Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  Afanasyev grew up in Ulyanovsk, the town where Lenin was born. His father, a household repair man, was sent to jail for several years in eastern Siberia on the usual false pretense: he had pilfered a few kilos of flour from the collective farm to give to a poor family. “But the strange thing,” Afanasyev told me one afternoon at his office at the Historical Archives Institute, “is that we did not experience it as a grief or tragedy, because literally every other person we knew then was in prison for collecting leftovers on the farm or for missing a day of work. We never had any conversations about Stalin and I had no doubts about him.”

  Like Gorbachev, Afanasyev was a provincial boy whose grades were good enough to gain him admission to the best university in the country, Moscow State University. As a student, Afanasyev said, “I was like everyone else. I memorized The Short Course like any good Komsomol boy, like any other Communist.” On the night before Stalin’s funeral in March 1953, Afanasyev wandered the streets near the Kremlin. Tens of thousands of people jammed the streets headed for the Hall of Columns, where Stalin lay in his coffin. People were hysterical, wracked with fear after the death of their living god. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people suffocated to death in the mad crush to get to the hall. Afanasyev broke free of the crowd. As he walked, he could hear some drunks singing in an alleyway. He had never heard such joyous singing. The drunks were celebrating the death of Stalin.

  “I suppose once or twice in a lifetime you have those moments when you see something or hear something that tilts your life just slightly in another direction. When I heard those men, well, suddenly the purity of my political consciousness was stained,” Afanasyev said. “I felt the first moment of doubt. It wasn’t until Khrushchev’s speech three years later that I really started to rethink things more thoroughly, but it was this drunken celebration in the dark corners of Moscow that made me start to doubt. I was never quite the same.”

  After graduation, Afanasyev worked as a Komsomol leader in Krasnoyarsk, not far from where his father had been in jail. He certainly was no radical. He believed in the “infinite possibilities” of the Party. He and his friends talked about the great vistas of Leninist ideology, the great hydroelectric power station they—or at least the workers—were building.

  “That enthusiasm,” he said, “lasted until the late sixties, when Brezhnev tried to reanimate Stalinism.”

  Back in Moscow, Afanasyev worked in the national leadership of the Komsomol organization and then took his graduate degree in history, specializing in French historiography. Afanasyev knew enough to stay away from Soviet history as a field—“That’s where all the real idiots and time-servers were”—but even in his own work he made sure to glorify the obvious and denigrate “foreign influence.” For years his published works set out to prove that the “bourgeois” historians had grossly misinterpreted the October Revolution. Basically, he said, “I scoured the texts for their ‘glaring insufficiencies.’ ”

  But like so many others of his generation, Afanasyev developed a kind of two-track mind. Because he was such a loyal servant of the official line, he was sent abroad several times to study in France. In Paris, Afanasyev read books by the dissidents and émigrés. He lived in an academic atmosphere where he could speak a little more freely. So by the time he returned to Moscow, Afanasyev had changed just a little more. Once more he had heard the shouting from the dark corners, and he responded—or at least part of him did. Little by little, it became harder for him to resist the evidence. His faith—what little there was of it—eroded. Polish students at the university told him about Stalin’s massacres of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest. Afanasyev saw how senior professors of history at the university were arrested, or at least fired and silenced, when they strayed too far from doctrine.

  In the late seventies and early eighties, Afanasyev was a resident scholar of “the critique of bourgeois historiography” at a Moscow institute and was an editor at Kommunist, the Party’s chief theoretical journal. When Gorbachev came to office, Afanasyev wrote him a series of daring letters about the situation in Soviet historical science, calling on him to use his position as general secretary to end restrictions on academic study and open the archives of the Party and the KGB. Afanasyev got no direct answers. But he did win the key appointment in 1986 to take over as rector of the Historical Archives Institute and quickly used that position to give the first public lectures criticizing Stalin and introducing to the public several new faces—Dima Yurasov included.

  Afanasyev was determined to use his new post to help open up the study of the Soviet past. Exploiting his new access to at least some Party archives, he reviewed the letters of Olga Shatunovskaya, a woman who had been a member of the Communist Party Control Committee under Khrushchev. In those letters Shatunovskaya wrote that she had collected sixty-four folders of documents saying that according to KGB and Party data, between January 1935 and 1941 19,800,000 people had been arrested; and of these, seven million were executed in prisons. Her statement was supported by specific data describing how many were shot and where and when. But the files Shatunovskaya described were declared “missing.” By reading such letters, Afanasyev began to realize that the Party and the KGB had probably destroyed many of the most incriminating documents in the archives.

  Afanasyev got into some of his first battles with the Party hierarchy when he began to insist that professional scholars and not the Central Committee—not even the general secretary—should be the country’s principal historians. Although Gorbachev’s 1987 history speech helped open the process, Afanasyev said that there could no longer be such speeches. “As long as such things still exist,” he said, “there will still be the idea that history should be made not in the archives and universities and by writers, but rather at Party conferences and committees. That way history remains a handmaiden of propaganda and an extension of policy rather than a sphere of knowledge on the level of science or literature. If power wants to gain authority, then it has to say honestly, ‘We are not linked in any way with the previous regime.’

  “When we talk about perestroika, we see it in the following way: the former model of socialism was no good, so let’s work out a new model and put it into life. Again, we have it backward. We must give up this idea of a conscious construction of a more perfect society, the whole culture of belief in the limitless capabilities and opportunities of the human mind, and the ability to construct a model of socially engineered society and then realize it all.

  “Educators and Utopian thinkers used to think that the opportunities were endless. That the idea of a just society could be formed by the human mind, that it could be discovered on a theoretical basis; and it seemed to them that those theories could be realized in practice. In other words, a society of universal justice and prosperity could be built by thinking things out. We are now living through the final stages of that culture. Marx and Lenin are vanishing. They are being swept away in the same way that the ‘truth’ of Newtonian mechanics was swept away by Einstein and relativity.”

  By June 1988, Gorbachev’s victory in the Nina Andreyeva affair had given the Memorial leadership a sense of hope and expectation. Afanasyev and the liberal head of the Filmmakers’ Union, Elem Klimov, decided to seize on the Nineteenth Party Conference as Memorial’s moment. Both men had been elected delegates to the conference and here was a chance to propose the Memorial platform to the top officials of the Communist Party.

  Afanasyev had already helped to lay the political and intellectual groundwork for Memorial’s plan. A few weeks before the conference, he produced the most important political book of the Gorbachev era: Inogo ne dano (“There Is No Other Way”), a collection of thirty-five essays by the leading intellectuals of the “thaw” generation, men and women who had become the torchbearers of the glasnost era. While Gorbachev’s own book, Perestroika, was sodden with Party cliché, “There Is No Other Way” provided dazzling clarity and a sense of possibility. Published by the huge state-run firm Progress and edited by Afanasyev
, “There Is No Other Way” read like an underground manifesto but it was printed officially and on good paper. Afanasyev, Mikhail Gefter, the renaissance scholar Leonid Batkin, and the journalist Len Karpinsky all wrote essays on the persistence of Stalinism and the need to evaluate the past in order to create a humane future. In one way or another, the need for truth, for a clear-eyed view of history, was behind every piece in the collection, among them Vasily Selyunin’s analysis of the Soviet bureaucracy, Aleksei Yablokov’s survey of ecological disasters, Yuri Chernichenko’s essay on the “agro-gulag” of the collective farm system, Gavriil Popov’s piece on the absurdity of the centralized economic system. Nearly all the authors were scholars and journalists who had, for years, pulled their punches, spoken in euphemism, or spoken not at all. The presence of one author, however, honored the entire project. The simple addition of Andrei Sakharov, and his essay “The Necessity of Perestroika,” showed that an alliance existed between the dissidents and a much wider category, the liberal intelligentsia. Sakharov’s article was not much different from his underground manifestos; what was different now was the audience. The first printing alone was 100,000. Until Sakharov’s release from exile there were probably not ten thousand people in the country who knew the name Sakharov as anything other than an odious figure in the pages of Pravda and Izvestia. In his essay, Sakharov wrote that perestroika “was like a war. Victory is a necessity.” To even begin to win that war, he wrote, the leadership had to end the folly in Afghanistan, sponsor a thorough rewriting of the criminal code, endorse freedom of speech, and agree to a radical reduction in strategic and conventional weapons. In the next two years, Gorbachev would follow Sakharov’s prescriptions almost to the letter.

  A few days after buying my blue-and-silver copy of “There Is No Other Way,” I went to a demonstration organized by Memorial outside a sports arena in Moscow. It was a brilliant sunny day, and the people on the streets outside the arena took obvious delight in their freedom to chant slogans and carry signs reading “No to Political Repression,” “Death to Stalinism,” “Stalin’s Boot Still Endangers Us.” A half-dozen of the contributors to “There Is No Other Way” gave speeches on the steps. But one moment struck me above all. Not far from Sakharov, a young man carried a sign saying, in Russian, “I would like to call you all by name,” the famous line from Anna Akhmatova’s long poem Requiem.

  During Stalin’s Terror, Akhmatova spent seventeen months, day after day, waiting in long lines to find out what had become of her son, who had been arrested at the height of the purges. “One day someone ‘identified’ me,” she wrote in a preface to the poem. “Beside me, in the queue, there was a woman with blue lips. She had, of course, never heard of me; but she suddenly came out of that trance so common to us all and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there): ‘Can you describe this?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I can.’ And then something like the shadow of a smile crossed what had once been her face.”

  I quote a few lines here (in a translation by D. M. Thomas) because, in them, Memorial found its voice and credo:

  Again the hands of the clock are nearing

  The unforgettable hour. I see, hear, touch

  All of you: the cripple they had to support

  Painfully to the end of the line; the moribund;

  And the girl who would shake her beautiful head and

  Say: “I come here as if it were home.”

  I should like to call you all by name,

  But they have lost the lists.…

  I have woven for them a great shroud

  Out of the poor words I overheard them speak.

  I remember them always and everywhere,

  And if they shut my tormented mouth,

  Through which a hundred million of my people cry,

  Let them remember me also.…

  And if ever in this country they should want

  To build me a monument

  I consent to that honor,

  But only on the condition that they

  Erect it not on the seashore where I was born:

  My last links there were broken long ago,

  Nor by the stump in the Royal Gardens,

  Where an inconsolable young shade is seeking me,

  But here, where I stood for three hundred hours

  And where they never, never opened the doors for me.

  Lest in blessed death I should forget

  The grinding scream of the Black Marias,

  The hideous clanging gate, the old

  Woman wailing like a wounded beast.

  And may the melting snow drop like tears

  From my motionless bronze eyelids,

  And the prison pigeons coo above me

  And the ships sail slowly down the Neva.

  A few days after the demonstration, Afanasyev and Klimov hauled their huge sacks of petitions through the gates of the Kremlin. It was the opening day of the Nineteenth Party Conference, and the Party apparatchiks eyed them suspiciously. Afanasyev and Klimov presented the petitions to Gorbachev and his aides and waited for a response.

  On the last day of the Nineteenth Party Conference—after Boris Yeltsin’s dramatic appeal for rehabilitation, after a war over the direction of reform—Gorbachev took the podium and delivered a long speech. Just before he finished, he said that an idea had been “introduced,” one that echoed a similar suggestion in 1961 by Khrushchev—to build a memorial to the victims of the Stalin era. Now the Party, he said, must finally approve the idea. Gorbachev’s words had a tacked-on feel to them; they sounded like an afterthought. In fact, it was one of the most critical moments in the political and emotional life of the perestroika era. Although the Party would later try to block Memorial, although it would try to deny it funds and meeting places, the group had sown the first seeds of a struggle far deeper and more unpredictable than anyone had imagined.

  CHAPTER 9

  WRITTEN ON THE WATER

  Just as Memorial’s demonstration outside the sports area was ending, Arnold Yeryomenko’s plane was landing. Yeryomenko lived in Magadan, the city that had once been the “capital” of the Kolyma region of the gulag archipelago in the Soviet far east. The rest of the passengers were worn out from the ten-hour flight to Moscow aboard Aeroflot’s cramped and creaky liner. The one meal served had been a Dixie cup of green mineral water and a greasy chicken wing. Somehow, Arnold bounded off the plane “refreshed,” he said. He’d come to Moscow on a mission.

  Yeryomenko was the leader of Democratic Initiative, the first non-Communist political group ever in Magadan. The group’s membership decided to send him as a “delegate” to the Nineteenth Party Conference. “We figured that if democracy is starting in this country, then we ought to be heard, too,” he said. The membership passed a hat and collected his 800-ruble round-trip airfare.

  Before he left, Arnold called me in Moscow. He said he had heard my articles read in Russian on Radio Liberty. Could we meet? Of course. Not only had Yeryomenko managed to sound engaging at a distance of six thousand miles, I was also eager to talk to someone from Magadan. Magadan had always defined distant to me, an almost mythical outpost, closer to Los Angeles than Moscow, where the winters are ten months long and a mild day in January is forty degrees below zero. Magadan is the setting for two of the best books ever written about Stalinism: Yevgenia Ginzburg’s memoirs Journey into the Whirlwind and her son Vasily Aksyonov’s novel The Burn. Magadan “was, in a sense, the freest town in Russia,” Aksyonov wrote. “In it there lived the special deportees and the special contingent, which included those categorized SHE (Socially Harmful Elements) and SDE (Socially Dangerous Elements), nationalists, social democrats, Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists … people who recognized themselves as the lowest slaves and who, therefore, had challenged fate.” In June 1988, Magadan was still closed to foreigners. The only way to get there was on an official Potemkin-village tour with the Foreign Ministry. It was on such a trip in the summer of 1944 that Vice President Henry Wallace decided that Kolyma was w
onderful and the regional secret police chief, the infamous General Goglidze, was “a very fine man, very efficient, gentle and understanding with people.”

  I met Arnold at the Lenin statue on October Square near my building. He was in his early fifties with the silver hair and fine features of Cesar Romero, quick and jaunty as a bantamweight.

  “You are Remnick?” he said. “Well, come, I’ve got great things to show you.”

  Arnold spoke such good English that when we switched to Russian I had the odd sensation that he had an American accent. Probably he was just dumbing down his Russian for my sorry self. He told me he had learned his English in school “but mostly from listening to ‘the foreign voices,’ ” Radio Liberty, the Voice of America, and, especially, the BBC. Evidently the jamming system had been less efficient in Magadan than in Moscow. On the short walk to my apartment, Arnold told me he was born in 1937, the year the purges really began. His father was an engineer who had been assigned to Magadan for his technical expertise. In those days, Magadan was still short on barracks and ports for the slave ships that came in every few days from Vladivostok.