After two years of hesitation and the language of avoidance, Gorbachev used 1987 as his moment to begin what Khrushchev had started. He opened the door to history, and he did it first with a movie, then with a speech on the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution.
Tengiz Abuladze, a small and elegant man with piercing eyes, lived and made his films in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. By 1980, he had established his reputation as a filmmaker of extraordinary intelligence with two allegorical works: Supplication, which appeared in 1968, and The Wishing Tree, in 1977. Meticulous in manner and in his style of work, he spent years thinking and writing, letting his ideas mature, before he shot a single frame.
Unlike the musty cave-apartments of most Moscow intellectuals, Abuladze’s airy house in Tbilisi was a fine place “to live and breathe,” he said. Over a lunch of Georgian red wine—“Stalin’s favorite”—and the local variation of pizza called khachapuri, Abuladze talked of how he came to make Repentance, a film about the legacy of evil and the moral need—for both nation and individual—to confront the past. Although television and newspapers were the principal means of the glasnost explosion, Abuladze’s film was the bridge to the recovery of historical memory. More than any other work of the period—Mikhail Shatrov’s historical plays, Anatoly Rybakov’s and Vladimir Dudintsev’s novels—Repentance stunned a people into a state of awareness. The national screenings of Repentance in 1987 and 1988 had such a powerful effect that they can be compared to Lenin’s “agit-prop” trains that traveled throughout the provinces, bringing with them portable theaters to show propaganda films on the glory of the Bolshevik Revolution. As an artist or theorist, Abuladze might not be on the same level as the greatest of the early Soviet directors, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and Aleksandr Dovzhenko. But because of its political resonance, Repentance was the most important work of subversive art in the country since the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich during Khrushchev’s “thaw.”
Abuladze did not have to travel far to get the spark for Repentance. “I got the inspiration from a true story, an incident that took place in a village in western Georgia,” he said. “A man who had been sent unjustly to prison was finally released. His entire life had been broken, destroyed. And when he came home, he found the grave of the man who had sent him to jail. One night he went into the graveyard and dug up the coffin. He opened the coffin, took out the corpse, and leaned it up against the wall. This was his act of revenge. He would not let the dead man rest. This awful fact showed us that we could show the tragedy of an entire epoch by using this device. That was the spark for the treatment and then the script.”
With his daughter-in-law, Nana Dzhanselidze, Abuladze wrote an eighteen-page treatment and then a script in 1981 about a kind of Every-Dictator, a tyrant named Varlam who destroys one life after another in a time mirroring the late 1930s under Stalin. Varlam, a provincial mayor, promises to build a “paradise on earth” for his people. Instead he ravages them in fits of paranoia and sheer indifference. As an old man, he even tries to shoot down the sun with a pistol.
“The people need a great reality!” Varlam says, echoing the twisted paternalism of Lenin and Stalin. Later, he defends his own paranoia, saying, “Of every three people, four are our enemies! Yes, do not be shocked. One enemy is greater in quantity than one friend!”
Varlam is so ruthless that in one scene he befriends an artist named Sandro and then sends him off to die in the camps, declaring him guilty of “individualism” and friendship with “anarchist poets.” Sandro’s daughter, haunted for decades by the memory of the martyrdom of her Christlike father, eventually digs up the grave of Varlam and leans the corpse against the wall. She will not forget, and she will not let those around her forget.
The film, which is filled with the sort of allegorical devices and local grotesques common in Fellini, is about the necessity of memory, the need not only to battle tyranny of the present, but also to deal with the insanities of the past. Varlam’s son Abel is little better than the father. He temporizes; he repeats the sins of the father. He has no conscience, no memory. And he prosecutes Keti, the daughter of Sandro, the woman who has repeatedly dug up the grave of the tyrant.
Tornike, Abel’s son, cannot comprehend the life he has inherited. He rages against his father. In perhaps the most important scene in the film, Tornike confronts Abel, a battle that can be read not only as the conflict of generations, but as the singular struggle of man against power, the struggle of memory against forgetting.
“Did you know all that?” Tornike asks his father.
“All what?” Abel says.
“About Grandpa.”
“Grandpa never did anything wrong. Those were complicated times. It is difficult to explain now.”
“What do the ‘times’ have to do with it?”
“Plenty,” Abel says, getting angrier. “The situation then was different. It was a question of national survival. We were surrounded by enemies who wanted to crush us. Should we have just patted their heads?”
“Was the artist Sandro Barateli an enemy?” the boy asks.
“He was. Perhaps he was a good artist. But he failed to understand many things. I’m not saying we didn’t make any mistakes, but what are a few lives when the well-being of millions is at stake? We had so much to accomplish. Look at it from that perspective.”
“So you applied mathematics to human lives, with proportions paramount?” the boy says in disgust.
“Don’t be sarcastic,” Abel says. “It’s time you understood that a public official places the public interest above private considerations.”
Tornike’s contempt for his father has deepened. “A person is born human,” he says, “then he becomes an official.”
“Your head is in the clouds,” Abel says. “Reality is different. Varlam was guided by the interests of society, and sometimes what happened was not his doing.”
“Tell me,” says the son, “would he have destroyed the entire world if so ordered?”
At the end of the film, Tornike shoots himself in despair.
The year was 1981 and Leonid Brezhnev was general secretary and Eduard Shevardnadze was the most powerful man in Georgia. Abuladze brought the script to Shevardnadze. “Shevardnadze read the script and said we must find a way to do this,” Abuladze said. “He told me, ‘The year 1937 was in my home, too.’ He was a witness to all that happened. His own father was among those arrested. I remember it all, too. I was a child, and though I cannot remember all the specifics, I remember the emotion, the fear. My father was a doctor, and he always had a suitcase ready with some clothes in it. He had nothing to do with politics, but he knew there could be a knock at the door at any time. They made the arrest and you never returned.
“So Shevardnadze told us we must find a way to do something on this topic, by all means. But he said it had to go through Moscow. We went to Rezo Chkheidze, the manager of the film studios, and he told Shevardnadze that there were film programs for the republics and for the entire Soviet Union. For the republican program all we had to do was specify the topic of the film and the name of the director. So we sent a telegram saying, ‘Director Tengiz Abuladze wants to make a film on a moral and ethical problem.’ That was all. Moscow gave its permission, saying only that the film sounded ‘interesting.’ Then Shevardnadze had a good piece of advice. He told us, ‘The more general you keep it, the better.’ And so in a way he was an extra author to the film.”
Abuladze made sure that Varlam was not simply a direct analog for Stalin. Varlam, as played by the brilliant Georgian actor Avtandil Makharadze, had a Hitlerian mustache and wore a pince-nez that immediately evoked the image of Stalin’s secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria. Abuladze dressed Varlam’s guards in medieval armor to deepen the sense of time. Finally, he gave Varlam the last name Aravidze, which is a bit like Kafka’s semi-anonymous K. In Georgian, there is no name Aravidze, but the root of the word, aravin, means “no one.”
“We wanted e
ven the name to hint at Varlam’s being the very image of the totalitarian, the dictator, anywhere or at any time,” Abuladze said. “They are all in there: Stalin, of course, but also Khrushchev and Lenin, too. A friend of mine met Molotov before his death and he told Molotov, ‘You know, it’s a pity that Lenin died so early. If he had lived longer, everything would have been normal.’ But Molotov said, ‘Why do you say that?’ My friend said, ‘Because Stalin was a bloodsucker and Lenin was a noble person.’ Molotov smiled, and then he said, ‘Compared to Lenin, Stalin was a mere lamb.’ ”
Abuladze shot the film in five months in 1984. But Konstantin Chernenko, a protégé of Brezhnev, was still in power, and so the film simply remained “on the shelf,” along with the works of dozens of other filmmakers.
Soon after Chernenko died and Gorbachev came to power in March 1985, Abuladze’s old friend Shevardnadze was appointed to a position on the Politburo. The prospects for Repentance brightened. In the spring of 1986, Abuladze called Shevardnadze in Moscow and asked him if he could use his influence with Gorbachev to get the film shown in May at a big film festival in the capital. Shevardnadze felt a certain pang of guilt or obligation and met with Gorbachev.
“I owe a lot of people back home and I can’t repay them all now,” Shevardnadze told Gorbachev. “But there is one debt I must pay no matter what happens, and you can help me.”
Shevardnadze arranged a screening of Repentance for Gorbachev. When the film was over, Gorbachev, whose grandfathers had both been imprisoned during the Stalin era, gave his approval to release the film.
But a crisis intervened: the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. The decision had to be put off.
At around the same time, Elem Klimov, a director and the new head of the Filmmakers’ Union, set up a “conflict commission” as a way to move some of those many films that had been banned under previous Soviet leaders off the shelf and onto the screen. Klimov realized that the themes of Abuladze’s Repentance were so explosive that it would require a decision at the highest level. He went to the liberal ideologist of reforms Aleksandr Yakovlev. Yakovlev was astonished by Repentance and called Abuladze into his office and revealed his plan. They would “leak” the film, showing it first to limited audiences in carefully selected venues. Then they would slowly increase the number of screenings, creating a certain inevitability about Repentance.
As it turned out, the interplay between the screenings of Repentance and the timing of major political events was uncanny. In October 1986 there were several showings of the film, mainly for audiences of well-connected intellectuals in Moscow, Tbilisi, and other major cities. Then in January 1987, Gorbachev presided over a breakthrough plenum of the Central Committee at which he gave the clearest indication yet that he was preparing a radical reform of the political and economic systems. Filled with self-confidence now, Gorbachev returned to the public stage a month later, this time telling a gathering of journalists and writers at the Kremlin that the “blank spots” of history must be filled in. “We must not forget names,” Gorbachev said. “And it is all the more immoral to forget or pass over in silence large periods in the life of the people. History must be seen for what it is.”
Repentance played in thousands of theaters. Millions saw it—including the young man named Dima Yurasov.
After he’d been fired from his job in the archives of the Supreme Court, Yurasov had been working as a laborer, unloading trucks at a printing plant. The film helped raise his spirits. Now it seemed to him that change was no longer an empty promise. Yurasov discovered that he was not alone in his quest to learn more about the past. Groups of Moscow intellectuals, most of them old enough to remember the promise and the collapse of the thaw, began organizing discussion groups and public forums. With the sponsorship of Aleksandr Yakovlev, Yuri Afanasyev was appointed rector of the Historical Archives Institute. Afanasyev quickly launched a public campaign arguing for a radical revision of Soviet history and organized a series of lectures on the Stalin era. He invited scholars and the survivors of the purges to come forward at last and speak.
Yurasov, for his part, began thinking that he might “legalize” the work he had begun long ago in the stacks of the archives. He wanted to show people what he had done so far; he wanted their help to expand his collection of the names of the lost. He started going to these lectures and discussion groups, if only to be closer to people who had lived the life he had been reading about in the archives.
On April 13, 1987, Yurasov went to an “evening of remembrance” at the Central House of Writers. The first few speakers gave guarded talks about the crimes of the past. This was an older generation, one accustomed to using a language that hinted at truth, then retreated. They were trained in the art of euphemism and allegory. Their most direct complaint was about the lack of information.
Dima felt frustrated, stifled. Just before people got ready to leave, he asked for the floor and got it. With the angry, put-upon look of a petulant rock-and-roller, Yurasov described his work. He said he had collected 123,000 file cards of information from his own subterranean research. He said he knew from experience that there were at least sixteen million files in the archives covering arrests and executions. When he was rummaging in the files, Yurasov told the audience, he had discovered a confidential letter from the chairman of the Supreme Court of the USSR to Khrushchev reporting that between 1953 and 1957, 600,000 people, who had been executed during the Stalin era, had been rehabilitated posthumously. Another 612,500, Yurasov said, were rehabilitated between 1963 and 1967. He described how from 1929 on, all “anti-Soviet” crimes—the general term used during the purges and after—were recorded on a huge index card file in the archives of the Interior Ministry.
“I have statistical material,” Yurasov said. “Not complete, of course, but it gives a general idea.”
The crowd was astonished, not only by the numbers but by Yurasov’s access to them and his precision. One of the evening’s main speakers, an older historian, took the microphone after Dima sat down and said the young man clearly “knows much more than I do and, I expect, more than anyone else in the hall. I am very grateful to him.”
As the crowd was leaving the hall, one member of the audience asked Yurasov if he really thought his “sincerity” would lead to anything.
“Well,” he said, “it will soon become clear whether a perestroika has begun, or whether it’s merely words again.”
In the summer of 1987, Gorbachev and Aleksandr Yakovlev began drafting a speech on history that would be delivered at a jubilee celebrating the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution.
This speech would involve one of the most difficult rounds of political and rhetorical maneuvering in Gorbachev’s career. To begin with, Gorbachev himself was still convinced of what he called the “rightness of the socialist choice.” He continued to see Lenin as his guiding intellectual and historical model. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that Gorbachev was out to undermine, much less destroy, the basic tenets of ideology or statehood of the Soviet Union. Certainly not in 1987. He also knew well that the Central Committee, the Politburo, and regional Party committees were dominated by men whose careers and very being were based on the persistence of a fossilized view of the world, one that did not challenge too hard the official version of Soviet history: the “necessity” of the brutal collectivization and industrialization campaigns, the “glory” of Stalin’s leadership in the war. To keep his hold on power, Gorbachev could begin with only small doses of truth.
In the summer and fall of 1987, the Politburo held numerous sessions on how best to approach the Revolution Day speech. Gorbachev had little choice but to play a game of strategy and euphemism. The Communist Party was not only the most powerful political constituency in the country, it was the only one. What later became known as the democratic opposition hardly existed. The broad range of pro-reform forces, from the former dissidents like Andrei Sakharov to the early “informal” groups like Democratic Perestroika, all put th
eir hopes in Gorbachev. That was where the power was, and they wanted to keep it that way. Gorbachev faced a Politburo in which the committed reformers were a minority of four: Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Yakovlev, and Eduard Shevardnadze. Hard-liners like Yegor Ligachev and moderate conservatives like Nikolai Ryzhkov were in the clear majority. “It would be foolish to think that the conservatives then were any less conservative than the people who led the August coup,” Shevardnadze told me. Every word of the history speech was a potential battle, a political war. Yakovlev told me that when Gorbachev passed around a proposed draft, a majority of the members of the Politburo insisted that Gorbachev not call Stalin “criminal.” On that question, Gorbachev exercised his option and overruled his colleagues.
In October, Gorbachev went before the entire Central Committee in a closed plenary session for a trial run of the November speech. Like Khrushchev in 1956, Gorbachev gave specific figures to describe the Stalinist terror: how ten of the thirteen Old Bolshevik revolutionaries who survived until 1937 were purged; how 1,108 of the 1,966 delegates to the 1934 Party Congress and 70 percent of the Central Committee were “eliminated”; how “thousands of Red Army commanders, the flower of the army on the eve of Hitler’s aggression,” were killed; how the triumphs of the war came in spite of—and not because of—Stalin’s leadership. As he recited this bloody litany, Gorbachev noticed a kind of disturbed murmuring in the crowd. Breaking off from his text, he retreated slightly.
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