Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  The law class was dominated by some older vets and younger men, like Gorbachev, who had won academic medals in high schools. Unlike the politics or history departments, the law departments provided their students, by the standards of the time, with a relatively wide reading list. Along with the standard diet of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, students read many of the essential works of Western thought: Roman law, Locke’s treatises on government, Rousseau’s Social Contract, and even the U.S. Constitution. But those texts served mainly as relics of bourgeois liberalism, and the core readings, the holy writ, were Stalinist textbooks.

  Gorbachev, who as general secretary would campaign for a “law-base state,” was steeped in the theory of its opposite: Stalinism. “The theme of political crimes was touched upon only in very brief and general terms,” according to Mlynar. “There was nothing complex about it, as long as you accepted the fundamental principle that political activity upsetting to the government was comparable to any other form of criminal activity.” Dissidence among the students was a crime; dozens of students were arrested for ideological missteps and sent to labor camps.

  Mlynar, who returned to Czechoslovakia and eventually helped lead Alexander Dubcek’s ill-fated Prague Spring reforms, now lives in Vienna. Some biographers have found a pleasant irony in what they see as Mlynar’s influence on the man who would become the most powerful reformer in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. But Kolchanov said that “the influence is overrated. Gorbachev was intellectually curious, he was tolerant, but there were no signs of radicalism. You can’t make those leaps. Remember, Stalinism was something deep inside us. We were only lucky that we were young enough and flexible enough to change later on.”

  But there was in Gorbachev and some of his friends a tendency toward independence, toward questioning authority, that was surprising, considering the times. Once, in 1952, as a professor teaching “Marxism and Issues of Language” droned on—he was reading straight from the works of Stalin—Gorbachev rose from his chair and said, “Respected professor, we can read for ourselves. What is your interpretation of the reading, and why don’t we discuss it?” Gorbachev was summoned to the dean’s office. But he was not punished. Probably his position in the Komsomol helped him avoid a suspension.

  But at the same time, Gorbachev was a leader of the law department’s Komsomol group, and in this position, he took no risks. Two émigrés now living in the West who were in Gorbachev’s class remembered him as a hard-liner in the Komsomol who made speeches scolding the shortcomings and improprieties of fellow Party members. Writing in the émigré journal Possev, Friedrikh Neznansky recalled hearing “the steely voice of the Komsomol secretary of the law department, Gorbachev, demanding expulsion from the Komsomol for the slightest offense, from telling inappropriate political jokes to trying to avoid being sent to a collective farm.”

  Midway through his five-year course, Gorbachev met Raisa Titorenko, a philosophy student from Siberia. A few of Gorbachev’s friends were taking a ballroom dancing class, and one day Gorbachev and Kolchanov dropped by with the expressed purpose of mocking their buddies. “We were ready to say, ‘You call yourselves real men and look at all this,’ ” Kolchanov said. “But then one of our friends in the class, Volodya Kuzmin, introduced Mikhail Sergeyevich to his dance partner. It was Raisa Maksimovna. I think for Gorbachev it was love at first sight. Just like in the movies. She was just so striking. And, as I think he discovered later on, she was extremely smart.” Raisa, for her part, liked Gorbachev, according to Mlynar, for his “lack of vulgarity.”

  The marriage may have been the crucial personal event of Gorbachev’s youth, but the signal political event for nearly everyone of his generation came in March 1953: the death of Joseph Stalin. In the years to come, Khrushchev would set free hundreds of thousands of prisoners and begin to tell the truth about Stalin. Although Gorbachev would choose the path of the Party apparatchik, scaling his way up through the hierarchy, flattering Brezhnev and his superiors, he would be one of thousands who would be changed by the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 when Khrushchev gave his “secret speech” denouncing Stalin. Through a long process of personal and historical change, Gorbachev would recognize the need to transform the country and its relationship to the world. “Really, we have no alternative,” he would say, decades later.

  But at the moment Stalin died, there was for Gorbachev and his friends only stunning confusion. “There are a lot of things you could say about Mikhail in the old days that you could say now,” Rudolf Kolchanov said. “He was hardworking, a good listener, tolerant, decent, but he was also much like the rest of us. In fact, he was not the most impressive student in our class by any means. And he believed what he was taught about Stalin. It’s not as if he were always a great reformer and world leader just waiting to happen. Most of us were out all night in the freezing cold trying to see Stalin’s body at the Hall of Columns. When we all got back to the room, in the early hours of the morning, we were sitting on our beds. We tried to talk, but mostly we were just silent, thinking. Some were crying, though I remember that I wasn’t, and neither was Mikhail Sergeyevich. We were so accustomed to life under Stalin. We might find it strange and terrible now, but that was how it was. And then someone spoke the question that everyone had on his mind: ‘What are we going to do now?’ ”

  CHAPTER 11

  THE DOUBLE THINKERS

  A very popular error: Having the courage of one’s convictions; rather, it is a matter of having the courage for an “attack” on one’s own convictions!

  —FRIEDERICH NIETZSCHE, notebooks

  On a winter’s night in 1986, two electricians and their KGB escort installed a “special telephone” in the apartment of Andrei Sakharov. For six years, Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner, had been living in the industrial city of Gorky under government edict, and the phone seemed at first just another Orwellian moment in the day of exiles. Maybe the Soviet press would call for an interview, Sakharov thought. Two magazines had already put in requests. Turning the moral equations in his mind, Sakharov arrived at a finely calibrated stand of principle: he would refuse all interview requests until there was no longer a “noose around my neck.” The KGB agent merely turned to Sakharov and said, “You will get a call around ten tomorrow morning.”

  The next day, the phone rang. A woman’s voice said, “Mikhail Sergeyevich will speak to you.” Now Gorbachev was on the line, telling Sakharov that he and Bonner could return home to Moscow.

  “You have an apartment there,” Gorbachev said without a word of apology or regret. “Go back to your patriotic work!”

  Sakharov said a brief word of thanks, then wasted no time in going back to his “patriotic work.” He told Gorbachev that for the sake of “trust, for peace, and for you and your program,” the Kremlin was obliged to release the political prisoners included on a long list he had mailed to the leadership from Gorky. The Soviet leader said he did not quite agree that all the prisoners Sakharov was speaking for had been tried illegally. Then the two men said their awkward good-byes.

  One week later, Sakharov arrived by overnight train at Moscow’s Yaroslavl Station, an event of such moral and political importance that it evoked another homecoming decades earlier—that of Lenin at the Finland Station. But no one could have predicted what was ahead for Sakharov in the three years left to him. Exile had worn him down. KGB threats, a painful hunger strike, forced feedings, random attacks, thefts of his diaries and manuscripts—all of it had taken a toll on his health. Now, as he answered questions into the swarm of tape recorders and television lights, his voice was mumbly, hesitant at times. He walked with a stoop and had to catch his breath every few steps on flights of stairs. Bonner said at the time that Sakharov would limit his activities. He would read up on developments in cosmology and work on specific human rights cases. That seemed like more than enough.

  A few days after his return to Moscow, Sakharov was sitting at the kitchen table of his close friend the human rights activist Larisa Bogoraz.
Another of the guests, the historian Mikhail Gefter, turned to Sakharov and said, “How are you feeling, Andrei Dmitriyevich?”

  Sakharov said sadly, “It is difficult to live now. People write me, they visit, and they are all hoping that I will be able to help somehow. But I am powerless.”

  For months Sakharov mulled over his role, tried to find his political voice. Some younger dissidents were impatient with Sakharov’s hesitation and what they saw as his naive, uncritical support of Gorbachev.

  Those young dissidents probably should have known better, but the rest of the country knew Sakharov hardly at all. They could not have known what sort of man he was. Until Sakharov returned from exile, most people knew nothing more about him than the slanders they had read for years in the press. Even intellectuals with some connection to the human rights movement knew little about him. “We knew he was out there, but for years Sakharov was almost like a myth,” said Lev Timofeyev, one of the political prisoners freed shortly after Sakharov’s return from Gorky. But when Sakharov did return home, his gift for judgment became an open secret and a public trust. Many ordinary people who had been instructed to despise Sakharov came to love and trust him. Through him they saw the hollowness of the old propaganda and the system itself. There was a sense of the uncanny about Sakharov. In 1988, at a discussion sponsored by and published in Ogonyok magazine, a group of Soviet and American intellectuals went around the table trading opinions on the myriad issues of perestroika. For nearly an hour, Sakharov seemed half asleep, but when it came his turn, he found all the inherent faults in the latest wave of political reforms. He zeroed in especially on the “unhealthy” way Gorbachev continued to control both the government and the Communist Party. No one had ever said that before, and yet, as we all left the room, Sakharov’s brief exposition seemed like sense itself.

  For anyone living in Moscow in those years, Saturday mornings were a time to listen to this voice. Sakharov was everywhere. He inevitably became either the chairman or the spiritual leader of all the key groups to the left of Gorbachev: first Moscow Tribune, then Memorial, and, later the Interregional Group of radical deputies in the parliament. Nearly every Saturday morning, Sakharov would sit in some dim auditorium, usually the House of Scholars on Kropotkinskaya Street, or the Filmmakers’ Union near the Peking Hotel, and for half an eternity he would doze, his great dome of a head nodding off as the speeches went on. When it was his turn at last, Sakharov would take the lectern, and in a few minutes of very formal, incisive Russian, he would make the point that most needed making, invariably pushing public thinking ever closer to the creation of a civil society.

  With the authority of his life and the clarity of his thinking, Sakharov became a one-man loyal opposition, a moral genius who was now, at last, able to speak directly to the people. “Sakharov was the only one among us who made no compromises,” said Tatyana Zaslavskaya, a leading sociologist whose views helped shape the early reforms. “For us, he was a figure of the inner spirit. Just the bare facts of his life, the way he suffered for all of us, gave him authority that no one else had. Without him, we could not begin to rebuild our society or our selves. Gorbachev may not have understood it quite that way when he let Sakharov come home, but he would understand it eventually.”

  What made Sakharov unique was not his suffering alone. Others had suffered much more. And what made him unique was not his ideas. He shared his ideas with men and women who were dissidents even before he was—Larisa Bogoraz, Pyotr Yakir, Pavel Litvinov, Solzhenitsyn, and, for that matter, the first opponents of Russian totalitarianism, Aleksandr Herzen, Nikolai Berdyaev, Vladimir Solovyov. “My father’s ideas were not original,” Sakharov’s son Efrem told me. “His ideas of morality and liberty had all been said before. It was his fate to bring received wisdom to a place where it did not yet exist.” The story of the perestroika years—the years between the rise of Gorbachev and the collapse of the Soviet state—was, to a great extent, the story of change inside the hearts and minds of individuals. Sakharov’s life and thought prefigured that change in such a dramatic way that I would not hesitate to call him a saint. He was the dominant moral example of his time and place.

  Sakharov was a scientist whose metaphors and sense of truth were rooted in an understanding of cosmology, the “magic spectacle” of a thermonuclear explosion, the calculus of the Big Bang. His unerring sense of rightness, like that of scientist-moralists from Galileo to Oppenheimer, was steeped in his understanding of the scientific problems of light and time, his firsthand appreciation of both the laws of the universe and man’s tragic tendency to turn progress into catastrophe. He held in mind, it seemed, a picture, even a music, of eternity. Sakharov once turned to his wife and said, “Do you know what I love most of all in life?” Later, Bonner would confide to a friend, “I expected he would say something about a poem or a sonata or even about me.” Instead, Sakharov said, “The thing I love most in life is radio background emanation”—the barely discernible reflection of unknown cosmic processes that ended billions of years ago.

  Sakharov was a man inclined toward the purities of theoretical physics but who became the conscience of the Soviet Union, a political actor in spite of himself. His physics and his politics grew out of the same mind, the same sense of wholeness and responsibility. “Other civilizations, perhaps more successful ones, may exist an infinite number of times on the preceding and following pages of the Book of the Universe,” Sakharov wrote in his Nobel Prize lecture. “Yet we should not minimize our sacred endeavors in the world, where, like faint glimmers in the dark, we have emerged for a moment from the nothingness of unconsciousness into material existence. We must make good the demands of reason and create a life worthy of ourselves and of the goals we only dimly perceive.”

  For almost every young man and woman who would one day join the circle of Communist Party liberals around Gorbachev, the death of Stalin was the pivotal event of moral and intellectual life. The same was true for Sakharov. Like Gorbachev, Sakharov knew well the horrors of the age. When he was a boy, his aunt Zhenya received news of her husband’s death in the camps when one of her letters was returned “Addressee relocated to the cemetery”; later one of Sakharov’s friends died in the gulag, the authorities announced, owing to a “chilling of the epidermal integument.”

  And yet, Sakharov’s response to the death of Stalin was utterly typical. He heard the news while he was working on the Soviet bomb project and wrote home to his first wife, Klavdia: “I am under the influence of a great man’s death. I am thinking of his humanity.” Even in his memoirs, written three decades later, Sakharov could not pretend to understand his own reaction:

  “I can’t fully explain it—after all, I knew quite enough about the horrible crimes that had been committed—the arrests of innocent people, the torture, the deliberate starvations, and all the violence—to pass judgment on those responsible. But I hadn’t put the whole picture together, and in any case, there was still a lot I didn’t know. Somewhere in the back of my mind the idea existed, instilled by propaganda, that suffering is inevitable during great historic upheavals: ‘When you chop wood, the chips fly.’ … But above all, I felt myself committed to the goal which I assumed was Stalin’s as well: after a devastating war, to make the country strong enough to ensure peace. Precisely because I had invested so much of myself in that cause and accomplished so much, I needed, as anyone might in my circumstances, to create an illusory world, to justify myself.”

  Sakharov’s sense of patriotic urgency after the American attack on Hiroshima and also the sheer seduction of the scientific world involved left him “no choice,” he once said, but to move to a desolate weapons research center in Kazakhstan known only as the Installation, the Soviet Los Alamos. Even though he was immersed in what he called the “superb physics” of nuclear weaponry—“the sustenance of life on Earth but also the potential instrument of its destruction were taking shape at my very desk”—Sakharov still saw the gulag through the fence. The Installation, where S
akharov lived for eighteen years, was near a slave labor camp, and every morning he watched long lines of prisoners trudge to and fro, guard dogs at their heels.

  Nevertheless, there was a determined innocence about Sakharov in those first years at the Installation. The prisoners and the guard dogs were a background that could be overlooked. But five months after Stalin’s death, Sakharov began a personal and political conversion ignited by nothing less than the explosion of the first Soviet thermonuclear bomb. On August 12, 1953, twenty miles from ground zero, he watched the explosion, his eyes protected by dark goggles. The test was a success, and in his memoirs Sakharov describes the vision only in its incandescence, without a trace of regret: “We saw a flash, and then a swiftly expanding white ball lit up the whole horizon. I tore off my goggles and though I was partially blinded by the glare, I could see a stupendous cloud trailing streamers of purple dust.” The government awarded Sakharov and his partner, Igor Tamm, 500,000 rubles each, dachas in the countryside outside Moscow, and the title of Hero of Socialist Labor. Marshal Kliment Voroshilov spoke for the state at the awards ceremony in the Kremlin: “I have been told that Sakharov’s work was especially outstanding,” he said. “Let me kiss you.”

  In the months to come, Sakharov grew more and more concerned about the effects of nuclear fallout. Secretly, he was beginning to make calculations, trying to figure out how many innocent people would likely be hurt by every nuclear test. Roald Sagdeyev, the former head of the Soviet space program, visited Sakharov at the Installation after the test and noticed how “this young, distant god of physics” drew little offhand doodles of airplanes dropping bombs as he talked. “Those were the first real doubts,” Sagdeyev told me. The accidental deaths of a young girl and a soldier at the test site also startled Sakharov. Then, after another successful test in 1955, Sakharov’s sense of complicity in these few accidents began to torture him.