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  Acclaim for

  DAVID REMNICK’S

  LENIN’S TOMB

  “An eloquent and riveting oral history of an epochal moment of change.”

  —Michael Ignatieff, Los Angeles Times

  “Remnick is an observer of great scope.… He writes with enormous ease, and the humor and honesty of a modern de Tocqueville.”

  —Christian Science Monitor

  “A superbly reported account of the fall of the Soviet Empire.”

  —U.S. News and World Report

  “Remnick has written what may be the definitive narrative of the last days of the Soviet Union.… [Lenin’s Tomb] is a history that combines old-fashioned narrative of great events with the more fashionable approach of describing common lives. It succeeds smashingly.”

  —Birmingham News

  “Always vivid, often funny, sometimes moving.”

  —USA Today

  “David Remnick has written one hell of a book.”

  —Baltimore Sun

  “A riveting account of the unraveling of the Soviet Union … Lenin’s Tomb … reads like a novel. Mr. Remnick develops with artistry and compassion a handful of characters who best reflect the themes of the waning years of Soviet rule.”

  —Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “David Remnick has produced a prodigious and fascinating account of what it was like to witness the collapse of both an empire and its imperial history.… It is difficult to imagine anyone writing about the disintegration of the USSR more graphically, more intimately or more comprehensively.”

  —Wisconsin State Journal

  “Remnick’s gripping and valuable first reading of events is destined to achieve a permanent place in the literature of Russian history.”

  —Kansas City Star

  “Lenin’s Tomb is touching, witty, and informative.”

  —Raleigh News & Observer

  “Remnick has given us a book that is essential reading for anyone interested in the final years of the Soviet Union. It should not be missed.”

  —Wichita Eagle

  David Remnick

  David Remnick was a reporter for The Washington Post for ten years, including four in Moscow. He joined The New Yorker as a writer in 1992 and has been the magazine’s editor since 1998.

  FIRST VINTAGE EBOOKS EDITION, MAY 1994

  Copyright © 1993, 1994 by David Remnick

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies. Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form in the United States by Random House LLC, New York, in 1993.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd: Thirty-two lines from “Requiem” from You Will Hear Thunder by Anna Akhmatova, translated by D. M. Thomas. Copyright © 1976, 1979, 1985 by D. M. Thomas. Reprinted by permission.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-7358-2

  www.vintagebooks.com

  Cover design by John Gall

  v3.1

  to my parents

  and to Esther

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Part I: By Right of Memory

  1. The Forest Coup

  2. A Stalinist Childhood

  3. To Be Preserved, Forever

  4. The Return of History

  5. Widows of Revolution

  6. Ninotchka

  7. The Doctors’ Plot and Beyond

  8. Memorial

  9. Written on the Water

  Part II: Democratic Vistas

  10. Masquerade

  11. The Double Thinkers

  12. Party Men

  13. Poor Folk

  14. The Revolution Underground

  15. Postcards from the Empire

  16. The Island

  17. Bread and Circuses

  18. The Last Gulag

  Part III: Revolutionary Days

  19. “Tomorrow There Will Be a Battle”

  20. Lost Illusions

  21. The October Revolution

  22. May Day! May Day!

  23. The Ministry of Love

  24. Black September

  25. The Tower

  26. The General Line

  27. Citizens

  Part IV: “First as Tragedy, Then as Farce”

  Part V: The Trial of the Old Regime

  Afterword to the Vintage Edition

  Acknowledgments

  Notes on Sources

  Bibliography

  PREFACE

  Long before anyone had a reason to predict the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, Nadezhda Mandelstam filled her notebooks with the accents of hope. She was neither sentimental nor naive. She had seen her husband, the great poet Osip Mandelstam, swept off to the camps during the terror of the 1930s; she described in ruthlessly clear terms how the regime left its subjects in a permanent state of fear. The people of the Soviet Union had been made, as she put it, “slightly unbalanced mentally—not exactly ill, but not normal either.” But Mandelstam, unlike so many scholars and politicians, saw the signs of the Soviet system’s inherent weakness and believed in the resiliency of the people.

  On August 20, 1991, a rainy, miserable afternoon, I walked among the crowds protecting the Russian parliament from a potential invasion by the leaders of a military coup. We all saw that day what so few could have predicted: Soviet citizens—workers, teachers, hustlers, children, mothers, grandparents, even soldiers—all standing up to a group of ignorant men who believed themselves yet another improved version of the Bolshevik regime and possessed of a power to freeze, even turn back, time. In their hurried calculations, the conspirators assumed “the masses” were too exhausted and indifferent to fight back. But tens of thousands of ordinary Muscovites were ready to die for democratic principles. It was said then and is said even now that the Russians know little or nothing of civil society. How strange, then, that so many were willing to give up their lives to defend it.

  I do not usually have a great memory for the things I have read, but that afternoon of the coup, hours before it came clear that there would be no attack and the putsch would fail, I thought of a short passage, bracketed in black, in my paperback copy of 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.” The leaders of the August coup had not reckoned with the development of their own people. They understood nothing. They were jailed for the miscalculation, and the struts of the old regime collapsed.

  As I write, the euphoria of those August days is past and Russian democracy is a delicate thing. There are days when it seems that little has changed, that the fate of Russia hinges, once more, on the skills, inclinations, and heartbeat of one man. This time it is Boris Yeltsin: heroic during the coup, flexible, clever, but also, at times, reckless with language, careless with the bottle. No one knows what would happen should Yeltsin fall from power, the result of a stroke or an uprising of the hardline nationalists, neofacists, and nostalgic Communists who dominate parliament. As this book goes to press in April 1993, the power struggle between Yeltsin and parliament is unresolved and has underscored the lack of a clear and workable constitution, legal system, and system of authority. The institutions of this new society are embryonic, infinitely fragile.

  In January 1993,
Yeltsin’s program of economic shock therapy has resulted in only fitful progress, much pain, and, everywhere, anxiety. Food and other supplies are in some places more plentiful, but prices are out of control. The inflation rate is beginning to look Latin American. The heads of the vast military plants show little interest in converting to a peacetime economy, and the absurd subsidies they receive make a mess of Russia’s finances. A brash new class of young hustlers and even some honest businesspeople are thriving, but the old, the weak, and the poor are despondent. The crime rate is out of control. And everywhere there is a new demagogue—Communist, nationalist, or simply mad—ready to exploit the failures, vanities, and misfortunes of the elected government. The danger of the authoritarian temptation still lurks in Russia. So far, nearly all the potential successors to Yeltsin promise to be less inclined to radical economic reform and more likely to carry out an aggressive anti-Western foreign policy.

  Elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, the situation is at least as worrisome. There are unlovely little wars in the Caucasus, coups d’état in Central Asia. Moldova, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania charge Russia with imperialism for leaving behind its troops. The Russians, for their part, complain that the leaders of the Baltic governments treat non-Balts as second-class citizens. Armenia is broke and on the edge of breakdown, Georgia is consumed in civil war. Despite a series of historic treaties with the United States, the unresolved conflicts over arms stockpiles between Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan trouble our sleep with dreams of what James Baker once called “Yugoslavia with nukes.”

  Despite it all, I am partial to Mandelstam’s brand of hardheaded optimism. This book, after all, chronicles the last days of one of the cruelest regimes in human history. And having lived through those final days, having lived in Moscow and traveled throughout the republics of the last empire, I am convinced that for all the difficulties ahead, there will be no return to the past. In the West, we cannot afford to look away from this process. To refuse help will endanger Russia, the former Soviet Union, and the security of the globe.

  It will take many books and records to understand the history of the Soviet Union and its final collapse. We are, after all, still debating the events of 1917. To write history takes time. When asked what he thought of the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai said, “It’s too soon to tell.” To understand the Gorbachev period will require a new library covering an immense range of subjects: U.S.-Soviet relations, economic history, the uprisings in the Baltic states, the Caucasus, Ukraine, and Central Asia, the “prehistory” of perestroika, the psychological and sociological effects of a long-standing totalitarian regime.

  I went to Moscow in January 1988 as a reporter for The Washington Post and saw the revolution from that peculiar angle. Like a lot of reporters in Moscow, I was filing three and four hundred stories a year to editors who would certainly have taken more. Even then, in the midst of that feverish work, it seemed that the multiple events of the Gorbachev-Sakharov-Yeltsin era followed a certain logic, a pattern: once the regime eased up enough to permit a full-scale examination of the Soviet past, radical change was inevitable. Once the System showed itself for what it was and had been, it was doomed. I begin in Part I with that essential moment—the return of history in the Soviet Union—and then move on in Part II to the beginnings of democracy and in Part III to the confrontation between the old regime and the new political forces. Part IV is an attempt to describe, from multiple points of view, the August putsch—that most bizarre and climactic of episodes—and its aftermath. In Part V, we see the final attempt of the Communist Party to justify itself while, all around, a new country is being born. Throughout, I tell the story largely through the eyes of a few representative men and women, some well known, others not.

  I am sure if Nadezhda Mandelstam were alive today she would not dwell long on celebration. She would be ruthlessly critical of the inequities and absurdities of politics in post-totalitarian Russia. She would warn of the problem of expecting an injured and isolated people to make a rapid transfer to a way of life that no longer promises cradle-to-grave paternalism. She would, despite her own love of Agatha Christie novels, warn against the new tide of junk culture—the sudden infatuation with Mexican soap operas and American sneakers. She would not ignore the difficulties, even disasters, ahead. But she would, I think, remain optimistic. Optimism is a belief in a gradual and painful rise from the wreckage of Communism, a confidence that the former subjects of the Soviet experiment are too historically experienced to return to dictatorship and isolation. Already there are signs all over Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union of new generations of artists, teachers, businesspeople, even politicians on the rise. People “free of the old complexes,” as Russians say. A day may even come soon when getting from one day to the next in Russia will no longer require the sort of miracles we witnessed in the last several years of the old regime. Perhaps one day Russia might even become somehow ordinary, a country of problems rather than catastrophes, a place that develops rather than explodes. That would be something to see.

  PART I

  BY RIGHT OF MEMORY

  The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

  MILAN KUNDERA

  CHAPTER 1

  THE FOREST COUP

  On a dreary summer’s day, Colonel Aleksandr Tretetsky of the Soviet Military Prosecutor’s Office arrived at his latest work site: a series of mass graves in a birch forest twenty miles outside of the city of Kalinin. He and his assistants began the morning digging, searching the earth for artifacts of the totalitarian regime—bullet-shattered skulls, worm-eaten boots, scraps of Polish military uniforms.

  They had heard the alarming news from Moscow on television and radio before coming to work that morning: Mikhail Gorbachev had “stepped down” for “reasons of health.” The GKChP—the “State Committee for the State of Emergency”—had assumed power, promising stability and order. But what to make of it? Kalinin was several hours north of Moscow by train and a long way off the trail of rumor and information. And so like almost everyone else in the Soviet Union on the morning of August 19, 1991, Tretetsky set to work, an almost ordinary day.

  The digging in the woods outside Kalinin was a merciless project. 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. The Kremlin took history so seriously that it created a massive bureaucracy to control it, to fabricate its language and content, so that murderous and arbitrary purges became a “triumph over enemies and foreign spies,” the reigning tyrant a “Friend to All Children, the Great Mountain Eagle.” The regime created an empire that was a vast room, its doors locked, its windows shuttered. All books and newspapers allowed in the room carried the Official Version of Events, and the radio and television blared the general line day and night. Those who were loyal servants of the Official Version were rewarded and pronounced “professors” and “journalists.” In the Communist Party citadels of the Marxist-Leninist Institute, the Central Committee, and the Higher Party School, the priests of ideology swerved from the dogma at their peril. There were secrets everywhere. The KGB was so keen to keep its secrets that it built its vacation houses in the village of Mednoye near Kalinin, where the Polish officers had been executed and buried in mass graves, the better to keep watch over the bones.

  But now something had changed—ch
anged radically. After some initial hesitation at the beginning of his time in power, Gorbachev had decreed that the time had come to fill in the “blank spots” of history. There could be no more “rose-colored glasses,” he said. At first, his rhetoric was guarded. He spoke of “thousands” instead of tens of millions of victims. He did not dare criticize Lenin, the demigod of the state. But despite Gorbachev’s hesitation, the return of historical memory would be his most important decision, one that preceded all others, for without a full and ruthless assessment of the past—an admission of murder, repression, and bankruptcy—real change, much less democratic revolution, was impossible. The return of history to personal, intellectual, and political life was the start of the great reform of the twentieth century and, whether Gorbachev liked it or not, the collapse of the last empire on earth.

  For decades, the massacres at Kalinin, Starobelsk, and Katyn had been a symbol for the Poles of Moscow’s cruelty and imperial grip. For a Pole merely to hint that the Soviet Union was responsible for the massacres was a radical, even suicidal act, for it made clear the speaker’s point of view: the “friendship of peoples,” the relationship between Moscow and Warsaw, was one based on violence, an occupier’s reign over its satellite. Even Gorbachev knew that to admit the massacres would be to undermine the Polish Communists. But by 1990, with Solidarity in power, Gorbachev saw little to lose. While General Wojciech Jaruzelski was visiting Moscow, Gorbachev finally conceded Moscow’s guilt and turned over to the Polish government a huge packet of files on the massacres at Katyn, Starobelsk, and Kalinin.

  Soon after the Kremlin’s admission of guilt, the excavations began. Working with Soviet army soldiers and Polish volunteers, Colonel Tretetsky started work in Mednoye on August 15, 1991. Tretetsky, a career officer in his mid-forties with a thin mustache and sunken cheeks, had spent several months uncovering graves in Starobelsk. With every new grave, he felt himself more deceived. He had believed deeply in Communism and the Soviet Union. He served first in the navy and then, after studying law in Ukraine, signed on in the military for life. He served nearly four years in East Germany and even volunteered to be sent to Czechoslovakia in 1968, the year the Soviet Union crushed the “Prague Spring.”