Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  “There is something special in Homo sovieticus, in this special nation of people, and the scale of anti-Semitism here is unique,” Natasha said. “Here, anti-Semitism is political, it is a weight on the political balance. Our government will sell Jews or not sell Jews, will let them go or not, depending on what it gets in return. Jews are a card in the political game. And this makes anti-Semitism more dangerous, because you never know how politics will change and what they will do with us the next time around.”

  Natasha was thwarted in her attempts to leave the country for Israel or the United States. Israelis promised her an immediate post at the Chaim Weizmann Institute in Jerusalem, but she could not persuade her parents to move. And her husband, Vladimir, was also hesitant. “He is a very indecisive man,” she said. “This issue almost broke up our marriage. I think my life would have been different in Israel. As a scientist I could have worked as far as my talents could bring me. Here I am trapped, kept in a cage.”

  Natasha was determined that at least her daughter, Vika, would learn to live and think like a free woman. At first, when the little girl came home humming and singing the Bolshevik hymns she had been taught in school, Natasha was furious. “I told her to shut up,” Natasha said, “but she loved those songs. When I tried to counter the lies she was being told in school and I told her to look around at the real life around her, she started crying and shouting, defending what she was told in the second and third grade. She was struggling for the sake of these beautiful lies.”

  But as Vika grew older, she began to understand the deep contradictions between the textbooks in school and everything she knew about the real history of her own grandfather and the world around her. Like so many, she grew cynical, alienated from anything that smacked of official Soviet life. She decided she would emigrate if she could. “By the time I was thirteen I already knew that I could no longer live here,” Vika told me. “I was still in the Soviet Union, but I knew it was temporary. Just thinking that way set me free.

  “I’m not scared of the latest wave of anti-Semitism. They are pathetic people, and they will always be around. I’m leaving because I cannot stand it here any longer: the rules, the psychology, the gray sameness of everything. If I stay here, I will suffocate. Unless a brick were to fall on my head, I could predict every moment of my life here until I die. I want to have children one day, but I will not have them here. I will miss everyone, but I am gone.”

  A few nights before she was to leave for Israel, Vika and her mother staged an extraordinary puppet show for all their friends and relatives. Around seventy-five people were packed into a single tiny room. The puppets, with voices supplied by Vika’s friends, played out her own personal history and coming exodus. When it was over, and the puppets lay in a heap, some people were still laughing, the rest were in tears.

  Until the last minute, Vika was reminded of just why she was leaving. On the night of her departure, she and Natasha were driving through their neighborhood in north Moscow in Natasha’s tiny orange Lada. Natasha glanced in the rearview mirror and noticed they were being followed. She pulled into the local police station and said, “What the hell is going on? Why are you having me followed?”

  “It’s for your own protection,” the police captain said.

  Natasha was furious, but her daughter smiled, as if in justification of her decision to go. That night, Vika flew to Budapest, then switched planes for the flight to Tel Aviv. When Vika left, Natasha said, “it was the first time in weeks that I had a good night’s sleep.”

  A little while later, I visited Natasha Rapoport once more. With her daughter in Jerusalem and her father still in Moscow, Natasha said she felt like a “woman in the middle.” Whenever we talked, she did everything she could to avoid the inevitable question of her father’s death and her long wait to emigrate. Finally, she brought it up herself.

  “I know what you are thinking,” she said. “And the answer is yes. When he is gone, I will be gone, too.”

  CHAPTER 8

  MEMORIAL

  Esther has no idea where her grandfather died or where he is buried. Most likely, he was shot in the back of the head. Probably he is buried in a mass grave somewhere near the city of Gorky. She can guess, but she does not know.

  In the Soviet Union, an empire of holocaust survivors and the children of survivors, this gnawing uncertainty was the usual condition of life. As Hannah Arendt writes, “The concentration camp, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life.” I am not sure we met anyone who did not have a grandparent, a parent, a sibling, a friend, someone who still wandered through his dreams, still ghostly because there was no way to fix the dead one’s end in time and place. The survivor can usually imagine the death in a generic way—the executioner’s rubber apron, the ditch dug in frozen mud. But the suffering continues because there is no closure. It’s as if the regime were guilty of two crimes on a massive scale: murder and the unending assault against memory. In making a secret of history, the Kremlin made its subjects just a little more insane, a little more desperate.

  Awake, the people lived in the ruins of their nightmares. In their daily lives they lived in apartment buildings that had been built by prisoners, sailed through canals dug by slaves of the state. One afternoon in Karaganda—an industrial city in central Kazakhstan that, seen from the air, looked like an ashtray stuffed with cigarette butts—I wandered into the woods and discovered an abandoned school. The coal miners showing me around pointed to the bars in the windows. “It was a pretty good school, but it was a wonderful prison camp,” one miner said bitterly. His father spent a year for “anti-Soviet activity” in a room that later became the second grade. The rooms were dank, and a bitter wind blew through them. In the basement playrooms, the miner said, the guards carried out their nighttime executions. There were drainpipes in the floors to catch the blood, zebras and wildebeests on the walls to amuse the children.

  Much later on, I took another trip, this time to Kolyma in the Russian far east, the old prison camp region just across the water from Alaska. At least two million prisoners died in Kolyma. The survivors went home years ago, but the place was still haunted. The Russian north was once the region of “little peoples,” hunters and nomads, Eskimos, Yakuts, Chukchis, Yukagiris. A friend told me that one hundred or so Eveni people lived in the village of Godlya an hour north of Magadan. Would I like to see them?

  We arrived in Godlya at about eight-thirty in the morning. The village was a sea of mud, a few heaps of garbage, an empty store, a couple of wooden houses tilting into the mud, and the sort of poured-concrete barracks you’d see on the outskirts of almost any Soviet city. We saw a young woman—a beautiful woman, with a round Eskimo face—stumble drunkenly through a puddle. She sort of squinted at us and dropped to one knee. Farther on, we saw a few more people, some leaning against a wall, a couple more passing a bottle back and forth and saying nothing. Half the town was smashed before breakfast. It was always this way in the morning, and by sundown hardly anyone was awake, my friend told me. They drank vodka, bathtub gin, hair tonic, eau de cologne, even bug spray. It had been that way for years. The Eveni had been herded into these villages after centuries of hunting reindeer in the forest; once they ceased to wander, they were lost. The regime, in order to create a more perfect Soviet Eveni, or Chukchi or Eskimo, took children away from their parents and villages and “educated” them in state boarding schools, sickening little places in the middle of nowhere. By the time the schools got done with them, there was no Eveni left in them at all. Now they spoke Russian miserably and Eveni not at all.

  One of the few sober men around, a squat young man with a withered arm, introduced himself. He said his name was Viktor, and I asked him my earnest questions. “The Eveni are dying out,” he said. “They have nothing to do and they drink until they can’t drink anymore. I spoke Eveni until I was four years old. That’s what they tell me.
Then they sent me off to the schools. It wasn’t school really. They just let us sit there and made sure we spoke only Russian. So most of us didn’t say anything at all.”

  I asked him what chances he thought he had in life and whether the changes in Moscow might help. By now a small crowd of drunks had circled round us. Their eyes were glassy and their heads swayed slightly, like dandelions in a breeze.

  “We are done for,” Viktor said, looking at his neighbors. “It’s too late. They killed us.”

  Viktor led us over to two other Eveni men. They were wearing cheap Soviet coveralls and University of Alaska baseball caps that must have floated across to Siberia on the Bering Strait. They were the only two men in town working. They had a curious job. With huge blowtorches they scorched the skin on a huge dead hog until it was pink and dry. Then, they cut the skin in strips and fried and salted them. “Very tasty with vodka,” one said. Bar food, Eveni potato chips.

  Another man, Pavel Trifonov, came over and watched this strange ritual with us for a while. “This is the sort of thing we do now,” he said. “The state won’t let us fish. And there are no reindeer left. They call this village a state farm, but there hasn’t been any farming here in a long time. It’s way below zero most of the time. What are we supposed to raise? Lemons? Most of the time, this place is a sheet of ice.”

  I asked him what his family had done before they settled here in Godlya.

  “My grandfather was a trapper and a hunter and he traded with the Japanese,” Pavel said. “And what am I? I stand around and watch this. I don’t feel like an Eveni and I am not a Russian. I don’t feel like anyone. They are killing us. No, they already have. This is slow genocide, and it’s almost at its end.”

  How to put a limit on these stories, this sense of hauntedness? On a winter afternoon in Leningrad, I paid a call on Dmitri Likhachev, a distinguished scholar of medieval Russian literature at the Leningrad institute known as Pushkin House. Likhachev was eighty-four at the time, and his office seemed designed to ignore all things Soviet. The feeling of entering that room was the reverse of what happens to the pitiful exile in Nabokov’s story “The Visit to the Museum,” who wanders through a museum in France and magically finds himself “not in the Russia I remembered but in the factual Russia of today.” One entered Likhachev’s study as if into another time. There was Dal’s great dictionary of the Russian language, a prerevolutionary clock, a stunning portrait of Pushkin where the dull face of a general secretary might have been. But it somehow avoided fakery. This was not fantasy, but rather an act of attention and defiance. In a city where thousands of volumes in the main library had been burned and ruined from neglect, where Rembrandts faded needlessly on the walls of the Hermitage, Likhachev created an idealized room in which to read and think.

  “Most of all, I like the quiet,” he told me that winter afternoon. “Russia is a noisy state.” When he was a boy, Likhachev watched the February and October revolutions from his window. A decade later he had an even closer view of the rise of Soviet civilization, courtesy of a five-year term in a labor camp. Likhachev was arrested in 1928 for taking part in a students’ literary group called the Cosmic Academy of Sciences. The club posed about as great a threat to the Kremlin as the Harvard Lampoon does to the White House. For election as an “academician,” Likhachev presented a humorous paper on the need to restore to the language the letter “yat.” The Bolsheviks banned the letter as part of a campaign to “modernize” Russian after the revolution. Later, one of Likhachev’s interrogators railed at him for daring to waste his time on such things.

  “What do you mean by language reform?” the interrogator shouted. “Perhaps we won’t even have any language at all under socialism!”

  Likhachev spent most of his term in Solovki, a labor camp established by Lenin in 1920 on a White Sea island. The monastery on the island had been used as a prison before, but a single statistic gives some idea of the difference between the czarist repressions and the Bolshevik Terror. From the sixteenth century to the end of the Romanov dynasty in 1917, there were a total of 316 inmates at Solovki. On a single night—the night of October 28, 1929—Likhachev listened to gunfire as three hundred men were executed.

  “It was autumn and my parents had come to visit me. We had rented a room from one of the guards,” he once said. “A man came running to see me on that night saying the wardens had just been to the barracks to get me. Well, I told my parents that I had to go because I was being summoned for night work and that they shouldn’t wait up for me. I could not tell my parents that they were coming to take me away and shoot me. I hid myself behind stacks of firewood so they would not see it happening.

  “Meanwhile the shooting was in full swing. I was not found. It meant that I was also included in that number, I was also meant to be one of those three hundred. So they took somebody else instead of me. And when I emerged from my hideout the next morning, I was a different man. So many years have passed since then, more than half a century, sixty years in fact, and I still cannot forget it. Exactly three hundred people were mowed down just like that, as a warning.… Three hundred shots, one per man. The executioner was drunk, so he did not manage to kill them all immediately. But all the same, they threw all the bodies in a big pit. The executioner is older than me, and he is still alive.”

  A little while after the Nina Andreyeva affair in the spring of 1988, I was walking along the Arbat, the pedestrian mall in downtown Moscow, and saw a young woman in her twenties collecting signatures. This was still dangerous business in 1988. I’d seen people arrested on the Arbat and near Pushkin Square for handing out petitions or organizing an “unauthorized” demonstration. Sasha Podrabinek regularly got himself arrested when he passed out his underground paper, Express-Khronika, on the street.

  There were about a half-dozen people huddled around the woman. A couple signed; the others kept a step back and listened, passing the time. She said her name was Elena and her petition, a sheaf of onionskin sheets riffling in the wind, was for a new “historical, anti-Stalinist” group called Memorial.

  Memorial, Elena said, wanted to “give a name” to the victims of the Stalin era; they wanted to build monuments, research centers. The more she explained the group, the more it seemed to me their goal was to build a kind of Soviet Yad Vashem, the memorial center in Jerusalem dedicated to the memory of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. She kept talking about “the names,” giving people back their names, and as I stood there, I remembered going to Yad Vashem nearly twenty years before and walking into a vast, dark library, a room filled with immense volumes containing the names of the lost. I had never even begun to understand the immensity of the Holocaust until that moment. I’d had teachers who had asked us to imagine four of the five boroughs of New York gassed to death. But it was only in that simple room, surrounded by the names of all of them, that I felt it. And what had Solzhenitsyn written? What was his count of the victims of the Soviet regime? Sixty million?

  The woman told me how I could find out more about Memorial. She said I should find Lev Ponomarev or Yuri Samodurov, a human rights activist and a friend of Sakharov’s. Lev Ponomarev lived on the very outskirts of Moscow, a neighborhood that had apartments on one side and miles of birch forest on the other. He was in his forties but looked many years younger. Unlike the shaggy Russian intellectual of legend, Ponomarev looked like an astronaut, fit, clean-cut. With his daughter running in occasionally with a shriek and announcements about the weather (“huge snow!”) or dinner (“coming soon!”), Ponomarev brought me up to date on the start of Memorial. He said that he and most other intellectuals in their twenties, thirties, and forties viewed the advent of Gorbachev skeptically. But when Sakharov was released from internal exile, he said, “We began to come around.”

  “Like a lot of people,” Ponomarev said, “I thought that what had to be done at the start in order to dismantle the system was to tell people how many victims there have been, to plant the idea that monuments should be erec
ted to those who had perished, archives should be published. This is the real start of perestroika. The truth. And with that, the process can become irreversible. Without that, without everyone acknowledging that the system is discredited and guilty, a crackdown can always succeed.

  “In the winter of 1987, I got together with Yuri Samodurov. We formed an action group of about fifteen people. This was at a time when many informal groups were being launched. A general meeting was held in someone’s apartment. We started drafting a one-page-long appeal in order to begin a petition campaign. To get the language of it just right was very tricky. For example, we knew that millions of people had been killed, no one doubted it, and yet we didn’t know whether we ought to include the word ‘millions’ in our document. We still had no legal proof to substantiate it. We were afraid of turning people off.”

  The Memorial founders, a group of mainly young unknown scholars and writers, first tried to collect signatures at their various offices. That seemed to be the safest route. But Ponomarev and the others found that even close friends they had known for many years were refusing to sign.

  “A lot of them agreed with what we were after,” he said, “but they were suspicious. You could see they were wondering if their friends had suddenly become agents and the petition was some kind of trap. So then we decided to take the more anonymous route and go to the streets and ask passersby to sign. And since we wanted our appeal to have legal force, we asked people for both their names and their addresses. We all had our doubts about this. This is something that is terribly dangerous in our country. The levels of suspicion run so deep. But people responded! After all these years, people were just ready for this. It was such an amazing sociological experience. We discovered that there were people willing to give a name and an address and yet they had no idea that we were not KGB agents. They trusted us.”