Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

by David Remnick

It will take many books and records to understand the history of the Soviet Union and its final collapse. We are, after all, still debating the events of 1917. To write history takes time. When asked what he thought of the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai said, “It’s too soon to tell.” To understand the Gorbachev period will require a new library covering an immense range of subjects: U.S.-Soviet relations, economic history, the uprisings in the Baltic states, the Caucasus, Ukraine, and Central Asia, the “prehistory” of perestroika, the psychological and sociological effects of a long-standing totalitarian regime.

But now something had changed—changed radically. After some initial hesitation at the beginning of his time in power, Gorbachev had decreed that the time had come to fill in the “blank spots” of history. There could be no more “rose-colored glasses,” he said. At first, his rhetoric was guarded. He spoke of “thousands” instead of tens of millions of victims. He did not dare criticize Lenin, the demigod of the state. But despite Gorbachev’s hesitation, the return of historical memory would be his most important decision, one that preceded all others, for without a full and ruthless assessment of the past—an admission of murder, repression, and bankruptcy—real change, much less democratic revolution, was impossible.

On and on the blind man droned, pointing his finger at “the others,” denying the importance of his own role, no less a cruel, bland beast than Eichmann in Jerusalem.

They had to begin to impress upon their children that Stalin, the Mountain Eagle, was a lowly beast.

His best recipe, the “Finis coronat opus,” is Cat Gut: 100 grams of Zhigulev beer, 30 grams of “Sadko the Rich Merchant” brand shampoo, 70 grams of anti-dandruff shampoo, and 20 grams of insect repellent. And now, “your Cat Gut is ready. Drink it from early evening in large gulps. After two glasses of this, men become so inspired you can spit at them from five feet for half an hour and they won’t take the blindest bit of notice.”

The Soviet system’s lust for confession had not changed much since the days of the Terror. Dima wrote the letter and considered himself lucky that the incident ended there.

Whether he relished the task or not, Gorbachev was acting as the keeper of the secrets, the chief curator of the Party’s criminal history. Just as the Soviet regime combined brutality and the technology of the totalitarian state to leave behind tens of millions of corpses and a perverse social order, it also used the completeness of the state, the pervasiveness of every institution from the kindergartens to the secret police, to put an end to historical inquiry.

“I got the inspiration from a true story, an incident that took place in a village in western Georgia,” he said. “A man who had been sent unjustly to prison was finally released. His entire life had been broken, destroyed. And when he came home, he found the grave of the man who had sent him to jail. One night he went into the graveyard and dug up the coffin. He opened the coffin, took out the corpse, and leaned it up against the wall. This was his act of revenge. He would not let the dead man rest. This awful fact showed us that we could show the tragedy of an entire epoch by using this device. That was the spark for the treatment and then the script.”

A friend of mine met Molotov before his death and he told Molotov, ‘You know, it’s a pity that Lenin died so early. If he had lived longer, everything would have been normal.’ But Molotov said, ‘Why do you say that?’ My friend said, ‘Because Stalin was a bloodsucker and Lenin was a noble person.’ Molotov smiled, and then he said, ‘Compared to Lenin, Stalin was a mere lamb.’

I once asked if I might have a phone line capable of calling abroad, a maneuver that should cost about $15. This would cost $20,000, UPDK replied. So you had to love them for that.

Like every politician I have ever known, the men of the October Region wanted you to feel sorry for them, to feel for a moment their terrible burden.

“Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of the press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life in every public institution dies out, becomes a mere appearance, and bureaucracy alone remains active. Public life gradually falls asleep; a few dozen extremely energetic and highly idealistic Party leaders direct and govern; among them, in reality, a dozen outstanding leaders rule, and an elite of the working class is summoned to a meeting from time to time to applaud the speeches of the leaders and to adopt unanimously resolutions put to them. In essence this is the rule of the clique, and of course their dictatorship is not the dictatorship of the proletariat but the dictatorship of a handful of politicians.… Socialism without political freedom is not socialism.… Freedom only for active supporters of the government is not freedom.”

Shafarevich was not alone. While many leading Russian writers spoke out against anti-Semitism, the Russian Writers’ Union leadership promoted a nationalist ideology steeped in hatred of Jews. In an open letter signed by seventy-two of its leading members and published in the house organ, Literaturnaya Rossiya, the union declared: “It is precisely Zionism that is responsible for many things, including Jewish pogroms, for cutting off dry branches of their own people in Auschwitz and Dachau.”

“Educators and Utopian thinkers used to think that the opportunities were endless. That the idea of a just society could be formed by the human mind, that it could be discovered on a theoretical basis; and it seemed to them that those theories could be realized in practice. In other words, a society of universal justice and prosperity could be built by thinking things out. We are now living through the final stages of that culture. Marx and Lenin are vanishing. They are being swept away in the same way that the ‘truth’ of Newtonian mechanics was swept away by Einstein and relativity.”

Michael Solomon, a Romanian prisoner, wrote of his shock as he was herded into the hold of the ship Sovlatvia headed north to Magadan. It was a scene, he said, “which neither Goya nor Gustave Doré could ever have imagined”: thousands of men and women, dressed in rags, half-dead and covered with boils and blisters. “At the bottom of the stairway we had just climbed down stood a giant cask, on the edges of which, in full view of the soldiers standing on guard above, women were perched like birds, and in the most incredible positions. There was no shame, no prudery, as they crouched there to urinate or empty their bowels. One had the impression that they were some half-human, half-bird creatures which belonged to a different world and a different age.

Stalin died of a stroke on March 5, 1953. He once said that those revolutionaries who refused to use terror as a political tool were “vegetarians.” According to Roy Medvedev, Stalin’s victims numbered forty million. Solzhenitsyn says the number is far greater—perhaps sixty million. The debate continues even now.

Stalin is with us and Stalin will come. That is the mind-set of a generation. We went into battle with his name on our lips. He took Russia, which had a wooden plow in its hands, and he left it with an atomic bomb. Such a man cannot be slandered. The young should learn their history.”

“Let me tell a parable,” he said. “An old man wearing only a shirt was praying before an icon. ‘Guide me, harden me. Guide me, harden me.’ His wife, who was lying [in bed], said, ‘Just pray to be hard, old man, I can guide it in myself.’ Let’s drink to getting hard.”

“Gorbachev, me, all of us, we were double-thinkers, we had to balance truth and propaganda in our minds all the time,” said Shakhnazarov, an elfin intellectual who was at Gorbachev’s side from start to finish. “It is not something I’m particularly proud of, but that is the way we lived. It was the choice between dissidence and surrender.”

The restaurant director’s salary is one hundred ninety rubles a month, say. You can’t live on that, and so he is forced to take bribes. But there is a system of bribing in the USSR. You can’t get too greedy. A restaurant director cannot take more than two thousand or three thousand rubles per month. If he starts taking more, the system grows worried, and in the next five or six months new people will come around to inspect your place, which means that you can be arrested for violating the unwritten code of bribery.

At times, Yeltsin seemed the Huey and Earl Long of Soviet politics, a theatrical populist. Relying on the politics of resentment, he won an angry public’s affection.

“[The examiner] asked me on what page of which volume of Das Kapital Marx refers to commodity-money relationships. Assuming that he had never read Marx closely and had, of course, no idea of either the volume or page number in question, and that he didn’t even know what commodity-money relationships were, I immediately answered, half-jokingly, ‘Volume Two, page 387.’ What’s more I said it quickly, without pausing for thought. To which he replied, with a sage expression, ‘Well done, you know your Marx well.’ After it all, I was accepted as a Party member.”

Komsomolskaya Pravda, the Party’s youth newspaper, blamed the Soviet system, pointing out that before the 1917 revolution, Russia ranked seventh in the world in per capita consumption and was now seventy-seventh—“just after South Africa but ahead of Romania.”

“When that child was born, it was a cold winter morning,” Aba Abayev said. “No one has phones here, and there are no hospitals or doctors around. I ran two or three kilometers to the pay phone and called. It looked like the baby was dying—or was dead already, maybe—and it took the doctors more than an hour to get here. By then the child was dead. This is the way our lives go out here. I have no hope, to be honest. And for my children, I don’t think things will change, unless they get worse somehow.”

“This is not a life for human beings. We have no time for leisure. We have no decent clothes. We spend our entire lives making just enough to feed ourselves and our children. The shift starts at six A.M., so you have to be up at four-thirty. You go to the mine, work eight hours underground, and all your life is work. When you come home you are too exhausted to do anything but collapse. On the weekend there are chores to do at home. About the only leisure we have is a mug or two of beer in the morning after the night shift. That’s it. And then you quit—if you haven’t already been killed in an accident. A few years later, your lungs give out, or your heart goes. Bye-bye. You’re dead.”

“Chernobyl was like everywhere else in this empire,” Yuri Shcherbak said. “The only thing that stood between us and total oblivion was a few good people, a few heroes who told the truth and risked their lives. If it weren’t for the danger, they should leave the Chernobyl plant standing. It could be the great monument to the Soviet empire.”

He led us to the captain’s stateroom, a wood-paneled affair of surprising elegance. The table was already set with china, decent silverware, dishes heaped with food, and a half-dozen bottles: Georgian champagne, Ukrainian beer, pepper vodka. There was no way out. We were in for a time of it, and I prayed only that the seas would stay calm.

Savenko said that some of his psychologist and psychiatrist “friends” were reduced to pranks: “I know some people made fun of Kashpirovsky by sending him cables saying things like ‘Thanks to you, my amputated stump has grown five centimeters longer.’ Then they waited for him to read them out in public as a testimonial.”

Perm was a classic Soviet city—that is, an urban mass indistinguishable from hundreds of others, with a Lenin Avenue and broad and pitted streets and apartment blocks so ugly and uniform that you could weep looking at them.

Then Yakovlev made a connection between Lenin and Stalin that was still considered radical even for non-Party intellectuals. To hear it from the main ideologist of glasnost, perestroika, and the “new thinking” in foreign policy was absolutely stunning: “Today, when we are asking ourselves the excruciating question of how it was possible for this country and Lenin’s Party to accept the dictatorship of mediocrity and put up with Stalin’s abuses and the shedding of rivers of innocent blood, it is obvious that one of the factors that nurtured the soil for authoritarian rule and despotism was the morbid faith in the possibility of forcing through social and historical development, and the idealization of revolutionary violence that traces back to the very sources of the European revolutionary tradition.”

His people reminded me of the inner circle around Citizen Kane. They knew he would crash, but they wanted to be next to something transcendent and new. Sterligov’s ambitions were boundless and wild, a mix of Thatcherian free-market zeal, Chicago in the twenties, and P. T. Barnum myth-making.

He told me that when he first started listening to rock and roll, it was impossible to get records and it was before the era when audio cassettes were easy to find. “We had friends who worked in medical clinics and they would steal used X rays,” Kolya said. “Someone would have a primitive record-making machine and you would copy the music by cutting the grooves in the material of the X rays. So you’d be listening to a Fats Domino tune that was coming right off of the X ray of someone’s long-forgotten broken hip. They called that ‘on the bones.’

“I’ll tell you this, speaking as a red-blooded American who has no beef with the Russians: I hope they get this game down,” Bill Lee said. “Because if they learn how to play, they’ll discover it beats the shit out of working. Take anything. Take music. When they can turn on the TV and they can see Joe Cocker singing ‘Civilized Man’ with fifty thousand people going apeshit and everybody’s got their tops off and their tits jiggling, well, they’ll say, ‘You know, I want that! I gotta have that!’ The same with baseball. They want what we have. And why the hell not?”

In the presence of a KGB “press officer,” Katya answered my questions—or didn’t. She said the contest had taken place “in private” and even the number of contestants was a secret. That there obviously had never been any contest at all was, I supposed, a given and did not bear mentioning. But Katya, for someone trained in “kill methods” and marksmanship by the most feared organization in the world, was charming.

“We climb breathlessly. Truth is not given easily. We look back down and know there is a great climb ahead. I remember the words of Tenzing, who climbed Mount Everest with the British. He said that you can only approach a mountain with respect. The same is true with God. Truth is closed to those who approach it without respect.”

When Napoleon met Aleksandr I in East Prussia, Napoleon said, “I see that you are an emperor and a pope at the same time. How useful.”

The coverage of economics in our paper starts from the principle that we don’t need to tear our hair out about whether Marxism-Leninism or capitalism is the right way to go. That debate is dead as can be. Do we really have to go crazy over whether it is good to find a healthy balance between efficiency and social welfare? About whether the rules of the market are ultimately correct? I don’t think so. I don’t cover Communism or any other religions in these pages. That’s not my business.”

Later, when I asked Gorbachev’s former economic adviser, Nikolai Petrakov, whether Gorbachev truly “slept through” the Vilnius events in ignorance, he said, simply, “Don’t be naive.”

Shcheglov now spent his days standing in lines at empty village stores, shuttling from one filthy hospital to the next looking for doctors, aspirin, glycerin pills. “An old man’s life,” he said. But what brightened him, he said, was the nerve and determination of his fellow miners across the country.

“You have given the worst press conference of your career,” Yakovlev told Gorbachev privately. “The Party is dead. Why can’t you see that? Talk about its ‘renewal’ is senseless. It’s like offering first aid to a corpse!”

“We must execute not only the guilty,” Lenin’s commissar of justice, Nikolai Krylenko, said. “Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more.”