Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  Stalin, who was five feet four, wanted a court portrait done showing him as a tall man with powerful hands. The painter Nalbandian complied by portraying Stalin from a flattering angle with his hands folded, powerfully, across his belly. Stalin had his other portrait painters shot and their paintings burned. Stalin rewrote the official Short Biography of Stalin, personally adding the passage “Stalin never allowed his work to be marred by the slightest hint of vanity, conceit, or self-adulation.”

  Stalin died of a stroke on March 5, 1953. He once said that those revolutionaries who refused to use terror as a political tool were “vegetarians.” According to Roy Medvedev, Stalin’s victims numbered forty million. Solzhenitsyn says the number is far greater—perhaps sixty million. The debate continues even now.

  It was the trial of the season. Since the rise of Gorbachev, a retired lawyer from Kharkov named Ivan Shekhovtsov had filed repeated lawsuits against various intellectuals and newspapers for “slandering Stalin.” He made a career of these suits. Sixteen so far. This time his opposition was Vechernaya Moskva, the city’s evening newspaper.

  STALIN IS THE FATHER OF OUR PEOPLE.

  SLANDER IS THE DIRTY WEAPON OF THE ANTI-STALINISTS.

  “Get those signs out of here,” said the judge.

  At the witness table, Shekhovtsov sat taking notes. He wore a suit and a row of military medallions. He had been a tank gunner on the Baltic and Ukrainian fronts in the war and had lost part of a lung in a firefight. There were a half-dozen benches, all crammed with Shekhovtsov’s supporters. Most of them were older men and women, and nearly all wore ribbons and medals from the war. They were angry that they had to get rid of their banners, but they made up for it with loud gossiping. There were some nasty remarks about the Jews and Armenians, about Raisa Gorbachev, about Memorial. They carried copies of right-wing journals, Nash Sovremenik (“Our Contemporary”), which was hard-line Russian nationalist, and Molodaya Gvardiya (“Young Guard”), which was hard-line Stalinist. There was a lot of whispered speculation about whether the representative from Vechernaya Moskva was a Jew. Of course, they concluded. She must be.

  “We spent our lives building socialism, and now these people—Afanasyev, Adamovich, Korotich—they are getting rid of socialism and they are succeeding,” a woman named Valentina Nikitina told me as we waited through the lull in the proceedings.

  She, too, was a decorated veteran of the war. She said she had lost many friends and relatives in the war—“half the people I knew,” she said—and the idea of reforming, much less dismantling, the system was unconscionable. “These people are like the Hungarians in 1956. They are staging a counterrevolution. The majority of our people support Stalin as a builder of socialism. The kulaks, most of them, were Jews. The secret police at the Belomor Canal were Jews. The leader was a Jew! The chief engineer was a Jew! If the Jews would only move to an autonomous region, they would have a wonderful life!”

  I thanked her for sharing her thoughts with me and turned to Shekhovtsov himself. He looked imperious and bored. He drummed his fingers on the witness table, making sure the three judges could observe his superiority even as they conferred. Shekhovtsov had no lawyer. He was his own advocate.

  A few yards away, the woman from Vechernaya Moskva finally stood and told the judges that her lawyer could not make the session. Could she have a continuance?

  “He’s on vacation,” she said uncertainly.

  Shekhovtsov rolled his eyes. The crowd chuckled and hissed. The judge set another court date.

  “A lot of rubbish that is!” my seatmate muttered. We all stood to leave. As the woman from Vechernaya Moskva left the crowded little room, she kept her head down and took quick, purposeful steps toward the door.

  “Slanderer!” the crowd hissed at her. “Shame on you!”

  Out in the parking lot, Shekhovtsov’s supporters unfurled their banners and celebrated. I introduced myself to Shekhovtsov.

  “Then I suppose you want to interview me,” he said. “Well, I could use a lift to the train station. And maybe something to eat, if you don’t mind too much.”

  I asked Shekhovtsov why he bothered. Why was he spending all his money and energy filing suits and always losing? He looked at me, not angrily, but with a sort of kindly eye. I was a foreigner and didn’t know any better.

  “It is I who is restoring the historical truth,” he said. “I didn’t know anyone who was repressed. In the press now they are saying that in every house everyone at least knew someone who was repressed. In Kharkov, I investigated one hundred and fifty households and not one said it was waiting for a knock on the door. These numbers you are hearing are all sensations, pure libel. During collectivization in 1929, my grandfather was kicked off his land and exiled. But people gave us clothing and food, and after six months we returned to the land. During the exile, my brother died of an inflammation of the lung, but my mother never blamed Stalin. It was the local officials! My mother is eighty-six and she understands this with her woman’s mind!

  “From the point of practical deeds, Stalin did more than even Lenin. But that, of course, is probably a matter of longevity. I get letters all the time from people nostalgic for the life under Stalin—their joy in labor and love of the Motherland, how they lived with heads raised high and sang patriotic songs. Right now we don’t hear anyone singing. And it’s not that there is an absence of songs to sing. There is an absence of faith. You see, people forget. They need to be reminded. In the thirties, when I was in the Young Pioneers and in Komsomol, there was unprecedented patriotism in this country. There was a willingness to sacrifice personal needs for the good of the nation. People had in mind great aims and a wonderful future, and so they endured. Stalin is with us and Stalin will come. That is the mind-set of a generation. We went into battle with his name on our lips. He took Russia, which had a wooden plow in its hands, and he left it with an atomic bomb. Such a man cannot be slandered. The young should learn their history.”

  In his most celebrated suit, Shekhovtsov charged that Ales Adamovich, the Byelorussian writer and one of the leaders of Memorial, had slandered Stalin in a film called Purification. To Shekhovtsov, Adamovich represented the “worst kind of liar,” a “man old enough to know better” who was trying to lead the youth of the Soviet Union astray.

  “People have lost the ability to learn the truth for themselves,” Shekhovtsov said. “They listen to Korotich and Yevtushenko. They don’t read the truthful histories that have been published by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism.”

  And what about Sakharov? After all, Sakharov was now the nominal chairman of Memorial. Could he not be trusted either?

  “Under Brezhnev, Sakharov was exiled to Gorky so that he would not have the chance to talk about nuclear secrets or slander the system,” Shekhovtsov said. “Now, under Gorbachev’s instructions, he has been returned. But in revenge, Sakharov is trying to slander us, and he is guiding the greatest power in the country—Memorial. Memorial can one day turn into an alternative party.”

  Shekhovtsov said he knew Nina Andreyeva and thought her a “good worker.” Their acquaintance seemed confirmed when he said he was quite convinced that “the majority of people who slander Stalin and the homeland are Jews.”

  A few weeks later, Shekhovtsov called to tell me he had some news. He’d won his suit against Vechernaya Moskva. Not that it had slandered Stalin. But the court did rule that the paper had libeled Shekhovtsov when it said that he had used “Stalinist methods” when he was working as a prosecutor. The paper printed a long apology, and Shekhovtsov said he had won a great victory for himself and, most of all, for “Stalin’s good name.”

  “The day I stop my fight,” he said, “is the day I die.”

  In the courtroom, I’d gotten a dinner invitation from a woman who described herself as a “great lover of Stalin,” Kira Korniyenkova. She was a matronly woman in her late fifties. Plump and stern, she wore wire-rimmed glasses, and her hair was done up in a bun. She looked like a teacher who specialized
in handwriting and never gave an A. Her apartment was dim, dowdy, crammed with books. She lived with her two parakeets, Tashka and Mashinka. “My children,” she called them as she poked the cage. She had never married. Never wanted to. “I wanted to be free,” she said. “When you have close relatives living with you, they get in the way. They are a hindrance. I’ve got my plan and I am fulfilling that plan.”

  If she ever had a passion, it was Stalin. “I have always loved him. I have dedicated my life to him and his memory.” Kira Alekseyevna was a woman unstuck in time. She spent countless days at the Lenin Library researching the “scandalous” charges of Western and Soviet scholars writing on Stalin. Medvedev, Solzhenitsyn, Afanasyev, Roginsky—they were all “enemies” to her. She wanted to disprove “everything they say about how Stalin killed millions. He didn’t. He only attacked enemies of the people.” Sometimes she wrote letters to the Central Committee to complain about one point or another in the avalanche of articles in the liberal press.

  “Feel right at home,” she said, and left me in the dining room with the parakeets. She went off to cook. The room was decorated with dozens of pictures of Stalin. Stalin as a boy. Stalin with Lenin in Gorky. Stalin on the front page of Pravda. Stalin in white military dress. She had hundreds more photographs in albums and shoeboxes. She had stacks of photos wrapped with purple silk ribbons.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” I said, shouting politely down the hall as if I were admiring my hostess’s Matisse.

  “Oh, I’ve got lots of them!” she said, shouting back from the kitchen. “Look, look …”

  She came running down the hall, flushed. She started shuffling through a stack of pictures.

  “Look!” she said, thrusting them a few inches from my eyes. “Each one shows a different emotion, every stage of that great man’s life.” Kira glowed.

  Like a lover of Wagner who goes every year to Bayreuth, Korniyenkova took an annual pilgrimage to Gori. Sometimes, she said, she went twice a year: once on the anniversary of Stalin’s death, once to celebrate Victory Day. “There are a lot of people who think as I do. In 1979, we gathered there for the centenary of his birth. I think more than thirty thousand people visited the Stalin Museum that day. People who want to build a monument to the so-called victims of Stalin should think about that a little. It’s not necessary to build a monument to people who were imprisoned. They had something to answer for. It’s not necessary to build monuments for rich peasants who were purged. They should build monuments to the Communists. Traitors don’t deserve monuments.”

  Kira served pot roast and potatoes. By the by, it seemed, she said that two of her relatives had been sent to the camps during the purges. Their crime had been being late to work.

  “They were properly judged,” Kira said. I didn’t say anything at all. Tashka and Mashinka twittered in their cage. Kira’s voice rose in anger. “Was it Stalin’s fault that my uncles were out late drinking and came in late for work? They had to be punished for that. I am a person who loves order. I am for real order, an iron hand or some other kind of hand. I am for a situation in which people are answerable for their deeds.”

  The food was delicious, but Kira Alekseyevna did not eat. She lectured. She swooned. She ascended to rapture. “I only wish we could be living in such merry days as we had then,” she said. “When you see the documentary films, you can see how animated people were, how happy they were. Their faces glowed. They had poor tools, but they worked and they loved working. And now we are supposed to think that labor is ‘monkey’s work.’ It was always so wonderful for the people to tell Stalin about their successes. I was only eighteen when Stalin was alive, but I could see how my mother worked in those years. She didn’t work because she was afraid of anything, but for the sheer pleasure of it. Those parades on Red Square were some of the happiest days of our lives.”

  I asked her if she had ever actually seen Stalin. Kira’s eyes watered as if she had suddenly been swept by a wave of memory, love recalled. “The last time I saw Stalin was in 1952. I remember the mood of the workers when, at first, Stalin could not be seen standing on the Lenin Mausoleum. They mourned. But then he appeared, and you cannot quite imagine the happiness we felt. He was quite old by then, and we greeted him with such joy. We were all fulfilling the tasks he had set out for us. We were ready to go to the moon for him. We loved Stalin, we believed in him with all our hearts.”

  When I asked Kira how she had reacted to Stalin’s death, she told me, and cried all the while. After she heard the news, she said, she felt ill and would not leave the apartment for several days.

  “On the day of the funeral I went out into the street, and you could hear all the factory sirens wailing,” she said. “They used to do that when a worker left a plant forever, and now they were wailing for Stalin. Nowadays we have no such passion for our leader. Everyone gets his salary, but there is no food. How can I believe in these rulers? I believe in real things.”

  After dinner, Kira told me that she had once been friends—“oh, well, not friends, but comrades”—with a few of Stalin’s relatives. She had even visited Molotov at his dacha. Molotov, she said, had “the eyes of wisdom.” Until he died in his nineties, Molotov would tell all his visitors that Stalin had acted rightly. There had been enemies, and enemies, he said, had to be eliminated.

  But hadn’t there been mistakes? I asked Kira Alekseyevna. Did Stalin never commit a mistake?

  “Mistakes?” she said. “Yes, he made one. He died too soon.”

  There was one other visitor to the Stalin trial I wanted to see: Stalin’s grandson, Yevgeny Djugashvili. There were four Stalin grandchildren still living in Moscow: a housewife, a surgeon, a theater director, and Djugashvili. The first two begged off from a meeting. I spoke with the director, a slender and quiet man named Aleksandr Burdansky, at his office at the Soviet Army Theater, a vast building shaped like a star. All his life, he had done what he could to distance himself from Stalin. He changed his name. (“I think Burdansky sounds better than Stalin. Don’t you agree?”) He quit military school and always tried to look at Stalin “the way an artist would.”

  “I have to carry a burden, but I am not to blame for having such a grandfather. I think and act like a normal man. I have no extreme views about Stalin. I try to understand him as a phenomenon. Shakespeare’s Richard III helped me understand Stalin. Not the play so much as Richard’s biography. Richard was born a hunchback, but he had talent and a quick mind. So the man wanted to prove his right to be on an equal footing with everyone else.”

  If Burdansky had not pushed Stalin off to the boundaries of his mind, then he certainly liked to think he had. I had never known anyone to talk about Stalin with such an air of boredom and abstraction. “Looking at it from a civilized point of view,” he said professionally, “it would be naive to regard Stalin as pure evil after he was portrayed by everyone as the friend of all peoples, children, and animals, the most outstanding personality of the age, and so on. I think he correctly translated Marx’s ideas into life. It was the only way to carry them through, alas.…”

  Burdansky did have one public moment of pique—an appearance on television in which he made it plain that he despised his grandfather. He outraged the Stalinist wing of the Stalin family. When I called Yevgeny Djugashvili on the phone, he said, “Just one thing. Don’t talk to me about that faggot half brother of mine. He betrayed Stalin. His grandfather.”

  Djugashvili was the son of Yakov, who was captured by the Nazis and, when Stalin refused or failed to win his release, was executed. The day I met him, Djugashvili was preparing to retire from his job in the Defense Ministry in Moscow and retire, at the age of fifty-five, to Tbilisi. The man who opened the door looked exactly like Stalin: a little thinner, perhaps, his mustache more a pencil line than a hairbrush, but, still, the resemblance was chilling. He was in full military dress and, at first, conducted himself with the formality of a Politburo member. We entered a room that had several portraits of Stalin on the wall
and a bookcase crammed with Party and military histories published in the Stalin era. There was a simple table and on it a stack of fresh paper and several sharpened pencils.

  “So, what is question number one?” he said as he stared hard at me across the table. This was not a naive man. He was not so foolish as to think that an American reporter was visiting in order to do anything other than harm—and, in this, I suppose, he was right. But there was no point in confronting him. I simply asked him what he thought about his grandfather, what he thought of the attacks in the press and within the Party. It was the question he had expected.

  “I always adored Stalin,” he said. “No congress, no book or magazine article is ever going to change that and make me doubt him. He is my grandfather, first of all, and I adore him.”

  Solzhenitsyn was “an immoral scum,” and, as for Gorbachev, “The Party’s authority has fallen, this is obvious. They say the fish rots from the head. And when the fish is rotten, people throw it away. Everything is moving in that direction. In the end, I think the party will be disbanded.”

  Djugashvili had a nasty word to say for all the obvious people—Shatrov, Afanasyev, Sakharov, Yeltsin, the leaders of Memorial. He went on for a while, too, about the latest plays and television programs that had slandered his grandfather. He clearly kept up with it all. The only thing that seemed to lift his mood was his own recent appearance, as Stalin, in a Georgian film production.

  “They say I’m a real chip off the old block!” And then he stopped and stared at me once more. For a moment it really felt as if Stalin were there. But Djugashvili broke the spell.

  “Enough!” he said, slamming his hand down on the table. His face broke into a weird grin. “I like you! I have decided that! Now I will make you my real guest!”