Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  “But about deception. This was really a question of the inertia of the Communist Party. Every new general secretary got carte blanche at the beginning. A new man would come to the fore and he was supported. You know, let him talk about innovations, about something new, it has to be tolerated, and then he will calm down and everything will go back to normal. Let him talk about democracy and pluralism, but sooner or later we’ll all be back together harnessed to the same horsecart. That happened with every newcomer: Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov. And the same destiny was expected of Gorbachev.

  “Gorbachev played politics, but he also realized that things had to change. It was impossible to go on living as we were. But when he started changing things, the system resisted those reforms. These changes were hindered by the simple logic of the state. And whether he wanted to or not, Gorbachev had to deal with these contradictions. Like Gorbachev, at the beginning, I believed that in our country, only a revolution from above was possible.

  “Even now Gorbachev talks about our ‘socialist choice.’ … But we cannot speak of a socialist choice in this country. Our experience, our ‘choice,’ is not socialist and never was. We had a slave system here. Who can talk about a socialist choice? Maybe Germany, or Israel, or Spain. But not us.… But Gorbachev could not overcome his mentality. In general, this power, the concept of power, acts like a poison on a person.”

  During my talk with Gorbachev, his press aide, Aleksandr Likhotal, had slipped him a note. Gorbachev went silent, read the note quickly, darkened with what seemed to be anger, composed himself, and then picked up the long string of his monologue. I didn’t think much of it then. But later that evening, as I watched the evening news show Vesti, I realized what the note must have said: for his refusal to appear in court, he was being deprived of his right to travel abroad. He had a trip planned to South Korea and there were more on the schedule. That was a cruel and clever blow. Gorbachev was endlessly applauded abroad; he was treated as one of the great figures of the century. In Moscow, he was punished, mocked, and ignored.

  Three days later, the Russian government announced it would take back most of the building it had given Gorbachev as part of his resignation package. On a cool, gray morning, three buses filled with Moscow police officers pulled up to the institute. The police chief, Arkady Murashev, ordered his men to surround the building.

  Just minutes later, Gorbachev arrived, in a rage. The press gathered around him on the front steps of the building. “You don’t know the pressure that my family and I have endured in the past seven years!” he told the reporters. “But personal matters are not the thing. They are trying to put Gorbachev in his place! The Russian press speculates that Gorbachev is traveling the world looking for a vacation house! There’s the rumor that my daughter is in Germany and her husband is to join her there. Or America. And now that he has a daughter settled, Gorbachev is looking for a warm place for himself. Well, they’d be very happy if Gorbachev left the country. They’d probably pay a million for it. But I’m not leaving.…”

  A few miles away, the Constitutional Court heard its next witness. The tired men of the Communist Party protested their innocence. How could we have been what you charge? they seemed to say. Just look at us. We are plain. We are ordinary. We are nobody now.

  A few weeks later, the Constitutional Court of Russia ruled that Communists were free to meet on a local level but the Communist Party, as a national entity, was illegal. The Party’s assets and properties remained under the control of the elected government of the Russian Federation. The era that had begun in 1917 with the Bolshevik coup had now ended—in a court of law.

  AFTERWORD TO THE VINTAGE EDITION

  “THE HEART IS NOT YET JOYFUL”

  From the first moment that Mikhail Gorbachev began his frenetic tinkering with the Soviet system, time, and the perception of time, lost its normal rhythm. Every year seems like an entire era. So many triumphs, agonies, and bitter surprises register on the landscape of the old empire that it is hard to focus on anything more distant than the previous week much less on that Christmas night, in 1991, when Gorbachev signed his resignation papers and the red flag over the Kremlin was lowered for the last time. But even now I cannot forget that time. As Gorbachev was preparing his departure, I went to the Kremlin to see one of his most loyal aides, Giorgi Shakhnazarov. Like Gorbachev, Shakhnazarov had hoped to reform communism, to rescue the system and drag it into the modern world. That project, the last lingering dream of socialism, turned out to be folly. Now the regime was in ruins and the empire in dissolution. All the talk was of a democracy and a free market; Gorbachev had passed into history and the movers were coming to cart away the boxes.

  “How will all these republics survive without Moscow?” Shakhnazarov said. He was a gnomish man—half scholar, half apparatchik—and now he looked resigned, withered. “What will become of them? What will a republic like Georgia do? Do you think they’ll get any oil selling mandarin oranges to Saudi Arabia? And Armenia and Azerbaijan: don’t you think they will be at each other’s throats?”

  Shakhnazarov’s desk was bare but for one single-spaced letter he was leaving behind for the next occupant, “whoever that might turn out to be.”

  “I’m just letting him know I wish them all luck,” Shakhnazarov said. “They’re going to need it.”

  In the more than two years since, Russia and the former Soviet republics have surely not been blessed with anywhere near the amount of luck they have needed. Nor have they always had the wisdom or the means to avoid economic and political disaster. One can only begin to count up the mounting catastrophes in the old Soviet Union: the collapsed economies; the troubling diaspora of twenty-five million Russians in “foreign” lands; the threat of nuclear accidents and ecological ruin; the rise of a hard-line Russian nationalist and the astonishing persistence of various Communist parties. In retrospect, Boris Yeltsin wishes that he had acted even more quickly and decisively in the wake of the August coup. While he still had the political support, he should have dissolved parliament and called for elections, thereby avoiding the disastrous two-year-long confrontation with parliament that led to the bloody storming of the White House in October, 1993. But history is unforgiving; it does not accommodate the words “if only.”

  On my last trip to Moscow, toward the end of 1993, everywhere I went, from the central market to the villages outside of town, from newspaper offices to Kremlin anterooms where aides sat dully around, watching music videos, there was a sense of drift, even hopelessness, about political life. “The October events” and then the dispiriting December elections, which brought into the new parliament dozens of ultra-nationalists and Communists, obliterated any shred of triumphalism left over from the defeat of the August coup of 1991. The relatively easy verities of the old political struggle—good versus bad, reformers versus reactionaries, democrats versus Communists—had dissolved into a bitter soup of uncertainty. The December elections confirmed the despair among Russians, as nearly 25 percent voted for the ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, more as a protest against the squalid status quo than as an endorsement of his mad program of aggression abroad and the iron fist at home. Nearly half the electorate did not bother voting.

  Much of the opposition to Yeltsin is rooted in one form or another of mythic nostalgia: the Communist nostalgia for the order of Stalin and the supposedly dependable standard of living under Brezhnev; the military nostalgia for the fear the Soviet arsenal once struck in the heart of the Western enemy; the nationalist nostalgia for empire and higher spiritual purpose. It is natural—all too human—that nostalgia should be such a powerful force of politics now in Russia, just as it was for the Ottomans and the British as they lost their hold on the earth. Empires are not lost happily. Enoch Powell was driven to fits of poetry over the loss of India and even today “neo-Ottomanism” is a powerful force in Turkish politics.

  For tens of millions of Russians, the story of their country since Gorbachev’s advent in 1985 has been one of
unremitting loss and wounded pride. What took decades for the citizens of Constantinople and London to absorb struck the Russians in an instant. The empire has vanished. That the economy has been dying is obvious to any Western visitor. Less obvious is the Russian’s anxiety about his place in the world. The jewels of empire are lost: the beaches of the Crimea, the vineyards of Moldova, the oil fields of Kazakhstan, the ports of Odessa—to say nothing of Prague, Budapest, and Warsaw—are all within foreign lands now. The army is fraught with draft dodging and erosion. Foreign policy is a road map of retreat. A leading sociologist in Moscow, Yuri Levada, recently published a poll in the daily newspaper Izvestia showing that only 11 percent of the population believe that Russia is still a great power while two-thirds of the respondents said that the country should regain its lost prestige on the world stage. Between those two statistics is a great longing, a feeling of national loss and anxiety. And that longing, as much as the failing economy, is a lethal weapon in the hands of Yeltsin’s political opponents. While Yeltsin and his supporters are trying to create, all at once, a market economy, a democratic political system, and a civil society, his hard-line opponents, more often than not, indulge in a politics of loss, a new sort of populism.

  Many influential liberals in politics, such as Yeltsin’s former adviser Galina Staravoitova, feel that Russia’s economic failure and wounded self-esteem are so profound and combustible that the rise of a charismatic authoritarian movement in Russia cannot be ruled out. “One cannot exclude the possibility of a fascist period in Russia,” Staravoitova said on the radio station Echo of Moscow. “We can see too many parallels between Russia’s current situation and that of Germany after the Versailles Treaty. A great nation is humiliated, and many of its nationals live outside the country’s borders. The disintegration of an empire has taken place at a time when many people still have an imperialist mentality.… All this is happening at a time of economic crisis.”

  In his campaign for parliament, Vladimir Zhirinovsky played on the feelings of humiliation in the post-Great Power era and spoke in a rhetoric of stark simplicity and darkest comedy. Jews, Central Asians, Armenians, and Azerbaijanis should be driven from positions of power; only people with “kind Russian faces” should appear on Russian television. He declared himself willing “to blow up a few Kuwaiti ports and aircraft plus a few American ships” to defend the old Soviet ally Iraq. And should the Japanese press their demands for the Kurile Islands, “I would bomb the Japanese. I would sail our large navy around their small island and if they so much as cheeped I would nuke them.” As if this were not enough, he promised everything from a magical end to the economic crisis to “love and romance” for the lonely. The pro-reform democrats, for their part, gave Zhirinovsky his opening. They were smug and divided, nearly oblivious to the fact that they were doing nothing to build support for radical economic reforms that have proved painful to millions of people. Zhirinovsky’s triumph was a warning. Russia and the world cannot afford a President Zhirinovsky.

  If Russia was ever under any illusions about its being a democratic country, it is no longer. In conversations with Yeltsin’s aides, all of them admitted that the illusion of a smooth and swift transfer from a communist dictatorship to a free-market democracy is gone. It turns out that the fall of the old regime, which had been so morally satisfying, has left the new regime in an impossible moral position. The choice is stark: Behave with the manners of a western democrat and allow the current anarchy to overwhelm Russia, or take “decisive measures” and risk flouting any semblance of civil society. Now the talk is of a transitional regime of “enlightened authoritarianism” or “guided democracy” or some such hybrid that makes no secret of the need for a prolonged concentration of power in the presidency. “The hand of power cannot be totally weak,” Yeltsin’s legal adviser, Yuri Baturin, told me one afternoon at the Kremlin. “When the use of power was necessary during the October events, it was impossible to use it right away because the so-called power ministries—defense, security, police—were hesitating. Had they used their force more quickly, it would have been accomplished sooner, with less blood.”

  But Yeltsin’s advisers also admit that in trying to restore some degree of order in Russia, there is a constant danger of an imperceptible drift into the traditional habit of iron rule. “Like Gorbachev’s perestroika, everything now in the development of democracy is being guided only from above,” said Giorgi Satarov, a member of the presidential council. “It is very easy to slip into dictatorship. There are no checks. Monopolistic rule is responsible for checking itself, and this self-restriction has to hold somehow before there are real checks and balances. There can be little steps toward dictatorship, each one seeming small in and of itself, but the trend can drag us into dictatorship. This can happen. But so far as I know the president and his motives, I do not think he has any intention of becoming a dictator.”

  There are more than enough people who have called on Yeltsin to become an unabashed autotrat. A poll published recently in Izvestia showed that three-quarters of all Muscovites welcomed the brief state of emergency that followed the October events and wanted to see it prolonged indefinitely. But even if Yeltsin were inclined to become the leader of a full-scale authoritarian regime—and he is not—he wouldn’t be able to manage it. Although some of his advisers point to South Korea and parts of Latin America as places that built potential democracies under authoritarian rule, the analogy falls flat before Russian realities. Despite the military’s decisive role in October 1993, the army has no Latin-American-style ambitions for junta-dom; the generals would much rather win higher wages and other social guarantees than take the upper hand in politics. Nor can Russia rely on an Asian work ethic or efficiency, to say nothing of a democratic political culture—a feature of life in Chile before Pinochet. Russia has to make democracy with Russians.

  The truth is that Yeltsin, or any other leader who emerges as his potential successor, has the near impossible task of trying to build a democracy in conditions of social and economic anarchy. Aleksandr Rutskoi and Ruslan Khasbulatov may be in jail after their failed grab for power in October 1993, but theirs is not likely to be the last episode of rebellion or violence. Even those who accept or, at least, are resigned to Yeltsin’s notion of transition understand that the anger and disillusionment throughout Russian society is growing ever worse. The dulling realities of Soviet society—equality in poverty, the stability of repression—have come unwound, and now Russia is a scene of radical polarization. The fondest wish of the Russian reformers in 1991 was that out of economic change would emerge a huge middle class and a business elite that would become the main constituencies for further change. There are no signs of this happening. Instead, Russians have watched with fury and envy as a handful of people have grown rich—gaudily rich—amid growing chaos and criminality. Capitalism in Russia has spawned far more Al Capones than Henry Fords. Reform is not a period of retreat.

  There is not a single field of activity, not a single institution, free of the most brutal sort of corruption. Russia has bred a world-class mafia. According to Luciano Violante, chairman of Italy’s parliamentary committee of inquiry into the mafia, Russia is now “a kind of strategic capital of organized crime from where all the major operations are launched.” He said that Russian mob leaders have held summits with the three main Italian crime organizations from Sicily, Calabria, and Naples to discuss drug-money laundering, narcotics trade, and even the sale of nuclear material. Russia, he added, “has become a warehouse and clearing house for the drug market.”

  The new Russian mobsters, who are into everything from arms sales to banking, have learned to work with former officials in the highest ranks of the Communist Party and the KGB as well mob bosses abroad. There is also little doubt that the ministries of Yeltsin’s government—especially in areas like foreign trade, customs, tax collection, and law enforcement—are thoroughly corrupt. According to Yuri Boldyrev, until recently the government’s chief investigator, the co
rruption in state and public institutions now “goes beyond the limits of the imagination.” A ten-page report drafted by the police and security ministries and submitted to Yeltsin in 1993 described how senior military officers based for years in the former East Germany have been involved in huge embezzlement schemes. The officers set up their own companies to buy food and liquor, had them transported as military supplies, and then sold them on the free market in Poland and Russia. Sales were estimated at a hundred million Deutsche marks—fifty-eight million dollars. In another case, Air Force Major General Vladimir Rodionov and his deputy, Colonel Giorgi Iskrov, were charged with using military aircraft for commercial flights and keeping the proceeds.

  Yeltsin has not been averse to admitting what is before the eyes of everyone. According to a report by Victor Yasmann of Radio Liberty, Yeltsin told the heads of the central and regional law enforcement agencies that two-thirds of all commercial and financial enterprises in Russia—and 40 percent of individual businessmen—were engaged in some form of corruption. He said in 1992 that two billion dollars had simply “disappeared” from the budget of the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations. Even the anti-Mafia investigators are suspect. One of the chiefs of the Interior Ministry was arrested in 1993 for taking a one-million-ruble bribe. A subsequent search of his home found another 805,000 rubles in cash.

  Foreigners trying to do business in Russia have become easy targets. A friend told me about a Westerner who was caught in traffic in Moscow and, as he inched along, lightly touched the bumper of the car ahead of him. A man dressed mainly in jewelry and leather leaped from the car, ran up to the foreigner’s window, stuck a revolver in, and said, “Buy my car now or I will kill you!” The foreigner, an experienced resident of Moscow, knew well that this mafioso was not joking. He went home, gathered up all the cash he could find, and bought the car. The following week, the same unfortunate man was traveling to St. Petersburg on the midnight train. Someone drugged him, and when he woke up in the morning all his valuables were gone. Such crimes shock no one in the West, but they are an ominous novelty in Russia.