Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  In the old days, Father Aleksandr’s meetings with intellectuals like Solzhenitsyn, Nadezhda Mandelstam, and Aleksandr Galich were more or less a secret. Now he had become, in spite of himself, a central figure in the rebirth of a degraded church. In the past couple of years, he’d been able to preach and lecture in churches and auditoriums, even on radio and television, all without fear. Just the night before, Men had given a lecture in Moscow and spoken of the spiritual quest as an endless ascent: “We climb breathlessly. Truth is not given easily. We look back down and know there is a great climb ahead. I remember the words of Tenzing, who climbed Mount Everest with the British. He said that you can only approach a mountain with respect. The same is true with God. Truth is closed to those who approach it without respect.”

  Father Aleksandr never seemed to tire, and he was intent now on getting an early start on Sunday. He kept walking along the asphalt path through the Semkhoz woods toward the train. The narrow macadam path had proved dangerous at times. There had been rapes, a few beatings. Drunks in town sometimes took their bottles into the woods and harassed the passersby. Not long ago, the local authorities had cleared away some of the trees to make the path to the train platform less forbidding. Still, a couple of weeks before, Men asked his young assistant, Andrei Yeryemin, to help find him a place to stay in the city on nights when he was teaching or lecturing late. He said it was getting dangerous to walk too late at night. “I was amazed to hear him say it after all the things he’d been through in 1981 and 1982 when he could have been hauled off at any time,” Yeryemin said. But it wasn’t just that. Lately, the priest had betrayed a tone of fatalism in his voice. He told one friend that he hadn’t much time to live. He gave no explanation.

  Suddenly, from behind a tree, someone leaped out and swung an ax at Aleksandr Men. An ax: the traditional Russian symbol of revolt, Raskolnikov’s weapon in Crime and Punishment, one of the symbols of the neofascist group Pamyat. The ax hit Men on the back of the skull. The killer, police said later, grabbed the priest’s briefcase and disappeared into the woods. Father Aleksandr, bleeding terribly, stumbled toward home, walking a full three hundred yards to his front gate at 3A Parkovaya Street. Along the way, two women asked if he needed help. He said no and continued on. From her window, Natasha Men saw a figure slumped near the gate, pressing the buzzer. She could not quite make out who it was in the half-light. Then she did. “Gospodi!” Good Lord! She called an ambulance. Within minutes, her husband was dead.

  The murder of Aleksandr Men on September 9, 1990, was an ominous, almost supernatural portent of a time of troubles, and it had come just when political expectations seemed once more on the rise.

  All summer it appeared as if Gorbachev was preparing to accelerate the pace of reform, if only to keep up with the events around him. As one republic after another, including Russia, took its cue from the Baltic states and declared itself sovereign, Gorbachev made the dramatic step of joining with Yeltsin to draw up a radical economic program that would encourage the creation of a market and, even more important, redistribute power from “the center” to the republics. In a government dacha outside the city, a witty old economist named Stanislav Shatalin and a plump wizard of market principles named Grigori Yavlinsky plotted, in civil tones and bureaucratic language, the dismantling of the System. On the face of it, the “500 Days” plan was an ambitious and amazingly facile prescription to begin the cure of a ruined economy. Few had any illusions about the 500 Days part. It would certainly be more than a year and a half before the empty lots of Moscow were transformed into shopping malls of plenty. When I asked Shatalin how long it would be until the Soviet Union had what passed for a modern economy, he said, “My optimistic scenario?” Yes. Be optimistic, I said. “Generations,” he said. No, it would be a good while before there was a Silicon Valley in the Urals and the people of eastern Siberia were cruising the supermarket aisles choosing among Tide, Ajax, and Solo. It was the set of principles behind the 500 Days that made it so revolutionary, so immediate. Realization of the plan would mean the shutdown or conversion of hundreds of defense plants, the rise of private property, radical cuts in the budgets of the army, the police, and the KGB. What could that mean for the lords of the System? It was very simple. It meant the end.

  When Gorbachev returned from his annual summer holiday on the Black Sea he told the legislature he was “inclined” to support the plan. That was all the hard-liners had to hear. The fight for their political life, a war that would rage for the next eleven months, had begun. The KGB chief, Vladimir Kryuchkov, piled dozens of reports on Gorbachev’s desk insisting that the 500 Days plan was nothing more than an attempt, supported by the West, to crush socialism, destroy the Party, and weaken the country. At various meetings, leaders of the Party and the military-industrial complex threatened to revolt against Gorbachev if he gave his final support to the plan. A creeping coup was under way, but Gorbachev was so vain, so sure of his ability to master both the machinations of the System and the passions of the people, that he thought he could control it all, finesse it as easily as he had the Nina Andreyeva affair in 1988.

  One Politburo document, dated March 12, 1990, revealed the dark sense of foreboding in the Communist Party leadership and the attempt to exaggerate the situation in order to encourage emergency tactics. “The popular consciousness is being radicalized,” the memo said. “Distrust in official structures and administrative structures grows. The criticism of the ‘partocracy’ and the local and central apparatus is more acute.… The opposition forces are attempting to exploit the situation. In fact, plans are being made to seize power by clearly antidemocratic means—through pressure, rallies, and the ‘roundtable’ tactic, which is completely antidemocratic.” The “healthy forces in society,” the memo added, want “decisive measures based on the law.… Use all means of propoganda to stop the discrediting of the army, the KGB, and the police.… Disarm the [opposition] ideologically and undermine them in the eyes of society.”

  For thousands of believers and nonbelievers in the city of Moscow, the first portent of the grim year ahead came with the swing of an ax in the village of Semkhoz. When I first heard about the murder of Aleksandr Men, I did not understand the importance of the event or of the man himself. He was a village priest whose church was an hour’s drive from Moscow. And yet within days of the murder, I heard over and over how much he had meant.

  In theory, at least, perestroika liberated the realm of the spirit as much as it did political and economic life. After seven decades of dogmatic atheism, the regime ended the persecution of religious believers and the institutions of worship. Suddenly, the word bogoiskatelstvo—“the search for God”—was the vogue. There were plenty of frauds around like Anatoly Kashpirovsky, but there were good signs as well. The churches were no longer the domain only of ancient women with childhood memories of a czarist world. Religious classes were no longer dissident activities. Gorbachev returned to the Russian Orthodox Church its ruined monasteries and cathedrals. Synagogues and mosques reopened. But just as the attempt at political reform slammed into one wall of resistance after another, the revival of spiritual life could not, in an instant, transcend a history of political repression. The nomenklatura of the Russian Orthodox Church, put in place by the ideologists and intelligence operatives of the Party, was at least as strong as the nomenklatura of the Party.

  The history of the spirit’s subservience to state authority goes back centuries before the first Bolshevik. As opposed to the Catholic Church, which developed its independent structures after the fall of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Church was always dependent on the state. The Byzantine emperors presided over all the synods of the church and were considered “God on earth.” In a sign of things to come, the great dukes of the early Moscow period urged the clergy to reveal the mystery of confession, especially if state security was at issue. Ivan the Terrible tortured priests and jailed one metropolitan for life. The word “czar” is a Slavic form of the word “Caesar,” but Iosif
Volotsky, a great religious philosopher, wrote that the czar was simply the highest of all priests. When Napoleon met Aleksandr I in East Prussia, Napoleon said, “I see that you are an emperor and a pope at the same time. How useful.”

  The Bolsheviks despised the Russian Orthodox Church as an embodiment of old Russia. Lenin planned a soulless utopia. But when the Revolution needed to mobilize millions of illiterate people, it couldn’t preach Marx to them. As the spiritual inheritor of Russian statehood, the Party needed to co-opt, not destroy, the church, bring it to its knees but not cut off its head. Stalin knew well how deeply the appeal of the church echoed in the Russian soul. To gain the allegiance of the population during the war, he appealed not so much to Communist ideology as to a mystical sense of Russianness, to Holy Russia and its warriors Nevsky, Suvorov, and Kutuzov. In his radio addresses to rally the country, Stalin would put aside the language of atheism. He returned some priests from prison camps and gave them decent positions and salaries. He was their emperor and pope. How useful. And when the war on Germany ended, the war on religion resumed. The dynamiting of churches, the imprisonment of priests, rabbis, and muftis, the prosecution of believers as “enemies of the state”—it all resumed.

  Aleksandr Men was born a Jew. His father was a nonbeliever, and his mother converted to Russian Orthodoxy. In a country where Jewish religion and culture had been assaulted even more severely than the church, many families of the intelligentsia gravitated to Russian Orthodoxy, if only because they were able to feel their Russian identity more closely than their Jewishness. Men’s mother, Yelena, saw the church as a place apart, a refuge. “In our family there was a personal religious search,” said Men’s brother, Pavel, a computer programmer. “Like so many people disgusted here by the life around them, our family tried to look within themselves for a religious way out.” Yelena Men took her sons to pray under the guidance of an honest priest named Serafim who evaded the authorities by moving from apartment to apartment. The “catacomb church,” they called it. Most of the parishioners were believers who had been in the prison camps, people who had lost relatives and friends for their faith.

  “And so Aleksandr saw around him a kind of elevated moral life, God’s people,” Pavel Men said. “He made a decision when he was just twelve to study for the priesthood. He went to the local priest and asked what he would have to do to get into the seminary one. day. The priest said Aleksandr was not ‘one of ours.’ Meaning he was Jewish. But Aleksandr set out to overcome that kind of thinking.” As a boy and young man, Men found religious books in ramshackle country stores, “there among the nails and the guinea pigs.” He began reading the great religious philosophers of the early part of the century, such writers as Vladimir Solovyov, Sergei Bulgakov, and Nikolai Berdyaev, who wrote in spiritual opposition to the Bolsheviks. Such reading, Men once said, “inoculated me against the cult of Stalin. I trembled as I read them.”

  As a young man, Men went off to study biology at an institute in Irkutsk, a Siberian city on the shore of Lake Baikal. His closest friend there was another Orthodox believer, a temperamental redheaded student named Gleb Yakunin. Men and Yakunin lived together in a tiny wooden house. Men brought with him huge trunkloads of books and kept Yakunin up nights at their rickety kitchen table talking about issues forbidden or, at least, discouraged by Soviet law. They talked about the sham that Soviet biology had become, about questions of Christian ethics and the way they contradicted the rules they lived under. “The Russian character, as you may have noticed, can be very lazy and unambitious,” Yakunin told me, “but Aleksandr knew just what he wanted to do. He was interested in all subjects, and he had a purpose. Unlike me, he always knew he was meant to serve God, no matter the consequences.”

  One day the two city boys wandered into a village church looking, as Yakunin said, “like a couple of white elephants.” Someone told the local KGB about these strange creatures. For making their religious faith so public, the two men risked their academic careers. The institute director barred Yakunin from finishing his studies and wanted to throw Men out, too. But the students, feeling the first flush of the post-Stalin “thaw,” went out on strike in support of Men, refusing to go to lectures or classes. Men completed his degree.

  Yakunin and Men returned to Moscow to follow their varying paths. Yakunin became Father Gleb, a priest and an unabashed political dissident who wrote letters to the Kremlin and the church hierarchy calling for religious reforms. For that he got nine years in prison camps and internal exile. Under Gorbachev, Yakunin returned home from exile and in 1990 was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Republic.

  Men became a spiritual dissident, a less dangerous path than Yakunin’s, but still perilous. “Each man has his own talent, his own way, and I moved toward the politics of religion,” Yakunin said. “Aleksandr had another kind of gift. In a church that suffered from inaccessibility, he had the ability to explain, to make the teachings of the church available to people.” Men’s form of dissidence meant being an honest, uncompromising priest; it meant providing the means for internal, spiritual rebellion in individuals. While his friend Yakunin organized political groups to defend the rights of believers, Men tried to instill a kind of spiritual dissidence in his parishioners, an independence of soul. He was a man of faith, but his own man, and God’s. Especially for urban intellectuals, Men became a link to turn-of-the-century religious thinkers and philosophers such as Bulgakov and Solovyov who stood apart from this tragic tradition of subservience and obscurantism. Even in the darkest moments under Brezhnev, Moscow intellectuals made Sunday pilgrimages to the village of Pushkino to hear Aleksandr Men. The crowds only increased with the gradual erosion of fear under Gorbachev.

  “In general, I think politics is a transitory thing and I wanted to work in a less transitory way,” Men told the newspaper Moskovski Komsomolets just before he was killed. “I consider myself a useful person in society, which like any society needs spiritual and moral foundations.” Men once said, “Dissent is the individual’s way of protecting his right to perceive reality in his own way, not to yield to the views of the mass. When an individual calls such views into question, he shows his natural independence, his freedom. It is only when such a personal appraisal is lacking that the law of the mob prevails and an individual turns into a particle of a mass which can easily be manipulated.”

  After such a long period when he was called in for interrogations by the KGB, Men suddenly found himself a very public theologian in the Gorbachev era. He gave lectures in meeting halls and spoke on the radio. He taught courses on religion at the Historical Archives Institute, Yuri Afanasyev’s outpost for nonconformist academics in Moscow. Young people who attended his lectures taped them and then circulated the tapes throughout the country. Just days before the murder, officials at the Russian Republic’s new television station were discussing ways to give Men airtime at least once a week to speak on religious topics.

  “This was a man who could speak to all of us, from Sakharov to the simplest person,” said the writer Yelena Chukovskaya. The literary critic Natalya Ivanova said, “In a country where the regime managed to eliminate, in a sort of grotesque genetic engineering, its best minds, its most honest souls, Men survived to teach, to be an example.”

  All that was cut off in the woods of Semkhoz. Andrei Bessmertni, a young filmmaker and “spiritual child” of Father Aleksandr, said Men “could have reached millions of young people.” Men, he said, saw how at a time when faith in the “bright future of Communism” had faded away, young people had begun a spiritual quest. To overcome their profound cynicism, their sense that history had provided them nothing to rely on or believe in, younger people had turned inward, more in search of themselves than the next political sensation. “These times are not just about getting blue jeans and a McDonald’s hamburger,” Bessmertni said. “Some people actually want meaning in their lives, spiritual food.”

  On the day of the funeral, thousands of people, including religious leaders from th
e West, crowded the grounds of the village church in Novaya Derevnya. In Men’s hand was placed a small Bible and a golden cross. People wept, and some sank to their knees in prayer. Several of the Orthodox priests who did their best to ignore or suppress Aleksandr Men in his lifetime made sure to speak his praises in eulogy. “My stomach turned as I listened to it all,” Yeryemin said.

  The eulogy that seemed to speak most eloquently for Men’s followers and admirers was published a week later in Ogonyok. The article, written by a young journalist named Aleksandr Minkin, revealed that Men, as an honest, charismatic, and, not least, Jewish-born priest, had scores of enemies: the anti-Semites of Pamyat, the conservative zealots in the Russian Orthodox Church establishment, the police, the KGB. Minkin was convinced that the murder was not simply a random disaster, a mugging that went too far, the grotesque folly of an angry drunk. He was sure that this was an assassination intended to scare anyone else who would dare to challenge the System. A thief, Minkin wrote, “goes after a woman wearing jewels on the street or a well-dressed man with a fat wallet. But rich people don’t go to work at 6:00 A.M. on a Sunday morning. The rich don’t live in Semkhoz.… Humanization and democratization are one side of our system. The other is murder. We have been freeing ourselves from fear, but the ax is an instrument to remind us of our fear. They are reminding us that we are defenseless.” Minkin compared Men’s murder with the Polish secret police’s assassination of the pro-Solidarity priest Jerzy Popieluszko in 1984—“an event that once and for all set the people against the forces of power in Poland.” But in the Soviet Union, Minkin wrote, “people are standing in lines talking about other things. They have fallen lower into the muck than our brothers in the ‘socialist camp’ in Eastern Europe. So much the worse for us. We have not revolted, we have not become indignant.… This is a turning point in our history and we do not realize it yet. When we do become aware, what will we do?”