Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  Upstairs, Bonner was frantic with grief. With her husband’s body still in the apartment, she had to go through the ordeal of planning the funeral with Gorbachev’s man, Yevgeny Primakov. Finally, an ancient and humpbacked ambulance pulled up in the slush near Primakov’s limousine. Three medics in dirty smocks went up to Sakharov’s place. They strapped the body to a stretcher and carried him down seven flights of stairs to the car. Then Bonner had to deal with the reporters out on the stairs. She stuck her head out the door and lost it: “You all worked hard to see that Andrei died sooner by calling us from morning till night, and never leaving us to our life and work. Be human beings! Leave us alone!”

  Bonner did have a terrifying temper, but she, too, had to be admired deeply. She was indispensable to Sakharov, his lion at the gate. She protected him, inspired him, and he loved her ferocity. In their human rights work, Sakharov and Bonner were a team. They suffered, physically and psychologically, as equals. The KGB harassed the Sakharovs every way they could, even mailing them “Christmas cards” with grotesque images of mutilated bodies and monkeys with electrodes stuck in their skulls. There were threats against their children and grandchildren. Tass, Izvestia, and Pravda spewed reams of slander. In Gorky, thugs broke into the apartment waving pistols. After threatening to turn the apartment “into an Afghanistan,” one of the men turned to Sakharov and said, “You won’t be here long. They’ll take you to a sanatorium where they have medicine that turns people into idiots.” A “historian” named Nikolai Yakovlev wrote a book insulting Bonner as a “sexual brigand … who foisted herself on the widower Sakharov.” In the most memorable moment in the history of Russian chivalry, Sakharov—good, gentle Andrei Dmitriyevich—confronted Yakovlev and slapped him square in the face.

  “A year ago, Yelena Georgiovna and I went to Paris together for a conference on human rights,” Lev Timofeyev told Esther at the wake. “Andrei Dmitriyevich was coming from the States and had met us at the airport. They hadn’t seen each other for a month and a half, and when they saw each other, their faces lit up like young newlyweds. Such clear young faces. They saw nothing except one another. All the journalists who were waiting there seemed out of place, and I felt like an interloper at a meeting of two lovers.”

  Primakov offered Bonner a general secretary’s funeral for Sakharov. He could lie in state at the Hall of Columns across from the Kremlin—the same place where the corpses of the various Bolshevik leaders had been put on display in their time. Bonner said no. She wanted something less official, and unique to Sakharov. She chose the Palace of Youth, an enormous hall on Komsomolsky Prospekt.

  The next morning it was so desolate and cold that it hurt to breathe. Esther and I picked up Flora and Misha Litvinov and some of their friends and walked along the ice to the Palace of Youth. We were an hour early for the wake and were stunned to see that a line of thousands of people had already formed. We found people in line who had flown from Leningrad, Armenia, and Siberia. There were Azeris and Crimean Tatars, teenagers and children, old men and women who suffered terribly in the cold. Some of them waited three or four hours, their faces red and chapped—but they waited.

  Inside, Sakharov was laid out on a coffin festooned in red and black crepe. Within moments after the doors had opened, mountains of flowers accumulated at his feet. Yelena Georgiovna sat off to the side with her children and other family from Russia and the United States. Yeltsin, Timofeyev, Sergei Kovalev, and many others stood near the coffin as honor guards. And for the next five hours the long flow of people streamed by at a slow, unceasing step.

  “Forgive us!” one woman cried out as she passed. “Forgive us, Andrei Dmitriyevich!”

  Yelena Georgiovna walked over to the coffin and bent over her husband, kissed his forehead, smoothed his cheek with the back of her knuckles. She stood a long time there, her elbow draped over the coffin and her face buried in her hands.

  If the day of mourning at the Palace of Youth had shown the general grief set off by Sakharov’s death, the next day made clear the political dimension of his loss.

  At nine-thirty on December 18, a string of black limousines pulled up to the front entrance of the Academy of Sciences building on Leninsky Prospekt. Gorbachev and a half-dozen other Politburo members got out of their cars and walked up the stairs past a banner of Lenin that read: “Under the Banner of Marxism-Leninism, the Leadership of the Communist Party, Forward Toward the Victory of Communism! Proletarians of the World, Unite!” It had gotten slightly warmer, and there was a mix of drizzle and fat snow-flakes that melted when they hit the ground. A few minutes later, the funeral train arrived, a police Mercedes leading a few decrepit yellow buses. As Sakharov’s coffin was unloaded from the back of one of the buses, Bonner spoke briefly with Gorbachev and the other members of the Politburo. She told Gorbachev that with the death of Sakharov he had lost his most loyal opponent. He asked if there was anything he could do for her. Yes, she said. Memorial had still not been registered as an official national organization. It will be done, Gorbachev said.

  A member of the honor guard lifted the lid of the coffin. Gorbachev took off his gray fur hat and stepped to the foot of the casket. The other members of the Politburo took off their hats and flanked their general secretary. They stood in silence for two or three minutes, all of them staring at Sakharov’s pale and regal face. Someone held a black umbrella over the coffin. Then, with two quick nods of the head, as if to say, “Okay, enough,” Gorbachev signaled that the moment was over. The group went inside the Academy of Sciences and signed a memorial book. The general secretary wrote “M. S. Gorbachev” in a bold script and the rest of the Politburo signed below in more modest hands.

  Before Gorbachev left, a reporter asked him a question about Sakharov’s Nobel Prize for Peace in 1975, an event that the Brezhnev regime had taken as a humiliating international endorsement of state treason.

  “It is clear now,” Gorbachev said, “that he deserved it.”

  Early in the afternoon, the funeral cortege slowly wended its way from the physics institute where Sakharov had once worked to the parking lot of the Luzhniki sports complex near the Moscow River. I was just a few yards behind the lead bus. The back door was open and Bonner sat on a bench next to the coffin. Yeltsin was walking just ahead of me. Even then it was clear that if anyone was going to take the lead of the political opposition, it was Yeltsin; and yet he knew that Sakharov and the people closest to Sakharov regarded him with apprehension. Yeltsin was not one of them. He was, after all, a former member of the Politburo. But while Yeltsin already had tremendous support as a populist, he wanted badly to widen his appeal, to learn from the radical democrats and to get their support. By walking just behind Sakharov’s casket he was not so much grandstanding as he was keeping himself as close as possible to everything he was not, but wanted to be.

  The march went on for hours. It was not until we reached Luzhniki that I could see how many people had come to say farewell to Sakharov. No fewer than fifty thousand people had packed into a vast parking lot. And there was something far more striking about the crowd than its mere size. It was the first time that I got any sense that there could ever be a unified democratic movement in the Soviet Union. Until now, the miners, the Baltic independence groups, the Moscow and Leningrad intelligentsia had all seemed spread out, loosely knit at best. But now I saw Baltic flags, a Russian tricolor, banners supporting the Rukh independence movement in Ukraine, miners from Vorkuta, students. There were placards with a huge “6” crossed out—meaning that Article 6 of the Constitution, which guaranteed the Party’s “leading role” in society, should be eliminated.

  Oginsky’s “Farewell to the Motherland” played through the loudspeakers. The speakers included former political prisoners—Kovalev and dissident priest Father Gleb Yakunin among them—and the politicians who would now have to begin filling in the enormous vacuum: Yeltsin, the Lithuanian independence leader Vytautas Landsbergis, the Leningrad law professor Anatoly Sobchak, Ilya Zaslavsky, Yuri A
fanasyev, Gavriil Popov. Sakharov’s casket was hoisted up in front of the flatbed truck where the speakers stood, and Bonner, wearing Sakharov’s gray fur hat, stood near the microphone smoking cigarettes. She stepped up to speak only once, asking everyone to make room so that the ceremony would be peaceful and safe. Only a non-Soviet would have missed the reference: in the days after Stalin’s death, the crowd outside the Hall of Columns was so dense and emotional that hundreds of people were crushed to death—a fitting tribute.

  Dmitri Likhachev, the scholar of Russian literature and the oldest of all the deputies in the Congress, was the first to speak: “Most respected Yelena Georgiovna, relatives, friends, colleagues, and students of Andrei Dmitriyevich! Respected comrades! We are gathered here to honor the memory of a very great man, a citizen not only of our country, but of the whole world. A man of the twenty-first century, a man of the future. This is why many did not understand him in this century.

  “He was a prophet, a prophet in the ancient sense of the word. That is, he was a man who summoned his contemporaries to moral renewal for the sake of the future. And like every prophet, he was not understood. He was driven from his own city.”

  Afanasyev said that in the future the union of democratic forces should be named for Sakharov. Father Gleb Yakunin compared Sakharov to a holy man; others mentioned Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Tolstoy. Landsbergis said that on Cathedral Square in Vilnius, church bells were ringing out in tribute to Sakharov. As they listened to the speeches, many people held candles and wept. As darkness gathered, the service broke up. The huge crowd shuffled to the metro stations and the bus stops. I have never heard so many people be so quiet.

  The burial was an hour later on the outskirts of Moscow at Vostryakovskoye, a cemetery cut out of a pine forest. The snow was falling once more, and everywhere was the smell of pine and snow. A military band played Chopin’s “Funeral March” and Schumann’s dirge “Traumerai.” Sakharov’s grave, fresh and deep, was dug out next to two straight pines and the grave of Bonner’s mother, Ruf. Bonner let a cigarette drop from her hands into the wet earth. She pulled back the thin white cloth that covered Sakharov’s face, kissed him one last time, covered him, and stepped away. But she could not bear it. She came back, kissed him once more, and lingered there. I was near Timofeyev, who stood at attention, tears flowing into his beard. Finally the music stopped. Two workmen closed the coffin and lowered it into the grave. Bonner threw a bit of dirt down onto the coffin. Others did the same, with dirt and pine branches still dusted with snow, and everywhere there was quiet except for the thud of the dirt and the branches on the coffin. The gravediggers filled in the hole and Bonner watched, smoking. Soon the mourners, carrying candles, covered the grave over with flowers, red carnations and yellow roses. Then they stepped back and lingered. There was nothing left to do. Once more the rain began to fall.

  I felt hollow that day and for days after. I have never felt that way about anyone’s death except the death of those whom I have loved. Many people I knew in Moscow felt the same, and even more strongly for having lived their lives under the regime. In March 1953, the bewitched people of the Soviet Union learned of Stalin’s death and asked themselves, “What now?” Now, the spell was finally gone, but the question was the same. “What now?” Sakharov was just better than the rest of us. His mind worked on an elevated plane of reason, morality, and patience. Valentin Turchin, one of Sakharov’s closest associates both in physics and the human rights movement, remembered one typical episode:

  “It was September 1973, soon after the infamous letter of forty academicians condemning Sakharov. I was sitting with the Sakharovs—in their kitchen, as usual—and discussing the letter. The Sakharovs had just returned from a Black Sea resort, and Yelena told me about a funny occurrence which took place a couple of days before they left. They were taking the sun at the beach when a short man ran up to Andrei Dmitriyevich, said how glad he was to meet him, shook his hand, and several times repeated how fortunate it was that such a person was among them.

  “ ‘Who was that?’ Yelena asked when the short man departed. Andrei Dmitriyevich answered that it was Academician so-and-so. Three days later, when the letter of forty was published, that academician was among the signers. Yelena, who is generally emotional, spoke with contempt and indignation, which were certainly well justified. I looked at Andrei Dmitriyevich: what was his reaction? It was very typical of him. He was not indignant about the episode. He was thinking about it.”

  The Soviet Union could ill afford to lose such a man.

  CHAPTER 20

  LOST ILLUSIONS

  Aleksandr Yakovlev thought he was a dead man. He lay on a swampy battlefield outside Leningrad, his body and legs riddled by Nazi machine-gun fire. It was dark and cold and he was terrified. He was a village boy, so sickly as a child that his mother waited two years before she registered his birth. Now he was eighteen and a lieutenant in the Baltic marines’ 6th Brigade and he was going to die. His only chance for survival was the tradition of the Soviet marines: no one was to be left on the battlefield, not the wounded, not even the dead. Tradition saved him. Five of Yakovlev’s buddies sprinted onto the field to get him. The first four were shot down and killed. The fifth scooped Yakovlev up in his arms and ran. They made it. Yakovlev came home to his village outside Yaroslavl on crutches. His mother was so horrified at her son’s condition that he felt as if he had failed her. There were three younger sisters to feed and the country was a ruin. What was he going to do with his life?

  A half century later, after he had become known as Gorbachev’s closest adviser and the intellectual architect of perestroika, Yakovlev told a group of students at Moscow State University how he, a wounded teenaged veteran of war, became a man of the Communist Party. He went to a pedagogical institute and dreamed of a career in teaching. But he had also become a Party member in 1944. With millions of Party activists dead or still in battle, the local bosses scrambled to train young Communists, to fill up the ranks. They urged Yakovlev into political work and out of academia. “Then, after a number of years, enrollment began for the Higher Party School,” Yakovlev told his audience. “I was invited for an interview to the regional Party committee. I didn’t know what they wanted of me. In those times, everything was done in an atmosphere of utmost secrecy. I was asked to sit for exams, which I passed to become a trainee of the Higher Party School. That was how I started.”

  For liberal students in Moscow in February 1990, Yakovlev was about the only figure in the Politburo who could be trusted—Gorbachev included. The Communist Party was, for them, a dead issue. No one took the old exams in Party history anymore; those who specialized in Party history did so with the dispassionate interest of anthropologists studying the lives of cannibals and fire-eaters. Downstairs, in the main lobby of the university, students pinned up the most notorious quotations of Lenin and Stalin; they started clubs in honor of the Beatles, Iron Maiden, banned Russian authors, and American baseball. But they were young and still wanted to know what it was like to have lived through a nightmare.

  Yakovlev told the students he was a typical member of his generation. He and his buddies had run into battle shouting, “For Stalin! For the Motherland!” They believed in the “shining future” promised by the Party. In Korolyovo, the tiny village where Yakovlev grew up, no one could even begin to understand the great tragedy the country was living through. When one of Yakovlev’s great-uncles was thrown off his land and deported in the twenties, no one understood that this was part of a far greater collectivization campaign in which millions would die. There were few newspapers around, and the ones that could be found were filled with lies. Many of the people in the region, including Yakovlev’s mother, were illiterate; his father had four years in a Russian Orthodox school, his mother no schooling at all. It was only through an accident of kindness and loyalty that Yakovlev’s father did not disappear into the meat grinder of the purges.

  “Our district military commissariat was headed by a man named
Novikov. As it turned out, he was the commander of my father’s platoon during the Civil War. He was an extraordinary person. I remember how he would ride through our village high on his horse, talking with all the kids and conscripts. He was the only one we knew from the district leadership. One day he came and knocked on the window with his whip handle. My father was not home, and Novikov told my mother, ‘Tell him that he should go to the conference, which—only be sure to get this right—will last three days at least. I’ll come later.’

  “Mama didn’t understand. When she went to tell my father, he questioned her several times—especially about that last phrase, ‘I’ll come later.’ My father packed some things in a bag and went to a neighboring district, to mother’s sister Raya—‘to the conference.’ He told mama where he could be found, just in case. Mama was a quiet woman, a peasant.

  “That night, there was a knock at the door and they asked where my father was. Mama said, ‘He went to the conference.’

  “ ‘What conference?’

  “ ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He didn’t say.’

  “They left. They came again the next night.… And after three days, Novikov showed up. That’s what the friendship of the front meant. Not everything was inhuman. Then Novikov told Mama it was time to tell her husband to come home. The ‘conference’ was over! Mama sent me off to get him.”

  As Yakovlev well understood years later, the local Party committee probably had a “plan” to fulfill: kill X number of people in Y number of days. When Nikolai Yakovlev could not be found, they just found someone else.