Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  Just after the affair was over, Gorbachev and Yakovlev pretended it had never happened. When asked about Ligachev, they said that all was well and unanimous in the Politburo. To state otherwise would be to mouth the lies of the Western press and its intelligence organs. But long after, Yakovlev would be more candid. “Did you notice that the article against Nina Andreyeva in Pravda didn’t even mention her name? That’s not by chance,” he told me. “It was all part of a process that snowballed. Besides, we knew how the whole thing had been organized, who was behind it, who revised the article, who went to see her in Leningrad. Had it been just some lady named Nina Andreyeva writing an article that somebody published, it would have been different. The article in response did not mention her because it was not addressed to her.”

  In private, Yakovlev urged Gorbachev once more to reconsider his attitude toward the Communist Party. In December 1985, Yakovlev had written a confidential memo to Gorbachev asking him to consider splitting the Communist Party and then siding with the more liberal faction. After all, the Andreyeva affair had already proved just how deep the splits actually were. There could be no acceleration of change while the dead weight of the Party apparatchiks hung on the shoulders of the reformers. Eventually, Yakovlev insisted, they would have to consider the idea not only of two or three Communist parties but of a true multiparty system.

  Sooner or later, Yakovlev knew, the Party would have to break with its own history, or it would collapse entirely. The Party was filled with ministers and apparatchiks who swore their fealty to the general secretary, but they were always prepared to betray him in the name of the System. Years later, in retirement, Gorbachev would admit that even he did not understand fully the “monster” he was trying to transform. “At least Ligachev was out in the open,” he would say. There were others who would pretend loyalty and then send tanks into the streets of Moscow.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE DOCTORS’ PLOT AND BEYOND

  Sometime between the Andreyeva affair and the start of the Nineteenth Party Conference in June 1988, the anti-Semitic incidents began. In a suburb of Moscow where Jewish intellectuals often rented dachas for the summer, vandals burned one house to the ground and broke into a few others, smashing windows, knocking over furniture, and spray-painting swastikas on the walls. Members of Pamyat and other hate groups toppled Jewish headstones and tacked up handbills signed “Russia for Russians: The Organization of Death to Yids.”

  Judith Lurye, a longtime refusenik, called me one night and said that she and her friends were terrified. That night they had gone to a hall they’d rented at the Yauza Club for a meeting of their new Jewish cultural organization. When they arrived, the door was padlocked and a pair of KGB officers were on guard. A leaflet was nailed to the door.

  “How long can we tolerate the dirty Jews?” it said. “Scoundrel Jews are penetrating our society, especially in places where there are profits to be gotten. Think about it. How can we allow these dirty ones to make a rubbish heap out of our beautiful country? Why do we—the great, intelligent, beautiful Slavs—consider it a normal phenomenon to live with Yids among us? How can these dirty stinking Jews call themselves by such a proud and heroic name as ‘Russians’?”

  Many of the same Jews who were calling to warn me were also publishing their literary or scientific work for the first time and getting visas to travel abroad. Some were getting permission to emigrate. They had high hopes for perestroika, but they could not let down their psychological guard. A historic dislocation had begun. The economy was in serious decline. If things got much worse, the Jews understood, they would be among the first ones blamed. Far-right intellectuals writing for Nash Sovremenik (“Our Contemporary”) and Molodaya Gvardiya (“Young Guard”) were already shaping a fanatic Russian nationalist ideology that made all Jews devils, and all enemies Jews. If they came to despise a Russian, they then wrote that the person in question had obviously changed his name from Goldshtein or Rabinovich.

  Igor Shafarevich, a world-renowned mathematician who joined both Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn in the seventies in a number of dissident causes, turned out to be one of the most dangerous of the intellectual anti-Semites. His long essay “Russophobia” proposed that “the Little People”—mainly Jewish writers and émigrés—had ruined the self-respect of “the Big People”—native Russians—by describing them as a nation of slaves who worship power and intolerance. Jews, he wrote, had managed to create an image of themselves as reasonable, cultivated, and European and of Russians as barbaric.

  I visited Shafarevich one evening at his apartment on Leninsky Prospekt. He eyed me suspiciously and denied he was an anti-Semite. His enormous hound circled the floor of the study, never stopping. Such accusations, he said, were the result of Jewish “persecution mania.”

  “There is only one nation whose needs we hear about almost every day,” Shafarevich had written in Nash Sovremenik. “Jewish national emotions are the fever of the whole country and the whole world. They are a negative influence on disarmament, trade agreements, and international relations of scientists. They provoke demonstrations and strikes and emerge in almost every conversation. The Jewish issue has acquired an incomprehensible power over people’s minds and has overshadowed problems of Ukrainians, Estonians, and Crimean Tatars. And as for the Russian issue, that is evidently not to be acknowledged at all.”

  When I read this passage back to Shafarevich, he nodded in agreement, enthusiastically, as if hearing it for the first time. Then he said, “The term ‘anti-Semitism’ is like an atom bomb in our heads. Against the background of violence against Armenians or Russians, it is impossible even to speak of anti-Semitism. I haven’t heard about a single quarrel or of people being beaten in the face because of anti-Semitism. It is absolutely incompatible with the real problems present now. I am just amazed to hear such things.”

  Shafarevich was not alone. While many leading Russian writers spoke out against anti-Semitism, the Russian Writers’ Union leadership promoted a nationalist ideology steeped in hatred of Jews. In an open letter signed by seventy-two of its leading members and published in the house organ, Literaturnaya Rossiya, the union declared: “It is precisely Zionism that is responsible for many things, including Jewish pogroms, for cutting off dry branches of their own people in Auschwitz and Dachau.”

  For months, Jewish friends called saying they were convinced that there would soon be pogroms. Not more abuse, not the occasional attack, but pogroms, a word that evoked the memory of massacres of Jews a century ago in Kishinev, Odessa, and Kiev, a word that implied the tacit participation of the state. The Kremlin did nothing to help the situation. The official Tass news agency ran an item saying that Natan Shcharansky, who had spent eight years in the camps on trumped-up charges before he was allowed to leave the Soviet Union for Israel, was now “scrambling back into the news” as an army conscript. “As he was issued his brand-new Israeli uniform, Shcharansky declared pompously that he had finally found his place in life,” Tass reported. “Walking on Palestinian corpses is indeed a logical and natural campaign in the life of that sham advocate of human rights.”

  It was hard to judge what all this amounted to. One of the older leaders of the Jewish community in Moscow told me he had not seen such threatening signs of anti-Semitism in Moscow since Stalin’s time.

  I had been complacent about all this until the first night of Passover the previous spring. After all, hadn’t vandals desecrated Jewish cemeteries at home? Why was this more of a threat? Esther and I went to evening services at the Choral Synagogue, itself a depressing sight. Outside on the steps, KGB goons kept a careful watch on who went in the building. In a way both cloying and threatening, the agent of the evening (dressed in the easily recognizable black plastic topcoat and red-and-brown plaid scarf) asked questions as if he were taking a poll: “Do you believe in almighty God? Have you ever been to Israel?” Usually, a couple of his buddies waited in a car across the street. Inside, on the main floor of pews, where the men prayed, th
ere were only a few dozen ancients gossiping in Yiddish and some curious tourists from New York and Buenos Aires. The young had long since written off the synagogue as an impossible place to meet or pray. The few observant Jews who had not already gone to Israel or the West prayed in their homes. Even those who didn’t care much about the KGB presence outside felt the rabbi had been too compromised over the years.

  Upstairs, sitting with the women, Esther got into a discussion about Passover rituals and discovered that they knew next to nothing.

  “My grandfather used to do all this,” one old woman said, casting back her memories to the last century, “but I forget: how many cups of wine must we drink?”

  Esther, who was raised in an Orthodox home and knew the language and rituals as second nature, was astonished. She explained as well she could, but it broke her heart to see how desperate they were to know. “Can you really not eat bread on Passover?” another woman said.

  We left the services early to get back and prepare the seder at home for a half-dozen Soviet friends. But when we got to the car I noticed that someone had written on the grimy door a huge Y with a circle around it. Y for Yid. If the leaflets and vandalism had not focused my attention, the writing in the dust certainly did.

  As it turned out, there would be no pogroms. But the anxiety was real. As the state structures began to disintegrate, so too did the old facade of a “friendship of peoples.” The glasnost that had begun to encourage genuine historical debate also, inevitably, revealed the depths of historical resentments and hatred in Stalin’s empire. In Tallinn, I heard Estonians describe Russians as cretins and brutes, and Russians describe Estonians as Nazi collaborators. In Yerevan, Armenians were sure that Azerbaijanis had deliberately “set off” the earthquake that killed at least 25,000 people with an underground nuclear test and were about to carry out an Islamic crusade against them more bloody than the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1915. In Baku, Azerbaijanis knew with absolute certainty that the Yerevan government was preparing to grab all its territory and assert an Armenian kingdom with the help of émigré millionaires in Los Angeles.

  For Jews in cities like Leningrad, Moscow, and Novosibirsk, the new street-level face of hatred was the group known as Pamyat, “Memory.” Pamyat began in the early 1980s as a group attached to the Aviation Ministry and was organized by a few cultural activists to help preserve Russian monuments and buildings. But after years of expansion, infighting, and splits, the most vocal group still calling itself Pamyat turned out to be a band of anti-Semitic fanatics, a motley bunch of Russian factory workers, Party members, teachers, career military officers, and street thugs. Their feeling for imagery was impeccable and historically resonant. They wore black T-shirts, a symbol that linked them to the Black Hundreds, the anti-Semitic mob that carried off dozens of pogroms under the last czars.

  While he was still in the Politburo, Boris Yeltsin met with representatives from Pamyat on the grounds that as Moscow Party secretary he should get to know a broad range of public groups. He went away from the session disgusted. “Pamyat began as something interesting and then turned out evil,” he said. He never had anything to do with it again.

  I met leaders of Pamyat at various apartments and rallies in Moscow, Leningrad, and Siberia, and they were uniformly, and not surprisingly, supreme dolts. Dmitri Vasiliyev, a former photographer and bit player in the movies, boasted of having only an eighth-grade education, a claim that did not stretch credulity. At one small rally, this doughy little man barked into a megaphone for a couple of hours, berating Zionists and “those who would humiliate the Russian people.” He said that Russian children were being turned into alcoholics because “sinister forces” were slipping alcohol into the yogurt supply. Jewish editors were guilty of subliminal conspiracy because they used six-pointed stars in their papers. Jewish architects “by no coincidence” designed Pushkin Square so that Pushkin’s back was to the movie theater, the Rossiya. It was unclear whether Vasiliyev was the most dangerous of the Pamyat leaders. His rival Valery Yemelyanov, after all, spent a few years in a mental institution after murdering his wife. He left the institution just in time to enjoy the fruits of the new glasnost.

  The clearest and most comprehensive representation of Pamyat’s “ideas” I saw was contained in a twenty-four-page manifesto that had been passed along to me. The document was written in a less hysterical tone than Vasiliyev’s rants, but, all the same, it attacked the “satanic” cultural influence of the West and a “genocide of the Russian people.” Jews and Zionists were responsible for the ills of Russia. Jews, homosexuals, and Masons were responsible for rock music, drug addiction, AIDS, and the dissolution of Russian families. Brodsky’s poems, Chagall’s paintings, and Pasternak’s “antipatriotic” novel Doctor Zhivago were all worthless, a blot on “true Russian culture.” The Russians, the manifesto said, “saved” the Jews in World War II, but the Jewish media only mocked and degraded Russians and their suffering: “It’s as if the mass media told us that only Jews were killed on the front during the war.”

  Pamyat members circulated copies of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and won support from Literaturnaya Rossiya, Molodaya Gvardiya, and other right-wing magazines. In Leningrad, one of the most active centers for Pamyat, the group denounced Isaak Zaltsman, a Jew who headed the production of Soviet tanks during World War II, for organizing “a chorus of sixteen-year-old Russian virgins” and then seducing them. Elsewhere, Pamyat blamed Jews for food shortages, sex on television, and the nuclear accident at Chernobyl.

  Compared to what was going on elsewhere in the empire, the real threat to Jewish life was relatively slight. Yet the rise of glasnost, the loosening restrictions on emigration, and the atmosphere of tension and fear of an uncertain future all helped to produce the moment that Jews around the world had awaited for many years. An exodus had begun. Soviet Jews who wanted to leave now for Israel, for the most part, could. In 1989, 100,000 Soviet Jews left for Israel and the West. Hundreds of thousands more were waiting for visas, invitations, and tickets. A people that had once seemed destined for oblivion were getting visas for a new life.

  There would be no second “Doctors’ Plot.” In fact, the only living survivor of that ugly affair, Yakov Rapoport, declared he would not join the new wave out. “My time is past,” he told me. “I’m ninety-one years old. It’s too late for me. I’ll be buried here.” And yet his story, and his family, seemed an emblem of the history and the future of the Jews of Russia.

  Yakov Rapoport, like many Jews of his generation, well understood that the purges of the 1930s were not an aberration of the moment. Cruelty had preceded 1937 and cruelty was sure to follow. Stalin was indulging his hatred of the Jews. In 1948, Stalin ordered the execution of Solomon Mikhoels, the legendary director of the Jewish State Theater and the leader of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee as a presumed enemy of the state. After the murder of Mikhoels—called a car accident by the authorities—the KGB arrested the leading members of the Anti-Fascist Committee, citing a “postwar return to normalcy.” Almost as a warm-up to the Doctors’ Plot and the coming purge, the KGB killed twenty-three Jewish intellectuals in 1952 on trumped-up charges of spying and treason. Then, in the first weeks of 1953, Stalin ordered the arrest of a group of nine prominent doctors, six of them Jewish; the Party papers claimed the doctors were poisoning the Kremlin leaders and covering up the conspiracy. Stalin’s murderous paranoia appeared ready to soar once more. Most historians now agree that Stalin’s order to arrest the doctors was similar to the Kremlin-ordered assassination of the Leningrad Party chief Sergei Kirov in 1934—a prelude to a wave of mass terror. Khrushchev said as much in his speech at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956:

  “Stalin personally issued advice on the conduct of the investigation and the method of interrogation of the arrested persons. He said that Academician Vinogradov should be put in chains, another one should be beaten. Present at this Congress is the former minister of state security, Comrade Ignatiev. Stalin told
him curtly, ‘If you do not obtain confessions from the doctors, we will shorten you by a head.’

  “Stalin personally called the investigating judge, gave him instructions, advised him on which investigative methods should be used. These methods were simple—beat, beat, and, once again, beat. Shortly after the doctors were arrested, we members of the Politburo received protocols containing the doctors’ confessions of guilt. After distributing these protocols, Stalin told us, ‘You are blind like young kittens; what will happen without me? The country will perish because you do not know how to recognize enemies.’ ”

  Of the nine doctors arrested, only Yakov Rapoport lived to see the advent of glasnost. I got to know him, his daughter Natasha, and his granddaughter Vika and visited them several times at Natasha’s apartment. The old man was long retired, but his memory was good, his voice as clear as that of a man half his age. “I thought I was finished, a dead man,” he said, remembering his despair in prison. “Then one day they let me out of jail—for no reason at all, it seemed. I didn’t understand what had happened until I came home and my wife told me that Stalin was dead. It was just dumb luck, for me—and probably for hundreds of thousands of other Jews.”

  The furious anti-Semitism of the Stalin era and the Doctors’ Plot itself were merely two of countless “blank spots” in official versions of Soviet history. The first official publications on the period were Yakov Rapoport’s memoir in the magazine Druzhba Narodov (“Friendship of Peoples”) and Natasha Rapoport’s memoir in Yunost (“Youth”)—both in April 1988. Both father and daughter began writing years before the rise of Gorbachev. But it was only in 1987 that either one thought it might soon be possible to tell the story of the Doctors’ Plot. Natasha visited her friends Irina and Yuli Daniel in the country and read them her manuscript. She could not have chosen a better audience. Yuli Daniel, along with Andrei Sinyavsky, had been jailed for seven years in the sixties in one of the very first dissident cases. Daniel’s father was Mark Meyerovich, a celebrated Yiddish writer. When Natasha finished reading, Daniel told her it was time to publish.