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

by David Remnick

A half-century before, at Stalin’s direct order, NKVD executioners slaughtered fifteen thousand Polish military officers and threw the bodies into rows of mass graves. The month-long operation in Kalinin, Katyn, and Starobelsk was part of Stalin’s attempt to begin the domination of Poland. The young officers had been among the best-educated men in Poland, and Stalin saw them as a potential danger, as enemies-in-advance. For decades after, Moscow put the blame for the killings on the Nazis, saying the Germans had carried out the massacres in 1941, not the NKVD in 1940. The Kremlin propaganda machine sustained the fiction in speeches, diplomatic negotiations, and textbooks, weaving it into the vast fabric of ideology and official history that sustained the regime and its empire.

Mostly I wanted just to sit in the same room with Kaganovich, to see what an evil man looked like, to know what he did, what books he kept around.

Reporting is often foolish work, but there was something especially shaming about knocking endlessly on a tyrant’s door. It raised insane questions of etiquette, such as what the rules of harassment are where a mass murderer is concerned.

As Sergei Ivanov, a Soviet scholar of the Byzantine period, wrote, the rites of Communism had their roots in Constantinople, when the leader’s rare appearances “before the people were accompanied by thoroughly rehearsed outbursts of delight, specially selected crowds who chanted the officially approved songs.”

Yerofeyev made his living at any job he could keep. He didn’t keep them long, generally, but he did rise to the post of foreman. He commanded a small brigade of men who were laying cable, or pretending to, in the town of Sheremetyevo outside Moscow. “This is what we would do. One day we would play poker, the next day we would drink vermouth, on the third day we’d play poker, and on the fourth day it was back to vermouth.… For a while everything was perfect. We’d send off our socialist pledges once a month and we’d get our pay twice a month.

Then they slashed Solzhenitsyn from Russia, hustling him from a prison cell to a jet and finally to his exile. It could not tolerate Solzhenitsyn’s sneer, Brodsky’s impudence, or Sakharov’s superiority. The regime would rather kill its brightest children than give way.

At his trial in Leningrad, Brodsky encountered the soul of the regime, its peculiar language. JUDGE: What is your profession? BRODSKY: Translator and poet. JUDGE: Who recognized you as a poet? Who has enrolled you in the ranks of poets? BRODSKY: No one. Who enrolled me in the ranks of human beings?

Just before he left the country in 1972, Brodsky adopted an old Russian tradition and wrote a letter to the czar. “Dear Leonid Ilyich: A language is a much more ancient and inevitable thing than a state. I belong to the Russian language. As for the state, from my point of view, the measure of a writer’s patriotism is not oaths from a high platform, but how he writes in the language of the people among whom he lives.… Although I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet. I believe that I will return. Poets always return in the flesh or on paper.”

In their first year of medical school, students were informed that there were two species of human beings: Homo sapiens and Homo sovieticus.

at his entrance exam, Dima found himself writing an essay that extolled the sham autobiography of Leonid Brezhnev, The Little Land, which was filled with heroic exploits that had never actually taken place. Brezhnev never even wrote the book, and yet he rewarded himself with the year’s top literary prize, a spectacle not unlike Ronald Reagan awarding himself the Pulitzer Prize for his own ghost-written book.

But real winter was endless and foul, a gray slog that began in late September and ended with the even uglier spectacle of late April, known euphemistically as spring.

If the sky was blue over Moscow ten or fifteen days between September and May it was a lot. Living without light was like living on another planet, another realm, and by the time we’d been there a year, we both felt like mushrooms, mushy and beige.

Now, under Gorbachev, that was gradually changing. Friends now pointed to the chandelier and said, “I hope the microphone is on, because I have something very important I want to say. Gorbachev sucks.” Or doesn’t suck. Whatever. Fear was slowly on the way out.

In foreign capitals and Soviet cities, he ordered his limousine to stop, got out on the streets, and worked the crowds. No one had ever seen such a thing: a modern Soviet leader who walked without an aide at each elbow. “Who is Gorbachev’s chief supporter?” the joke went. “No one. He can stand up all by himself.” The puffy gray men in the lower ranks of the Communist Party, men who had run the cities and towns like feudal princes, were beginning to get the idea that a little contact with the serfs they commanded just might prolong their dominion. And so it was that I was extended a warm welcome to the Regional Communist Party Committee of the October Region.

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. And for the next hour or so, the two of them, Laryonov and Kuprin, whined about their common plight. For the first time, people were calling them on the phone and complaining about the garbage pickups that never came, the ten-year waiting lists for a phone, the fifteen-year waiting list for an apartment.

Nina Aleksandrovna’s eyes widened just a bit, scandalized. Rock was “mindless rhythms,” she said, songs that were “half-animal, indecent imitations of sex.” She’d read in the Leningrad magazines about a singer named Yuri Shevchuk. “He sings a song called ‘Premonition of a Civil War.’ What in God’s name is that? I saw this picture of him, showing him dancing, and he’s wearing a pair of cutoff jeans and a waistcoat with his belly button showing. Okay, let him do it, but excuse me, everything was unbuttoned so his chest was showing and, down below, his male dignity was protruding! He is dancing with his male thing jutting out in front of all those young girls. How can you talk about purity anymore after that?” The question seemed to ring in the air, unanswered. Then Nina Aleksandrovna enlarged on her point.

Yakov Rapoport, like many Jews of his generation, well understood that the purges of the 1930s were not an aberration of the moment. Cruelty had preceded 1937 and cruelty was sure to follow. Stalin was indulging his hatred of the Jews. In 1948, Stalin ordered the execution of Solomon Mikhoels, the legendary director of the Jewish State Theater and the leader of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee as a presumed enemy of the state. After the murder of Mikhoels—called a car accident by the authorities—the KGB arrested the leading members of the Anti-Fascist Committee, citing a “postwar return to normalcy.” Almost as a warm-up to the Doctors’ Plot and the coming purge, the KGB killed twenty-three Jewish intellectuals in 1952 on trumped-up charges of spying and treason. Then, in the first weeks of 1953, Stalin ordered the arrest of a group of nine prominent doctors, six of them Jewish; the Party papers claimed the doctors were poisoning the Kremlin leaders and covering up the conspiracy.

“By the time I was thirteen I already knew that I could no longer live here,” Vika told me. “I was still in the Soviet Union, but I knew it was temporary. Just thinking that way set me free. “I’m not scared of the latest wave of anti-Semitism. They are pathetic people, and they will always be around. I’m leaving because I cannot stand it here any longer: the rules, the psychology, the gray sameness of everything. If I stay here, I will suffocate. Unless a brick were to fall on my head, I could predict every moment of my life here until I die. I want to have children one day, but I will not have them here. I will miss everyone, but I am gone.”

One afternoon in Karaganda—an industrial city in central Kazakhstan that, seen from the air, looked like an ashtray stuffed with cigarette butts—I

I took another trip, this time to Kolyma in the Russian far east, the old prison camp region just across the water from Alaska. At least two million prisoners died in Kolyma.

The regime, in order to create a more perfect Soviet Eveni, or Chukchi or Eskimo, took children away from their parents and villages and “educated” them in state boarding schools, sickening little places in the middle of nowhere. By the time the schools got done with them, there was no Eveni left in them at all. Now they spoke Russian miserably and Eveni not at all.

The more she explained the group, the more it seemed to me their goal was to build a kind of Soviet Yad Vashem, the memorial center in Jerusalem dedicated to the memory of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. She kept talking about “the names,” giving people back their names, and as I stood there, I remembered going to Yad Vashem nearly twenty years before and walking into a vast, dark library, a room filled with immense volumes containing the names of the lost. I had never even begun to understand the immensity of the Holocaust until that moment. I’d had teachers who had asked us to imagine four of the five boroughs of New York gassed to death. But it was only in that simple room, surrounded by the names of all of them, that I felt it. And what had Solzhenitsyn written? What was his count of the victims of the Soviet regime? Sixty million?

Roy and Zhores had idolized their father. He had been a strict teacher and a scholarly example to them, urging them to read everything from Jack London to the Russian classics. His letters to them from Kolyma betrayed none of his own suffering. They concentrated instead on the boys’ future. My dear Roy and ’Res: At last, spring has come, a rare guest in this part of the country. I am very far from you, but in my thoughts and in my heart, I am very close, closer than ever. You fill my everyday thoughts, and you are the aim and essence of my life. You are on the threshold of becoming young men. I so want to be beside you and give you all my experience and deliver you from youth’s mistakes. But destiny has decided otherwise. I do not want my absence from your lives to sadden your youth. The main thing is that you must study persistently and not limit yourselves just to the school program. Use your time when your perceptiveness and memory are especially keen. Try to be disciplined in your work, for even a mediocre man can accomplish a great deal if he is disciplined. You are talented capable boys. You must learn to think and be well organized. What you need above all is patience. You must learn to overcome difficulties no matter how large. I am sorry for the preaching tone … Love, Your Father

Afanasyev was determined to use his new post to help open up the study of the Soviet past. Exploiting his new access to at least some Party archives, he reviewed the letters of Olga Shatunovskaya, a woman who had been a member of the Communist Party Control Committee under Khrushchev. In those letters Shatunovskaya wrote that she had collected sixty-four folders of documents saying that according to KGB and Party data, between January 1935 and 1941 19,800,000 people had been arrested; and of these, seven million were executed in prisons. Her statement was supported by specific data describing how many were shot and where and when. But the files Shatunovskaya described were declared “missing.” By reading such letters, Afanasyev began to realize that the Party and the KGB had probably destroyed many of the most incriminating documents in the archives.

Magadan “was, in a sense, the freest town in Russia,” Aksyonov wrote. “In it there lived the special deportees and the special contingent, which included those categorized SHE (Socially Harmful Elements) and SDE (Socially Dangerous Elements), nationalists, social democrats, Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists … people who recognized themselves as the lowest slaves and who, therefore, had challenged fate.” In June 1988, Magadan was still closed to foreigners. The only way to get there was on an official Potemkin-village tour with the Foreign Ministry.

Arnold spoke such good English that when we switched to Russian I had the odd sensation that he had an American accent.

In a way, arrival was a relief, the journey had been such hell. The train trip to the far east from Moscow and European Russia was in cattle cars, and it took a month at least. The prisoners were packed together so tightly that it was said there were those who starved to death and were found still upright at the end of the journey. At the embarkation points on the Pacific, inspectors went up and down the line looking for slaves. Like horsemen before an auction, inspectors checked the prisoners’ teeth and eyes. They pinched their biceps and buttocks to see how much muscle tone there was left after more than a month in the cattle cars. At Vanino in the late 1940s the NKVD had a contract to supply some state firms for 120,000 slave workers a year.

“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.”

Stalin, who was five feet four, wanted a court portrait done showing him as a tall man with powerful hands. The painter Nalbandian complied by portraying Stalin from a flattering angle with his hands folded, powerfully, across his belly. Stalin had his other portrait painters shot and their paintings burned.

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.

“I didn’t know anyone who was repressed. In the press now they are saying that in every house everyone at least knew someone who was repressed. In Kharkov, I investigated one hundred and fifty households and not one said it was waiting for a knock on the door. These numbers you are hearing are all sensations, pure libel. During collectivization in 1929, my grandfather was kicked off his land and exiled. But people gave us clothing and food, and after six months we returned to the land. During the exile, my brother died of an inflammation of the lung, but my mother never blamed Stalin. It was the local officials! My mother is eighty-six and she understands this with her woman’s mind!

On television, Gorbachev dove into crowds. No one had to know that the KGB had carefully screened those crowds or that the producers had carefully edited the footage to the general secretary’s own specifications. The entire state media apparatus was dedicated not to reporting the news but rather to the evolution of a personality and the promotion of a policy, a new way of doing things.

Political humor had always been a staple of private life in the Soviet Union, starring Brezhnev as the doddering fool or the corpse of Lenin as kopchushka, the “smoked fish.” But such jokes were never permitted in official publications. In the March 1988 issue of Teatr, the satirist Mikhail Zadornov adopted the voice of a resident of a town Gorbachev had just visited. He writes a letter to the general secretary telling him how the once dingy town had been transformed. “It is true that you informed our local authorities about your visit just three days in advance,” the mock letter to Gorbachev says, “but even in those three days they managed to do more for our city than they had in all the years of Soviet power. All the buildings that you were supposed to pass were painted, but then someone said that you like to swerve off your planned course and so our authorities were obliged to paint all the other houses in the city. They worked so hard that they painted the windows, too.” The joke was less on Gorbachev than on the vanity of the Communist Party and the Russian tradition of Potemkin villages.

But when I said I wanted to go to Privolnoye, the village nearby where Gorbachev was born and raised, Nizin stiffened. He would get back to me on that, he said, and disappeared into his office. Within an hour, he told me I could not go. “There is a quarantine in Privolnoye,” he said. “It is forbidden to you.” “What sort of quarantine?” “The cows are diseased, apparently. They do not want any foreigners to come and get sick.” “The cows are against it?” “No,” Nizin said. “Not the cows.”

At the very moment when Gorbachev was born in March 1931, southern Russia and Ukraine were living through the collectivization campaign and the starvation that went along with it. According to Western studies, more than thirty thousand people in the Stavropol region died during the terror-famine of 1931–32.

“You will get in your car, and proceed directly to Stavropol,” he said. “What about Privolnoye?” I said. “I told the foreign ministry I’d go there, too.” “As you know, there is a quarantine.” “What quarantine?” “You know very well. You were told.” “And how do you know that?” The deputy chief blinked once, slowly, to indicate annoyance. I was not to be childish, he seemed to say. He had no time. He had an entire town to run into the ground before the year was out.

“He could be so cool and businesslike sometimes. Once at a Komsomol meeting, in front of everyone at the local cinema house, he was angry with me for not finishing on time a little newspaper we put out. And despite our friendship, he reprimanded me in front of everyone, saying that I’d failed, that I was late. He was shouting a bit, disciplining me. Then afterward it was as if nothing had happened. He said, ‘Let’s go to the movies.’ I was at a loss. I couldn’t understand why he did what he did, and I said so. He said, ‘My dear, one thing has nothing to do with another.’

Gorbachev

I cannot say I am glad, just that my destiny is my destiny. I see things as a realist. When I do think back to those days, I see it as a pleasant island of time.

But Kolchanov said that “the influence is overrated. Gorbachev was intellectually curious, he was tolerant, but there were no signs of radicalism. You can’t make those leaps. Remember, Stalinism was something deep inside us. We were only lucky that we were young enough and flexible enough to change later on.”

Sakharov once turned to his wife and said, “Do you know what I love most of all in life?” Later, Bonner would confide to a friend, “I expected he would say something about a poem or a sonata or even about me.” Instead, Sakharov said, “The thing I love most in life is radio background emanation”—the barely discernible reflection of unknown cosmic processes that ended billions of years ago.

Sakharov was a man inclined toward the purities of theoretical physics but who became the conscience of the Soviet Union, a political actor in spite of himself. His physics and his politics grew out of the same mind, the same sense of wholeness and responsibility. “Other civilizations, perhaps more successful ones, may exist an infinite number of times on the preceding and following pages of the Book of the Universe,” Sakharov wrote in his Nobel Prize lecture. “Yet we should not minimize our sacred endeavors in the world, where, like faint glimmers in the dark, we have emerged for a moment from the nothingness of unconsciousness into material existence. We must make good the demands of reason and create a life worthy of ourselves and of the goals we only dimly perceive.”

Even in his memoirs, written three decades later, Sakharov could not pretend to understand his own reaction: “I can’t fully explain it—after all, I knew quite enough about the horrible crimes that had been committed—the arrests of innocent people, the torture, the deliberate starvations, and all the violence—to pass judgment on those responsible. But I hadn’t put the whole picture together, and in any case, there was still a lot I didn’t know. Somewhere in the back of my mind the idea existed, instilled by propaganda, that suffering is inevitable during great historic upheavals: ‘When you chop wood, the chips fly.’ … But above all, I felt myself committed to the goal which I assumed was Stalin’s as well: after a devastating war, to make the country strong enough to ensure peace. Precisely because I had invested so much of myself in that cause and accomplished so much, I needed, as anyone might in my circumstances, to create an illusory world, to justify myself.”

Some people still think, erroneously, that the life of the apparatchik breeds only conformists and subjects loyal to the regime. Actually, the regime splits people into two opposing factions: those who believe they can make it only through conformism and time-serving, and those who, thanks to a different structure of mind, dare to question the surrounding reality.

careerists, flatterers, loudmouths, cowards, and other products of the bureaucratic selection process.

The Communist Party apparatus was the most gigantic mafia the world has ever known. It guarded its monopoly on power with a sham consensus and constitution and backed it up with the force of the KGB and the Interior Ministry police. There were also handsome profits. The Party had so obviously socked away money abroad and sold off national resources—including the country’s vast gold reserves—that just after the collapse of the August coup, the Party’s leading financial officer took a look into the future and threw himself off a high balcony to his death.

The Party’s corruption under Brezhnev was not a matter of exceptions, of rotten apples fouling the Utopian barrel. No thorough prosecution could stop with a single indictment.

The trade mafia worked thousands of scams. Even the small-time jobs had a certain beauty to them. In Central Asia, I was told about the fruit juice scam. Workers paid enormous bribes to get jobs servicing carbonated juice machines throughout the warm, southern republics. When the workers serviced the machines, they skimped on the syrup and then sold it elsewhere. They also skimmed some of the money out of the cash boxes. The workers used part of their gains to pay the foremen; the foreman, in turn, paid off the assistant minister; the assistant minister paid the minister … and all the way up the line and to the top of the Party structure.

One afternoon, the nanny who took care of our son came to work exhausted and depressed. Her mother had died, but what had run her down most was the enormous effort and expense of getting the woman buried—a process that drained her as much as it enriched the “cemetery mafia” and its Party patrons. “I knew immediately this was going to run into big money for us,” Irina said. “We were supposed to get a free funeral and burial. But that is a joke. The first stop was the bank. First, Mother’s body had to be taken to the morgue. We were told that the morgues were all filled up, and they wouldn’t take her. But when we paid two hundred rubles to the attendants, they took her. Then there was the fifty rubles for her shroud. “Then the funeral agent said he had no coffins my mother’s size and that we could only buy something eight feet long. My mother was five feet tall. For eighty rubles he came up with the right size. Then the gravediggers said they could not dig the grave until two P.M., even though the funeral was set for ten A.M. So that took two bottles of vodka each and twenty-five rubles each. The driver of the funeral bus said he had another funeral that day and couldn’t take care of us. But for thirty rubles and a bottle of vodka we could solve the problem. We did. And so on with the gravesite and the flowers and all the rest. In the end, it took two thousand rubles to bury my mother. Three months’ income for the family. Is that what ordinary life is supposed to be? To me, ...

In his autobiography, Yeltsin recounts with a brand of irony foreign to Gorbachev the preposterous oral exam at the local Party committee required for membership: “[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.”

Those were the last days of illusion in the Soviet Union. Under Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko, the regime floated on an immense sea of oil profits. At the height of the world energy crisis and its aftermath, the state plundered its vast oil reserves in Siberia, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan, giving Moscow the cash it needed to fund the vast military-industrial complex. The rest of the economy was a wreck and ran on principles of magic and graft, but so long as world crude prices remained high, it hardly mattered to the Kremlin. There was still enough wealth to fill the stores with four kinds of cheese, cheap boots in wintertime, and 3-ruble vodka. But by the time Gorbachev took power in March 1985, the oil boom had vanished. The economy of illusion was dead. The Soviet Union entered the era of high tech with none of its own and could not hope to compete. It could barely hope to survive. The state of affairs was best summarized in the chestnut “The Soviet Union makes the finest microcomputers! They are the biggest in the whole world!”