Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  On the fortieth day after the murder, the day in the Orthodox faith on which the soul of the deceased either ascends to heaven or descends to hell, I drove out to the church in Novaya Derevnya. Even now, weeks after the funeral, people walked down the muddy road to the church to stop awhile at the grave, to lay down fresh flowers. The rotting flowers smelled like old wine, fruity and sour. I met a woman, eighty-six years old, named Maria Tepnina near the grave. She had known Aleksandr Men since he was a child; she knew the whole family. She stared a while at the grave and her face darkened with grief and confusion. After we stood there a while in silence, a light rain slowly soaking us, Tepnina invited me to her house. She lived just up the road from Father Aleksandr’s church. Half the floor was covered with just-harvested potatoes, the walls were covered with family pictures and small icons.

  For many years, Tepnina said, she helped Men with his secretarial work. “He’d get threatening letters all the time. He just threw them all away, never paid any attention. They accused him of everything from insulting the church, to being a ‘rotten kike,’ to serving the powers that be. Awful things, and they meant nothing to him.”

  From 1946 to 1954, Tepnina was in a prison camp near the Siberian city of Kemerovo and then in exile in Krasnoyarsk. In the camps, she met priests and believers, “real holy men.” She saw people baptized secretly in their cells, priests shot muttering their thanks to God. But, she said, she had never met anyone with Men’s gift for sympathy. And so she made sure, in her old age, to live near his church. Now, she was trying to make sense of the murder. “I think he was a genuine apostle, and all apostles end their lives as martyrs,” she said. “So maybe there is a certain justice in this. All his life, Father Aleksandr prepared himself for this, daring to speak from his soul.”

  Another of Men’s parishioners, Tatyana Sagaleyeva, came in and sat down with us. She had just moved from the nearby village of Abramtsevo to Tepnina’s house. She also came to be closer to Men’s church and to care for her aging friend. And now she was crying, and angry. “The murder of Father Aleksandr is a mystical event, not just a simple killing, an accident,” she said. “God has taken this man from us, a spiritual leader who was at the prime of his life. His appearance was a miracle, a man who could, despite it all, despite an aggressive atheistic state, penetrate the sufferings of a great writer like Solzhenitsyn or of a simple woman like me. And suddenly he disappears. How to understand it? Why did God take him from us? Why now?”

  The day after the murder of Aleksandr Men, a convoy of paratroopers from the Ryazan Airborne Division headed north for Moscow, 125 miles away. It was 3:00 A.M. Hours later, three dozen military transport planes carrying two regiments in full battle gear landed at airstrips in Ryazan. The KGB’s elite Dzerzhinsky Division was also put on full battle alert.

  For days after the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda broke the story, there were rumors that the military had staged a rehearsal for a coup d’état. Yeltsin appeared before the Russian parliament and said, “They are trying to prove to us that these are peaceful maneuvers connected with the November 7 Revolution Day parade. But there are strong doubts about this.” A spokesman for the military, of course, declared the maneuvers were not maneuvers at all. The soldiers were merely helping out in the fields collecting the potato harvest. Which led Komsomolskaya Pravda to ask why soldiers gathering potatoes required the use of AK-47 machine guns and bulletproof vests.

  By now, I had spent many nights in Moscow listening to the dark forecasts of one Russian friend or another. Every unpromising development, every hint of difficulty, was somehow part of a larger pattern, a murderous conspiracy. For a long while, I felt like Earl Warren at an unending convention of Kennedy-assassination theorists. What it took me a long time to realize was that in Moscow, being paranoid doesn’t mean doom is not on the way. To live in a totalitarian world and not be paranoid—or at least pessimistic—was itself lunacy. When had events ever been benign in this twisted Oz?

  As we would soon find out in the coming months, first in Vilnius and Riga, then in Moscow, there was indeed a conspiracy under way, and it was the most open, unguarded conspiracy imaginable. The hard-liners’ struggle for power started with pressure, fleeting signs, random moments of psychological terror. Perhaps we would never know who had killed Aleksandr Men … but we could guess. We would never know what the troops were doing in Ryazan … but we could guess.

  What was so strange about the times we were living in was that the press was free to guess, too. Political talk was no longer a dark parlor game among trusted friends. The week after the Ryazan “rehearsal,” a well-known writer, Andrei Nuikin, published a piece in Moscow News called “Military Overthrow.” Nuikin quoted a leader of the radical servicemen’s group “Shield,” who told him that “the leadership of the armed forces already had a clear plan to take control of the situation in the country.” Nuikin said the plan was to start the coup, perhaps in the far east, with the seizure of television stations and newspapers and with the “neutralization” of foreign journalists and their ability to get information out of the country. The Shield supporter said the military would justify the coup not by campaigning directly against Gorbachev’s reforms, but by claiming that ethnic tensions had gotten out of control, the economy was collapsing, and socialism was endangered and that the situation required emergency measures. Nuikin wrote that he had no evidence that the military actually had plans for such a coup but he added that the liberals had “grounds to consider means of responding.”

  The third omen of September arrived on the 18th with the morning mail. Komsomolskaya Pravda contained a special insert: a sixteen-thousand-word essay called “How Can We Revitalize Russia.” The author was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and the essay marked the first time in three decades that he had been able to publish a new work in a Soviet journal.

  The article seemed like notes from the dead, as if Herzen or Dostoevsky had suddenly published from the Great Beyond a manifesto on the current state of things. Solzhenitsyn was being published everywhere now, but they were works from the sixties and seventies, historical works about twentieth-century tragedy written in an eighteenth-century language. Some readers were interested; some were bored with later works, especially the “Red Wheel” cycle of historical novels. But in either case, Solzhenitsyn himself was a gigantic absence, a legend living a ghostly life in a place that might as well have been a mountain palace in Brunei. And that mattered. In Russia, the presence of the writer was almost as important as the presence of the work. One writer after another—Vasily Aksyonov, Sasha Sokolov, Yuz Aleshkovsky, Vladimir Voinovich—came back, at least for long visits, to make contact with the audience and the language they had lost. Even in emigration they had always written for “home.”

  But Solzhenitsyn was secluded and mum. He was a legend. Russian intellectuals, especially, were alternately fascinated and repelled by the odd life the writer led in the woods of Cavendish, Vermont. Each new detail intrigued them. Solzhenitsyn lived in a good, but not indecently opulent, house, and he put up a chain-link fence to keep away unwanted visitors and snowmobiles. But in Moscow, I often heard people talk of Solzhenitsyn’s “castle” and the “great wall” that surrounded it. When he first moved to Vermont, he spoke for twenty minutes at a town meeting and apologized to the people of Cavendish for the fence. He told them that when he lived without it, scores of uninvited visitors “arrived without invitations and without warning.… And so for hundreds of hours I talked to hundreds of people, and my work was ruined.”

  That Solzhenitsyn would insist on such a monkish life seemed incredible, especially in America, where publicity was the coin of the realm. Solemn, imperious, even righteous beyond measure, Solzhenitsyn had the nerve to make much of the contemporary literary scene look vaguely frivolous. He wrote gigantically (if not always well), as if from another age. He lacked the modernist leveler of irony. Instead, his rare public pronouncements were chillingly sarcastic. In political argument, disdain was his most common thre
ad. He thundered against the “cowardice” of the West and the “liquid manure” of pop culture in the fierce voice of another era. Jeremiah was heroic, no doubt, but hard to love. He made no apologies. “The writer’s ultimate task is to restore the memory of his murdered people. Is that not enough for a single writer?” Solzhenitsyn told his biographer, Michael Scammell. “They murdered my people and destroyed its memory. And I’m dragging it into the light of day all on my own. Of course, there are hundreds like me back there who could drag it out, too. Well, it didn’t fall to them; it fell to me. And I’m doing the work of a hundred men, and that’s all there is to it.”

  To me, Solzhenitsyn had a perfectly accurate sense of his mission and place in the world. No matter how dull some of the later work on the Revolution might be, The Gulag Archipelago would never fade from the history of Russian literature or the history of Russia. No single work, including Orwell’s novels, did as much to shatter the illusions of the West; no book did more to educate the Soviet people and undermine the regime. So who cared if he had a fence? Who cared if some of his books were beside the point? But the price Solzhenitsyn paid for his sense of mission and its immodest expression was mockery. Both in America and in the Soviet Union, there were jokes about Solzhenitsyn’s “gulag complex,” speculations that he craved the isolation of prisons and prisons-of-his-own-making. He was a monarchist, an anti-Semite, a paranoiac. Voinovich wrote a satirical novel, Moscow 2042, that featured a Solzhenitsyn-like character who seemed a cross between a fundamentalist imam and a West Virginia hermit. Solzhenitsyn felt wounded. “They lie about me as they would about a dead man,” he once said.

  Aleksandr Isayevich, for his part, kept to his schedule. He worked twelve to fourteen hours a day at his desk filling notebooks with the tiny handwriting he learned while trying to conceal his drafts in prison. He also worked on assembling archives on the Revolution and the development of a fund to help the survivors of the gulag. In August 1990, he got back his citizenship. The Russian prime minister, Ivan Silayev, practically begged Solzhenitsyn to return home “in the interests of the state and its future destiny.… Your return to Russia is, in my view, one of those moves that our homeland needs as much as air.” It seemed strange that Solzhenitsyn still had nothing to say about what was going on in the Soviet Union. When he caved in and granted an interview to Time magazine, he set down firm conditions: no questions about Gorbachev or politics, only literature.

  “How to Revitalize Russia” came as a shock. After such long silence, Solzhenitsyn worked all summer on his essay and then published it in a paper with a circulation of between twenty-five and thirty million readers. (The next day it also ran in the weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta, which went out to another four million.)

  The text began in prophetic voice:

  The clock of communism has tolled its final hour.

  But the concrete structure has not completely collapsed.

  Instead of being liberated, we may be crushed beneath the rubble.

  That opening, and the essay as a whole, had much the same rhythm as his “Letter to the Soviet Leaders,” which he sent to the Kremlin the year before his exile. “Your dearest wish,” he had written to Brezhnev, “is for our state structure and our ideological system never to change, to remain as they are for centuries. But history is not like that. Every system either finds a way to develop or else collapses.” He was now addressing a country that was doing both at once, though the collapse was ruthless and the development erratic. After a ringing restatement of the “blind and malignant” Bolshevik disaster—the murder of tens of millions of people, the destruction of the peasantry, the poisoning of the environment, the moral and spiritual degradation of the country—he provided what he called a “tentative proposal” but what sounded more like the vatic prescription of a convinced prophet:

  “This is how I see it: We should immediately proclaim loudly and clearly: The three Baltic republics [Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania], the three Transcaucasian republics [Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan], the four Central Asian republics [Kirgizia, Uzbekistan, Turkmenia, and Tajikistan], and also Moldavia, if it is drawn more to Romania, these eleven—indeed!—definitely must be separated for good.…

  “We do not have the energy to deal with the periphery, either economically or spiritually. We do not have the energy to run an Empire! And we do not need it, let us shrug it off: It is crushing us, it is draining us, and it is accelerating our demise.…”

  The essay did not mention Gorbachev by name and gave him credit for nothing. Instead, the criticism, resounding and heavy with sarcasm, began in the third word of the title: obustroit’ was a play on the word “perestroika.” Gorbachev and the Communist Party used “perestroika” to mean the “rebuilding” or cleansing of socialism after Stalin’s “deformation” of Leninism. Solzhenitsyn’s verb, obustroit’, could be translated as to reconstitute, fix, fix up, make comfortable, organize, or, more loosely, revitalize. The ironic echo of “perestroika” and the use of “Russia” instead of “Soviet Union” made it clear from the start that Solzhenitsyn’s program had little to do with Gorbachev’s idea of a “humane democratic socialism” or the maintenance of the “multiethnic state.” Indeed, Solzhenitsyn showed little else but disdain for Gorbachev’s efforts. The events of five years were reduced almost to nothing:

  “What have five or six years of the much-celebrated ‘perestroika’ brought us? Pathetic reshuffling in the Central Committee. Slapping together of an ugly, artificial electoral system, with a view solely to the Communist Party’s clinging to power. Slipshod, confused, and indecisive laws.…”

  Immediately after publication, there were varied complaints about the essay. The language, so full of archaic words, felt artificial, dusty. The Kazakhs were furious that Solzhenitsyn felt the northern part of the republic was, essentially, Russian. Ukrainians, especially, made it clear that independence, not a Slavic union, was their goal. Then there was the cranky side of Solzhenitsyn, the prig worrying that Russia would mindlessly pursue the road to Gomorrah because it couldn’t find the off switch on the TV set: “Our young people, whom families and schools have overlooked, are growing in the direction of mindless, barbaric emulation of anything enticing coming from alien parts, if not in the direction of crime. The historic Iron Curtain protected the country superbly from everything good that exists in the West.… However, this Curtain did not reach all the way down, and this is where the liquid manure of debased, degraded ‘mass pop-culture,’ most vulgar fashions and excessive public displays seeped through. It was this waste that our impoverished, unfairly deprived young people swallowed greedily.”

  This old-mannish side of Solzhenitsyn seemed to me as marginal as Tolstoy’s retrograde views on women and sex in The Kreutzer Sonata. But more important was that the right-wing fanatics, the monarchists and black-shirted nationalists, the anti-Semites of Pamyat, were deeply disappointed by the essay. They were looking for an endorsement of authoritarian rule, and what they got was a peculiar, but distinct, support of democracy and private property. What they got was a call for the breakup of the empire they worshiped.

  There were serious mistakes and misjudgments in the essay. Solzhenitsyn did not recognize just how deeply Ukrainians, for example, had come to believe in their own distinctiveness, how much they wanted a capital in Kiev, not Moscow. And, as always, Solzhenitsyn created problems for himself with the pitch of his voice, its hyped-up grandeur. Somehow, the strength of his own hopes for a Slavic state drowned out the admission that he also makes: that, yes, of course, it must be the Ukrainians themselves who decide if they want to join Russia.

  Solzhenitsyn’s most curious critic turned out to be Gorbachev himself. A few days after the publication of “How to Revitalize Russia,” a member of the Supreme Soviet asked the president to comment. (The idea of it! The general secretary responds in parliament to Solzhenitsyn!) To a hushed chamber, Gorbachev said he felt “contradictory” emotions after reading the essay twice through. Solzhenitsyn’s view
s “on the future of the state,” he said, “are far from reality and are being constructed out of the context of our country’s development and bear a destructive character. But nonetheless there are interesting thoughts in the article of this undoubtedly great person.” A splendid backhanded compliment. But then Gorbachev felt the need to distort Solzhenitsyn, to exploit the recurring stereotype of his views. Solzhenitsyn, Gorbachev said, “is all in the past, the Russia of old, the czarist monarchy. This is not acceptable to me.” It was self-serving, a moment of demagoguery designed to present himself as the singular modern democrat.

  On October 15, Gorbachev received the Nobel Prize for Peace.

  On October 16, after the leaders of the KGB, the police, the army, and the defense industry made it quite clear that they would not tolerate a radical reordering of political and economic power, Gorbachev withdrew his support for the 500 Days plan. Gorbachev had caved in to the people who had everything to lose from the reform of the country. When he did that it was clear to everyone in the Soviet Union that Gorbachev had begun listing to the right. Soon he would reject all the reformers in his team, he would begin to speak, with a sneer, of the “so-called democrats.” He would ignore one grab for power after another, ever confident that he was serving the cause of reform. The counterrevolution, which began with the swing of an assassin’s ax, was now ascendant.

  “When Mikhail Sergeyevich rejected the 500 Days program he was rejecting the last chance for a civilized transition to a new order,” Aleksandr Yakovlev told me. “It was probably his worst, most dangerous mistake, because what followed was nothing less than a war.”