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

by David Remnick

Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope:

“This terror could return, but it would mean sending several million people to the camps. If this were to happen now, they would all scream—and so would their families, friends and neighbors. This is something to be reckoned with.”

Hannah Arendt writes, “The concentration camp, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life.”

Magadan is the setting for two of the best books ever written about Stalinism: Yevgenia Ginzburg’s memoirs Journey into the Whirlwind and her son Vasily Aksyonov’s novel The Burn.

A very popular error: Having the courage of one’s convictions; rather, it is a matter of having the courage for an “attack” on one’s own convictions! —FRIEDERICH NIETZSCHE, notebooks

epigone

It did not take Karpinsky or anyone else long to realize that Brezhnev had no intention of instituting reforms. Just the opposite—a neo-Stalinist movement was in the works. One night at dinner with Yevtushenko and Otto Latsis, Karpinsky began to pronounce aloud what was happening to his generation, to its way of thinking. “Our idea was this: when one has an education in philosophy and a certain intellectual background, one begins to understand the inner properties of reality, something I termed ‘intellectual conscience.’ It’s not a natural, inborn conscience, yet a conscience that stems from a kind of thinking that links you with a moral attitude to reality. If you understand that everything in this society is soaked in blood, that society itself is heading toward collapse, that it is all an antihuman system—if you understand this instinctively and intellectually—then your conscience cannot remain neutral. Look, I never really took any risks, and didn’t want to. I was sort of compelled to take the steps I did by my conscience. And once compelled to take those steps, I could never foresee the bad consequences. Every time I thought I’d get away with it. And every time I didn’t.”

The life of the underworld was now rumbling around them, with deputies continually running to and fro, trains going up and down, drawn by trotting horses. The darkness was starred by countless lamps. —EMILE ZOLA, Germinal

“The time when military force can solve everything has long since passed. Tanks are not only an immoral argument, they are no longer omnipotent. The main thing is that such a turn of events could once and for all put the Soviet Union back into the ranks of the most backward of totalitarian states.”

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

“Words that are not backed up by life lose their weight,” Havel wrote, “which means that words can be silenced in two ways: either you ascribe such weight to them that no one dares utter them aloud, or you take away any weight they might have, and they turn into air. The final effect in each case is silence: the silence of the half-mad man who is constantly writing appeals to world authorities while everyone ignores him; and the silence of the Orwellian citizen.”

“Chernobyl was not like the Communist system. They were one and the same,” said Yuri Shcherbak, a physician and journalist who led the fight in Ukraine to publicize the medical and ecological hazards of the accident. “The system ate into our bones the same way radiation did, and the powers that be—or the powers that were—did everything they could to cover it all up, to wish it all away.”

From the moment that the engineers in the control room of reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl reported a disaster beyond imagining, their superiors refused to act. The top bureaucrats at Chernobyl kept repeating the same fiction: that there had been a “mishap,” but nothing terrible, the reactor had not been destroyed. They quickly passed on this fiction to the leadership in Moscow. The next day, the people of Chernobyl, Pripyat, and the neighboring villages acted out their lives under a radioactive cloud. Children played soccer in radioactive dust. There were sixteen outdoor weddings sponsored by the Young Communist League. Old men fished in a contaminated river and ate the contaminated fish. When he was told by his engineers that the radiation at the plant was millions of times higher than normal, the plant director, Viktor Bryuchanov, said the meter was obviously defective and must be thrown away. For more than a day, Boris Shcherbina, a deputy prime minister, refused suggestions to carry out a mass evacuation. “Panic is worse than radiation,” he said. The world got word of the seriousness of the accident only when Scandinavian scientists reported dramatic increases in radiation levels. Even as they were evacuating their own families, Ukrainian Communist Party officials insisted on holding the annual May Day parade; the children of Kiev kicked up radioactive dust to celebrate the victories of socialism. After a long filibuster in the Politburo and strict controls on public inform...

“Meanwhile the reactor was burning away,” wrote Grigori Medvedev, an engineer who once worked at Chernobyl. “The graphite was burning, belching into the sky millions of curies of radioactivity. However, the reactor was not all that was finished. An abscess, long hidden within our society, had just burst: the abscess of complacency and self-flattery, of corruption and protectionism, of narrow-mindedness and self-serving privilege. Now, as it rotted, the corpse of a bygone era—the age of lies and spiritual decay—filled the air with the stench of radiation.” In the aftermath of the accident, Shcherbina, the deputy prime minister, issued a secret decree in force from 1988 to 1991 telling Soviet docto...

The country in which my books are printed will not be the same country that exiled me. And to that country I will certainly return. —ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN

Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate.

Yelena Chukovskaya

Sofia Petrovna,

the last island of the gulag, the last outpost for political prisoners, was a camp in the Ural Mountains called Perm-35.

he pressed Gorbachev to repeal Article 6 of the Constitution, which gave the Communist Party a guaranteed monopoly on power.

Men told the newspaper Moskovski Komsomolets just before he was killed. “I consider myself a useful person in society, which like any society needs spiritual and moral foundations.” Men once said, “Dissent is the individual’s way of protecting his right to perceive reality in his own way, not to yield to the views of the mass. When an individual calls such views into question, he shows his natural independence, his freedom. It is only when such a personal appraisal is lacking that the law of the mob prevails and an individual turns into a particle of a mass which can easily be manipulated.”

“ersatz”

Yeltsin’s memoir, Against the Grain, became an underground best-seller precisely because it hacked away at the Mystery. He revealed what the mighty talked about in private, their petty greed, their weakness. He described for all Gorbachev’s taste for luxury, his marble bathrooms and swimming pools. One morning, Komsomolskaya Pravda ran a story about a woman who had worked for many years as a seamstress in the secret tailor shop the KGB maintained for the use of the country’s highest leaders. Klava Lyubeshkina stitched suits for everyone, from the entombed corpse of Lenin (“every eighteen months the cloth begins to lose its original splendor”) to Gorbachev. “The tailor dummies of the Politburo members were kept in special closets which nobody except us, the cutters and tailors, dared ever to touch,” she told the paper. “We always worked behind closed doors and surrounded by armed guards.… Two or three times a year a KGB specialist would go abroad, usually to Scotland or Austria, to buy material for the suits.” The secret police had opened the shop in 1938, the height of the purges. Klava saw her customers only on Vremya and referred to them, mysteriously, as “units.” She was devoted. She would watch the leaders on television expressly “to see if their suits fit them well or if there were wrinkles.” She remembered how she worked night and day for three days to get ready the gold-embroidered laurel leaves and stars in heavy gold thread for the

new defense minister, Marshal Ustinov. She remembered Andrei Gromyko’s stinginess (“He always sent in for repairs, never a new suit”) and Mikhail Suslov’s temper tantrums when the fit was not quite right. Klava’s sense of the Mystery ended one day when three men in white smocks attacked her, twisted her arms behind her back, and dragged her off to a psychiatric clinic. The KGB had mistaken her for a dissident. Klava asked to be released, saying that she was making a suit for Yuri Andropov which had been left “unattended” at the studio. The agents let her use the phone and she was able to tell her colleagues where she was. Soon the KGB released her. For the “moral damage” committed, the state awarded Klava a Japanese watch. Just before she retired in 1987, she had the pleasure of making a suit for Gorbachev. The new Soviet leader rewarded her with a box of chocolates. In her old age, Klava received a poverty-level pension of 100 rubles a month. She wrote the Kremlin for more but got nothing. The Bolsheviks, however, could not be counted as unfeeling men. In 1991, Kryuchkov mailed all the seamstresses cards wishing them well on International Women’s Day. Klava, for her part, took her pleasure in revealing her trove of secrets from the Kremlin sweatshop to the twenty-five million readers of Komsomolskaya Pravda. “We worked there for so long in silence,” she said, “and all along we wanted to reveal the mystery.”

Richard Pipes, a historian at Harvard University and the author of Russia Under the Old Regime and The Russian Revolution, submitted into evidence an eighteen-page essay outlining the Communist Party’s assumption of absolute state power within three months of the October coup. “From the point of view of historical science,” Pipes wrote, “the so-called party of the Bolsheviks was, of course, not a party, but an organization of a wholly new type, which had some features of a political party: Its structure was without precedent, an organization which was beyond government, which controlled the government and controlled everything, including the country’s wealth. It was beyond any outside control. In no sense of the word was it a political ‘party,’ nor a voluntary social organization.… This political organization of an absolutely new type … was a precedent for the Fascist party of Mussolini and the Nazi party of Hitler and the countless

so-called political parties of a totalitarian character which, beginning in Europe and then spreading throughout the world, established single-party government.… Never, in all its years of activity, did the Communist Party consider itself responsible to the law or constitution. It always considered its will and its goals the decisive factor; it always acted willfully, that is, unconstitutionally.”

anathematize

The Red Wheel,

Shalamov, Varlam. Kolyma Tales. New York: W. W. Norton, 1982.

Simis, Konstantin. USSR: The Corrupt Society. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982.

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago. 3 vols. New York: Harper & Row.