Edik and I spent a few days at one of the villages near Vologda, a row of two dozen houses called Spasskaya. Behind an abandoned church, the cemetery was filling up. Every six months or so, a workman arrived from the city, borrowed a shovel, and dug a grave. No one had been born in Spasskaya in twenty-five years. A prosperous village before the Revolution, it was now little more than a few collapsed cabins, a graveyard, and wheel ruts in the mud.
Mariya Kuznetsova, a stooped old woman with fierce, squinting eyes, spent her days tending her chicken coop and gossiping with her neighbors along the rails of a rotten pine fence. There were seventeen people left in Spasskaya. Once there had been hundreds. At seventy-five, Mariya was among the youngest. “On winter days,” she said, “we check the other houses. If there’s no smoke coming out of one of the chimneys it usually means another one of us is dead.”
Mariya Kuznetsova said she lived on a pension of less than 3 rubles a day. Not long ago, before new pension levels were adopted, retired farmers got a ruble a day. Kuznetsova’s meals were mainly bread, milk, macaroni, cabbage soup, potatoes, and salted fat. If she needed to see a doctor or go to the store, she had to walk two miles down a road of mud and stones to catch a bus that “comes when it comes.” During the winter, when temperatures hit thirty and forty degrees below zero and the snow piled up, she said, “we are prisoners.”
“We listen to the radio and hear all that talk about ‘Land for the Peasants’ and private farming, but who’s going to do the work?” she said. “Who is going to save the countryside? One generation should hand down what it knows and what it has collected to the next. But all that is broken. Everyone has long since left for the cities. The collective farms are a disaster. There’s nothing left. It’s all lost.”
One of Kuznetsova’s neighbors, Anatoly Zamokhov, leaned out the window of his cabin and cackled viciously. He spit at the sound of the word Moscow. “I’ll tell you about Moscow,” he said, taking an angry drag on a foul cigarette. “Before the Bolsheviks, my parents and their parents lived decently. They weren’t rich—not by any means, God knows—but they had food and a cow and a table to call their own. We were all supposed to be one big family after collectivization. But everyone was pitted against everyone else, everyone suspicious of everyone else. Now look at us, a big stinking ruin. Now everyone lives for himself. No one visits anyone on Easter. What a laugh, what a big goddamn laugh.”
During collectivization, people in Spasskaya told me, police crammed countless peasants into a complex of labor camps that was just north of the village. The police ripped the crosses and icons out of the churches and used the transepts and basements as holding cells. In the Vologda region, 25,000 children died in the churches over a three-month period. In a matter of a few years, an entire fabric of social relations, of village life, was in shreds. The “masters of the land” were suddenly servants of the state, stripped of their religion, their traditions, and their will.
The Bolshevik contempt for the peasant was rooted in the works of Lenin, who called them myelki khozyaichiki—roughly, “little landlords.” Before the Revolution, Solzhenitsyn has estimated, the peasantry constituted more than 80 percent of the Slavic population. Today, many of those “little capitalists” not already in mass graves, urban bunkers, or dying villages live in the “inter-nats,” state-run homes for the aged.
Not far from Spasskaya, about a hundred villagers lived at the inter-nat in the town of Priluki, near an abandoned monastery. The place was run by a well-intentioned, kind woman named Zoya Matreyeva. She and her small staff did what they could to keep the place clean, care for the sick and dying, and arrange decent burials when the time came. She had lived in the area for many years and said that the old people yearn only for the village life before the ruin began. Soviet and Western historians have described the harsh conditions, drunkenness, and bigotry of the prerevolutionary villages in such stark terms that it seems impossible for anyone to be nostalgic for them. Impossible, that is, until the surviving villagers describe what came afterward, in the early 1930s.
“We even have a few old Communist Party members here, people who worked half their lives and more on the collective farms, but you won’t find one who believes in collectivization,” Matreyeva said. “They talk about the cows and chickens they had, how it was theirs and they cared about it. Then it was all stripped away.”
The inter-nat dining room was a dim place of buckled linoleum, fluorescent light, and Lenin’s portrait. The old women, plump and toothless, peasant scarves tied around their heads, shuffled to their seats. The men ate in a separate room, and there were only a few of them—nearly all the men in the area were killed in World War II. Each place was set with a bowl of soup, a tin spoon, and two small pieces of brown bread. Zoya Matreyeva, for forty years a loyal employee of the state, had a point she wanted to prove.
“Grandmothers!” she said. “Maybe you can tell our visitor about what you remember about the old days. The old days before you were on the collective farms.”
The old women stopped stirring the sour cream into their soup and looked up. “These gigantic state farms killed the villages and put nothing in their place,” said one, and then they all began to chime in.
“Six of the families from our village were dragged away and we never saw them again.”
“In my village, there were one hundred and twenty houses. Now there are ten, and the only people who live there now are people who use the houses on weekends to get out of the city. They garden, they don’t farm.”
“I had to spend my life feeding something called the state. Now at least the state feeds me.”
“My grandchildren wouldn’t know what to do with a piece of land. Even my own children have a hard time telling the difference between a horse and a cow. Are these the new ‘masters of the land’?”
“One generation is supposed to show the next how to live. One generation is supposed to build something so the next can carry on. That was all cut off. Destroyed. Do they think you can rebuild that in a day? In five years?”
After a while, the old women quieted down. In a way they seemed happy for a moment to have a visitor ask a question or two, but as the memories rushed forth, the women grew sullen and tired, and they ate.
MAGNITOGORSK
At the height of the Depression, John Scott, a young socialist from Philadelphia, decided to quit his academic work and join in the creation of what The Nation was then calling “the world’s most gigantic social experiment.” Scott arrived in Moscow in 1932, desperate to find a future that worked. Stalin’s bureaucrats promptly sent Scott, and hundreds of other young American socialists, to one of the “hero projects” of the first five-year plan, to “Magnetic Mountain,” the steel town of Magnitogorsk in the Urals.
In Magnitogorsk, Scott discovered a city that was one massive construction site: workers pulling eighteen-hour shifts, families living in tents and ramshackle barracks. The vast majority of the Soviet workers at Magnitogorsk had come not out of any ideological commitment to the “shining future” of socialism, but because they were forced to. Many of them had been peasant farmers, forced off their private plots during the collectivization campaign. Scott saw priests in their cassocks digging coal with picks and wheelbarrows, workers killed by falling girders. But in his memoir of working at Magnitogorsk between 1932 and 1938, Behind the Urals, Scott noenetheless remembered a “city full of vitality and life.… Tens of thousands of people were enduring the most intense hardships in order to build blast furnaces, and many of them did it willingly, with boundless enthusiasm, which infected me from the day of my arrival.”
Magnitogorsk became a legend of the war. Because it produced the steel for half of the tanks and one third of the artillery used to defeat the Nazis, people began referring to the mills as “Hitler’s grave.” But Magnitogorsk never stopped running on a wartime mentality. The ultimate bosses, the ministers in Moscow, measured success in sheer quantity. Never mind that other countries were beginning to produce mode
rn steel alloys that brought the weight of a refrigerator down to a hundred pounds, not four hundred; never mind that pollution got so bad that the clouds of poison above the city decreased sunlight 40 percent. But the Lenin Steel Works, the biggest mill in the world, kept churning on in ignorant isolation. And always the command was “More steel!”
“Magnitogorsk is a classic Stalinist city,” Aleksei Tuplin, a correspondent for the local paper, the Magnitogorsk Worker, told me. “We built an autonomous company town here that pushed away every cultural, economic, and political development in the civilized world. We existed, and still do exist, for the sake of a machine that doesn’t even work.” When Premier Aleksei Kosygin proposed a massive retooling project in the 1960s that would have put an end to Magnitogorsk’s antiquated open-hearth mills in favor of more efficient conversion techniques used elsewhere in the world since the 1950s, Brezhnev and the rest of the leadership pronounced the project too expensive. “All they ever wanted was more steel,” Dmitri Galkin, the plant director during the Brezhnev era, told me. “That’s all they ever cared about.”
I stayed a week in Magnitogorsk as a guest of the city coroner, Oleg Yefremov. Oleg was in his early forties, and he had a smoker’s cough that plagued him without end. He did not smoke. He suffered, as did most of the citizens of Magnitogorsk, from the habit of breathing.
“I should quit inhaling,” he said.
We woke early and drove to the top of a hill to get a sense of the biggest company town I’d ever seen. The Lenin Steel Works stretched seven miles along the left bank of Factory Lake. The plant was in full operation day and night, grinding out sixteen million tons of steel every year. The smokestacks never stopped pumping poison, a sickly mix of yellow, gray, green, and bluish smoke that shifted in color, depending on the light. According to a report by the local environmental protection committee, the city’s industries dumped one million tons of pollution annually. “There’s four hundred and thirty thousand of us, so that means more than two tons for everybody,” said Yuri Zaplatkin, the committee’s chairman. Satellite pictures show that the mills have produced a zone of ruined air and soil 120 miles long and 40 miles wide. In winter, the snow was crusted black; in summer, the grass grew in sad, brownish tufts.
Oleg said that at one time or another in their lives, 90 percent of the children of Magnitogorsk suffered from pollution-related illnesses: chronic bronchitis, asthma, allergies, even cancers. The local environmental protection committee reported that birth defects in Magnitogorsk doubled between 1980 and 1990. At the city morgue, Oleg surveyed the morning’s corpses. A worker with collapsed lungs. A little girl dead from asthma, a weakened heart, or both.
Oleg lived on the “good side” of Magnitogorsk; the bad side being downwind from the plant, the “left bank.” One of the worst neighborhoods in the city was one of the oldest, Hardware Square. The air there was especially foul and gassy; you could taste the dust on your tongue. In room after room in one of the barracks, old women stared blankly out windows, children were as filthy as any street kid in the barrios of Lima. At eight o’clock in the morning at the health clinic on Hardware Square, groups of a dozen children got ultraviolet treatments and drank their daily “oxygen cocktails,” a viscous soup of fruit juice, herbs, and sugar infused with pure oxygen. Older patients came in just to take a few pulls from an oxygen tank.
Down the road at the steelworks’ own pulmonary ward, one of the doctors, Natalya Popkova, said that she had seen thousands of workers and their children who came in for a few days suffering from “what the plant provides us.” “The patients, all of them, become permanently angry at the mills,” she said. “They know why they are sick, but what choice do they have? Where can they go?”
The apparatchiks who ran the mill and the city were masterful in the way they headed off any potential political conflicts with the work force. The mill owned everything in town, from the sewer system to the streetcars; the mill directors had an iron grip on food supplies and distribution of the goods they earned in barter deals with the West. When companies from West Germany or Japan offered televisions, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners in exchange for scrap metal, the bosses used the goods to bribe the workers. “We are a poor people,” said Viktor Seroshtanov, a judge in the municipal court. “If you throw us a little piece of meat, a VCR, something, we’ll be happy. In a way, the foreign companies that do business with the mill are contributing to a kind of colonial system.” When the Communist Party organization in the mill sensed there might be a strike coming in 1989, they tipped off the factory bosses, who quickly sold barrels of cheap beer to the workers. When the threat of strikes disappeared, so did the beer. “What am I supposed to do about it?” a mill worker named Viktor Oyupov told me. “Should I rebel and not eat? Then what?”
The trap seemed inescapable, as inescapable as the system itself. For all the excitement in the big cities over glasnost and the new parliament, the great majority of the people in the Soviet Union felt trapped, cogs in a system that not only oppressed them, but also failed to provide a decent, minimal standard of living. “Our workers are soldiers, shock troops who serve a machine,” said Oleg Valinsky, a liberal member of the Magnitogorsk city council. “They wear the shoes the factory gives them. They kill themselves working and they go home. All the spirit is drained out of them. We created a city of robots.”
CHAPTER 14
THE REVOLUTION UNDERGROUND
The life of the underworld was now rumbling around them, with deputies continually running to and fro, trains going up and down, drawn by trotting horses. The darkness was starred by countless lamps.
—EMILE ZOLA, Germinal
For the first few years of the glasnost era, Moscow News, Ogonyok, and the rest of the liberal press had only hinted at the connection between the seventy-year rule of the Communist Party and the disastrous state of the country. The year of miracles in Europe, 1989, began with the first opportunity for the people of the Soviet Union to make that connection for themselves. On March 26, the people would vote in multiparty elections for the new Congress of People’s Deputies. Despite Aleksandr Yakovlev’s advice to split the Party, to separate the progressives from the conservative majority, Gorbachev believed that by strengthening the government, by creating this new Congress, he could gradually diminish the role of the Party regulars.
In the months before the balloting, I spent many nights at election meetings and debates—in Moscow, Leningrad, the Baltic states, in provincial Russia. The issues varied somewhat. In the Baltics, of course, the emphasis was on sovereignty, on gaining greater distance from Moscow; in the Russian provinces, the emphasis was on empty stores, ground-level economics. But everywhere the talk was of freedom, of learning democracy. Confronted for the first time by the prospect of political choice, people were both confused and exhilarated. They had no prior experience of genuine debate or choice, and yet they seized the opportunity immediately: Nowhere was that more the case than in my own precinct—Gorbachev’s district—the October Region of Moscow.
On a January afternoon, after the first shift had let out, the bureaucrats and workers of the Red Proletariat machine-tools factory filed into their auditorium and saw their boss and director, Yuri Ivanovich Kirillov, waiting onstage to greet them. For once, Kirillov was all smiles, saccharine and ingratiating. He looked like a game-show host in a bad suit. With his seigneurial handshakes and shoulders-back posture, he showed every sign of expecting the 325 “electors” for the six thousand workers to fall into place, to rise as one and nominate him as their candidate for the March 1989 elections.
The workers stashed their heavy wool coats under their chairs, settled down, and quickly chose a secretary and a chairman. Then the chairman called a factory foreman named Nikolai Blinkov to the rostrum. Blinkov read a long, formal speech, talking of the “grave responsibilities” of political reform. “There were so many mistakes in nominating candidates in the past,” he said. “This is why we are so nervous now.” Then, “without furthe
r ado,” Blinkov proposed the nomination of Yuri Ivanovich Kirillov. Surrounded by his deputies in the first row, Kirillov crossed his legs suavely and smiled, the master of all he surveyed. The election meeting was going splendidly, just as he had planned it. The birth of democracy was going to be wonderful.
“This man,” Blinkov said, pointing to Kirillov, “this man is a simple Soviet worker. He is not spoiled by applause.” Blinkov praised Kirillov’s “magnificent” two years as factory director, his “extraordinary facility with problem-solving,” his “superlative” relations with the workers, his “uncanny” ability to remember everyone’s name. The applause was furious in the front rows near Kirillov, and softened out in the rear.
Then someone on the aisle rose and asked Blinkov the first impertinent question of the afternoon.
“Are there any other candidates proposed?”
There followed a moment of tense silence. Clearly, this question was not part of the script. Blinkov blinked, then scanned the first row, a rabbity panic in his eyes. But the denizens of the first row could not help him, Kirillov least of all. They had not anticipated the messiness of democracy any more than Blinkov had.
Blinkov conceded the obvious. “On my way over here,” he said, “I was told that in all the work collectives there were no other names suggested.”
The chairman edged Blinkov away from the podium and called on a succession of Red Proletariat employees to sing the praises of Yuri Ivanovich. “From the day he walked in the door, our director was already a well-formed organizer,” said a worker named Sergei Khudyakov. “And thanks to him, our factory has a resort home for the workers in the Crimea.” A Komsomol leader pledged the “fealty of our youth to Yuri Ivanovich.” A foreman described the director’s “generosity of spirit” and “high intelligence.”
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