Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  As an officer, Volkogonov was prepared to do anything for the Motherland. At a nuclear test site, he was ordered to drive a new-model tank straight through the area that had just been the epicenter of an atomic bomb test. And he did. “There was nothing I would not do,” Volkogonov told me. “I was a young lieutenant when Stalin died and I thought the heavens would fall without him. The fact that my father had been shot and my mother died miserably in exile, that didn’t seem to matter: it was destiny, incomprehensible. My mind was contaminated. I was incapable of analyzing these things, of putting the pieces together.”

  In the Komsomol and the Communist Party organizations of the Lenin Military Academy in Moscow, Volkogonov became such a master of the standard texts of dogma that he gained a reputation among the senior officers as an especially reliable polit rabotnik, a political propagandist. Volkogonov got a doctorate in philosophy—which, in those days, meant Marxist-Leninist philosophy—and in 1970 was transferred to the army’s Department of Propaganda. There he climbed the ladder steadily; he was promoted to general at forty, won a professorship at forty-four, and made it to deputy chief in charge of political instruction. Along the way, he also earned a doctorate in history.

  With his high rank and credentials, Volkogonov was allowed access to all the most important—and closed—archives in the capital. “But make no mistake about who I was,” Volkogonov said. “I was not a closet radical. I cannot distort history to suit my needs. The fact is, I was an orthodox Marxist, an officer who knew his duty. I was not part of some liberal current. All my changes came from within, off on my own. I had access to all kinds of literature. You know there were many people, especially young officers of the KGB, who thought liberally because they had more information than anyone else. That’s why there have always been a lot of thinking people in the KGB, people who understand the West as it really is and what our own country really was.

  “I was a Stalinist. I contributed to the strengthening of the system that I am now trying to dismantle. But latently, I had my ideas. I began asking myself questions about Lenin, how, if he was such a genius, none of his predictions came true. The proletarian dictatorship never came to be, the principle of class struggle was discredited, Communism was not built in fifteen years as he had promised. None of Lenin’s major predictions ever came true! I confess it: I used my position. I began gathering information even though I didn’t know yet what I would do with it.”

  While working in a KGB archive during the thaw, Volkogonov even read his father’s file and learned that what his mother had whispered had been true. Anton Volkogonov had been shot in 1937 just after his arrest.

  Almost as a dream, Volkogonov decided he would write a trilogy on Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky. By the late seventies, Volkogonov was secretly working on the Stalin volume. His apartment was crammed with tens of thousands of photocopied documents and books, many of them banned. As time passed and times grew a bit more liberal, Volkogonov made little secret of what he was doing. The military hierarchy, however, decided that Volkogonov’s historical research was not “consistent” with his position as a propagandist. He was shunted aside and installed at the Institute of Military History, a move that represented a demotion, Volkogonov said, of “three steps down the ladder.” For a soldier, perhaps. But for a historian, the demotion was a gift. Now Volkogonov had more time and access to the archives. When the leadership finally came looking for a biography of Stalin, Volkogonov was there, ready to write.

  Using his position as a general, Volkogonov was able to realize the dreams of such outsiders as Dima Yurasov. Volkogonov’s work in the archives not only provided him international fame, it also shattered whatever last illusions he might have had about Soviet history. Now Volkogonov, like so many other intellectuals throughout the union, saw the roots of catastrophe in the ideology itself, in Leninism. “Abstract ideas give rise to fanatics, and such was Trotsky,” he wrote. The utopianism, the ferocity, of Bolshevism gave rise to the totalitarian state.

  In the spring of 1991, Volkogonov invited me to meet with him in his hospital room. He was exhausted by his battle with Yazov and the other generals. The hospital was tucked away on a side street off Kalinin Prospekt. Compared to other Soviet hospitals I’d seen, with their filthy floors, their crowded rooms, this special clinic for the military elite was a wonder. There were private rooms, wood-paneled hallways, a clean and efficient staff. Volkogonov told me he was ill and not sure how long he had to live. He had stomach cancer and would go for surgery to Western Europe. But he did not seem shocked or sad and wanted only to pick up on what we had talked about in his various offices.

  “You see, I am now convinced that Stalinism created a new type of man: indifferent, without initiative or enterprise, a person waiting for a messiah, waiting for someone to come alive and solve all of life’s problems. The most awful thing about it is that this cannot merely be shed, like taking off an old raincoat and donning a new one. There are many aspects of this mentality still inside me, and I lose them only slowly. This whole period we are living in now is about scrubbing this mentality from our minds. We are all becoming revolutionaries when it comes to our own individual way of thinking. For you it is so hard to understand. You are indifferent as to who will be in power in your own country. Democrats or Republicans, America is America. Only some nuances of the system change. For us, a mutiny is going on. The Revolution was one sort of mutiny, and we are on the threshold of another. We are making our way through an intellectual and spiritual fog and all around us is collapse.

  “The generals in the army reproach me for being a chameleon. They say I am a traitor or a renegade. But personally I think it is a more courageous stance to abandon honestly something which has been devalued by history instead of carrying it to the end in your soul. There are people among them who criticize me in public and in private say I am right but they can’t say so.

  “Now I am in complete isolation. I get support from the grass roots, from junior officers, and a couple of generals even support me secretly. The majority despise me. Even when I meet generals here in the hospital they pretend not to notice me. Others want to talk to me, but they fear the consequences.

  “These people are frozen in the past. Even truth will not change them. Stalin died physically, but not historically. The image of Stalin lives because it has so many allies. No less than fifteen percent of the letters I get are from Stalinists, and the worse the situation gets, the more of those I get. The Party has sixteen million people in it. Thirty percent are like Akhromeyev or Nina Andreyeva. They won’t change. Another thirty percent see the Party as a modus vivendi. They can’t advance in their careers if they are not members. And the rest could leave at any moment.

  “The army and the KGB were never for real perestroika. They were for minor repairs of the system, a little camouflage. They wanted to preserve the system intact by getting rid of the most obviously odious features: super-bureaucracy, corruption, and so on. Yet none of them wants to question the essence of the system. The Party ought to be in control, they say.

  “Totalitarian systems usually absorb people absolutely. As I have come to realize, very few people have been able to transcend such a system, to tear themselves away from it. Most people of my generation will die imprisoned in this system, even if they live another ten or twenty years. Of course, people who are twenty or thirty are free people. They can liberate themselves from the system quite easily. The only thing I have to offer is my experience. Maybe my example will be valuable in tracing the crisis, the tragedy, and the drama of Communist ideas and utopia played out over the generations.”

  Volkogonov was getting tired. And at the same time, his mood was changing. The full weight of the news he had just gotten was beginning to hit him, and he began to talk about working “at full speed” to finish the volumes on Lenin and Trotsky and perhaps write a memoir. When we got to talking about the dark mood in Moscow, I finally asked him what he thought was ahead.

  “Democratization is irr
eversible on the historic, strategic scale,” Volkogonov said. “But on the tactical plane, in the short run, the right-wing forces still have a chance. They may even come to the head of the country and hustle us all back into the barn for another five or ten years. They could try. They are that crazy and that angry.”

  CHAPTER 27

  CITIZENS

  YAGUNOVSKO

  In the summer of 1989, when the miners brought the revolution to Siberia, Anatoly Shcheglov walked me back from his village to the tram for Kemerevo and invited me back. “I’ll take you fishing in the taiga,” he said. Now, a year and a half later, the miners were on strike again and I was back in Siberian coal country. Most of the government’s promises had been broken and conditions were as dismal as ever. Along the road to Shcheglov’s hut on Second Plan Street, the snow was crusted black, the air was cold and gassy.

  Anatoly Shcheglov had no phone. I just assumed he’d be at home. When he opened the door, he greeted me as if I’d been away a week and coming back to Yagunovsko were the most ordinary thing in the world for an American. He looked cleaner, more relaxed, but a good deal older. A lace-work of wrinkles ate deep into his face. “I’m retired now,” he said. “The expected happened.” He said that the winter after we’d met, as he settled his huge frame into a chair one night after dinner, he had a heart attack. Like a horse kicking him in the chest, he said. He was fifty years old. “It’s the usual thing for us underground men,” Anatoly said. “You quit at fifty and you’re lucky to make it to fifty-five. I doubt if I’ll be around much longer.”

  Shcheglov now spent his days standing in lines at empty village stores, shuttling from one filthy hospital to the next looking for doctors, aspirin, glycerin pills. “An old man’s life,” he said. But what brightened him, he said, was the nerve and determination of his fellow miners across the country. The strikes now had nothing to do with the issues of July 1989. “It’s not about soap or vacation pay anymore,” he said. The miners wanted nothing less than the resignation of Gorbachev’s government and the dismantling of the system of state socialism. “There are no more illusions left, no more socialist dreams,” Shcheglov said. “The first strikes were for a crust of bread, a cut of meat. We got nothing that was promised us. Life just got worse. Now we know the secret. The system has to go.”

  Since the beginning of March 1991, over 300,000 miners had gone out on strike. The remaining 900,000 miners worked only to avert a complete collapse of the national economy. The strike leaders figured they would gain no supporters if it came to that. Their strategy was measured and effective. In the coming weeks there were warning strikes by machinists in Leningrad, electricians in Samara, Black Sea dockworkers in Odessa.

  The strikes terrified the Kremlin hard-liners. They knew that the radicalization of the workers—the proletariat’s evolving consciousness, to borrow from the Marxist phrasebook—could be the finishing blow to a tottering regime. Soviet power seemed able to withstand the demonstrations of urban democracy movements, but the workers had the power to turn the lights out in the Kremlin. And they were not kidding. “No more games,” Shcheglov said. “No more games.” At a session of the Russian Republic’s legislature, most of the deputies did little more than echo softly Yeltsin’s latest demands for Gorbachev’s resignation. But late in the session, the Kuzbass strike leader, Anatoly Malikhin, took the floor and announced, “We are prepared to flood the mines.” The miners, he said, had lost all tolerance for the system that had bled them white. Lead the attack, he told the Russian deputies, or the miners will.

  A few days after the speech, I met Anatoly Malikhin at the Rossiya Hotel in Moscow. There were remnants everywhere of late-night strategy sessions: leaflets, stuffed ashtrays, and dirty glasses. Strike headquarters was wherever Anatoly Malikhin happened to be. His phone rang incessantly: strike committees from Siberia, Ukraine, the far east, and Vorkuta in northern Russia called with congratulations, questions, advice, more plans.

  “Well, then fuck ’em,” he said at one point on the line to the Kuzbass. “We’ll go back when the demands are met. Not sooner.”

  Malikhin showed more certainty, more sense of purpose, than any of the liberal intellectuals in Moscow and Leningrad. He was absolutely serious; there was no theater to him, no veneer of irony. He and the other strike leaders had taken Gorbachev at his word when they negotiated a settlement to the strikes in 1989, and they would not repeat the mistake. Simple as that.

  “No one is belittling what Gorbachev has already done, but every person has his moment, his moment of peak operation, like a machine,” Malikhin said. “But Gorbachev thinks he is unique. At the beginning, he really did do a lot, and we take our hats off to him. But he should have changed the system radically a year or more ago. Then he could have found himself a place for himself in that new structure. But he didn’t. He was stuck with his socialist principles. Now he is doing more harm than good. If Gorbachev is so smart, why is he still trying to protect the Party? There is a rumor that he is getting ready to send army troops to the mines. Well, believe me, if he does that the soldiers will die there by the thousands.”

  NOVOCHERKASSK

  No one knew where the dead were buried. There were rumors: the KGB had pushed the corpses down a mine shaft or into a swamp, or the police had brought the bodies to a series of unmarked graves in cemeteries spread across the Black Earth zone of southern Russia. But no one knew.

  For nearly thirty years, the story of the Novocherkassk rebellion was a secret of the state. The strike in June 1962 over price rises and wage cuts at the city’s Electric Locomotive Works was the first workers’ uprising in Russia since the fitful years immediately after the Revolution. At Moscow’s orders, the military turned its machine guns on the unarmed demonstrators in Novocherkassk. At least twenty-four were killed, dozens more injured. Not long after, the Kremlin’s judges ordered the execution of seven “ringleaders” who had survived. Within three days, all mention of Novocherkassk disappeared from the state-controlled press. Even Western specialists knew almost nothing of the bloody affair. Solzhenitsyn published a few pages of rough description in the third volume of The Gulag Archipelago, but that, of course, was considered “anti-Soviet propaganda” and banned until 1990.

  Now, with the miners on strike once more, with the KGB, the army, and Gorbachev himself feeling threatened by nationalists and political opponents, in a time of increasing food shortages and ethnic division, there was constant talk of conflict, of civil disobedience, of the possibility of bloodshed. The massacre of demonstrators in Tbilisi, Baku, and Vilnius made it clear that the regime, despite all the reforms, could be expected to bring out the tanks and machine guns, even poisonous gas, if that was what it took to survive. What had changed, if anything, since that summer afternoon in southern Russia in 1962?

  In addition to the twenty-four people killed in Novocherkassk, the massacre claimed at least one more victim: Soviet Army General Matvei Shaposhnikov, a true believer in the Bolshevik ideal who was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union after leading a tank division to victory in some of the bloodiest fighting in World War II. Years before the emergence of Sakharov and the dissident movement, Shaposhnikov had done the unthinkable. Ordered to attack the demonstrators at Novocherkassk, he refused.

  When I met him, the general was eighty-four years old. His political superiors forced him to retire three years after the Novocherkassk massacre, but he was active and strong. With his grip he could have crushed a walnut. His apartment in the city of Rostov-on-Don, which he shared with his daughter and son-in-law and their children, was military-neat, his books and memorabilia perfectly arranged and dusted.

  “Let’s talk, face to face,” Shaposhnikov said, lifting a heavy chair and setting it down for his guest. He was older than the regime. “I remember clearly singing revolutionary songs as an eleven-year-old boy in 1917: ‘Oh, march, march forward, working people …!’ I believed all my life in Soviet power, and now I was being told to shoot at my own people, unarmed pe
ople. I had to pay for my decision with everything. They stripped me of my rank, my decorations, my membership in the Communist Party. They told me to retire for ‘health reasons.’ And my wife, my dear, dear wife, finally paid for it even more deeply. She died a few years ago, and I am convinced she died from the attacks on us. Finally, she just could not bear it.”

  There was not one hour, even now, the general said, when he did not think back to the days of the massacre. On the morning of June 1, 1962, the Communist Party press in Novocherkassk announced that the prices of meat and butter would go up at least 25 percent. When workers at the Electric Locomotive Works arrived at the plant, they discovered that their wages would be cut by as much as 30 percent. Both local newspapers, the Hammer and the Banner of the Commune, assured the people that these were merely “temporary measures,” all in the name of “social progress.” Somehow, the workers were not prepared this time to believe the usual doublespeak. Their anger was so intense that they forgot themselves. They forgot for a moment their “party discipline” and confronted the plant director, an odious bureaucrat named Kurochkin.

  How would they live now? the workers demanded.

  “You’re used to wolfing down meat pies,” Kurochkin replied. “Now you can stuff them with jam instead.”