Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  I was also here to visit my friend Arnold Yeryomenko. We’d first met in Moscow during the Nineteenth Party Conference in 1988, and we saw each other whenever he returned to the capital. I sent a telegram to Arnold telling him I was on the way, but I knew he’d never get it. He was still a marked man in his hometown. The Party press in Magadan wrote denunciations of him as if he held it in his power to topple the regime and steal all its daughters. He was still the anti-Soviet devil.

  After the nine-hour flight, I walked to Arnold’s building and stuck a note under the door telling him where he could find me. The building was appalling. The concrete looked wet and ancient all at once and the yard outside was a sea of mud and abandoned construction junk. Kids had nothing at all to play with. They threw rocks against a wall, and when they tired they just sat down on a thick stick stretched across a sheet of abandoned concrete.

  The next morning, Arnold found me at the Hotel Magadan. We took a long walk to the sea, and then headed back up the hill, the same path the prisoners took fifty years ago. “You see where that ship is now?” he said, pointing down a hill into the port. That was where the lines of prisoners began their march from the sea to the holding camps. Many of them would be marched hundreds of miles to camps throughout Kolyma. Arnold said, “Our house was fifty meters from a labor camp—now it’s a movie theater. I could see them from my room, from the kitchen. None of it was ever out of my sight, and it went on from the time I was a baby until I was a young man. And I remember every day in school we ran to the windows and watched the prisoners go by in their chains: the Russians, later the Japanese POWs and the Vlasovites. I remember we’d come up to them and one might say, ‘Boy, go get me some fish.’ And he’d slip us a few rubles to buy it. But everyone knew they’d soon be dead. Getting them fish: it was like some horrible joke.”

  Magadan really was the history of the Soviet Union, its proper spiritual capital. Magadan and the vast territory of Kolyma had been all but wild, unsettled before the Revolution. Magadan was an invention of the Kremlin and the NKVD, an administrative center for mass murder throughout the Kolyma region in eastern Siberia. As a project of centralized planning, Magadan fulfilled and overfulfilled its five-year plans. In the one hundred camps of Kolyma, an area six times the size of France, around three million people were slaughtered between 1936 and 1953. They were shot, stabbed, beheaded, thrown into pits, or starved. Three million in just one corner of a country that was itself a vast network of concentration camps. There was no way to shove it out of the mind; in Magadan, the dead were everywhere, in the abandoned mine shafts, under the taiga, under the seabed. One of the roads to the northern camps was built on a bed of bones. The main street, Lenin Prospekt, was a road to oblivion. Starting from the center of downtown, the prisoners walked to their camps, sometimes to an outpost a thousand miles away. You could walk all the way to Yakutia, where the reindeer run. And now nearly all the living in Magadan slept in the houses of the dead. Eighty percent of the standing structures in Magadan were once barracks or headquarters for the secret police administration or “shooting halls.”

  Varlam Shalamov was the poet of Kolyma. He survived seventeen years in a camp there, all for the crime of declaring Ivan Bunin, who had won the Nobel Prize, a “classic author.” Shalamov’s own classic stories, quick narratives, sharp and glinting as mica, so pierced Solzhenitsyn that the younger man invited Shalamov to help him with the massive project of The Gulag Archipelago. Shalamov was too old and sick. He declined. But the work he did leave behind provided the clearest picture of the Kolyma nightmare that exists. In one story, he described the officer Postnikov, who made a blood sport of hunting down escapees:

  “Drunk with murder, he fulfilled his task with zeal and passion. He had personally captured five men. As always in such cases he had been decorated and received a bonus. The reward was the same for the dead and the living. It was not necessary to deliver the prisoners complete. One August morning a man who was going to drink at a stream fell into an ambush set by Postnikov and his soldiers. Postnikov shot him down with a revolver. They decided not to drag the body to the camp but to leave it in the taiga. The signs of bears and wolves were numerous.

  “For identification, Postnikov cut off the fugitive’s hands with an ax. He put the hands in his knapsack and went to make his report on the hunt.… In the night the corpse got up. Pressing his bleeding wrists to his chest, he left the taiga following the trail and reached the prisoners’ tent. With pale face and blue eyes, he looked inside, holding himself at the opening, leaning against the doorposts and muttering something. Fever devoured him. His padded coat, his trousers, his rubber boots were stained with black blood. They gave him warm soup, wrapped his chopped-off wrists in rags, and took him to the infirmary. But already Postnikov and his men came running out of their little hut. The soldiers took the prisoner. He was not heard of again.”

  As late as 1988, the Communist Party allowed no monument to the dead of Kolyma. In fact, the Party chief, Aleksandr Bogdanov, did unveil one monument in 1988: a bust of Reingold Berzin, the founding director of the Far Northern Construction Trust and the concentration camps of Kolyma. Berzin himself was purged after Stalin’s Central Committee decreed in 1937 that prisoners could no longer be “coddled.”

  But by June 1991, times had changed. For one thing, foreigners were allowed to visit, and I saw Russians on the streets wearing their old plastic overcoats and the new trucker caps that the exchanges across the water had brought: “Alaska Airways,” “I Love Anchorage.” There was a video store renting Terminator and a complete line of Bruce Lee movies. I saw one man wandering in an empty butcher shop wearing the official jacket of the Seattle Seahawks.

  Perhaps most alien of all, this Russian city, this museum of brutality, was taking part in a presidential election. On the streets, there was something otherworldly about standing near a building that was once a camp barracks and listening to sidewalk political arguments that in spirit, if not content, sounded like primary-year debates on the street corners of Nashua or Sioux City. It did not take a computer poll to figure out where the votes were. Boris Yeltsin was going to win, and, more important, the Communist Party was doomed. Outside a shoe store, people milled around in the cold and debated the election. A few young men in leather jackets and scarves handed out Yeltsin leaflets printed by the Democratic Russia group in Moscow. Another kid held up the red, white, and blue tricolor, the flag of czarist Russia. “The point is to get rid of the Communists in Russia, once and for all,” Tamara Karpova, a housewife who was with the Yeltsin group, told me. “My parents and grandparents lived in the Ukraine until the Communists sent them here to the camps,” Karpova said. “Why should I vote for anyone in the Communist Party?”

  Bogdanov had been replaced as head of the Magadan Party organization, but his successors were no smarter. Their only cause was survival. They printed one article after another in their newspapers describing Yeltsin as a “wrecker” and his Communist Party rival in the race, Nikolai Ryzhkov, as the voice of “unity” and “justice, honesty and order.” Ryzhkov was the man to help the Party men keep their jobs. Without Ryzhkov, they would lose their offices with the baize tables and red runner carpets at Party headquarters. Without Ryzhkov, they would lose their dachas in “Snow Valley” outside of town. Yeltsin represented a new order and, most likely for them, unemployment.

  In totalitarian society, habit replaces happiness, and habits were in jeopardy. “My father was a Party member, my husband is a Party member, and that is how I will vote. The rest are all adventurists,” said Svetlana Murashkina, a woman who passed out Ryzhkov leaflets on the same street corner.

  In the village of Palatka, I spoke to Boris Sulim, who had worked in one of the camps when he was a teenager and was now serving on the local raikom, the Party committee. Sulim was a sawed-off shotgun of man with a broad, meaty face. He was a Ryzhkov man—“fast and firm.” But the longer we talked, the sadder he got. He seemed exhausted, uncertain. All he had believed in, all
he had worked for, was finished, and he knew it. His local Party committee, which had always ruled Palatka, had no influence now, “and I guess I know that.”

  Under Stalin, Sulim worked in the Omsuchkan camp, about four hundred miles from Magadan. “I was eighteen years old and Magadan seemed a very romantic place to me. I got eight hundred eighty rubles a month and a three-thousand-ruble installation grant, which was a hell of a lot of money for a kid like me. I was able to give my mother some of it. They even gave me membership in the Komsomol. There was a mining and ore-processing plant which sent out parties to dig for tin. I worked at the radio station which kept contact with the parties.

  “If the inmates were good and disciplined they had almost the same rights as the free workers. They were trusted and they even went to the movies. As for the reason they were in the camps, well, I never poked my nose into details. We all thought the people were there because they were guilty. Why should I have believed anything else? In 1936, when I was still in the first grade, our teacher made us blot out the pictures in history books of the generals Tukhachevsky, Blucher, and Yegorov, and we had to cover them over with swastikas and write in the margin, ‘enemy of the people.’ ”

  Sulim said that after watching a few television documentaries on the Stalin era he would admit there had been “mistakes” and “abuses.” I asked him if he had ever seen any of the prisoners executed or any of them die from the cold and the endless work in the mines. “Deaths?” he said. “I don’t know. I wasn’t interested then. But I think death is a natural phenomenon under any circumstances. Look, I was not part of the gulag system, so I have no intention of repenting.”

  MOSCOW

  Sulim was a man of the old regime: ignorant, angry, unrepentant. But even in his worst moments, Gorbachev held firm to his better self, his ability to change, if only to survive. On April 23, with Yeltsin clearly headed for victory and his own percentage in the popularity polls nearing single digits, Gorbachev had yielded to the obvious. Despite the bad information he was getting, despite the betrayals around him and his own tragic vanity, even he could look out the window and see. He could see that the people were no longer his. They were Yeltsin’s, and Landsbergis’s, and Nazarbayev’s in Kazakhstan … but not his. And so Gorbachev moved once more to the left. He did not announce a favorite candidate—many people assumed he would vote not for Yeltsin or Ryzhkov, but for Vadim Bakatin, the former interior minister—but he did sign a “nine plus one” agreement. The document, drafted jointly by Gorbachev and the republican leaders, was an agreement to agree: republican leaders (so far, the Baltic states, Georgia, Armenia, and Moldavia declined to participate) were announcing their intention to form a new Union Treaty, under which the republics would acquire vastly more political power.

  In June, Yeltsin won the election, as Gorbachev and everyone else knew he would. For his inauguration at the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses, Yeltsin planned a ceremony, both moving and pompous, clearly intended to distance the new office from Soviet history and align it with a kind of liberal Russian nationalism. He stripped away all signs of the Bolshevik state in the Kremlin hall. In place of the massive picture of Lenin that had always been the backdrop for ceremonies of state, there was simply a red, blue, and white Russian flag. Priests, rabbis, muftis, and ministers sat in the front row. Patriarch Alexy II, with his flowing robes and Tolstoyan beard, blessed Yeltsin with the sign of the cross and said, “By the will of God and the choice of the Russian people, you are bestowed with the highest office in Russia.… We will pray for you.” Russia, the patriarch said, “is gravely ill.” An actor from Leningrad, Oleg Basilashvili, read a long speech describing the degradation of the country through seventy years of Bolshevik rule.

  Introduced by regal trumpeters and a blaring fanfare, Yeltsin swore himself in. At times he seemed overwhelmed by the occasion, and his voice broke once or twice with nervousness. He did not begin with the traditional tovarishchi, “comrades.” “Citizens of the Russian Federation … Great Russia is rising from its knees …” he began. “The president is not a god, not a monarch, not a miracle worker. He is a citizen … and in Russia, the individual will become the measure of all things.”

  Gorbachev, for his part, tried to appear gracious at the ceremony, but he did not quite bring it off. He made a clumsy speech and even clumsier attempts at humor about the strangeness of a country with two presidents. At one point he said, “People on all continents are watching with great interest what you and I are doing.” The intonation was such that people in the hall understood it to mean that the two men were up to some sort of shenanigans. The hall fairly buzzed with discontent until Gorbachev moved on.

  But even as he was trying to assert his power, Yeltsin was hoping that his presidency would help Gorbachev realize that there could be no future in an alliance with Kryuchkov, Yazov, Pugo, and the old guard. He needed to seduce and bully Gorbachev at the same time. And so when Gorbachev was finished with his speech, Boris Yeltsin was the first out of his seat to lead a standing ovation.

  But in 1991, nothing was stable. You couldn’t relax for a moment, you could never think for an instant that all would be well. As Sobchak had said, the side-by-side existence of a totalitarian regime (no matter how subdued compared to the Stalin era) and a fledgling democracy was impossible. Something would have to give.

  In June, there were clues once more that the hard-liners were prepared to act, no matter what sort of marriage—of convenience or conviction—existed between Gorbachev and Yeltsin. The Soviet Prosecutor’s Office, backed up by a report by Marshal Yazov, said, “In the course of the examination of the events [in Novocherkassk in 1962], it was established that arms were used by the military in accordance with the law, in order to defend state property from criminal attack and for purposes of self-defense.… The shooting started only after the unruly crowd attacked the soldiers and tried to seize their weapons.” To most Soviet readers, the report was a justification not only of an event thirty years past, but of the assaults in Tbilisi, Vilnius, and Baku. And perhaps they were a threat, too; a threat of more violence to come.

  Yeltsin answered that veiled threat with a veiled warning. He sent a representative to Novocherkassk with a message from the Russian president: “The truth about the tragedy of Novocherkassk is a stern warning to anyone who tries to resolve social problems by means of military force.” Like General Shaposhnikov, the people would resist.

  Two weeks later, on June 17, the Soviet prime minister, Valentin Pavlov, went before the parliament and asked to be given many of Gorbachev’s powers. Pavlov, who clearly had the backing of Supreme Soviet Chairman Anatoly Lukyanov, said he was making the proposal out of consideration for Gorbachev’s onerous schedule. “There are just not enough hours in the day,” Pavlov suggested sweetly. What he forgot to say was that he was acting without Gorbachev’s knowledge.

  “I heard about it and told Gorbachev,” Aleksandr Yakovlev told me. “Gorbachev was outraged. It was the first he had heard about it.” But before Gorbachev had a chance to act, Pugo, Yazov, and Kryuchkov all went before a closed session of the Supreme Soviet and read out speeches accusing the leadership (they would not say “Gorbachev”) of selling out the Party and leading the country to ruin. Yazov complained that hundreds of thousands of young men were refusing to obey their draft notices. Pugo railed on about “disorder” and “lawlessness.” Kryuchkov was most vicious of all, saying that the reforms of the leadership and the fondest wishes of the CIA seemed to coincide. He was charging treason. That gave the delegates from the Soyuz faction the cue to rise from their chairs and call for resignation.

  “Away with Gorbachev! And away with his clique of liberals!” cried Leonid Sukhov, a cabdriver from Kharkov and a deputy in the Soyuz faction.

  “A great power has been reduced to the lowly status of a beggar standing by others’ doors with outstretched hands instead of working out its problems here where its problems are,” charged Yevgeny Kogan, a Russian speaker from Estonia and another m
ember of Soyuz.

  Gorbachev was slow to react, but when he finally came to the Supreme Soviet to respond on June 21, he was able to summon for the occasion one of his vintage performances, full of indignation. Still he could not go all the way. Just as he would never admit to any conflict with Yegor Ligachev in 1988, he said he had no differences with Pavlov. The prime minister’s proposals, he said, were “not well thought out.”

  When the session was over, Gorbachev came out of the chamber to meet the press. He was surrounded by none other than Messrs. Yazov, Pugo, and Kryuchkov. The three ministers were stone-faced and silent. “The coup is over,” Gorbachev said. He was laughing. He meant it as a joke. And it was.

  PART IV

  “FIRST AS TRAGEDY, THEN AS FARCE”

  Evil has great momentum, but the forces of good are inert. The masses … have no fight in them, and will acquiesce in whatever happens.

  —NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM, 1970

  Boris Yeltsin was twelve when he had his first run-in with the Communist Party. He’d had a mean childhood. His father was a construction worker who beat him with a belt. The family lived in a hut near a building site in the Urals, and the six of them, and their goat, lived in one room. Everyone slept on the floor. Once, when Yeltsin was six, he woke in the middle of the night to see his father being led out of the hut by strange men. The family was lucky that the arrest did not lead to a long jail term or the camps.

  As a boy, Yeltsin was a good student and a troublemaker. “I’ve always been a bit of a hooligan,” he told me. In the fifth grade, he encouraged the entire class to jump out the first-floor window while the teacher was out of the room. He took part in gang fights and got his nose broken when one of his friends took a swing at him with a club. When he was eleven and the war was on, Yeltsin and a few of his friends broke into an arms depot in a local church. They climbed through three layers of barbed wire and stole a couple of hand grenades: “We just wanted to see what they were made of.” Yeltsin, of course, decided that he would take charge. Without removing the fuses, he tried to open the grenades with a hammer. The explosion mangled the thumb and forefinger on his left hand, and when gangrene set in, the fingers had to be removed. “Wouldn’t you say that was brilliant?”