Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  “Comrades,” he said, “please bear in mind that not everything I have stated here will go into the jubilee speech in detailed form. It will include only general, overall assessments of the complex periods in our history.”

  Some time before the anniversary and the public speech, Ligachev rang Gorbachev on the phone. Ligachev told me that his and his wife’s families had been “wounded” by the Stalinist purges, and, yes, he, too, supported the screenings of Repentance. But now he was beginning to fear that a strong speech from the general secretary would “blacken” Soviet history.

  “This would mean canceling our entire lives!” Ligachev told Gorbachev in a rage. “We are opening the way for people to spit on our history.”

  Gorbachev knew his prerogatives, but he also recognized the delicate balance of power. At the end of the Central Committee plenum one of the strongest supporters of reform, Boris Yeltsin, resigned in a fury, accusing Ligachev of “bullying” and even Gorbachev of creating a “cult of personality” that permitted too little disagreement within the Politburo. Yeltsin’s resignation, and the furious, ritual denunciations that followed, made it clear that Gorbachev was operating in a political environment that he would one day compare to a “lake of gasoline.” In the coming months, as minutes of the plenum became public, people would learn just how volatile, even vicious, the atmosphere in the Party leadership could be. Even Yakovlev and Shevardnadze felt compelled to join the hard-liners in heaping abuse on Yeltsin. Gorbachev, too, showed little mercy. One day, Yeltsin’s bravado would be made to order for the historical moment. One day, the hard-liners would refuse to be manipulated and would launch a counterattack, first political, then military. That would be Yeltsin’s moment. But now as Gorbachev tried to manipulate the historical debate, subtlety and compromise were required. Yes, Gorbachev would spit on Stalin—but carefully.

  On November 2, 1987, at the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses, Gorbachev delivered his speech to a national television audience and the great relics of the Communist world. Erich Honecker of East Germany, Wojciech Jaruzelski of Poland, Fidel Castro of Cuba, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Milos Jakes of Czechoslovakia, Nicolae Ceauşescu of Romania, Gorbachev’s own Central Committee: they were all there to hear what would, and would not, be said about the history of the regime. Soon, all of them would fall to revolution and election—all but Castro—and in large part, the reason was this speech. Bland, hedged, filled with the Communist Party Newspeak imagined by George Orwell and perfected by committees of cowardly men, Gorbachev’s speech nevertheless opened the gate. And the lion of history came roaring in.

  To read it now, just a few years later, the speech seems like a relic from another world, an ideological incantation in which the descendants of the tyrant pay annual tribute to the past and the rightness of the Party’s course.

  “Dear Comrades! Esteemed foreign guests! Seven decades separate us from the unforgettable days of October 1917, from those legendary days that became the starting point of a new epoch of human progress and the true history of mankind. October is truly mankind’s hour of genius and its morning dawn.…

  “The year 1917 showed that the choice between socialism and capitalism is the main social alternative of our age and that there is no way to advance in the twentieth century without moving toward a higher form of social organization, to socialism.”

  Only many paragraphs and rounds of applause later came the hint of real purpose, an almost apologetic break with the tone of ritual celebration.

  “If today we look into our history with an occasionally critical gaze,” Gorbachev said, “it is only because we want to get a better, a fuller idea of our path into the future.”

  Gorbachev was in a pathetic patch here, and when he turned explicitly to Stalin, he promised even-handedness, a balanced view. “To stay faithful to historical truth, we have to see both Stalin’s indisputable contribution to the struggle for socialism, to the defense of its gains, and the gross political mistakes and the abuses committed by him and his circle, for which our people paid a heavy price and which had grave consequences for society.” Gorbachev even paid tribute to the notion of a determinist course of history and the very kind of historical thinking in The Short Course. “Looking at history through sober eyes and taking into account the totality of domestic and international realities, there is no avoiding the question: Could a course have been chosen in those conditions other than that put forward by the Party? If we wish to remain true to historic method and to life itself, there can be only one answer: No, it could not.”

  Only one answer possible! The applause was deafening.

  But then came the reason for all this bilge, a moment of candor that Khrushchev in 1956 could only venture in secret. Finally, a Soviet leader had come before the public, before millions watching on television, to speak a few paragraphs of truth:

  “It is perfectly obvious that the lack of the proper level of democratization of Soviet society was precisely what made possible both the cult of personality and the violations of the law, arbitrariness, and repressions of the thirties—to be blunt, real crimes based on the abuse of power. Many thousands of members of the Party and nonmembers were subjected to mass repressions. That, comrades, is the bitter truth. Serious damage was done to the cause of socialism and the authority of the Party, and we must speak bluntly about this. This is essential for the final and irreversible assertion of Lenin’s ideal of socialism.

  “The guilt of Stalin and those close to him before the Party and the people for the mass repressions and lawlessness that were permitted are immense and unforgivable.… even now we still encounter attempts to ignore sensitive questions of our history, to hush them up, to pretend that nothing special happened. We cannot agree with this. It would be a neglect of historical truth, disrespect for the memory of those who found themselves innocent victims of lawlessness and arbitrariness.”

  A few paragraphs submerged in this great stew. As if to save himself, to avoid going too far, Gorbachev quickly retreated to the tone of celebration and absolute self-confidence.

  “Neither the grossest errors nor the deviations from the principles of socialism that were committed could turn our people and our country from the path they embarked upon in 1917.…

  “The socialist system and the quest and experience which it has tested in practice are of universal human significance. It has offered to the world its answers to the fundamental questions of human life and appropriated its humanist and collectivist values, at the center of which stands the workingman.… In October 1917 we departed the old world and irreversibly rejected it. We are traveling to a new world, the world of Communism. We shall never deviate from this path.”

  And, the transcript tells us, “[prolonged and stormy applause].”

  At the time, many historians in the West called the speech a huge disappointment, if not a sellout. But for all the glaring insufficiencies of the speech—its unwillingness to criticize Lenin, its praise of the brutal collectivization campaign—Gorbachev opened the most important discussion of all. Intellectually, politically, and morally, the speech would play a critical role in undermining the Stalinist system of coercion and empire. The Kremlin’s reluctant “discovery” in 1989 of the secret protocols to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which signed over control of the independent Baltic states from Nazi Germany to Moscow, accelerated the liberation of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. A roundtable discussion published in Pravda simply arguing the merits of the 1968 invasion of Prague came just as hundreds of thousands of Czechoslovaks were demonstrating in Wenceslas Square. The Pravda article confirmed the Kremlin’s shifting attitude toward its own past and helped rob the Czech Communist Party of its last shred of “legitimacy.” The Polish people would learn the truth about the massacres in the forests of Kalinin, Katyn, and Starobelsk and the origins of their country’s subjugation to Moscow. There were dozens of other examples. History, when it returned, was unforgiving.

  CHAPTER 5

  WIDOWS OF REVOLUTI
ON

  Two months after Gorbachev’s history speech, my wife, Esther, and I moved from Washington to a two-room apartment on October Square in central Moscow. No. 7 Dobryninskaya Street was a titanic L and had the hulking gravity of Co-op City in the Bronx, but little of its charm. Except for the foreign cars in the parking lot and the armed guards protecting them, the building looked like most others in the city. It was a ruin the day it went up and it was always threatening to come down. Concrete fell away from the walls in chalky little chunks. The elevator slammed shut like a cattle-car door. At $1,200 a month, my masters at The Washington Post were paying hundreds of times more in rent than the average Muscovite did for a similar place. This may be counted as the last vestige of state socialism. The Communist Party bureaucracy that ran the building—an agency of harpies and spooks called UPDK—gouged foreigners for hard currency whenever they could. I once asked if I might have a phone line capable of calling abroad, a maneuver that should cost about $15. This would cost $20,000, UPDK replied. So you had to love them for that.

  Across the street from us was the city’s biggest statue of Lenin, a bronze behemoth that had run the workers’ state more than $6 million. It was a glorious thing to see. A mythic wind bulged Lenin’s bronze coattails and billowed his trouser legs as he pointed toward the “shining future.”

  The city was littered with horrific monuments, and each had its own nickname and local following. The husky statue of the poet Mayakovsky was known as “Mr. Big Pants,” and the soaring, silver phallus paying tribute to the Soviet space program was known as “The Impotent Man’s Dream.” But Lenin was ours, our rendezvous, as in “Let’s meet near Lenin’s left shoe.” He was irresistible. Tourists were forever coming to stare up the great man’s skirts and take a picture. Nearly four years after we arrived, local engineers were measuring Lenin for destruction. The best strategy, they felt, was to saw him off at the ankles and bring him down with a crane. But that’s getting ahead of the story.

  The weather when we arrived was filthy: a drizzly cotton-wool sky, muddy snow humped along the curbs. The ancient cars slogged like hippos along the swampy streets, their movement barely perceptible through the fog. The world of Russia moved in slow motion. A light snow or rain would fall and the sidewalks would be iced for days. Just to stay upright, you had to walk with a certain slide and push, your feet never quite leaving the ground. Here and there you would see someone—invariably a block-sized babushka, knees sore and numbed from hours waiting on lines, her nerves frayed with the rub and bump of shopping in stores with nothing in them—suddenly slip fiercely, flipping a couple of feet in the air and landing square on her hip. A fall like that could kill you. Usually it just left black-and-green bruises the size of dessert plates. Soon I had two myself, one for each side, the insignias of arrival.

  I had imagined a winter out of David Lean’s (not Pasternak’s) Doctor Zhivago, a CinemaScope vista of whiteness and cold. But real winter was endless and foul, a gray slog that began in late September and ended with the even uglier spectacle of late April, known euphemistically as spring. The melting snow, the dun-colored landscape, the buses so caked in mud that you could not see out the windows, the sudden appearance of defeated-looking weeds, all reminded one Russian friend of “an old whore disrobing.” If the sky was blue over Moscow ten or fifteen days between September and May it was a lot. Living without light was like living on another planet, another realm, and by the time we’d been there a year, we both felt like mushrooms, mushy and beige. I once asked a painter I knew why he did not emigrate when his work was starting to sell for thousands of dollars in Europe and America. “For the light,” he said.

  The rooms were bugged, of course. Not that we ever saw the mikes. But doubting their existence was both stupid and bad form. Stupid, because I didn’t want to say anything that would get a Soviet friend in trouble; bad form, because I felt that if our offices did not think we were under “psychological pressure” we might lose the cost-of-living allowance. No successor would forgive me that. In the bad old days, a foreigner’s apartment was pretty much off-limits to ordinary Soviets. Our predecessors, “pre-Gorbachev,” would never have dreamed of having Soviet friends over for dinner. The only Soviets you had as guests were people you couldn’t stand: low-level officials, shady instituteniks, and hack journalists, all of whom were spooks, or at least extremely cooperative with “the organs.” They were safe. But the prospect of having a real friend show his documents to the militiaman stationed at the compound gate was too grim. Now, under Gorbachev, that was gradually changing. Friends now pointed to the chandelier and said, “I hope the microphone is on, because I have something very important I want to say. Gorbachev sucks.” Or doesn’t suck. Whatever. Fear was slowly on the way out.

  As a resident of the October Region—a cigar-shaped ward running south along the length of Leninsky Prospekt—I thought it wise to visit the men who ran the place. This was something no reporter would ever have dreamed of doing before. But glasnost, this curious striptease of ideology and language, was now at center stage. With each week another taboo fell to the floor. It hardly mattered that Gorbachev’s committee-written speech on history had been an exercise more in evasion than revelation. One day it was all right to know that Stalin was “rude,” as Lenin put it in his last testament; then it was all right to know he had slaughtered millions during the collectivization of Ukraine. Gorbachev was also making political performance a form of glasnost. In foreign capitals and Soviet cities, he ordered his limousine to stop, got out on the streets, and worked the crowds. No one had ever seen such a thing: a modern Soviet leader who walked without an aide at each elbow.

  “Who is Gorbachev’s chief supporter?” the joke went.

  “No one. He can stand up all by himself.”

  The puffy gray men in the lower ranks of the Communist Party, men who had run the cities and towns like feudal princes, were beginning to get the idea that a little contact with the serfs they commanded just might prolong their dominion. And so it was that I was extended a warm welcome to the Regional Communist Party Committee of the October Region.

  “Please come by,” Mikhail Kubrin, the Party secretary, said over the phone in that extra-casual tone so in vogue in 1988. It was a tone, at once nervous and flip, that wanted you to get the idea that these fellows had been doing nothing but chatting up the constituents since the days of Lenin. Then, as a flourish of confidence, Kubrin said, “Bring a notebook.”

  I arrived at the October Regional Party Committee, a gray concrete hulk. In the lobby, an old woman with legs wrapped in elastic bandages mopped the floor with filthy water. She kept missing the same spot, over and over. There was the overpowering smell of disinfectant, bad tobacco, and wet wool. This was the winter smell of Russia indoors, the smell of the woman in front of you on line, the smell of every elevator. Near an abandoned newsstand, dozens of overcoats hung on long rows of pegs, somber and dark, lightly steaming, like nags in a stable.

  Suddenly, Kubrin appeared, all smiles and handshakes, a real glasnost man.

  “Welcome, Comrade Resident!” he said.

  Kubrin led me up a flight of stairs to his office. He was a New Age sort of Soviet leader with a European tie and a good haircut. He was at that middle rank in Moscow where loyal service to the state might bring a trip to the Bulgarian coast in summer. And there, too, was Yuri Laryonov, the head of the municipal government apparatus, a meaty fellow with Gorbachevian rhetoric and a Brezhnevian brow. Laryonov spoke sweetly enough, but his handshake made it clear that he was capable of crushing a Volga sedan or at least a petty bureaucrat when and if the occasion demanded. His face was as worn and gray as steel wool.

  We sat down at a huge table of polished blond wood. A secretary, jittery and quick, served tea and cookies all around. She set down a chipped amber bowl filled with the wrapped candies produced down the road by the Red October chocolate factory.

  “Well, what is it you would like to know?” Laryonov said, smiling and rolling h
is candy wrapper into a tight little spear.

  “To tell you the truth,” I said, “I come as a resident as well as a reporter. I’d love to know why every year you shut off the hot water in the district for a month. A whole month at least. The heat is nothing to write home about, either.”

  This tack was known at the time as “exploring the limits of glasnost.”

  Laryonov leaned forward in his chair and smiled the smile of a hungry cheetah spotting a gazelle with a sprained ankle. “I’m glad some of our foreign friends live in our district,” he began, “but, sir, if you write a lousy article, we’ll not only turn off your hot water, we’ll turn off your lights and turn your sewage pipes around.”

  We all laughed, but it was clearly time to change the subject. The talk turned to the trials of running a city district of 230,000 people, forty-four schools, eleven technical colleges, the Academy of Sciences, the Gubkin Institute of Oil and Gas, the Red Proletariat machine-tool factory. To say nothing of the chocolate plant. Like every politician I have ever known, the men of the October Region wanted you to feel sorry for them, to feel for a moment their terrible burden. And for the next hour or so, the two of them, Laryonov and Kuprin, whined about their common plight. For the first time, people were calling them on the phone and complaining about the garbage pickups that never came, the ten-year waiting lists for a phone, the fifteen-year waiting list for an apartment. There was a couple, divorced for more than five years, calling to say that they were forced to live together in a one-room apartment and if the Party couldn’t find them another room somewhere the Party would have “blood on its hands, as if it needs more of it. You pigs. Goodbye.”

  The two of them, Laryonov and Kubrin, sighed magnificently. I mentioned that there had been a great many articles in the press about the privileges of the party apparatus—the cars, the apartments, the vacation retreats.