Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  Law enforcement, too, is a bitter joke. Mobsters at every level have more troops and more powerful weapons than the police. Army officers and recruits, desperate for cash, are only too glad to sell guns, rocket launchers, and grenades to the highest bidder. It is not unknown for members of mafia gangs in southern Russia to use a tank to settle an especially stubborn account. And at a time when nearly everyone is impoverished—including police, jailers, and judges—the likelihood of successful prosecution is minuscule. Vladimir Rushailo, chief of the Moscow police department, said, “Even if we manage to jail an influential member of the mafia, his fellow bandits immediately unleash a campaign pressuring the victims, witnesses, judges, public accessors. And they do this quite freely. Clearly, the criminals are more inventive than the law makers.”

  Perhaps the constituency that has been most stunned by the course of Russia since the collapse of the old regime is the liberal intelligentsia—the array of writers, artists, academics, and journalists who were at the forefront of the perestroika era. For centuries, Russian intellectuals had been a kind of shadow government, a moral prod to the tsars and, later, the Communist Party. When Pushkin stood up to the tsar, or Sakharov to the General Secretary, they were asserting a belief in the power of truth and the individual against a brutal system. For years, American writers like Philip Roth would return from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe marveling at the importance of literature there. Roth once remarked that in the West everything is permitted and nothing matters, and in the East nothing is permitted and everything matters. Now in the East everything goes—and the intelligentsia matters less than it ever has.

  One afternoon I went to the ramshackle offices of Znamya (The Banner), which was one of the leading literary and political monthlies in the Gorbachev years, to see the deputy editor Natalya Ivanova. I had been visiting Ivanova as a reporter on and off for six years and had never known her to be so pessimistic. At first I thought it might be the fate of Znamya and the other literary magazines. Where once they sold over a million or more copies in the late 1980s, none now sells more than eighty thousand or so. Where once the best-seller lists were filled with titles from Solzhenitsyn, Orwell, and Brodsky, they are now litanies of mass-lit: Dale Carnegie, John Grisham, Latvian sex manuals. Larissa Vasilieva, a Russian pop-historian, has made a fortune with Kremlin Wives, a look at the seamy world of political boudoirs in the Communist era. Rex Stout may now be the most popular novelist in the country. “People want a little pleasure,” one writer told me. “If they have to read about one more concentration camp, they’ll die.”

  But Ivanova was worried about more than the statistics of culture. It was inevitable, she realized, that once the regime fell, the importance (and outsized popularity) of serious literature would fade. “We can all accept the idea that the only people reading now are the ones who read for non-political reasons,” Ivanova said. “Now you see the rise of advice columns, personal ads, Harlequin romances. Well, that’s OK. What is unexpected is the general degradation of culture and of the intelligentsia itself. Its dominant position is now held by this new class of so-called businessmen and they have no class at all. This new bourgeoisie is mostly made up of speculators stealing from the country.” Ivanova showed me the galley proofs for an article of hers called “Double Suicide.” It is an angry piece in which she accuses her fellow artists and thinkers of being more interested in “the course of the dollar than in moral problems,” of bowing humbly before a new and vulgar image of what the Leninists once called the “shining future.”

  Where once the Russian landscape was littered with one kind of propaganda—“We Are Marching Toward Leninism!” etc.—television, radio, and the newspapers are now filled with a propaganda of a different sort: advertisements for unaffordable luxuries, fantastic commercials geared toward lives that hardly exist. One minute you are Homo Sovieticus surrounded by the aggressive blandness of communism, the next minute you are watching a Slavic vixen sucking on a maraschino cherry and telling you which casino to visit. There is something profoundly irritating (and American) about ads for investment funds or “premium” cat food in a country where the vast majority live in poverty. A year or two of exposure to American-style commercials has produced what decades of Communist propaganda could not: genuine indignation on the part of honest people against the excesses of capitalism. But the intelligentsia is bewildered by it all and incapable of providing moral guidance. “They struggled for a new life and it turned out that this life deceived them,” Ivanova said sadly.

  For the young, there is just no sense, no prestige, in pursuing intellectual life. At Moscow State University, it is suddenly a cinch to gain admission to the humanities department; everyone wants to learn finance. The endless ethereal conversations around the kitchen table, the wonderful no-show jobs at academic institutes, the huge audiences for poetry readings—that world is dwindling. “What we had under Gorbachev and for the years before was like the ecological system in Australia before the English brought their dogs and rabbits,” another friend, the political scientist Andrei Kortunov, said. “We had this weird, authentic, original kind of culture. The intellectuals were even a privileged class. But when the English came with their dogs and rabbits, the ecological system decayed. I suppose we need to go through this period of consumerism and pop culture, just as they are in Poland and Czechoslovakia. The question is whether Russia will ever be able to preserve even part of the old ecology, its distinctive intellectual character.”

  One night I took Leonid Radzikhovsky, the journalist, to dinner at the plush Italian restaurant in the Kempinski, a new, German-owned hotel across from the Kremlin. When I asked him about the lost world of the Russian intelligentsia, he betrayed no wistfulness. “I am a cynic maybe, a realist,” he said, “but there is no more moral authority in Russia. Russia is a country in the stage of primitive accumulation of capital. Look around you, at this restaurant. What will dinner cost? At least one hundred dollars, right? An average Moscow salary for a month. In the nineteenth century there were landlords and peasants and no thought of mixing them. But now everyone thinks he has a right to have dinner at the Kempinski. And everyone wants it. This is all anyone thinks about. They don’t think about novels or plays or poetry. If it is true that everything in America is about dollars, it is even more true now in Russia. This is a hungry country and it wants to be fed.”

  A while after returning from Moscow, I traveled up to Cavendish, the small town in Vermont where Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has lived in exile for eighteen years. When I visited him, he had just finished his life’s work, the massive historical novel The Red Wheel, and was preparing to return at last, in May 1994, to Russia. The house was filled with packing crates. His wife, Natalia, was frantically trying to find a mover that could ship all their books and papers to Moscow without losing anything. A fax came from Moscow with more troubling news: the roof on their new house on the outskirts of the city was damaged and would have to be repaired at great expense.

  “All the same, we can’t wait to go home,” Natalia Solzhenitsyn said over lunch in the kitchen. “Our minds are already back in Russia. It’s as if we are no longer here in this house we have lived in for so long.”

  There are two adjacent houses on the property, and Natalia led me to the smaller one, where Solzhenitsyn has worked, fourteen and sixteen hours a day, without a day off since the family moved to Cavendish in 1976. He sat at a small table in his study, his face a kind of living photograph of a nineteenth-century man. But while his beard and Asiatic eyes are reminiscent of Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn is a man of the Russian twentieth century. He, more than anyone, more even than Sakharov, made it impossible for the West to ignore any longer the true nature of the Soviet regime. If literature has ever changed the world, his books surely have. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich opened the world of the camps up to the people of the Soviet Union in the early sixties, and the three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago erased all lingering doubts in the seventies.

 
We talked for the better part of the day, and Solzhenitsyn spent much of the time criticizing Gorbachev, whom he dismisses, for “running in place year after year,” and Yeltsin, whom he admires, for letting so many millions of Russians fall far below the poverty line. What was strange to me was that Solzhenitsyn never betrayed a moment’s pleasure in the victory that he, after all, had done so much to bring on: the fall of the Communist regime. “In August 1991, my wife and I were incredibly excited to watch on television as Dzerzhinsky’s statue was taken down in front of the KGB. That, of course, was a great moment for us,” he said. “But I knew inside that this was not yet true victory. I knew how deeply Communism had penetrated into the fabric of life. And what were we doing? What was Yeltsin doing? We forgot everything and just fought each other. The same even now. All is decay. It’s too early to celebrate. Why was I silent for so long about Gorbachev? Well, thank God something did begin, but everything was begun so badly. So what do you do, celebrate or weep? It is too early to celebrate. I just could not have gone over to Moscow in August ’91 and had a glass of champagne in front of the White House with Yeltsin. The heart is not yet joyful.”

  What he hopes for now, he said, was not a new empire, not the resuscitation of a great power, but simply the development of “a normal country.” It was time to join in that process. After a life that had reflected the agonies of the old regime—a communist youth, the war, prison, the camps, the battle with the Kremlin, forced exile—now, at the age of seventy-five, he was completing the circle. He had tickets to return home. “Even at the worst times, I knew I would be coming home,” he said. “It was crazy. No one believed it. But I knew I would come home to die in Russia.”

  —David Remnick

  January 1994

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The last generation of foreign reporters in the Soviet Union was the luckiest. We were witnesses to a singular triumphant moment in a tragic century. What’s more, we could describe it, we could talk to the players, major and minor, with relatively little fear of jeopardizing anyone’s freedom. In the past, journalists, historians, and diplomats writing about Russia and the Soviet Union were always wary about acknowledging their friends and sources. It is with a great sense of relief and promise that I feel freed of that constriction.

  During my time in the twilight of the Soviet Union, I had occasion to interview hundreds of people, some repeatedly and for many hours, some for just a little while in a Kremlin corridor or on a park bench. At first there were the old risks. I remember meeting the Ukrainian human rights defender Bogdan Horyn in a park in Lvov, the better not to be overheard or arrested. By the time I was preparing to leave for New York, I was interviewing Bogdan in the independent Ukrainian parliament, of which he was a prominent member. In my source notes, I’ve listed the interviews that were especially important to this book.

  The greatest source of my education in Moscow was the friendship of those who let me and my wife, Esther Fein, and our son, Alex, into their homes and lives. They were much more than sources of information. Masha Lipman, a superb translator and reporter, worked tirelessly for The Washington Post and on behalf of this book. I was lucky to count her as a friend and to have her wise counsel, her sharp eye for the fatuous and the absurd. Masha’s husband, Seriozha Ivanov, is a friend and guide through the academic and historical forests. The other members of the “gang of four,” Masha Volkenshtein and Igor Primakov, were good friends and teachers. Thanks also to Grisha Kosazsky and Lyola Kantor, Judith and Emmanuel Lurye, Eduard Gladkov, Misha and Flora Litvinov, and many others.

  The press corps in Moscow was superb, and I want to thank some my friends among them: Frank Clines, Bill Keller and Ann Cooper, Jeff and Gretchen Trimble, Xan and Jane Smiley, Eileen O’Conner and John Bilotta, Jonathan Sanders, Laurie Hays and Fen Montaigne, Marco Politi, and, at the Post, Eleanor Randolph, Gary Lee, Fred Hiatt, and Margaret Shapiro. My main running mate and bureau chief at the Post, Michael Dobbs, was indispensable, both as a friend and as a colleague. Lisa Dobbs showed my own family constant friendship just as surely as she showed Moscow the meaning of free enterprise.

  A number of scholars, both in the United States and in Russia, were of great help, among them Richard Pipes, Stephen Cohen, Arseny Roginsky, Leonid Batkin, and Natalya Ivanova.

  At The Washington Post, a raft of editors supported my work in Moscow, and I am especially grateful to Michael Getier, David Ignatius, and the wizard, Jeffrey Frank, for their advice and editing as the copy flowed in. Thanks also to Ben Bradlee, Leonard Downie, Robert Kaiser, Don Graham, and Katharine Graham for giving me one of the best jobs in journalism the century could offer.

  At my new home, The New Yorker, I am grateful first to Robert Gottlieb and Pat Crow for publishing an early piece of the book, and then to Tina Brown and Rick Hertzberg for making the arrangement permanent.

  Barbara Epstein invited me to write for The New York Review of Books while I was still in Moscow and has showered me with kindness, superb editing, and Federal Express packages ever since. Barbara, Jeff Frank, Masha Lipman, and Seriozha Ivanov read the manuscript with great care and insight.

  I am also grateful to the Council on Foreign Relations for making me its Edward R. Murrow Fellow in 1991–92, which gave me the time, the room, and the quiet in which to work.

  At Random House, Jason Epstein’s intelligence, wit, and skillet are all matchless. My agent, Kathy Robbins, is the source of endless patience and wise counsel. Early on, Linda Healey also gave me some very good editorial advice.

  I received great support from family and friends before, during, and after my time in Moscow. My parents gave me the go-ahead to move to the Motherland. I am in awe of their strength and forever grateful for their unquestioning love and support. My brother, Richard, and sister-in-law, Lisa Fernandez, as well as my grandmother, Miriam Seigel, were just as helpful, and to them much thanks and love. Esther’s parents, Miriam and Hyman Fein, let me take their daughter off to a terrifying place for them, and then they visited us there. They are a joy. Steve Fisher helped in the mysteries of the computer.

  Eric Lewis and Elise Hoffmann, Richard Brody and Maja Nikolic, Marc Fisher and Jody Goodman, Michael Specter and Alessandra Stanley, and Henry Allen were all friends in deed, even at such a great distance.

  My son Alexander Benjamin, named for great-grandfathers born in the last empire, was a little late getting to the show—he was born smack in the middle of the Twenty-eighth (and final) Congress of the Communist Party—but when he did arrive, he took Moscow by storm. Our second son, Noah Samuel, came later still. I only hope that one day both Alex and Noah will visit a democratic and prosperous Russia.

  My greatest thanks are to Esther, who ran off to Russia with me—a strange and wonderful way to begin a marriage. In Moscow, she wrote a string of elegant features and news stories for The New York Times, visited some of the stranger corners of the empire, and delighted the competition all the while. Back in New York, she was the manuscript’s keenest editor, and its author’s sustenance. This book is not only for Esther, it is also very much hers.

  NOTES ON SOURCES

  My main source of information for this book was personal interviews. Because many of those interviewed speak for themselves in the text, I have not noted them formally here. I also picked over many of my own dispatches in The Washington Post from January 1988 to January 1992, as well as longer pieces in The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker.

  While in Moscow, I also gained a great deal from reading, among others, Bill Keller, Francis X. Clines, Esther B. Fein, and Serge Schmemann in The New York Times and, especially, Michael Dobbs in the Post. Dobbs’s reports on Chernobyl, the assault on Lithuania in January 1991, and the August coup, including the battle for control of Izvestia, were particularly useful. The following notes mention some supplementary material and sources not self-evident from the text.

  PART I

  1. THE FOREST COUP

  Allen Paul’s book on the Katyn massacre is the best
so far in English. As the archives open there has been more material than ever coming from Moscow, including evidence that the Gorbachev leadership knew far more than it ever let on to the Polish government. Interviews with Colonel Aleksandr Tretetsky, Yuri Afanasyev, Yegor Ligachev, and Aleksandr Yakovlev were important, as was Tretetsky’s interview with the executioner Vladimir Tokaryev, first published in the Observer, October 6, 1991, p. 1.

  2. A STALINIST CHILDHOOD

  Natalya Gorbanevskaya’s account of the Red Square demonstration and Pavel Litvinov’s speeches, essays, and letters were helpful, but the Litvinov family members were the key sources here.

  3. TO BE PRESERVED, FOREVER

  Yerofeyev’s Moskva-Petushki, available in English as Moscow Circles (with the author’s name transliterated Benedikt Erofeev), is a seminal novel of the Brezhnev, or stagnation, era. The Brodsky trial transcript is available in a number of dissident anthologies. Brodsky’s letter to Brezhnev is quoted in The Washington Post, July 25, 1972. I interviewed Yurasov several times, and he also gave frequent interviews in the Soviet press. The best article on him in Russian is Viktoriya Chalikova’s essay “Arkhivni Yunosha” (“The Young Archivist”) in the St. Petersburg-based journal Neva, No. 10, 1988.

  4. THE RETURN OF HISTORY

  Gorbachev’s history speech of November 2, 1987, was published in Pravda, Izvestia, etc., in Russian on November 3, 1987, and in The New York Times the next day in English. Both The Short Course and The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union are available in English editions. Yeltsin’s Against the Grain contains a colorful version of the negotiations over the language of Gorbachev’s speech, and his retelling agrees for the most part with accounts given me by Yakovlev, Ligachev, and others.