Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  This was not the right thing to say, apparently.

  “The only privilege we have,” Laryonov said angrily, “is working weekends. And the privilege of people calling us on the phone and telling us we are petty bureaucrats. And that is not the worst thing they say!”

  “Not the worst,” Kubrin said, his head in his hands. “Not the worst thing at all.”

  It was not easy getting the feel for Moscow that winter of our arrival. One freezing morning, Esther and I decided to visit the Kremlin churches. We took the metro to the Lenin Library. As we were coming out of the train, I saw a man with no legs pushing himself along on a dolly cart. What hell it was to live disabled in Moscow: no ramps, elevators that gave out every other day. You hardly saw anyone on crutches or in a wheelchair, though. The state packed most of them off from childhood and stuck them in “internats,” dismal homes outside of town. And now this man was wrist-deep in slush, the commuters rushing around him or bumping him with their knees and net shopping bags stuffed with potatoes and beets. His face, angular with a slight gray beard, seemed familiar. I thought I remembered his picture from an old book about the dissident movement.

  I badly wanted to write something about the disabled and began to introduce myself. But before I could go on much further, he said, “Help me up these stairs, would you? There is a demonstration in fifteen minutes.” As Esther and I helped him, he said he was in fact the man in the book: Yuri Kiselyov, the founder of the Initiative Group for the Defense of the Rights of Invalids.

  When we got to the top of the stairs, Kiselyov pointed to the front of the library and a small crowd milling around. “Well, there they are,” he said. “The demonstrators. And the rest of them. This should be something to see.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. All I could see was some students and passersby, a few buses parked on the street.

  “What demonstration?” I said.

  Yuri rolled over to a slight young man with a black beard who was passing out a mimeographed newspaper.

  “This is Sasha Podrabinek,” Yuri said. Podrabinek had been jailed twice for his protests against the regime’s use of psychiatric hospitals as prisons. Now he was editing a unique newspaper called Express-Khronika, a mimeographed weekly paper filled with short news items: a taxi drivers’ strike in Chekhov, an emigration case in Kharkov, a mass rally in Yerevan. It was as if Podrabinek had developed an underground Associated Press in a country that had never had such a thing. All week long, he and his staff took dictation from their far-flung correspondents. On Saturday mornings, when the police were not too much in evidence, Podrabinek passed out his paper on the Arbat and in Pushkin Square.

  “You see those people on the top step?” Podrabinek said now. “They’re Crimean Tatars. At noon they’re going to unroll a banner.” It was a strange feeling, as if we had wandered onto a backlot at Universal or MosFilm and we were waiting for the crew to fix the lights before the big scene.

  Podrabinek turned to the street.

  “Now. See those yellow buses?” he said. “With the tough guys sitting in them? They’re all KGB and hired goons. Just before noon they’ll come out and try and stop the whole thing.”

  We were all standing on the library plaza, glancing from one side to the other. I checked my watch. It was 11:58.

  The KGB made the first move. An officer in an enormous blue overcoat and black felt boots climbed out of the first bus, three others trailing behind him.

  Surrounded now by KGB men, Podrabinek lowered his voice and continued narrating for my education this sidewalk guerrilla theater: “Watch how they circle behind the Tatars.… Notice the cameras.…”

  The lead officer tried to dip his head closer to listen. One of the other agents lifted his lapel to his mouth and started muttering.

  “Would you like me to talk a little louder for your microphone?” Podrabinek said.

  The agent did not smile. He looked down and spotted Kiselyov on his cart.

  “You are anti-Soviet, aren’t you?” he said. We all waited for Yuri’s answer.

  “It’s you who are anti-Soviet,” he said.

  Then the officer pointed to the Tatars waiting for the noon bell on the library steps. They were just a few of the many thousands who had been deported during the Stalin era, all under the pretense that they had supported Hitler during the war. Stalin wanted to destroy any sort of national movement or feeling in the Soviet Union in his quest to create a “Soviet man.” He was prepared to kill him to do it. Gorbachev, for his part, told his comrades on Revolution Day that all this had been a triumph. Multinational harmony had been achieved.

  “Why do you bother with them?” the officer asked me, this time using a confiding between-us sort of tone. “It’s their problem, not yours.”

  At noon, the KGB plainclothesmen, goonish young men with strips of orange cloth tied around their sleeves, poured out of the buses. A few started snapping pictures with Instamatics, and one guy panned the scene with a Sony videocamera.

  Now the protesters took their cue as well, unfurling a banner that read: “Let Us Go Back to Our Homeland.” The officer told them they were in violation of a recent order of the Moscow Communist Party banning demonstrations without authorization.

  “They denied us permission,” one of the Tatars said.

  “Then that’s it,” the officer said, throwing up his hands and signaling to his charges. The KGB men ripped the banner to shreds. The Tatars did not put up much of a fight as they were led away to the buses.

  Meanwhile, another officer demanded our passports and documents and wrote it all down. Then the officers with the cameras took our pictures.

  The whole demonstration lasted no more than three minutes. Esther and I tried to flag down a cab with Podrabinek and Kiselyov. We waited a long time and no taxi. After a while one of the KGB officers came up behind us and, sweet as could be, said, “You might have better luck getting a cab on the other side of the street.” Then he walked away.

  Kiselyov laughed and said, “The KGB want us to think they’re just people with a job to do.”

  The protesters were kicked out of Moscow. Most of them went back to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, where their families had been shipped in railroad cars in 1944. They were planning another series of demonstrations for the spring.

  But for all the demonstrations and local politics in those early days of glasnost, the greatest changes so far were not on the streets, but on the pages of the weeklies Moscow News and Ogonyok, the thick journals Novy Mir and Znamya, and in those tentative but startling speeches of Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Reading was the thing. Every day, the papers were filled with the ghoulish and the heartbreaking; novels were serialized in the monthly journals after a wait of decades; history and literature were now breaking news. It would be a mistake to think that the outpouring of articles, the publication of long-banned books and poems, was a phenomenon limited to the Moscow and Leningrad intelligentsia. “The truth was that by the time Zhivago and Brodsky and all the rest came out, the intellectuals had already read them in samizdat editions,” the fiction writer Tatyana Tolstaya told me. For Tolstaya, glasnost meant that she no longer had to hide her foreign books in her ground-floor flat in central Moscow. “Glasnost,” she said, “is wonderful for the intelligentsia, but, first and foremost, it is a revolution for the proletariat.” What was really incredible in 1988 and 1989 was to ride the subways and see ordinary people reading Pasternak in their sky-blue copies of Novy Mir or the latest historical essays in the red-and-white Znamya. For a couple of years, stokers, drivers, students, everyone consumed this material with an animal hunger. They read all the time, riding up escalators, walking down the streets, reading as if scared that this would all disappear once more into the censor’s black box. A people that had been deprived for so long of all that was best in their language consumed classics on the installment plan: Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem one week, Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur the next. So many people would read one copy of Novy Mir t
hat they would have to wrap it in a makeshift bookcover to protect it from fraying. Often they used Pravda, giving it, at last, a worthy purpose. A few foreigners also had places in that early pantheon, especially the British historian Robert Conquest for his work on the purges and, most of all, George Orwell for his uncanny description of the totalitarian state. “People read Nineteen Eighty-four for the first time and they discovered that Orwell, who got his education at Eton and on the streets of colonial Burma, understood the soul, or soullessness, of our society better than anyone else,” the philosopher Grigori Pomerants told me.

  In the dailies, there were articles on prostitutes, drug addicts, KGB informers, hippies, motorcycle gangs, nudists, mass murderers, rock stars, faith healers, and beauty queens, and all of it was new. No one had ever read anything like it. The weekly Ogonyok was publishing startling stuff on the war in Afghanistan by Artyom Borovik, a journalist in his late twenties who used his connections to get to the front. His father, Genrikh, had a more than passing relationship with both the KGB and Gorbachev himself. While his father was working as a “journalist” in New York, Artyom was prepping at the Dalton School. Artyom’s English was as good as it gets. He said his models for his reports on the troops in Afghanistan were Michael Herr’s book on Vietnam, Dispatches, and Hemingway’s journalism from the front. Eventually, he wound up with free-lance assignments from Life and an on-air job with 60 Minutes.

  For a reader, the hardest business was dealing with political prose. Until the very end, the prose of the Communist Party and its journalistic organs was clogged with the “Novoyaz”—the Newspeak—formed over dozens of years, great clots of language that had no purpose other than meaninglessness, the putting off of meaning, the softening of meaning. Gorbachev had given his crucial speech on history showing an uncanny ability to go on and on, for paragraphs, in the language of ritual: “… unforgettable days of October … a new epoch of human progress and the true history of mankind … mankind’s hour of genius and its morning dawn … the rightness of the socialist choice made by October … a higher form of social organization …” This was language from the Newspeak appendix of Orwell’s novel, gobs of pseudo-elevated language that expressed the sentiments of almost no one. Gorbachev was still operating in the hermetic culture of the Communist Party, a world in which the Leader had only to communicate to the members of the Party and, especially, its leaders. To speak directly and honestly to the people about the true state of deterioration in the Soviet Union would have been to risk the fury and revenge of the nomenklatura. The people hardly listened anymore to the old clichés. Who, after all, still believed that a new “epoch of human progress” began in October 1917? Certainly not the farmers of southern Russia humping hay on their backs while their tractors lay rusting in the mud. Who believed this was a “higher form of social organization”? Certainly not the workers and patients at the hospital in Krasnoyarsk, where the head physician said that the only way to get needles was to “scrape the rust” off the old ones and use them again. No, this was the old ritual in which the leadership spoke a dead language—a colorless, lying Latin—and the people spoke the vulgar tongue. The Party language had a ruinous effect on Russian, so much so that when people heard a speech by Sakharov, one of the first things they would comment on—even before the inevitable wisdom of it—was the purity of his Russian. Orwell would have loved that.

  In the history speech, Gorbachev was also capable of self-deception. “Comrades,” he said, “we justly say that the nationalities issue has been resolved for our country.” That sentence alone reflected the Party’s most suicidal illusion, that it had truly created a Soviet man, a multinational state in which dozens of nationalisms had all dissolved. Within a year, events in Yerevan, Vilnius, Tallinn, and beyond would prove otherwise. At least in public, Gorbachev seemed to have no idea of where events would lead, no idea, even, what the general movement of history was. “In October 1917 we departed the old world and irreversibly rejected it,” he said. “We are traveling to a new world, the world of Communism. We shall never deviate from this path. [prolonged and stormy applause]”

  In retrospect, it appears that the speech was a crucial moment in the intellectual and political history of the empire’s decline and fall. But at the time, Gorbachev seemed intent on replacing a clearly odious, untenable official history with a more liberal one, a model that proposed revised catchwords and icons for his stated goal: reforming socialism. Looking at the period after Lenin’s death, Gorbachev saw an opportunity lost, a dream betrayed. His rejection of Stalinism and embrace of socialist “alternatives” was the basis of his original vision as well as the long-held hope of an entire generation of party officials and intellectuals who became idealists during the Khrushchev thaw.

  These shestidesyatniki—“men of the sixties”—were half-brave, half-cynical careerists, living a life-in-waiting for the great reformer to come along and bring Prague Spring to Moscow. While they took few of the risks of the dissidents, the best of them refused to live the lie and found subtle ways of declaring at least a measure of independence from the regime. Some hurt their careers by refusing to join the party. Others joined research institutes or publications in the provinces or Eastern Europe where they could express themselves a bit more freely. They kept something alive within themselves. When Gorbachev took power, he put members of this thaw generation in positions of power. They edited key newspapers and magazines, led influential academic institutes, and even made policy recommendations to the leadership.

  For about a year after the speech, Gorbachev was the country’s principal historian, and he wanted to control the flow of revelations, keep them within certain bounds. Yuri Afanasyev, the rector of the Historical Archives Institute, soon discovered that while archives on the Stalin era were forthcoming, papers critical of Lenin and other first-generation leaders were not. A popular documentary released in early 1988, More Light, made a demon of Stalin but trod lightly around Lenin and the Red Terror. Later, Gorbachev’s Party ideologist, a dense character named Vadim Medvedev, told reporters there was no way the Politburo could allow publication of Solzhenitsyn, especially considering the anti-Leninist heresies in The Gulag Archipelago and Lenin in Zurich.

  In its way, Gorbachev’s schematic view of the Soviet past was as ideologically driven—though not nearly as pernicious—as the old Party version. To legitimize his plans for a liberalized socialism, Gorbachev and his generation in the Party intelligentsia even created a new set of icons. They emphasized the “late Lenin” of the less draconian New Economic Policy of the early 1920s; Khrushchev, as the initiator of the anti-Stalinist thaw; Yuri Andropov, as a general secretary of the Party and technocratic reformer who “died too soon”; and, perhaps most of all, Nikolai Bukharin, the relatively flexible Bolshevik ideologist who was executed by Stalin in the purges.

  Gorbachev, as general secretary of the Party, had no choice but to find a Lenin of his own. But if Gorbachev intended to appear the humanist Party man, a Soviet Dubcek, he could not look to the fury of Lenin’s State and Revolution or his bloody-minded letters and cables (“We must kill more professors!”) after the Bolshevik coup. To highlight a slightly more forgiving spirit in the Leninist canon, Gorbachev’s circle leaned on a few late essays such as “On Cooperation” and “Better Fewer, but Better,” in which Lenin seemed willing to endorse a less centralized, coercive economic and political system. Gorbachev’s Lenin was represented perfectly in the historical plays of Mikhail Shatrov, Dictator of Conscience and Onward, Onward, Onward. In those plays, Lenin was the infinitely wise and patient revolutionary, humane, willing to change; Lenin as both Mensch and Ubermensch.

  Khrushchev represented good intentions betrayed by political stupidity. He was the bumptious peasant who dared to undercut the Stalin cult but then lost his way in the 1960s with a series of capricious decisions that so upset the conservatives in the Politburo that they overthrew him. Until the moment of the August coup, Gorbachev remained obsessed with the example of Khr
ushchev, repeating to his aides, as if it were a mantra, that “the most expensive mistakes are political mistakes.” He would try to balance forces, stay in the middle, and survive. He would be wiser than Khrushchev and finish the vague, improvisational reform he had begun.

  Andropov, the KGB chief before he became general secretary, was important to Gorbachev for two reasons. First, Andropov believed that the first step toward an efficient, working socialism was to eliminate cheating, loafing, and double-dealing in the workplace and the bureaucracy. As a KGB man, he knew just how deep the problem was, and he was prepared to do something about it. In his short reign, Andropov upset the hard-core Brezhnevites by firing the lazy and arresting a few of the corrupt. The second reason was Andropov’s unstinting promotion of the career of Mikhail Gorbachev. Andropov greased Gorbachev’s graduation from provincial secretary to the Central Committee, and he never stopped campaigning on Gorbachev’s behalf. As he was dying of kidney disease at a hospital for the Kremlin elites, Andropov even dictated a testament to be read to the Central Committee asking that his protégé assume his powers in his absence. But, as Andropov’s aide Arkady Volsky told me, the party elders made sure that the testament was never revealed at the Central Committee plenum, and another Party mummy, Konstantin Chernenko, won the post instead. “Kostya will be easier to control than Misha,” one of the Politburo members said as he left the room where they had settled the issue.

  For Gorbachev, the most meaningful new icon of all was Nikolai Bukharin. While Gorbachev was on vacation and writing his history speech, one of his aides sent him a copy of a biography of Bukharin written by a historian at Princeton University, Stephen Cohen. (There was no Soviet biography of Bukharin at the time; his name was mentioned officially only as a criminal, a backslider.) Cohen’s book takes the view that Bukharin represented the road not taken—a more liberal alternative to Stalinist socialism. Such a figure could only be attractive, even an inspiration, to Gorbachev and many other reformers of his age in the party and among the intellectuals. The Bukharin alternative showed that all was not lost, that the line from Marx to Lenin did not lead necessarily to economic failure and genocide—to Stalin. Bukharin had forcefully rejected Stalin’s “Genghis Khan” plans and endorsed a far less brutal collectivization, a more mixed economy, and a limited pluralism. He was no democrat, but no butcher, either. His ascent (unlikely as it was) would not have led to a civilized state, necessarily, but it might have saved countless lives. Although he spoke of mass-producing “standardized” socialist intellectuals “as if in a factory,” Bukharin was also remembered as the one Party leader willing to protect the poet Osip Mandelstam from the secret police.