Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  According to the main human rights organizations in the Soviet Union and in the West, the last island of the gulag, the last outpost for political prisoners, was a camp in the Ural Mountains called Perm-35. Anatoly Shcharansky, Vladimir Bukovsky, Sergei Grigoryants, Timofeyev, and Kovalev had all spent time in Perm. Now the number of political prisoners had become so small that some of the Perm camps closed and were consolidated into just one, Perm-35.

  Perm was a classic Soviet city—that is, an urban mass indistinguishable from hundreds of others, with a Lenin Avenue and broad and pitted streets and apartment blocks so ugly and uniform that you could weep looking at them. For a long time, Perm was closed to foreign journalists. Like many cities in the Urals, it was a center for military production. But now Perm was open, and getting to the camp turned out to be no problem at all. Accompanied by a local journalist I had gotten to know in Moscow, I paid a call on the chief of police. The Interior Ministry in the region was thoroughly bored by then with occasional visits by journalists or members of Congress. Colonel Andrei Votinov, the man in charge, was just a harmless wise guy. He wanted me to tell him why “in God’s name” I wanted to drive for hours to see “a rathole.” And after I explained my worthy reasons, I asked what conditions were like at Perm-35.

  “You’ll see,” he said. “It’s just like Switzerland.”

  I was told to return to my hotel and wait.

  At eight the next morning, Major Nikolai Dronin, an unsmiling officer of the law, rapped on my door.

  “So now we go to prison,” he said.

  It was a four-hour drive to Perm-35 from the city, but I was happy for the boredom. In Moscow, and even on trips to other republican capitals, it was easy to lose the sense of the vastness of the country. Out here it was easier to understand how so many hundreds of islands in the gulag archipelago could go unseen, tucked away in forests and mining villages and on mountaintops. All the banalities of the size of the Soviet Union—the eleven time zones, the number of times you could fit France into Kazakhstan, etc.—took on real meaning just by driving hour after hour. In the Urals, as in so many other places, Russia seemed like an unending frontier, wild and huge with only occasional settlements, hastily built towns, unlivable places where tens of millions of people lived, not villages so much as population clusters, work forces built around workplaces: lumber works, chemical plants, coal mines. All along the road, we saw peasant men riding wooden carts heaped with coal, humpbacked women carting their heavy sacks down the road. We could have driven for a week or more to the east and seen little else.

  Finally there was a turnoff, primitive and unmarked. “The road to Perm-35,” the major said.

  My host would be Lieutenant Colonel Nikolai Osin, who had been running the camp since it went up in 1972. Shcharansky, Bukovsky, Marchenko, Stus, Orlov, Timofeyev: they all knew Osin. Shcharansky, especially, remembered his eyes, the dull gleam in the ruddy meat of his face. “Osin was an enormous, flabby man,” Shcharansky wrote, “with small eyes and puffy eyelids, who seemed to have long ago lost interest in everything but food.… But he was a master of intrigue who had successfully overtaken many of his colleagues on the road to advancement.… I could see that he enjoyed his power over the prisoners and liked to see them suffer. But he never forgot that the zeks—the prisoners—were, above all, a means for advancing his career, and he knew how to back off in a crisis.”

  Once, when Shcharansky was refused permission to celebrate Hanukkah, he went on a hunger strike. Osin didn’t want a scandal and cut a quick deal: if Shcharansky would end the hunger strike, he could light his Hanukkah candles. Shcharansky agreed, but demanded that while he said the appropriate prayers, Osin would stand by with his head covered and, at the end, say “Amen.”

  “Blessed are You, oh Lord, for allowing me to light these candles,” Shcharansky began in Hebrew. “May you allow me to light the Hanukkah candles many times in your city, Jerusalem, with my wife, Avital, and my family and friends.”

  Inspired by the sight of Osin, Shcharansky added, “And may the day come when all our enemies, who today are planning our destruction, will stand before us and hear our prayers and say, ‘Amen.’ ”

  “Amen,” Osin repeated.

  Shcharansky quickly spread the word in Perm-35 of Osin’s “conversion.” This meant a freezing stint in the isolation cell, but Shcharansky could not resist. Today, Shcharansky lives in freedom in Israel. After his release, his mother sorted through photographs of her son in Jerusalem. She wanted to send a little memento to Lieutenant Colonel Nikolai Makarovich Osin.

  Perm-35 was a tiny place, five hundred yards square, a few barracks, guard towers and razor wire everywhere. Osin was there to greet us, and he was much as Shcharansky had described him, enormously fat with dull, pitiless eyes. We went up a flight of stairs, past a few Party propaganda posters—“Socialism Is Order!”—to his office. Osin had a broad desk and a well-padded armchair, and he affected the pose of a contented chief executive officer. He was humbled only by the size of his work force. Just sixteen men remained in his charge. The Interior Ministry was planning to get rid of the “politicals” and bring in a “full population” of common criminals: rapists, murderers, thieves.

  “So it’s time to retire,” the commandant said, leaning back as if waiting for the gold watch. “I’ll be on a pension by the end of the year.”

  Osin tried, but failed, to conceal his disdain for the latest turn of Soviet history, the fitful lurch toward a civil society that was making him a relic of the totalitarian past. For years, he had inflicted punishment on dissident poets, priests, and mathematicians. He was, to use the Stalinist accolade, an exemplary “cog in the wheel.” He did what he was told, “and all the prisoners were the same to me.” Equal under lawlessness.

  “You know, they talk about political prisoners, but there were never any political prisoners here,” Osin said. “There were laws, and they were convicted on those laws, and that was it. They betrayed their Motherland. Later, the laws changed, but that’s something else.” There was no hint of repentance, or even self-doubt. “What do I have to regret?” he said. “People were sent here under the law, and I did what I was told to do. This was the work I chose, and I did it. This is what was required of me. I think the prisoners here have better living conditions than some people who are free. They have meat, after all.” At this, Osin grabbed his belly and shook with laughter. He was a card.

  Osin was not completely out of work, of course. The courts were still capable of indulging the political intrigues of local and regional Communist Party bosses, and, of all the branches of government, the judicial system has probably been touched least by reform. But most of the remaining cases were not, in the jargon of monitoring groups, “pure” political cases. In fact, Gorbachev and the administration at Perm-35 claimed that there were no political prisoners in the country at all. “Most of the remaining cases are mixed—people who tried to flee the country illegally, people with ambiguous contacts with foreign groups,” said Sergei Kovalev, a former political prisoner who eventually became the chairman of the human rights committee in the Russian parliament. “What I’m mainly working on is the length of their terms. People with ten, fifteen years in a camp for trying to row a raft to Turkey is absurd.”

  Like a good host at a housewarming party, Osin rose from behind his desk and said, “So! Let’s give you the tour!”

  Osin’s tour, with an emphasis on the quality of the paint job and the cleanliness of the floors and toilet, was significant insofar as we saw no prisoners.

  “They’re off at work,” Osin said.

  When will they be back? I asked.

  “Let’s have lunch,” Osin said.

  And so we did, a meal beyond the imagination of the prisoners—cabbage soup, brown bread, salad, chicken, mashed potatoes, fruit juice. Then, like hurried tourists, we were off for more touring. We saw the infirmary. We saw the barracks where the men slept. But suddenly, as Osin was demonstrating the firmness of the camp b
eds, a pasty, middle-aged man with a shaved head and wearing prisoner coveralls burst through a door and down the hall, screaming.

  “I must talk with you! They are beating me!”

  “Yasin,” Osin said glumly, his eyes still on the mattress. The commandant pursed his lips. His neck turned crimson.

  “I must talk to you!” Yasin said. The guards tried to wrestle him back down the hall and into a room where they had been keeping the prisoners. I asked Osin if it would be all right to talk to the man, fully identified later as Valery Yasin. The commandant rolled his eyes and made a signal with his hand to suggest that Yasin was mentally unbalanced and not worth listening to. Still, Osin said, “Bring him back in.”

  The guards led Yasin back into the room. He was out of breath and his skin was pale and damp. He had been in and out of prisons, mental hospitals, and camps like Perm-35 for more than fifteen years. He had been accused of fleeing the country illegally, consorting with foreign intelligence. His term was set to run until the year 2003. Yasin’s case, according to an official at Helsinki Watch, was murky—“the political and the criminal aspects are all tangled, confusing.” There was, however, no doubting Yasin’s fury. His words tumbled out between gasps for breath.

  “For seven years I refused to go out for walks or to go out to the street.

  This was my protest. I also demanded to stay alone in a one-man cell. I was in despair, sure I would be killed. They beat me. They demanded evidence that the KGB needed. They wanted me to cooperate with them and said that otherwise I’d be left to die here.

  “I was desperate and slashed my arm. I was beaten and put in an isolation cell. This was in February. I lost one and a half liters of blood. I was half dead, and in this state I was dragged into the isolation cell, which was extremely cold, and they threw me in there naked. This was the order of Lieutenant Colonel Osin.”

  Osin, sitting nearby, rolled his eyes. He said nothing. A guard near the door spoke: “Let him say why he cut his veins!”

  “I have a written document stating why I cut my veins,” Yasin said. “They did barbaric things. On December 10, Human Rights Day, they forcibly shaved off my hair. I was beaten, my hands were twisted, my arms were twisted. This is how they celebrate Human Rights Day here.”

  The guard said, “You can only grow hair three months prior to release. How long until your release?”

  “My hair was already short,” Yasin said.

  “If someone passes a new law, then maybe we won’t shave your hair,” the guard said. “Until then, if you don’t get it cut voluntarily, then we’ll do it by force.”

  Osin was silent.

  Yasin was sweating. “So, this is how they abide by the law,” he said. “They put handcuffs on people and beat people, under the pretext that the guy will resist. People are forced to submit to this humiliating procedure. All over the world, when your head is shaved bald, it is considered a humiliation.”

  With an imperial wave of the hand, Osin signaled the guard to lead Yasin out of the room. I asked to talk to a few more of the prisoners. Osin rolled his eyes, but agreed. The first man I asked to see was Yuri Pavlov, who had been sentenced to seven years on charges of espionage for the United States. The man I met did not seem capable of dialing the United States on the telephone. He was lethargic and distant and admitted to some sort of “brain injury.” I asked him about the treatment of prisoners in Perm, and he said mechanically, “There are changes for the better. I remember how it was before, and I can compare with the present. When I was in Perm-36 with Timofeyev it was much worse. Now my complaints are mostly medical.” Pavlov asked to be remembered to Timofeyev and walked slowly out the door.

  Then the guard brought in the last prisoner on my list, Vitaly Goldovitch, a physicist who had worked in defense research and had been charged with treason and other crimes when he tried to row a rubber raft across the Black Sea to Turkey. Goldovitch was nervous, his hands fluttering at his sides. Months passed with no visitors, no company except the guards and his fellow prisoners. No one had told him a reporter was coming, and now the words, half-pronounced, flew out of him. To try to calm him, I repeated what Pavlov had told me, that the treatment had gotten better lately. But Goldovitch said that was nonsense, that he was still manhandled and berated.

  All the same, he said, “I’m trying to see the human being under the guards’ uniforms. I can see that some of them may be good people, but they are crushed psychologically. There are almost no free people in the Soviet Union.” Osin listened to all this with bored amusement. Once more he twirled his index finger around his ear, signaling that the charge was mere fantasy, craziness. Who would believe such a thing could happen in Perm-35?

  As we left Goldovitch, I asked Osin to see the “isolators,” the punishment cells. Nearly everyone in Perm-35, nearly every political prisoner in the history of the Soviet Union for that matter, had spent time in such places.

  “Is this really necessary?” Osin asked.

  Still, Osin walked outside in a huff, opened a huge gate, and pointed to a small field covered with snow and mud. There were rusted soccer goals at either end of the field. “Recreational facilities,” he said angrily. “Here we let them play soccer, volleyball, whatever. I don’t suppose they have that in prisons where you live, do they?”

  Osin opened the door to a shed with a narrow hall and a series of tiny cells—the punishment cells. For now—perhaps for the benefit of the day’s visitor—they were empty. Each one had a wooden plank for a bed. “See?” Osin said. “Not so terrible.” In our talk, Goldovitch had said he spent more than a year in a punishment cell after a rebellion in Perm-35 in 1989. Some prisoners had refused to work, attend roll calls, or wear their names on their shirts. “We refused to do everything that was required as if we were soldiers of the army,” he said. “We wanted to make this revolt in compliance with the law, in the framework of the law. Nine people ended up in the isolation cells after that.

  “It is very hard but you get used to it. The cell is three meters long, one meter wide, two meters high. The cell is like your clothes. You are very cold, but in three days your body heat keeps you warmer. You walk around all day, don’t sleep, look for some trifles, like filling the cracks with paper, to avoid going crazy. Or you wash your handkerchief over and over again. You think a lot and it helps.”

  Osin slammed shut the door to the cell and led me to our car. He said good-bye and did not smile.

  During the ride back to the city, Major Dronin got to talking about politics, about the “lawlessness” in the country these days.

  “There will be a dictatorship soon,” he said with a certain relish in his voice. “It won’t be the Communist Party organs, it will be the real organs—the KGB. They will try to develop the economy, but there will be a strict discipline.”

  As in Stalin’s day? I asked.

  “No, that was too harsh,” he said. “But maybe as it was under Brezhnev or Andropov.”

  Dronin stared out the car window as the camp disappeared into the milky fog behind us. His eyes were open, but he seemed to be dreaming.

  The decay of the old regime was evident in the old prison camp city of Magadan, where a statue of Lenin stood before a Communist Party headquarters building abandoned for lack of construction funds.

  (Edik Gladkov)

  Mikhail Gorbachev, the catalyst for the collapse of an empire and an ideology, began life as an actor in high school plays like Masquerade and The Snow Girl and, as a provincial, came to Moscow for an education. He played alongside his first girlfriend, Yulia Karagodina.

  (Courtesy of Yulia Karagodina)

  The most important element of glasnost was the ability to unearth the horrors of the regime. For the first time, people saw abandoned prison camps and, like this woman in Lithuania, the remains of relatives slaughtered by the secret police and buried in mass graves.

  (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) (Reuters/Bettmann)

  Pavel Litvinov, seen here with his wife and child in Siberian exil
e, was the grandson of Stalin’s foreign commissar. In 1968 he helped organize a stunning protest against the Brezhnev regime.

  (Courtesy Flora Litvinov)

  In Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, the popular fronts began their independence movements with protests against the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact that led to the Soviet annexation.

  (David Remnick)

  Anna Larina, the widow of the Bolshevik revolutionary Nikolai Bukharin, who was killed in Stalin’s purge. For Gorbachev, Bukharin represented an anti-Stalinist alternative in Soviet history and he sanctioned his rehabilitation after fifty years.

  (David Remnick)

  The poverty of everyday life in the Soviet Union wore on the faces of everyone, including these two Siberians.

  (Aleksandr Kuznetsov)

  Three who made a revolution: Within the Communist Party hierarchy, adviser Aleksandr Yakovlev, Gorbachev, and foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze were the chief architects of reform and fought an unending battle with more reactionary elements in the Party, the KGB, and the military.

  (Reuters/Bettmann)