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

by David Remnick

“Stalin Died Yesterday” was the title of Mikhail Gefter’s contribution to the “There Is No Other Way” collection and by that he meant that Stalinism infected everything and everyone in the Soviet Union. Every factory and collective farm, every school and orphanage was built on Stalinist principles of gargantuan scale and iron authority. In every relationship—in trade, on buses, in almost any simple transaction—people treated each other with contempt and suspicion. That was Stalinism, too. Only now were people beginning to wonder out loud about the efficacy of such a life. Only now were they permitted to express those doubts in the papers, in books, on television. “Stalinism is deep inside of every one of us,” Afanasyev told me after the Party conference. “Getting rid of that spirit is the most difficult thing of all. Next to that, getting the Party to permit a monument is nothing.”