Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  5. WIDOWS OF REVOLUTION

  Stephen F. Cohen’s Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution is still the definitive work on Bukharin. However, there are more negative assessments in Adam Ulam’s The Bolsheviks and Nekrich and Heller’s Utopia in Power. Anna Larina Bukharina’s memoir will be available in an English edition from Norton in 1993.

  6. NINOTCHKA

  I’ve tried to piece together the Nina Andreyeva intrigue through interviews with the main players in the drama, including Nina Andreyeva, Mikhail Shatrov, Yegor Yakovlev, Aleksandr Yakovlev, Viktor Afanasyev, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Aleksandr Gelman, Len Karpinsky, and Yegor Ligachev. Her article originally appeared in Sovetskaya Rossiya, March 13, 1988. Among the more useful articles on the affair are Robert Kaiser’s “Red Intrigue: How Gorbachev Outfoxed His Kremlin Rivals” in The Washington Post, June 12, 1988; Dev Muraka’s “The Foes of Perestroika Sound Off” in The Nation, May 21, 1988; and Vladimir Denisov’s “ ‘Krestni Otets’ Nini Andreyevoi” (“The Godfather of Nina Andreyeva”) in Rodina, No. 1, 1991. Ligachev’s description of the Andreyeva affair in his memoir is an attempt to paint himself as a victim of an intrigue by Yakovlev and Gorbachev. The BBC documentary series The Second Russian Revolution was an excellent source of information on the Andreyeva affair, as well as on other secret deliberations of the Communist Party, including the Politburo’s control over information surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

  7. THE DOCTORS’ PLOT AND BEYOND

  The Rapoport family was the key source here, as well as Yakov and Natalya Rapoport’s memoirs. There are good descriptions of the Doctors’ Plot in Salo Baron’s history of the Jews in Russia as well as in the Ulam and Volkogonov Stalin biographies and Khrushchev’s memoirs.

  8. MEMORIAL

  I interviewed many of the original and eventual leaders of Memorial. Arseny Roginsky, Yuri Afanasyev, Andrei Sakharov, Leonid Batkin, Nikita Okhotin, and Lev Ponomarev were especially helpful. Roy Medvedev in Moscow and Zhores Medvedev in London both spent many hours describing their early years.

  9. WRITTEN ON THE WATER

  Aleksandr Milchakov’s articles in Vechernaya Moskva describe in great detail his search for the remains of gulag victims in Moscow and elsewhere. Among the more useful articles appeared in that paper on June 9, 1990, July 12, 1990, September 28, 1990, October 20, 1990, April 14, 1990, May 17, 1991, August 10, 1990.

  PART II

  10. MASQUERADE

  Jay Leyda’s classic Kino is by far the best history of the Soviet cinema. So far the literature on Soviet television is relatively thin. Ellen Mickiewicz’s book contains useful information on Vremya and other early glasnost programs but was a bit early to include the real wave of liberation. Leonid Parfyonov, Eduard Sagalayev, Bella Kurkova, Igor Kirillov, and many other executives and journalists at the main glasnost-era programs were the best sources of information.

  Mikhail Gorbachev, understandably, still awaits his biographer, a wait that could take years while scholars gather all the necessary documents, interviews, and material accumulated over his incredible career as the Soviet Union’s last leader. In the meantime, he is at work on what his aides say is a serious memoir. So far the memoirs that have appeared, including Gorbachev’s The August Coup, are thin justifications of policy written in the heat of the political moment. Zhores Medvedev and Michel Tatu wrote early, useful biographies, and journalists such as Christian Schmidt-Haeur, Gerd Ruge, Dusko Doder and Louise Branson, Robert Kaiser and Angus Roxburgh have gathered useful information in their various books. Gail Sheehy’s biography contains some interesting information from her own trips to the Stavropol region, but the book is too weighted down by inaccuracies and misunderstandings of Soviet history and politics. Raisa Gorbacheva’s memoir, I Hope, is sentimental and almost entirely useless, but it does contain some interesting letters and other glances at life in Stavropol and in the Kremlin. Ligachev and Yeltsin, while ideological opposites, have written the most engaging (if not always truthful) memoirs, while Shevardnadze and Yakovlev have, so far, been hesitant and dry.

  11. THE DOUBLE THINKERS

  Sakharov’s two volumes of memoirs are remarkable, especially the first half of the first volume, in which Andrei Dmitriyevich describes his transformation from a man of science and the system into a dissident.

  Len Karpinsky described his strange career to me in a series of interviews. I am also grateful to Stephen Cohen for bringing Karpinsky to the attention of the West by publishing the essay “Words Are Also Deeds” in An End to Silence and then an interview with Karpinsky in a book edited by Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel, Voices of Glasnost.

  I interviewed many of the most prominent of the men and women of the Gorbachev generation, including Fyodor Burlatsky, Andrei Sakharov, Lev Timofeyev, Giorgi Shakhnazarov, Vitaly Korotich, Tatyana Zaslavskaya, Abel Aganbegyan, Oleg Bogomolov, Nikolai Shmelyov, Aleksandr Bovin, Mikhail Ulyanov, Giorgi Arbatov, Yegor Yakovlev, Yuri Karyakin, Andrei Bitov, and Sergei Khrushchev.

  12. PARTY MEN

  Leonard Schapiro’s The Communist Party of the Soviet Union remains the classic history of the Party, but I also found useful Michael Voslensky’s Nomenklatura, Konstantin Simis’s USSR: The Corrupt Society, and, especially, Arkady Vaksberg’s The Soviet Mafia. Geidar Aliyev, Dinmukhamed Kunayev, Arkady Vaksberg, Lev Timofeyev, Andrei Fyodorov, Yuri Shchekochikin, Dmitri Likhanov, Andrei Karaulov, Arkady Volsky, Telman Gdlyan, Boris Yeltsin, and Yegor Ligachev all provided me with their own versions of what was the Communist Party.

  13. POOR FOLK

  All the material, except where noted in the text, is based on reporting trips to Turkmenia, the Vologda region of northern Russia, the steel town of Magnitogorsk in the Urals, and the Moscow netherworld. I am grateful to Murray Feshbach at Georgetown University for his work on the question of poverty. Stephen Kotkin’s book on Magnitogorsk and John Scott’s Behind the Urals are complementary portraits of that city and industrialization. Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow is the key—even heroic—work on collectivization. Esther B. Fein’s articles on poverty in The New York Times (January 29 and August 14, 1989) and Komsomolskaya Pravda’s reports on infant mortality in Central Asia (April 25, 1990) and poverty in general (April 19, 1990) were very helpful.

  14. THE REVOLUTION UNDERGROUND

  Officials at the Red Proletariat machine-tools factory in my neighborhood in Moscow kindly gave me access to the election process there. I received even greater hospitality and access in western Siberia at the Yagunovsko mines and in other mining villages surrounding the city of Kemerovo. Anatoly Shcheglov and Anatoly Malikhin were just a couple of the miners who gave me long interviews and tours of the mining region. I had similar help from miners in Donetsk, Ukraine, in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, and on Sakhalin Island, Russia.

  15. POSTCARDS FROM THE EMPIRE

  Bogdan Nahaylo and Victor Swoboda’s Soviet Disunion is a useful primer on the nationalities issue. The works by Helène Carrère d’Encausse anticipating the ethnic crises in the Soviet Union remain invaluable.

  16. THE ISLAND

  Chekhov’s book is available in an excellent English edition, The Island: A Journey to Sakhalin. Nikolai Batyukov, Anatoly Kapustin, Vitaly Guly, and Ivan Zhdakayev, a bulldozer driver and deputy in the Supreme Soviet and friend, arranged my trip to Sakhalin and were extraordinarily helpful in describing life and the political transformation on the island. I am also grateful to Bruce Grant, an anthropologist at Rice University, who spent six months working in a fishing collective farm, for his tales of Sakhalin.

  17. BREAD AND CIRCUSES

  Anatoly Kashpirovsky and Alan Chumak both gave me a series of interviews and I attended their healing sessions. The Byzantine scholar Sergei Ivanov provided the quotation from Agathias.

  18. THE LAST GULAG

  Elena Chukovskaya, Vadim Borisov, Sergei Zalygin, Natalya Solzhenitsyn, Yegor Ligachev, Aleksandr Yakovlev, Lev Timofeyev, Tatyana Tolstaya, and Viktor Yerofeyev helped me piece together the Solzhenitsyn drama. J
ohn Dunlop’s Radio Liberty report (#407, 1989) was also helpful.

  Solzhenitsyn’s article “Kak nam obustroit’ Rossiya?” first appeared in Komsomolskaya Pravda, October 2, 1990. Michael Scammell’s biography of Solzhenitsyn is a superb work, and Charles Truehart provides some additional details on Solzhenitsyn’s current working life in The Washington Post, November 24, 1987.

  Before going to Perm-35, I interviewed a number of former political prisoners, including Bogdan Horyn, Vyacheslav Chernovil, Sergei Kovalev, Levon Ter-Petrossian, Sergei Grigoryants, and Lev Timofeyev. Natan Shcharansky’s memoir Fear No Evil has a fine description of the Perm camps. The researchers at Helsinki Watch also provided useful details on political prisoners and Perm-35. All the prisoners with whom I spoke at Perm were released in the wake of the fall of the August coup.

  PART III

  19. “TOMORROW THERE WILL BE A BATTLE”

  After his return from Gorky, Sakharov was not quite as available to journalists as he had been in the 1970s. I had one formal interview with him at his apartment and numerous short interviews with him at meetings of Memorial, Moscow Tribune, the Congress of People’s Deputies, and other public venues. There are helpful glimpses of Sakharov in many books by dissidents and Western journalists, but Sakharov’s own books are the best source: Memoirs, Moscow and Beyond, Alarm and Hope, My Country and the World, Sakharov Speaks, and Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom.

  Yelena Bonner’s Mothers and Daughters and, especially, Alone Together are extremely moving accounts of her life.

  Of all the tributes to Sakharov published after his death, the best was a special edition of Moscow News, December 17, 1989.

  20. LOST ILLUSIONS

  Aleksandr Yakovlev’s books include Predisloviye. Obval. Poslesloviye. (“Preface. Collapse. Afterword.”), Muki Prochiteniya Bitiya (“The Pain of Perceiving Life”), and On the Edge of an Abyss: From Truman to Reagan. The two recent books in Russian include the major speeches and an especially valuable interview first printed in Komsomolskaya Pravda, June 5, 1990. Yakovlev’s article “Protiv antiistorizma” (“Against Anti-historicism”) appeared in Literaturnaya Gazeta, October 15, 1972.

  My own interviews for this chapter that were the most helpful were with Yakovlev, Vitaly Korotich, Yegor Ligachev, Stanislav Shatalin, Nikolai Petrakov, Arkady Volsky, Eduard Shevardnadze, Anatoly Sobchak, Giorgi Shakhnazarov, Sergei Grigoriyev, Fyodor Burlatsky, Vyacheslav Shostokovsky, and Yuri Afanasyev.

  Bill Keller’s profile in The New York Times Magazine, February 19, 1989, was also helpful.

  21. THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION

  Ilya Zaslavski gave me free run of the October District, and I was able to sit in on meetings and private planning sessions as well as conduct interviews with his allies and enemies. The mayor of Moscow, Gavriil Popov, was also helpful with an interview on the difficulties of building a municipal government.

  Alex Kahn helped guide me through the world of the trade mafia in Leningrad and was able to arrange my meeting with “the Charity Society.” I also had useful meetings with young businessmen, legitimate and not, in the Baltic states, Tbilisi, Yerevan, Baku, Leningrad, Perm, and Magnitogorsk.

  22. MAY DAY! MAY DAY!

  Gavriil Popov, Aleksandr Yakovlev, Yegor Ligachev, and numerous demonstrators gave me their versions of what happened on May Day 1990. I was also able to read the Politburo’s anxious analysis of the event in the Party archives during my trip to Moscow in September 1992. Masha Lipman, Masha Volkenshtein, Seriozha Ivanov, Igor Primakov, Alex Kahn, and Kolya Vasyn were especially helpful on the theme of generations.

  23. THE MINISTRY OF LOVE

  I am grateful to Jeff Trimble of U.S. News & World Report for his help on many subjects, and he was especially insightful about the KGB.

  24. BLACK SEPTEMBER

  Members of Aleksandr Men’s family as well as his parishioners were helpful in providing me with interviews and copies of his lectures, sermons, and writings. Andrei Yeryemin, Men’s assistant and follower, was especially generous with his time, as were Pavel Men, Gleb Yakunin, Aleksandr Ogorodnikov, Lev Timofeyev, Andrei Bessmertni, Aleksandr Minkin, Maria Tepnina, and Tatyana Sagalayeva. Also useful were Twentieth Century and Peace, No. 1, 1991; Andrei Eremin’s “In Memory of Aleksandr Men,” Znamya, No. 9, 1991; Tamara Zhirmunskaya in Smena, No. 11, March 1991; and Mikhail Aksyonov-Myerson in Russkaya Misl, September 21, 1990.

  25. THE TOWER

  In reporting on the crackdown and eventual independence in the Baltic states, I am grateful to the staff of the newspaper Diena in Riga and a range of politicians and activists in Vilnius, including Vytautas Landsbergis, Arvydas Juozaitis, Romouldas Ozolas, Kazimiera Prunskiene, Algimantis Cekoulis, Justas Paleskis, Vladislav Shved, and Algirdas Brazauskas.

  Vitaly Tretyakov, the editor of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, gave me free run of the editorial offices there, and the staff, especially Sergei Parkhomenko, Pavel Felgenhauer, and Tatyana Malkina, described the short and brilliant history of the paper.

  In Moscow, both sides of the crackdown were available for interviews, if not always completely forthcoming. Eduard Shevardnadze, Stanislav Shatalin, Grigori Yavlinsky, Vitaly Korotich, Ales Adamovich, Aleksandr Yakovlev, Len Karpinsky, Andrei Grachev, and Giorgi Shakhnazarov—all, in their own way, defenders of reform—talked with me about the tense months leading up to the coup. Nikolai Petrushenko, Viktor Alksnis, Aleksandr Nevzorov, Sergei Akhromeyev, Aleksandr Prokhanov, and other conservatives were, strangely enough, just as helpful.

  26. THE GENERAL LINE

  Volkogonov’s main work so far is Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. The Trotsky biography is available only in Russian; Volkogonov is also at work on a biography of Lenin and a memoir.

  Walter Laqueur’s Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations is a helpful compendium of the recent discoveries about Stalin that have supplemented the standard biographies by Robert Tucker, Adam Ulam, Isaac Deutscher, Roy Medvedev, and Boris Souveraine.

  The transcript of the meeting denouncing Volkogonov was published in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, June 18, 1991. Nina Tumarkin’s “The Great Patriotic War and Myth and Memory,” Atlantic, June 1991, describes the role of the war as a legitimizing myth in the minds of the older generation.

  27. CITIZENS

  In Rostov, General Matvei Shaposhnikov described for me his experience at Novocherkassk. Olga Nikitina’s “Novocherkassk: Chronicle of a Tragedy,” Don, Nos. 8 and 9, 1990, is an excellent oral history of the massacre. At the Communist Party archives, I was able to read KGB documents on the Novocherkassk affair made available only in 1992. Solzhenitsyn’s account in the third volume of The Gulag Archipelago has stood up well despite the appearance of new materials.

  Robert Conquest’s Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps is the best historical compendium so far on the camps of the Soviet far east, but I was told that a number of scholars are now beginning work in the Kolyma region on more complete histories.

  PART IV

  For this account of the August coup, I depended largely on my own experience and the reports from the Post by Fred Hiatt, Margaret Shapiro, and, especially, Michael Dobbs.

  I am also grateful for having had the chance to read the reports by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Literaturnaya Gazeta, Izvestia, Argumenti i Fakti, Ogonyok, and Stolitsa. A useful compendium of press reports from Russia and the other republics on the coup is Korichnyevii Putsch Krasnikh Avgust ’91, published in 1991 by Tekst. The Russian, Moscow, and “main” television channels also carried helpful interviews, especially in the three or four days after the fall of the coup.

  Eventually, the best history of the August coup will come out of the dozens of volumes of testimony assembled by the Russian prosecutors. As I write, a year and a half after the coup, there has been no trial though one is scheduled for Spring 1993. The testimony and “inside” workings of the coup in my account come from the prosecutors�
� attempt to select the highlights from the still-closed investigation; in most cases, these details checked out with other published reports in the Western and Russian press.

  Stuart Loory and Ann Imse’s CNN album of photographs and reports, Seven Days That Shook the World, is based largely on the network’s excellent coverage. The BBC series The Second Russian Revolution also has excellent interviews with Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and other key players.

  Sobchak, Yakovlev, Gorbachev, Shevardnadze, Ryzhkov, and Bakatin were useful in their books, since each had his own angle of vision in this Roshomon tale.

  Karaulov’s interviews with Yanayev, Lukyanov, and other players in the coup for Nezavisimaya Gazeta will soon be published as part of a book. But perhaps the most revealing interview was Yuri Shchekochikin’s talk in the October 2, 1991, issue of Literaturnaya Gazeta with Pyotr Korotkevich, a top missile scientist in the military industry, who described Baklanov as a conspirator of dark genius.

  PART V

  THE TRIAL OF THE OLD REGIME

  This section came out of an article on the trial of the Communist Party I wrote for The New Yorker’s November 30, 1991, issue and an article on Gorbachev’s trip across America for Vanity Fair’s August 1991 issue.

  INTERVIEWS

  In one way or another, hundreds of interviews, long and short, helped me with this book. The “ordinary people” I spoke with for this book are usually cited by name in the text only. What follows is a list of those interviews with public or semipublic figures who were especially helpful. The list seems chockablock with “legislators,” “historians,” “activists,” and, God help us, “journalists.” But such were the times. In Moscow, Leningrad, and the Baltic states, especially, these people were at the center of public life. There were times when the Congress of People’s Deputies seemed, in part, like a joint convention of political hacks and the faculty club. That is changing now as a class of professional politicians evolves. Rather than list just the names, I have given some short indication of who these people were during the perestroika period and the immediate aftermath of the failed August coup of 1991. My thanks to all of them.