Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  At a banquet after the test, Sakharov gave the first toast, and said, “May all our devices explode as successfully as today’s, but always over test sites and never over cities.”

  The table fell silent, Sakharov recalled, “as if I had said something indecent.” Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, the ranking military man at the banquet, rose to give a countertoast, the rebuke.

  “Let me tell a parable,” he said. “An old man wearing only a shirt was praying before an icon. ‘Guide me, harden me. Guide me, harden me.’ His wife, who was lying [in bed], said, ‘Just pray to be hard, old man, I can guide it in myself.’ Let’s drink to getting hard.”

  Sakharov turned pale. He understood well that Nedelin’s joke was a parable. “He wanted to squelch my pacifist sentiment, and to put me and anyone who might share these ideas in my place,” Sakharov wrote. “The ideas and emotions kindled at that moment have not diminished to this day, and they completely altered my thinking.”

  Finally, Sakharov understood. His moral protests were nothing to the men of the Communist Party. The Party was way beyond the control even of a Hero of Socialist Labor. So gradually, Sakharov became a dissident, and the ideas of his dissidence, which crystallized in his 1968 manifesto Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom, anticipated the ideas of perestroika.

  But while Sakharov was the moral leader of the era, he was not a man of raw political power. There may have been no Gorbachev without Sakharov, no perestroika without the efforts of the dissidents to keep the idea of truth alive in a dead time, but there were other figures, less easy to love, more ambiguous, who had the political power to make something out of ideas.

  Gorbachev and the most influential people around him were contradictory men, politicians, academics, and journalists whose lives were filled with doubt, small victories, and sorry compromises. They had done things of which they were ashamed or should have been. For the sake of ambition, they told themselves lies and half-truths. They served brutal masters and tried not to care too much. There was Vitaly Korotich, the crusading editor of Ogonyok, who had once been only too glad to write a scurrilous book about America called The Face of Hatred. There was the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, preternaturally vain, slippery, periodically brave. And there were the Gorbachev advisers who had worked in the Central Committee staff under Yuri Andropov and still remembered it as an oasis of free thinking: the Americanist Georgi Arbatov, the policy advisers Anatoly Chernayev, Georgi Shakhnazarov, and Oleg Bogomolov, the journalists Aleksander Bovin and Fyodor Burlatsky.

  These were the shestidesyatniki—those who came of age during the thaw under Khrushchev, and grew disillusioned when Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring in 1968. They were the generation that woke to the horror of the Stalin era after Khrushchev’s “secret speech” of 1956 denouncing the “personality cult.” They harbored the dream of a humane socialism in Russia. They did not dare take the risks of full-blown dissidence, as Sakharov had, but they found a measure of independence and sanity in their work. There were scholars, like Abel Aganbegyan and Tatyana Zaslavskaya, who fled the oppressive scrutiny of Moscow for the relative academic freedom of Novosibirsk. There were journalists like Yegor Yakovlev and Yuri Karyakin who fled Pravda for Prague and wrote for the slightly liberal magazine Problems of Peace and Socialism. The shestidesyatniki, especially those from Moscow and Leningrad, were like an enormous floating club in which everyone had a nodding acquaintance with everyone else. They scrutinized each other’s compromises and drew fine distinctions that would appear to be nonsense to anyone outside. The gossip in this crowd was as thick as it is in official Washington or the studios of Hollywood. Whether they worked in academia, for the press, or inside the Central Committee, it was all the same: every day they were faced with questions of what to say, whom to protect, when to withdraw. They thought one thing and said another, and sometimes, after speaking lies long enough, they believed them and were beyond redeeming.

  “Gorbachev, me, all of us, we were double-thinkers, we had to balance truth and propaganda in our minds all the time,” said Shakhnazarov, an elfin intellectual who was at Gorbachev’s side from start to finish. “It is not something I’m particularly proud of, but that is the way we lived. It was the choice between dissidence and surrender.”

  Westerners were often fast to judge these people. They came from countries where liberty was almost a given, and still they mocked men and women in the Soviet Union who looked foolish in the act of trying to save both their families and their souls. The system made beasts of them, and it was a sorry sight. When the atmosphere of fear began to fade under Gorbachev, there were those who grabbed the public stage shamelessly, as if all that they had done in the past was of no matter. Some had trimmed their ideological sails for so many years that it was hard to take them seriously. They were indecent. But there were also quite a few who not only relished their new power, they understood their contradictions. They were complicated men and women who had done the best they could and knew their best was far from exemplary. Len Vyacheslavovich Karpinsky, a columnist and later editor in chief of Moscow News, was among the most likable because his case was one of the most complicated and tragic.

  Len Karpinsky’s parents were Old Bolsheviks. He was named in honor of his father’s mentor and friend Lenin. “The name Len was pretty common then and so was Ninel, Lenin backward, or Vladilen for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin,” Karpinsky said. “I’m just glad I didn’t get a name like Elektrifikatsiya or some others my friends got stuck with.”

  Karpinsky’s father, Vyacheslav Karpinsky, belonged to a generation of revolutionary romantics, the fin de siècle Communists. He joined the Communist Party in 1898, and in 1903, after his activities as a political organizer got him into trouble with the police in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov, he went into exile. In Switzerland he was Lenin’s aide and copy editor. In Moscow, after the Revolution, he helped Lenin assemble his personal archives from exile and held various posts at Pravda and the Central Committee’s Department of Propaganda. He received three Orders of Lenin and in 1962 became the first journalist ever named a Hero of Socialist Labor.

  For the Karpinsky family, a life in revolution provided an elevated sort of existence. From 1932 to 1952, they lived in the House on the Embankment with the Kremlin elite: generals, Central Committee members, agents of the secret police. There were billiard halls, swimming pools, and, for the children, Special School No. 19. When Len Karpinsky was a boy, he was even friendly with a couple of Stalin’s nephews. At a birthday party once, the playing stopped as the runty, pockmarked man with the withered left arm—the Mountain Eagle, the Friend of All Children—stood in the doorway. “Children!” one of the adults announced. “Iosif Vissarionovich is here!” Stalin waved and smiled. The children all waited in silence until he left, and then resumed their games.

  That was in 1935. In the coming years, Len watched dumbstruck as one acquaintance after another in the building lost parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and friends to the great furnace of Stalin’s purges. Nearly every night, secret police vans would arrive and there would be arrests—an admiral, a lecturer on Marxism-Leninism, the sisters of a spy in a foreign embassy. “There was a knock and then they disappeared,” Len said. It had been the world of Yuri Trifonov’s novella The House on the Embankment—a world where “a life went on that was utterly different” from the life of ordinary people. Now it was a world where the most devoted revolutionaries, the most obsequious ministers, suddenly found themselves declared “plotters” and “infiltrators” and “enemies of the people.” Karpinsky’s family was, by the standards of the building, not hard hit. One of his aunts and her two brothers were sent off to the camps. To this day, Karpinsky does not quite understand why his father, the very sort of Lenin loyalist who so threatened Stalin, was never arrested and executed. The only reason he can think of now, he said, is that by 1937 or 1938, his father was semiretired and out of politics.

  From the moment that the leadership installed K
arpinsky’s old friend Yegor Yakovlev as editor in chief, Moscow News became the paper of the thaw generation, subtly breaking taboos formed over seventy years. From time to time I visited Karpinsky at the Moscow News office, on Pushkin Square, and he always seemed to me an honest man, if a limited writer—a representative figure whose life had been, as he put it to me, “the inner conflict between the ambition to be a boss in the Communist Party and the almost involuntary development of a conscience.” His appearance, waxen and drawn, spoke of that struggle. He looked exhausted at every minute of the day. His face was long, lined, and worn. The fingers of his right hand were yellowed up to the first knuckle from tobacco. More often than not when I called and asked how he was, he would say dryly, “My health is awful. I’m spending the week in a sanatorium. I may die.”

  Karpinsky was so unassuming, so ironic about his own failures and hesitations, that it was hard to believe he was once, in the culture of Soviet politics, as ambitious as any flaxen-haired kid who takes a job as a Senate intern and starts talking about “the day I run for office …” He believed deeply in Communism and in himself, in his entitlement to success. After entering Moscow State University in 1947, he began working as a “propaganda man” at factories and construction sites during the days before the Party’s single-candidate elections. “My assignment was to make the workers get up at six in the morning and go to the polls,” he told me. “There was a competition among the propaganda men over whose group would be the first to finish voting. The limit was midday, by which time the whole Soviet people was supposed to have voted. That was a decision of the Party. We eighteen-year-olds were supposed to conduct propaganda among the workers, and the only tool was the promise to improve their housing conditions. They lived in horrible slums, railway cars with no toilets, no heat. I loved the work, thought it was a great service and, yes, a stepping-stone. At the university, Yuri Levada, who is now a well-known sociologist, wrote an article about me called ‘The Careerist.’ And it was true. I did it all with the idea of getting to the top. That was what it was all about: to be one of the bosses.

  “But having said that, I have to say a few words in self-defense. Society during the Stalin era left open no real opportunities for self-realization or self-expression except within this perverted system of the Communist Party. The system destroyed all the other channels: the artist’s canvas, the farmer’s land. All that was left was the gigantic hierarchic system of the Party, wide at the base and growing narrower as one climbed to the top. You had to have a Party membership just for admission. That was the only opportunity. When you are engaged in that work, you forget about the social and political implications, and just do it. Gradually, this sort of life bifurcates your mentality, your intellect. You can begin to understand that life is life and it’s better to do something good for thy neighbor than to climb upward stepping on their bones. But it all depends on moral principles. I suppose my first doubts came when I went to Moscow State University in 1948. A Jewish friend of mine named Karl Kantor was attacked at the university’s Party committee at the start of Stalin’s anti-Jewish campaign. That was just the start of a long transformation.

  “After graduation, I was sent to the city of Gorky for Komsomol work. It was in 1952 and Stalin had one more year to live. I got to know the working class and the peasants there. I saw the utter degradation, the ruin. I saw Soviet society as it had really emerged. This ‘intellectual conscience’ that I talk about began to emerge. Some people still think, erroneously, that the life of the apparatchik breeds only conformists and subjects loyal to the regime. Actually, the regime splits people into two opposing factions: those who believe they can make it only through conformism and time-serving, and those who, thanks to a different structure of mind, dare to question the surrounding reality.

  “So when Stalin died, I realized perfectly well what he had been all about. Still, I went to the funeral in Moscow out of curiosity. I felt like one of those prisoners in the camps who threw his hat in the air and cried, ‘The man-eater has finally kicked the bucket!’ My father’s reaction to Stalin’s death was interesting. By then he was retired, working for the Central Committee only as a consultant. He sat there in his office typing on an old Underwood which he had brought from the offices he had in Switzerland with Lenin. He called me into his study and said, ‘Son, Comrade Stalin has passed away. And having been an epigone of Lenin, he created all the necessary conditions for our cause to triumph.’ It was so strange. My father had never talked so formally before to me in his life. I think he talked that way because his generation had always carried a burden to promote at all times the Party line and he felt it was his duty to pass that down to his children. But in a way, this was a man, eighty years old, who had conceived of his idea of the Party before the Revolution and while living in exile. He had to convince not me, but himself. He was talking to himself.”

  When Karpinsky returned from Gorky to Moscow for good, in 1959, the thaw was in full swing. Novy Mir, Aleksandr Tvardovsky’s monthly journal of literature and opinion, was publishing texts critical of the old regime. Khrushchev himself read a manuscript copy of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and sanctioned its publication in Novy Mir. Karpinsky’s friends Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky were winning a following with their lyrics and public performances. In various pockets of the Central Committee apparatus, young apparatchiks wrote proposals and outlines of economic and political reform—though all within certain boundaries of ideology and language. For his part, Karpinsky worked as head of the Komsomol’s Department of Propaganda and Agitation and as the editor of Molodoi Kommunist (“Young Communist”). Then in 1962 he joined the empyrean of the adult Communist world. He was promoted to Pravda’s editorial board heading the department of Marxism-Leninism. He had made it.

  “Once I was back in Moscow from Gorky, my critical approach weakened somewhat,” Karpinsky said. “I was part of the elite again, and not merely as my father’s son but as a real member. I was part of the top nomenklatura, and the nomenklatura is another planet. It’s Mars. It’s not simply a matter of good cars or apartments. It’s the continuous satisfaction of your own whims, the way an army of boot-lickers allows you to work painlessly for hours. All the little apparatchiks are ready to do everything for you. Your every wish is fulfilled. You can go to the theater on a whim, you can fly to Japan from your hunting lodge. It’s a life in which everything flows easily. No, you don’t own a yacht or spend your vacations on the Côte d’Azur, but you are at the Black Sea, and that really is something. The issue is your relative well-being. You are like a king: just point your finger and it is done.”

  Karpinsky’s potential as a man of the Communist Party elite was unlimited. It is conceivable that he could have won election to the Politburo one day. He was a Soviet Ivy Leaguer: bright, ambitious, a legacy. One afternoon, at a Kremlin ceremony, two of Khrushchev’s most powerful partners in the leadership, Mikhail Suslov and Boris Ponomarev, complimented Karpinsky as their golden boy, their comer. One of them said Karpinsky was like a “son of the regiment” to them and they saw for him a great future in the ideological department of the Communist Party. “We are pinning our hopes on you,” Suslov said.

  Working in that rarefied atmosphere, Karpinsky got to know nearly every figure who would make a difference (one way or another) during perestroika. He was friendly with Yegor Yakovlev, the Lenin biographer who became the editor of Moscow News; Yuri Karyakin, a Dostoevsky scholar who was among the leading radical deputies in the Congress of Peoples Deputies; Aleksandr Bovin, the gargantuan journalist at Izvestia who promoted the “new thinking” in foreign policy; the reform-minded economists, Gavriil Popov and Nikolai Shmelyov and the sociologist Yevgeny Ambartsumov; Otto Latsis, the son of an Old Bolshevik and an editor at Kommunist; Gennadi Yanayev and Boris Pugo, who helped lead the August coup; and even the leading triumvirate of reform, Eduard Shevardnadze, Aleksandr Yakovlev, and Gorbachev himself.

  “I first met Gorbachev in the s
ixties when I was working at Pravda and he was in Stavropol working in the Komsomol organization there,” Karpinsky said. “He was not very well known at the time, but I must tell you that Gorbachev was saying the same things then that he did at the beginning of perestroika. He was in Moscow on some business trip or another—I forget what it was all about—but we met for a couple of hours, and I was impressed. He talked about the outrage of paying combine operators by the mileage and not their output. In a nutshell, he spoke about the absurd system of incentives, or lack of them, in the economy. He was excitable, but somehow very rational. And for the first two or three years of perestroika, Gorbachev was the same sort of innovator he was when he was young. The innovative projects were always limited, within certain boundaries, and that, of course, was telling later on. Well, I understand him. Like all of us, Gorbachev had to have a dual nature. It was in his mind and soul. He knew well that the idea of reward for work well done was considered out of the ordinary but not quite heretical. You could experiment with something limited like that. But we were not allowed to make any political or philosophical conclusions that the system itself was a failure. In your mind you avoided such conclusions. You were simply incapable of thinking that way. To think that way was not only career suicide, it was a form of despair. And so, like the rest of us, Gorbachev hedged—outwardly, and within himself.”