Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  The question seemed to ring in the air, unanswered. Then Nina Aleksandrovna enlarged on her point. “The thing is, we may not need an iron hand, but in any state there must be order,” she said, her voice rising to meet the higher theme. “This is not a state we have now, it is like some anarchistic gathering. When there is such a gathering, there is no state, no order, no nothing. A state, above all, means order, order, order.”

  The labels of public life had long ago become meaningless in the Soviet Union. If Mikhail Gorbachev had been a politician in the late 1920s and had gone around Moscow peddling privatization of farms, democratization of the government and the Communist Party, free markets, and the rest of the pretty-colored bottles in the sales case called perestroika, he would have been branded, with Bukharin, a right-wing deviationist. And then they would have put him up against a wall.

  “Now ‘right’ is left and ‘left’ is right and no one knows what anything means anymore. Who is who?” Nina Aleksandrovna said. She rolled her eyes like an exasperated teenager.

  Her husband, Vladimir Ivanovich Klushin, a whey-faced scholar of “Marxist-Leninist concepts,” sat across the small card table, interrupting every so often until his wife resumed her train of thought and cut him off. He tried to put in his two cents on the left-right problem, but she would not hear of it.

  “Volodya, quiet. I’ll tell it, thank you,” she said.

  “You see, if Bukharin had been our leader,” she went on, “there would have been no Soviet Union today. The Soviet Union would have been destroyed completely during World War II. Bukharin as a personality was fine, a good man. He went skiing with his students in the hills, and anyone could talk with him. But he lacked character and principles. He was for collective farms, but only step by step. He would have dragged it out until the fifties. But if there’d been no collective farms in the beginning of the thirties, then in 1941 we would have been destroyed. Demolished.”

  And with that, Nina Aleksandrovna smiled queerly and poured out tea and a few tiny glasses of cognac.

  Since 1985, she said, the country had been awaiting the results of Gorbachev’s reforms. Where were they? “During four years of Lenin, the country succeeded in revolution and won the Civil War and we were saved from foreign invaders. In four years under Stalin, the people rebuffed the Nazi attack and became a part of the vanguard of nations. Approximately the same amount of time was needed to heal the wounds after the war and achieve the prewar levels of production.”

  And what of perestroika, the “brainchild of the liberal intelligentsia”? Humbug. “The political structure of an antisocialist movement is taking place in the form of democratic unions and popular fronts. The number of ecological disasters is growing. There is a decline in the level of morality. There is a cult of money. The prestige of honest, productive labor has been undermined. We have also aggravated the situation of our socialist brethren. Poland and Hungary are running ahead of us, straight toward the abyss.”

  It was these feelings of horror, the fearful sense that the country had lost its way and was sprinting hellbent for oblivion, that caused Nina Aleksandrovna Andreyeva to write her famous letter. In her way, she was a defender of “traditional values”—the homey Stalinist verities of collectivization, central authority, the dictatorship of the proletariat. She said she had begun thinking about writing after reading two articles on politics and Afghanistan by Aleksandr Prokhanov in the conservative tabloid Literaturnaya Rossiya and the labor paper Leningradsky Rabochy. Prokhanov romanticized the Afghan adventure, made it seem like a great imperial quest. She approved, but found them “wanting.”

  Nina Aleksandrovna left me with her husband, tied an apron around her thick waist, and retreated to the kitchen. She prepared an enormous lunch of salads, roast potatoes, vegetables, and meat and only occasionally ducked her head into the sitting room to punctuate her husband’s sentences.

  While Nina Aleksandrovna cooked, the windows steamed and Vladimir Ivanovich came to life once more. He had been mostly silent in her presence, having learned the price of his wife’s celebrity and severity. In her absence he was unbound. As he unleashed a great tirade on the “tremendous value of Stalin,” I had the feeling that he was speaking for them both. Where she would temper her comments about Stalin, Vladimir Ivanovich was unapologetic. His lack of fame loosened his tongue.

  “What is the younger generation learning from the liberal magazines like Yunost and Ogonyok? That Stalin was a paranoiac, a sadist, a skirt-chaser, a drinker, a criminal. They try to equate him with Mao Zedong, as if there were no achievements under Stalin.

  “As for the repressions, I cannot talk about their scale. Because now people just feel free to present any old figure. Khrushchev, when he was working on the commission about those times, found that eight hundred and seventy thousand were repressed in this country. This is a lot, but it is not a million, not twenty million or fifty million as some people are trying to say it was. Everything now is based on inventions and concoctions.

  “Look,” Klushin said sternly, “in a struggle there are always victims. But I was at the front in 1943. I knew common soldiers, officers. And they treated Stalin differently.… The majority of our farmers and intellectuals respected Stalin. At any holiday, people drank their first drink to the commander in chief, to Stalin. No one was forced to do that.

  “My own father was repressed according to Article 58 of the criminal code. So what of it?”

  Vladimir Ivanovich told the story of how his father, an engineer, had lost “some kind of state secret or another” during the war. He was sent to a labor camp for ten years. It was harsh punishment for “a slip-up,” he conceded, “but, after all, he was to blame for something.”

  “You,” he said, pointing at me with a wagging finger, “you represent a younger generation. Ask your parents who might have fought in the war. During that time, man’s life was not as valuable as it is now. In this country, we had war from 1914 to 1917, then again in 1918 to 1921. In wartime, when perhaps a simple punishment is enough, people are executed. This is very cruel … but had there not been such cruelty, everyone would have just run around in different directions. Sometimes brutality can be justified.”

  The lunch was hot, long, and filling. Russian reactionaries, I had been discovering, were fine cooks. Nina Aleksandrovna was exceptional. Considering Leningrad was almost empty of food and the provinces were worse, the lunch was a miracle of shopping and preparation.

  As she savored her own meal, Nina Aleksandrovna sat back in a hard chair and talked of her life.

  “I was born October 12, 1938, in Leningrad to a simple family,” she began. “I was baptized and still remember the church bells at Easter. They elevated you to great heights. But I believe in reality. Religion is just a wonderful fairy tale that while we suffer here, tomorrow will be better. Communism is based on your real actions, on what you have done today.

  “My parents were peasants from the Kalinin region of central Russia. In 1929, when the famines started, they escaped to the city. My father, my mother, and my elder brother all joined the ranks of the proletariat. My father had only four years of education and my mother less. My mother’s family had been considered middle-class. They had ten children, they had a horse and a rowboat with a little motor. There was a cow, too, but the children were always half-starved.

  “At the start of the war, my mother dug trenches in Leningrad. She and one of my sisters worked in a hospital where the wounded soldiers came. I was three years old when I was evacuated from the city with two of my brothers and their school class. Mama left Leningrad on the very last train out of the city. After that, all links with Leningrad were broken.

  “My eldest sister went to the front and was killed in 1943 at Donbass. Her husband, a commissar with an antitank battalion, was killed a week after she was. My father was at the Leningrad front, and my eldest brother was also at war.

  “My sisters and mother and I lived in a place called Uglich until 1944. It was a communal apa
rtment, twenty-two or twenty-four square meters, that we shared with two other families. There was a table—I always wondered why it wasn’t used for firewood—and an empty bed and nothing else. No bowl, no spoon, no glasses. Absolutely zero. We were loyal and kept a ‘red corner,’ a place for a portrait of Lenin; the same place where Christians used to keep their icons. One day they came and told us that my brother and my father, who had been in the artillery battalion, had been killed at the front.

  “In 1953, back in Leningrad, we heard the news that Stalin had died. I was in the sixth or seventh form. It was a time of total mourning. All the children stood in a line as the director spoke to us about Stalin. All the teachers were crying. The deputy master of the school was sobbing so hard she could not speak. We all stood there, holding back our own tears. It was a gloomy day, a spring day without sun. We put on our coats and went out onto Nevsky Prospekt to the monument of Catherine the Great. Funeral music was playing on all the radios. Everyone was sad, and everyone was thinking about the same question: What will we do now?”

  There was a catch in her throat. For a moment, Nina Aleksandrovna could not go on telling the story of her life. Then she raised her head and waved it all off, half angry, half sad. Why continue the story, after all? It seemed that nothing would fulfill Nina Aleksandrovna’s hopes. Khrushchev was a failure, a debunker of Stalin. Brezhnev was corrupt and a fool. Now she was living through an age when dissidents were suddenly dominant, legal voices, and Stalin was compared to Hitler on national television. When Nina Aleksandrovna considered it, her eyes narrowed; a stony anger overtook her.

  “Stalin is the leader under whose leadership the country built socialism for thirty years,” she said. “We were poor, illiterate people shod in slippers. The majority of the peasants were so poor they could hardly exist from harvest to harvest.

  “Our media are lying about Stalin now. They are blackening our history and erasing the world of millions of people who were building socialism in terrible conditions. We are saying, ‘Look at how awful our lives were.’ Well, our lives were hard, but everyone had the belief that we would live better and our children and grandchildren would live better still. People with nothing could achieve something. And now what? Now do we have such trust and faith in the future? I think in the four years of perestroika, they have undermined the trust of working people—I emphasize working people, decent, normal people—because they have spit on our past.

  “An unpredictable future cannot be a basis for a normal working existence of the current generation. In the past, a person going to bed at night knew that in the morning he’d go to work and have free medical care—not very skilled care, but free nonetheless. And now we don’t even have these guarantees.”

  We cleared the dishes and took a walk along Komintern Street. The meal had been fine, the talk clear and frank, but by now something had gone very wrong. For a while Nina Aleksandrovna’s opinions seemed mainly those of a woman of her particular age and circumstances. She had been poor, she’d lost a brother, her father. She had survived, and all in the name of Stalin. Guarded from real accounts of history, Nina Aleksandrovna made sense to herself, just as so many people had made sense to themselves for so long. But now she was faced with an avalanche of contradictions, an army of “pseudo-intellectuals” telling her that the history of Bolshevism was a litany of horror, and this she could not, and would not, accept. Although she was merely a tool, a curiosity, in a greater political struggle, Nina Aleksandrovna seemed to think that she herself was the lead crusader of the party, its Saint Joan.

  Late afternoon was coming on, the long-shadowed moment in the day. But just before the conversation turned into the timeworn suburban ritual of helping the guest figure out the quickest way back to the city—the electric train? the ferry across the gulf?—Nina Aleksandrovna somehow slid into the subject of Jews. She had not been asked. She knew there were subjects to avoid with a stranger, especially an American journalist. It was as if she had been driving and had suddenly fallen asleep and lost control:

  “Switch on Leningrad TV,” she said. “If you watch it you see that they are mainly praising Jews, whether you like it or not. They may call the person ‘Russian,’ but that is only for naive people. If they show a Russian on TV, they’ll always find a fool with horrible bug eyes and protruding teeth. A caricature. Then they’ll show an artist, a painter, who is supposedly a representative of Russian art. But excuse me, he is not Russian. He is a Jew.

  “In our society there are less than one percent Jews. That’s just a very few. So then why is the Academy of Sciences in all its branches, all the prestigious professions and posts in culture, music, law—why are they almost all Jews? Look at the essayists and the journalists. Jews, mostly. At our institute, people of all different nationalities defend their theses. But Jews do it illegally. We can see that the work they hand over is a simple dissertation, but they insist that they have made a world-class discovery. And there’s nothing in it at all. This is how the department is formed.

  “Certain Zionist organizations are carrying out their work here. You have to take that into account. They are clever conspirators. I know that our Leningrad professors—I got this information from someone who is no longer at the institute—they go once a month to the synagogue and give them money on the day they get their salary. This goes on. This is constant mutual aid. In such a way, the Jewish people keep getting into the institute.

  “You are not even allowed to say someone is a Jew. You aren’t even supposed to pronounce the word! You can say Russian, Ukrainian, so why not Jew? Does it diminish the person? Why hide him behind some other nationality? ‘Jew’ and ‘Zionist’ mean different things, but all Zionists are Jews. Life has proved this, and not just to me.

  “Among our friends, there are some wonderful Jews. In our society, there are some interesting Jews, clever professors, economists, and they don’t accept the political positions now being advertised. Do you understand?”

  Of course, I said. I understood.

  Nina Aleksandrovna looked around a bit. At first she seemed a bit surprised by her own outburst, and then she gave a quick nod, as if to say, “Well, so I said it. So what?”

  We kept walking. In the czar’s summer gardens, no one knew Nina Aleksandrovna. They knew her name, perhaps, but not her face. In high heels and a white outfit that made her seem even more the head nurse, she had a proud strut, and her husband kept pace, describing this fountain, that historic bench. At one point the talk was of beauty and then beauty contests in the Soviet Union, a new phenomenon. Nina Aleksandrovna made a face that one would have thought she saved specially for rock-and-roll.

  “The most beautiful thing in a woman is her charms and femininity, the richness of her soul, her purity. She must clean and purify a man, to lead and raise him to something higher, to take away from him all that is wild and animal. In the sex act, she must enrich him, raise him above animal desire. These girls, they strip themselves down to their God-knows-what, and wiggle their backsides.”

  After that, we walked along in silence. What more could be said? This was the woman, I thought, who was the ideologist’s ideologist. She was both pawn and theoretician, no more ignorant than her sponsors, just less of a politician. At last, we reached the ferry dock. As I climbed into the boat, Nina Aleksandrovna waved and then turned toward home, her face to the palace of the czars and her back to the West.

  By the beginning of April, Gorbachev and Yakovlev were beginning to win their battle. Perhaps for the last time, they were able to rely on the key authoritarian principle of the Party—Party discipline—to bring the conservatives to heel. Even though the reformers were in a minority in both the Politburo and the Central Committee, Gorbachev was able to manipulate the situation so that defiance of the general secretary would be impermissible. They still had control over the main party newspaper, Pravda, and they began to prepare an article that would make it clear that the “Andreyeva coup” and its sponsors had lost.

  “The Po
litburo spent two days going over this article,” Yakovlev said. “All the members of the Politburo had their say and expressed their views. Mikhail Sergeyevich’s opening remarks were very harsh—he gave a severe assessment of the article—and as a result, as it always happens with us, with our very high sense of principle and probity, everyone agreed with his view!”

  Ligachev recalled that two-day-long session of the Politburo as a “witch-hunt in the spirit of [Stalin].” He said that before the meetings began, several members of the Politburo expressed support for the Andreyeva article, but folded under pressure from Yakovlev and Gorbachev.

  Gorbachev’s article, as drafted by Yakovlev, denounced those who would “put the brakes” on perestroika or indulge in “nostalgia” for the old order. It ran on page three of Pravda on April 5. As they read the text that morning, the liberals in Moscow, from Dima Yurasov to Yuri Afanasyev to Yegor Yakovlev, all breathed a little easier for the first time in three weeks.

  “It has proved harder than we had presumed to rid ourselves of old thoughts and actions, but there is no turning back,” Yakovlev wrote in the Pravda piece. “The [Sovetskaya Rossiya] article is dominated by an essentially fatalistic perception of history which is totally removed from a genuinely scientific perception of it, by a tendency to justify everything that has happened in terms of historical necessity. But the cult [of Stalin] was not inevitable. It is alien to the nature of socialism and only became possible because of deviations from fundamental socialist principles.”