Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  Glasnost meant admitting to all this, too. Sometimes the admission came in the shape of an earnest article in the paper, sometimes with a certain flair, a Russian irony that deflated Soviet pomposity. The Exhibition of Economic Achievements, a kind of vast Stalinist Epcot Center near the Moscow television tower, had for years put on displays of Soviet triumphs in the sciences, engineering, and space in huge neo-Hellenic halls. Vera Mukhina’s gigantic statue Worker and the Collective Farm Girl (jutting breasts and biceps, bulging eyes) presided at the entrance, providing citizens with the sense that they were now part of a socially and genetically engineered breed of muscular proletarians. But with glasnost, the directors grew humble and put up an astonishingly frank display: “The Exhibit of Poor-Quality Goods.”

  At the exhibit, a long line of Soviets solemnly shuffled past a dazzling display of stunning underachievement: putrid lettuce, ruptured shoes, rusted samovars, chipped stew pots, unraveled shuttlecocks, crushed cans of fish, and, the show-stopper, a bottle of mineral water with a tiny dead mouse floating inside. All the items had been purchased in neighborhood stores. “It was time to inject a little reality into the scene here,” one of the guides told me. The exhibit was unsparing, a vicious redefinition of socialist realism. In the clothing section, red arrows pointed to uneven sleeves, faded colors, cracked soles. One piece of jewelry was labeled, simply, “hideous,” and no one argued.

  “Let me tell you a little secret,” a transport worker, Aleksandr Klebko, said as we filed past the display of rotten fruit. “This isn’t so bad. I’ve seen worse. Most stores have less than this. Or nothing at all.”

  ASHKHABAD

  Stalinism was still lethal a quarter century after Stalin was dead. In the mud-brick hovels on the outskirts of Ashkhabad, the capital of Turkmenistan, children were the first casualties of poverty. Every year, thousands of infants throughout the republic and the rest of Soviet Central Asia died within twelve months of birth. Countless others suffered more slowly, weakened by the heat and infected water, the pesticides from the cotton fields, a diet built on bread and tea and soup. “I consider myself fairly lucky. I’ve given birth five times, and only one child died,” said Elshe Abayeva, a woman of thirty-one who looked twenty years older. Some of her children played on a hillock of mud and garbage as she cut grass with a blunt scythe. Farther up the road, Abayeva’s neighbors, the Karadiyevs, were not so lucky. “Five children are alive and three died—two at birth and one after a month,” the father said. “In Turkmenia, it’s like this all the time. Worse in the villages.”

  Inside the Abayevs’ two-room hut, the bare bulbs were furred with dust, flies buzzed around the children’s faces. The children were filthy, their clothes in tatters. Only heavy stones kept the tin roof from blowing off the outhouse and the rusted chicken coop. Aba Abayev, Elshe’s husband, earned 170 rubles a month as a video technician for state television—less than 6 rubles a day to support a family of six. The Abayevs had been waiting since 1975 to be assigned an apartment in the city. “When that child was born, it was a cold winter morning,” Aba Abayev said. “No one has phones here, and there are no hospitals or doctors around. I ran two or three kilometers to the pay phone and called. It looked like the baby was dying—or was dead already, maybe—and it took the doctors more than an hour to get here. By then the child was dead. This is the way our lives go out here. I have no hope, to be honest. And for my children, I don’t think things will change, unless they get worse somehow.”

  In Turkmenistan, the official infant mortality rate in 1989 was 54.2 infants per 1,000 births, ten times higher than in most West European countries and more than two and a half times that of Washington, D.C., the city with the highest rate in the United States. Turkmenistan was about on a level with Cameroon. In especially poor regions, such as Tashauz in the north, the rate soared to 111 deaths in every 1,000 births. Many experts in Moscow and the West said that even these statistics understated the problem. The Central Asian republics, they said, regularly underreported their infant mortality rates by as much as 60 percent.

  Children fell sick for many reasons, but mainly they suffered from the effect of the cotton “monoculture,” the obsession with a cotton crop at all costs. Working in the cotton fields, the children often drank from irrigation sources poisoned with pesticides and toxic minerals. In the regions near the Aral Sea, which had been ruined and drained through a mad scheme to irrigate the cotton fields by diverting the rivers that flow into the sea, the poisons in the drinking water were so intense that children were taking them in through their mothers’ breast milk. Even seeing a doctor proved dangerous at times. In the first year of their lives, Turkmenian children were given an average of two hundred to four hundred injections, compared to three to five for American children. It was nothing systematic. The doctors threw everything they had at the children. Within a few years the effect of the vaccines was close to zero.

  Everything that went wrong with the Soviet system over the decades—the centralization of authority, the vacuum of responsibility and incentive, the triumph of ideology over sense, the dominance of the Party and its police—was magnified in Central Asia. The system was known as “feudal socialism,” a Soviet-Asiatic hierarchy led by Communist Party bosses and collective-farm chairmen.

  At the Institute of Health Care for Mothers and Children in Ashkhabad, the head pediatrician, Yuri Kirichenko, treated dozens of patients every day. Outside Kirichenko’s door, Turkmenian women, many of them pregnant, paced the hall and waited hours for treatment for themselves and their children. Some of the pregnant women were in their late forties and had already had a dozen or more children. Because of the tribal legacy, there was a high rate of marriages among close cousins and other relatives. Many Turkmenian men refused birth control, and women frequently gave birth twice in one year, believing that more children would bring greater wealth—“more hands, more rubles.” The state, of course, encouraged the high birth rate, figuring that could only mean a boon for the cotton crop.

  Kirichenko said he was a Communist Party member of twenty-five years’ standing, but he was thinking about quitting after reading about what the Party hierarchy had done to the region. “We had always been brought up to believe that our system was the best, that our lives were the best, and now we find just the opposite,” he said. “This is not Africa—children are not starving to death in the same blatant way—but there is no way to hide it anymore: we are poor and we are suffering. Of course, we need to educate people on birth control and all the rest. But as a Party member—and it hurts me to say this—the truth is that poverty here is tied to politics. Ninety percent of the blame lies with the system, the bureaucracy, the command system, the centralization of control. There is no escaping that.”

  In Ashkhabad, government and health officials did all they could to convince me that their horrifying infant mortality rate was “temporary” and had nothing to do with politics. They were furious that I had come to write about the problem at all. I asked local officials for permission to visit several of the collective farms west of Ashkhabad. They refused most of my requests on the grounds that they were too close to the Iranian border. Finally, I was granted permission to visit Bakharden, which was also close to the border, but, evidently, not so close that I would be tempted to make a run for Teheran.

  The Mir Collective Farm was a pathetic sight. A mother and her dirt-caked, vacant-eyed daughter stood by the gate. A ragged dog slept curled in the road, flies buzzing around its sores. The “office of administration” was a shed with a few ancient desks, a half-empty bookshelf, and a portrait of Lenin framed in gold. At a small hut nearby, I struck up a conversation with a young woman named Aino Balliyeva. She was twenty years old and unmarried. She picked cotton in the fields and said she knew there were dangers in the work, that she was undoubtedly taking in pesticides and defoliants that would one day hurt her children. “But what can I do about it?” she asked. “I want to have children, because that is life. And as for the rest, I just do
n’t know what to do.”

  As if on cue, a police car, lights flashing, pulled up. Two uniformed police told me and my friend—a Russian photographer, Edik Gladkov—that we were in a “restricted area” and that we should “come along.” At the police station, we were interrogated by a couple of officers and then by a blond Russian official who was clearly KGB. Like a fool, I told the KGB officer that if he called the officials in Ashkhabad he would find out that I had their permission to go to Bakharden. He called, and, of course, the very same official said no such permission had been granted and, in fact, he could not recall our ever having met. Edik pointed to one of the wall posters: under a portrait of Lenin, it read, “Socialism—is control.” After a few hours, we rode back to Ashkhabad, this time with a police escort.

  I did meet a brave man in Turkmenia. His name was Mukhamed Velsapar, a young writer who had grown up in a family of eight children near the town of Mary, east of Ashkhabad. He said he never knew, until long after he was a young man and had seen the relative wealth of Moscow, that he had been raised in poverty. “And that is the mind-set of nearly all Turkmenians: ‘We have bread, we have tea, we have a roof, we are alive—therefore, we are not poor,’ ” he said one afternoon. “These people have no basis for comparison. There are seventy-three newspapers in the republic, and not one of them has any degree of freedom.”

  In 1989, Velsapar, along with a few hundred other writers, journalists, and workers in Ashkhabad, organized Ogzibirlik, a democratic advocacy group with two key aims: to bring glasnost to Turkmenistan and to encourage radical economic change to end what one member called “the cycle of poverty and the colonization of our resources.” Members of Ogzibirlik met with nationalist leaders in the Soviet Baltic republics for crash courses on developing a mass movement. The Ogzibirlik activists believed that the ruin of Central Asia had been the decades-old demand from economic planners in Moscow that the republics turn most of their farmland into cotton fields. The cotton monoculture, directed by Moscow planners and Central Asian overlords, brought the region everything from the tragic infant death rate to the drying up of the Aral Sea. The rulers of the Russian empire had never been as cruel. Ogzibirlik was seemingly powerless to challenge the Communist Party boss, Saparmurad Niyazov, and his well-organized apparatus. Velsapar said he was often interrogated by party officials. “They’ll just blatantly say they have been listening to my phone conversations and then make some wild accusation,” he said.

  Velsapar did succeed, however, in stirring up the Party. His weapon was a short article in Moscow News. “It is hard to believe,” the piece began, “but the majority of Turkmenian children in our time are permanently undernourished.” The article was merely a summary of the infant mortality crisis, but for local authorities it was a humiliation. Not so much because it exposed the horrific details of infant mortality in the region—there had been other such articles in local papers—but because it appeared outside Turkmenistan in a paper read by the liberal intelligentsia and Gorbachev himself.

  “It was a libel on all of us!” Geral Kurbanova, vice president of the republic’s Children’s Fund, shouted at me. “No one goes hungry here. The Turkmenian people love to eat! And poor? Oh, they have lots of money, cars—two cars sometimes. They could buy proper food if they wanted, but instead they buy carpets and expensive dresses.” Comrade Kurbanova was a Turkmenian version of those American demagogues who go on about welfare queens who buy Cadillacs with food stamps.

  What intensified the furor over Velsapar’s article was the accompanying photograph of an emaciated two-year-old child named Guichgeldi Saitmuradov. The image was hellish, like something out of the worst African famines—hollow, desperate eyes, a skeleton barely alive. Several sources corroborated the boy’s fate: After repeated trips to a hospital near his parents’ collective farm in the Tashauz region, the child died in 1988. Before Guichgeldi’s death, however, Khummet Annayev, a physician and senior researcher at the Institute for the Health of Mothers and Children, made a research trip to the region. He reported dire shortages of meat, butter, chicken, and other foodstuffs over a ten-year period, abuse of pesticides and defoliants, miserable medical facilities. And when he saw Guichgeldi in a clinic, he asked someone to take the photograph that would eventually be published in Moscow News.

  “An aberration,” said the republic’s deputy health minister, Dmitri Tessler, who pronounced Velsapar an “adventurer” and Annayev “out of his depth.” The republic’s newspapers never reprinted Velsapar’s article, but they did run countless denunciations triple its length.

  After the Bakharden incident, the republic’s foreign ministry said I ought to see what a “typical” collective farm looked like. They sent me to a farm called Soviet Turkmenistan just outside Ashkhabad. The head of the farm looked like Burl Ives playing Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Broad-bellied and wearing a crisp suit and a panama hat, Muratberd Sopiyev was one of the most powerful men in the republic. He had been “elected” chairman of Soviet Turkmenistan thirty years running. “We have democracy here on the farm,” he told me. “Every so often I’ll tell the people they can nominate an alternative candidate, but they say, ‘Oh, no! Never! No need!’ and that’s that.”

  Sopiyev said the rate of infant mortality on his farm was “not so bad” as in the rest of the republic—“forty-five out of a thousand”—but that is still more than double that of Washington, D.C., Like the rest of the Turkmenian leadership, Sopiyev saw the “triumph of Communism” as the road out of poverty.

  “We have to keep fulfilling, even overfulfilling, the five-year plans,” he said. “We don’t need private property. Not in this country. That will only bring exploitation. No one wants it. We know that in capitalist countries they have very, very poor people. We don’t have that. We provide free apartments, gas, education, medical care. We don’t need a multiparty system, either. We don’t need the chaos that would bring. We need the Communist Party, and we have to follow the Party line. That is the way to wealth.”

  With that, Sopiyev got into his car, and his driver took him to a ministry in Ashkhabad where the republic gets its instructions from Moscow.

  SPASSKAYA

  At the height of spring planting, Edik Gladkov and I visited the farm villages outside Vologda in northern Russia. At midday, with the sun high and the weather ideal, we drove past one field after another—all empty, all unplowed and unplanted. There were tractors and trucks leaning at crazy angles, stuck in the mud. We stopped at the gates of one of the biggest state farms in the Vologda region, the Prigorodni Sovkhoz, which allegedly grew vegetables and raised livestock.

  The usual cheap irony greeted us at the entrance: a faded portrait of Lenin and a tattered banner—“We Shall Witness the Victory of Communist Labor.” We drove down the long road to the farm center, its headquarters, its store, and its three-story concrete barracks. Everything looked abandoned, the fields, the road. Where had everyone gone? Certainly not into the fields. In the store, the shelves were bare of everything except some canned eggplant and pickled tomatoes.

  “Most people go on the buses and buy food in Vologda,” the counterman said. “Probably they’re off in the city now.”

  And where does the food in Vologda come from? Why weren’t there any vegetables in the store here?

  The counterman rolled his eyes. He explained patiently, as if to idiots, the problems on the farm. The ministry still hadn’t delivered seed. Wages were low, so no one wanted to work. They couldn’t get spare parts for the machinery. And so on for a half hour. “So you see,” he said, “there is no point.”

  The farmers and their families who were not in Vologda standing in grocery lines were in their concrete apartments. They all had televisions and they were all watching the same game show.

  One member of the farm who showed both anger and initiative was a young man named Yuri Kamarov. He said that of the hundreds of people on the farm, he was the only one who thought the idea of giving some land back to the peasants would come t
o anything good. Everyone on the farm had parents and grandparents who had been jailed, starved, or deported for their dreams of ownership and prosperity. “I guess I’m the only true believer here, the only one,” Kamarov said. He was twenty-seven and dreamed of raising livestock and vegetables on a plot that was now little more than a swatch of mud and rubble. Every day after work, Kamarov worked alone, building a house for his wife and daughter. The neighbors came by sometimes and laughed. Others made threatening remarks about destroying his project. Kamarov was suffering from that terrible envy born of years of serfdom under czars and general secretaries, an envy embodied in a classic Soviet joke: A farmer’s cow dies, but a great spirit grants him one wish. And what is the wish? “Let my neighbor’s cow drop dead, too,” he says. Kamarov persisted, nonetheless. He took out a 24,000-ruble loan, which meant, he said, “I’m up to my eyeballs in debt for the rest of my life. That’s the gamble. Let them laugh. Maybe they’re right, and nothing will ever change,” the true believer said, “but it’s time I started living a real life, a life like my grandfather had long before the disasters began.”

  The legacy of collectivization was everywhere in the Soviet Union. In the Vologda region alone, there were more than seven thousand “ruined” villages, ghost towns of collapsing houses and untended land that had once been working farms. For decades, the young had been abandoning the wasted villages in droves, searching for a decent wage in the textile and machine-tool plants of Vologda. Like others before them, their search for the industrial utopia turned out to be fruitless. They found only miserable work in textile plants and lived in vast dormitories.