Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  And so on. The Party would be shameless to the end. Its members would argue their case on the basis of civil liberties, political pluralism, and the historical record. The Party men said now that the country had triumphed under their rule and gone to ruin in their absence. Such was history as they were prepared to present it in court.

  When that high-minded tactic did not seem convincing to the court, or perhaps to themselves, the Communists’ tone shifted from mock-heroic to threatening. At one point, another of the Party’s representatives, Dmitri Stepanov, said that if Yeltsin’s decrees were declared constitutional in court, then the Communists were prepared to use “the same methods” as the members of the August putsch to grab power.

  “Emergency committees are nothing out of the ordinary,” he said. “We have them all the time.” He also defended the “alleged” brutality of the Party by saying that more people are killed in a couple of years in traffic accidents in Russia than were killed by Stalin. And besides, he added, the Party was never as brutal as the U.S. Army: “The Americans mowed down whole villages in Vietnam, whereas in the Baltic states we just exiled people to Siberia.”

  Sergei Shakhrai, Yeltsin’s lead advocate in the Constitutional Court, was also prepared to argue the historical record. Shakhrai, a celebrated jurist in his mid-thirties, had written nearly all of Yeltsin’s legal decrees during the siege of the White House. With the help of two other lawyers, Andrei Makarov and Mikhail Fedotov, Shakhrai set out to establish a case against the Communist Party based on a historical record of dictatorship, deception, and violence.

  “The organization that called itself the CPSU was neither a de facto nor a de jure party,” Shakhrai said after a court session one day. “According to every canon of the Marxist-Leninist theory of the state and the law, we had a state that called itself the CPSU. There was a particular group of persons who dealt with the government and had a monopoly on the state: the one and a half million people in the Party nomenklatura, several million civil servants, and, finally, the special apparatus of coersion. The KGB was the armed detachment of this organization that called itself the CPSU and it was even used for the physical destruction of dissidents. Essentially we had a regime in which the basic law of the state and society were the rules of the Communist Party.”

  Among Shakhrai’s first witnesses were three well-known political dissidents and former political prisoners: Lev Razgoh, a writer who spent more than a decade in forced labor camps under Stalin; Vladimir Bukovsky, who was in the camps under Brezhnev from 1967 until he was finally traded to the West for the Chilean Communist leader Luis Corvalán in 1976; and Gleb Yakunin, a dissident Russian Orthodox priest who was imprisoned and later banished from practicing in Moscow. All three men provided firsthand testimony to the Party’s brutality. To supplement the historical record, Richard Pipes, a historian at Harvard University and the author of Russia Under the Old Regime and The Russian Revolution, submitted into evidence an eighteen-page essay outlining the Communist Party’s assumption of absolute state power within three months of the October coup.

  “From the point of view of historical science,” Pipes wrote, “the so-called party of the Bolsheviks was, of course, not a party, but an organization of a wholly new type, which had some features of a political party: Its structure was without precedent, an organization which was beyond government, which controlled the government and controlled everything, including the country’s wealth. It was beyond any outside control. In no sense of the word was it a political ‘party,’ nor a voluntary social organization.… This political organization of an absolutely new type … was a precedent for the Fascist party of Mussolini and the Nazi party of Hitler and the countless so-called political parties of a totalitarian character which, beginning in Europe and then spreading throughout the world, established single-party government.… Never, in all its years of activity, did the Communist Party consider itself responsible to the law or constitution. It always considered its will and its goals the decisive factor; it always acted willfully, that is, unconstitutionally.”

  Although the testimony of former political prisoners, legislators, and Western historians was impressive enough, Shakhrai and his team meant to build an even more specific case. As a bureaucratic machine, the Party and the KGB left behind a paper trail of tens of millions of documents. Shakhrai petitioned the Russian government’s new committee on the declassification of Party and KGB archives in order to provide documentary, and not merely anecdotal, proof of the way the Communist Party wielded and abused power. “Every kid in school now knows about the horrors perpetrated by the Communist Party, but we want to prove our case legally, with documents, so it cannot be denied,” said Andrei Makarov.

  When they first considered using the archives, Shakhrai’s team had no idea what would be available to them. There was no telling what was lost—the tradition of destroying documents began early on when Lenin is said to have ordered the archive on the Red Terror cleaned out—but tens of millions of papers are now in government hands.

  The Shakhrai team, of course, could not possibly hope to read even a fraction of the available documents, but they were able to obtain files describing in painful detail the purges of the 1930s, the repression of dissidents in the 1960s and 1970s, even transcripts of Politburo meetings at which the invasion of Afghanistan was discussed.

  During the court’s August recess, Shakhrai, Fedotov, and Makarov read through tens of thousands more pages of documents marked Soversheno Sekretno, “Top Secret.” They were preparing for the climax of the trial scheduled for late September and early October when some of the biggest names of the Gorbachev era were scheduled to testify, Politburo members and Central Committee secretaries known mainly by their grainy portraits and the rumors of their politics and personalities: Yegor Ligachev, Nikolai Ryzhkov, Vladimir Dolgikh, Valentin Falin, Aleksandr Yakovlev, Ivan Polozkov.

  Gorbachev, for his part, was still warning the court that he had no intention of testifying, that he would not appear “even if they dragged me there in handcuffs.” (For this latter remark, the puckish daily Nezavismaya Gazeta published a front-page cartoon featuring Gorbachev being dragged to the court, hands cuffed.) The lawyers on Yeltsin’s side certainly wanted to question Gorbachev, mainly to establish the idea that no one was above or beyond the legal system, but they also felt they could do without testimony from him. Mainly, it was the Communists who wanted the opportunity to put their former general secretary on the stand, to lacerate him for what they said was his betrayal of the Party. “Gorbachev had evil plans,” Dolgikh said. “He destroyed the Party in 1989. Sure, the Party made mistakes. But the whole world recognized our power. When there was a Party, this country was not falling apart.” Ligachev, who had been the number-two man in the Party from 1985 to 1990, called Gorbachev a “revisionist,” the same word Stalin once used like a branding iron on his doomed opponents. “Gorbachev started us on the path of anti-Communism,” said Ligachev. “Perestroika lost its way and headed toward bourgeoisism.”

  After the first few days of the trial in July, most Russian and foreign journalists stayed away. They had more urgent things to do than cover this curious epilogue to the Communist era. There were wars in Abkhazia, Nagorny-Karabakh, and Tajikistan. There were breadlines and no electricity in Armenia. Vast hunks of Russia, from the northern Caucasus to Yakutia, were threatening to break away from Moscow’s rule. The crime rate was spiraling almost as quickly as inflation. Shady businessmen were exploiting the new economic chaos and were exporting billions of dollars in capital out of the country. The Russian army was threatening to go to war in Moldova. The West was worried that the republics were still playing politics with the control of nuclear weapons. There were reports of arms deals with Iran and China. In Latvia and Estonia, few of the heroes of the independence movements showed themselves as nasty racists, forcing Russians, Poles, and other non-Balts into the status of second-class citizenship. In anger, Yeltsin put a halt to the withdrawal of troops from the region just
weeks after it began.

  So, no, the former Soviet Union was not wanting for more urgent issues and tragedies. For most, the trial was an afterthought. But, still, I wanted this last glimpse of the old regime—the last exhausted generation of Communist leaders. I could not resist it. For so many years, Soviets had seen these men as distant antigods, men with rumpled faces and dark fedoras, possessed of immense power, and silent. In the first years of the perestroika era, their unearthly quality faded somewhat as Gorbachev stripped the city of the old ubiquitous portraits and slogans. But they were still accountable to no one, available to no one. By the end of the decade, the press, both foreign and domestic, began to learn more about these elusive shades from their opponents, from rumor, even from actual interviews. But until now, they manipulated interviews the way they did the state. They were perfectly capable of listening to a reporter’s question and then reeling off a pompous, hour-long speech, then dismissing the guest, his tea now cold in its china cup. But in court the Party men were nonentities, tired men in bad suits. In the audience, they mumbled angrily during testimony they did not approve of, and, like Baptist parishioners, they barked agreement to urge on their compatriots at the lectern.

  On a day when Nikolai Ryzhkov was testifying on his five years as prime minister under Gorbachev, I spent the two-hour afternoon recess with Ivan Polozkov, a Party chieftain from the southern Russian city of Krasnodar who in 1990 had become the leader of the Russian Communist Party and Ligachev’s successor as the conservative “dark prince.” At Central Committee meetings in 1990 and 1991, Polozkov had been openly critical of Gorbachev, but even then there was something guarded about his speech. A glimmer of traditional Party discipline, to say nothing of simple desire for self-preservation, prevented him from saying the things he was saying now.

  “I am free now,” he said, “free now to vent my spleen.” Like the other Party men who came to court every day, Polozkov operated on the fuel of resentment. He was, in his mind, a great man made small by the deceptions of Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the Central Intelligence Agency.

  I asked him why he thought the Communist Party and the Soviet system had collapsed with such stunning speed after seeming to all the world to be unconquerable, a monolith of power and strength.

  Polozkov’s eyes widened, more in surprise than in anger. “They had so much and we … we had nothing!” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I said. “That the Communist Party had nothing and the opposition had everything?”

  “Precisely,” Polozkov said, with a satisfied little nod. “We know the CIA financed parties here. You gave them Japanese cameras, German copying machines, money, everything! You had your dissidents who worked for you, the liars, the diplomats, the military double agents. Gorbachev, Yakovlev, Shevardnadze, these men were all yours, too. They were yours! Look at the book contracts they’ve gotten! Millions! One of our secretaries in the Russian Communist Party, Ivan Antonovich, was in the United States and he was invited to speak at a conference. Shevardnadze was on the bill, too. Shevardnadze spoke first, and then he left. Then Antonovich spoke. Afterward they gave him a souvenir: a copper coffee cup. Someone came up to him from our embassy and said how unfair it was, that Antonovich had only gotten a mug and he spoke in English while Shevardnadze spoke in his bad Russian and got five thousand dollars!

  “Look, I understand what it was all about. It was a confrontation of two systems. Reagan called us an ‘evil empire’ and other Western leaders were judged according to how anti-Soviet they could be. The putsch was just a culmination of this struggle. And I will admit this: so far you have been winning this war. But I want to emphasize—‘so far.’ Remember this: Napoleon was in Moscow, but France did not defeat us. The Nazis were near Moscow, but look what happened. But I must tell you—and listen carefully—the war is still on and, in the end, you will not be able to endure in this competition with Communism.”

  I asked Polozkov if he thought that Gorbachev was a paid traitor. He began nodding, rapidly, crazily.

  “Look,” he said, “who do you think is on Gorbachev’s level, historically speaking? What sort of stature do you think he has?”

  I said that I’d just read an article in the French press comparing Gorbachev to de Gaulle.

  “What?” Polozkov barked. “How can you compare Gorbachev to de Gaulle? Pétain is more like it! He lies like Pétain! He betrayed his country like Pétain! De Gaulle did not bend low before Hitler the way Gorbachev did to the West. It’s an insult to our people to compare Gorbachev to de Gaulle. Gorbachev fled the Party like a coward. For his first couple of years, Gorbachev did well. But then he began to travel. He was praised abroad. They celebrated him as a great leader, and this tickled his ambition. He lost a sense of who he was, where he came from. He became vain, always out for his own career. And then they gave a Nobel Prize to a man who destroyed his country with wars and collapse. They made a mockery of that prize.”

  After talking with Polozkov and several other Communist Party chieftains who came to the small courtroom every day to watch the proceedings, I realized that these men had processed the August coup in their own minds, first as tragedy and now as farce. That is, they were so shaken by the way it changed the world that when they recovered from the shock of losing power, they began to excuse the putsch as a mockery, a nonevent. It simply never happened.

  Vladimir Ivashko, the former deputy general secretary of the Party, was typical in the way he regarded the coup as “no coup at all.” He had served the Party so long, and so well, he had lived by its myths so thoroughly, that he could not, and would not, think of the “August days” as the study in betrayal and incompetence that they were. “I know these men who are in prison,” he said. “I know them as well as one man can know another. They are capable men, the top men in the Party. Honest men. Do you think they are fools? Yeltsin was never arrested. There were tanks, yes, but they never fired. People put flowers in the gun barrels. This is a coup? No, I am sorry. This was a drama, designed to crush the Communist Party and create bourgeois power in Russia.

  “In the West, even here, they try to say that the Communist Party was reactionary, that it was against change. Those in power—and I knew them all well—none of them were against change. The discussion was always about the pace of change, about the retention of the Union. The members of the so-called putsch acted in the interest of a native power. To say they acted as opponents of reform is groundless. The Party kept this country together. Look at the Balkans, look at Ireland. Why were we able for so many years—until now—to avoid such conflict? Because there was unanimity from the top to the bottom. The tragedy of Gorbachev and of Yeltsin is that they destroyed the Party mechanisms but created nothing in their place. Nothing will take the place of the Party. Nothing. Never.”

  I spent the better part of two days watching both sides question Nikolai Ryzhkov, a politician so emotional and prone to personal slights in his time that he was known in the press as “the weeping Bolshevik.” In his days as Gorbachev’s prime minister, Ryzhkov would choke up and splutter if members of the Supreme Soviet dared question his economic plans or his role in a weapons scandal. Unlike Ligachev or Polozkov, who affected the steely toughness of a regional Party boss, Ryzhkov had a touching vulnerability and righteousness that was his last selling point before his popularity vanished completely by late 1990. His memoir, Perestroika: A History of Betrayals, was filled with venom toward Gorbachev, Yakovlev, and Yeltsin.

  Uncommonly slender and spry for a Party leader of his seniority, Ryzhkov stood at the witness stand with a studied casualness, his hip cocked, his left hand thrust in his pocket, as he answered the first easy volleys from the Communist side. Then, as Makaraov and Fedotov began to ask questions based on confidential Party documents, he bristled at what his life had come to. He came to attention.

  Makarov picked up one bound set of documents after another and seemed to mock Ryzhkov simply with the manner of his question. Makarov was possessed of an elephantine girth and
the voice of a field mouse; somehow this queer combination made him seem skeptical, even sarcastic, with no effort at all. He needed only to open his tiny cupid’s mouth.

  Respected witness, he would say. Here is a document describing secret arms sales to foreign Communist parties using government monies. Here’s another specifically setting out the plan to cover up the nuclear accident at Chernobyl. Here the Politburo allocates money to “education.” Do political parties usually have educational systems? Respected witness, respected Nikolai Ivanovich, the CPSU supported left-wing parties in capitalist, developed countries. Does that mean we gave succor to capitalist, developed countries? Toward what end?

  For a long time Ryzhkov kept his cool and deflected painful questions about the past by saying “that was then” and “the Party was in the process of reform.”

  “Why did the Party, even after it relinquished its constitutional guarantee of power in 1990, why did it continue to control the government and virtually run public life?” Makarov asked. “Does that indicate to you constitutional, legal behavior?”

  Finally, Ryzhkov lost his temper. “I protest these questions!” he said. “You are asking me questions as if I were a criminal.… You are trying to paint me into a corner!”

  Ryzhkov’s self-image, that of the reasonable moderate surrounded by reactionaries like Polozkov and unconscionable radicals like Gorbachev and Yakovlev, began to appear ridiculous. When transcripts were read to him describing how he voted for one pernicious measure after another, his explanations were weak and absurd.