Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  And this weakness, I asked, was all the fault of Shevardnadze?

  “The last myth of perestroika is collapsing: the myth of our wonderful foreign policy,” he said, and then launched into an account of grievances, of being “sold out” by a government willing to debase itself before its rival, to grant every concession, to withdraw from every “interest”—all to get economic help that never came. It was humiliating! And now, he said, Washington was backing a Baltic independence movement that would tear apart the union and lead it to civil war. “Look at the technical equipment of the popular front of Latvia, the number of fax machines, computers, video machines. That kind of stuff can only be bought for foreign currency, and they had none of their own. It was all received from the West under the cover of various charities. I am acquainted with documents gathered by Soviet intelligence, and it is clear what measures the West has taken to support the separatists in the Baltic states. These are government organizations. They actively support them.

  “The West,” he went on, “has an official plan to break apart the Soviet state. Doesn’t Bush’s statement indicate that when he says he supports separatist movements in the Baltics? Doesn’t the pressure indicate this? I think it does. This is called arm-twisting, and it’s a policy.… The West wants to remove the Soviet Union from the political arena as a superpower. They have already managed to remove the Soviet Union as an ideological enemy. Now they want to remove them from the world arena. It is all being achieved without the use of force, just through exploiting the processes going on inside the Soviet Union. The West now thinks it can talk down to us. They used to think of the Soviet Union as Upper Volta with missiles. Now they just think of us as Upper Volta. No one fears us.”

  More than anything else, Alksnis wanted to be feared. This was his role, to give a face to intimidation. He wanted the democrats and the independence movements to fear the possibility of violence; he wanted the West to fear its own attempts at intervention. Fear, which had been so undercut by five years of reforms, was still the only weapon left to the hard-liners. Everything else—ideology, the promise of a shining future—was lost, forgotten.

  Alksnis even had a prescription for the near future, and it went like this: disband the democratically elected parliaments, arrest all resisters (“Landsbergis, Yeltsin, whatever it takes”), take control of the press, and install in power a “national salvation front.” I said that sounded a lot like the scenarios for Prague in 1968 or, even more, the martial law in Poland.

  “Yes,” he said, “and you should not forget that martial law in Poland prevented a civil war there. It preserved the internal political stability in Poland and allowed a peaceful transition to reforms.” Gorbachev, he said, could play the role of General Jaruzelski. “And then everything will be okay. There will be stabilization of the economic situation, the internal political situation. Gorbachev may not want it, but he is not in a position to dictate the situation. Events have gone too far, and Gorbachev is hostage to his own policy. It’s gone beyond his control. It’s a grass-roots policy. These processes will splash out into the streets in the next few months. It will be very hard to take any specific actions then. The situation is such that it will all happen in the next few months.”

  The tanks rolled in Lithuania on January 13, 1991.

  For more than a year, the KGB and the army had been running operations in Lithuania designed to terrify the popularly elected government and the people. They arrested and beat draft dodgers; they seized various public buildings, institutes, and printing presses; they embarked on a propaganda campaign designed to convince the Russians, Poles, and Jews living there that the Lithuanians would turn them into third-class citizens; they ran military “exercises,” including sending dozens of tanks rumbling past the parliament building in the middle of the night; they established a National Salvation Committee led by the few Communist Party officials in Lithuania still loyal to Moscow.

  For more than a year, they hinted at an all-out offensive to unseat the Lithuanian government. On January 13, at around 2:00 A.M., the operation began. The National Salvation Committee declared itself in power and tried to take over all means of communication. With the KGB and ground forces commander General Valentin Varennikov in charge, soldiers fired on demonstrators at the Vilnius television tower. At least fourteen people were killed and hundreds injured: they were shot, beaten, or crushed under the tank treads.

  But it was a botched job. Even as thugs, the organizers of the coup were miserable failures. The violence did nothing but intensify hatred toward Moscow. The attempts to control the media were halfhearted. The newspaper Respublika continued publishing daily eyewitness reports. The television station in Kaunas, a city two hours from Vilnius, jacked up its signal and broadcast the same footage that was going out on CNN, the BBC, and other foreign stations. The men who planned the operation had figured that the Western media would be too preoccupied with the war in the Persian Gulf to care much for Lithuania. They figured that the Bush administration would be too grateful for Moscow’s support of the allied coalition against Saddam Hussein to show much public outrage. There was some truth in this. Americans were spending hours “watching the war” on CNN. The Lithuanians despaired that the West would overlook a series of events that could well mean the end of the revolutionary attempt to transform the Soviet Union.

  “Of course, it depends on where you are sitting, but I am convinced that in the long run, what you are seeing now in the Soviet Union will prove more important historically than the war in the Persian Gulf,” Algimantis Cekoulis, a leader of the Sajudis front in Lithuania, told me. “I don’t think anyone doubts that the allied coalition will win in Iraq, but who will prevail in the Soviet Union? How much blood will be shed? This is not some isolated issue for the tiny Baltic states, or even for the Soviet Union. The course of events in this country will have a dramatic effect on the fate of Europe and even of the United States.”

  My colleague Michael Dobbs finished dictating his first eyewitness account to me from Vilnius at around four-thirty in the morning. I got a couple hours’ sleep and went to Manezh Square. If there was going to be any demonstration at all, it would be outside the Manezh, an exhibition hall near the Kremlin gates. A few hundred people had gathered in the cold. Those with radios kept them tuned to the BBC or Radio Liberty. The main Moscow television and radio stations were broadcasting no news about what had happened in Lithuania except to say that there had been some sort of “incident,” and it was all the fault of the sitting government, of course. But Radio Liberty and the BBC were reading back essentially what the Western reporters in Vilnius had put into the Sunday-morning papers.

  The reaction was furious: “Gorbachev Is the Saddam Hussein of the Baltics!” one sign said. “Down with the Executioner!”

  I ran into Sergei Stankevich, a charming baby-faced politician, and now the deputy mayor of Moscow. I’d first met him when he was campaigning for the Congress of People’s Deputies wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He was furious. He had joined the Party because of the promise of Gorbachev and spent one night after another in political argument trying to defend the general secretary to his friends. “Now, that’s over. No more,” he said. “I’m finished with Gorbachev. There are just so many times you can let yourself be deceived.”

  Yuri Afanasyev climbed a platform and told the crowd that they would march toward the Central Committee buildings, the Party headquarters in Old Square. “The killings in Vilnius are the work of a dictatorship of reactionary circles—the generals, the KGB, the military-industrial complex, and the Communist Party chiefs,” he told the small crowd. “And at the head of that Party dictatorship stands the initiator of perestroika, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.”

  We marched up Marx Street toward the Central Committee, a series of dreary and imposing buildings around the corner from the KGB. A line of police had already cordoned off the area with sawhorses and a row of parked buses. But the crowd was in no mood to behave, and the people simply walked ar
ound the barriers and headed toward the entrances to the headquarters of the Communist Party. One man rushed by the cops and planted a six-foot crucifix at the front door. For a while, the people shouted up at the windows of the building and at the occasional apparatchik coming in to work. Then the police regrouped and cut off the marchers once more. Another charge could have led to blood. Stankevich and the other Democratic Russia leaders stepped in and said it was best to disperse, “to go home and figure things out.”

  The failed coup attempt in Lithuania changed everything for the middle-aged intellectuals who had remained loyal to the idea of a reformed Communist Party. They were the Gorbachev generation, the Moscow News generation, and they had lost a dream that many of them had held since the end of the war and the Twentieth Party Congress. While the young staff at Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported the story of the Lithuanian coup attempt as if it were the logical extension of the events of the months before, the writers and editors at Moscow News suddenly went through an ideological conversion. With the bloodshed in Vilnius, they lost all faith in Gorbachev. Len Karpinsky, Yegor Yakovlev, and a long list of shestidesyatniki including Vyacheslav Shostokovsky from the Higher Party School and Tengiz Abuladze, the director of the movie Repentance, signed a front-page editorial in Moscow News saying the regime, now in its “death throes,” had executed a “criminal act” in Lithuania: “After the bloody Sunday in Vilnius, what is left of our president’s favorite topics of ‘humane socialism,’ ‘new thinking,’ and a ‘common European home’? Virtually nothing.”

  For so long, most of these men and women had hoped for a socialism made humane. They felt comfortable with the idea of the traditional power structure—the Party—leading the way. After all, weren’t they all members? The idea of other parties was something foreign, bourgeois. The impudence of such people as Boris Yeltsin and Vytautas Landsbergis made them uncomfortable. Yegor Yakovlev, especially, had never liked Yeltsin, never liked the way he attacked Gorbachev or conducted himself. Now the men of Moscow News and their generation had nowhere to go but to the people Gorbachev had called, so venomously, the “so-called democrats.”

  “The Lithuanian tragedy must not fill our hearts with despair,” the editorial continued. “While opposing the onslaught of dictatorship and totalitarianism, we are pinning our hopes on the leadership of other Union republics.”

  The crowd at Nezavisimaya Gazeta viewed the conversion of Moscow News with pity and condescension. “The truth is, I could never understand why those people only decided to make their split when the tanks rolled into Vilnius,” Igor Zakharov said. “It’s like trying to figure out why a woman who hates her husband for twenty years finally decides one day, after one little incident, to get up, walk out the door, and never come back.”

  Maybe the young could never understand. The editors at Moscow News sat a long and painful wake for their own dreams and delusions. Not long after the attack in Lithuania, Yegor Yakovlev invited Karpinsky and a few other friends to his apartment for a sixtieth birthday party. “It was a meeting of people who didn’t know what to say to one another,” said Yakovlev’s son Vladimir, the editor of the business paper Kommersant. “The energy they used to have was gone, and the world around them was no longer their world. And, most important, they didn’t know how to relate to this new world. It was the feeling you see at the gatherings in Russia forty days after someone dies. No one is crying anymore, but no one knows quite what to say. These birthday gatherings had always been such celebrations. Now it was just silence, a complete breakdown.”

  While the newspapers played out their generational drama, the most brutal struggle was the war for television. It was fitting that the scene of violence in Vilnius was the concrete television tower on the edge of the city, for this revolution was a battle for the minds of every person in the Soviet Union. “The television image is everything,” Aleksandr Yakovlev had said, and now both sides knew it. For the reactionaries to recapture television would be far more than a symbolic defeat for democracy. It would be the beginning of the end.

  When I got to Vilnius a week after the killings, young Red Army soldiers were still camped around the tower, guarding it as if it were the most precious property in all of Lithuania. And it may have been. The soldiers had AK-47s slung over their shoulders and wore tight, frightened expressions. These were kids, eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old, many of them unaware of what had happened. The crack troops who had carried out the assault had already been evacuated.

  Outside the chain-link fence, on an incline leading away from the tower, a Lithuanian sculptor had carved out of wood a weeping, haggard Christ, a figure out of the paintings of Goya. People had made a shrine of the Christ, surrounding it with candles and flowers. Teenagers came and sat on the muddy hill and played tapes of Lithuanian folk songs and stared off into the pale winter sky.

  Down the road a couple of miles, thousands of pro-independence Lithuanians had surrounded the parliament building with makeshift barricades, the better to guard against the next assault. They used huge blocks of poured concrete, steel scrap, sandbags, buses, trams. Outside the building, people sat in the cold, some of them around oil-drum campfires. One man made a fire for himself out of a dozen copies of The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Along the barbed wire that cut off access to the front entrances to the parliament building, people had thrown the symbols of their fury: plastic machine guns, water pistols, watercolors of the tanks painted by schoolchildren; there were portraits of Gorbachev as a killer, Gorbachev kissing Stalin on the lips, Gorbachev shoving Lithuanians into a meat grinder; some had spiked their red Party membership cards along the top of the razor wire, giving the fence a leafy, autumnal look. Inside the parliament building, everyone was waiting for the next move. Why would they stop at the TV tower? Landsbergis stayed in his office and slept a few hours a night on his couch. He refused to go home for fear of kidnapping, or worse. Kids who had run away from the Red Army acted as a makeshift guard. They carried ancient hunting rifles, rusty knives, and the sort of clunky revolvers you saw in Hollywood westerns. In the press room upstairs, young volunteers sent out faxes and telexes to news bureaus around the world: bulletins, appeals for help, official pronouncements of the president. Always, the televisions played. We watched the British Sky Channel and CNN to see what the world was seeing and Vremya in the evening to get a fix on the Moscow propaganda line. The Lithuanians despaired when the Gulf War news completely overwhelmed their own crisis on the Western stations. Rumors inside the building gave everyone a bad case of the jumps: “Tonight’s the night.” “They’re going into Latvia tomorrow morning.” “The roof’s been rigged up so they can’t land the helicopters.” Lithuania was on the edge of a nervous breakdown, but there was no retreat.

  “Why should we not win?” Landsbergis said.

  At first, there were some heroic attempts in Moscow to bypass the censors and deliver the news. The cheeky late-night program Television News Service (TSN) broadcast footage of soldiers beating Lithuanians near the tower. The Leningrad magazine show The Fifth Wheel also showed tape of the beatings and shootings.

  But the Kremlin’s new television czar, a fearsome hack named Leonid Kravchenko, quickly clamped down on all information broadcast about Lithuania. As the head of Gosteleradio, the huge bureaucracy that ran central television and radio, Kravchenko wiped out nearly all the major programs that had dared to report the news independently. In short order, Kravchenko banned Vzglyad (“View”), the most heroic of the glasnost magazine shows; he censored the reports on TSN; he darkened whatever glimmer of independence Vremya was beginning to show and returned it to the glory days of the Brezhnev era.

  In the halls of the Supreme Soviet one afternoon, a reporter asked Kravchenko what he wanted in his broadcasts.

  “Objectivity,” Kravchenko said.

  “And who decides what is objective?”

  “I decide,” he said.

  Kravchenko said plainly that central television should reflect the
view of the president and not attack him. “State television does not have the right to engage in criticism of the leadership of the country,” he told Nezavisimaya Gazeta. What replaced much of the censored shows was even more insidious and cynical. Just as the Party had used the faith healer Anatoly Kashpirovsky to soothe a hurting country, they now filled the airwaves with other diverting junk. Field of Miracles, a rip-off of the low-rent American show Wheel of Fortune, was the new sensation. Contestants lined up to win such wonders as a rhinestone ring and a box of Tide. Kravchenko put on professional wrestling, Geraldo Rivera’s interviews with dwarf transvestites, the Death of Elvis miniseries, schmaltzy World War II documentaries, and a Czech soap opera, Hospital on the Edge of Town. Kravchenko was willing to try whatever opiate on the masses that seemed to work. On the day after the bloodshed in Vilnius, while there were solemn marches in cities across the country honoring the dead, Kravchenko aired the Aleksandr Show, a variety hour so sleazy that Wayne Newton would have cringed.

  In their front-page editorial, the Moscow News editors and their supporters echoed Solzhenitsyn’s essay “Live Not by Lies” and put out the call to their colleagues: “We appeal to reporters and journalists: If you lack courage or opportunity to tell the truth, at least abstain from telling lies! Lies will fool no one anymore. They are evident today.”

  But because state controls were still relatively tight, television journalists had a much harder time following their consciences than print reporters. On TSN, Tatyana Mitkova ran a tape of Interior Minister Boris Pugo’s fantastical testimony about Lithuania in the Supreme Soviet. Pugo’s defense of the operation in Vilnius was a transparent lie. When Mitkova came back on the screen, she said, “Unfortunately this is all the information TSN has found it possible to provide.” That was the best she could do.