After he returned from forced exile in the city of Gorki, Andrei Sakharov was the spiritual leader of the democratic forces in Russia. Tens of thousands of people lined up to wish him farewell after his death in December 1989.
The author with archrivals Yegor Ligachev (top) and Boris Yeltsin. Ligachev bemoaned the “radicalization” of perestroika while Yeltsin left the Communist Party to lead the radicals and, eventually, Russia itself.
Journalist Len Karpinsky was an exemplar of the Gorbachev generation of officials and intellectuals who had lived lives of compromise and small gestures of protest until their moment arrived. Karpinsky, the “golden boy” of the Party as a young man, was a loyal Gorbachev supporter until the army massacre in Vilnius in January 1991.
In Siberia, faces of rebellion and defeat.
(Aleksandr Kuznetsov)
In a time of revolution, despair took different forms. Nina Andreyeva, pictured here with her husband, wrote a neo-Stalinist manifesto that became a tool of the Communist Party’s right wing in March 1988.
(David Remnick)
In Moscow and in many other cities, people fell for the bread-and-circuses of faith healing, in person and via television, Here a woman holds the passport of her sick son and a bottle of water. The healer promises to “charge” the water and the photograph with “healing energy.”
(David Remnick)
The coal miners’ strikes in 1989 were the first signs of a “revolution from below.”
(Reuters/Bettmann)
Anatoly Shcheglov, a miner in Kemerovo, Siberia, said he was through with a lifetime of unquestioning “slavery” and led his brigade out of the pits.
(David Remnick)
Father Aleksandr Men, a defiantly independent Russian Orthodox priest in a village outside Moscow, was murdered by someone wielding an ax. Many Muscovites suspected the KGB or the right-wing Pamyat organization. Though there was never an arrest, this shadowy, Dostoyevskian incident was seen as a sign of conspiracy and a reactionary crackdown.
In the battle for Baltic independence, Estonia was the brains, Latvia the organizer, and Lithuania the moral leader. The Balts also sent emissaries to Georgia, Armenia, Central Asia, and other regions to help organize anti-Kremlin revolts. Here a woman in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, joins in an anti-Moscow demonstration.
(Reuters/Bettmann)
Even on the first day of the August coup, there were signs that it would not succeed. Here a woman gives a young soldier some hard-boiled eggs for lunch as he stands guard outside the Russian parliament building where Boris Yeltsin was leading the resistance.
(Reuters/Bettmann)
After the collapse of the coup, the streets of Moscow were a scene of celebration and the old Russian tricolor replaced the red Soviet flag forever.
(Reuters/Bettmann)
Lenin’s remains are still in the mausoleum on Red Square, but, despite all of Russia’s lingering crises, there is little chance of his resurrection.
(Reuters/Bettmann)
After the coup, a couple of workers play dominoes at a foundry that used to make busts of Lenin. The factory now operates for the tourist industry.
(Reuters/Bettmann)
PART III
REVOLUTIONARY DAYS
CHAPTER 19
“TOMORROW THERE WILL BE A BATTLE”
The facts of history evolve into the mythologies of history, but I had never realized just how quickly. Everything I was watching in Moscow, Vilnius, Siberia, and beyond instantly transcended “the facts”—the meetings, the demonstrations, the newspaper accounts, the transcripts and videotape. No part of the narrative, no conflict or uprising, was without its mythic dimension: the revenge drama of Gorbachev-and-Yeltsin, the David-and-Goliath drama of Lithuania-and-the Kremlin, the ironic drama of the coal miner proletariat. Most mythic of all was the presence of a saint among the foolish and the vain, among the insulted and injured. Sakharov was the founder of fire (the hydrogen bomb) who renounced his gift; who dedicated himself to the rescue of the Land of Nod when rescue seemed quixotic; who returned from exile to reveal his wisdom and prod the czar.
But there was the man, too, and, by the end of 1989, Sakharov looked as though he had wrung the last ounce of blood and energy from his body. He was sixty-eight and his face was delicate as parchment. He spoke in a slurred mumble. He had trouble walking up more than seven or eight stairs before gasping for breath; he was stooped, listing a little to the right. And yet the demands on his time and energy only increased. There were more visitors now to the apartment on Chkalova Street than there had been in the seventies when Sakharov’s kitchen table was the crossroads of the human rights movement. Now no one had reason to be afraid to come, and so they all did, reporters, filmmakers, friends, foreigners on the make, acolytes, deputies, scholars from abroad.
In bringing home Sakharov from Gorky, an act that met with much grumbling in the Party nomenklatura, Gorbachev felt himself to be the kind and benevolent czar. He was proud. But Sakharov refused to indulge Gorbachev’s vanity. Even in that first telephone conversation from Gorky, he quickly reminded Gorbachev of the death of one political prisoner, his dear friend Anatoly Marchenko, and then pressed for the release of a long list of others. Sakharov did what saints do; he lightly complimented the czar when he did right, but never let him relax. Sakharov’s support was conditional; his decisions were based not on intra-Party realities—though he understood them well—but on a set of moral standards that could be etched on two small tablets of stone.
Sakharov respected Gorbachev as a brave politician, but he was not in awe of him. During the first session of the Congress, Gorbachev had given Sakharov the floor immediately and often, but when Sakharov tried to press Gorbachev into endorsing a “decree on power” that would end the Communist Party’s guaranteed ascendancy, Gorbachev’s response was haughty disdain. Saints annoy, and Sakharov annoyed Gorbachev profoundly. Even the transcript, devoid of the glares, the peremptory, bullying tone of Gorbachev’s voice, showed that much:
GORBACHEV: Anyway, finish up, Andrei Dmitriyevich. You’ve used up two time allotments already.
SAKHAROV: I’m finishing. I am leaving out arguments. I have left out a great deal.
GORBACHEV: That’s it. Your time, two time allotments, has run out. I beg your pardon. That is all.
SAKHAROV: [Inaudible]
GORBACHEV: That’s all, Comrade Sakharov. Do you respect the Congress?
SAKHAROV: Yes, but I respect the country and the people even more. My mandate extends beyond the bounds of this Congress.
GORBACHEV: Good. That’s all!
SAKHAROV: [Inaudible]
GORBACHEV: I ask you to finish. I ask you to conclude. That’s all! Take away your speech, please! [Applause in the hall] I ask you to sit down. Turn on the other microphone.
There was part of Gorbachev that could not help but respect Sakharov, even envy him; but it rankled him, too, that the man he had deigned to release was, somehow, untouchable, uncontrollable. Sakharov seemed, somehow, to float above politics even as he was engaged in the most critical debates. When an Afghan vet attacked him and Sakharov was booed and whistled at by the hard-line majority, some viewers called in worried that Andrei Dmitriyevich would suffer a heart attack. But he was serene, absolutely serene. Perhaps it was that quality that helped drive Gorbachev to distraction. When the weekly tabloid Argumenti i Fakti published a poll showing that Sakharov was, by far, the most popular politician in the country, Gorbachev was incensed. He even threatened to fire the editor.
It was very simple: Sakharov represented the hard and inescapable truth. One evening during that first Congress session, Sakharov requested a private audience with Gorbachev. In his memoirs, Sakharov remembers waiting for the meeting:
“I could see the enormous hall of the Palace of Congresses, semidark and empty. There were guards at the distant doors. Finally, around a half hour later, Gorbachev came out with [his deputy, Anatoly] Lukyanov. Lukyanov had not been part of my plans, but the
re was nothing that could be done about it. Gorbachev looked tired, as did I. We moved three chairs to the corner of the stage at the table of the Presidium. Gorbachev was very serious throughout the conversation. His usual smile for me—half kindly, half condescending—never appeared on his face.
“I said, ‘Mikhail Sergeyevich! It is not for me to tell you how serious things are in the country, how dissatisfied people are and how everyone expects things to get worse. There is a crisis of trust in the country toward the leadership and the Party. Your personal authority and popularity are down to zero. People cannot wait any longer with nothing but promises. A middle course in situations like these is almost impossible. The country and you are at a crossroads—either increase the process of change maximally or try to retain the administrative-command system with all its qualities. In the first case you must use the support of the ‘left,’ you can be sure there will be many brave and energetic people you can count on. In the second case, you know for yourself whose support you will have, but you will never be forgiven the attempt at perestroika.”
In other words, side with the radicals, who you know are right; the Party apparatchiks, the military-industrial complex, are enemies no matter what you do. They will betray you no matter how long you coddle them. Do not delude yourself. But Sakharov could not break through to Gorbachev.
Just after the strikes broke out in Siberia, Sakharov, Yeltsin, Yuri Afanasyev, and the economist Gavriil Popov put together a radical opposition faction in the legislature, the Inter-Regional Group. That development only increased the tensions between Gorbachev and Sakharov at the next session of the Congress in December 1989. To his credit, once more Gorbachev made a point of calling on Sakharov to speak, but when the speech was too radical, he dismissed him summarily. “That’s all!” Gorbachev barked as Sakharov tried to present him with tens of thousands of telegrams sent him in support of eliminating the Party’s monopoly on power. At home, Sakharov despaired so of Gorbachev’s “half-measures” that he wrote out in a thick spiral notebook his own proposed constitution envisioning a Eurasian commonwealth in which participation was voluntary and the Communist Party was one among many. Just as his essays in 1968 anticipated the ideas of perestroika, his constitution envisioned what would one day seem like sense itself. (“If we had only listened more carefully to Andrei Dmitriyevich, we might have learned something,” Gorbachev would say three years later.)
Late in the afternoon of December 14, the Inter-Regional Group held an open caucus at the Kremlin. Sakharov looked worn out, and he dozed off during some of the other speeches. Yeltsin would say later that Sakharov was “obviously suffering,” but no one said a word at the time and the session dragged on. Sakharov delivered a typically understated speech. He said he despaired of the current policy of half-measures and an opposition force was the only way to accelerate the reform process. Gorbachev’s government, he said, was “leading the country into catastrophe and dragging out the process of perestroika over many years. During this period it will leave the country in a state of collapse, intensive collapse.… The only way, the only possibility of an evolutionary path, is to radicalize perestroika.” Once more he pressed Gorbachev to repeal Article 6 of the Constitution, which gave the Communist Party a guaranteed monopoly on power. Instead of heading home when the session was over, Sakharov agreed to meet with some Kazakh journalists at a hotel near the Kremlin for a long interview.
Back at his apartment, Sakharov told his wife, Yelena Bonner, that he was going downstairs to his study. He wanted to take a nap and then get up to write another speech. He asked Bonner to come wake him at nine. He had a lot of work to do before morning. “Tomorrow,” he said, “there will be a battle.”
When Bonner went downstairs to wake her husband, she found him in the hallway on the floor, dead. “The totalitarian system probably killed him,” Vitaly Korotich said later. “I’m only glad that before he died Sakharov dealt the system a mortal blow. If God sent Jesus to pay for the sins of humankind, then a Marxist God somewhere sent Andrei Sakharov to pay for the sins of our system.”
By nine in the morning of the 15th, as the deputies milled around in the vast foyer of the Palace of Congresses, everyone knew, was finding out, or was about to know. The men and women closest to Sakharov looked stricken. They stood alone or with friends, saying nothing, smoking and staring through the windows that looked out on the churches and spires of the Kremlin. Yuri Karyakin, the Dostoevsky scholar who had helped found the Moscow Tribune study group with Sakharov, told me the country had lost its “perfect moral compass.” Yeltsin wandered the hall, loose-limbed and aimless, until a few of us asked him about Sakharov. Yeltsin seemed relieved to have a task, to deal with the cameras and the notebooks. “We must come to the end of the path that Sakharov began. Our duty is to Sakharov’s name, to the persecution he suffered,” he said, sounding very much like a man talking to himself.
Gorbachev, in his constant need to appeal to the majority of deputies in the room, played politics. It would take him years to admit fully to Sakharov’s influence, and now he chose not even to announce the news himself or comment from the rostrum. He expressed his regrets to the liberal weekly Moscow News, but would not do the same in front of this audience. He lost the moment. Instead, one of the thickest men in the Politburo, Vitaly Vorotnikov, was in the chairman’s seat and his gavel came down at ten o’clock. Vorotnikov stood and droned that “one of the country’s greatest scientists and a prominent public figure,” Andrei Dmitriyevich Sakharov, was dead. “His contribution to the defense capability of the state was great and unique,” he allowed. But when it came to politics, Vorotnikov was all euphemism: “The objective analysis of various aspects of his activities is the province of history.” No mention of the dissident movement or the new opposition, nothing of his moral leadership or example.
Then we all rose for a minute of silence.
From there, Gorbachev just let Vorotnikov go on with business. Members of Sakharov’s circle found it astonishing that the session was not called off for the day or that the day of the funeral was not declared a day of national mourning. Ilya Zaslavsky, the thirty-year-old engineer crippled by a childhood blood disease, hobbled on his crutches to the podium. He represented the October Region of Moscow. Before the session, Zaslavsky had approached Gorbachev and asked that he declare a day of mourning in honor of Sakharov. Gorbachev refused, telling him it was “not the tradition.” And so now Gorbachev knew very well what Zaslavsky wanted to say, and before the young deputy could open his mouth, Gorbachev said firmly, “Sit down!” But Zaslavsky would not move. Again, Gorbachev told him to sit. And again Zaslavsky stood his ground and waited only for the deputies to stop their murmuring and hear him out. From the side of the stage came a flunky who tried deftly to “help” Zaslavsky down the steps. Zaslavsky cast him a withering look, the look of a boxer staring across the ring at a presumptuous opponent. The flunky slunk away. And so now Gorbachev had the choice of either forcing a young cripple to his chair for the crime of wanting to speak out for a fallen saint, or to give in. It was an amazing standoff, and even from my gallery seat, I could see (with a pair of binoculars) the fury in Gorbachev’s eyes. But he gave in. Zaslavsky demanded a day of mourning, and the chairman said the suggestion would be taken under advisement. It never was.
Later, Zaslavsky told me about the encounter. “I considered it my duty not to sit down,” he said. “Sometimes a person has to say his piece. Sakharov was the conscience of our country. I have admired him since childhood and I felt this was my duty to him. At the beginning of the session I approached Gorbachev and asked him to call for national mourning, but he said he could probably not do that because it would defy tradition. We have a procedure, it seems, for this: a general secretary gets three days of mourning, a Politburo member one, and none for an academician. Gorbachev said that according to precedent, there should be no such mourning. But all the other countries will be in mourning. What about us?”
Meanwhile, the hard-line
rs in the Congress could not restrain their scorn for Sakharov. They, too, played their part in the mythic narrative, the unbelievers, the heathen raging against the saint. They had jeered him when he was at the rostrum and now they disdained him in death. Tatyana Zaslavskaya, a sociologist who had given Gorbachev invaluable advice on public opinion before he came to power, told me she was filled with shame and disgust hearing the “mocking, filthy remarks made by the apparat” about Sakharov. When it was finally announced that the session would be suspended for a few hours on the day of the funeral, the conservatives hissed. There was hypocrisy everywhere. Tass, which had slandered Sakharov in his lifetime as a “foreign agent” and “moneygrubber,” was now spitting out shameless tributes over the wires. And by the way, came one announcement, exclusive videotape of Sakharov’s last days is available to foreign television stations—for $1,500, hard currency only. There were other squalid moments, too. Yevgeny Yevtushenko scurried around the Congress buffet, handing out to correspondents (in Russian and English) a copy of the poem that he had written, instantly, in honor of Sakharov. “Maybe you will print it on your editorial page?” he said.
The people of Moscow were fast turning 48 Chkalova Street into a shrine. They came alone and in groups and heaped carnations at the doorstep. Someone tacked a photograph of Sakharov to the wall, and, as if this were not icon enough, others put lighted candles and flowers around it. One of the first mourners at the building put out a thick notebook for the people to write out messages of farewell. “We are orphans,” one entry said. “Without you, there is no one to defend us and our children.” “Shame on the murderers,” said another. “Forgive us for all the misfortune that we caused you. Forgive us for the fact that now only good things will be said of you by those who did not do so while you were alive. Words will not help, and we did not safeguard your life. But I believe we will safeguard your memory. Forgive us.”
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