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

by David Remnick

For years, while state television was still broadcasting documentaries about the street people of New York as an advertisement against capitalism, the Moscow police tried in vain to keep their own homeless out of sight. But as the number of homeless grew, their efforts collapsed. Moscow bomzhi—the acronym for “without definite place of residence”—slept in cemeteries, railway stations, construction sites, and basements.

The leading cause of house fires in the Soviet Union was television sets that exploded spontaneously.

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.”

In the first year of their lives, Turkmenian children were given an average of two hundred to four hundred injections, compared to three to five for American children. It was nothing systematic. The doctors threw everything they had at the children. Within a few years the effect of the vaccines was close to zero.

Kamarov was suffering from that terrible envy born of years of serfdom under czars and general secretaries, an envy embodied in a classic Soviet joke: A farmer’s cow dies, but a great spirit grants him one wish. And what is the wish? “Let my neighbor’s cow drop dead, too,” he says.

Magnitogorsk became a legend of the war. Because it produced the steel for half of the tanks and one third of the artillery used to defeat the Nazis, people began referring to the mills as “Hitler’s grave.” But Magnitogorsk never stopped running on a wartime mentality. The ultimate bosses, the ministers in Moscow, measured success in sheer quantity. Never mind that other countries were beginning to produce modern steel alloys that brought the weight of a refrigerator down to a hundred pounds, not four hundred; never mind that pollution got so bad that the clouds of poison above the city decreased sunlight 40 percent. But the Lenin Steel Works, the biggest mill in the world, kept churning on in ignorant isolation. And always the command was “More steel!”

I stayed a week in Magnitogorsk as a guest of the city coroner, Oleg Yefremov. Oleg was in his early forties, and he had a smoker’s cough that plagued him without end. He did not smoke. He suffered, as did most of the citizens of Magnitogorsk, from the habit of breathing. “I should quit inhaling,” he said.

The leaders of the Baltic independence movement, backed up by nearly every reputable Western historian, argued that Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania came under the Soviet sphere of influence as the result of a secret deal between the Kremlin and the Nazis. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 surreptitiously divided Europe into Soviet and German spheres of influence. One of the secret protocols gave Moscow control over Latvia, Estonia, and parts of Poland and Romania. A second protocol, signed a month later, gave the Kremlin control over Lithuania. In 1940, Stalin annexed the Baltic states and forced their puppet legislatures to “request admission” into the union. And now Valentin Falin, chief of the Party’s international department, was on the stage of the Foreign Ministry press center telling us that even if there had been such protocols, so what? They had nothing to do with “present realities.” Falin’s excuses would have shamed a schoolboy. The dog, he seemed to say, had eaten the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

Western visitors, still flush with Gorbymania,

Gorbachev trotted out one of his favorite aphorisms for the occasion: “Life itself punishes those who delay.”

the pleasure of smoking two cigarettes a day and intensifying that pleasure by smoking slowly in front of a mirror;

On a trip to the western Ukrainian city of Lvov in 1989, I met with small groups of nationalists who promised that “one day” their republic of over fifty million people, the biggest after Russia, would strike out for independence and do far more damage to the union than the tiny Baltic states ever could. They knew their history. “For us,” Lenin once wrote, “to lose the Ukraine would be to lose our head.”

In the aftermath of the accident, Shcherbina, the deputy prime minister, issued a secret decree in force from 1988 to 1991 telling Soviet doctors they could not cite radiation as a cause of death. Shcherbina, who had himself been exposed to high doses of radiation, died in 1990. The cause of death was marked “unspecified.”

“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.”

According to the more polite critics in town, he was a time-server, a low-rent apparatchik who had worked his way up from the coal mines to a soft office job in the union bureaucracy. He was in no way nasty, and friendlier even than Guly. Kapustin was eager to please. He had voice like a bassoon and a crushing handshake. He smiled constantly, like a maniac.

After lunch, Kapustin led us on an expedition of the mine, and it was worse than anything I’d seen in Siberia, Ukraine, or Kazakhstan. The mine was a horror. There were no elevators, and the shafts were brutal and tight. It took some of the miners two hours of sliding and creeping along stone just to get to their work stations. Later, my back and legs were covered with bruises and I was more sore than I would have been if I’d run ten miles. Until the strike, the miners had not been paid for this “commuting” time: they tore themselves up, four hours every day, for free. “And we’ve taken you down the best mine we’ve got here,” the director said. “This one’s dry. In the others, you’ve got water running down your back all day.”

Once, when Shcharansky was refused permission to celebrate Hanukkah, he went on a hunger strike. Osin didn’t want a scandal and cut a quick deal: if Shcharansky would end the hunger strike, he could light his Hanukkah candles. Shcharansky agreed, but demanded that while he said the appropriate prayers, Osin would stand by with his head covered and, at the end, say “Amen.” “Blessed are You, oh Lord, for allowing me to light these candles,” Shcharansky began in Hebrew. “May you allow me to light the Hanukkah candles many times in your city, Jerusalem, with my wife, Avital, and my family and friends.” Inspired by the sight of Osin, Shcharansky added, “And may the day come when all our enemies, who today are planning our destruction, will stand before us and hear our prayers and say, ‘Amen.’ ” “Amen,” Osin repeated. Shcharansky quickly spread the word in Perm-35 of Osin’s “conversion.” This meant a freezing stint in the isolation cell, but Shcharansky could not resist.

Back at his apartment, Sakharov told his wife, Yelena Bonner, that he was going downstairs to his study. He wanted to take a nap and then get up to write another speech. He asked Bonner to come wake him at nine. He had a lot of work to do before morning. “Tomorrow,” he said, “there will be a battle.” When Bonner went downstairs to wake her husband, she found him in the hallway on the floor, dead. “The totalitarian system probably killed him,” Vitaly Korotich said later. “I’m only glad that before he died Sakharov dealt the system a mortal blow. If God sent Jesus to pay for the sins of humankind, then a Marxist God somewhere sent Andrei Sakharov to pay for the sins of our system.”

Years later, when I asked him about his pre-perestroika books, Yakovlev said that they, like their author, were “prisoners of the time.”

violence as the midwife of history

“As the Bible says: there is much grief in wisdom.…

True, all this leaves scars on the heart, but I want to say this to the organizers of this well-orchestrated campaign and those who are behind it: you may shorten my life, but you can’t silence me.”

By the end of the session, Zaslavsky and Vasiliyev were depressed. The euphoria of the election campaign was fading fast. “We never understood just how deep the psychology of Bolshevism is in every one of us,” one aide, Ilya Gezentsevei, told me. “The harder we try to push, the harder that psychology pushes back.”

“Some people call us gangsters,” an ex-athlete named Sergei explained as he popped a knuckle. “We like to think of it this way: we protect people. We persuade them to let us protect them.” Sometimes, Sergei said, they used pistols and Uzis bought on the black market as their instruments of persuasion.

It came as no shock to Zaslavsky that a lot of the negative letters he got in the mail, to say nothing of the articles in the nationalist press, were anti-Semitic. As the business explosion intensified and the average wage bought less and less, resentment eventually made its way toward that fine end. Anyone with a little extra was a Jew. You heard the grumbling on the buses, on the streets, on park benches. Sometimes it became the stuff of public meetings and demonstrations. On June 6, 1990, at the Red October cultural hall in Moscow, seven hundred members of something called the People’s Orthodox Movement met, and the level of hatred was startling. “We declare that the Jews bear collective responsibility for the genocide of the Russian people and other peoples of our country!” said one speaker, Aleksandr Kulakov. “And we demand that Jews be forbidden to leave the country until a tribunal of the Russian people decides their fate. We express solidarity with the Arab world, which struggles with this evil! We also express solidarity with the German people. The Jews were never victims of the German people. The Germans were the victims of Jewish deception!”

At least for me, the ritual lost its aura with the discovery that underneath the mausoleum there was a laboratory charged with monitoring the temperature and rate of deterioration of “the living Lenin.” Below that, there was a gymnasium where the guards could work out on off hours. The idea of some pimply kid from Chelyabinsk doing squat thrusts in the bowels of sacred territory somehow erased all mystery from the grand procession and the leaders who watched it.

Europe chose the undeniability of death as a principle, refusing to construct anything everlasting, so life ends with the end of life and is senseless. Previous old cultures and modern Oriental cultures chose another explanation. One possibility is to create something that lasts forever, a form of eternity. So we are together and there is no death. When some cells in an organism die in one organ, the organism still lives on, because it is social and not individual. The problem of death is solved. The idea that the ego has borders that are the same as the borders of the self is a new idea; it began with Descartes’s idea ‘I think, therefore I am.’ If you ask a representative of old Roman culture or European medieval culture, ‘Does human life coincide with the life of one man?’ he’d say no.

In Leningrad, I met a man, no longer young, named Kolya Vasyn. He was a genuine dissident in the Brezhnev years, but his dissidence consisted of his worship not of Jefferson or Mill, but of Chuck Berry, Keith Richards, and, above all, John Lennon. “Lots of things can liberate people,” he told me as we listened to a tape of The White Album. “For me it was the freedom in John Lennon’s voice.” Since the early sixties, he and his friends had been collecting pirated tapes of Western rock and roll and listening to them with the same furtive pleasure and sense of revelation as the intellectuals who read Sakharov in onionskin underground editions in one night-long sitting. 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.’

But for the young, the West was the dream itself. Compared to the hole they were in, the problems of the West seemed laughable. The West was romanticized, sure enough, but why not? How could you begin to talk about the decline of the American economy with a thirty-year-old woman who still had to live with the husband she had divorced five years before because there was nowhere to move?

Spooner managed to supply the Chemists, his team at the Mendeleyev All-Union Chemical Society, with gloves, balls, helmets, and even videocassettes of Los Angeles Dodgers highlights. The more they watched the tapes, the more the Russians developed the tics and affectations of their American brethren. Scratching, spitting, bubble-blowing. It took a while to get them all down pat. In one game, a guy took his gift of Red Man chewing tobacco and gobbled it down like chocolate. He threw up and spent the rest of the game in a hopeless daze. He struck out three times, looking. “Now they chew and spit all right, but so far they haven’t caught on to the tradition of grabbing your balls before the pitch,” Protexter said.

And when he went on road trips with the team, Vadim Kulakov gave his girlfriend a Gary Carter 1988 Topps baseball card “so she will remember me.”

“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?”

Even before Kryuchkov’s arrival, they let a British journalist spend a few days debriefing the defector Kim Philby. Philby, a rat forever pretending to be a mouse, did his Honorable Englishman routine to perfection, waxing on about his service to ideals and complaining about the delay in getting copies of the Times and the Independent. Actually, Philby was a terrible drunk and the KGB treated him like a pathetic dependent whose bedpan needed constant changing. When Philby died in 1988, the KGB managed to leak very selectively the time and place of the funeral. Some of the British papers played the story as if it were the signal event of the century.

For months, Howard trained in Virginia and Washington, learning “dead drops” and countersurveillance techniques, putting little pieces of film in tree stumps and not blinking. He learned terms like “wet assets” (Russian terminology for liquidated spies), “honey pots” (women used as sexual lures), and “ravens” (male homosexual lures). He learned of how the agency kept the names of its “live assets” in Moscow in separate black envelopes in a basement safe.

The word “czar” is a Slavic form of the word “Caesar,”

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.”

Every system either finds a way to develop or else collapses.” He was now addressing a country that was doing both at once, though the collapse was ruthless and the development erratic.

Another article warned against “strangers bearing gifts” and “cancer-causing shampoos” from Poland, “contaminated bread boxes and shopping bags” from Vietnam, and, of course, the American Big Mac (“too fast and very unhealthy”).

As a deputy, Alksnis represented the Soviet military bases in Latvia. He was not much liked. His own aunt went door to door campaigning against him.

Vremya, of course, tried to do what it could to stanch the propaganda wound of the Lithuanian assault with some bogus account of how the independence movement had itself caused the tragedy. Gorbachev waffled, and said the first he had heard of the assault was when he was wakened by his aides the next morning. Was he lying? It was hard to know which was worse: that he was telling the truth, and therefore not in control of the army and the KGB; or that he was lying, and at the head of a coup attempt against the Lithuanians.

Most appalling of all to the hard-liners, Volkogonov’s draft concluded that the Soviet Union had won the war almost “by chance”—despite Stalin, not because of him. They implied that perhaps the death of twenty-seven million Soviet people was in vain, that the victory of the Soviet Union represented the victory of one brutal regime over another.

You know there were many people, especially young officers of the KGB, who thought liberally because they had more information than anyone else. That’s why there have always been a lot of thinking people in the KGB, people who understand the West as it really is and what our own country really was.

The Mystery—the theological notion that the acts and purposes of the deity are unknowable—was always a critical part of the pseudo-theology of the atheist state. Stalin must have gotten the idea during his failed career in the seminary. One of the keys to his own mystery was to stay out of sight; hence, a pockmarked mediocrity becomes a god. For decades, the Thursday-morning meetings of the Politburo were more mysterious than sessions of the College of Cardinals; transfers of power were more difficult to decipher in the Kremlin than in the Vatican. The catechism language of Vremya, the iconic posters of the great leaders, all added to the Mystery. And now it was all but gone. Now we learned from the press the details of the Lenin Mausoleum; it turned out that there were other floors beneath the holy of holies, and on one of them there was the gymnasium for the guards and a bathroom and buffet for visiting luminaries; beneath that there was a “control room” which carefully monitored the temperature and deterioration of Vladimir Ilyich. Yeltsin’s memoir, Against the Grain, became an underground best-seller precisely because it hacked away at the Mystery.

Klava Lyubeshkina stitched suits for everyone, from the entombed corpse of Lenin (“every eighteen months the cloth begins to lose its original splendor”)

Yanayev, who was probably making sure the mark was still in place, was the worst sort of Party nonentity. He was a vain man of small intelligence, a womanizer, and a drunk. I’m not sure it is possible to describe just how hard it is to acquire a reputation as a drunk in Russia. And Yanayev was not merely a drunk, he was a buffoon. On the day he went before the Congress for confirmation as vice president, one of the deputies asked him if he was a healthy man. “My wife has no complaints,” Yanayev said and snickered.

REGARDING CERTAIN AXIOMS OF THE EXTRAORDINARY SITUATION 1. We must not lose the initiative and enter into any kind of negotiations with the public. We have often ended up doing this in an attempt to preserve a democratic facade. As a result, society gradually becomes accustomed to the idea that they can argue with the authorities—and this is the first step toward the next battle. 2. One must not allow even the first manifestations of disloyalty: meetings, hunger strikes, petitions, and information about them. On the contrary, they become, as it were, a permitted form of opposition, after which even more active forms will follow. If you want to proceed with a minimal amount of bloodshed, suppress contradictions at the very beginning. 3. Do not be ashamed of resorting to clearly expressed populism. This is the law of winning support from the masses. Immediately introduce economic measures that are understandable to all—lowering of prices, easing up on alcohol laws, etc.—and the appearance of even a limited variety of products in popular demand. In this situation do not think of economic integrity, the inflation rate, or other consequences. 4. One must not delay in informing the populace about all the details of the crimes of one’s political opponent. At first they will avidly search for information. Exactly at this point one must bring down an information storm of exposure, the revelation of guilty groups and syndicates, corruption, and so forth. On other days the informatio...

I saw one man, a vet in his old jungle fatigues, holding a stick in one hand for protection and a bottle of vodka in the other for bravery.

On August 23, at a raucous session of the Russian parliament, Yeltsin clearly had the upper hand, and he used it to flay and humiliate his opponent. He forced Gorbachev to read aloud a transcript of the August 19 Council of Ministers meeting at which all but two of the ministers whom Gorbachev himself had nominated pledged their hearty support of the coup.

Feliks

Arseny Roginsky, one of the founders of Memorial, told me one evening. “Nuremberg was a trial on war crimes, and the criminals were being judged by the victors, the victims of those crimes. Here we must judge ourselves. We judge each other. And who is unsullied? Who was a pure victim of the Party? Who was not complicit? I realize that is not the stated purpose of the Constitutional Court, but those are essential questions.”