Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  One day during those first weeks of Nezavisimaya Gazeta’s life, I went to the paper’s offices with Karaulov. As we walked along the muddy streets near the KGB buildings on Lubyanka Square, he was trying to sell me—literally—some crackpot spy-story documents involving the Bolshoi Theater. Information was constantly for sale now in Moscow. When asked for interviews, some Kremlin officials had no shame. “How much?” they would say. When I refused Karaulov’s “tip” on the Bolshoi and explained the rules about not paying for information, he seemed alternately bemused and hurt. “Besides, you’d never find the place without me,” he said. “You owe me for that, at least.” Nezavisimaya Gazeta’s offices were tucked away in an obscure courtyard building not far from Lubyanka Square. At the time, the paper shared the building with the Voskhod (Sunrise) printing company. Expansion eventually eased the printers out. The paper originally had twenty staffers and appeared three days a week, then built up to two hundred employees and five issues a week. When I first visited the office, the place was a sea of paper and ironic memorabilia—faded portraits of old Politburo members a specialty. No one looked as if he had slept, showered, or shaved in days.

  Tretyakov wanted nothing more than to mimic the traditional model of a Western newspaper. His staff looked Village Voice, but he yearned for the style and substance of The New York Times. “It may seem boring to you,” Tretyakov told me during one of our talks, “but I want to create the first Western-style, respectable, objective paper of the Soviet era.”

  Turned down by the older stars, Tretyakov got his journalists wherever he could find them. Most of them had worked at second- and third-tier publications, at movie and theatrical quarterlies, Baltic underground sheets, Komsomol dailies. Some had no experience at all. They were biologists, secretaries, workers, students, diplomats, anything. Whatever skills they did or did not have, they had a unanimous contempt for all things sovok—the slang term for “Soviet.” (The staff’s favorite early fan letter read, “Congratulations: You are neither pro-Soviet nor anti-Soviet. You are simply non-Soviet.”) All were young, and they did not bother to struggle with the questions of their elders. The ideological ruminations of a man like Len Karpinsky were for these kids irrelevant and just a little bit sad.

  Mikhail Leontyev, the paper’s economics editor, was a typical hire. He had studied economics at the Plekhanov Institute in Moscow, but to avoid doing “idiot work for the regime,” he quit the academic world and worked for years restoring old Russian furniture. He hardly ever wrote, he told me: “Why bother?” He did publish one prescient essay for the Latvian paper Atmoda in 1989 titled “The New Consensus,” about the growing front of fascists, nationalists, and military leaders. “That was about all I could do,” Leontyev said. “I just couldn’t work for any of the old papers. Coming here, discovering Nezavisimaya Gazeta, was the revelation we were all waiting for. The coverage of economics in our paper starts from the principle that we don’t need to tear our hair out about whether Marxism-Leninism or capitalism is the right way to go. That debate is dead as can be. Do we really have to go crazy over whether it is good to find a healthy balance between efficiency and social welfare? About whether the rules of the market are ultimately correct? I don’t think so. I don’t cover Communism or any other religions in these pages. That’s not my business.”

  The darkening political mood that winter, the ominous sense that the army, the KGB, and the Communist Party now formed an open alliance against a radical reform of the country, had given Nezavisimaya Gazeta an immediate sense of purpose. Muscovites reading Nezavisimaya Gazeta in that first month or so had a sense of understanding and foreboding about the political earthquake to come. Not so with Moscow News, which still kept its reports within certain bounds. Moscow News was no longer responding to government censors—they had been either removed or rendered completely benign—but, rather, to an internal sense of propriety and caution, a lingering reverence for Gorbachev and the old hopes of the thaw generation.

  Week after week, Nezavisimaya Gazeta was reinventing the newspaper in Moscow, and a twenty-seven-year-old reporter named Sergei Parkhomenko was consistently the paper’s most incisive political commentator. The son and grandson of journalists, Parkhomenko first won a name for himself at the quarterly Teatr when he covered the first session of the Congress of People’s Deputies in May 1989, a job he called the “ultimate in theater criticism.” Gorbachev played the Great Reformer, Sakharov was the Conquering Saint, and the Communist Party hacks were the Evil Chorus. “Imagine if you in America had held the Constitutional Convention live on television,” he said. “The old order died a little every day. No play ever changed an audience more thoroughly.”

  One night, I went with Sergei to the presses at Izvestia where Nezavisimaya Gazeta was printed. He was the duty editor, acting as a liaison between the printers and the editors back at the office, who were constantly trying to shove late items into the paper. He had already written a column in the morning and had called in a few items for his after-hours job as a stringer for other publications. Like many good young reporters in Moscow, Parkhomenko discovered he could make some hard currency on the side by working for a foreign news organization—in his case, Agence France Presse, the official French wire service. As it turned out, the experience expanded his sense of journalism. “With the French, I got a taste of real reporting,” he said. “It was a new sort of game. Who can be the first to get the information? Who can get sources? Before it was all ‘I think this,’ ‘I think that.’ Now the game had changed and I loved it and the skills were just what I needed. You see, I somehow always knew I would work at a place like Nezavisimaya Gazeta. I knew it instinctively. I wanted a place that was born without any complexes. There are more radical publications, but I’m not interested in the contest for who can be the most radical or liberal. I can’t stand unity and consensus.”

  Parkhomenko was best known in Moscow for his commentaries—mainly because he refused to shill for any one politician or party line—but he was also an instinctive investigative reporter. He caused a terrific scandal when he discovered that the Central Committee had been running for years a huge fourteen-room workshop for manufacturing fake Western passports. He reported that there were fake stamps, blank passport forms for dozens of foreign countries, and even false mustaches and beards and hats for the passport photos.

  Investigative work was a signature of the front page at Nezavisimaya Gazeta. A married couple in their twenties at the paper, Anya Ostapchuk and Zhenya Krasnikov, enraged the Party when they scooped everyone by printing a copy of the Communist Party’s proposed new platform endorsing a “democratic, humane socialism.” Anya’s methods were “quite simple and un-Soviet.” She went to the apartment of a Central Committee member, Vasily Lipitsky, and asked about the platform. He gave her the twenty-three-page document written by Gorbachev’s aide, Giorgi Shakhnazarov, and said she could read it, “but no notes and no tape recorders.”

  “Then something odd happened,” Anya said. “Lipitsky said he had to take a phone call in the next room. As soon as he left, I got out my tape recorder and read the thing as fast as I could. He didn’t come back in time to stop me. I finished. But I’m sure he wanted me to do just that. It was terrific fun.”

  Presented with the scoop, Tretyakov was stunned. At Moscow News, his bosses would never have permitted such a thing. Too dangerous, a distinct lack of respect. But Tretyakov immediately published the piece. In a wry note to the readers, he wrote that ordinarily Nezavisimaya Gazeta did not print party manifestos and platforms “because that would be a form of advertising,” and added, “but from such a party we would rather not take any money.”

  The next day, as every newspaper in Moscow scurried to catch up with the platform story, Parkhomenko got a swift lesson in the sensibilities of the powerful. At a small late-night press conference in the Moscow suburb of Novo-Ogarevo, Gorbachev looked at the reporters and said, “Okay, so who here is from Nezavisimaya Gazeta?”

  The reporter f
rom state television, a whinnying time-server, blanched and panicked.

  “No, no, it’s him,” he said, pointing at Parkhomenko.

  “Where did you steal it from?” Gorbachev said.

  “I can’t say,” Parkhomenko said.

  “And why not?”

  “Because that’s the way we work.”

  After the press conference, two of Gorbachev’s aides tried to weasel the information out of Parkhomenko. “Oh, come on,” one of them said. “You can tell me. I won’t tell another soul!”

  Shakhnazarov, for his part, told me he was shocked to see his work in the paper. “Woodward and Bernstein—that is not exactly something we’re used to,” he said.

  Sometimes Tretyakov and Zakharov, the village elders at the paper, were scared by their own reporters, their relentlessness, their giddy fearlessness. They were well aware of just how inexperienced the reporters were, how little they knew about degrees of reliability and balance. Often, reporters turned in stories that were merely rumors that seemed a bit too good to check. But while the top editors often demanded more reporting and numerous rewrites, they seldom killed any stories. The only story that Tretyakov refused to run without further question was the rubbish about the KGB and the Bolshoi Theater that Karaulov had tried to peddle to me.

  “The reason these kids do things like investigative work is that they not only don’t fear the system, they don’t even respect it,” Zakharov said. “These kids are arrogant, silly, uneducated, undisciplined; they live only in the present. They don’t care about yesterday and have no idea that there is nothing new under the sun. But they have no prejudices. They don’t think ahead and wonder if someone at the Kremlin will think this or that. They just go ahead and do it.”

  The young reporters also changed the language of newspapers. They dispensed with the wooden bureaucratese and fanatic sloganeering of the Soviet period. “We don’t talk Pravda language,” Parkhomenko said. The change was incredible. Before I left for Russia, I took a course at George Washington University in something called “Newspaper Russian.” For weeks, we memorized endless lists of political clichés: “The talks were held in a warm and friendly atmosphere”; “The peace-loving comrade-nations of the world will face the imperialists in a round of negotiations next week”; and so on. It was the language of Novoyaz, or Newspeak, and nowhere had it reached such a level of absurdity as in the Soviet Union. But Nezavisimaya Gazeta’s younger reporters had never had to write that way—or at least not for long. While someone like Len Karpinsky still had trouble clearing the Novoyaz from his prose—“I try, but I can’t always get it clear”—the Nezavisimaya Gazeta crowd had no such handicap.

  “Right away, we tried to imitate Western language,” Parkhomenko said at the print shop. “In Russian, there had never been political language of a civilized country.”

  It took a while, but I was getting a better sense now of who was leading the right-wing counterrevolution. One night I went to the Red Army Theater for what the right-wing press promised would be an evening of “patriotic celebration.” It was a full house, and nearly everyone was in uniform: army drab, priests’ black, and, here and there, a writer in a pilled chocolate-brown suit. Onstage, one Father Fyodor, his robes festooned with military decorations, droned on about the greatness of Russia’s warriors, “her Aleksandr Nevsky, her Dmitri Donskoi, her proud knights.”

  “God is our greatest general!” he cried out, and God’s seconds, the teenage recruits who’d been bused in for the show, applauded dutifully.

  “But what about Yazov?” one of these teenagers whispered to me. “Isn’t he our general?”

  Valentin Rasputin, a Siberian novelist well known for his moral indignation and attacks on the ecological ruin of Lake Baikal, sat off to the side of the stage, nodding solemnly at all the speeches. Rasputin was a writer of real talent. His stories about the degradation of the countryside and Communism’s damage to the spirit were respected even by those critics who despised his right-wing politics. But he was not merely conservative. Rasputin was a hater, a brooding anti-Semite who blamed the Jews for the crimes of the Bolsheviks. And that was when he was giving an interview to The New York Times. He was less discreet at gatherings of the Russian Writers’ Union.

  For years the right-wingers lived in comfort. They controlled the unions, lived decently. But now, with the barbarians at the gate, they were ready to form even the strangest of coalitions. Rasputin’s literary nationalists and the official priests of the Russian Orthodox Church aligned themselves with men like Akhromeyev and Yazov of the Red Army and Kryuchkov of the KGB, avowed Communists and party leaders. It was a confusing picture. But as I sat there that night in the Red Army Theater, I could see that they had forged a common language, one that had nothing to do with Communist ideology or theocracy. The unifying banner of this alliance of “patriots” was the imagery of empire, vast and powerful, unique and holy. Democracy, rock and roll, stock markets, foreign businesses, independence movements, uppity Jews, Balts, and Asians all undermined the empire.

  After the priest blessed the military, and Rasputin blessed Mother Russia, Lieutenant General Gennadi Stepanovsky, one of the leaders of the army’s Communist Party organization, gave the final benediction. The democrats, he said, were “auctioning off our tanks, destroying our monuments, destroying our ability to fight for freedom in the Baltics. But they will not win. They cannot wipe out our great history.” Like Stalin during the war, Stepankovsky hoped a mystical stew of great-power nationalism would form the common bond. This time the enemy was not the Nazis, but the greater world itself, and its vanguard, the democratic infidels.

  After the ceremonies that night I glanced through the latest issue of Molodaya Gvardiya (“Young Guard”), one of the exemplars of the new ideology. It was filled with the usual claims: “[Yeltsin’s] Russia is a marionette of Western Zionism without a single shot being fired. One clearly sees a plan to draw the world into yet another world war in which Russians and other Slavs will be the cheap cannon fodder. A new spiral of historical genocide is being plotted against us.” Another article warned against “strangers bearing gifts” and “cancer-causing shampoos” from Poland, “contaminated bread boxes and shopping bags” from Vietnam, and, of course, the American Big Mac (“too fast and very unhealthy”).

  The most powerful of the hard-liners—Kryuchkov, Pugo, Yazov, Lukyanov—knew better than to announce their leadership of the creeping, militarized coup d’état that Shevardnadze had warned of. They made threatening gestures and issued chilling proclamations, but, in general, they let others do the dirtiest work. In those winter months, the man who gave a face to the coup was an army colonel from Latvia, Viktor Alksnis. With his high black pompadour and black leather jacket, Alksnis was known in the liberal press as the “black colonel,” the Darth Vader of the hard-line set. He loved his role and fairly chewed the scenery every time he appeared on the public stage.

  “Before you stands a reactionary scum!” he once told the Congress. (Who would doubt him?) Then he pushed up his lower lip and affected the glare of Mussolini. Caricature, the picture of outsized badness, was just what the part required, and Alksnis played it beautifully. By comparison, men like Supreme Soviet Chairman Lukyanov and Kryuchkov thought they would look like the soul of sweet reason.

  As a deputy, Alksnis represented the Soviet military bases in Latvia. He was not much liked. His own aunt went door to door campaigning against him. But Alksnis won, promising to restore the “honor of the military” after the “humiliations” of the withdrawal from Afghanistan and Eastern Europe, the arms reduction treaties with the West, and the cuts in the defense budget. As Party elders like Geidar Aliyev and Yegor Ligachev faded from view, Alksnis, and his counterpart from Kazakhstan, Colonel Nikolai Petrushenko, organized the Soyuz faction under Lukyanov’s subtle patronage. Soyuz was a remarkably effective weapon for the right. It was Soyuz that pressured Gorbachev to fire his liberal interior minister, Vadim Bakatin, and replace him with a hard-liner, Bo
ris Pugo. And it was Soyuz that constantly denounced Shevardnadze’s foreign policy as treasonous. When he resigned, Shevarnadze angrily wondered why no one had defended him against the “boys in colonel’s epaulets.”

  Alksnis’s grandfather, Yakov, was head of the air force in the 1930s. In May 1937, at the height of the purges, Yakov Alksnis was a member of the three-man military tribunal that ordered the conviction and execution of Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the most brilliant military man of his time, on trumped-up charges of espionage. Alksnis then fell to the logic of the era. Eight months after Tukhachevsky’s trial, he was arrested and shot.

  “Those were complicated times,” the grandson said blandly.

  I met “the black colonel” at his suite at the Moskva Hotel, the vast home to out-of-town deputies in the Supreme Soviet. After looking me up and down, Alksnis said, “If you want to call me a reactionary, go ahead.” A strange greeting, but then he was not an ordinary man. Even in his overheated room, Alksnis never took off his black leather jacket. He was like a teenager who could feel the length of his hair and the cut of his jeans at every moment like a second being. His look was his statement. He affected at all times an expression of bored disgust and quickly pronounced himself disgusted to meet me, a representative of the “lying bourgeois press.” But, at the same time, he was eager to convey the greater disgust he felt with the way the Kremlin had gone all fuzzy and pusillanimous on him. “We are like Cupid: armed, naked, and we impose love on everyone,” he said. “Sad as it may be, the reality of today’s ‘new thinking,’ the priority on ‘common human values,’ well, the reality of it is that the Soviet Union has lost its status as a superpower. It is treated as if it should know its place. We are bullied now!”