Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  In Georgia, a good host usually shows his guest around the farm and the farmhouse. Stalin’s grandson showed me his kitchen, then his bathroom shelves.

  “I built these myself!” he said, waving his hand across them lovingly as if they were a prize in a game show.

  “And here is the bedroom … and over here … the living room!… By the way, you know, I never got anything out of being Stalin’s grandson. But, of course, when I needed an apartment I wrote a letter to Brezhnev. They gave me this place. And they jumped me ahead on the waiting list for a car, too. So it hasn’t all been bad.

  “And this,” he said, entering the kitchen, “is the kitchen again.”

  Djugashvili yanked a jerry can out from under a table. “Here is cha-cha,” he said, lifting the moonshine. Then he put a watermelon in my arms, and we marched back to the living room.

  “Pour out two glasses of cha-cha,” he said. Djugashvili cut thick slices of the watermelon with a curved dagger and salted them. He stood and lifted his glass and waited. I stood.

  “We shall drink to friendship between nations!” he said. Fair enough, I thought, and we both downed the cha-cha, a home brew from Tbilisi. On first gulp, the drink did not seem as obvious or as strong as Russian vodka.

  Djugashvili stood again. “In a Georgian house,” he said, “the host makes all the toasts, and in my house, the second toast is always to Stalin!”

  I felt a wave of nausea sweep through me and weaken my knees. But I kept my glass high and my eyes fixed on my host’s. “The Soviet Union took on the brunt of the war, and Stalin was at the head of all that,” he went on. “He took a backward country, with peasants in felt boots, and made it great. And yet we still curse him. These people should be punished and their lies exposed! I think there will come a day when the Soviet people will give their evaluation. And so … to Stalin!”

  “To Stalin,” I said. And may God forgive me.

  By the end of 1988, there were chapters of Memorial in over two hundred Soviet cities. A debate was beginning between members who wanted to limit Memorial’s attention to the repression during the Stalin period and those who thought it should widen to include all acts from the first arrests and executions under Lenin to the death of the dissident writer Anatoly Marchenko in a prison camp in December 1986. In other words, some Memorial members were beginning to speak not merely of the “aberration of Stalin” but of a criminal regime.

  Novy Mir, Neva, and other journals began to publish articles critical not only of Stalin, but of Lenin and even the Revolution. In January 1989, Yuri Afanasyev presided over a two-day constituent congress of Memorial. Vadim Medvedev, a leading member of the Politburo, tried to shut down the session before it ever began, citing obscure reasons of “permission” and “sanction.” Sakharov called Medvedev and informed him that the Politburo had no business getting involved. “If you shut us out of our meeting hall, we will hold the congress in apartments all over Moscow,” he said. Medvedev gave up, and the congress went on. The Communist Party was beginning to lose control of history, and a Party that could not be sure of its hold on the past had to be nervous about its future.

  But even as Memorial expanded its definition of the past, its essential purpose remained the same: to honor the dead, to give them back their names. Some of the younger historians and volunteers worked on their own to accumulate more information on arrests, executions, exiles. Others made careful studies of existing history textbooks and won a series of critical victories when the Party decided to rewrite the schoolbooks, eliminate high school ideology exams, and make mandatory university courses in Marxism-Leninism and scientific socialism as optional as basket weaving.

  No one took the mission of Memorial more literally than Aleksandr Milchakov. A journalist whose father had been the general secretary of the Young Communist League and head of one of the industrial ministries, Milchakov grew up in the House on the Embankment. When he was a child, he saw guards in the courtyard carrying what seemed to be violin cases. “In reality, they were cases for their machine guns,” he told me. “They were ready for action at all times.”

  Milchakov was in his fifties and still lived in the apartment of his childhood when I got to know him. As one of the leading figures of Memorial, he decided to narrow his journalism to a single investigation. According to Roy Medvedev’s Let History Judge, around one thousand people per day were killed during the height of the purges in the late thirties. Milchakov wanted to know where the dead of Moscow were buried.

  Milchakov’s own father was arrested and spent fifteen years in internal exile. “During those arrests I was only around eight or nine, but I was a curious boy and liked to hang around the courtyard. I saw the reaction of the other boys when their parents were taken away. It was a time when you could hear the clomp of high boots on the staircase. The police were in the habit of never using the elevator. I remember clearly how they took my father down the stairs, not the elevator. And so we all listened every night for footsteps.

  “Most of the parents truly believed that there were enemies in the Party and that there was a genuine political struggle going on. They were always surprised when someone was arrested. But their surprise was that someone who they thought was honest turned out to be a traitor. When my father was arrested and our belongings were confiscated, I remember how we children were ousted from our own apartment and we sat in the courtyard on wooden sleighs and no one, none of our old friends, would come near us or talk to us. To talk to a relative of an enemy of the people was the gravest sort of sin.”

  Using Western and Soviet published sources, Milchakov began researching the location of the biggest mass graves in the Moscow area: the Donskoi Monastery, the grounds of a KGB colony in the village of Butovo, the Kalitnikovsky Cemetery near the city pet market, the fourteenth-century Novospassky Monastery, the banks of the Moscow-Volga Canal.

  Early one morning, my friend Jeff Trimble of U.S. News & World Report and I met Milchakov outside the House on the Embankment and headed for the Donskoi Monastery. The flower ladies in their blue canvas jackets sat near the entrances selling carnations, 5 rubles a bunch. Milchakov led us toward the main building on the cemetery grounds, the crematorium. We walked to the back of the building where an old man, an attendant, was watching over a small bonfire of garbage. A few broken tombstones lay on the ground.

  “See this gate?” Milchakov said. “Well, every night trucks stacked with bodies came back here and dumped the dead in a heap. They’d already been shot in the back of the head—you bleed less that way—at the Lubyanka prison or at the Military Collegium. They stacked the bodies in old wooden ammunition crates. The workers stoked up the underground ovens—right in through that door—to about twelve hundred degrees centigrade. To make things nice and official they even had professional witnesses who countersigned the various documents. When the bodies were burned they were reduced to ash and some chips of bone, maybe some teeth. Then they buried the ashes in a big pit.”

  We walked for a few minutes up and down rows of tombs, elaborate monuments that would not have seemed out of place at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. We stopped at a tomb marked “The Grave of Unidentified Corpses, 1930–1942.” There were four white plastic tulips stuck in the ground and a stack of rotting carnations that smelled like spilled wine. Someone had also put a tiny icon of Saint George near the base of the monument. Milchakov said that the pit had been five yards deep and twenty feet square and when it was filled completely with ashes—“hundreds and hundreds of pounds of ash”—the secret police paved it over with asphalt. He said there were rumors that Bukharin was buried at Donskoi, but he was not sure.

  “When the purges were at their peak,” he said, “the furnaces worked all night and the domes of the churches and the roofs of the houses here were covered with ash. There was a fine dust of ash on the snow.”

  We drove to Kalitnikovsky Cemetery, a dumping ground for thousands of corpses. There was a sausage factory nearby, a fetid place, and Milchakov said
, “In the purges, every dog in town came to this place. That smell you smell now was three times as bad; blood in the air. People would lean out their windows and puke all night and the dogs howled until dawn. Sometimes they’d find a dog with an arm or a leg walking through the graveyard.”

  At the Novospassky Monastery, Milchakov showed us the steep bank near the pond where the NKVD buried the bullet-riddled corpses of foreign Communists: John Penner of the American Communist Party; Herman Remmele, Fritz Schultke, Herman Schubert, and Leo Fleig, leaders of the 842 German antifascists arrested in April 1938; Bela Kun and Laiosh Madyr of the Hungarian Communists; Vladimir Chopich of the Yugoslavian Party; Marcel Pauker and Alexander Dobrodzhanu of Romania.

  “There used to be apple trees along the bank,” he said. “They burned them off. They took the prisoners to the monastery church to a room they called ‘the baths.’ They stripped the prisoners, weighed them, and shot them in the back of the head. In the records, this was called the ‘medical process.’ They had them shot in a sitting position. A little window would open behind the prisoner’s head and the executioner reached in and fired. They used that method so they could avoid strokes, heart attacks, and hysteria. They stacked the bodies like pencils in a box and carried them off in a horse-drawn cart to a crematorium.”

  Milchakov struggled constantly with the KGB to get permission to carry out excavations on all these sites. The “glasnost” KGB, under Vladimir Kryuchkov, was engaged in an extraordinary public relations maneuver. Kryuchkov tried to humanize the secret police, declaring to the press that he was a great lover of theater and dogs and children. At the same time, the KGB did what it could to deflate the likes of Aleksandr Milchakov. They rebuffed his requests for documents, denied him access to Butovo, and made sure he was followed and harassed when he went on one of his field trips. But the better-known Milchakov became, the more he publicized his findings in a series of articles in Vechernaya Moskva, the more he accomplished. The KGB didn’t help him much, but they did not stop him either.

  A couple of weeks later, we went together to the very edge of town near a water-treatment camp on the banks of the Moscow-Volga Canal. Stalin ordered the construction of the nearly useless canal in 1932, and it was finished in 1937. The workers were slaves, prisoners, most of them peasant farmers who, because they owned a horse or a cow, were declared kulaks and arrested. Genrikh Yagoda, the secret police chief at the time, worked the prisoners to death.

  Milchakov said that around 500,000 prisoners died working on the canal, most of them from cold and exhaustion. Even in winter they were given nothing more to wear than a thin jacket. The prisoners lived in shabby barracks next to the construction site. They built the 127-mile canal using shovels, picks, and wheelbarrows. Their diet was dismal. Scientists have done analyses of the teeth of the prisoners. From the way the enamel has worn off, it appears that many of the prisoners ate bark, roots, and grass to supplement the bread and thin gruel they were given.

  Milchakov was not prone to superstition, but in order to find the graves along the canal he resorted to divining rods when witnesses and guesswork proved unavailing. He had arranged for us to meet with an expert diviner near a certain row of birches. Milchakov assured us that in the past he’d been able to dig up several long mass graves with this man’s help. And so for a couple of hours we watched in silence as the diviner paced and weaved through the woods and a flock of jays rioted in the trees.

  “Someone else is meeting us here, too,” Milchakov said. He led me to a monument in the woods: a towering cross wrapped in barbed wire. Memorial had constructed it to honor the prisoners who died building the canal. Next to the cross stood an old, stooped man who introduced himself as “Sergei Burov, pensioner.”

  He said that when he was a child of ten or eleven, he had lived near the barracks. Every morning, on his way home from the store, the workers would call out to him to throw them pieces of bread.

  “I’d wrap the bread in newspaper and throw it,” he said. “Sometimes I saw the guards catch them and beat them. I saw the burial teams, too. They were prisoners, and for their work they were given bottles of vodka to keep them drunk. I remember running around, quite innocently, playing, and seeing these men in their prison clothes throwing bodies into the ground. Our parents told us about it and they would say, ‘There is some sort of wildness going on.’ They just had no idea. They did not want to know.”

  One morning, years after the canal had been completed, Burov said, he was walking beside it and saw some families on the bank. They were all crying. They folded pieces of paper, letters, and put them in bottles. They corked the bottles and threw them into the water.

  “I asked them what they were doing and they told me they were sending messages to people they had lost on the canal,” Burov said. “They said they hoped that sometime in the future people would find the bottles and read the letters and remember. They said they were sending the names of their loved ones into the future. They cast their names on the water.”

  PART II

  DEMOCRATIC VISTAS

  CHAPTER 10

  MASQUERADE

  After the Bolsheviks sacked the Winter Palace and seized power in 1917, they still had an empire to win. To help conquer the hearts and minds of the people, Lenin declared cinema the most important of the arts and sent propaganda films and projectionists by train across Russia to advertise the Revolution. Stalin, too, saw the value of the new art. Though his preferred instrument of enculturation was the pistol, he told the Communist Party that cinema was “the greatest means of mass agitation.” And so for years after the Great October, workers and peasants in makeshift tent-theaters and railroad cars watched The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, Strike, October, and Kino-Eye, imbibing all the while the spirit of revolution.

  But with new revolutions come new media. When Gorbachev rose to power in 1985, his chief ideologist and propagandist, Aleksandr Yakovlev, declared, “The television image is everything.” Yakovlev had been for ten years an ambassador in Canada, and he often sat at home in Ottawa, watching the Canadian and American networks. Yakovlev also studied television in Moscow. For years he worked in the Central Committee’s ideology department. Better than anyone around him, he understood the potential of television as an instrument of persuasion, coercion, and homogenization in an empire as vast as the Soviet Union.

  Though the Soviet Union was poor and primitive, nearly everyone had a television. Everyone watched. Yakovlev understood that if there was one ritual that could unite Baltic intellectuals and Siberian peasants, it was television. Above all, he understood the essential value of Vremya (“Time”), the official evening news program, a prime-time ritual for nearly 200 million people every night of the week.

  Stalin had been an untelevised tyrant. He was like some magical Eastern god, unseen, rarely heard. The media technology of the day allowed him easy control of his own cult. To a great extent, Stalin’s cult was a phenomenon of print: histories, newspapers, textbooks, posters. It was so easy to manipulate. His photographs in Pravda were retouched. Pockmarks disappeared. He grew a head taller. It was impossible to tell he had a withered arm.

  But as the system loosened somewhat and technology advanced, the people of the Soviet Union came to know the leaders of the post-Stalin era—Khrushchev and Brezhnev—more intimately, mainly through television and the evening news. Vremya was an invention of the Central Committee in the sixties. It was a product designed to be the high mass of a closed, atheist state. The Party ideologists shaped the look and sound of the program with painstaking care. After a long search, they discovered their Big Brother in Igor Kirillov, an unassuming actor of deceptive skill. For twenty years, Kirillov would anchor Vremya. He was slender and wore serious glasses, giving him the unthreatening look of a kindly teacher of mathematics. Such was the public face of the Kremlin.

  Kirillov was the master of his own voice and presence. Using the slightest gesture or shift in intonation, he made the decla
rations of the Central Committee seem the revealed wisdom of heaven; he could also report the most ordinary events in the capitalist West as if they were scandals against humanity, a mockery of all that was good and decent. Above all, he commanded attention. “Today, in the Politburo …” Kirillov would begin gravely, and every subject would listen, waiting for instruction.

  Kirillov, like so many servants of ideology, went through a conversion experience born of necessity under Gorbachev. When I saw him at the state television studios in 1991, Big Brother wore a sweater and the hound-dog look of repentance. He was grateful for a second chance, and now introduced various youth programs. He apologized for himself constantly and wore his cardigan as if it were sackcloth. “The sweater shows I’ve changed,” he said. “The system survived as long as it did thanks to the ideological service of the Communist Party and television. It was a kind of mass hypnosis.” For that Kirillov seemed genuinely sorry.

  Kirillov had been chosen for his great role thanks to his training in the Stanislavsky Method. “I had the ability to make people believe,” he said. Kirillov remembered being overcome with emotion in 1961 when Khrushchev declared on television that the Soviet Union would achieve Communism in his lifetime. “And as Khrushchev spoke those words, the sun came out—and the entire Hall of Congresses seemed to light up. See, we told each other, even nature believes in our cause. That’s when my wife and I decided to have our first daughter. We hoped that she would live under Communism. Now I am ashamed that I was used as a marionette and that, through me and through television, a fog was created in the minds of the people.”

  The producers of Vremya knew precisely how to create an imagery of empire and to win over, or at least befuddle, the people. They surrounded Kirillov with the aural and visual symbols of Bolshevik grandeur. When the question arose about what music to use for the opening of the show, the TV ideologists immediately ruled out Mozart and Beethoven. To use German music would have violated the Russian imperial spirit.