Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  The young people in Red Square on May Day had changed not only in intellectual terms. Many of them were fairly ordinary, if being a worker or a student or running an elevator is ordinary. Simply because the intellectuals and the articles and books they wrote might have given the best expression of the times, the perestroika phenomenon was also a matter of the pleasure principle, the Id unleashed. The Id of sex, of self-expression, of rock and roll, of materialism, of even the junkiest impulse. The Id of tabloid accounts of the murderous past, the ruined landscape.

  The war in Afghanistan, for example, was just one reason among many that the young had come to despise anything that smelled of official Soviet life. More and more, the worst insult you heard was sovok, a slang word for Soviet. If you called someone sovok you were saying he was narrow-minded, officious, weak, lazy, obsequious, a hypocrite. After years of reducing the West to a swampy hell of imperialism and homelessness, Soviet television and the press now romanticized “over there” as an attainable paradise. The movie Little Vera, with its brutally realistic view of Soviet family life, was a hit, but eventually people tired of putting the mirror to their own sorry selves. The state film industry quickly realized that the way to fill the theaters was to buy up Hollywood movies—surf movies, second-rate police thrillers, Porky’s II, anything smacking of dumb pleasure.

  In Leningrad, I met a man, no longer young, named Kolya Vasyn. He was a genuine dissident in the Brezhnev years, but his dissidence consisted of his worship not of Jefferson or Mill, but of Chuck Berry, Keith Richards, and, above all, John Lennon. “Lots of things can liberate people,” he told me as we listened to a tape of The White Album. “For me it was the freedom in John Lennon’s voice.” Since the early sixties, he and his friends had been collecting pirated tapes of Western rock and roll and listening to them with the same furtive pleasure and sense of revelation as the intellectuals who read Sakharov in onionskin underground editions in one night-long sitting. He told me that when he first started listening to rock and roll, it was impossible to get records and it was before the era when audio cassettes were easy to find. “We had friends who worked in medical clinics and they would steal used X rays,” Kolya said. “Someone would have a primitive record-making machine and you would copy the music by cutting the grooves in the material of the X rays. So you’d be listening to a Fats Domino tune that was coming right off of the X ray of someone’s long-forgotten broken hip. They called that ‘on the bones.’ ”

  Kolya Vasyn’s closet-sized apartment, decorated with Beatles memorabilia and a massive reel-to-reel tape recorder, became the equivalent of Sakharov’s kitchen for the rock-and-roll set. Every major rock and jazz talent in Leningrad—the Soviet Union’s Liverpool—came through, talked the night away, and, inevitably, collapsed in a corner. The native rock scene there was interesting enough: Kolya, Alex Kahn, and a bunch of others started a rock club on Rubenshtein Street, and Boris Grebenshikov’s group, Aquarium, was as innovative as many of the top bands in the West. But what was most important was not the Soviet version of rock and roll, but the way that rock and roll brought kids into the greater world.

  The Soviet regime had long worried about the lures of Western pop culture. Even the dullest ideologues, men who had never traveled much farther west than Minsk, knew that somehow James Brown and the Rolling Stones were nearly as dangerous as Helsinki Watch and the Voice of America. “The enemy is trying to exploit youthful psychology with dubious programs,” Konstantin Chernenko declared at a 1983 plenum of the Central Committee. The Party’s youth paper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, said of rock and roll, “Those who fall for this bait are playing into the hands of ideological opponents who sow in immature minds the seeds of a way of life alien to our society.” But by 1989 and 1990, Komsomolskaya Pravda was earnestly reporting the latest news about Pink Floyd, the Talking Heads, and the kheep-khope (hip-hop) phenomenon. On my trip to Perm to visit the prison camp, I heard an odd throbbing sound coming from a vegetable stand. It was the first time I had ever heard a Russian rapper.

  Rock and roll brought along with it sexier clothes, Reeboks, commercials, McDonald’s. To the ideologues and nationalists nostalgic for an imagined Russian past, Purple Rain and Metallica were more of a threat than the idea of a stock exchange on Revolution Square. Now even the conservatives admitted that the country needed wealth, but in any issue of Molodaya Gvardiya or Nash Sovremennik you could read raving polemics about the evils of rock music, the encroachment on traditional Slavic music. “Live rock has become the scourge and poison of our lives,” wrote Valentin Rasputin, Vasily Belov, and Yuri Bondarev, all prominent novelists and cultural conservatives. “Pop music, with its stupefying, monotonous, hollow pulsation, absurd texts, completely lacking in poetry, is kicking every new stream of youngsters into a spiritual void.” I was even told that the Politburo would frown severely upon the rise of a rock culture in the Soviet Union. Alexsandr Yakovlev’s view is what passed for liberalism. “It’s not exactly my sort of thing, but I don’t think banning it is the answer,” he said. Ligachev, for his part, wanted to prevent Elton John from getting an entry visa. I am not sure what dire order Yegor Kuzmich would have given had it been Ice-T and Public Enemy on the passport line.

  Most of the men who ran the Kremlin had never been to the West, or when they had been, it was in the “bubble” of an official visit. It was not by chance that the two men who had traveled in the West extensively before coming to power were also the two main figures of official reform: Yakovlev and Gorbachev. God only knows what the hard-liners thought the Soviet Union would look like if the West moved East. But you could guess. When a young activist named Roman Kalinin registered a gay newspaper with Moscow City Hall in 1990 and published personal ads and some fairly tame articles on gay life in Moscow, Pravda accused the paper, Tema, of telling necrophiliacs where they could find corpses and pedophiles where to buy children for sex. Kalinin seemed unfazed. He started passing out fliers for a gay rights demonstration: “Turn Red Square into the Pink Triangle.”

  For the older generation that had finally given up the Communist dream, the West was the land of their defeat, a smug and garish landscape of success. It was as if all the dreams of utopia had evaporated and they were stranded between McDonald’s and the gulag. What could they do but order a Big Mac?

  But for the young, the West was the dream itself. Compared to the hole they were in, the problems of the West seemed laughable. The West was romanticized, sure enough, but why not? How could you begin to talk about the decline of the American economy with a thirty-year-old woman who still had to live with the husband she had divorced five years before because there was nowhere to move? By 1990, one of the fastest-selling books in the street kiosks was How to Find Work in America, followed quickly by How to Find Work in Europe. This lust for all things Western could break your heart. For a couple of weeks, I watched the making of Russia House. The director, Fred Schepsi, set John le Carré’s novel against all the most predictable postcard backgrounds. Off to the side, dozens of young Russians worked in odd jobs, as translators, stand-ins, technicians. I talked mostly with a young woman named Kira Sinyeshikova, who helped the Americans communicate with the Russians in the crew. I watched her watch Hollywood; I watched her bask in the glow of Michelle Pfeiffer. Kira could not get over the organization, the equipment, the treatment of the stars. And after a while she giggled at the way the Americans thought they were “capturing the true Russia” as they filmed Red Square, the Zagorsk cathedrals, the radiant parks of Leningrad. A few weeks after the production closed, Kira was back in her regular job as a tour guide at the Museum of the Revolution in Leningrad. We had agreed to meet for dinner, and I joined one of her tours. It was late morning and she was leading around a bored group of tourists from Voronezh and Siberia. She told them all about the “wondrous” documents stored there, the “unique” memorabilia of Lenin. The tourists did not care, and Kira cared less. I have rarely seen eyes so blank.

  Things Western opened the world up. That
spring and summer of 1990, I spent a couple of afternoons a week in Lenin Hills, where the Japanese had built a pretty decent baseball park for Moscow State University. I sat in the dugout with a kid from Sioux City named Bob Protexter who had come all the way from Iowa to coach baseball.

  “I read this was happening in Sports Illustrated,” he said. “I wanted adventure, but what the hell would I do in Tahiti? So I figured I’d teach Russians how to turn a double play.”

  When the baseball craze began in 1986, traditionalists were gravely concerned. Somehow it never occurred to them that the country had also gone basketball-mad in the seventies without causing the sudden implosion of the Soviet nuclear force. Nevertheless, Izvestia published a frenetic editorial claiming that baseball was a foreign intruder and that, anyway, Russian lapta was a superior game that gave America the idea for baseball in the first place. Sergei Shachin wrote that lapta, which dates back to the days of Ivan the Terrible, came to California when Russian émigrés settled there in the nineteenth century. Hence, baseball. “It was a guess,” Shachin admitted later.

  The Soviets were getting an all-star team ready for an American tour, and they looked raw but not without talent. The field was filled with former javelin throwers, former water polo players, and former hockey players. Protexter’s friend Richard Spooner was the Johnny Appleseed of the game in Moscow. He worked days at an American business consortium and spent weekends preaching the wisdom of the infield fly rule. Spooner managed to supply the Chemists, his team at the Mendeleyev All-Union Chemical Society, with gloves, balls, helmets, and even videocassettes of Los Angeles Dodgers highlights. The more they watched the tapes, the more the Russians developed the tics and affectations of their American brethren. Scratching, spitting, bubble-blowing. It took a while to get them all down pat. In one game, a guy took his gift of Red Man chewing tobacco and gobbled it down like chocolate. He threw up and spent the rest of the game in a hopeless daze. He struck out three times, looking.

  “Now they chew and spit all right, but so far they haven’t caught on to the tradition of grabbing your balls before the pitch,” Protexter said.

  Vadim Kulakov, Spooner’s catcher at Mendeleyev, was a fanatic devotee of Gary Carter, later of the Mets and Expos. “If I ever have a son,” Kulakov said, “I shall call him Gary, after the great Gary Carter.” Kulakov used a curling iron to affect the cherubic look of Gary Carter. On the field, he had the same frenetic style, the same showy sense of hustle as “Mr. Hustle.” And when he went on road trips with the team, Vadim Kulakov gave his girlfriend a Gary Carter 1988 Topps baseball card “so she will remember me.”

  So far, no Russian had ever hit a home run at the Moscow State University park. The Big Bear was still a nation of spray hitters. So far, no one had thrown a proper curve, and the slider was as distant a dream as shopping malls and microwaved tacos. But the fielding was surprisingly good. The country boys, the kids from the collective farms, had a good sense of outfield play. The only thing that seemed a little precarious was the decision-making. Billy Martin-Reggie Jackson-like squabbles were a common sight in the Moscow dugouts, and I was told that was likely to last a good while. “We decide everything together,” said the leading Soviet manager, Vladimir Bogatyryov. “Despite all that’s happened, we still have more of a collective mentality here in Russia.”

  It was nice to see that the Russian ballplayers had developed a sense of style despite the obvious impediments. Most of the players wore caps from major-league teams, though one wore a Minute Maid model and another, as if in the worst nightmare of the KGB, sported a model with the bold logo “Radio Liberty.” In the other dugout, one of the coaches was writing a new lineup combination on the pale-blue cover of an old copy of Novy Mir. For a while I watched the action with Bill “the Spaceman” Lee, late of the Boston Red Sox. Lee was entranced with the players, the way they strived equally for mannerism and real skill, as if they knew, instinctively, that the quirks of the American game were not irrelevant, but the beauty part. He tried to show the pitchers that they had to “respect” the mound, to care for it “like your home, your office.” And they loved the Spaceman.

  “I’ll tell you this, speaking as a red-blooded American who has no beef with the Russians: I hope they get this game down,” Bill Lee said. “Because if they learn how to play, they’ll discover it beats the shit out of working. Take anything. Take music. When they can turn on the TV and they can see Joe Cocker singing ‘Civilized Man’ with fifty thousand people going apeshit and everybody’s got their tops off and their tits jiggling, well, they’ll say, ‘You know, I want that! I gotta have that!’ The same with baseball. They want what we have. And why the hell not?”

  CHAPTER 23

  THE MINISTRY OF LOVE

  Until I got to Moscow, I never caught the spy bug. In college, there were rumors that a professor might tap you for the work, the way the Communist dons of Cambridge had done for Philby, Burgess, and Blunt. I never heard of it happening, though I suppose that was the idea. As a reporter in Washington, I felt ridiculous the few times I was called upon to write about espionage and its entertainments. Inevitably, someone was feeding you a hunk of fakery: a “scoop” that won an obscure political point, an alluring narrative cooked up in some embassy basement. Once I wrote a story about a Soviet defector, the wife of an embassy official. She betrayed her country and fled into the arms of a used-car salesman. She was known, in the headlines and elsewhere, as “the Woman in the Blond Wig.” On television, she wore her wig and big sunglasses. Later she signed a six-figure book contract. I knew I was somebody’s fool. But whose?

  In Moscow, it was understood that we, the foreigners, were under careful watch by the KGB. People talked about other reporters making graceless exits from Moscow after having been shown eight-by-ten glossies of themselves in sexual rapture with someone not their spouse. No matter how dramatic events became in Moscow, our friends and relatives at home wanted to know most of all what it felt like to be listened to, to be watched. After it became an instinct to avoid any mention of our Soviet friends, a life overheard felt like nothing at all, or almost nothing, like a slight numbness on your forearm that you forget until you touch it. Mostly, you stopped caring. Stupidly, arrogantly, you felt invulnerable. Go ahead. Let them listen. The cold war was over, wasn’t it?

  Vladimir Kryuchkov, who took over as KGB chief in 1988 from Viktor Chebrikov, tried hard to convince the world that he had created a kinder, gentler secret service. The Ministry of Love, as Orwell called it. Taking a page from Gorbachev’s own stylebook, Kryuchkov tried to “personalize” himself and the institution he represented. He described for the press his great love for Bellini’s Norma. If only Van Cliburn would move to Moscow, he said, the KGB would build him a wonderful apartment. Kryuchkov even begged for the workingman’s sympathy. “The KGB chairman’s life is no bed of roses,” he told the editors of New Times. So much work, and so little time. He gave press conferences. He fielded (carefully screened) questions on a television talk show. He met with foreign visitors. There were even tours of Lubyanka on which guides would point to display cases filled with preposterous spy equipment—telephones in the heels of shoes, things like that. Kryuchkov never mentioned that he took part in planning the invasion of Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968. This did not quite fit with the new image.

  Without cutting his forces by a single spy or border guard, Kryuchkov had embarked on one of the most curious public relations campaigns in history: trying to portray the spy apparatus of Dzerzhinsky, Yezhov, Beria, and Andropov as an earnest government servant of legality and democratic reform. One evening, the press was invited to the Foreign Ministry press center and treated to a documentary about the “new KGB,” in which officers swooned over the food (“Can I have the recipe?”) and generally acted like the corn-fed careerists in a U.S. Army recruiting film. Kryuchkov was eager not only to gild the present, but also to whitewash the past. “Violence, inhumanity, and the violation of human rights have always been alien to the w
ork of our secret services,” he told the Italian paper L’Unità. Although the Brezhnev era was “not the best in our lives,” Kryuchkov said the KGB acted at the time in “compliance with existing legislation.”

  Kryuchkov’s self-advertising was born of necessity. For the first time in its existence, the KGB was subject to public criticism. The former Olympic weight lifter Yuri Vlasov took the podium at the Congress of People’s Deputies in May 1989 and denounced the KGB as a vast “underground empire” that had been using its troops and prisons to slaughter the best and brightest of every Soviet generation since the Revolution. Vlasov, a Hercules with horn-rimmed glasses, said the KGB was the “most powerful of all the existing tools of the apparatus” and must be put under strict control of the new, elected legislature. Needless to say, such a thing had never happened before, especially not on live national television. Kryuchkov admitted he had an “unpleasant” reaction to Vlasov’s speech, “but then I asked myself: I must think about what is taking place.… He is just not aware of the many things we are now engaged in and what we are planning to do. If all Soviet people are as ignorant as he is, then many of them must think along the same lines.” After all, he said, Western reports that the KGB somehow represented a reactionary, antireform force in the leadership were “unsubstantiated.… The KGB and the army both are closely connected with the people. They entirely accept the program of perestroika worked out by the Communist Party and are ready to support it and defend it.”