Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  The Party, of course, tried to make sure the country did not hear about the demonstrations. Official television gave blanket coverage to the first hour of the parade, but once the radicals crested the hill and entered Red Square, the broadcast ended. Of course, glasnost subverted any attempt to control the information. The more liberal papers were filled with accounts of the May Day events, and the public read not only about Moscow, but about the anti-Communist demonstrations in Eastern Europe and the “anti-empire” demonstration in Ukraine. The Party had been humiliated nearly everywhere. In Lvov, the center of the Ukrainian independence movement, demonstrators carried icons of the Virgin Mary and signs saying, “USSR: The Prison House of Nations.” The mayor of Lvov, Vyacheslav Chernovil, could not help but applaud. He’d spent the better part of his adulthood as a dissident and political prisoner. “Happy May Day,” he told everyone. “Happy May Day.”

  A few days later, Aleksandr Yakovlev had the pitiable job of facing the press. Playing against type, the most liberal man in the leadership denounced the May Day demonstrations as “insulting” and “freakish.” Yakovlev turned demagogue as he singled out the few kooks in the march, war veterans with pictures of Stalin, monarchists with icons of Nicholas II. He made out this lunatic fringe to be the main current of the demonstration itself and then pompously declared that what we had witnessed that day were “anti-reform” forces trying to frighten the goodly men of the Kremlin. What a strange and terrible thing it must have been for Yakovlev to carry out such a task. Yuri Prokofiyev, the Moscow Party chief, was more honest in his anger. The crowds, he said, “carried insulting slogans exceeding the limits of decency. They smeared the leaders of the country, the Communist Party, and the president and chanted rude, almost obscene words and whistled. The goal of these people was explicitly clear: to spoil the holiday with the poison of confrontation.” What a phrase! “Almost obscene words!”

  The Party press scolded the “tastelessness” of the demonstration, as if the demonstrators had used the fish fork for the steak. Gorbachev, for his part, just kept away from the subject. What could he say? What he felt standing there on the mausoleum? What had Lyndon Johnson felt as he sat in the Lincoln bedroom or the Oval Office and heard the great throbbing coming from Lafayette Park: “Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?” In his own perverse way, Johnson had started out thinking of himself as doing good, raising up the poor, giving black folks a chance. And now he was a baby-killer, a demon. Gorbachev’s indignation on May Day must have gone even deeper. He had challenged institutions and a system many times more monstrous than anything a modern American could imagine. His maneuvering, his attempt to erode the power of the Party and slowly build up democratic institutions, was the political feat of an age. No czar or general secretary had ever put himself and his power in such jeopardy. And now it had all gone wrong. Day by day, the people of the Soviet Union were developing minds of their own. Gorbachev cheered that—at least in principle. But the reality of a new psychology, independent and defiant, confused him, sent him running to the reliable bases of traditional power. He ignored those who told him what he did not want to hear. The only men who would flatter him were precisely those who would one day betray him. His tragedy had begun.

  The liberal press was forever wringing its hands over the lack of young people in politics. I found that strange. Red Square that May Day was filled with men and women in their thirties, twenties, and teens. Unlike Karpinsky, Afanasyev, Yakovlev, and Gorbachev—men who had been raised as true believers and then begun the long process of awakening after Stalin’s death—the young had never believed for a minute. They did not believe in Communism, the Party, or the system. They did not believe in the future. As a secret Politburo analysis dated May 19, 1990, described the phenomenon, there was now in Soviet society an utter “disrespect for the organs of state power.”

  The Gorbachev years were not a negation for the young, but rather a chance to fill a void, to move from a despairing cynicism toward something resembling normal modern life in all its multiplicity. For the young, the instructions and pretensions of the existing system constituted a separate world of the absurd, a realm of lies so funny you could die laughing.

  The official indoctrination had started in the first grade. On the first day of school, the principal would gather all the children in an auditorium and tell them, “You are so lucky to be living in this country where all childhoods are happy ones!” The first words in their readers were “Lenin,” “Motherland,” and “Mama.” The flyleaf bore a picture of the Lenin Mausoleum, and in the sixties the last page of all textbooks had a portrait of Khrushchev with the caption “Nikita Sergeyevich is a fighter for peace. He says to all peoples, ‘Let’s live in peace!’ ” On Revolution Day, the children were declared Oktyabritsti, “Children of October,” and they wore star-shaped badges bearing little pictures of Lenin as a cherubic child. In the essay “Less Than One,” Joseph Brodsky captures the experience of school under the regime in two sentences: “It is a big room with three rows of desks, a portrait of the Leader on the wall behind the teacher’s chair, a map with two hemispheres, of which only one is legal. The little boy takes his seat, opens his briefcase, puts his pen and notebook on the desk, lifts his face, and prepares himself to hear drivel.”

  In summer, the luckier children went to Pioneer camps, where they played war games with balsa rifles and acted out “The Siege of Sevastopol” in evening song competitions. They were raised on a quaint prudery. During the Brezhnev era, the weekly Ogonyok magazine advised that “girls should learn self-respect, then there won’t be any need to pass laws prohibiting kissing and hugging on the street. A woman’s modesty increases the man’s sexual energy, but a lack of modesty repels men and brings about total fiasco in their intimate relations.” In 1980, an American researcher published Sex in the Soviet Union and cited one article in the official press declaring that premarital sex caused neurotic disorders, impotence, and frigidity; another article said that the “ideal duration of the sexual act” was two minutes, and a man who delayed ejaculation for the pleasure of his partner was doing something “terribly harmful” which could lead to “impotence, neuroses, and psychoses.” All this while many Russian girls, in the absence of effective birth control, were having one abortion after another.

  Those who grew up under Brezhnev were slowly crushed by a great, invisible weight. “Most conformed out of laziness, hopelessness,” the music critic Alex Kahn told me one night. “When I was eighteen and in my first year of college, I was picking apples on a collective farm and I was talking to a friend of mine every day in the field. And I remember how we concluded that we were living in the most sophisticated dictatorship that has ever existed on this planet. The force of the propaganda was so strong that there could never be a revolution from below. I knew all about Sakharov and the other dissidents, but they were a tiny island off by themselves. The system had permeated society at every level. It was everywhere. No one was being tortured, as in the Middle Ages or under Stalin—or, at least, not many. But the system was unshakable because it penetrated society so thoroughly. You could talk openly only with your closest friends, and even that was not always safe.”

  But people of Alex’s generation and younger grew up without the same sense of ever-present fear that their parents had known. The “era of stagnation” demanded obedience, but usually not your neck, not even your soul. For the first time, a generation began to distance itself from the system and look at it with disdain; it saw the strangeness and horror in all that had gone on before. Its relation to the state and its institutions was purely ironic.

  What seemed to save people was the cocoon of friendships, the feeling of independence and intimacy that long nights of talk could provide. My tutors in this were, above all, a quartet of friends in their mid-thirties so close to one another for so many years that I feel presumptuous even now saying I was part of their circle. At least I was a kind of tangent to the circle of Masha Lipman and her husband, Se
riozha Ivanov, and Masha Volkenshtein and her husband, Igor Primakov. They were the sort of people you’d see in the audience at meetings of Memorial or Moscow Tribune or, joking and paying half attention, at a rally somewhere on the outskirts of Moscow. Seriozha was a historian, Igor a seismologist, Masha Lipman a translator, Masha Volkenshtein a pollster. They were not famous, but they knew people who knew this well-known artist or that reform politician. Of the four, I knew Masha Lipman best, because she eventually came to work for the Post. When we finally had the nerve to stop hiring the KGB-approved informers that the Foreign Ministry had always sent us, Masha went to work as a researcher and translator, finally displacing a harpy of the higher organs.

  Most nights when we got together, the talk was about politics. I supposed that was always the way in a city of revolution. But after a while Masha and Seriozha talked about their families, typical stories for educated people of their generation.

  “My maternal grandfather, David Rabinovitch, was born in Kharkov, in the Pale of Settlement, and he became enthralled with proletarian ideas,” Masha told me. “He was a typical Jewish intellectual, enthusiastic about a new era, a new art. He was a musician. When he came to Moscow and graduated from the conservatory, he taught Marxist political economy and was a member of the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians. He wanted a new proletarian culture, loved Mayakovsky. For Jews, the Revolution meant the idea of an end to the Pale of Settlement. Grandmother was an actress who studied with Meyerhold, worked in his Theater of the Revolution. My grandfather knew Shostakovich, and my grandmother played a vendor who sold fur-lined brassieres in a Mayakovsky play.

  “It was incredible. They and their friends developed a revolutionary style even in the way they lived at home. They had no dishes, no real furniture. They decided it was all too bourgeois and left it all in Kharkov. Birthday parties, weddings, and New Year’s trees were also gotten rid of. Bourgeois. To make a table, my grandmother found a few boards, scrap wood, and asked the super to make a table. They thought that traditional Russian felt boots, valenki, were also bourgeois, so the children walked through the slush and the snow in their thin leather shoes, crying of the cold. They just mocked all traditions of the old order. So they had my mother call them by their first names and they ate their meals off of butcher paper.”

  Nevertheless, Masha’s maternal grandfather was sent to the camps for espionage. He had met a few times with an American reporter. He survived, returning home after Stalin’s death. Her paternal grandfather was not as fortunate. Aleksandr Levit was a revolutionary who worked in the Komintern and attended the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1935. He used the pseudonym Tivel. The year after the congress, he was arrested and disappeared. During the Moscow purge trials, Masha’s grandmother turned on the radio and heard the voice of one of the accused, Karl Radek, testifying. “It was Tivel who came to me suggesting we kill Comrade Stalin,” Radek said. Masha’s grandmother fainted straightaway: “She knew it was the end.”

  Seriozha’s family history was less dramatic and, perhaps, more typical. “My first clear memories can be easily dated. My parents had sent me to bed. Guests were coming over. My uncle brought a typewritten copy of Paris Match, which had run excerpts of Khrushchev telling the story of Stalin’s death. I was in bed, trembling with curiosity. I had the door opened slightly and listened. I remember I was incredibly interested, even though my parents tried to fight this interest. They knew it was vaguely dangerous.

  “When I was thirteen I had some very sharp political discussions with my parents, about history, about Bolshevism, about conformity. I was insisting that Bolshevism was a mistake that had caused incalculable suffering. I knew it from the beginning. I listened to the ‘foreign voices’ even though they were jammed. You had to sit out those long wooo wooo sounds. But you could hear the stations better out in the country where the jamming wasn’t quite as good as it was in the center of Moscow.”

  At about the same age, Masha said, she was in a ninth-grade class that was reading Crime and Punishment, and the discussion turned into a political event, a moment when Masha realized that she was growing slowly and inexorably away from the mythical Soviet childhood. “I raised my hand and said I thought the killing of another human soul was prohibited, and what’s more, there was nothing more precious than a human life. No one in the class agreed. There were those who said, ‘What if the person is an enemy?’ The teacher accused me of sharing an ‘abstract concept of humanism.’ At the next parent-teacher meeting, this teacher told my mother with great assurance, ‘Don’t worry. I will struggle with her.’ ”

  As a teenager, Masha listened carefully to the talk at her kitchen table. Her parents were on the margins of dissident society. They knew people who knew Solzhenitsyn. They visited Nadezhda Mandelstam, the great memoirist; as always, Mandelstam greeted her guests in bed, in her nightgown and covered with the husks of sunflower seeds and cigarette ash. Masha listened to her parents’ underground music tapes—the magnitizdat—of Aleksandr Galich and Bulat Okhudzhava. “The tapes were a big secret. Not all of my friends had a tape recorder, and my friends would come and listen to other things. Once a girl opened a drawer and saw the tape marked ‘Galich’ and I will never forget the terror of that moment. I was sure that we’d end up at the KGB.”

  Masha and Seriozha traveled in the same circles during the Brezhnev years. When they first met, they discovered that they both adored the same book: Venedikt Yerofeyev’s comic epic Moskva-Petushki. “That was the book of what our lives were, the pain of it and the irony, too,” Masha said. “It was a book about trying to escape when no escape was possible.” Their friends were students, young men and women who lived on the edge of dissidence, who were absorbed in books and talk. “In school and university, to be an intellectual meant that you got together all the time, talking and drinking and talking about how drunk you got the night before,” Masha said. “I think of it now as a life of meaninglessness. It was considered the height of good taste to disdain your studies, to skip classes. A job was valued insofar as how often you could call in sick without losing it.”

  “My choice of occupation was a form of escape,” Seriozha said. “I really wanted to be a diplomat, but I realized what that led to. Then a journalist. I was sent by my school in 1971 to sort of hang around the paper Moskovski Komsomolets, and I realized very quickly that it was impossible to be a journalist and a decent person. The means of escape for intellectuals were ancient history, theoretical physics (if you could avoid military research), structuralism. Or you could be a dvornik, a caretaker or an elevator operator, and spend your vast amounts of spare time reading. It was a bit easier to be a scientist, but in the humanities you always had to be on the watch for the dead hand of ideology. So that’s what I did. I raced into the past, far past the Bolsheviks, to Byzantium.”

  The circles of urban intellectuals whom Masha and Seriozha knew so well played at escape, at separateness, through style as well as substance. Unlike their Bolshevik grandparents, who affected the lives of ascetics, these Westernized intellectuals made a point of having good manners, of an almost stylized politeness, with men holding open doors and helping women on with their coats. They used a slightly ornate vocabulary, one as distant as could be imagined from the crude, politicized speech of Pravda and Izvestia. “There was a time when you would even kiss a woman’s hand as a greeting,” Seriozha said. “What could be more opposite from ‘Greetings, comrade!’ ”

  Real escape was possible only through emigration. And even though Masha and Seriozha both saw many of their friends off at the airport, they could not bear the idea of leaving, of living a life outside the Russian language and culture, of forcing their children to imagine their Russianness from a tremendous distance. “I went many times to get the forms and applications, but finally I just could not imagine myself stepping off a plane in another country and saying to myself, ‘Where I am now is where I will be for the rest of my life.’ I could not do it.”

  And so they staked th
eir lives on a new Russia and tried to understand the pathology of the old. “Igor would quote Paul Tillich, who said there are two great fears: the fear of death and the fear of vastness, senselessness,” Seriozha said. “Death and suffering are the same for all, but senselessness means different things in different cultures. Europe chose the undeniability of death as a principle, refusing to construct anything everlasting, so life ends with the end of life and is senseless. Previous old cultures and modern Oriental cultures chose another explanation. One possibility is to create something that lasts forever, a form of eternity. So we are together and there is no death. When some cells in an organism die in one organ, the organism still lives on, because it is social and not individual. The problem of death is solved. The idea that the ego has borders that are the same as the borders of the self is a new idea; it began with Descartes’s idea ‘I think, therefore I am.’ If you ask a representative of old Roman culture or European medieval culture, ‘Does human life coincide with the life of one man?’ he’d say no.

  “This was the case with Russian culture. And in Russia, this medieval mind-set has lasted until very recently. The serfs in Europe were liberated in the mid-fifteenth century, but it happened in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. The idea of community was more important; that way the physical unit lasted eternally. The idea that the individual was of absolute value appeared in Russia only in the nineteenth century via Western influences, but it was stunted because there was no civic society. This is why human rights was never an issue. The principle was set out very clearly by Metropolitan Illarion in the eleventh century in his ‘Sermon on Law and Grace,’ in which he makes clear that grace is higher than law; you see the same thing today in our great nationalists like Prokhanov—their version of grace is higher than the law. The law is somehow inhuman, abstract. The attempts to revise this principle were defeated. The Russian Revolution was a reaction of absolute simplification. Russia found its simplistic and fanatic response and conquered its support. What we are living through now is a breakthrough. We are leaving the Middle Ages.”