Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  In Kaunas, the Lithuanian television producers set up a relay system so that their broadcast could go to all the Baltics, southern Finland, and eastern Poland. When the Kaunas Party chief went on the air to defend the attack, the host stared him down and said, “After what’s happened in Vilnius, how do you even look people in the eye?” The Kaunas station director, Raimondas Sestakauskas, told me, “Look, we don’t have tanks, we don’t have much at all to win our war for independence. But we’re going to resist, and the resistance now is a matter of strength of character … and television.”

  No matter what the Moscow News appeal said, the Communist Party still thought it could lie to the people and get away with it. Their designated con man was Aleksandr Nevzorov, the right wing’s video warrior. A former movie stuntman, he hosted 600 Seconds, an immensely popular program on Leningrad television that featured gruesome true-crime stories and propaganda in the service of the Motherland. Like his friend Colonel Alksnis, Nevzorov was into leather. He always wore a black leather jacket and a matching sneer. As a journalist, he was equal parts Geraldo Rivera and propaganda minister, a master of the basest instincts of schlock and vengeance. For a couple of years, 600 Seconds had been a semi-harmless distraction for hard times, the Soviet equivalent of a few minutes with the New York Post or one of the “real cops” shows on American television. Nevzorov won huge popularity by exposing his audience of around eighty million people to the world of corruption and vice. His was the scream in the agitprop cathedral, and the people loved it. Night after night, as the clock ticked away frantically in the corner of the screen (600 … 599 … 598 …), Nevzorov showed police dragging bullet-riddled corpses from the Neva River, cajoled rapists and murderers into “live on tape” confessions, and exposed the dalliances and secret luxuries of the Communist Party elite. Nevzorov was constantly sticking his camera in the snoot of some greedy apparatchik who’d just been caught getting a deal on a car or a house. “I’m probably responsible for the heart attacks of about forty apparatchiks,” Nevzorov boasted when I went to see him at his studios in Leningrad.

  Despite Nevzorov’s attacks on the Party, few people ever had any illusions that he was a knight of liberal reform. He described himself as a monarchist and occasionally wore a czarist-era military uniform, thoughtfully sewn for him by his girlfriend. He bragged about his extraordinary rapport with the police and, especially, the KGB. “I have good relations with the KGB,” Nevzorov said. “This is natural. They give us a lot of help and I highly value that organization.… They are incorruptable and not for sale.” As the counterrevolution began to show its head, first in the Baltic states and then everywhere else, Nevzorov quickly became the televised face of Gorbachev’s allies in the defense of the empire: the army and the KGB. As the semioticians might have said, he was the sign of the times.

  One night when I was in Leningrad, 600 Seconds showed a tape of a city council liberal frantically combing his bald spot. “So this is the last hope of the city?” Nevzorov growled in the voice-over. Then, armed with a minicam, Nevzorov and his crew stormed the headquarters of the Movement of Civil Resistance, one of the council’s more radical factions, as if they had uncovered Hitler’s bunker. “The place is a pigsty,” Nevzorov said. Next, in a move that would have earned him an immediate libel suit in the West, he showed file footage of a pile of guns and said, “It’s difficult to imagine how many arms these people have.” There was never any proof that the guns belonged to the movement. But too late. It was time for the next item. On other nights, Nevzorov accused Leningrad city council deputies of welshing on their alimony payments, wandering drunk through the streets, and conducting shady business deals. And as for Sobchak, Nevzorov said, “His sole policy is survival at any cost. If the Germans attacked Leningrad again, he’d start learning German just to stay in power.”

  After years of grain harvest assessments, intermediate Polish lessons, and “Boy Meets Harvester Combine” movies, Soviet television may have needed Nevzorov badly. He was pugnacious, malicious, and wonderfully crude. He provided a thrill-hungry country with a nightly video frisson and his libels were somehow easy, or convenient, to overlook. Even Sobchak tried hard not to mind too much. “Nevzorov is a journalistic cowboy from the Wild West who does what he can to stay in the saddle” was about the worst thing the mayor would say.

  But what was once a sordid amusement now became a centerpiece of the Kremlin’s turn toward authoritarian politics. At times it seemed as if Nevzorov’s role in the shift to the right ranked just below the ministerial level. Vremya, of course, tried to do what it could to stanch the propaganda wound of the Lithuanian assault with some bogus account of how the independence movement had itself caused the tragedy. Gorbachev waffled, and said the first he had heard of the assault was when he was wakened by his aides the next morning. Was he lying? It was hard to know which was worse: that he was telling the truth, and therefore not in control of the army and the KGB; or that he was lying, and at the head of a coup attempt against the Lithuanians. Later, when I asked Gorbachev’s former economic adviser, Nikolai Petrakov, whether Gorbachev truly “slept through” the Vilnius events in ignorance, he said, simply, “Don’t be naive.”

  The Kremlin and Kravchenko knew they needed a new form of public relations. Enter Nevzorov. If Vremya was Lawrence Welk, Nevzorov was Ice-T, the hip-hop artist of Soviet television. He didn’t wear those mouse-gray suits like the announcers on Vremya. He was cool. When he lied, he did not sweat. His lip did not even twitch. And he had fantastic ratings. Boris Gidaspov, the conservative head of the Communist Party in Leningrad, told the city that “our Sasha Nevzorov” would soon deliver the “objective truth” on the situation in Lithuania.

  The day after the shootings, Nevzorov and his crew piled into one of those tuna-can-sized Ladas and raced from Leningrad to Vilnius, where they quickly shot a ten-minute piece. Nevzorov called his film Nashi—“Ours,” or “Our People,” meaning … Russians. The idea was that the military was the defender of “Ours” and the Lithuanians an unruly—no, treasonous!—mob. Nevzorov called Landsbergis’s pro-independence government “fascists” who had “declared war” on the state. In other words, the message was the same as Gorbachev’s, the same as Vremya’s. But it was the imagery that did it. With a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder and snippets of Das Rheingold booming on the soundtrack, Nevzorov inspected the fierce and sturdy faces of the troops inside the television center. They were defenders of the faith, defenders of the holy airwaves. They would save us all against the hordes of ungrateful Lithuanian college professors. Didn’t they understand what an empire was? And as for the dead, Nevzorov had an answer for that, too. They had not died from the soldier’s bullets; no one was crushed under the treads of the tanks or beaten to death with the butt-end of a rifle. No, they died in “car accidents” and of “heart attacks.”

  The funny thing about Nashi was that Nevzorov never interviewed a single Lithuanian. I asked him about that later in Leningrad. “I could have shown sweet Lithuanian flags waving in the air,” he said, “but I didn’t.” Why should he? This was the army’s show—with production credits to the KGB and the CPSU.

  Nevzorov’s broadcast and the endorsement it won from the Kremlin leadership were almost as chilling as the violence in Vilnius itself. The omen was nasty. The Supreme Soviet, with a push from Lukyanov, ordered Nevzorov’s film shown three times on national television. The Communist Party daily, Pravda, which for years had suffered the scorn of 600 Seconds, now praised Nevzorov as a “brilliant professional … an intrepid man.” The paper said that Nevzorov’s film was convincing proof that “the responsibility for the deaths of innocent people lies with the chief Lithuanian ‘democrat’—Vytautas Landsbergis.”

  The broadcast cut into Nevzorov’s ratings a little. Some of the democratically inclined said it made them just sick to watch him now. But that was all right with Nevzorov. His cubicle office at the Leningrad studios had turned into a political headquarters for local reactionaries. Every day,
right-wing members of the city council, retired cops, and leaders of groups like Motherland and the United Workers’ Front piled into the room to get a glimpse of him, to ask him to get their grievances (the Jews! the co-ops! Yeltsin!) on the air. To make everyone feel at home, Nevzorov decorated the place with some czarist memorabilia, a bulletproof vest, and a classic Bolshevik recruiting poster from the Civil War period that he’d doctored to read: “Have You Killed Any Democrats Today?”

  In the weeks after the Vilnius affair, Nevzorov intensified his nationalist campaign in other films. In Riga, he hailed the decision of the shadowy Black Berets to storm the local police station, an incident that left at least five dead. He tirelessly promoted the career of Colonel Alksnis, who was now busy egging on Gorbachev to “finish the job he started” in Lithuania.

  In all his reports, Nevzorov’s methods were simple. He meant to scare the hell out of his viewers—all in the service of the Motherland. If the Baltics became independent, he warned, Leningrad would suddenly be overrun with hundreds of thousands of refugees: “There will be tent cities, hunger, fights, deaths, and with all those weapons we have!” Those who were with him were “ours.” Those who were not were “radical scum.”

  Nevzorov insisted he was his own man, but at the same time he was quick to sing the praises of the KGB and the army—“the only institutions holding the country together.” The local paper Chas Pik (“Rush Hour”) reported that the “Public Committee for the Support and Protection of the TV Program 600 Seconds” included eight directors of huge defense plants and leaders of the local military-industrial complex. Nevzorov made it a point to brag about a hunting rifle that the defense minister, Dmitri Yazov, had given him, and he went on and on about his grandfather who had been a KGB officer—in Lithuania. “They say I am the spitting image of my grandfather. He was a hero, wounded many times in the line of duty. This is a source of great pride for me,” Nevzorov said. “The KGB is a great group of guys.”

  Nevzorov said his alliance with Gorbachev was probably only a temporary “coincidence of positions.” He felt more at one with the men who carried the hardware, the soldiers who “bore the ideals of Peter the Great and Aleksandr Nevsky. These are our great Russian defenders. Look, there is chaos in the country. It’s better to bring in the tanks now when we are not talking about hundreds and thousands of deaths.… A military coup, a military dictatorship, will be around for a while. It’s only logical. If there are no healthy forces in society and everything is headed for chaos, then it is only natural that power should be seized by a structure that can maintain authority and order.”

  Nevzorov said he found my questions about television “whiny and pathetic.” He was a pragmatist, he said. “Television and newspapers are nothing more than weapons,” he said. “They brainwash the people. A journalist is always serving someone. I am serving my Fatherland, my Motherland. The Fifth Wheel is sophisticated propaganda against the state and order. I have no problems with censorship. If the head of Leningrad TV calls me up and tells me to do this or that, you just say, ‘Fuck off.’ ”

  And with that he stormed off to do battle for the Motherland. On the way out, I stopped off at the offices of The Fifth Wheel, where everyone was trying to figure out ways to beat the censors and undermine Nevzorov’s broadcasts. Nothing was working and they were desperate. Viktor Pravdiuk, one of the lead reporters, told me, “They haven’t strangled us yet, but their fingers are tightening around our throats.”

  CHAPTER 26

  THE GENERAL LINE

  May the god of history help me.

  —STALIN, 1920

  As 1991 dragged on, the fury of the hard-liners deepened with every week; with every victory they won, the more brazen their demands became. There was no mystery about what was going on. In meetings public and private, Gorbachev was hearing the full-throated cry of the generals, the military-industrial complex, the Communist Party apparatus, and the KGB. They demanded he turn away from his most reform-minded advisers, and he did. They blamed him for the “loss” of Eastern Europe, the “triumphs” of Germany and the United States, the “ruin” of the union and the Communist Party, and the “degradation” of the armed forces. The KGB chief, Vladimir Kryuchkov, made speeches asserting that the policies of perestroika had evolved into a road map for the destruction of the Union, plans that were no less anti-Soviet than the darkest designs of the CIA. In a meeting in Moscow with Richard Nixon, Kryuchkov said, “We have had about as much democracy as we can stomach.”

  There was an acrid smell in the air, a sense of panic, fear of the past returning. The Moscow Spring of 1988 was long gone. Privately, Aleksandr Yakovlev told his friends that they would soon see each other in Siberia, “against a wall somewhere.” There may have been something to his gallows humor. The press printed rumors that the KGB had even ordered the “reconstruction” of labor camps in eastern Siberia.

  Gorbachev counseled calm, but you could see he was thoroughly spooked. At an afternoon session of the Congress that winter, I saw him mounting a short flight of stairs and, in the hasty, idiotic way of such encounters, I blurted, “Mikhail Sergeyevich, they say you are moving to the right.”

  Gorbachev stopped walking and fixed his eyes on me. His mouth clenched in a pained, ironic grin. The truth is, he said, “I feel as if I am going around in circles.” It was the impish explanation of the confused schoolboy, the harried parent. But in Gorbachev’s mouth, it was sad. What more was he willing to do to mollify these people? While Gorbachev may well have thought he was finessing the hard-liners and playing for time, he was ruining himself forever. The more he attacked Yeltsin and Landsbergis, the more he made cult figures of them. The man who had mastered his own personality and the tactics of the Communist Party now found himself unable to master the new form of politics he had set free. Gorbachev’s compromises, his ugly language, betrayed him. A great man now looked weak, mean-spirited, and confused. There he was, in prime time, railing against the “so-called democrats” who got their marching orders from “foreign research centers.” What fresh hell was this? Yeltsin accused Gorbachev of betraying the people, and who now was rushing to the defense of Mikhail Sergeyevich?

  The generals, for their part, were so confident of their hold on power and the flow of events that they were ready at last to turn back history. They would reassert a “balanced” version of the past and rescue history from the historians. The hard-liners even had a new icon. Colonel Alksnis, Ligachev, and conservatives of all varieties wrote articles and gave interviews extolling the late KGB chief and general secretary Yuri Andropov for seeing the need for technocratic reform and for modernizing the economy. Andropov, they all said, had been a man of stability, one who never challenged the principles of socialism or the state.

  To chart a new historical orthodoxy would not be easy for the hard-liners. The debate on Soviet history had long since gone beyond the boundaries set out by Gorbachev in 1987. Every leader, not merely Stalin, was now under question. The taboo against criticism of Lenin had weakened to such a degree that now even conservatives like Ligachev had to admit, with the gravity of sudden revelation, “Vladimir Ilyich was a man, not a god.” Even Khrushchev and Bukharin were no longer held out as “alternatives.”

  At street demonstrations, however, there were signs calling for the criminal indictment of the Party and the KGB. The slogans of the old order gave way to a new irony and sense of repentance. “Workers of the World Forgive Us!” one banner read. The liberal intellectuals no longer debated whether the seventy-year history was a disaster; the argument was over the roots of that disaster. Igor Klyamkin, a leading economist, blamed Lenin for setting the tone of Soviet power with the Red Terror and the first labor camps. Aleksandr Tsipko, a former Central Committee official, argued that Marxism was the cause.

  Of all the major events in Soviet history since 1917, the one that was preserved the longest as an unquestionable victory of the regime was the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany. Not even the Revolution held such
an important place in the collective psyche of the Soviet people.

  The May 9 victory parades were just one element in the cult of the war. Even in the mid-eighties, you could turn on the television any day of the week and there was a better than even chance that a group of veterans, old and festooned with medals and ribbons, would be talking about the Battle of Stalingrad to a group of theatrically interested schoolchildren. The war was the touchstone, the regime’s lingering reason for being. When Gorbachev defended his allegiance to socialism in early 1991, he said, yes, his grandfathers had been persecuted, but how could he betray his father, who fought bravely at the Dniepr and was wounded in Czechoslovakia? Gorbachev recalled his train ride in 1950 from Stavropol to Moscow and looking out the window at mile after mile of devastation and misery. If he abandoned socialist principles now, he asked, would he not be betraying the memory of the twenty-seven million Soviet citizens killed during the war?

  For the hard-liners, the meaning of the cult of the war went even deeper. Victory in the war served to legitimize the brutal collectivization and industrialization campaigns that went before it. Although these men no longer celebrated Stalin, at least not in public, their view of history was surely Stalinist. In textbooks and on television, the Party’s propagandists portrayed the war as proof of the system’s ultimate strength—the system that saved the world! Of course there had been excesses, the Stalinist pamphleteer Nina Andreyeva once told me, but without collectivization “we would have starved during the war,” and without industrialization “where would the tanks have come from?”