Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  Of course, the traditions of tribute pleased him even more. When Brezhnev came to the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, in 1978, Aliyev gave him a gold ring with a huge solitaire diamond, a hand-woven carpet so large it took up the train’s dining salon, and a portrait of the general secretary onto which rare gems had been pasted as “decoration.” For an official visit in 1982, Aliyev built a palace for Brezhnev’s use, an edifice with all the kitsch grandeur of the Kennedy Center in Washington. The great man slept there for a couple of nights and then the palace closed. To commemorate the same visit, Aliyev gave Brezhnev yet another ring that symbolized the worldview of the Kremlin better than any map. One huge jewel, representing Brezhnev the Sun King, was surrounded by fifteen smaller stones representing the fifteen union republics. “Like planets orbiting their sun,” as Aliyev explained. This masterpiece of the jeweler’s art was given the title “The Unbreakable Union of Republics of the Free.” When he received the ring and listened to Aliyev’s careful explication, Brezhnev, in full view of the television cameras, burst into tears of gratitude.

  This system of shadows and gilt served the Party well while it lasted. But now Aliyev, who had grown accustomed to long Zil limousines while he was in power, found himself with his knees jammed into the seat ahead of him.

  “Ach, I live badly,” he said as we sped along the highway linking Moscow to the villages where the Party elite kept their dachas. “My pension is tiny. Believe me, you would never work for such a sum. The driver? The car? Not mine. I just have the right to order them up once in a while.”

  In office, Aliyev had grown used to ordering suits from the Kremlin tailor, to regular deliveries of Japanese electronics, American cigarettes, and delicacies from the special farms and shops run by the KGB. Now his world was confused and threatening. “Gorbachev says he is for the renovation of socialism and against capitalism,” Aliyev said. “Fine. But what sort of renovation? What does it mean? Is it social democracy? That’s not socialism. What exactly is his socialism? No one knows. They don’t know what socialism is anymore, and they are all living in a fog. You Americans want everyone to follow your way, and the more things here are to the liking of George Bush, the better. But is Bush Jesus Christ or something?”

  We rode on a while in an agreeable silence toward Pushkin Square. Then, suddenly, through the evening fog, the gleaming apparition of the future: a pair of yellow arches, a winding line of hungry Russians. Aliyev sneered.

  “McDonald’s!” he said. “There’s the perestroika you all love so much.”

  The Communist Party apparatus was the most gigantic mafia the world has ever known. It guarded its monopoly on power with a sham consensus and constitution and backed it up with the force of the KGB and the Interior Ministry police. There were also handsome profits. The Party had so obviously socked away money abroad and sold off national resources—including the country’s vast gold reserves—that just after the collapse of the August coup, the Party’s leading financial officer took a look into the future and threw himself off a high balcony to his death.

  The Party’s corruption under Brezhnev was not a matter of exceptions, of rotten apples fouling the Utopian barrel. No thorough prosecution could stop with a single indictment. “If it were a question of just one of the former leaders, the new government could easily give him up to be destroyed, presenting him as the black sheep—a sad exception to the general rule,” according to Arkady Vaksberg, the top legal writer for the weekly paper Literaturnaya Gazeta. “But since it is a question precisely of all (or nearly all) of the members of the previous administration of autocratic old men, their exposure would lead to only one possible and inescapable conclusion from a historical perspective, that is, of the criminal character of the Party and the whole political system which enables criminals to make their way into positions of power and fanatically protects them from exposure.”

  In many ways, Stalin’s Terror mirrored the tactics of the mafia. He used violence as an instrument of coercion and discipline; he fostered an atmosphere of secrecy and universal suspicion; there were “made” men (Party apparatchiks) and the outward appearance of legitimate business (embassies, diplomats, trade, etc.). As terror faded under Khrushchev and then Brezhnev, the Communist Party’s business became business. “Sometimes you gotta get rid of the bad blood,” Richard Castellano tells Al Pacino in The Godfather. But after an all-out war, the mafia always dreams of an Arcadian period of cooperation, of relations that are profitable, stable, and, always, “just business.” Ideology in the post-Stalin era was not so much a system of beliefs or behavior as a kind of language, a password among the “made” men; if you could speak the language without deviation, you might be trusted to share in the loot. “More than anything else,” the Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas wrote a few years after Stalin’s death, “the essential aspect of contemporary Communism is the new class of owners and exploiters.”

  It was only in the post-Stalin era, after the violent period of collectivization and industrialization was over, that the Party-mafia structures took shape. Vladimir Oleinik, a famously honest investigator in the Russian prosecutor’s office, published excerpts from his diary in Literaturnaya Gazeta that described the rapid growth in the 1960s of the trade mafia, a pyramid of corruption that began in the Communist Party Central Committee and the top ministers and went all the way down to butchers, bakers, and gravediggers, with everyone getting a piece. Oleinik wrote of how one Central Committee member filled his bank account by selling midlevel positions in the ministries for 50,000 rubles a spot.

  The trade mafia worked thousands of scams. Even the small-time jobs had a certain beauty to them. In Central Asia, I was told about the fruit juice scam. Workers paid enormous bribes to get jobs servicing carbonated juice machines throughout the warm, southern republics. When the workers serviced the machines, they skimped on the syrup and then sold it elsewhere. They also skimmed some of the money out of the cash boxes. The workers used part of their gains to pay the foremen; the foreman, in turn, paid off the assistant minister; the assistant minister paid the minister … and all the way up the line and to the top of the Party structure.

  In the same region, even high Party positions and awards were for sale. The magazine Smena (“Change”) reported that the position of regional Party secretary in Central Asia cost a bribe of $150,000, and an Order of Lenin, the Soviet Union equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor, cost anywhere from $165,000 to $750,000.

  It wasn’t as if this swamp of corruption were a secret to the Soviet people any more than the existence of the mafia is a secret to the New York storekeeper forced to pay protection money. The mafia made itself known at every turn. You literally could not leave this earth without feeling its heavy hand on your shoulder. One afternoon, the nanny who took care of our son came to work exhausted and depressed. Her mother had died, but what had run her down most was the enormous effort and expense of getting the woman buried—a process that drained her as much as it enriched the “cemetery mafia” and its Party patrons.

  “I knew immediately this was going to run into big money for us,” Irina said. “We were supposed to get a free funeral and burial. But that is a joke. The first stop was the bank. First, Mother’s body had to be taken to the morgue. We were told that the morgues were all filled up, and they wouldn’t take her. But when we paid two hundred rubles to the attendants, they took her. Then there was the fifty rubles for her shroud.

  “Then the funeral agent said he had no coffins my mother’s size and that we could only buy something eight feet long. My mother was five feet tall. For eighty rubles he came up with the right size. Then the gravediggers said they could not dig the grave until two P.M., even though the funeral was set for ten A.M. So that took two bottles of vodka each and twenty-five rubles each. The driver of the funeral bus said he had another funeral that day and couldn’t take care of us. But for thirty rubles and a bottle of vodka we could solve the problem. We did. And so on with the gravesite and the flowers and all
the rest. In the end, it took two thousand rubles to bury my mother. Three months’ income for the family. Is that what ordinary life is supposed to be? To me, it’s like living by the law of the jungle.”

  In the West, the mob historically moves in where there is no legal economy—in drugs, gambling, prostitution—and creates a shadow economy. Sometimes, when it can buy the affections of a politician or two, the mafia meddles in government contracts and runs protection schemes. But in the Soviet Union, no economic transaction was untainted. It was as if the entire Soviet Union were ruled by a gigantic mob family; virtually all economic relations were, in some form, mafia relations. Between a government minister’s order for, say, the production of ten tons of meat and Ivan Ivanov’s purchase of a kilo of veal for a family dinner, there were countless opportunities for mischief. No one could afford to avoid at least a certain degree of complicity. That was one of the most degrading facts of Soviet life: it was impossible to be honest. And all the baksheesh, eventually, ended up enriching the Communist Party.

  “Look, it’s all very simple,” Andrei Fyodorov, who opened Moscow’s first cooperative restaurant in 1987, told me. “The mafia is the state itself.”

  Before opening his restaurant, 36 Kropotkinskaya, Fyodorov worked for twenty-five years in the state restaurant business. Over a cup of tea one morning in his empty dining room, Fydorov described how it all worked at his old place of business, the Solnechny Restaurant, a huge state banquet hall. “The game started at nine o’clock on Friday mornings when the inspectors came by. I soon realized they were not really interested in the state of things in the restaurant. Very soon we established good contacts in terms of giving them various foodstuffs, providing tables in the restaurant, arranging saunas. The director of the restaurant would just tell me which services I had to arrange for them. You see, every person working in services is always on a hook. The restaurant director’s salary is one hundred ninety rubles a month, say. You can’t live on that, and so he is forced to take bribes. But there is a system of bribing in the USSR. You can’t get too greedy. A restaurant director cannot take more than two thousand or three thousand rubles per month. If he starts taking more, the system grows worried, and in the next five or six months new people will come around to inspect your place, which means that you can be arrested for violating the unwritten code of bribery.

  “It goes from the bottom on up. From waiters, the bribes go to the maître d’, and then on to the deputy director, to the director of the restaurant, and upward to various Party officials and auditing bodies. The same system applies to cafés, tailor shops, taxi depots, barbershops. A man who does not give bribes for more than six months is doomed.”

  Until his untimely arrest a few years ago, the most flamboyant mafia figure in the country was Akhmadzhan Adylov, a “Hero of Socialist Labor” who ran for twenty years the Party organization in the rich Fergana Valley region of Uzbekistan. Adylov was known as the Godfather and lived on a vast estate with peacocks, lions, thoroughbred horses, concubines, and a slave labor force of thousands of men. Anywhere Adylov went, he was accompanied by his personal cooks and a mobile kitchen. For lunch, he always ate a roasted baby lamb. He locked his foes in a secret underground prison and tortured them when necessary. His favorite technique was borrowed from the Nazis. In subzero temperatures, he would tie a man to a stake and spray him with cold water until he froze to death.

  Adylov insisted he was a descendant of Tamerlane the Great. Considering his taste for ritual and cruelty, his blend of ancient and Bolshevik cruelty, it seems fitting. Adylov often sat in judgment, as if on a throne, under a portrait of the state deity, Lenin. When a Party hack named Inamzhon Usmankhodzhaev was nominated for high office in Uzbekistan, he had to appear before Adylov for approval. As a test of loyalty, Adylov ordered Usmankhodzhaev to execute an informer, but he could not bring himself to pull the trigger. Adylov could not excuse such a pathetic show of weakness and relented only when Usmankhodzhaev begged for forgiveness and, on his knees, licked clean the shoes of the Godfather.

  From the Uzbeks, Brezhnev wanted only cotton and, more important, wonderful cotton statistics. The cotton scam was gigantic, yet elegant. Brezhnev would call on the “heroic peoples” of Uzbekistan to pick, say, 20 percent more cotton than the previous year. The workers, heroic as they were, could not possibly fulfill the order. (How could they when the previous year’s statistics were already wildly inflated?) But the local Party leaders understood the overriding issue. They assured Moscow that all had gone as planned. If not better! The central ministries in Moscow would, in turn, pay vast sums of rubles for the record crop. The republican leaders would pocket the extra cash. Brezhnev, for his part, smacked his lips anticipating the gifts that would come, air freight, from Bukhara, Samarkand, and the other centers of Uzbekistan.

  Of all the most famous Party mafias in the Soviet Union—the Kazakhs, the Azeris, the Georgians, the Crimeans, the Muscovites—the Uzbeks showed a certain flair. Sharaf Rashidov, the republican Party chief, was a soft-spoken sybarite with literary pretensions. He fancied himself a novelist. To fulfill his ambition, he hired two Moscow hacks, Yuri Karasev and Boris Privalov, to do the writing. The resulting potboilers were published in editions that would cause Judith Krantz profound envy. Rashidov also knew how to satisfy his appetites. After hours of waving to the masses from the podium on May Day, he would descend into the basement beneath the podium, where, as Vaksberg reports, there were tables “piled with festive fare and delightful young ladies ready to put the spring back in his step.” Rashidov was awarded ten Orders of Lenin, and when he died in 1984 he was buried with pharaonic ceremony in the center of Tashkent near the Lenin Museum. For years, people brought mounds of roses and carnations to the tomb. Finally, the Uzbek leaders recognized the shift in political winds from Moscow and moved the grave to a remote village. But Rashidov’s legacy lived on. In 1988, regional Party officials summarily pardoned 675 people who had been sentenced for their roles in the corruption scandals of the Brezhnev era.

  These were the go-go years under Brezhnev, and Uzbekistan did not, by any means, hold a monopoly on the grotesque. In the Krasnodar region of southern Russia, a mafia stronghold, ordinary membership in the Party cost anywhere from 3,000 to 6,000 rubles. Vyacheslav Voronkov, mayor of the resort city of Sochi, hired an Armenian architect to construct a musical fountain in the foyer of his state mansion. Tourists were permitted to pay a few kopecks to hear their Party leader’s fountain in full aria. When Communist Party chiefs in Russia went fishing, scuba divers plunged underwater and put fish on the hooks. When they went hunting, specially bred elk, stag, and deer were made to saunter across the field in point-blank range. Everyone had a wonderful time. When the king of Afghanistan visited the Tajik resort of Tiger Gorge, he blew away the last Turan tiger in the country.

  The mutual congratulations, the feasts and wedding parties, the piety and self-righteousness all smacked of mafia culture. At a conference of the Soviet Writers’ Union in 1981, Yegor Ligachev, who would later serve as Gorbachev’s nominal number-two man and conservative nemesis, said, “You can’t imagine, comrades, what a joy it is for all of us to be able to get on with our work quietly and how well everything is going under the leadership of dear Leonid Ilyich. What a marvelous moral-political climate has been established in the Party and country with his coming to power! It is as if wings have sprouted on our backs, if you want to put it stylishly, as you writers do.”

  In Kazakhstan, a republic bigger than all of Western Europe, Dinmukhamed Kunayev showed a certain kindliness to his relatives and (a rare feature in mafia men) to his wife. Arkady Vaksberg confirmed a story about Kunayev’s connubial bliss that I had first heard when I was in Alma-Ata.

  It seems that Kunayev’s wife became jealous after learning that the wife of the Magadan Party secretary had been given as a gift an extremely expensive Japanese tea service. Magadan, the former labor camp center in the far east, had unique access to Japanese goods, but Mrs. Kunayev would not be s
oothed. She had to have these cups and saucers. Party etiquette did not allow Kunayev simply to order the tea set from Japan or even Siberia. That was somehow too obvious. Even dispatching an aide to Tokyo was deemed unseemly.

  “A way had to be found, of course,” Vaksberg writes. “And such was its originality and refinement that it deserves its own little page in the history of the Soviet mafia.” Kunayev could not merely send his private plane, a Tupolev 134, on the mission. Party rules dictated that a Politburo member’s plane always had to be on the ready for emergency sessions in Moscow. So Kunayev told his aides to draw up an official report saying the plane’s engine required repair. This would allow him to order another plane while the first was being “fixed.”

  Rules also dictated that after the repair, a Politburo member could not fly on the plane until it had been flown twenty thousand kilometers. “The point of this brilliant move is clear,” Vaksberg writes. “Some of Kunayev’s closest associates were happy to take on the ‘kamikaze’ role. They worked out a route which, there and back, would clock up the required distance of twenty thousand kilometers. There would be stopovers in Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, and Khabarovsk. They would return via Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, for it would have been unthinkable to visit the Soviet far east and not gawk at geysers and an active volcano. Everywhere they were received at the highest level—after all, they were emissaries from Kunayev himself. Those that have clawed their way to power have an astonishing passion for recording their pleasure on film. Thanks to this hobby we can today see with our own eyes how their trip went. Lavish picnics everywhere with the traditional shashlik and variety of vodkas, saunas, and royal hunting of boar, elk, and deer especially put up in front of them for easy shots.