Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  Falin had a great deal to answer for. His office was in charge of dispensing millions from the state purse to “brotherly parties” or terrorist organizations in Greece, Portugal, the United States, Angola—nearly one hundred countries in all, according to the Russian government. He ran the secret workshop within the Central Committee that produced fake passports, beards, and mustaches for operatives on the road. Falin eventually took refuge in Germany, lecturing to the university students of Hamburg.

  “Those were awful days for us,” Vladimir Ivashko, the deputy general secretary of the Party, told me. “We were all terrified. We were suffering terribly inside the Central Committee. The Party was in the midst of reform, but no one would listen to that! It was terribly unfair!”

  Even after he returned from captivity to Moscow following the fall of the August coup, Gorbachev defended the Communist Party. He was its son, its protector, and he would neither abandon nor kill it. At his first press conference after the putsch, Gorbachev spoke earnestly about his allegiance to the “socialist choice” and the Party’s “renewal.” He told all who would listen that he had returned to a “different country,” but he did not seem to know what that meant.

  Gorbachev’s closest adviser, Aleksandr Yakovlev, grew furious as he watched that mystifying session with the press. For six years, Yakovlev had prodded Gorbachev to abandon the hidebound nomenklatura and join forces with the urban intelligentsia, the pro-independence forces in the Baltic states—with all those who actually sought a transformation of the old order. But Gorbachev refused, insisting that the party had “begun perestroika and would lead it.” Even now, after falling victim to a putsch, Gorbachev failed to see what was right and necessary.

  “You have given the worst press conference of your career,” Yakovlev told Gorbachev privately. “The Party is dead. Why can’t you see that? Talk about its ‘renewal’ is senseless. It’s like offering first aid to a corpse!”

  Yeltsin catered even less to the sensibilities of Mikhail Gorbachev. Their personal battle had gone on for so long and contained so many seriocomic incidents that they seemed paired in eternal tension and dependence. Yin and Yang. Punch and Judy. On August 23, at a raucous session of the Russian parliament, Yeltsin clearly had the upper hand, and he used it to flay and humiliate his opponent. He forced Gorbachev to read aloud a transcript of the August 19 Council of Ministers meeting at which all but two of the ministers whom Gorbachev himself had nominated pledged their hearty support of the coup.

  Gorbachev looked small and weak, but Yeltsin was not finished. “And now on a lighter note,” he said with a jack-o’-lantern grin, “shall we now sign a decree suspending the activities of the Russian Communist Party?”

  “What are you doing?” Gorbachev stammered. “I … haven’t we … I haven’t read this …”

  But it was too late. Gorbachev was powerless. And on August 24, he resigned as general secretary of the Communist Party, dissolved its Central Committee, and declared, in essence, an end to the Bolshevik era.

  The people of Moscow did not celebrate Gorbachev for his announcement. He could have done no less. Perhaps one day they would come to recognize and revere Gorbachev’s contribution, but not now, not yet. Now they celebrated themselves and the ruin of the System. All around the city, young people smeared statues of Old Bolsheviks with graffiti and uprooted them with crowbars or, when necessary, cranes. The Moscow city government sponsored the removal of the huge statue of “Iron” Feliks Dzerzhinsky from the square outside KGB headquarters, thus creating the ultimate image of the regime’s demise: the founder of the secret police dangling from a noose as the crowd cheered. Within a few days, the field next to the Tretyakov Gallery had become a Communist mortuary; children climbed on toppled statues of Sverdlov, Dzerzhinsky, and other fallen revolutionaries. The Museum of the Revolution put up a display honoring the resistance to the coup, and the Lenin Museum simply closed down “pending reconstruction.”

  For a while, the celebration was mixed with the macabre.

  Marshal Akhromeyev, Gorbachev’s military adviser, was found dead in his office, his neck in a noose, a series of suicide notes laid out neatly on his desk. The first described how he had botched a first attempt: “I am a poor master of preparing my own suicide. The first attempt (at 9:40) didn’t work—the cord broke. I’ll try with all my strength to do it again.” Another letter was addressed to Gorbachev, and in it Akhromeyev explained why he had rushed home from vacation to support the coup; in closing, he asked forgiveness for having broken military regulations. And in a letter to his family, the marshal wrote, “I cannot live when my Fatherland is dying and all that I have made my life’s work is being destroyed. My age and all I have done give me the right to leave this life. I struggled to the end.”

  Investigators arrived at the apartment of Boris Pugo to arrest him for his role in the coup and instead found a revolting scene of carnage. Pugo, dressed in a blue track suit, was dead, a gaping bullet wound in his head; his wife was also shot, but half alive. Pugo’s aged father-in-law, in a late stage of dementia, wandered around the small apartment, as if nothing had happened. Pugo left a suicide note for his children and grandchildren: “… Forgive me. It was all a mistake. I lived honestly, all my life.”

  Nikolai Kruchina, a Communist Party official who had administered the finances of the Central Committee, jumped from his apartment window to his death. The newspapers speculated that Kruchina knew better than anyone else about the Party’s foreign bank accounts, its funding of foreign Communist parties, its secret squandering of gold reserves and other resources. According to Russian journalists, the official news wire Tass was aware of at least fifteen other suicides but did not report them.

  Under arrest, the chief conspirator, the now former chief of the KGB, was cool and unrepentant. “My heart and soul are full of various feelings,” Kryuchkov told a reporter for Russian television. “I recall the entirety of my life, the way I lived it, and if I had the chance, I would take the same course. I believe I’ve never done anything in my life my Motherland could blame me for. If I could turn back the clock five or six days, I might have chosen a different way and I would not be behind bars. I hope the court will pass a fair decision, an optimal judgment, that will allow me to work in conditions of freedom and serve my Motherland, whose interests mean everything to me.”

  After his plea of innocence failed in the Supreme Soviet, Anatoly Lukyanov also went to jail—isolation cell No. 4 of Matrosskaya Tishina, “Sailor’s Rest,” one of the most notorious prisons in Moscow. And as he waited for the prosecutors to prepare their case and begin a trial, he turned once more to poetry. He still believed in “the cause,” and that the people of the Soviet Union should trust in him. His new theme was self-pity:

  Human gratitude! There will be none of that!

  Do not wait for it, do not torment or mourn,

  All trust is now in ashes,

  And there are glib slanders in all the papers,

  But I know that there will be rewards,

  There will be an honest trial in our souls,

  There will be new shoots, like the gifts of spring.

  Andrei Karaulov, the cultural editor for Nezavisimaya Gazeta, visited Lukyanov and heard him complain about Gorbachev. “I love him. I can’t change him, though. Speaking openly, I know his weaknesses, his shortcomings,” Lukyanov said. “Of all the people who made perestroika, I alone stayed next to Gorbachev, the rest left, from the left and right.… Time will show I was loyal.… I will remain a Communist, maybe without a Party membership card, but all the same.… I am to blame before the parliament, because this dealt it a blow. These are my children, my pain, my creation. This is very painful. I feel my blame before my mother, who lost her husband, lost her first son, and now is losing me. She is eighty-five and I love her very much. I am to blame before my wife, a great scholar, a corresponding member of the Academy of Medical Sciences, before my daughter … I am to blame before my grandson, my greatest pleasure, but to hi
m and to all people I can say that I lived honestly, worked, without complaining, sixteen hours a day. And maybe they will remember some good poetry I wrote.… I don’t know if I’ll write again, but I … well, I’ll say that my book closes with these words:

  “ ‘And yet, and yet,

  I hurried to turn

  The final page …

  I believed in our shining destiny …’

  “No, no, that’s not it. Now … now I remember …

  “ ‘I believed in our shining destiny,

  I never avoided the hard work,

  I was ashamed to work poorly …

  And if …’ ”

  But Lukyanov gave up. “I’ve forgotten it,” he said. “I’ve forgotten.…”

  With time, Gorbachev himself began to admit that he had played a dangerous game with the Party for far too long. In interviews he seemed a kind of political analysand, rambling on, finding moments of self-discovery among the ego, the pride, the self-deception: “Do you think I did not know that the Party’s conservative circles, which had united with the military-industrial complex, would make a strike? I knew, and I kept them beside me,” he said. “But they procrastinated. They, too, were also afraid that the people would not follow them, and they waited for the people’s discontent.… I will tell you: if [the conspirators] had acted twelve or eighteen months earlier the way they did in August, it would have come off. It is worth realizing this.…”

  He was right. Had the leaders of the KGB and the Central Committee wanted in 1988 or 1989 to get rid of Gorbachev and return to an Andropov-style regime of modest reform and bitter discipline, they could have succeeded. At least for a while. But now they had to deal with an elected leader of Russia and tens of thousands of people who now felt themselves to be citizens, empowered. Gorbachev had to admit that he had failed to understand the fury of the hard-line opposition. “I certainly did not think they would go as far as a putsch,” he said. “At some point, I misjudged the situation. For all the importance of strategy, it is important in politics to make the right decision at the right moment. It like a battle in war.… I should have forged a strong common front with the democrats.… I should have realized that earlier, in August 1990. I should have looked for some form of cooperation then, held a roundtable discussion or some other meeting. I missed that opportunity and paid dearly for it.”

  In early September, Gorbachev assembled the Congress of People’s Deputies at the Kremlin for what would be its last session. It would be the last time, in fact, that the Kremlin would function as “the center.”

  The session itself was an elaborate ruse, a last bit of political theater directed by Mikhail Gorbachev. While the Baltic states, Moldavia (now Moldova), and Georgia already considered themselves independent, the remaining ten republican leaders decided with Gorbachev to dissolve the Congress and create the basis for a new decentralized Union. Gorbachev envisioned the new Union with Moscow retaining some key functions as a coordinator of the common defense and foreign policy. Yeltsin differed and said that the Union presidency would be ceremonial, “something like the Queen of England.” What was most remarkable was the way Gorbachev and his newfound allies rammed the interim proposals on a new Union through the Congress, a body, after all, that was packed with Communist Party apparatchiks. Gorbachev was so eager to get what he wanted and finish the Congress that he promised the deputies that even after the dissolution of the legislature, they would still get salaries and priority access to plane and railway tickets. That was enough to win their votes.

  On December 26, 1991, at his dacha in the woods outside Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev climbed into the backseat of his Zil limousine and headed north toward the Kremlin. Suddenly the Soviet Union was a half-remembered dream and its last general secretary a pensioner. Ukraine’s decision to pull out of the negotiations for a new Union finally ended Gorbachev’s hopes for a place for himself as its president. Instead, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Byelorussia patched together a sketchy plan for a new commonwealth. There was no role left for “the center.” The republican leaders voted on Gorbachev’s retirement package.

  Now, in Moscow, Gorbachev wanted to take care of some last-minute meetings and clean out his desk before leaving for a few weeks of vacation. The Russian government had promised him a peaceful boxing day before they took up residence. But when Gorbachev arrived at the Kremlin, he saw his nameplate had already been pried off the wall. “Yeltsin, B. N.” gleamed brassily in its place. Inside the office, Boris Nikolayevich himself was behind the desk. For days there had been the air of self-pity about Gorbachev, and this petty incident, a gaudy exclamation in the intricate narrative of these revolutionary days, magnified his fury. Never mind Gorbachev’s own assaults on Yeltsin over the years. “For me, they have poisoned the air,” he complained. “They have humiliated me.”

  Comeuppance was what it was. In 1987, Gorbachev had dragged Yeltsin from a hospital bed and made him stand before the Moscow city Party organization for hour after hour of denunciations. Yeltsin spent the next several weeks under a doctor’s care, suffering from nervous exhaustion. When given the chance to humiliate Gorbachev, Yeltsin grabbed it.

  In their last meeting, Gorbachev had promised Yeltsin he would stay away from politics. He would not be an opposition figure. He had, it seemed, no other choice. “Yeltsin had Gorbachev by the balls,” said Sergei Grigoriyev, who had been deputy spokesman for Gorbachev. All the KGB, Communist Party, and military archives were now in Yeltsin’s hands. KGB officials told me that in the days before and after the coup, secret police workers were dumping crates of documents into underground furnaces, but the few files that did leak after the coup could only have embarrassed Gorbachev. There were documents showing Gorbachev’s approval of secret funding of the Polish Communist Party even after Solidarity came to power. Another file showed him maneuvering to prevent the German government from opening the old East German archives. Yeltsin also came into possession of transcripts of his own phone calls from the days when the Gorbachev government and KGB tried desperately to discredit him. Gorbachev’s handwritten notes were in the margins.

  Moreover, few believed anymore that Gorbachev was merely an innocent bystander during the worst moments of the perestroika years: the military attacks on peaceful demonstrators in Tbilisi, Vilnius, Riga, and Baku. When his popularity was at its height, he escaped blame. He was out of the country or out of the loop. But now even those closest to him admitted otherwise. “I am sure Gorbachev knew all about what was going on in Vilnius and Riga,” said Nikolai Petrakov, who had been Gorbachev’s chief economist. Other top-ranking officials, sympathetic to Gorbachev, agreed.

  But that was all past, and now Russia faced a great historical moment, an elected president occupying the Kremlin for the first time in the thousand-year history of Russia, the hammer and sickle gone from the flagpole, the regime and empire dissolved. And yet it all had the pallid, made-for-television feel of Washington ceremony. History felt like nothing more than a miserable winter day, the sky as empty and wan as the butcher shops. The Western press corps roamed Red Square in desperate search of passion or comment. “You care, we don’t,” a fist-faced old woman from the provincial city of Tver told a clutch of reporters. With that the woman stormed off in search of potatoes and milk for her family.

  In the afternoon, Gorbachev’s press secretary, Andrei Grachev, invited a small group of aides, foreign reporters, and Russian editors to a reception at the Oktyabrskaya Hotel. A farewell party, Grachev billed it, and he could not have chosen a more appropriate stage. For years, the hotel across from the French embassy had been a symbol of the Communist Party’s opulence, heavy on the marble and mirrors.

  At a few minutes before five o’clock, the reporters and editors stood waiting at the top of the marble stairs for the guest of honor to arrive. By chance, I took my place near Len Karpinsky, who was now the editor in chief of Moscow News, and Vitaly Tretyakov, whose Nezavisimaya Gazeta was now, with Izvestia, the most respected paper in the
country. Gorbachev’s resignation meant a transition from the intellectual idealists of Karpinsky’s generation to a breed of younger men and women like Tretyakov—business neophytes, scholars, hustlers, and, in this case, newspaper editors—who would perhaps build a new world not so much out of the jagged ruins of the old experiment, but on a model, faintly perceived, from the West, from Europe and America. As Gorbachev was leaving center stage, so, too, was Karpinsky. Moscow News, which had broken one taboo after another in the first years of perestroika, was a tired paper: still interesting at times, still honest, but one that spoke to a generation that now seemed, like Gorbachev, exhausted.

  “It’s good that Gorbachev’s leaving now, but I am moved to the core of me,” Karpinsky told me. “How can I deny that I have just finished the most important chapter of my life?”

  In the spring of 1992, Gorbachev toured the United States in the Forbes corporate jet, The Capitalist Tool. He saw nothing odd or ironic in this. The crowds tossed garlands at his feet, plutocrats deposited checks in his name. He spent an afternoon with Ronald Reagan drinking wine and eating chocolate-chip cookies. They reminisced about the cold war, long over. It seemed to all the victory tour of the century’s last great man.

  But in Russia, Gorbachev was unwanted, hated by the Party men he had betrayed and ignored by the democrats he had abandoned. Many were ready to think the worst of him. Izvestia, the most authoritative daily in Russia, published a front-page item in May saying that Gorbachev was getting ready to walk out the very doors he had opened. The first and last president of the Soviet Union, Izvestia said, had bought a two-story house in Florida “with a lot of land” for $108,350 in a development called Tropical Golf Acres.

  In fact, Gorbachev had not bought land abroad and denied any plans to emigrate. “I repeat, for anyone who is still willing to listen,” he said, “I have no dacha in California, nor in Geneva, nor in Tibet with tunnels leading to China.” And yet some of Gorbachev’s closest friends and confidants admitted to me that he was angry and on edge, harboring both terror and grand illusions about his future. “Gorbachev fears he may have to flee the country one day like some kind of Papa Doc Duvalier,” said the playwright Mikhail Shatrov, who was helping Gorbachev write his memoirs. “He knows only too well that eleven of the fourteen coup plotters have testified against him, claiming he somehow encouraged the August putsch. Gorbachev knows the situation is unpredictable. At the same time, Gorbachev has delusions of returning to power. Not right away, but someday. But it won’t happen. He cannot return to power.”