Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  Karpinsky and his friends were, at first, not greatly upset with Brezhnev and Suslov’s overthrow of Khrushchev in 1964. When Karpinsky heard the news, he and Yegor Yakovlev celebrated over a bottle of cognac. Khrushchev had long since tightened restrictions on the press and the arts, and he had become prone to unpredictable decisions—a manic “voluntarism,” as the Party language had it. It was only years later, when Khrushchev was a sad old man living in the exile of his dacha, that Karpinsky called him to wish him well on his birthday. Karpinsky said he was calling on behalf of the “children of the Twentieth Party Congress” and that Khrushchev should know that one day history would make clear to everyone the importance of that session, in 1956, at which he leveled his first attacks against Stalin’s “cult of personality.”

  “I have always believed this and I am very pleased that you and your relatively young generation understand the essence of the Twentieth Congress and the policies I initiated,” Khrushchev replied. “I am so happy to hear from you in my twilight years.”

  It did not take Karpinsky or anyone else long to realize that Brezhnev had no intention of instituting reforms. Just the opposite—a neo-Stalinist movement was in the works. One night at dinner with Yevtushenko and Otto Latsis, Karpinsky began to pronounce aloud what was happening to his generation, to its way of thinking. “Our idea was this: when one has an education in philosophy and a certain intellectual background, one begins to understand the inner properties of reality, something I termed ‘intellectual conscience.’ It’s not a natural, inborn conscience, yet a conscience that stems from a kind of thinking that links you with a moral attitude to reality. If you understand that everything in this society is soaked in blood, that society itself is heading toward collapse, that it is all an antihuman system—if you understand this instinctively and intellectually—then your conscience cannot remain neutral. Look, I never really took any risks, and didn’t want to. I was sort of compelled to take the steps I did by my conscience. And once compelled to take those steps, I could never foresee the bad consequences. Every time I thought I’d get away with it. And every time I didn’t.”

  Karpinsky made his first real foray into the netherworld of what he called “half-dissent” in 1967, and it was a personal disaster. He and a friend at Pravda, Fyodor Burlatsky, wrote an article in Komsomolskaya Pravda calling, in a euphemistic way, for an easing of censorship in the theater. Karpinsky now says the piece was “half rotten,” especially its solipsistic arguments that the best way to eliminate anti-Soviet sentiments from the theater would be to let the people, and not the official censors, decide. That way, the authors said, the playwrights would have no right to complain about the government, and so would be deprived of a source of anger and subject matter. But the article, “On the Road to the Premiere,” contained one idea, plainly stated, that caused an uproar when it appeared: the personality cult, Karpinsky and Burlatsky said, had been criticized only lightly, and the censors were preventing anything deeper.

  Brezhnev, who had already begun the ideological rehabilitation of Stalin, was furious when his aides brought the article to his attention. He took it as a personal attack. By chance, the article appeared on the same day that a member of the Central Committee criticized the country’s enormous arms industry, which had been Brezhnev’s province before he became general secretary. Karpinsky, Burlatsky, and the editor of Komsomolskaya Pravda were all fired. Karpinsky was quickly appointed to a job at Izvestia, but after he made a few critical remarks at a meeting of that paper’s Communist Party committee, he was eased out of that post, too.

  Despite his inherited romantic view of Bolshevism and his own pleasure in the perquisites of power, Karpinsky could no longer hide his disaffection. The invasion of Czechoslovakia, in August 1968, was, for Karpinsky and many of his friends, a breaking point. He did not join the seven young protesters who went to Red Square. Nor did he form any close links with Sakharov or other leading intellectuals who had decided, once and for all, to give up their lives in the hierarchy for the dangers of political dissidence. But he did act. Under the pen name L. Okunev, Karpinsky wrote a long article titled “Words Are Also Deeds,” for circulation only among a select group of friends and would-be reformers within the world of the Party and its official academies. (The pseudonym was an inside joke—“Karpinsky” derives from “carp,” and “Okunev” from “perch.”) In the article, Karpinsky argued that free thought—and not “rows of armed soldiers, insurgent crowds, columns of revolutionary sailors, or a volley from the cruiser Aurora”—would one day challenge the Soviet system. Furthermore, the state structures and ideological machinery would not be able to resist, for the system “lacks any serious social basis. It cannot convince anyone of its viability and only hangs on by the instinct of self-preservation. The face of neo-Stalinism we are passing through is just the outward expression of the ‘uneasy forebodings’ the petty tyrants feel. They long for the old regime, the ‘Stalin fortress,’ but they find only decrepit foundations too weak to support such a structure.”

  The article, like nearly all of Karpinsky’s writings, is clogged with indirection and filler, great clots of undigested verbiage typical of a Party apparatchik. But this piece was remarkable not only for its points of clarity and daring but also for its prescience. Here was an apparatchik (“We are pinning our hopes on you,” Suslov had said) who now believed no more in the viability of the Bolshevik state than did Sakharov himself.

  “Our tanks in Prague were, if you will, an anachronism, an ‘inadequate’ weapon,’ Karpinsky wrote. “They ‘fired’ at—ideas. With no hope of hitting the target. They ‘dealt with’ the Czechoslovak situation the same way that at one time certain reptiles ‘dealt with’ the coming age of mammals. The reptiles bit at the air, gnashing their teeth in the same ether that was literally seething with the plankton of renewal. At the same time, fettered by their natural instincts, they searched for ‘hidden stocks of weapons’ and diligently occupied the postal and telegraph offices. With a fist to the jaw of thinking society, they thought they had knocked out and ‘captured’ its thinking processes.”

  Karpinsky also provided an insider’s view, identifying within the monolith of the Party structure “a layer of party intellectuals.” He went on to say, “To be sure, this layer is thin and disconnected; it is constantly eroded by cooption and promotion and is thickly interlarded with careerists, flatterers, loudmouths, cowards, and other products of the bureaucratic selection process. But this layer could move toward an alliance with the entire social body of the intelligentsia if favorable conditions arose. This layer is already an arm of the intelligentsia, its ‘parliamentary fraction’ within the administrative structure. This fraction will inevitably grow, constituting a hidden opposition, without specific shape and now aware of itself, but an actually existing and widely ramified opposition at all levels within the administrative chain.”

  It was this “layer” that made itself known when Gorbachev came to power. The dissidents were the bravest and most clear-minded of all, but in the early Gorbachev years they did not constitute, in numbers or in force, an adequate army. As if from nowhere, intellectuals within the Party, the institutes, the press, and the literary, artistic, and scientific worlds slowly took a Soviet leader at his word when he said that this would be a different age. For once, the purposes of a Kremlin leader and the liberal intelligentsia intersected.

  The tragedy was that by the time Gorbachev came to power there were so many broken lives: great minds lost to emigration, drink, suicide, despair, or sheer cynicism. It was a miracle, after seven decades of murder and repression, that there was any intelligentsia left at all. “So many people had been destroyed,” Karpinsky said. “One can behave in that split way of thinking for a while, but then you begin to degenerate and start to speak only what is permitted and the rest of the conscience and soul decays. Many people did not survive to perestroika. We had to create an internal moral system, and not everyone could sustain it indefinitely. Solzhenitsyn spoke
about this in his essay ‘Live Not by Lies.’ I understood his viewpoint, and we tried not to live by lies, but we couldn’t always manage it. If you ignore the regulations of the state completely, and go into complete dissidence, then you can’t have a family, you don’t know where you will get rent money, and your children would have to go into the streets to scrape up money. To fulfill this principle of living not under a lie in every aspect is just impossible, because you live in a certain time.

  “Compared to the people who were not afraid of prison, my friends were not heroes. We abstained from direct acts. This position was itself a compromise. But it was like the sort of compromises you make when you are in the same cage with a lion. It is understandable, though nothing to be proud of. When I myself was in the position of having to say what I felt, I said it. I just didn’t deliberately try to put my head in a noose. I used Aesopian language. I had to use hints about progress, but nothing more. What we did publish only hinted at our real thoughts.”

  But Karpinsky’s “Words Are Also Deeds” went far beyond Aesopian language. In 1970, Karpinsky gave a copy of his text to Roy Medvedev, the Marxist historian. One night, Medvedev called Karpinsky and told him that the KGB had ransacked his apartment and taken every manuscript in sight, including “Words Are Also Deeds.” For a few years, Karpinsky was oblivious to the trouble he was in. He bounced around from job to job, from a sociology institute to editing Marxist-Leninist works at Progress Publishers. But in 1975, when he was caught working on the manuscript of his friend Otto Latsis’s book On the Eve of a Great Breakthrough, an analysis of collectivization and Stalinism, the KGB called him in. Naturally, the interrogator was an old friend: a Komsomol buddy named Filipp Bobkov, who had become one of the most infamous figures in the Soviet secret police. Karpinsky tried to soften up Bobkov. “When you came to me there was tea and cookies,” he told him. “You don’t even offer me tea. It’s not very polite.” Bobkov was not amused. He had passed along the damning documents to the Communist Party Control Committee, and Len Karpinsky, son of Lenin’s friend and the Party’s great hope, was expelled. Suslov, for one, viewed Karpinsky’s transgressions as a personal betrayal.

  Now Karpinsky did whatever he could to make a living—among other things, commissioning paintings and monuments for a state agency, for which he received a minuscule salary. He kept up his friendships, talked politics, lived awhile at the dacha he had inherited from his father. The moment of reckoning he had written about in “Words Are Also Deeds,” the advent of dissent as a cultural and political fact of life, seemed years and years off.

  Even after Gorbachev took power, Karpinsky never dreamed change could come so quickly. And at first it did not. Although the liberals in the Politburo secured the editorship of Moscow News for Karpinsky’s friend Yegor Yakovlev and told him to transform this tourist giveaway sheet, published in Russian and several foreign languages, into a “tribune of reform,” glasnost was initially a process of hints, insinuations. To read now through a stack of Moscow News issues from 1987 and 1988 is to get lost in a blur of nonlanguage. The barriers were immense at first, the victories almost unbearably difficult. When the editors of Moscow News wanted to print a simple obituary of the émigré poet Viktor Nekrasov, the Politburo itself had to give permission, and did so only after long debate.

  “But, still, the change was tremendous,” Karpinsky said. “The difference between ‘the thaw’ and ‘glasnost’ was a difference in temperature. If the temperature under Khrushchev was two degrees above zero centigrade, then glasnost pushed it to twenty above. Huge chunks of ice just melted away, and now we were talking not only about Stalin’s personality cult, but of Leninism, Marxism, the essence of the system. There was nothing like that under Khrushchev. It was just a narrow opening, through which only Stalin’s cult could be seen. There were no real changes. And as we saw, it could all be reversed. The bureaucracy, the Party, the KGB, all the repressive apparatus in charge of the intelligentsia and the press, remained in place.”

  For Karpinsky, Moscow News provided the opening to a public hearing and a rehabilitation. In March 1987, he published a long article, “It’s Absurd to Hesitate Before an Open Door.” Like his other liberal pieces of the past, it was a mixed performance. Karpinsky made sure to blast the West for what he thought was its phony concern for the Soviet dissidents, but he also made a crucial point that was getting close consideration within the government but was rarely voiced in public: the critique of Stalin begun in 1956 would have to go deeper. Reform without a thorough consideration of the country’s “core” problems, the rottenness of its history and foundations, would be meaningless.

  Karpinsky wanted to rejoin the Party not only as personal vindication but also to play a role in what was still the central institution of political power. At a meeting with the chairman of the Party’s Control Commission, however, the hard-liner Mikhail Solomontsev mocked Karpinsky. From a thick stack of papers that had obviously been compiled by the Party and the KGB, Solomentsev pulled out a copy of “Words Are Also Deeds” and, holding it up, he shouted, “You still have not disarmed ideologically! Nothing has changed in our party!”

  But things had changed. The sharp ideological divisions within the Party had now become an open secret, an open struggle, and the trick was to get the support of powerful liberals within the structure. Three old friends—Yuri Afanasyev, Nikolai Shmelyov, and Yuri Karyakin—brought to the Nineteenth Special Party Conference, in June 1988, a petition demanding Karpinsky’s rehabilitation. With the help of his old acquaintances Aleksandr Yakovlev and Boris Pugo, the tactic worked. By the next year, Len Karpinsky was in the regular rotation as a columnist at Moscow News—a golden boy, he says, “of a certain age.”

  CHAPTER 12

  PARTY MEN

  Geidar Aliyev was humiliated. After two decades as the Communist Party boss of Azerbaijan, he had been dumped in 1989 from Gorbachev’s Politburo, vilified for corruption in the news columns of Pravda, and reduced to sharing the backseat of a dismal Volga sedan with an American journalist. The upstarts in the Party—the Karpinskys, the Yakovlevs, even Gorbachev himself—had all betrayed him. “When we made Gorbachev general secretary we had no idea what it would lead to!” he said. The pressures of Aliyev’s decline wore on him. He had suffered mild heart attacks; his complexion had turned the shade of a votive candle. He complained of poverty to all who would listen. But Aliyev was still possessed of a certain unctuous charm, a parody of William Powell’s parody of a regal smoothie. “You should feel quite honored,” he told me as we drove to Moscow from his posh dacha in the village of Uspenskoye. “It’s not often that I give an audience.”

  When he was a young man, Aliyev’s ambitions were almost derailed when he was accused of sexual assault. He avoided expulsion from the Party by a single vote at his disciplinary hearing. There were, of course, no further “legal” proceedings. The Party’s judgment was all. In 1969, as the republic’s KGB chief, Aliyev launched a “crusade against corruption.” He intended only to purge his enemies and elevate himself and his clan, and he succeeded spectacularly. Once installed as republican Party chief, Aliyev ruled Azerbaijan as surely as the Gambino family ran the port of New York. The Caspian Sea caviar mafia, the Sumgait oil mafia, the fruits and vegetables mafia, the cotton mafia, the customs and transport mafias—they all reported to him, enriched him, worshiped him. Aliyev even practiced hegemony over the intellectual life of Azerbaijan. He appointed his relatives chairmen of various institutes and academic departments, enabling them, in turn, to charge tens of thousands of rubles to scholars in search of meaningful employment.

  The structure of state in Azerbaijan—and everywhere else in the Soviet Union—was itself a mafia. The Communist Party’s dispensation of power and property was unchallenged by election or by law. Administrators of “socialist justice” were duplicitous props intended by the Party to give the appearance of civil society. These judges, police captains, and prosecutors were generally well fed and not meant to stand up for a
nything more than their share of the booty.

  There had been, of course, some honest men in the Party structure. In one famous incident in Azerbaijan, a prosecutor named Gamboi Mamedov tried to investigate corruption in the Communist Party leadership. Aliyev had him fired and denounced. Later, at a session of the republican legislature, the inflamed Mamedov managed to grab the microphone, shouting, “The state plan is a swindle, likewise the budget—also, of course, those reports of economic success are a pack of lies, and …” Police hustled Mamedov off the speaker’s platform and into a back alley of obscurity. Seventeen loyal legislators quickly lined up to defend Aliyev. “Who are you fighting against, Gamboi?” Suleiman Ragimov, a hack writer and deputy, cried out. “God sent us his son in the form of Geidar Aliyev. Are you then opposing God?” The legislature rose as one in a standing ovation.

  When Gorbachev came to power in 1985, he became the boss of bosses, the leader of a Communist Party Politburo in which most of the leaders were unabashed mafia sultans, men like Aliyev of Azerbaijan, Viktor Grishin of Moscow, Grigori Romanov of Leningrad, Dinmukhamed Kunayev of Kazakhstan, Vladimir Shcherbitsky of Ukraine. In Russia, the principle of blood ties did not mean as much as it did in Azerbaijan or Central Asia, but the Party hierarchy, and the way it controlled all economic activity, was just as powerful. The Central Committee, too, was filled with “dead souls,” Party hacks whose sole mission was the protection of the Party as a privileged class. They had all long ago turned the poverty of Leninist ideology to their own advantage. In a state in which property belonged to all—in other words, to no one—the Communist Party owned everything, from the docks of Odessa to the orange trees of Georgia.

  Aliyev, like the others, knew that the only real imperative of stability under Brezhnev had been to grease the don. Leonid Ilyich did not require the genuine prosperity or happiness of his people to please him. He needed only reports of same. As long as the official-looking documents that crossed his desk informed him of record successes and overfulfilled plans, he was well pleased.