Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  The Memorial people usually went to the streets in groups of threes. One held a poster saying “Sign this appeal,” another collected signatures, and the third held up a quotation from Gorbachev’s speech saying there should be no “blank spots” in history. Gorbachev still had tremendous authority and popularity; what’s more, Lev said, Memorial hoped that a quotation from the general secretary would ward off the police. It did not always work. The petition groups were often arrested, until, finally, mysteriously, they found themselves getting hauled into the police stations less and less often. Divine—or Party—intervention, they supposed.

  If the Memorial group was to become the preeminent historical preservation society, it needed historians to help. This was an almost impossible order. The field of Soviet history had become so degraded over the years that the Memorial people felt they could not trust anyone; the ones they could trust, people like Dima Yurasov, were not professionals.

  There was one exception at first, a young scholar named Arseny Roginsky. Roginsky’s father was arrested twice in the Stalin era and died in 1951 at a camp near Leningrad when his son was five years old. But, typically, the KGB did not bother to tell the Roginsky family about the death. Month after month, until 1955, Arseny’s mother sent parcels to her husband in the camps, all the while planning for his eventual return. The family learned about the death only when they received a telegram informing them that the “packages are no longer being received.” Later on, the Roginskys were given a packet of documents that claimed the cause of death had been a heart attack. “When I saw that document I was eight or nine years old,” Arseny told me one afternoon at the Memorial headquarters. “I saw the stamp and the seal of the Soviet Union, and yet I knew it was false. They were telling us lies and they didn’t care how absurd they were. That’s when I decided to become a historian.”

  Roginsky took his university degree in Tartu, a university town in Estonia that had about it the air of the Berkeley academic underground in the sixties. The most influential teacher there—and Roginsky’s mentor—was the cultural historian Yuri Lotman. While it was impossible to conduct courses and draw up reading lists on subjects considered “anti-Soviet,” Lotman and his students looked at the structure of literary texts and cultures in a way that they all understood as a thinly veiled critique of the society they were living in. Their refusal to use Newspeak and channel everything into Marxist-Leninist categories was a form of dissidence. At Tartu, Roginsky’s classmates included Natalya Gorbanevskaya, who joined Pavel Litvinov on Red Square for the 1968 demonstration, and Nikita Okhotin, another future leader of Memorial.

  After graduating and moving to Leningrad, Roginsky took a tremendous risk. He founded an underground group called Pamyat, or Memory (not to be confused with the racist Russian nationalist group of the same name). Roginsky’s Pamyat was a forerunner to Memorial. Working secretly and with friends in the dissident movement, he began building an archive of Western and Soviet documents on the Stalin period. Roginsky followed Solzhenitsyn’s lead in The Gulag Archipelago and interviewed dozens of camp survivors about their experiences. “More than anything, I wanted to prove that the study of history actually could exist in this country,” he told me. It was not long before the police and the KGB were on to him. They searched his apartment seven times, bugged his telephone, and called him in for questioning. But while the KGB obviously knew what Roginsky was up to, he made it difficult for them, carefully burying his tapes and papers. The KGB never found that evidence. Then in 1981 the KGB ended all pretense toward the legal niceties. They arrested Roginsky and he was sentenced to four years in the camps. They moved him from camp to camp in order to prevent him from “infecting” the other inmates with anti-Soviet ideas and to make sure he never got too comfortable. When Roginsky finally returned to Moscow in August 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was in power. He was ready to try the same crime again. “I had to assume that history would outlast stupidity and cruelty,” he said.

  Through the spring of 1988, Memorial was adding thousands of names to its petition lists. Gorbachev planned on holding a special conference at the end of June to plant the seeds of a more democratic political system, and Memorial wanted to find some way to use the historic meeting to establish itself. For that it needed support at a higher level; it needed backing from people who would command the attention of at least the reformist flank in the Party leadership. The activists needed a core of names that would lend some political heft to Memorial. Most of the names were obvious: Sakharov, of course, writers such as Ales Adamovich, Dmitri Likhachev, Daniil Granin, Lev Razgon, Anatoly Rybakov, and Yuri Karyakin; the editor of Ogonyok, Vitaly Korotich; and Boris Yeltsin, who had become a mythic figure of defiance after his ouster from the Politboro in 1987.

  And there were two historians on the list. The first was Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev. Throughout the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, there had been other scholars who tried to work honestly, to conduct research outside the system of Party rules and guarded archives. Mikhail Gefter, another of Arseny Roginsky’s mentors, was well known to historians in the West for his essays on what he saw as the Stalinist “aberration.” Viktor Danilov’s groundbreaking first attempts to describe the scope and brutality of the collectivization campaign had also won respect abroad.

  But while Western historians trying to piece together the scale of the Soviet catastrophe relied almost solely on published Soviet documents, literature, and émigré sources, only one historian still living in Moscow played a major role in deepening the world’s understanding of Stalin and his successors. The publication in the West of Medvedev’s Let History Judge in 1971 astonished foreign scholars with its unstinting denunciation of Stalin and the sheer accumulation of evidence.

  I came to Moscow thinking that Roy Medvedev was the man to know. Dozens of my predecessors—especially the American and Italian correspondents—depended mightily on him for analysis and high-grade gossip: who was fighting whom, who had a fatal cold in the Politburo. The same sources in the world of Communist Party politics, bureaucracy, and journalism who had informed Let History Judge also provided Medvedev with nuggets of information that, for foreigners, could be mined almost nowhere else.

  Roy and his wife, Galina, lived on Dybenko Street in a distant part of town not far from Sheremetyevo Airport. Medvedev’s tiny study was a meticulous arrangement of books and files, a masterly use of space imposed by necessity. File cards peeked out of the shelves announcing “early Leninists,” “Beria,” or “Brezhnev.” Roy’s twin brother, Zhores, who had lived in a middle-class section of London called Mill Hill since his exile in 1973, had arranged his own office in the same fashion. London street life murmured outside, but inside, Zhores had recreated Russia. All through their separation, Roy and Zhores exchanged necessities with the help of obliging Western diplomats and journalists. For Zhores’s books on Soviet agriculture and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Roy sent clippings and source materials; Zhores handled Roy’s foreign-language publication rights and sent him packages of books, rubber bands, envelopes, folders, and underwear, socks, and shoes.

  Before Gorbachev came to power, Roy Medvedev was considered a dissident. After years of study and teaching school in the provinces, Medvedev took Khrushchev’s “secret speech” in 1956 at the Twentieth Party Congress and the further anti-Stalinist mood of the Twenty-second Party Congress in 1961 as a signal of permission. Year after year he accumulated source materials and interviews with Party officials, camp survivors, and other witnesses to the era. As a scholar he pushed the limits of the possible. But Medvedev’s timing was dangerous. By the time he finished Let History Judge and sent it to the West for publication, Khrushchev was out of office and Brezhnev had already begun a movement to rehabilitate the reputation of Stalin.

  Medvedev, who had maintained his membership in the Communist Party, was soon banned from its ranks. But while he was rejected by officialdom, he was also never really accepted by the dissidents. In his memoirs, Sakharov rarely levels any perso
nal attacks, but in several spots he makes it clear that by the early seventies he not only disagreed with Medvedev’s Marxism but also did not entirely trust him. Without saying so directly, he wonders if Medvedev did not have at least the tacit support of, or some kind of unsavory relationship with, the KGB. Other dissidents were far less guarded in their conjectures.

  I find it hard to believe the worst. In the early eighties, a KGB guard sat outside Medvedev’s door, and I doubt he was there to give out flowers to foreign guests. The specter scared off some visitors, but not all, and by the time I arrived, Roy still gave help to anyone who asked for it. I think his fallen reputation among the dissidents and then, later, among the liberal intelligentsia as a whole had more to do with his refusal to shed Marxism than with any shady dealings with the Party and its organs. It seemed strange to me that people who had never made a peep for thirty years could forgive themselves rather quickly for their cowardice, but were brutally critical of Medvedev’s constancy. This was a man who first made sense of his life as a scholar during an interrogation at Lefortovo Prison in the mid-seventies.

  “Comrade Medvedev, tell me, please,” the KGB officer had said, “would you have written your books about Stalin if your father hadn’t been sent away to the camps?”

  For nearly two decades before the start of glasnost, the KGB had regularly shown its interest in Roy and Zhores Medvedev. Zhores was Roy’s equivalent in the scientific world, a biologist and gerontologist who wrote about the abuse of genetics under Stalin and the use of psychiatric wards as prisons for dissidents under Brezhnev. In 1970, the authorities declared that Zhores suffered from “paranoid delusions of reforming society” and threw him into an insane asylum. Only Roy’s intervention, his rallying of Soviet and Western scholars, forced the Kremlin to release Zhores within three weeks.

  The KGB officer at Lefortovo had surely asked Roy the right question. “Why?” No one had ever posed it to him quite so directly or with such perverse intent. “I realized then just how closely my destiny was intertwined with my father’s,” Roy told me one day in his tiny study. “I was sitting there in that prison room, and it all came back.”

  On an August night in 1938 there was a knock on the door. The familiar scene had begun. Working with their uncanny efficiency and speed, KGB men introduced themselves and went to work. The twins, fair and thin, sat up in bed and tried to make out the muffled commotion outside the bedroom door.

  “Why do you come so late, comrades?” they heard their father say.

  They could not make out the answer.

  For weeks the boys had noticed that their father was depressed, eating almost nothing. It was a mystery to them why their father, Aleksandr Medvedev, a respected officer in the Red Army and a professor of philosophy and history at the Tolmachev Military-Political Academy, had been fired from his job. And why had they been sent home early that summer from Pioneer camp? Some of the family’s friends had been arrested, but the boys could not understand what their father understood only too well, that the defining principle of the terror was its randomness. There was no reason for any of this except the ruthlessness, perhaps the pathology, of Josef Stalin and the system he had built.

  When the boys woke the next morning, the visitors were still there, opening and slamming cabinets, pushing aside furniture, rummaging through everything. The bedroom door opened and the boys’ father walked in. He was dressed in a military tunic, but wore no belt. He looked as if he’d gone days with no sleep. Without a word, he sat down on the bed and embraced his sons. There was something final and desperate about his grip. Zhores told me he still remembered the feel of his father’s prickly, unshaven face scratching against his cheek, how his father’s wordless terror was so obvious, so physical, that all three began to cry at once.

  A few minutes later, the visitors left with Aleksandr Medvedev.

  In the first months after the arrest of their father, Roy and Zhores and their mother received a series of letters from Aleksandr Medvedev. He was writing from Kolyma, the camps of the far east. Some of the letters from their father were addressed for forwarding to the Communist Party Central Committee, the Supreme Court, the secret police. They all protested his innocence.

  “There was always the sense that this was odd, a mistake that could not have happened to us,” Zhores said. “Of course, everyone in the country, when it touched them, felt that way.”

  Roy and Zhores had idolized their father. He had been a strict teacher and a scholarly example to them, urging them to read everything from Jack London to the Russian classics. His letters to them from Kolyma betrayed none of his own suffering. They concentrated instead on the boys’ future.

  My dear Roy and ’Res:

  At last, spring has come, a rare guest in this part of the country. I am very far from you, but in my thoughts and in my heart, I am very close, closer than ever. You fill my everyday thoughts, and you are the aim and essence of my life. You are on the threshold of becoming young men. I so want to be beside you and give you all my experience and deliver you from youth’s mistakes. But destiny has decided otherwise. I do not want my absence from your lives to sadden your youth.

  The main thing is that you must study persistently and not limit yourselves just to the school program. Use your time when your perceptiveness and memory are especially keen. Try to be disciplined in your work, for even a mediocre man can accomplish a great deal if he is disciplined. You are talented capable boys. You must learn to think and be well organized. What you need above all is patience. You must learn to overcome difficulties no matter how large. I am sorry for the preaching tone …

  Love,

  Your Father

  In the winter of 1941, the Medvedev family received a letter from Aleksandr saying he was in the hospital and needed vitamins. A few months later, a letter they had sent to him in Kolyma came back unopened and stamped: “The money is returned on account of the death of the addressee.” For a while, the family could not accept this all too obvious reality and continued sending parcels. But each time they were returned with the same dark stamp.

  When he was just a teenager, Roy’s mother told him, “Don’t be a philosopher or a historian. It’s too dangerous.” And too painful. When Roy was studying at Leningrad State University in the forties, he began to do some independent research. He slowly uncovered who had betrayed his father. At the height of the terror, Boris Chagin was both a military officer and an intelligence agent of the NKVD, the precursor to the KGB. He was the author of numerous letters slandering his fellow officers. Those letters helped send many men, including Aleksandr Medvedev, to the camps. In Leningrad, Roy discovered that Chagin held a prestigious position in the same history department in which Roy was studying. Chagin was a professor of dialectical materialism.

  The Medvedev brothers stood off to the side, observing the man who had betrayed their father. Zhores especially made a thorough study of Chagin’s books: The Struggle of Marxism-Leninism Against the Philosophy of Revisionism and The Struggle of Marxism-Leninism Against Reactionary Philosophy. They took no action. They did not confront him. They learned. “I felt disdain for him, but not hatred or the desire for revenge,” Zhrores said.

  Decades later, when Roy was interviewing camp survivors for Let History Judge, a woman called him at home. “Are you the son of Aleksandr Medvedev?” she asked. Roy said he was, and the woman invited him to visit her at her apartment, which she shared with several other survivors from the Kolyma camps. There, for the first time, Medvedev heard the story of his father’s death, how he had injured his arm in an accident while working in a copper mine and was sent to work in a greenhouse. He developed cancer and was admitted to the camp infirmary. The inmates knew their friend was gone only when they saw the camp foreman walking like a peacock around the muddy yard. He was wearing the dark wool jacket Aleksandr Medvedev had had on his back when he arrived in Kolyma.

  For all his credentials as a scholar, Roy Medvedev was not for Memorial, and Memorial was not for him.
Although he was nominally a member of the group’s “public committee”—its council of well-known senior figures—Medvedev did not attend meetings and even doubted the value of the group. Roy believed in Gorbachev and in the Party as the only legitimate body of power. Memorial, to him, seemed ragtag, beside the point.

  The man who quickly took the lead as Memorial’s chief scholar-politician and was an admitted hypocrite, a calculating man who had been on the editorial board of Kommunist and was an instructor in the Higher School of the Young Communist League. Yuri Afanasyev had no illusions about his past. “For more years than I care to remember,” he said one night on television, “I was up to my neck in shit.”

  His ascendance was astonishing. In my first year in Moscow, Afanasyev was already the democratic movement’s master of ceremonies. At nearly every meeting you’d go to—at the Saturday-morning sessions of Moscow Tribune, at the lectures on Stalin—Afanasyev was invariably the man at the microphone, mediating, introducing, lecturing. He was a specialist in French historiography, and yet he looked, with his bullfrog neck and barrel chest, like a high school football coach. He had the gruff confidence of a man who had led many a committee meeting, first in the Young Communist League (the Komsomol), later in the radical opposition.

  His metamorphosis was not so much laughable as pitiable. Here was a man who never would have dared defend Roy Medvedev in the seventies and then scorned him as “hopelessly reactionary” in the late eighties. But I found that for all his presumption, his gall, Afanasyev’s analyses of what was happening in the country and where the situation was leading were uncanny. There were times when Afanasyev, with his supreme confidence, reminded me of Norman Mailer. He knew he had lived a life full of mistakes but he insisted on being heard. His campaign for the “return of history,” his early attacks on the “Stalinist-Brezhnevite” Supreme Soviet and on Gorbachev himself, always preceded fashion. He was not much loved—he had none of Sakharov’s subtlety or carriage—but he was often right. In contrast, Medvedev’s predictions now were not nearly as reliable as his gossip had once been. Typically, the day that Eduard Shevardnadze resigned as foreign minister in December 1990 predicting the rise of a dictatorship, Medvedev declared to all who would listen that Shevardnadze was stepping down because of trouble in the Georgian Republic.