Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  As hyperinflation drove the ruble into irrelevance, a system of financial apartheid arrived. The dollar, suffering everywhere else, was supreme in Russia. Every day more foreign business executives arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport, toting their briefcases like pickaxes and pans, hoping to find the new Klondike. In the meantime, they were also the new colonials, hiring servants and snapping up Russian antiques for a song. In the House on the Embankment, the swank home of the nomenklatura a half century ago, the former apartment of Stalin’s chief executioner was now occupied by the top executive of McDonald’s.

  There was no nostalgia or reverence for the old dogma. At the biggest bookstore in the city, the House of Books, I saw a weary sales clerk using a stack of the collected works of V. I. Lenin as a stool while she handed out copies of the latest editions of Agatha Christie and Arthur Hailey. Moscow had become a city of disorientation, so much so that you could easily take a wrong turn into the nineteenth century. A former journalist named Vadim Dormidontov sat in an office at Moscow City Hall and decided which streets and neighborhoods would lose their Soviet-era names and regain their old ones. Lenin Hills was Sparrow Hills once more. The residents of Ustinov Boulevard now lived again on Autumn Boulevard.

  While nearly everyone tried to get his bearings in this strange new world, Yeltsin struggled with a hard-line opposition more than willing to exploit the collapse of the economy for its political gain. The coalition of conservatives was often known as the “red and browns,” the alliance of former Communist Party bosses and ultranationalists, even neofascists. For Yeltsin, the trial was a critical front in the battle to stave off the reactionaries. “The so-called red and brown forces are advancing,” he said on the eve of the trial. “I would say that today Russia’s destiny depends on the Constitutional Court rather than on the president.… Any support for the Communists may play into their hands and promote their destructive activity, which may push us into a civil war.”

  In Moscow now, hardly any politician dared refer to himself as a “democrat,” for fear of appearing too Western, too liberal, incompetent. Some of the leaders of the radical reform movement tried to broaden their political appeal by playing, however cautiously, the nationalist card. Sergei Stankevich, the young adviser to Yeltsin, had begun his political career in 1989 as a radical democrat and now referred to himself as a “statist democrat.” He wanted a little nationalist shading to broaden his political base. Yeltsin, too, had to emphasize his “national feeling,” making fast friends with the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church and refusing to make a deal with the Japanese on the Kuril Islands. Yeltsin realized that it was hard for Russians to lose all the time—lose territory, power, influence—and count it as victory.

  But the radical right was not impressed with Yeltsin’s guile. He was considered the chief culprit in the fracturing of the Soviet state and the fragmentation of Russia itself. The historian Yuri Afanasyev, a deputy now in the Russian parliament, told me he thought the Russian scene was one of dangerous flux. “The old system will never regain its shape, but all kinds of possibilities exist for the future of Russia,” he said. “We could look like South Korea, or, say, Latin America with a taint of Sicily. It is a far from sure thing that we will resemble the developed Western democracies. The pull of the state sector, the authoritarian tug, is still a very dangerous thing. Fascism, in the form of national socialism, is a major threat. And it is finding supporters not only in the lunatic fringe, but in the alleged center. The Russian consciousness has always been flawed by a yearning for expansion and a fear of contraction. Unfortunately the history of Russia is the history of growth. This is a powerful image in the Russian soul, the idea of breadth as wealth, the more the better. But the truth is that such expansion has always depleted Russian power and wealth. Berdyaev was right when he said that Russia was always crippled by its expanse.”

  To some degree, the Communist Party’s myth-making machinery had been replaced by Russian nostalgia for a prerevolutionary utopia that never was. Stanislav Govorukhin’s 1992 film The Russia We Lost portrayed the last czar—previously considered a dolt and a weakling in Communist propaganda—as a man of great learning, military skill, and compassion. Lenin is a “slit-eyed” fanatic with “pathological obsessions” and, naturally, Jewish forebears. Gorvorukhin told the newspaper Megapolis-Express that were there to be another putsch he would not rush to the White House to defend the popularly elected government as he had during the August coup. “Following a totalitarian regime,” he said, “a sea of democracy and freedom is a safe road to fascism.” His credo now was the famous declaration of the czarist reformer Pyotr Stolypin to the Russian Duma: “You want great upheavals, but what we need is a great Russia.”

  Although there were only a half-dozen people in the Moskva Theater when I went to see The Russia We Lost, and while the opinion polls did not indicate a great public longing for an overthrow of the Yeltsin government, Moscow seemed filled with demagogues who would be czar. The first to appear on the scene was Vladimir Zhirinovsky, an unabashed neofascist who won six million votes—almost 8 percent of the electorate—in June 1991 when he ran against Yeltsin and four other candidates for the Russian presidency. Just after the coup, I watched Zhirinovsky at a parliamentary session at the Kremlin deliver two hour-long monologues to clumps of fascinated deputies in the corridors. He rambled on, picking up so much speed as he described his imperial ambitions that he showered his listeners, and the television cameras, with little sprays of spit:

  “I’ll start by squeezing the Baltics and other small nations. I don’t care if they are recognized by the UN. I’m not going to invade them or anything. I’ll bury radioactive waste along the Lithuanian border and put up powerful fans and blow the stuff across the border at night. I’ll turn the fans off during the day. They’ll all get radiation sickness. They’ll die of it. When they either die out or get down on their knees, I’ll stop it. I’m a dictator. What I’m going to do is bad, but it’ll be good for Russia. The Slavs are going to get anything they want if I’m elected.

  “I will send troops to Afghanistan again, and this time they’ll win.… I will restore the foreign policy of the czars.… I won’t make Russians fight. I’ll make Uzbeks and Tajiks do the fighting. Russian officers will just give the orders. Like Napoleon. ‘Uzbeks, forward to Kabul!’ And when the Uzbeks are all dead, it’ll be ‘Tajiks, forward to Kabul!’ The Bashkirs can go to Mongolia, where there’s TB and syphilis. The other republics will be Russia’s kitchen garden. Russia will be the brains.

  “I say it quite plainly: when I come to power, there will be a dictatorship. I will beat the Americans in space. I will surround the planet with our space stations so that they’ll be scared of our space weapons. I don’t care if they call me a fascist or a Nazi. Workers in Leningrad told me, ‘Even if you wear five swastikas, we’ll vote for you all the same. You promise a clear plan.’ There’s nothing like fear to make people work better. The stick, not the carrot. I’ll do it all without tanks on the streets. Those who have to be arrested will be arrested quietly at night. I may have to shoot one hundred thousand people, but the other three hundred million will live peacefully. I have the right to shoot these hundred thousand. I have this right as president.”

  Despite his surprisingly strong showing in the last Russian presidential race, the vast majority of people believed Zhirinovsky was either mad, an agent of the secret police, or both. But he was not alone in his extremism. Aleksandr Sterligov, a former KGB colonel who promised the “iron hand,” was only the latest in a collection of would-be dictators who were hoping the public would grow so disenchanted with the Yeltsin government that it would turn to them.

  One afternoon on my trip in the fall of 1992, I visited the grungy editorial offices of Dyen, the newspaper that was now one of the leading voices of the hard-right coalition. Just weeks before the August coup, Dyen published the infamous “Word to the People,” the front-page appeal for a military seizure of power. I met with the author of the appea
l and the editor of the paper, Aleksandr Prokhanov, and his deputy, Vladimir Bondarenko. Bondarenko told me he had just returned from the United States, a trip, he said, that was sponsored, in part, by David Duke, the former Nazi and Ku Klux Klansman.

  “Perhaps Duke’s views are a bit extreme,” Bondarenko allowed. “I suppose my views are better compared to those of your Patrick Buchanan.”

  We talked a long time about the coup, and here, too, the conservatives spoke of the putsch as a shadow play, something that was not what it seemed.

  “When people heard about the putsch, most of them said, ‘Finally, at last, they are doing what they have to do,’ ” Bondarenko said. “They did not believe in terror, but they wanted elementary order, the sort of order that states have everywhere. But the leaders of the coup were so stupid. They are to be condemned not because they pulled off a coup, but because they did it so stupidly.”

  Prokhanov, a performance artist of the right wing, made Bondarenko seem almost rational. “You did it!” he said, pointing at me as the representative American. “You did it! And how do I know? I have friends at Langley, at the State Department, and at the Rand Institute. The general concept was yours—the CIA’s. I am sure of it. The process was regulated and designed by your people. The so-called leaders of the coup were pushed forward and then betrayed. They were left to be torn to pieces by the public opinion. They were so stupid to have believed Gorbachev.

  “In this whole drama, only the CIA was smart. They alone knew that the Soviet Union would fall apart under the concept of republican sovereignty—an idea they planted in the Baltics and then elsewhere. Do you think East Germany fell apart on its own? Do you think Poland, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and finally the Soviet Union fell apart on their own? The plan of struggle against the Soviet Union has existed ever since World War II.”

  Prokhanov said he was “elated” on the first morning of the coup and “disgusted” when it collapsed three days later. But he said he was sure that his time would come again. “After a year in which the government has lost trust and the democrats are in a state of collapse, the patriots from the left and the right will come together and the war will continue. And it will be, I assure you, an anti-American movement. There are three ways we can come to power—and we will use any means to do it. First, we can do it in parliament. Second, there can be a split within the government and the liberals lose the support of the army, the new KGB, and there is a gradual drift to the right. Or we can do it through extra-governmental means: strikes, demonstrations, general chaos. In any case, the Yeltsin people should not relax.”

  The trial shoved ahead. Interest dwindled even further. “Society is sick of history,” Arseny Roginsky, of the Memorial historical society, told me. “It is too much with us. For people trying to cope with crazy inflation and adjusting to a new economy in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, it’s a natural psychological situation. People do have some sense that their current troubles are tied to the history of the Party, but it is not always easy to step back and see that.”

  The only aspect of the trial of the Communist Party that was grabbing any space in the newspapers and on the evening news was the question of Mikhail Gorbachev’s refusal to testify. Chief Justice Zorkin insisted from the start that Gorbachev’s testimony, as general secretary of the party from March 1985 until August 1991, was essential. In Zorkin’s summons, however, Gorbachev saw only the invisible hand of Boris Yeltsin and another attempt to humiliate him. The two men had been playing out their opera of rivalry and unconscious cooperation for so long that Muscovites had wearied of it. As part of his “retirement package,” Gorbachev got from Yeltsin a dacha, bodyguards, a pension, and a fine piece of real estate—the former Party institute on Leningrad Prospekt. Gorbachev, for his part, said he would use the institute as a base for research, not political opposition. But détente, such as it was, collapsed quickly. Gorbachev began accusing Yeltsin of running a government not dissimilar to “an insane asylum,” and Yeltsin’s aides began chipping away at Gorbachev’s retirement deal, first taking away his limousine and replacing it with a more modest sedan, then threatening worse. “Soon,” one newspaper cracked, “Mikhail Sergeyevich will be going to work on a bicycle.”

  During the trial, I went to see Gorbachev at his institute, hoping to talk about many things besides the furor over his refusal to testify. There was no chance of that. He had already been fined 100 rubles by the court—around 30 cents at the time—and he knew well that more sanctions were on the way. After he greeted me, he plopped himself down into an armchair, saying with false cheer, “They are running around like mad. They all got into this shit and they don’t know what to do now.”

  Gorbachev was furious, obsessed. I asked a question and he finished his answer forty minutes later, an answer that was part set piece, part harangue. I had spent many hours while living in Moscow listening to Gorbachev at press conferences, summits, interviews, meetings, and he was never one for concision. But now, he seemed at times like Lear raging about plots against his underappreciated self. He truly believed that the court’s summons amounted to political persecution of the most heinous sort.

  “Even Stalin’s sick mind could not have dreamed up anything like this!” Gorbachev said. “To rule that eighteen million Communists be deprived of their citizenship and swept away! Not just simply to deprive them, but sweep them away with a broom. And with their families, we are talking about fifty to seventy million people. Only a lunatic would do this. If you call yourselves democrats, prove it with your deeds. Gorbachev had enough courage always to tell the truth to everyone and endure the pressure. I’ve got plenty of courage and even now I will not yield.

  “What is this, a Constitutional Court? There is no court in the world that can judge history! It is up to history proper to judge history. Historians, scholars, and so on.… Will the court go all the way back to the October Revolution, to the Bolsheviks, or even earlier? Will they anathematize it all? Is this the business of the Constitutional Court? Let’s analyze what Lenin did to take power. Does this mean that all the countries that cooperated with Soviet Russia, and all the agreements that were made, do they all go … pffffft?… Is it all rubbish? Unconstitutional? God knows what this all is! You don’t have to be too bright to understand what this process is likely to lead to.”

  Somewhere along the way I managed to ask Gorbachev if he kept in contact with Yeltsin any longer. Gorbachev frowned. He was being ignored. This seemed to him worse than any sanction of the court.

  “He never calls me,” Gorbachev said. “I called him several times at first, but from his side there has never been a call. Boris Nikolayevich knows everything! We have no relations. What kind of personal relations can there be when his press secretary publishes a statement saying that they will take measures against Gorbachev, that they will put him in his place? What relations can there be? This is ruled out.

  “The democrats have failed to use their power. Look at how they struggled for power and how much they promised. There were even statements that the Russian president would lay himself down across the railroad tracks if living standards went down. Well, now they’ve gone down fifty percent! The tracks must be occupied.

  “They have to tell the people how they are going to get through the winter, what there will be to eat, whether there will be any heat, and what will happen to reforms. And they have no answer. They don’t know what to say. They need to play for time and they need to find a lightning rod. It’s amazing—Yeltsin’s team, the Constitutional Court, and the fundamentalists who defended against the August coup are all in this struggle together against Gorbachev. This is phenomenal!”

  I left Gorbachev’s office thinking that everything about him was outsize: his achievements, his mistakes, and, now, his vanity and bitterness. At one point in his monologue he even passed on a rumor that at the tensest moments of the coup, Yeltsin had been making plans to hide in the American embassy. This was hard, if not impossible, to believe. For all of
Yeltsin’s shortcomings, it was his courage that won the day in August of 1991. Gorbachev, in suggesting otherwise—especially in such a dark and clumsy way—revealed the depths of his bitterness. He had loved his place in the world—a place he had earned despite all the mistakes—and now, it seemed, it was slipping away, almost gone. He was despised in his own country.

  Feeling a little stunned, I left Gorbachev and headed down a flight of stairs to visit the man who had been his closest friend and ally in the leadership, Aleksandr Yakovlev. I told Yakovlev what I had just heard, and he rolled his eyes in amusement and frustration. Yakovlev had always betrayed a certain intellectual condescension for Gorbachev, but he also appreciated his political gifts, his complexity.

  I told Yakovlev I had finally seen the transcript of the historic March 11, 1985, Politburo meeting and I was a little surprised that things had gone so easily for Gorbachev. Why had there been no opposition? And had Gorbachev been deceiving the conservatives? Why had they made him general secretary if they knew he would try to change the system?

  “There was a preliminary agreement,” Yakovlev said. “Everything was agreed on beforehand. Everything was clear. Grishin’s entourage prepared a speech, a program for him. Richard Kosolapov, the editor of Kommunist, was very active on Grishin’s behalf. But that was just in case. In fact, there were no other candidates for this position. Once Gorbachev was made chairman of the funeral commission for Chernenko’s funeral on March 10, everything was clear.