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

by David Remnick

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.”