When Luxemburg finishes, Shatrov has his Lenin cry out, “Bravo, Rosa!”
An incredible moment. Shatrov had given theatrical shape to the new, approved, Gorbachev-version of things. If only Lenin had lived! A life of tolerance, the shining future! Historically, it was preposterous. While Luxemburg’s prophecy could not have been more accurate, Lenin’s approval of a Bolshevik Bill of Rights is, and was, pure fantasy. Lenin was a theoretician of state terror. In January 1918, he sent sailors from the Baltic fleet to put down the elected Constitutional Assembly—the Bolsheviks had lost in multiparty elections. And in 1921, Lenin eliminated official opposition, even within the Communist Party. But those were facts, details. They hardly mattered. Interpretation of history had always been politics in the Soviet Union, and Shatrov and Gorbachev bent the facts as long as the narrative had a pleasing conclusion. There was a noble end: to discredit Stalin and Stalinism. Other questions would have to wait.
Shatrov, a man of Gorbachev’s generation, not only sympathized politically with the idea of a socialist “alternative,” he was related to it by blood. He was five years old in 1937 when his uncle Aleksei Rykov, the former premier, was arrested and later sentenced to death alongside Bukharin. Shatrov’s father was also arrested and shot, and twelve years later his mother was jailed as a wife of an “enemy of the people.” Because of his own status as son and nephew of discredited Bolsheviks, Shatrov studied at a mining institute rather than at a more prestigious university. When he began writing, it was with a definite political purpose. Using the powerful vehicle of the ritual Lenin play, he would ever so slightly expand the form, drop hints, make rehabilitations and accusations of his own. Like the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Shatrov was vain, at times rather loud about his moments of genuine daring; and like Yevtushenko, he had his privileges and patrons within the Party. Shatrov lived in a vast apartment with antique furniture in the famous House on the Embankment, once a stronghold of the Party elite. His dacha was next door to Pasternak’s house in Peredelkino, a village just outside Moscow where the cultural elite spent weekends and summers. But for all his privileges, Shatrov was a figure the gray apparatchiks despised. He was a wooden writer and an unexceptional thinker—next to him, Neil Simon is Euripides—but he had the political skills to make himself a presence, the dramaturge of a threatening new script.
On January 8, at a meeting of Party leaders and newspaper editors, the editor of Pravda, Viktor Afanasyev, attacked Shatrov’s play, telling Gorbachev that the text was filled with “inaccuracies” that “blackened” Soviet history. Afanasyev, like the majority of the members of the Central Committee, was a relic of the Brezhnev era, a self-proclaimed Marxist philosopher with an aristocratic passion for water skiing. He was not an editor in the Western sense. As editor of the Party daily, Afanasyev was an immensely powerful figure in the Communist hierarchy, a member of the Central Committee who often attended meetings of the Politburo. “Of course, I don’t vote,” he told me. But on his desk there was a cream-colored phone which provided the ultimate access. There were no buttons or dial on the phone, only the printed word “Gorbachev.” “All I do,” he said, “is pick it up and I’m connected.”
But Gorbachev was clearly not in synch with Viktor Afanasyev. Two days after the meeting, Pravda published an attack on Shatrov, excoriating the playwright for “mistakes” and unthinkable “liberties.”
On February 1, the letters department of Sovetskaya Rossiya, a particularly conservative Party paper, received a letter from a reader named Nina Andreyeva, a chemistry teacher in Leningrad and a Party member of two decades’ standing. The letter approved the paper’s own negative review of Shatrov’s play and said that an “internal process in this country and abroad” was out to “falsify” the “history of socialism.” Andreyeva wrote that the play proved that the author had “turned away from Marxist-Leninist theory” and ignored the “objective laws of history” and the “historic mission of the working class and its role in a party of the revolutionary type.”
Sometime in the first week of March, the editor of the paper, Valentin Chikin, came to Vladimir Denisov’s office with a small stack of papers. Denisov was the science editor, but lately he had been handling ideology. He had good connections, too. Denisov had spent years working in the Siberian city of Tomsk when Yegor Ligachev was the party secretary there.
“Read this,” Chikin said, giving Denisov a photocopy of the original Andreyeva letter. “Let me know your opinion.”
Denisov knew Chikin had undoubtedly made up his mind. Chikin was not the sort to care about an underling’s opinion.
The letter began with a scathing critique of Shatrov. Nothing unusual on the face of it. Sovetskaya Rossiya, which clearly spoke for the most conservative wing of the Communist Party, had been getting many such letters since the publication of Onward, Onward, Onward in Znamya. But Chikin came clean, according to Denisov’s account. He told Denisov that he had been forwarding the letters to Ligachev at the Central Committee’s ideology office. One morning, Chikin said, Ligachev called him on the Kremlin’s secure phone-line system—the vertushka—and said, “Valentin, what are you planning to do with this letter? It must be used in the paper!”
Ligachev, for his part, would deny this. Years later, he made a great show of being honest about his role in what came to be known as the “Andreyeva Affair.” Speaking imperiously in the third person, Ligachev lied like a thief. “Okay, I’m ready to answer everything,” he told me. “The first thing is, as for the publication of this material, Ligachev had nothing to do with it.… Ligachev learned about Nina Andreyeva’s article like all readers—from reading Sovetskaya Rossiya.”
But not only did Ligachev “advise” Chikin to print the letter, Denisov recounted, he also sent him an annotated copy with certain passages underlined.
Still, the piece needed improvement, sharpening, expansion. Chikin ordered Denisov to go to Leningrad and meet Andreyeva to work further on the letter. On March 8, Denisov called Andreyeva and arranged to meet her the next day. She told him to meet her on a square outside the institute where she taught.
“How will I know you?” he said.
“I’ll find you,” she said.
On the 9th, Denisov’s train pulled into Leningrad station ahead of schedule early in the morning. He was exhausted. Not to worry. Someone had reserved a room for him at the plush Smolenskaya Hotel, the hotel of the Party bosses. It would not have been in the power of an obscure chemistry teacher to make such a reservation. The Central Committee apparatus was on the case and leaving nothing to chance.
Rested now, Denisov came to the square at the appointed hour. Then he heard a voice behind him.
“Are you Denisov?”
“I’m Denisov.”
“Then let’s go,” said Nina Andreyeva.
For the rest of the day, they worked on expanding the ideas in the original letter. Denisov was no great liberal, but he was shocked to discover the depths of Andreyeva’s conservatism.
“I’m a Stalinist,” she told him in the matter-of-fact way an American might say she was a Democrat.
“Well, what about the Stalinist economic system?” he said. “Hasn’t it shown its lack of viability?”
“Just the opposite. The system hasn’t had a chance to show its real capabilities.”
Denisov decided not to argue. It was going to be Andreyeva’s name on the piece, not his, he figured.
The next day, on the 10th, Andreyeva gave Denisov additional material in typescript. He was surprised at how quickly she had come through. He should not have been. Nina Andreyeva was, after a fashion, a woman of letters. Years before she had been thrown out of her institute’s Party cell for writing a stream of anonymous letters condemning her colleagues for various ideological shortcomings. More recently, she’d written letters to Pravda, Sovetskaya Kultura, and other papers condemning the drift of the Gorbachev line. Just before he left for Moscow, Andreyeva told Denisov, “I trust you and the editors to make whatever change
s you think are necessary. Sovetskaya Rossiya is not the sort of paper that would meddle with my thoughts.” Then she asked whether the piece really would be published.
“I am sure of it,” Denisov said. He did not reveal the source of his confidence.
The next morning at the newspaper’s offices in Moscow, Chikin said, “Have you brought it?” Chikin seemed as excited as a schoolboy on his birthday.
“I’ve got it,” Denisov said.
“Good. We’ll put it in Sunday’s paper.” That was just two days away, March 13, just as Gorbachev would be preparing to leave for an important trip to Yugoslavia. Aleksandr Yakovlev, Ligachev’s ideological opponent, would be leaving for Mongolia. In Gorbachev’s absence, Ligachev was the first among equals in the Politburo. His influence in the Central Committee was, perhaps, even greater. Gorbachev had put Ligachev in charge of personnel, and there were dozens of men in the Central Committee who owed their jobs to Yegor Kuzmich Ligachev.
Chikin himself came up with the headline for the piece: “I Cannot Forsake Principles.” With unguarded irony, Andreyeva had used the phrase in her piece. It came from Gorbachev’s speech to a Central Committee plenum in 1987: “We must act, led by our Marxist-Leninist principles. Comrades, we can never forsake our principles under any pretext.”
At the Saturday-afternoon editorial meeting, Chikin told the staff he’d be putting the Andreyeva piece on page three of the Sunday edition. No one gave it much thought. It was a relatively lazy day at the office, a day to chat, drink tea, and keep the paper moving along. Some of the editors did not bother even to read the proofs. They should have. The text, a full page in the paper, was a complete contradiction of everything Mikhail Gorbachev, Aleksandr Yakovlev, and the liberal intelligentsia had been saying for more than a year. The Andreyeva article, Yakovlev would say later, was “nothing less than a call to arms, a counterrevolution.”
“The subject of repressions,” Andreyeva wrote, “has been blown out of all proportion in some young people’s imagination and overshadows any objective interpretation of the past.” Stalin may have made some “mistakes,” but who else could have built the country so quickly, prepared it for the great victory against the Nazis? The country, she said, was suffering from “ideological confusion, loss of political bearings, even ideological omnivorousness.” Shatrov, of course, came in for scathing criticism for daring to deviate “substantially from the accepted principles of socialist realism.”
“They try to make us believe that the country’s past was nothing but mistakes and crimes,” Andreyeva wrote, “keeping silent about the greatest achievements of the past and the present.”
There were also some less-than-subtle anti-Semitic remarks, especially to carve up Trotsky, émigrés, and the intelligentsia. “There is no question that the [Stalin era] was extremely harsh. But we prepared people for labor and defense without destroying their spiritual worlds with masterpieces imported from abroad or with home-grown imitations of mass culture. Imaginary relatives were in no hurry to invite their fellow tribesmen to the ‘promised land’ turning them into ‘refuseniks’ of socialism.”
The piece ran on Sunday, March 13, and within hours, telegrams of support started pouring into the Sovetskaya Rossiya offices from war veterans and local Party offices. Chikin boasted to Denisov that even Gorbachev’s own military adviser, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, had phoned to say that he “fully supported” the piece.
On the same day, in Ligachev’s home city of Tomsk, Shatrov’s play had its national stage premier. A great battle for history had begun.
On the morning of the 14th, with Gorbachev in the air to Belgrade, Ligachev used his position as ideologist to call a meeting of the leading editors and broadcast agencies. He did not invite the two best-known liberal editors, Yegor Yakovlev of Moscow News and Vitaly Korotich of Ogonyok magazine. Chikin came back from the meeting at the Kremlin beaming. He told Denisov and other editors that Ligachev had told everyone to read the article by Nina Andreyeva, which “in all respects,” Ligachev had said, “is a wonderful document.” Ligachev also told the head of the Tass news agency to put out the word to all provincial papers across the country that the leadership “recommended” they reprint the Andreyeva letter. By the by, Ligachev said, he was hoping that the Central Committee would soon pass a resolution “not allowing destabilization in the country.”
“I was in Mongolia and Mikhail Sergeyevich was in Yugoslavia,” Yakovlev recalled years later on Russian TV. “They phoned me from Moscow that the article had appeared. It was quickly sent to me; my aide telephoned Irkutsk, and they sent it and I read it. Well, my reaction was understandable.… I know the ways of the apparatus—and I knew it had been clearly sanctioned. Such an article could not appear without being sanctioned by the leadership, because this was indeed an anti-perestroika manifesto. It was meant to overturn everything that had been conceived in 1985. What especially surprised me was the form in which it was done.… It had a firm, sort of Stalinist accusatory form as in the style on the front pages of our old newspapers. In other words, there was a shout of command. You know, if this had been an average article based on this theme, I would not have paid any attention. But this was a harsh bellow of a command: ‘Stop! Everything is over!’ I returned to Moscow the same day.…”
For the next three weeks, as the infighting within the Politburo developed, the liberal intelligentsia fell into a state of despair. Ogonyok’s editor, Korotich, half in jest, but only half, told friends he was keeping a packed bag handy in case there was a knock at the door. A few editors went to Aleksandr Yakovlev saying they wanted to respond. Cryptically, Yakovlev told them to wait.
There was really only one instance of outright protest. On March 23, a friend of Shatrov’s, the playwright Aleksandr Gelman, stood up at a Party cell meeting at the Filmmakers’ Union and said the neo-Stalinist attack in Sovetskaya Rossiya was designed to prolong the current system and its millions of Party bureaucrats. The Party apparatchiks, Gelman said, wanted only a slight tinkering with the system, a moderate, technocratic liberalization instead of a genuine democratization which would redistribute power. Such a liberalization, he said, was merely an “open fist,” a kinder, gentler version of business as usual. The Filmmakers’ Union, by far the most liberal in Moscow, endorsed Gelman’s statement and sent it on to the Central Committee.
Provincial editors, though, understood the Andreyeva letter to be an official change of course, and very few dared ignore it. As Ligachev had hoped, the article ran in papers across the Soviet Union. One signal that the old Communist guard was on Ligachev’s side came from as far away as East Berlin. East Germany’s version of Pravda, Neues Deutschland, published “I Cannot Forsake Principles” in its April 2 edition. The Party apparatus in Moscow also gave signs of waging an underground agitprop campaign. Moscow News reported that conservatives were passing out unsigned leaflets, including one called “Information for Reflection” that said that perestroika would lead to “economic disaster and social upheaval and then to the country’s enslavement by imperialist states.”
“It was a terrifying time,” said Yegor Yakovlev, the editor of Moscow News. “Absolutely everything we had ever hoped for and dreamed of was on the line.”
Lost in all of this was the woman herself.
Nina Aleksandrovna Andreyeva lived on Komintern Street in the Leningrad suburb of Peterhof. All day tour buses roared to and from the czar’s summer palace about a mile away. On Komintern Street, though, it was quiet. The shops were empty. The air was still and redolent of gasoline.
I knocked at her door.
Andreyeva opened the door and invited me in. Somehow she did not fit the role of a polemicist, not physically anyway. With her hair swept up in a loaf, her eyes narrow and darting deep within the plump meat of her face, she looked rather more like a head nurse, a starched and angry woman of fifty trying, when the occasion demanded, to be nice. I’d called ahead, but she seemed to have forgotten my last name. I reminded her. Smiling stiffly, sh
e repeated the two syllables, sifting through them for ethnic clues, shifting the accent fore and aft, searching for a nugget of recognition. She was too polite, though, to ask any questions. Finding nothing, she smiled and invited her guest to sit down to tea and a box of candy.
I had decided on the way that it was best not to break with the custom of foreigners visiting Russians. Nina Andreyeva was nothing if not a traditionalist. And so I presented her with a box of German chocolates and a $7 bottle of Bordeaux.
“How lovely,” Nina Aleksandrovna said.
She lived in the smallest apartment I had ever seen. There was a minuscule kitchen and, next to it, a room the size of a king-size bed that served as living room, dining room, and bedroom. There were books all over, Party histories and the like, and a huge box of letters. Seven thousand of them, she said, and nearly all in support.
For a while, the discussion buzzed this way and that, confused, frenetic, like a wasp caught between double-paned windows. The train trip from Moscow. The weather. The remarkably low price of books. The train trip again. Finally the talk alighted, somehow, on rock-and-roll.
“Do you like it much?” I asked.
Nina Aleksandrovna’s eyes widened just a bit, scandalized. Rock was “mindless rhythms,” she said, songs that were “half-animal, indecent imitations of sex.” She’d read in the Leningrad magazines about a singer named Yuri Shevchuk. “He sings a song called ‘Premonition of a Civil War.’ What in God’s name is that? I saw this picture of him, showing him dancing, and he’s wearing a pair of cutoff jeans and a waistcoat with his belly button showing. Okay, let him do it, but excuse me, everything was unbuttoned so his chest was showing and, down below, his male dignity was protruding! He is dancing with his male thing jutting out in front of all those young girls. How can you talk about purity anymore after that?”
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