammed back into the genie’s bottle, real reform, much less democratic revolution, was impossible. Dmitri Yurasov and the democrats knew it, and Gorbachev knew it, too. The return of history to the intellectual and political life of the people of the Soviet Union was the foundation of the great changes ahead.