Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  I saw Kashpirovsky in Moscow and on his world tour in the West. It was always the same scene, a mix of spooky New Age and Beatlemania. One night in New York, at a school in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx, Kashpirovsky hid in a corner, trying to avoid the stares of the bulky, perfumed émigré babushkas as they filed into the auditorium. The healer was in an awful mood. A few nights before in Queens he had had a good time of it. The adulation level was just right. “I believe in you like a god,” one woman told him. “Someone should blow up your enemies. Thank God that you were delivered to us. You are a god on earth.” Another man threw away his cane and started limping joyously around the apron of the stage, yelping his thanks in Russian. Kashpirovsky accepted all this as his due. He feigned boredom. Sure there was a “cult of Kashpirovsky,” Kashpirovsky allowed, but it wasn’t “as if I’m going to tell them to blow up a nuclear power station.… You shouldn’t be afraid of a repeat of Stalin or something.”

  But now, Kashpirovsky wore the collapsed look of the doomed. He was sure everything would go wrong. His manager, Mikhail Zimmerman, darted around like a wasp, frantic to know why the microphone crackled with static, why his star was so riddled with gloom. “Anatoly Mikhailovich is like a great instrument,” Zimmerman said. “Sometimes he is just not in tune.”

  Kashpirovsky was feeling the despair of all self-declared prophets. The world, the very universe, was not prepared for his wonderfulness. “Humankind is not ready yet to be saved,” he said. “There is not yet the technique. Imagine that everyone is healthy, no one is dying, and people keep reproducing. Where will they go? The other planets aren’t inhabitable yet. It’s some kind of law.”

  Once he was on stage, Kashpirovsky gave it a valiant try but never caught the groove. Never mind the inadequate universe; hell, as Robert Frost said, is a half-filled auditorium. He was angry at the middling ticket sales. He was used to 300 million on TV and 25,000 live, and now he had three hundred, if he was lucky. He recited his accomplishments and theories with all the tricked-up enthusiasm of a guy selling toupees on late-night television. Then the testimonials began. A woman’s neck no longer had its crick. Hallelujah. Another woman’s rheumatism was gone, her gray hair had darkened. “I feel like thirty, not sixty,” she said. She looked seventy. Kashpirovsky hardly acknowledged the miracles he had wrought. He had his eye on the clock on the back wall, and, after a decent interval, he declared it time for the real séance, the synthesizer music and the purring into the microphone, the healing. But even this, his centerpiece, wilted.

  As he strolled up and down the aisle, Kashpirovsky spotted people who had not closed their eyes, others who fidgeted in their seats.

  “Don’t look at me!” he shouted at one woman. “You’re irritating me! Turn away from me!”

  As he turned away, the music swelled, and Kashpirovsky reddened: “Where did you get that music?!” he barked at his assistant at the mixing board. “This is not human music! This is the sort of music they play at the May Day parade! Quieter! Turn it down!”

  When it was over, Kashpirovsky waited at the lip of the stage as grandmothers and mothers and children all rushed at him in a frantic grab for the star’s handshake and his healing glance. A few tried to corner him and describe their cancers, their migraines and tumors. “Look, I’m not an ordinary doctor,” he answered in a huff. “Don’t address me with your concrete illnesses.” Sometimes when the ailing and the weak approached him with their ills, their pains, Kashpirovsky was even more specific.

  “Take a couple of pills,” he said.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE LAST GULAG

  The country in which my books are printed will not be the same country that exiled me. And to that country I will certainly return.

  —ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN

  On a summer afternoon in 1988, Yelena Chukovskaya was leading a tour through the small museum in the village of Peredelkino dedicated to the life and work of her grandfather, the children’s-book writer and eminent literary scholar Kornei Chukovsky. One of the tourists fixed on a small photograph of Solzhenitsyn, a friend of the family. “Why doesn’t Solzhenitsyn just come home?” the tourist asked. “What is he waiting for?”

  Yelena was stunned. “I could not believe how naive, how unknowing, the question was,” she told me. “And the younger people, they just had no idea who Solzhenitsyn was. A generation had already gone by since his exile, and he’d become little more than a legend to them, almost forgotten in his own country.”

  By that summer, Gorbachev’s glasnost had already opened the door to many of the “anti-Soviet” classics: Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. After a comic court case, the government even let Nabokov’s Lolita go through. But nothing of Solzhenitsyn. The Politburo would not sanction it. I asked Yegor Ligachev, Gorbachev’s conservative rival, about Solzhenitsyn, and he made it plain that the Politburo felt, for a long time, that it could not tolerate a writer—especially a living, exiled writer—who considered the entire reign of the Communist Party an unmitigated crime and catastrophe. Ligachev wanted me to know that he was no critic but he knew obscenity when he read it. Ligachev was in charge of presenting a report to the Politburo on Solzhenitsyn, and he portrayed himself as the put-upon Party apparatchik, staying up night after night at home reading through the entire oeuvre, from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to the historical volumes known as The Red Wheel.

  “You know that adds up to a lot of pages,” he said proudly.

  It was Solzhenitsyn’s merciless portrait of Lenin as a fanatical revolutionary, as the originator of a system based on state terror, that most disturbed Ligachev and, for a time, Gorbachev himself. “After all, Lenin is ours!” Ligachev said. “We adhere to his viewpoint, to Leninism, and we must defend him.”

  But why should the Politburo decide instead of the reader? I asked.

  Ligachev grimaced and waved the question away in disgust. After all, it had always been so. It was Khrushchev himself, after a long day’s reading in 1962, who gave the word that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich could be published in Novy Mir. And it was also Khrushchev who led the campaign against Pasternak. It was the Party’s absolute right to decide.

  “We have sacred things, just as you do,” Ligachev said dryly.

  But why use censorship to enforce it?

  “Okay, pardon me, but we have a different psychology, a different worldview,” he said, his voice rising. “I respect you and you should respect me. For me, Lenin is sacred.”

  A few days after the incident at the museum in Peredelkino, Yelena Chukovskaya sat down at her desk determined to “do something—and fast.” She wrote a brief article outlining the facts of Solzhenitsyn’s life and appealing to the government to return his citizenship. Then she sent it to Book Review, a weekly with a good reputation among the intelligentsia. The act seemed natural to Yelena, an extension of family tradition. Her mother, Lydia Chukovskaya, set an example in the 1970s when she went before the Writers’ Union and, at great risk, swore to it that despite its evil denunciations, Solzhenitsyn would return to Russia. For her troubles, Lydia Chukovskaya was denounced and Sofia Petrovna, her extraordinarily personal novel about the purges, banned. Now Yelena was picking up the battle. Just hours after receiving the piece, the editor of Book Review, Yevgeny Overin, took an enormous risk. He accepted the article for the August 5 issue on “editor’s responsibility,” an extraordinary step meaning that he did not wait for clearance from the censors.

  Yelena Chukovskaya’s piece was an immediate sensation. Thousands of letters and telegrams of support arrived at her door and at Book Review’s ramshackle offices. Officials in the Central Committee reported that they, too, started getting more and more mail demanding the rehabilitation of Solzhenitsyn and his works. Chukovskaya’s article and the response to it were signals, hints of what was politically possible and morally necessary. Other publications quickly took the cue. The
editors of Rabochoye Slovo (“Worker’s Word”), an obscure newsletter for Ukrainian railway workers, acted first, becoming the first aboveground publication to print Solzhenitsyn for nearly three decades. On October 18, the paper’s 45,500 subscribers heard the old vatic voice, Solzhenitsyn’s appeal to the young from 1974, the year he was exiled, to “Live Not by Lies”:

  “Let us admit it: we have not matured enough to march into the squares and shout the truth out loud, or to express openly what we think. It is not necessary. It is dangerous. But let us refuse to say what we do not think. This is our path, the easiest and most accessible one, which allows for our inherent, deep-rooted cowardice.”

  From his home in Cavendish, Vermont, Solzhenitsyn tried to manage the terms of his return. The editors of Novy Mir talked with him by phone and telegram and asked for permission to publish the two early novels, Cancer Ward and First Circle. Solzhenitsyn refused, insisting instead they they publish The Gulag Archipelago before any other of his books. Not only was Gulag his monument to the millions of victims of the Soviet regime, it was also the book, when it was published abroad, that hastened his arrest and his forced exile to the West. Solzhenitsyn’s demand was also a way of attacking in the quickest way possible the latest official version of the Soviet past. Unlike the Gorbachevian scheme of socialism-gone-errant, of blaming all sins on Stalin, Solzhenitsyn’s three-volume “literary investigation” argued that the forced labor camp system was no aberration, but began instead with Lenin.

  The editors agreed to Solzhenitsyn’s demand. Now they had to deal with something only slightly less intimidating: the Communist Party. At first, Novy Mir’s editors thought they could somehow ignore the Party and slip Solzhenitsyn into the pages of the magazine, as if through a hidden door.

  On the back cover of Novy Mir’s October 1988 issue, the editors printed a cryptic announcement, saying merely that Solzhenitsyn had given them permission to publish “some of his works” beginning in 1989. But the Central Committee’s ideological department, which certainly had its informers at the Izvestia plant where Novy Mir was printed, quickly suppressed the plan. In the middle of the night, the printers got a firm “stop work” order from an anonymous official in the ideological department of the Central Committee. “The printers were indignant,” said Vadim Borisov, the editor at Novy Mir who was working most closely with Solzhenitsyn. “They felt great respect for glasnost, democracy, and the name of Solzhenitsyn. They were furious and invited reporters from the newspapers and television to come to the print shop to see what had happened. But no one came.” The printers were forced to pulp more than a million covers and print new ones—without the Solzhenitsyn announcement. Only a few subscribers, mainly in Ukraine, got the journal as it was originally printed.

  Not long after, Vadim Medvedev, who had replaced Ligachev as the chief Party ideologist in a shift in the leadership, attacked Solzhenitsyn for his “disdain” of Lenin and the Soviet system. The Gulag Archipelago and Lenin in Zurich, he told reporters at a news conference, “undermine the foundations on which our present life rests.”

  That foundation, however, was crumbling fast. The momentum of glasnost, fueled now by the publications of Solzhenitsyn in Book Review, Worker’s Word, and other journals, as well as by rumors of the Novy Mir incident, could not be contained or ignored. Novy Mir was well positioned to press the issue. The editor in chief, Sergei Zalygin, was a contradictory figure, an elfin man in his seventies who had “played the game” in the Brezhnev years, constantly compromising principles to stay afloat. Like Len Karpinsky at Moscow News or Vitaly Korotich at Ogonyok, Zalygin had much to regret. But he saw glasnost “as my last chance,” he told me. He would try now to right a great wrong. Zalygin adopted a strategy of defiant persistence. For six months running, he kept including Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize lecture in the galleys for the next issue—and for six months, the censors kept removing it. Aleksandr Tvardovsky, a legendary figure during the thaw, had used the same strategy when he ran Novy Mir in the sixties. Zalygin also made his rounds, campaigning quietly for publication with various members of the Politburo, including Gorbachev himself. Zalygin knew there were sharp ideological divisions in the leadership—especially on questions of history and glasnost—and he was prepared to wait for his opportunity. He knew, most of all, that Gorbachev was in an extremely difficult position. Many members of his earliest constituency, the middle class and the intelligentsia, were growing impatient, disillusioned with reform. Any further resistance to publishing Solzhenitsyn could only damage his popularity further. But as an avowed Leninist, a “committed Communist” dependent on the support of the Party apparatus, Gorbachev also had to find a graceful way to change the policy and, at the same time, keep his distance from a writer who despised the system.

  On a June afternoon in 1989, Medvedev summoned Zalygin to his office at the Central Committee. The meeting, Novy Mir’s Vadim Borisov told me, was “extremely unpleasant,” and gave Zalygin the distinct impression that the delay in publishing Solzhenitsyn could be indefinite. The next day, the Politburo gathered for its usual Thursday meeting. To the surprise of some Politburo members, Gorbachev broached the “Solzhenitsyn problem.” He suggested that the Soviet Writers’ Union meet and decide the issue for themselves.

  The Novy Mir contingent did not know what to expect of the union, an organization famous for its cowardice. Many of the leaders who still ran the union headed the smear campaigns against Solzhenitsyn in the early 1970s which led to his exile. Zalygin and Borisov settled uneasily into their seats at the Central House of Writers.

  The first speaker was the union first secretary, Vladimir Karpov, a veteran toady of the regime. Karpov was one of those hack novelists who, in return for unstinting obedience, won huge printings for his books, a large apartment, and a dacha in the shade. Just a year before, Karpov had told reporters at a news conference that Solzhenitsyn would never be welcomed back in the Soviet Union if he did not renounce his views: “If someone wants to come back to take part in our reform process, then he is welcome. But if a person has lied through his teeth and slandered our country from abroad and wants to come back and do the same from here, then there is no place for him.” Surely, Karpov would do the Kremlin’s bidding, Zalygin thought. But what would that bidding be?

  “Comrades,” Karpov began, “we used to think one way about Aleksandr Isayevich, but now things have changed.…”

  Borisov felt his entire body lighten with happiness. The long wait was over. Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel lecture appeared in the July 1989 issue of Novy Mir along with an announcement that the first of several installments of The Gulag Archipelago would appear in August. The state-run publishing house, Sovetsky Pisatel, announced that it would issue a multivolume Collected Works. After long exile, Solzhenitsyn had returned.

  A few days after I got the first “Solzhenitsyn issue” of Novy Mir in the mail, I went with my friend Lev Timofeyev to see a theatrical version of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich at the Independent Studio. There were no ads, no posters around town. The Independent Studio group was a poor, obscure troupe working out of a dank basement just around the corner from one of the most ominous buildings in Moscow: 38 Petrovka, the headquarters of the Interior Ministry police.

  Backstage, I met with the lead actor, Yuri Kosikh. His head was shaved clean and he was dressed in his costume, the filthy padded jackets that prisoners wore in the camps throughout the Stalin era. Could it be that labor camp prisoners, like eccentric English colonels or French roués, were now “characters” on the Moscow stage?

  Kosikh was quick to say, however, that the play was not distant to him. In rehearsals, he heard the voice of his father ringing in his head. His father had spent ten years in the labor camps of Kolyma. “I’ve played Chekhov, Shakespeare, every kind of role,” Kosikh said. “But never has it come so smoothly. It’s as if I’d internalized the being of Ivan Denisovich through my father.”

  Like the novella, the play began with five-o’clock reveille and end
ed with Ivan Denisovich falling asleep “fully content.” And as in the novella, Kosikh’s Ivan spends a day—one of hundreds—filled with petty humiliations, brutalities, and small triumphs of the spirit. The set was dreary, barbed wire draped over heating ducts, dirt scattered in clumps on the concrete floor. The light flickered weakly, even at “midday,” like winter afternoons in Siberia.

  The production was sometimes overwrought, but, all the same, Lev was deeply moved. He idolized Solzhenitsyn. Lev spent more than two years in the labor camp at Perm in the Urals—more than six months of that time in an isolation cell. He was a Gorbachev-era prisoner who was released only during the “amnesty wave” following Sakharov’s return to Moscow from Gorky and the superpower summit in Reykjavik. No writer meant more to him than Solzhenitsyn. He had read Gulag in an underground edition, and just the memory of certain passages about the spiritual life of the prisoner helped sustain him throughout his own term. “Aleksandr Isayevich leveled the telling blow against the system,” he said. “The Gulag Archipelago is the criminal and spiritual indictment of a sick society.”

  Onstage, Ivan Denisovich was falling asleep. There was darkness for a while, then the dawn of the house lights at half power and a stunned, desultory applause. The people in the audience finally rose to their feet, everyone weary and stretching, stunned to be in a theater and thinking, suddenly, of ordinary things: the walk home and how to buy some milk and bread for breakfast. But the feeling stayed with Lev for hours. As we walked down the street, he said, “That smell. Even that smell of wet leather and wet wool and sweat is the smell of the camps. It takes me back.”

  By 1990, political prisoners became a new breed of politician. In Ukraine, nationalists looked to former “politicals” to lead them: Bogdan and Mikhail Horyn, Stepan Khamara, Vyacheslav Chernovil. I met the philologist Levon Ter-Petrossian in Yerevan a week after he was released from prison; two years later he was elected president of Armenia. Georgia adored the former political prisoner Merab Kostava, and then mourned him endlessly after he was killed in a car crash. A far lesser man, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, filled the gap. Gamsakhurdia was a paranoiac, an untrustworthy fool, but he was, after all, a comrade to Kostava. That was his selling point. He would be elected Georgian president and then chased out of Tbilisi in a coup d’etat. Sakharov’s protégé the biologist Sergei Kovalev, a prisoner in the Urals for many years, became a key leader in the Russian parliament. As a deputy, he suddenly found himself in a suit touring prison sites and instructing the commandants in the rudiments of decency and human rights.