Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  “It was kind of a gulag boomtown,” Arnold said with a terrific smile; it was the “gateway to hell.” Even in late spring, the ice was thick near the shore. It was on days like those that the tramp steamers could not make it through to the docks. The prisoners, many of them barefoot and dressed in rags, had to walk on the ice for the last mile to shore. A camp orchestra would assemble on the ice and play for the new prisoners, usually a march or a waltz.

  In a way, arrival was a relief, the journey had been such hell. The train trip to the far east from Moscow and European Russia was in cattle cars, and it took a month at least. The prisoners were packed together so tightly that it was said there were those who starved to death and were found still upright at the end of the journey. At the embarkation points on the Pacific, inspectors went up and down the line looking for slaves. Like horsemen before an auction, inspectors checked the prisoners’ teeth and eyes. They pinched their biceps and buttocks to see how much muscle tone there was left after more than a month in the cattle cars. At Vanino in the late 1940s the NKVD had a contract to supply some state firms for 120,000 slave workers a year.

  The rest of the prisoners were then packed into the holds of tramp steamers headed for Magadan. As the purges became a permanent condition of state in the thirties and forties, rumors of the sea journey reached Moscow and the other big cities on the “mainland.” But no rumor could capture the horror of the voyage itself. Michael Solomon, a Romanian prisoner, wrote of his shock as he was herded into the hold of the ship Sovlatvia headed north to Magadan. It was a scene, he said, “which neither Goya nor Gustave Doré could ever have imagined”: thousands of men and women, dressed in rags, half-dead and covered with boils and blisters. “At the bottom of the stairway we had just climbed down stood a giant cask, on the edges of which, in full view of the soldiers standing on guard above, women were perched like birds, and in the most incredible positions. There was no shame, no prudery, as they crouched there to urinate or empty their bowels. One had the impression that they were some half-human, half-bird creatures which belonged to a different world and a different age. Yet seeing a man come down the stairs, although a mere prisoner like themselves, many of them began to smile and some even tried to comb their hair.”

  Later, the officers would load on board even more prisoners—not more “politicals,” but murderers, thieves, rapists, whores: “When I saw this half-naked, tattooed apelike horde invade the hold,” Yevgenia Ginzburg wrote, “I thought that it had been decided that we were to be killed off by mad women. The fetid air reverberated to their shrieks, their ferocious obscenities, their wild laughter and their caterwaulings. They capered about incessantly stamping their feet even though there appeared to be no room to put a foot down. Without wasting any time, they set about terrorizing and bullying the ‘ladies’—the politicals—delighted to find that the ‘enemies of the people’ were creatures even more despised and outcast than themselves. Within five minutes we had a thorough introduction to the law of the jungle.” Feeding time came and the warders dumped a cartload of bread down the hold and into the gaping mouths of the beasts.

  The killing went on and on, day after day, and in every form. The ships would often get caught in the ice far from any shore, and the crew had no choice but to wait out the weather and keep the rations for themselves. The wait could go on for weeks, even months. Thousands of prisoners would die of hunger and disease. Sometimes the guards left the corpses in the hold with the living. Sometimes they pitched the dead over the rails onto the ice, where they stayed, day after day, rotting, until the thaw came and the sea swallowed them and the ship sailed on, to Magadan.

  That was the world Arnold Yeryomenko grew up in, the landscape of his childhood and youth. “The ships would come in to shore all the time,” he said as we sat down to some coffee in my kitchen. “I remember seeing the prisoners in huge lines, five, six thousand men and women in rags, exhausted, being marched from the ships and onto the shore and up to the barracks. The guards were always beating them in the street, and sometimes you heard the pistols going off. Sometimes you’d see a dead man in the street. Maybe no one had time to cart him off.”

  Arnold’s professional life never really got going. He studied engineering and foreign languages in the early 1960s. But he was broke, and, to make some extra money, he tried to trade on the black market. He was arrested and put in jail for ten years. When he was freed, he was not allowed to live in Moscow, and he moved back home to Magadan. The humiliation of his arrest and imprisonment and his growing sense that the cruelty he had seen as a child was still an essential part of the social order of the Soviet Union helped make Yeryomenko an angry man, a political man. In 1981, he wrote a book condemning the Communist Party and circulated it in samizdat editions. For that he got two more years in prison.

  When perestroika finally started in Moscow, Arnold was impudent enough to think that reform ought to come to Magadan as well. He started Democratic Initiative. He stood outside KGB headquarters—he and a few kids and housewives—shouting slogans into a bullhorn. He was summarily fired from his construction job. The local Party committee and the KGB began to treat this out-of-work engineer and his younger friends in Democratic Initiative like an invading army. They bugged, harassed, and occasionally jailed the members on false charges.

  Arnold said I should come see for myself. I told him I’d always wanted to go to Magadan, but it was still a closed city.

  “Well, you don’t have to go,” he said. “I can show it to you on television.” He took a videocassette out of his briefcase and said, “Do you have Beta or VHS?” He explained that one of the members of Democratic Initiative had bought a videocamera on a trip to Alaska. “It’s better than having a newspaper, which of course, we can’t,” he said.

  The tape flickered and jerked and then finally found its focus on a crowd of about 2,500 people on the city’s main square. Lenin Square, of course. There were signs protesting that the city’s leading Communist Party officials had grabbed up all the delegate seats to the Party conference in Moscow. There was Arnold shouting into a bullhorn, demanding that the Party, the “sole possessor of power in this country,” let representatives from outside the Party apparatus represent Magadan in Moscow. Another speaker pointed to the “White House,” the relatively elegant-looking building that was the Party headquarters, and asked why the “Communists always hogged all the wealth.”

  “That’s where the mafia lives!” the speaker shouted. “That’s why they have to be guarded day and night by the militia! They’re criminals!”

  Another speaker demanded that a special hotel for visiting Party officials be converted into a kindergarten. It wasn’t easy to make out all they said. The police had hooked up a set of speakers near the demonstration and played deafening Soviet pop music to drown out democracy.

  The most dramatic moment came when Ludmila Romanova, a local Party official, accepted Arnold’s invitation to address the crowd. The young woman spoke with a kind of hyped-up spirit, but she could only talk in the old Party way. She told the anti-Party demonstrators that they had assembled “without proper permission from the Party.” But she did say that workers would be “invited to participate” in discussions about new schools and other civic improvements.

  “We’re sick of your promises!” “We don’t want your words!” came some of the more polite replies.

  Then Romanova ended with a prim reminder of “Soviet legality.”

  “You must know,” she said, “that according to the Constitution, the political rights given to the people should not damage the rights of others.” The crowd was less than impressed with her insinuation and booed her off the platform.

  Now Arnold was laughing. He got up from his chair and pointed to a building and a set of windows in the top right-hand corner of the screen.

  “There,” he said. “Look at that building. You can see the KGB guys in the windows taking our picture.”

  The next day, Arnold tried to deliver Democratic In
itiative’s manifesto and petitions to the Party conference. We stood about half a mile from the Kremlin and watched one black limousine after another ferry the visiting Party hacks to the conference.

  “They won’t let me near the place,” Arnold said.

  After he dumped off his documents at a Party “reception hall,” he booked a seat back to Magadan. Back at my place, we watched some of the conference on television. We were like football fanatics on New Year’s Day. We could not take our eyes off the set. Arnold hissed the hacks and cheered on the liberals.

  “You know what will bring these people down?” he said. “Embarrassment. One day they will just slink off the stage.”

  Like most of the liberals in Moscow, Arnold was all for Gorbachev’s scheme to create a new legislature, but suspicious that it would be rigged and loaded with Party leaders. He loved watching Yeltsin’s confrontation with Yegor Ligachev, his plea to the Party for rehabilitation and his call for a faster, more radical, program of democratization. Looking dazed by the task ahead, Yeltsin jutted his jaw and barged on, evoking in speech if not in manner nothing less than the return of Nikolai Bukharin and other Old Bolsheviks who had been shot in the purges and restored to the Party ranks under Gorbachev:

  “Comrade delegates! Rehabilitation fifty years after a person’s death has now become the rule, and this has a healthy effect on society. But I am asking for political rehabilitation while I am still alive.”

  Yeltsin also lambasted Ligachev for trying to railroad him and obstruct reform, in general. Ligachev had his chance at the podium and replied, “Boris, you are wrong!” To Yeltsin’s barrel-chested, hangdog heavyweight, Ligachev came across on television as a street-tough middleweight. He was furious, accusing Yeltsin of sitting mute at Politburo meetings. The nomenklatura in the hall roared their approval while most of the country made a hero of Yeltsin.

  Yeryomenko reveled in this liberating theater. Like millions of others, he was delighted to see the Party begin, at last, to feed on itself, to expose its corruptions and splits, live on television. But most of all, Arnold was thrilled that Memorial had won its great victory at the conference. By allowing the construction of a memorial to the victims of the regime, the Party, largely in spite of itself, had begun a period of national repentance.

  “At least the conference wasn’t a complete loss,” he said from the airport. I told him I still wanted to come to Magadan. “I’ll see you soon,” I said. We both laughed. The possibility still seemed very far away.

  Memorial’s victory at the Party conference was sweet, but even its leaders knew that there was something too easy and superficial about it. “Stalin Died Yesterday” was the title of Mikhail Gefter’s contribution to the “There Is No Other Way” collection and by that he meant that Stalinism infected everything and everyone in the Soviet Union. Every factory and collective farm, every school and orphanage was built on Stalinist principles of gargantuan scale and iron authority. In every relationship—in trade, on buses, in almost any simple transaction—people treated each other with contempt and suspicion. That was Stalinism, too. Only now were people beginning to wonder out loud about the efficacy of such a life. Only now were they permitted to express those doubts in the papers, in books, on television. “Stalinism is deep inside of every one of us,” Afanasyev told me after the Party conference. “Getting rid of that spirit is the most difficult thing of all. Next to that, getting the Party to permit a monument is nothing.”

  I met a filmmaker named Tofik Shakhverdiyev, an Azerbaijani who had made a documentary called Stalin Is with Us. He interviewed Stalinists all over the country: a Cossack on the Don River, a cab driver in Tbilisi, the man who was Bukharin’s guard during the purge trial. At one point in the film, a group of veterans is sitting around a table singing songs in praise of Stalin. The old soldiers seem transported.

  I told Tofik about my Kaganovich obsession, and instead of giving me a patronizing look, he laughed and said, “Me, too. But he just won’t answer the door.” Lately, Moscow News and a few other papers had been trying to figure out, through interviews and polls, how people felt about Stalin. Just the idea of political opinion was new. But the polls were primitive, and I thought Tofik would have as good a sense as anyone what it meant now to be a Stalinist. Who were they? What did they want?

  “The number of people who openly defend Stalin, really admire him, is limited,” Tofik said. “But if you talk about people whose first instinct is a passion for order, then I think you are talking about not less than half the people in the Soviet Union. You see, we use fashionable words like ‘democracy’ and ‘pluralism’ now, but so few people can really live without the security of complete order and control.

  “In a perverse sense, the dissidents and the nonconformists of today are Stalinists. We democrats have become like-minded in a way. We ignore or ridicule what’s really out there. But off to the side, the Stalinists are going against the current, and this halo of being dissidents, strange as it seems, gives them a sort of dignity. They believed in their great cause and the creation of a great society, of Communism. They see democracy and capitalism as a matter of the rich exploiting the poor, while in our system, we are all poor. For them, the lack of an iron hand means prostitution, AIDS, emigration to the West. Stalinists derive their sense of themselves from their connection to the memory of the great man himself. When a slave kisses the hand of the master who whips him, he is getting some of the power of the master. A belief in his greatness appears.”

  That spirit remained on view, at least physically, in the Republic of Georgia, among other places. Like all reporters in Moscow, I eventually made a trip to Gori, Stalin’s hometown. As if that would tell me much. Gori was about an hour’s drive through the mountains from the Georgian capital, Tbilisi.

  The centerpiece of the town was one of the most spectacular bits of kitsch on earth. The Gori Party authorities, with some funding from Moscow, had moved Stalin’s ancestral house—a tiny two-room structure—to the center of town in 1936. In an attempt to make a hut into Olympus, the Party had built neoclassical columns to frame the great man’s childhood home. The rooms themselves were intended to speak for Stalin’s Leninist modesty. One room had a simple wooden table, the other a portrait of Stalin with his beady-eyed, black-shrouded mother. Next door, the vast Stalin Museum, as grandiose as the columns, was closed—“pending reconsideration,” the guard told me.

  People who had finished looking around the Stalin house sat outside in the park under the trees eating sausages and apples. Not a single visitor I spoke to said he had any problem with Stalin. They said the country needed someone just like him to put an end to all the “confusion.” A factory worker I talked with showed me the tattoo on his chest. It was an impressive double portrait of Lenin and Stalin. I asked the worker about Gorbachev. Was there room for him?

  “Gorbachev?” he said. “I wouldn’t tattoo his name on my ass.”

  Stalin was born Iosif Vissarionovich Djugashvili on December 21, 1879. His father was a drunk and beat his wife. He died young. When he was a boy, Stalin’s favorite story was Aleksandr Kazbeg’s The Patricide, the tale of an avenging hero of Georgia named Koba. After he read the book, Stalin demanded that all his friends call him Koba. “That became his ideal,” wrote a childhood friend. Stalin’s closest comrades in the party called him Koba—sometimes until the day he had them shot.

  Stalin studied at a Russian orhthodox seminary. The monks said he was “rude and disrespectful.” His mother always wanted him to enter the clergy. When he visited her in 1936—by then he was already the Soviet leader and planning the Great Purge—she said, “What a pity you did not become a priest.”

  In 1895, Stalin wrote:

  Know this: He who fell like ashes to the ground

  He who was never oppressed,

  Will rise higher than the great mountains,

  On the wings of a bright hope.

  In 1926, Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda, left him. He begged her to return, and at the same t
ime had her followed by the secret police. Six years later they fought over Stalin’s brutal treatment of the peasantry in Ukraine. When the row was over, Nadezhda left the room and shot herself. Her daughter, Svetlana, later said, “I believe that my mother’s death, which he took as a personal betrayal, deprived his soul of the last vestiges of human warmth.”

  Stalin lived for years by himself in the Kremlin. One of his guards said that Stalin bugged the phones of all his advisers and spent long periods of the day listening in on their conversations. Aleksei Ribin, a secret police officer and Stalin’s guard, wrote in Sociological Research magazine that Stalin loved to tell his limousine driver to pull over to the side of the road to give old women rides home. “He was just that kind of man,” said Ribin.

  In the Homeric tradition, Pravda used countless titles to refer to Stalin: Leader and Teacher of the Workers of the World, Father of the Peoples, Wise and Intelligent Chief of the Soviet People, the Greatest Genius of All Times and Peoples, the Greatest Military Leader of All Times and Peoples, Coryphaeus of the Sciences, Faithful Comrade-in-Arms of Lenin, Devoted Continuer of Lenin’s Cause, the Mountain Eagle, and Best Friend of All Children.

  There were many Western intellectuals who were all too willing to indulge Stalin in his cruelties. In the midst of a state-imposed famine, George Bernard Shaw looked up from his plate at the Metropole Hotel and said, gaily, “Do you see any food shortages here?” Later he added that he “took his hat off” to Stalin “for having delivered the goods.” In a meeting with Stalin, Shaw’s traveling companion Lady Astor asked, “How long will you go on killing people?”

  “As long as necessary,” Stalin replied.

  Lady Astor quickly changed the subject, asking Stalin if he could help her find a good Russian nanny for her children.

  After his own audience with Stalin, H. G. Wells reported he had never “met a man more candid, fair and honest.” The American ambassador in Moscow, Joseph Davies, wrote of Stalin that “a child would like to sit on his lap and a dog would sidle up to him.”