Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  “Many times I spoke out against a measure,” he said, “but when I found myself alone or in the minority, I voted for it.”

  Chief Justice Zorkin tried to keep the proceedings above emotion and raw political battle, but the effort was doomed. After Makarov had whispered into his microphone the proceedings of yet another Politburo meeting that the Communist Party never imagined would be read aloud, Ryzhkov snapped.

  “Secrets are secrets!” he said. “One day soon we’ll realize that. There were always secrets! Try and make an American turn himself inside out for you!”

  At one point, Makarov swung his bulk in Ryzhkov’s direction and said he “worried” whether the “respected Nikolai Ivanovich” wasn’t tired.

  “You don’t have the figure for worrying,” the former prime minister said. “You shouldn’t worry.”

  “Well,” the lawyer huffed, “at least I don’t cry.”

  One night after a long court session, I accepted an invitation from Shakhrai’s team to follow them out to their “work dacha” at a government compound in the village of Arkhangelskoye. The compound was one of the Russian government’s many spoils of victory. Although most former members of the Communist Party leadership were still living lives of relative splendor even as they pled poverty in court and on television, most of the booty—the vacation homes, the resorts, the limousines—were now in the hands of the state. Yeltsin made his name by mocking the privileges of the Party powerful, but he was now doing a fairly good imitation of Louis XIV. Gorbachev’s old arrangement of a cortege of three Zil limousines did not suffice; Yeltsin traveled in a fleet of three or four Mercedes-Benz sedans.

  A high gate, a surveillance camera, and an armed guard marked the entrance to the compound. Shakhrai himself was in Austria that day—“buying himself a dacha in Salzburg, no doubt,” one of the Party lawyers had cracked—and Fedotov and Makarov had a long night ahead of them to prepare for the next witness, Yegor Ligachev. They seemed unfazed by their twenty-hour workdays. Fedotov, whose reddish beard and bald pate earned him the nickname “Lenin” among his friends, had grown up in what he called “dissident circles.” In the early 1960s, he attended public readings at Pushkin Square and Mayakovsky Square of banned poetry; for his trouble, he was expelled for a while from university. Fedotov was now the Russian government’s minister of “intellectual property,” presiding over the country’s copyright bureaucracy.

  If Fedotov was the earnest intellectual of the team, Makarov was its rogue. In 1984, he defended the Soviet president of a Soviet-Swiss bank that went mysteriously bankrupt. “Americans killed the bank, the CIA,” Makarov said without malice. “Nine members of the Politburo testified in the case, and so anything I learn now about the Party comes as no surprise.” In 1988, Makarov defended Brezhnev’s son-in-law Yuri Churbanov. After his marriage to Brezhnev’s daughter, Churbanov won a high-ranking post in the Interior Ministry police, a job he rather quickly exploited for its bribe-taking possibilities. On a trip to Uzbekistan, he accepted a suitcase stuffed with a few hundred thousand rubles. Makarov won high marks for his defense, but there was not much he could do for a son-in-law who was on trial as much for his relation to a family in disgrace as for his hunger for gold.

  Fedotov led the way into dacha No. 6—the same cabin where Gorbachev’s and Yeltsin’s advisers had tried to hammer out the abandoned 500 Days economic package in 1990. While dinner was being prepared, Makarov and Fedotov led me to a small study. A desk was stacked high with folders, many of them red and marked “Materials of the Politburo.”

  “We have to meet for a while,” Makarov said. “Why don’t you sit down and help yourself.”

  The hors d’oeuvres he offered were several short stacks of some of the most closely guarded secrets of the 1970s and 1980s in the Soviet Union.

  “We’ve gotten about eighty thousand documents,” Fedotov said. “Now there’s only around forty million more to go.”

  “Oh, before we leave you with these things, you might want to hear our performance of the Politburo meeting of August 29, 1985,” Makarov said.

  The two men began laughing with the anticipation of it, and like an old radio team—Bob and Ray coming to you live from dacha No. 6!—they read their script from one of the documents marked “Top Secret, Sole Copy.” Makarov read Gorbachev’s lines, giving a fair approximation of Gorbachev’s southern accent and grammatical flubs, and Fedotov read the remaining parts. The document was even more fascinating than its bizarre performance.

  At that session, the members of the Politburo discussed their strategy options regarding Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner, who were still living in forced internal exile in the closed city of Gorky (its name has since been changed back to the original, Nizhni Novgorod).

  Gorbachev says the Politburo has received letters from the Sakharovs and from elsewhere asking that Bonner be allowed to go abroad for medical treatment.

  Viktor Chebrikov, chief of the KGB, dominates the discussion and informs the other members of the Politburo that Sakharov “is not in excellent health and now is receiving an oncological exam because he is losing weight.” He fails to mention that Sakharov’s weight loss was due to a hunger strike which led the KGB to attempt to cram a tube down his throat and feed him.

  Another participant, Mikhail Zimyanin, warns that “no decency can be expected of Bonner. She is a beast in a skirt who was appointed by imperialism.” They are clearly worried that Bonner, half Jewish and half Armenian, will plead the case for emigration and human rights while in the West. Chebrikov cautions that if they allow Bonner to go to the West for treatment “she may make statements and get awards.… But it would look like an act of humanism.… Sakharov’s behavior is under the huge influence of Bonner and he is always subject to that.…”

  Gorbachev: “Well, that’s what Zionism is!”

  Makarov and Fedotov collapsed in laughter.

  Later on, over a dinner of broiled chicken and rice, Fedotov said that the two of them had spent hours reading the documents and had been alternately stunned and amused at the banality of the Politburo sessions. Makarov said he hoped that the theaters of Moscow would soon stage the old sessions of the Politburo using the transcripts as scripts.

  “When we read these absurd documents we laugh ourselves all the way to the floor,” Fedotov said. “But that is only when we are not crushed and despondent. Recently I read a Central Committee document from 1937 that said that the Voronezh secret police, according to the ‘regional plan,’ repressed in the ‘first category’ nine thousand people—which means these people were executed. And for no reason, of course. Twenty-nine thousand were repressed in the ‘second category’—meaning they were sent to labor camps. The local first secretary, however, writes that there are still more Trotskyites and kulaks who remain ‘unrepressed.’ He was saying that the plan was fulfilled but the plan was not enough! And so he asked that it be increased by eight thousand. Stalin writes back: ‘No, increase by nine thousand!’ The sickness of it! It’s as if they were playing poker.”

  “It’s true,” Makarov said. “Later, we read a document from Marshal Tukhachevsky giving instructions to his men saying if you meet a person on the street and he fails to identify himself immediately … shoot him! This is 1921, not the Stalin era. See, the thing to remember about the documents is not the sensations they provide. It’s their routineness, their banality, the way these very ordinary directives ordered the life of the country.”

  After dinner, I sat at the desk once more leafing through documents that recorded those banalities and, until now, were considered “eyes only”: KGB analyses of a school of writers in 1970 known as SMOG; a list of Western correspondents and dissidents at a rally at Pushkin Square on December 5, 1975; copies of private letters sent by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and intercepted by the KGB; a KGB dossier on the creation in Krasnodar at School No. 3 of an eighth-grade “Club for the Struggle for Democracy”; a September 1986 Politburo meeting at which the KGB chief, Chebrikov, says that whil
e political prisoners are being released, “they will be watched … in connection with prophylactic work”; an analysis by Brezhnev’s ideologist Mikhail Suslov of Sakharov’s first set of underground essays (“To read this is to become nauseated”).

  The minutes of a July 12, 1984, Politburo session revealed a truly nauseating spectacle: the leaders of the Party still defending Stalin against Khrushchev’s revisionism. At the meeting, the members listen to a report on how Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister, was “overwhelmed with joy” at the Politburo’s decision to restore him to the Party ranks. Molotov had been expelled during Khrushchev’s “thaw.”

  “And let me tell you,” says Marshal Dmitri Ustinov, the head of the armed forces. “If it hadn’t been for Khrushchev, they never would have been expelled and there never would have been these outrageous actions regarding Stalin.… Not a single one of our enemies has inflicted so much misfortune on us as Khrushchev did regarding his policies and his attitude toward Stalin.”

  Gorbachev, who knew well at the time that he would have to get the support of the conservatives to win the top job once Chernenko finally died, plays a marvelous game, saying that he would support the restoration to Party ranks of Molotov’s cohorts, Lazar Kaganovich and Georgi Malenkov. (“Yes, these are elderly people,” the Leningrad Party boss, Grigori Romanov, chimes in. “They may die.”) But Gorbachev also knows the value of discretion. As for the Molotov rehabilitation, he says, “I think we can do without publicity.” Ustinov gets so excited by this little neo-Stalinist wave that he says, “And in connection with the fortieth anniversary of our victory in the Great Patriotic War, shouldn’t we rename Volgograd back to Stalingrad?”

  “Well,” Gorbachev says, “there are pluses and minuses to this.”

  Even after Chernenko’s death and his own assumption of power, Gorbachev offered bones for his reactionary colleagues to gnaw on. At a March 20, 1986, Politburo meeting he suggests changing the name of the icebreaker Arktika to Brezhnev.

  “Yes, let’s do it,” Ryzhkov says, “but don’t announce it on television.”

  Finally, I lingered over a document that Sovietologists have been waiting to see for years: the transcript of the March 11, 1985, Politburo meeting at which Gorbachev was made general secretary. For years there had been speculation that it was a close vote, that the chief of the Moscow Party organization, the hard-liner Viktor Grishin, challenged Gorbachev, and had it not been for the absence of one or two conservative voters, Grishin might have won. Former Politburo members Geidar Aliyev, Yegor Ligachev, Aleksandr Yakovlev, and Grishin himself, in a brief phone conversation before his death, told me that it was untrue, that the vote was unanimous. But that was never good enough for Sovietology.

  Gorbachev opens the fateful meeting with the announcement of Chernenko’s death, and Yevgeny Chazov, the minister of health, gives a detailed description of Chernenko’s illnesses and final hours. Then, in a move that stunned some of the conservatives, Andrei Gromyko, a top official under every Soviet leader since Stalin, stands up at his place at the table and nominates Gorbachev. First, he provides some ritual words of praise for Chernenko’s “historical optimism” and the general “rightness of our theory and practice.” And then, in nominating Gorbachev, the baby of the Politburo, Gromyko pays tribute to his man’s “indomitable creative energy” and his “attention to people.”

  “When we look into the future—and for many of us this is hard—we have no right to let the world see a single fissure in our relations,” Gromyko says. “There is more than enough speculation on this abroad.”

  For his part, Viktor Grishin says, “When we heard yesterday about the death of Konstantin Ustinovich, we predetermined to some extent this issue [of the new leadership] when we arranged to approve Mikhail Sergeyevich chairman of the funeral commission.” Clearly, Grishin, who had worked with one party ideologist, Richard Kosolapov, to devise a program for his own election, could not have been thrilled that the behind-the-scenes maneuvering had left him powerless and Gorbachev head of the committee in charge of Chernenko’s funeral and, now, general secretary. But he did not challenge Gorbachev, and, instead, sings his praises just as loudly as the rest. During Chernenko’s illness, Gorbachev had proved a superior politician and Grishin must now swallow his ambition.

  Finally, Gorbachev gets up to speak. His performance, even on the page, is worthy of Machiavelli’s demands for a would-be prince. “Our economy needs more dynamism. This dynamism is needed for the development of our foreign policy,” he says. “I take all your words with a sense of tremendous excitement and emotion. It is with this sense that I am listening to you, my dear friends.

  “We do not need to change policy. It is correct and it is true. It is genuine Leninist politics. We need, however, to speed up, to move forward, to disclose shortcomings and overcome them and realize our shining future.… I assure you I will do everything to justify the trust of the Party.”

  Then he announces a plenum of the Central Committee in a half hour at which the leadership question will be “resolved.”

  Thus was the last general secretary of the Communist Party elected—with, as the old newspapers would add in parentheses, “prolonged and thunderous applause.”

  The morning after my trip to Arkhangelskoye, I went to court to hear the testimony of Yegor Ligachev, once the second most powerful man in the country. In power, “he was like a locomotive,” Ryzhkov recalled, and he certainly looked fit now. Ligachev had just published a memoir titled Zagadka Gorbacheva (“The Enigma of Gorbachev”), in which he laid out the conservative case against the last general secretary. Gorbachev, he wrote, “began well” with a gradualist program, but then fell victim to international acclaim, vanity, and the duplicity of the “extremists” in his midst. And instead of reforming the system, Gorbachev started on the road to “antisocialist” thinking. As he had in his memoirs, Ligachev tried in his testimony to portray himself as the last honest man victimized by endless conspiracies to destroy him and the socialist state. He was never an “opponent of perestroika,” as he had been portrayed in the press in Russia and abroad, but merely an advocate of gradual change.

  The Communist lawyers wanted Ligachev to feel comfortable and lobbed him a few easy leading questions to fuel his soliloquy. The government lawyers were not nearly so accommodating. For their part, they insisted on knowing Ligachev’s reaction to a raft of Politburo and Central Committee decisions during his years in power. Once more, Makarov read through the documents:

  Respected Yegor Kuzmich, he would say, what of this document dated November 1, 1989, in which the Politburo approves the funding for the construction of a rec room for the Afghan leader and his family? And what of this document that you drew up dictating to the press the rules for the coverage of the war in Afghanistan? “There will be not more than one report of a death or wound per month among Soviet servicemen.”

  And what of this document in which the Politburo approves of the creation of a news bureau for Komsomolskaya Pravda in Canada and stipulates that the resident correspondent be an officer of the KGB?

  “What of it?” Ligachev said. “This is a practice broadly implemented by other countries.”

  And what of the Politburo decision to create a special military unit of the KGB manned by people “infinitely loyal to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the socialist Motherland”? Isn’t it curious that the Party, which had allegedly relinquished the one-party system, could still dictate such a policy to a government ministry?

  “Well, I am sure there was no ill will intended,” Ligachev said.

  And what of this document, esteemed Yegor Kuzmich, a Politburo session on March 24, 1987, at which the members agree that permissions given for business trips abroad must be tightened up because, as they say, “we regret that only professional competence is being taken into account and not political concerns”?

  “What’s wrong with that?” he answered. “That just means that we were not indifferent to how peopl
e behaved abroad—moral factors included.”

  Finally, after a long day at the witness’s lectern, Ligachev began to show flashes of why he was feared by the hundreds of men and women working in the Central Committee apparatus. For years he had been the one asking the tough questions, not answering them, and now he, like Ryzhkov, snapped.

  “Look,” he said, “if we’d taken decisive measures at the beginning, this country would not be on fire as it is today! This war is not only close to Russia, it is entering our own homes. It is here!… Mikhail Sergeyevich took decisions only when every last citizen in the country knew they were necessary, when every last apple had ripened and fallen from the tree!”

  After a few days of watching the testimony at the Constitutional Court, I found it remarkable that there was hardly any interest at all among the public. The spectators’ gallery was nearly empty. Some days there were no more than five or six journalists around. Nearly all the regulars—the true court buffs—were themselves dinosaurs of the Communist Party.

  For nearly everyone else, the struggles and pleasures of the present were of far greater concern, for Moscow now, little more than a year after the coup, had become a phantasmagoria, a post-Communist world as painted by Hieronymus Bosch. Younger Muscovites, especially, seemed determined to rush headlong into some weird, pleasurable, vulgar world of primitive capitalism. In a leap typical of all Russian history, the new economy had bounded from one stage of development to the next, gliding quickly from complete deficit to sensual indulgence, never stopping to solve the mundane problems of subsistence, structure, and property. In the subway stations and the kiosks, you could buy a lace tablecloth, a bottle of Curaçao, Wrigley’s spearmint gum, Mars bars, a Public Enemy tape, Swiss chocolate, plastic “marital toys,” a Mercedes-Benz hood ornament, American cigarettes, and Estonian pornography.

  In the alleyways and restaurants, Moscow was beginning to look like the set of Once Upon a Time in America. As the old Communist Party mafia structures withered, more conventional ones took their place. The city was awash with twenty-five-year-old men wearing slick suits and black shirts and announcing their occupation as “a little buying, a little selling.” Their molls dressed in spandex and fox. A kiosk owner’s failure to pay his weekly protection money usually left him with a kiosk reduced to sticks and broken glass.