Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  “Models are out. Dogma is out,” Shostokovsky had told me. “Now we can only speak about goals.” Precisely. It was pretty clear what the goals were here. The climax of the film came when Douglas, doing his best Ivan Boesky imitation, delivered the killer line: “Zhdanost—eto khorosho!” (“Greed is good!”) The Communists went wild. There were whoops of approval. Unironic whoops.

  As we were all leaving Lenin Hall, the student next to me, Muen Tan Kong, an exchange scholar from Vietnam, said, “All I can tell you at this point is that Communism is the contradiction of capitalism—I think,” he said. “And the Party is the vanguard. We’re studying that now. It’s all very confusing. But the movie was good, wasn’t it?”

  Local elections were scheduled for early March 1990, and they held out the promise of a new vanguard of mayors and ward heelers. Such a sudden test of a multiparty system still in swaddling clothes seemed unfair. The Communists had the resources, the money, and, when all else failed, the KGB to keep them afloat. Most of the new parties consisted of a few dozen people in a rented auditorium making terrifically dull speeches. Sometimes there were sandwiches.

  But the democrats were confident of victory. In those first weeks after the collapse of the one-party system, one young politician, Moscow’s Ilya Zaslavsky, made a startling campaign promise. He told the voters of the October Region that if he was elected to the local council and made its chairman, he would do nothing less than reverse seven decades of economic disaster. “We will build capitalism in one district,” he declared. The reference was clear. Zaslavsky would counter Stalin’s greatest ambition to build “socialism in one country.”

  It was quite a campaign promise. All anyone could do was wish him the best of luck. The same Communist Party apparatchiks I had visited not long after moving in two years before were still running the October Region with singular incompetence. Like everyone else in the neighborhood, I was appalled at the decay: the heaps of uncollected garbage, the empty shops and decrepit buildings, the abandoned construction sites. The district looked like a slum. In this way it looked like almost everywhere else in the country. Now Zaslavsky was proposing as a remedy the very sort of free enterprise that Lenin had long ago declared “parasitism … a thing of the past.”

  The leaders of the democratic opposition—Zaslavsky included—had all but given up on the national parliament as anything more than a televised debating forum. They knew well that the majority of deputies were at best obedient to Gorbachev and at worst potential followers of a harder line. After that initial burst of drama and glasnost during the first session, the radicals despaired that the Congress did not have the means to push the program of economic or political changes faster or further. And so now the leading reformers of Russia had shifted their focus from national to local politics. Democratic Russia—an alliance of everyone from Memorial to the latest social democratic party—hoped to fill the city halls and regional soviets, or councils, with their people. Popular-front groups in the Baltics, Central Asia, and the Transcaucasus hoped to do the same. Just as Yeltsin wanted to win a seat in the Russian parliament and turn that institution into a power base, Zaslavsky wanted to do the same “at the sidewalk level.”

  As a Democratic Russia organizer, Zaslavsky advised candidates not only for the October Region, but for the entire city. In a country that had little experience of elections and none at all of the gimmickry of the West, Zaslavsky hired pollsters, ran seminars on campaign techniques, and even found psychologists to help draw up effective campaign literature. He called on well-known writers, who used their own connections to get leaflets printed when the main Party printing plants refused.

  Disabled, a little snide and condescending, Zaslavsky was not a natural politician. His teachers, his bosses at the textile plant where he worked, even his parents could not comprehend his becoming a politician—much less one of the most famous new names in Russia. He was just thirty years old. But the voters never forgot it when he insisted on calling for a day of national mourning when Sakharov died; and they never forgot that when Gorbachev told him to sit, he did not. Now all the reform candidates for the Moscow city council or the regional councils wanted his endorsement and his organizing talent.

  Zaslavsky won his race in the October Region easily. The local council was filled with Democratic Russia candidates, who quickly made Zaslavsky the regional chairman. His personal victory was one among hundreds for Democratic Russia and other reformist groups throughout the union. Many people had, as they put it, “voted a straight democratic line.” Yeltsin was elected to the Russian parliament, and it was obvious that he would try to become its chairman. Gavriil Popov, the economist, went to city hall and became the mayor of Moscow. Anatoly Sobchak, the law professor who became a star of the Congress, was now mayor of Leningrad. Once more, there was a brief wave of euphoria in the most politically active pockets of the Soviet Union, a sense of possibility and confidence. When I went to see Sobchak in Leningrad, he had commandeered an enormous office in the Mariinsky Palace. And yet I could not get past the fact that he still kept an enormous painting of Lenin hanging behind him.

  As I was leaving the office, I whispered to an aide, “What’s the painting doing there?”

  He laughed. “Pay it no mind,” he said. “We tried to take it down, but we found a huge stain on the wallpaper. We don’t have the money for new wallpaper.”

  In his first months in office, Zaslavsky came to an even deeper understanding of the Communist Party’s legacy. The Party, which had complete control over every store and factory, every police station and fire brigade, had let the October Region fall into a state of economic decay—a typical situation throughout the Soviet Union. Food supplies were erratic; there were days when even the bread shops were empty. The housing shortage was pitiful. Many people lived in studios the size of walk-in closets or in communal apartments with fifteen or twenty people to a bathroom. By reading district documents, Zaslavsky also discovered that the huge showpiece statue of Lenin on October Square had cost 23 million rubles—7 million of which had come from the local budget. In the meantime, garbage lay rotting for days on the streets, uncollected; doctors at the local state hospitals were paid half as much as bus drivers.

  One night a week, Zaslavsky sat in a dismal office near October Square listening to residents’ complaints. Widows, pensioners, drunks, and young parents would sit on narrow benches in the hall and wait their turn. To sit next to Zaslavsky from six until long past midnight was to hear a catalog of the failings of “socialism in one separate country”:

  “Ilya Iosifevich, my husband and I are divorced, but we still have to share the same one-room flat. We’ve been in line for a new apartment since 1978.…”

  “Ilya Iosifevich, my mother died this week, but they say the only way they will bury her is if I pay bribes to the cemetery manager. I have no bribe money.…”

  “Ilya Iosifevich, my son has leukemia, but the doctors say they can do nothing. They say the only place he can get treatment is in the West. We have no visa and no money.…”

  Zaslavsky slumped in his chair, not so much from the specific complaints—everyone knew the problems—but from the sheer number of them, the weight of his responsibility. The self-confidence was slowly draining out of him. He was powerless and sad. After he began his comeback in the Congress of People’s Deputies, Yeltsin had also allowed me once to sit in on his office hours, and while the complaints were similar, he was often able to do something. The apparatchiks may have despised Yeltsin, but they had to listen to him. He was still a former Politburo member and a member of the Central Committee. Yeltsin could make a quick phone call and get his constituent just about anything: an apartment, a wheelchair, a visa to see a daughter in Warsaw. But that was mainly because of his immense authority and connections as a former member of the Kremlin leadership. Zaslavsky could only leaf through the growing stacks of papers and complaints his constituents brought him. He would look into the problems, he told them all, he would do what he
could. He wrote letters, he made phone calls. But the system he relied on considered him its enemy.

  Zaslavsky knew real change would come only with political and economic reform far beyond the boundaries of the October Region. In the meantime, he could hardly look his constituents in the eye. “They think of me as their last hope,” he said one night between visitors, “and there is so little I can do. How do I tell them it will take years?”

  At first, Zaslavsky’s only successes were symbolic. New parties were required by law to register, and every new party in the city and Russia itself, it seemed, registered in the October Region because it had the most accommodating regulations. Nearly every Saturday another party would hold its founding congress in the October Region. “It got a little absurd. We’d already registered three different Christian Democratic parties before we ever made a move on economics,” said Grigori Vasiliyev, a thirty-two-year-old economist who was Zaslavsky’s choice to head the region’s ispolkom, or executive committee.

  Zaslavsky also recognized that glasnost was still far from free speech, and so he registered and helped fund newspapers that were too small or too radical to get help from the Party bureaucracy and its printing presses. Sergei Grigoryants, an underground editor whom Gorbachev, in an interview with The Washington Post, described as a parasite, was able to take over a small building and run his magazine Glasnost without government or Party interference. Zaslavsky also opened a book and magazine store in the lobby of the regional headquarters on Shabolovka Street where you could buy émigré journals like Kontinent and Posev. Later he sponsored the openings of newsstands in the metro stations.

  The October District also began to wage war on the Communist Party organization that had run things for so long. Zaslavsky stripped the Shabolovka Street headquarters of all its Communist trappings—the busts of Lenin, the hammers and sickles—and then pushed the Party bureaucracy out of the way. He gave them a few bad offices on a high, drafty floor and took away their internal phone lines.

  “Let them fend for themselves,” he said. “These people have no more right to this building than the Christian Democrats or the local bird-watchers’ association.”

  Zaslavsky and his colleagues knew what they wanted to do, but they wanted at least the pretense of consensus before they did it. I went along and heard Zaslavsky tell the local police force that the city, and not the Interior Ministry bureaucracy, should be hiring and firing police officers. I saw him try to describe to a room filled with befuddled factory workers how it was time that they had shares in their own workplace, that inefficient or polluting plants should be shut down and replaced with factories that “worked cleanly and made things that people need.” Zaslavsky also knew that the creation of a real market would lead to higher prices, unemployment, bankruptcies, and the end of relatively equal incomes, and he said so. He was cold and honest, and the reception he got was never easy or enthusiastic. At a machine factory one afternoon, Zaslavsky sat on the podium under a huge banner—“The Name and Work of Lenin Will Live Forever!”—and, once more, got an earful:

  “What are you going to do about all those Azerbaijanis selling in our markets?”

  “These kebab salesmen are making a fortune on our backs! They buy up all the meat and they sell it for three and four times the original price!” “Don’t make us your lab rats for capitalism!”

  The workers were understandably more concerned with their daily disasters than with grand designs and new October revolutions. Zaslavsky tried to explain the difference between the black market and a real market, the need for competition, regulation, incentive. He was getting nowhere. “If I had known about all this, I never would have voted for you!” one worker shouted.

  By the end of the session, Zaslavsky and Vasiliyev were depressed. The euphoria of the election campaign was fading fast. “We never understood just how deep the psychology of Bolshevism is in every one of us,” one aide, Ilya Gezentsevei, told me. “The harder we try to push, the harder that psychology pushes back.”

  For months, they floundered. But slowly, Zaslavsky and Vasiliyev’s economic planning began to pay off. Their first stroke of genius was to make the October Region the Delaware of Moscow. The regional council passed measures making it easy for private businesses to register in the region. With no Party bureaucracy to impress or bribe, the businesses came in droves. More than 4,500 small enterprises registered in the region within twelve months—nearly half of all the new private businesses in Moscow. Restaurants, brokerages, commodities exchanges, private research labs, construction firms, law firms, and an electronics store opened. Taking in a percentage of the business profits as tax, the October Region raised its annual income from 73 million rubles to 250 million rubles in one year.

  In the October Region you could see the first signs of a market economy: the ambition, the fast profits, the crime, the bewildering greed. The “October Revolution,” as the local papers called it, was a gold rush for a hustler like German Sterligov, a twenty-four-year-old college dropout and one of the self-proclaimed pioneers of Soviet capitalism. He set up a private commodities brokerage and named it after his dog, Alisa. Just like that. And within six months, he told me, he was worth “tens and tens of millions of rubles.” Sterligov made his fortune in the vacuum left by the collapse of the old command system. As the system deteriorated, it was becoming impossible for builders to get bricks, for truckers to get oil and gas. Alisa filled in where the old ministries would not, or could not. When I visited him at the brokerage house on Leninski Prospekt, he acted like a child sultan. Everywhere there were pretty young blond women wearing spandex miniskirts: Sterligov’s angels. “They are assisting me,” Sterligov said with a leer. He had big dreams and, what was more, he was fulfilling them. Sterligov was the owner of the country’s first professional hockey team and the founder of the Young Millionaires Club, a place where like-minded tycoons could get together and make big plans. “Oh, and another thing,” he said as his secretary stooped to light his Marlboro. “We’re going to take over the Moscow racetrack and bring in the Kentucky Derby people to set up some big-time international racing.”

  As he grew rich, Sterligov developed a stony heart. “Why should I pity the poor and the lazy?” he said. “Pity the sick and the weak, okay, but if the rest want to live in poverty, God help them. If they want to be slaves—well, then, every slave has his dignity before God. But history is made by the individual, not the crowd. It is only when the ignorant crowd takes part in the historical process that it turns into a mess.

  “My generation despises the system. It killed everyone and everything it touched. This was the richest state in the world and they destroyed it all down to the bone! But older people don’t understand us. Their psychology is all screwed up. They are so used to being equal in poverty that they assume if you have any money, you are a crook.”

  Sterligov was not a lonely robber baron. The newspaper Tochka Zreniya (“Point of View”) reported that there were at least 150,000 “ruble millionaires” in the Soviet Union by the end of 1990. “But look, a million rubles on the open market is now twenty-five thousand dollars. Is that really so much?” Sterligov said. “And I don’t have a single free ruble. Everything is tied up in the business.”

  After our talk, one of Sterligov’s men showed me around the trading floor, which was buzzing with brokers and angels. “Welcome to the future,” said Yevgeny Gorodentsov, an Alisa broker who had just put together a brick deal that brought him 750,000 rubles in commissions. He was twenty-one years old. The brokers all talked of Sterligov as if of a god—a slightly mad deity. His people reminded me of the inner circle around Citizen Kane. They knew he would crash, but they wanted to be next to something transcendent and new. Sterligov’s ambitions were boundless and wild, a mix of Thatcherian free-market zeal, Chicago in the twenties, and P. T. Barnum myth-making. When I last saw him, his newest scheme was to buy a huge tract of land 150 miles from Moscow and build a self-contained “mini Western country,” with factories a
nd accredited schools and universities, airports and heliports, satellite dishes and a “Japanese TV for everyone.”

  Perhaps the singular feature of Sterligov’s wealth was the envy, and the harassment, it attracted. Once a week, police inspectors showed up at Alisa demanding to see his books. The KGB dropped in too. To avoid racketeers demanding protection money, Sterligov, his wife, and their infant daughter moved from apartment to apartment. The same dangers appeared to await anyone who succeeded in the new marketplace. Of the twelve new members of the Young Millionaires Club, only Sterligov would reveal his name. Dozens of others told him they wanted to join but feared kidnapping and attacks. The Communist Party weekly Glasnost printed an article accusing Sterligov of a “pathological hatred of Communism,” a history of racketeering, and a “real lack of intelligence.” The attacks came from all sides. So successful was Alisa in its first six months of existence that rival entrepreneurs told me that they were sure Sterligov had a working relationship with the KGB. There were rumors that one of his uncles was a minister.

  Sterligov, like most plutocrats, immunized himself from criticism and convinced himself that everyone was simply jealous. “It’s still a sin to be rich in this country,” he said. “But we’re going to change all that. It won’t take long.”

  Liberals in their late thirties and forties were not so much angered as amazed at this new, younger generation. My friend Alex Kahn, a music critic from Leningrad, grew up in semi-dissident circles reading samizdat and listening to pirated tapes of John Lennon. Now the young seemed entranced by money and the possibility of money. “Every month, every week, you see more of these guys around town,” he said. “My generation, in our late thirties and forties, worshiped the ideas and ideals that were forbidden to us. We looked to the poets and the bards. These guys are sick of all that. What they want most is a society that works.”