Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  In his Revolution Day speech, Gorbachev broadcast what seemed to be a series of mixed signals on Bukharin: “Bukharin and his supporters, in their calculations and theoretical attitudes, effectively underestimated the significance of the time factor in the construction of socialism in the thirties.…” Meaning that Stalin was right to enforce an accelerated push to collectivize the farms and build gargantuan industrial plants in the Urals, northern Kazakhstan, and elsewhere.

  But then, later in the speech, Gorbachev said, “In this connection it is worth recalling the description of Bukharin given by Lenin: Bukharin is not just a most valuable and major theoretician of the party. He is also legitimately considered to be the favorite of the whole party. But his theoretical outlook can only be regarded with very great doubt as being fully Marxist, for in him there is something of the scholasticist. He has never learned dialectics, and I don’t think he has ever fully understood it.”

  There it was: the breakthrough compliment, appropriately outfitted in Leninist language, and then the ridiculous modification. As if there were more than a dozen men in the Palace of Congresses who had an idea—or gave a damn—what “dialectics” meant.

  In a cramped apartment in south Moscow, a woman in her seventies watched the history speech on television. She listened carefully to Gorbachev’s every word, and when she heard the word “Bukharin,” she edged closer to the set. Anna Larina, who was Bukharin’s young wife when he was sentenced to death at the 1938 Moscow show trials, had been waiting a half century for this moment. She hoped for justice. When Gorbachev finished, Larina leaned back, exhausted and feeling let down. Would Bukharin be rehabilitated? There was no clear signal at all.

  “I felt like I was back in limbo again,” she said.

  When I first met her that year, Anna Larina seemed improbably young for a woman whose life spanned nearly all of Soviet history. Her face was deeply lined, her hair a gray nimbus, but she moved easily and her eyes had the shine of polished stone. In pictures from the 1930s, she was stunning. She poured out the tea and served a plate of biscuits as she ruffled through the old photographs.

  “I grew up among professional revolutionaries,” she said, showing me a picture of her father, Yuri Larin, a close comrade of all the Old Bolsheviks. “Life was very intense and they all believed in their own saintly ideals. I’d even say they were fanatics. That’s what brought them to their deaths.” When she was a child, Larina’s father was sick, so weak he could not lift a phone receiver, and so the old revolutionary received Lenin, Bukharin, Stalin, and other Bolshevik leaders in his rooms at the Metropole Hotel. Little Anna met them all.

  “Of course, I saw Lenin when I was a little girl,” she said. “There was one episode when Bukharin and Lenin were both in my father’s room. After Nikolai Ivanovich left the room, Lenin said that Bukharin was the golden boy of the Revolution. I didn’t know what this meant and said, ‘No, no, he’s not made of gold, he’s alive!’ ”

  What seemed so strange to me was how Larina remembered those years as an intimate arrangement, the way one might remember childhood Thanksgivings. When Larina was ten, she watched Bukharin and the rest weeping at Lenin’s funeral. She remembered standing in the Hall of Columns, near the coffin and Lenin’s sisters, across from all the makers of the Revolution. Outside it was incredibly cold. There were fires burning on the streets, funeral marches everywhere, huge crowds coming to see Lenin.

  Larina and her family lived in room 205 of the Metropole. Bukharin lived just upstairs. By the time she was sixteen and Bukharin was forty-two, she had a terrific crush on him. One day she wrote Bukharin a love letter finally confessing her feelings. As she climbed the stairs to slip the letter under Bukharin’s door, she saw Stalin’s boots ahead of her. He was clearly headed for Bukharin’s room. She gave Stalin the letter and asked him to deliver it; for a moment, at least, one of the great murderers of the twentieth century played mailman for a young girl in love.

  For three years, Bukharin saw Anna all the time but worried that she was too young, that to marry her would ruin her life. Anna had her father’s blessing: “Ten years with Nikolai Ivanovich would be more interesting than a lifetime with anyone else.”

  Anna never got ten years. She married Bukharin, and they lived in the Kremlin in an apartment that Stalin had abandoned after his wife committed suicide. Bukharin soon admitted to his bride that for the past few years he had considered Stalin a monster bent on destroying the Party of Lenin and ruling through sheer force of terror and personality. Though she had grown up around Stalin, Anna now tried to keep her distance from him. She remembered hearing how one day Bukharin had taken a stroll with Stalin’s wife and Stalin hid in the bushes, watching the two of them. Suddenly, he darted into the clear, screaming, “I’ll kill you!”

  For years, Stalin kept Bukharin off-balance, as he did everyone else in the Party hierarchy. Many of the major Bolsheviks opposed Stalin, but never quite at the same time. At a Party meeting in the late 1920s, Stalin said, “You demand the blood of Bukharin? Well, you shall not get it.” Then, in 1935, Stalin once more pledged his friendship to Bukharin at a banquet. Raising a glass, he said, “Let’s all drink to Nikolai Ivanovich.”

  “It was strange,” Larina said. “As late as 1936, it looked as if Bukharin’s position was more stable. He was appointed editor of Izvestia, he was on the constitutional commission, and it even looked as if there could be a democratization process going on in the country. But Stalin played his chess game very cleverly. Bukharin figured that Stalin might kill him politically—that was fine, but Nikolai Ivanovich figured he was a talented man and he would survive. Or so he thought. He thought he could work as a biologist. It didn’t scare him.” Perhaps the only one who anticipated Bukharin’s fall was a fortune-teller in 1918 in Berlin who told him, “You will one day be executed in your own country.”

  It was increasingly clear by the end of 1936 that Stalin was about to wage a mass purge against his enemies, a campaign that would wipe out millions of political rivals (real and imagined), military leaders, and ordinary people. Bukharin’s illusions about his own survival dissolved. After a Party meeting at which it became evident that his arrest was imminent, Bukharin sat at his desk and wrote a letter, eight paragraphs long, and brought it to his wife.

  “He read it to me very quietly. We knew the rooms were bugged,” Larina said. “I had to repeat the words back to him and to learn it by heart, because he was afraid that if the letter was found during a search, I would be hurt. He couldn’t imagine that they would persecute me all the same.”

  With tears in his eyes, Bukharin dropped to his knees and begged Larina not to forget his appeal. Read today, it gives an eerie sense that it was addressed directly to Mikhail Gorbachev:

  “I am leaving life. I bow my head, but not before the proletarian scythe, which is properly merciless but also chaste. I am helpless, instead, before an infernal machine that seems to use medieval methods, yet possesses gigantic power. In these days, perhaps the last of my life, I am confident that sooner or later the filter of history will inevitably sweep the filth from my head.… I ask a new young and honest generation of Party leaders to read my letter at a Party plenum, to exonerate me.… Know, comrades, that on this banner, which you will be carrying in the victorious march to Communism, is also a drop of my blood.”

  Larina was terrified as she listened, but she memorized the letter and never forgot it.

  Bukharin’s trial was an exercise in the surreal. The Central Committee had already condemned him thirteen months before with a simple instruction: “Arrest, try, shoot.” Stalin’s lead prosecutor in the purge trials, Andrei Vyshinsky, compared Bukharin to Judas Iscariot and Al Capone, a “cross between a fox and a pig,” and accused him of leading a bloc against Stalin, of working as a foreign agent, of organizing a plot to murder Lenin. “The weed and the thistle will grow on the graves of these execrable traitors,” Vyshinsky said in the courtroom. “But on us and our happy country, our glorious sun will continue
to shed its serene light. Guided by our Beloved Leader and Master, Great Stalin, we will go forward to Communism along a path that has been cleansed of the sordid remnants of the past.”

  Larina could not attend the trial. She had been arrested as a “wife of an enemy of the people” and sent off to Astrakhan, the start of a twenty-year odyssey of prisons and exile all over Russia. The Bukharin’s thirteen-month-old son, Yuri, was put in the care of relatives. It was the last time Anna saw Yuri as a child. And as for Bukharin, Anna knew he was dead from the day he was arrested.

  In court, Bukharin played an astonishing linguistic and moral game with Vyshinsky, admitting to generalities but denying every specific trespass. Bukharin at once confessed and conducted his own countertrial of the Stalinist regime, all in the accustomed Party language of indirection and euphemism. Fitzroy MacLean, then in the British embassy, attended the trial, and believed then that Bukharin meant his general confession as a “last service” to the party. The same assumption is the basis for Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon. Cohen, however, makes the case that Bukharin confessed to the general charges to save his wife and child but made it clear to everyone in his testimony that he was not guilty at all.

  While Larina sat in a cell in Astrakhan, MacLean observed the drama from the Hall of Columns: “On the evening of March 12, Bukharin rose to speak for the last time. Once more, by sheer force of personality and intellect, he compelled attention. Staring up at him, row upon row, smug, self-satisfied and hostile, sat the new generation of Communists, revolutionaries no longer in the old sense, but worshipers of the established order, deeply suspicious of dangerous thoughts.… Standing there, frail and defiant, was the last survivor of a vanished race, of the men who had made the revolution, who had fought and toiled all their lives for an ideal, and who now, rather than betray it, were letting themselves be crushed by their own creation.”

  Bukharin was sentenced to die after a six-hour “deliberation” at 4:30 A.M., March 13, 1938. According to the death certificate, the date of execution was March 15, 1938. No place or cause of death was given on the document.

  In her apartment, fifty years later, Larina’s eyes filled with tears as she talked about those hellish days. She had no idea how her husband died or where he was buried, but it was probably safe to say that, like so many victims of the purge in Moscow, he was shot in the Lubyanka prison and cremated at the Donskoi Monastery.

  From prison, Anna wrote a letter to Stalin: “Iosif Vissarionovich, Through the thick walls of this prison, I look you straight in the eyes. I don’t believe in this fantastical trial. Why did you kill Nikolai Ivanovich? I cannot understand it.” The letter may never have reached Stalin. Larina’s wardens told her she would be set free if she would denounce Bukharin. She refused. She spent eight years in prison and was in internal exile until the late 1950s, well after the rise of Khrushchev. For years she lived adjacent to a Siberian pig farm.

  When the authorities finally agreed to let her son visit her in exile, Yuri was already twenty years old and had never been told who his father was. Anna and Yuri arranged to meet on a railway platform near the Siberian village of Tisul. On the platform that morning, Larina looked all around for a face she could recognize, a sign of her own face, of Bukharin’s. But Yuri recognized her first. Only seconds after they embraced, he wanted to know who his father had been.

  “I put the answer off one day after another,” Anna told me, smiling now. “Then he said, ‘I’ll try to guess, and you just say yes or no.’ ”

  Yuri’s grandparents had already told him he was the son of a revolutionary leader. But who? Trotsky? Radek? Kamenev? Zinoviev? When he finally guessed Bukharin, Larina said, simply, “That’s it.”

  “I told Yuri he couldn’t spread this news around,” Anna said. “When necessary, he told his friends that his father had been a professor.”

  While she was in jail, Anna had never dared write down her husband’s last testament. Instead, she lay awake at night in her cell reciting it “like a prayer.” But by the time she returned home—weak and sick from tuberculosis—Khrushchev had delivered his speech denouncing the Stalinist “cult of personality.” At last, she wrote down the testament. “Finally,” she said, “I had to get rid of this burden.”

  Larina lived in Moscow with her mother, who herself had been in prison and was now very sick, and Yuri, who was suffering from a life-threatening tumor. They all lived on Anna’s tiny pension. “Despite my sufferings and the camps, I always thought we would live through this, that this terrible business was just something on the surface and the real thing, socialism, would prevail in the end. I always felt that Bolshevism had been liquidated by one person, Stalin.”

  Larina tried to win rehabilitation for her husband under Khrushchev. Years later, dictating his memoirs in retirement, Khrushchev said that he regretted rejecting the application. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Bukharin became a kind of banner for relatively liberal Communist parties in Europe, especially in Italy. But in Moscow, Brezhnev and his neo-Stalinist ideologists held out no hope. Once more, Anna Larina would have to wait.

  On February 5, 1988, the foreign ministry announced that the evidence for the 1938 purge trials had been “gathered illegally” and the “facts had been falsified.” Bukharin and nineteen other Bolshevik leaders were rehabilitated. The Party was immensely proud of itself. “I do think we are witnessing a grand and noble deed,” said Gennadi Gerasimov, the spokesman who made the announcement at the foreign ministry press center.

  This was front-page news around the world, and for good reason. Bukharin’s rehabilitation was not so much an act of kindness or justice as it was a theoretical justification for the reformist principles of Gorbachev’s perestroika. Trotsky, with his call for “world revolution,” provided nothing of the kind, and to the day of the regime’s collapse, Trotsky was never officially rehabilitated.

  Bukharin’s name, which once carried with it the awful ring of “Nicholas II” or “Hitler” in official Soviet history books, was now glorified. Bukharin’s essays and Cohen’s biography were published officially. Anna Larina emerged from obscurity with a series of interviews to the press and appearances at “Bukharin evenings.” One afternoon at the Museum of the Revolution on Gorky Street, I saw Larina and Cohen walking together through the latest exhibit: the world of Nikolai Bukharin. The rooms were filled with Bukharin’s papers, his mementos, even his watercolors.

  “I believed,” Larina said. “I believed. I wrote letter after letter. I kept going. But I was never sure that this would happen in my lifetime. Nikolai Ivanovich suffered so much because he thought that he had destroyed my life. It was awful for him. He loved me so.”

  CHAPTER 6

  NINOTCHKA

  The season of Anna Larina’s euphoria turned quickly into the season of a coup. Not a coup with soldiers and tanks. That would wait. This was a quiet counterrevolution that the public hardly noticed, a struggle at the highest level of the Communist Party over the most vital questions of ideology and history. The only visible evidence of the coup was scraps of paper: a very dull play about Lenin, a pair of conflicting newspaper articles. But if this “silent coup” had succeeded, the drive for reform could have been stifled once more, perhaps for years. The process was still, as it had been thirty years before during the Khrushchev thaw, reversible.

  The conservatives in the Communist Party did not pounce on the high art of the season. Their targets were not Joseph Brodsky’s lyrics or Andrei Platonov’s prose. They worried more about the transmission of heresy through cartoons, tabloid journalism, television, and dramatization. They worried, in short, about what they still called so lovingly “the masses.”

  In their January 1988 issue, the editors of the monthly journal Znamya published Mikhail Shatrov’s play about Lenin and Stalin, Onward, Onward, Onward. To a Western ear, Onward, Onward, Onward seems yet another example of the classic “Lenin play,” a form of staged ideology and glorification that had been described and endorsed by
a meeting of the Party Central Committee as early as 1936. It was a Bolshevik version of the miracle and passion play, a ritualized epic of a savior’s arrival, his life and afterlife. In Shatrov’s work, as in all such plays, the characters take center stage and give long speeches; they are cardboard.

  But now it was clear to the ideologues of the Party, led by Yegor Ligachev, that millions of Russians would see the subtle heresies within Shatrov’s version. They would read the play as a total denunciation of Stalin as a destroyer of all that was fine and good in Lenin. They would understand contemporary Soviet life as a tragic failure and the men who ruled them as inheritors of a tyrant’s system. They would see the play as an endorsement of the “liberal Lenin,” the gentler revolutionary figure who died “too soon.” The critical moment in Onward, Onward, Onward comes when Rosa Luxemburg steps center stage and reads a letter she wrote from a German prison cell in 1918. She celebrates the Bolshevik Revolution but then predicts disaster ahead:

  “Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of the press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life in every public institution dies out, becomes a mere appearance, and bureaucracy alone remains active. Public life gradually falls asleep; a few dozen extremely energetic and highly idealistic Party leaders direct and govern; among them, in reality, a dozen outstanding leaders rule, and an elite of the working class is summoned to a meeting from time to time to applaud the speeches of the leaders and to adopt unanimously resolutions put to them. In essence this is the rule of the clique, and of course their dictatorship is not the dictatorship of the proletariat but the dictatorship of a handful of politicians.… Socialism without political freedom is not socialism.… Freedom only for active supporters of the government is not freedom.”