Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  At Daniel’s suggestion, Natasha took her manuscript to Yunost, a monthly famous for publishing young talents during Khrushchev’s thaw. The new, relatively liberal editors were impressed, but she was told there were “too many Jewish names” in the story, too much explicit discussion of anti-Semitism. Natasha laughed and said, “I told them it reminded me of the joke about the boy who asks his grandfather, ‘Is it true Christ was a Jew?’ And the grandfather says, ‘Yes, it’s true. At the time, everyone was a Jew. Such were the times.’ Well, during the Doctors’ Plot, such were the times.” The editors said they would try to publish, but they didn’t want to “irritate” the audience. They asked Natasha if she could remember any “good Russian people who had helped” her. The meetings ended vaguely, with no promises, no rejection. The editors had not yet gotten the necessary signal from above, and so they waited.

  “Then came November and Gorbachev gave the history speech,” Natasha said. “He even mentioned the Doctors’ Plot. Two days later there was a telephone call from Yunost congratulating me. They had decided to publish. And then they said, ‘Only don’t think that it is in any way connected to Gorbachev’s speech.’ Well, no, of course not! They got Yevtushenko to write the preface. He wrote rather a lot about anti-Semitism, but they cut that, insisting, after all, that Russians, too, had been arrested. There was also a sentence saying that there were rumors of pogroms in 1953, that concentration or labor camps were being prepared to accept Jews after the doctors were executed on Red Square. We fought over that, but what could I do? They cut that, too.”

  Despite the cuts, the appearance of both Rapoports’ memoirs marked the first attack in the press on anti-Semitism. “We took a walk in the forbidden zone,” Natasha said.

  The generations of Rapoports were tied to one another in an easy, undramatic way. Their stories, even their sentences, elided into a single line of thought and memory. Their family narrative was nothing less than the Jewish experience in the Soviet Union in this century. “There is a whole age behind these eyes,” Yakov said, “from Nicholas II to Gorbachev.” Natasha smiled and put her hand over her father’s knobby wrist.

  There was great love between them, but tension as well. “I’ve wanted to emigrate since the sixties, but my parents refused to go,” Natasha said. “They were afraid, and I couldn’t persuade them. They decided it was too late for them and that they should die here. My mother is gone now. I cherish her memory and I love my father very much. But still, I cannot forgive them this.”

  As he listened to this, no doubt for the thousandth time, Yakov Rapoport’s left hand trembled slightly. He said nothing, just stared at the teapot and let it pass. He feigned a kind of nonchalance that his hands betrayed. When Natasha began talking about her fears that a worsening economy would provide “openings” for groups like Pamyat, he said bravely, “I’ve seen this before. I’m not afraid,” but his hands shook once more.

  It must have seemed to him that little had changed. Weekend mornings sometimes, Yakov Rapoport looked out his apartment window and saw the Pamyat boys in their black T-shirts carrying placards around All Saints Church. “Yids Out!” “Down with the Judeo-Masonic Conspiracy!”

  “I have seen this before, too,” Yakov said.

  Rapoport grew up in the Crimea. His first memory was of a pogrom in 1905. “I was six years old. My father was teaching Russian and mathematics where I went to school. We were having a science lesson when the Cossacks rushed in. The school was destroyed. I remember the globes were smashed, there was broken glass everywhere, and my father was badly injured. The police brought the bodies to the morgue, and my father along with them because they thought he was dead. One of our friends saw my father there, only by chance, and they could hear him moaning. He was unconscious, covered with blood. His fingers and hands had been broken by the truncheons. He had tried to guard his face, so they just broke the arms. It took months for him to heal.

  “This friend of ours tried to drag my father through a gate to a cab. The school principal was there, and he was shouting, ‘Go away, you Jew!’ When my father finally returned to the school weeks later, the other teachers shunned him. They would not speak to him, and he finally had to leave the school. This is what was first imprinted on my memory as a child.”

  As a boy, Rapoport was also caught up in reports of the Beilis case in Kiev. For the Jews under the czars, the case had an impact equal to that of the Dreyfus affair in France. In 1911, police in Kiev found the corpse of a thirteen-year-old Russian boy. His mother, a poor prostitute, accused “the Jews”—that scheming mass—of murdering her son to use his blood to make Passover matzoh. The “Blood Accusation” was rooted in anti-Semitic folklore in Ukraine—and was, of course, preposterous. Nevertheless, the czarist police arrested a Jewish factory worker, Mendel Beilis, and thought they were sure to win a conviction. With the world press watching, the prosecution brought in witnesses to testify that such ritual murders were widespread. “It was an accusation against all Jews, not just Beilis,” Rapoport said. “In our school, about half the class believed the accusations, and half did not.” But the jury, made up mostly of illiterate Ukrainian peasants, rejected the Blood Libel and set Beilis free.

  “It was a great miracle,” Rapoport said. “One of the jurors was asked why he had voted for acquittal, and he answered, simply, ‘My conscience.’ I found out later that those peasants in the jury were seen praying before they brought in the verdict. So religion, at least in this case, was a carrier of conscience.”

  From one year to the next in Rapoport’s life, there were attacks on the Jews in schools and in the courts. There were always pogroms and the threat of pogroms. Discrimination, life-threatening and petty, touched every facet of ordinary life. Jewish students like Rapoport even paid extra fees to study in the state schools. “My family was never religious, but my whole life in the czarist times let me know who I was,” Rapoport said.

  A keen student of natural sciences, Rapoport set off to study medicine in Petrograd, the city of the czars that would soon be the city of revolution and renamed Leningrad. Petrograd was outside the Pale of Settlement, the only region where Jews were allowed to live, but for some reason the university officials let Rapoport study there. “All in all,” he said, “I think the czars were somehow more liberal than the Bolsheviks were.” Rapoport arrived in 1915 and rented the corner of someone’s room.

  Those years were for him a mix of laboratory study and street revolt. After mornings in class and autopsy rooms, he sat in the gallery of the Duma, the Russian legislature, listening to the charges of repression and incompetence gather against the czar. Later he stood on the street and watched Lenin preach workers’ revolution from the apartment balcony of the city’s richest ballerina. Soon there were food riots and student protests. “When the first—the February—Revolution took place and the czar fell, I was there,” Rapoport said. “I was armed with a rifle and a pistol. Together with the workers I helped arrest the czarist ministers. It was a real bourgeois revolution.… We thought we would have a constitutional state, as in France and other parts of Western Europe. I don’t think that was a naive hope.

  “At first, I was taken by the ideas of the revolution, but then I became much more realistic. I had no admiration for the Bolshevik Revolution. I saw it as a terrific threat because of the mass of illiterates inside it who hated intellectuals. That spelled the elimination of the intellectuals. I thought there would be chaos, and I turned out to be right.

  “Lenin was surrounded by both Russians and Jews. There was not such a differentiation then. They were just members of the Party, and this ethnic question was not raised there. But there is an interesting detail which quite often evades many people. I remember reading in the complete works of Stalin, where Stalin describes the Third Party Congress, where there was a split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. At the Third Congress, Stalin wrote, the majority of the Mensheviks were Jews and the majority of Bolsheviks were Russians. Malinovsky, a friend of Lenin’s, said
there should have been a Party pogrom. For Stalin that was no joke. Stalin understood that suggestion as guidance for action.

  “In the Crimea after the Revolution, I saw terrible things happening to the White officers. Zemlyachka and Bela Kun came to the Crimea and started to gather lists of people who had taken part in the White movement. They promised not to kill them, just to register them. And then they killed everybody, many young men among them. Those who did register were shot. Those who did not survived. I realized what was going on by then, and who was who.”

  Rapoport quickly became a prominent pathologist in Moscow. He tried to avoid politics as much as possible. But the better known he became in his field, the harder it became to stand apart. With Stalin in power, Rapoport was constantly being asked to join the Communist Party. Over and over again he refused. He got into trouble in the late 1930s when, as the head of the admissions committee at a medical institute in Moscow, he would not discriminate against children of the “enemies of the state”—those who had been arrested or shot for no reason by Stalin’s secret police. Rapoport guessed that the only reason he himself had avoided arrest and execution in the camps was that the country could ill afford to wipe out all its best doctors. “But the truth is I really don’t know why I got through the purges,” he said. “Good luck, maybe?”

  During the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943, the pivotal point in the war for the Soviet Union, Rapoport finally gave in and joined the Party—“for patriotic, not political reasons. At that time the Party was the only force that held the country together. What I will always remember is the interview I had at Party headquarters. The first thing they asked me was ‘What is Zionism? What do you think of it?’ I was angry with this, but I answered: ‘Zionism is the national liberation movement of Jews aimed at the organization of their own territorial state.’ They were stunned.”

  Natasha Rapoport was fourteen when the doorbell rang. It was the night of February 2, 1953. One of the family’s closest friends, Dr. Myron Vovsi, had already been arrested, and the newspapers and radio had begun a crude propaganda campaign against the “murderers in white smocks,” the Jewish doctors.

  “There were rumors that, for the sake of ‘protecting’ the others—the ‘innocent’ Jews—from the mass hatred, camps were being set up for them in Siberia. All of them would be sent there soon,” Natasha said. “The question of how to execute the criminals was widely discussed. Informed circles in my class contended that they would be hanged in Red Square. Many were worried whether the execution would be open to the public or only to those with special permission. Someone consoled the disappointed: ‘Don’t worry. Surely they will film it.’ I had nightmares about Vovsi on the gallows.”

  Now, with the doorbell ringing incessantly, the secret police had come for her father. The agents rifled through every drawer and book, noting a few volumes of Freud as further evidence for the court protocols against Yakov Rapoport. During the search, one of the agents happened to cut his finger. Terrified that Natasha’s mother would poison him with contaminated iodine, he refused treatment. “They phoned somewhere for a car,” Natasha said, “and the suffering one was taken away—most likely to a special clinic where his scratch would be treated by a trusted, dependable Russian surgeon.”

  The arrest was, for Natasha, what the 1905 pogrom in the Crimea had been for her father—the pivotal memory of what it means to be a Jew in a hostile place. “Stalin is a bastard and a criminal,” Natasha’s mother told her, “but never say this to anyone. Do you understand?” Natasha’s friends scorned her, stared at her in class. The children in the courtyard mocked her, telling her that her father had taken pus from cancerous corpses and rubbed it into the skin of healthy people. They hurled rotten tomatoes, stones, and dead mice at her. The police confiscated all the family’s money, bonds, and bank passbooks. Natasha’s mother sold the family’s copies of Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Hugo to buy bread and milk. Natasha lay awake nights wondering when the police would come for her mother, too.

  An anti-Semitic hysteria engulfed Moscow. Party committees met in every school, institute, and factory to denounce the doctors and instruct “the workers” to be “on the lookout” for other Jewish plotters. At Moscow State University, Mikhail Gorbachev sat through a painful session of his Komsomol organization and heard a colonel, a decorated veteran of the war, denounce Gorbachev’s close friend Vladimir Lieberman. Many years later, at a class reunion, Lieberman told a reporter, “Some comrades sniffed the wind, tried to criticize me. I was the only Jew at the law faculty’s Communist Party meeting. Gorbachev had entered the Party right before this event, but it was he who tried to prevent the attack on me and did so very sharply, using some unparliamentary words. He called one of our old and respected veterans a ‘spineless animal.’ That just stopped them.”

  But very few rebelled, and few did not believe the Doctors’ Plot was a prelude to something more ominous. Within a few weeks of the arrest, the Rapoports were convinced that Yakov was dead. The prison officials said it was no longer “necessary” to deliver food parcels to the jail. Hundreds of thousands of families during the purges recognized this as a sign that their loved ones were already dead.

  On March 5, the director of Natasha’s school gathered all the students in a huge recreation hall. Comrade Stalin was no more, she told them. For forty-five minutes, Natasha looked around her and saw everyone crying, her teachers, the students. She could not cry but tried not to seem too obvious. “Finally they let us go home,” Natasha recalled. “My friend and I were walking home and we started to discuss some absolutely other problems and we started to laugh. We had forgotten completely that Stalin had died and we should be mourning with all the others. As we laughed, the people around us on the street were furious, they were shocked. We had to run home because we were afraid we’d be beaten right there on the street.”

  Three days after Stalin’s death in March, there was a phone call, a stark male voice: “I am calling at the request of the professor. The professor asked me to tell you that he is healthy, feels fine, and is concerned about his family. What should I tell him?”

  He was alive! Yakov Rapoport came home on April 4. Before coming up to the apartment he called from a phone downstairs: “I didn’t want them to have a heart attack at the sight of me,” he said. Every year thereafter, the survivors of the Doctors’ Plot gathered for a party on that day as an anniversary of freedom. Around thirty people—the doctors who had been arrested and a short list of other “suspects”—celebrated their own survival and the survival of the Jews in Russia.

  “Now there is only me,” Yakov Rapoport said. “My family and I, we celebrate alone.”

  Yakov Rapoport came home a grateful man. Even now it was hard for him to find much fault with Nikita Khrushchev—“not after he freed hundreds of thousands of people and gave them back their good name.” But for Natasha, the Doctors’ Plot was a great divide between childhood and adulthood, innocence and alienation. The end of the plot meant freedom for her father, but a different quality of mind and trust for the daughter: “I began to see all the lies around me. I began to have a double life, one outside of my circle when I had to be careful what I did and said, and one inside my circle of family and friends, when I could have my own thoughts, my real life, the times when I could be myself.

  “My attitude toward people had changed. There were so many who had betrayed us, people I never would have suspected. I stopped trusting people. And I began to understand—really understand—that I was Jewish. I understood that to be Jewish was to be persecuted. Years passed until I understood that, and maybe I don’t have a full understanding even now. After all, I am deprived of Jewish history, Jewish culture, Jewish language.

  “For all of us, this is the saddest thing. We know nothing of ourselves. We have had in here in our building a Jewish boy, with a Jewish face and appearance. A funny little boy. Another boy came from Central Asia. And there was a fight between the two boys. One mother asked the Jewish boy why he was fighting
the Central Asian. The little Jewish boy said, “Because he is not Russian!” The poor child didn’t even understand that he was not Russian either. The first time he’ll understand it is when a Russian comes after him, with a leaflet, or a club.”

  State anti-Semitism followed Natasha Rapoport throughout her life and career as a chemist. After graduation she and the rest of her Jewish classmates were sent off to work in factories while others got far better work at academic institutes. Eventually she won a spot at a prestigious institute, but she was told she could not advance very far. “I don’t have anything against you or your abilities, Natalya Yakovlevna, but there are just too many Jews in your department,” said one of the institute chiefs. “The regional Communist Party committee is already angry with your lab boss for hiring too many Jews. Do you want him to have more problems?”

  In 1978, she watched with astonishment as a less deadly version of the Doctors’ Plot was played out at her father’s institute. Local authorities received an anonymous “tip” that Russian patients were dying while Jewish patients were being cured. The letters charged the Jewish doctors at the institute with carrying out Nazi-style experiments on the Russians and that the crimes were being covered up. “Instead of throwing the accusations in the garbage, the authorities made a thorough investigation,” Natasha said as her father smiled weakly at the absurdity of it all. “Can you imagine? Ancient history all over again. And guess what? It turns out that there had been no experiments after all.