Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  “The first lady herself did not take the trip, needless to say. Like her husband, she was not allowed to take chances with her life. However, the jolly kamikazes came back with the passenger cabin and baggage hold crammed with gifts from the Soviet far east and Siberia. They brought not only dozens of Japanese tea sets but also Japanese sound and video equipment, furs, carvings on rare deer horn—the finest art of indigenous craftsmen—thousands of jars of Pacific crab and other fruits of the ocean. All these things were brought back to Alma-Ata like trophies.”

  After three decades as the Kazakh Party chief, Kunayev had been forced to retire for “reasons of health” in 1986. In retirement, he lived across the street from a park named in his honor. The focal point of the park was an enormous monument, a huge plinth with the great man’s granite head perched on top. The building at 119 Tulebayeva Street looked like a second-rate Miami Beach motel. In addition to Kunayev, the two top-ranking Party leaders also lived there.

  The first time I went to meet Kunayev, I tried to “doorstep” him, to show up and hope for the best. This was not a wise maneuver. A KGB guard in the courtyard stopped me and made it clear, as his hand flashed lightly to his holster, that one further step toward the Kunayev residence would be inadvisable. So I tried a more conventional tactic. Through a Kazakh journalist, a particularly obedient one whom I knew from Moscow, I asked to see Kunayev and sent along a list of questions of the “What are the key achievements of Kazakhstan under Soviet power?” variety. While we waited for word back from Kunayev, we ate a multicourse dinner at the apartment of the journalist’s in-laws. It was a long evening. His father-in-law got badly hammered on the cognac I brought as a gift and spoke lovingly for some hours of Stalin’s “iron hand.” We all ate heartily of a dish that I was later informed was “delicious noodles” mixed with shredded horse heart. Tastes like chicken, my hosts assured me. They were wrong.

  Finally, the call came from Kunayev. He was ready to see us the next morning at eleven.

  We arrived, four of us, at the house five minutes early.

  “Where are you going?” the guard asked us.

  “We have an appointment with Kunayev.”

  “Impossible,” the guard said.

  “We do. An interview at eleven. He is expecting us.”

  “Documents!”

  We all showed our various papers, and the guard went to his special phone. He talked for a while and came back smiling in triumph.

  “The American is forbidden,” he said. This seemed nonnegotiable.

  Clearly, the ministers of Moscow had no interest in giving Kunayev a public platform, especially not in an American newspaper. They were prepared to let Kunayev live in relative splendor amid his beloved collections of cigarette lighters and foreign shotguns, but they did not want to be the agents of a resurrection. Gorbachev had already suffered once from Kunayev. When he fired Kunayev in 1986, Gorbachev made the mistake of appointing in his place an outsider and a Russian, Gennadi Kolbin. This was just what Kunayev needed. By all accounts, Kunayev’s clan encouraged anti-Russian, anti-colonial riots, using a latent nationalism to do his own work. Gorbachev soon corrected the mistake, replacing Kolbin with a Kazakh, Nursultan Nazarbayev. But it was that incident in Alma-Ata that should have demonstrated to the Kremlin that, contrary to myth, the Soviet Union had not solved its national problems; instead, the abuses of a half-century had created an empire of resentments. Alma-Ata was prelude to a series of national movements Moscow never expected.

  I waited on the street. An hour later, the Kazakhs came out of Kunayev’s place, beaming. “Kunayev seemed sad that you couldn’t come,” one of them said. “He said, ‘It seems I’m powerless in my own house.’ ”

  It seemed I would never meet the fallen don. But later the same day, while I was with another Kazakh political official, one of the journalists walked into the room, tapped me on the shoulder, and told me to “wrap things up.” He had called Kunayev and we were all set to meet—on the street, outside the gates of the Communist Party’s House of Rest.

  A half hour later, a Volga, not unlike Aliyev’s modest car, pulled up. Kunayev unfolded himself from the backseat. He was enormous, silver-haired, and dressed in a chalk-striped suit. He wore dark glasses and carried the sort of carved walking stick that gave Mobuto his authority. He had a fantastic smile, all bravado and condescension, the smile of a king. Without my asking a thing, he launched into a monologue about the such-and-such anniversary of Kazakhstan and wheat production and the need to preserve the monuments of the Bolshevik state. “I’ve never swayed,” he solemnly reminded us. “I am a man of the Leninist Party line. Never forget that.” We swore we would not.

  When I finally asked my earnest questions—about Gorbachev, about politics—Kunayev laughed them off, fiddled with the mahogany knob of his stick, and set back on the course of his monologue.

  There were, I said, interrupting, still many Kazakhs who wanted Kunayev to return to politics. “Are you ready to make a comeback?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t be against it,” he said. “Let the people decide. But tomorrow, I should tell you, I’m busy. I’m going hunting for ducks. I love hunting for ducks.”

  The decline of the Party mafia began with the death of Brezhnev and the brief reign of Yuri Andropov. Although Andropov was guilty of many things—most notably his brutally efficient campaign against the dissidents while he ran the KGB—he was a throwback to a tradition of Leninist asceticism. Andropov was profoundly corrupt, a beast. No man who ran the Budapest embassy during the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 can be declared an innocent. “In a way I always thought Andropov was the most dangerous of all of them, simply because he was smarter than the rest,” Aleksandr Yakovlev told me.

  But Andropov’s main virtue was that he was appalled by the kind of corruption and rot that had become endemic under Brezhnev. While he was KGB chief, Andropov conducted a wide-scale, independent investigation into Party business and the general state of the country’s economic system. After Brezhnev’s death, in his few months as general secretary, Andropov ordered arrests of some of the most obvious Party and police mafiosi. He frightened the worst elements in the apparatus so badly that a series of high-ranking officials in Brezhnev’s old circle shot, gassed, or otherwise did away with themselves.

  The remaining Brezhnevites at the top were not much grieved when Andropov became seriously ill. The Party mafia could not bear the thought of reforms that would endanger its comfort. As Solzhenitsyn wrote in 1991, “The corrupt ruling class—the many millions of men in the party-state nomenklatura—is not capable of voluntarily renouncing any of the privileges they have seized. They have lived shamelessly for decades at the people’s expense—and would like to continue doing so.”

  Had it not been for that primal urge to power and privilege, Gorbachev might well have taken over as general secretary more than a year earlier than he did. Arkady Volsky, a former aide to Andropov and a leading figure in the Central Committee, told me how the Brezhnevites in the Politburo steered power away from Gorbachev, an Andropov protégé, to “their man,” the moribund apparatchik Konstantin Chernenko. By December 1983, Andropov was in the hospital with kidney problems and blood poisoning. His aides would take turns visiting him in the hospital with important matters and paperwork. On a Saturday preceding a Tuesday plenum of the Central Committee, Volsky came to Andropov’s room at the Kremlin hospital on the outskirts of Moscow to help him draft a speech. Andropov was in no shape to attend the plenum, and he would have one of his men in the Politburo deliver the speech in his name.

  “The last lines in the speech said that Central Committee staff members should be exemplary in their behavior, uncorrupted, responsible for the life of the country,” Volsky said. “We both liked that last phrase.… Then Andropov gave me a folder with the final draft and said, ‘The material looks good. Make sure you pay attention to the addenda I’ve written.’ I didn’t have time to look right away at what he had written. Later, I got a chance to
read it and saw that at the bottom of the last page Andropov had added in ink, in a somewhat unsteady handwriting, a new paragraph. It went like this: ‘Members of the Central Committee know that due to certain reasons, I am unable to come to the plenum. I can neither attend the meetings of the Politburo nor the secretariat [of the Central Committee]. Therefore, I believe Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev should be assigned to preside over the meetings of the Politburo and the secretariat.’ ”

  Volsky knew well what this meant. The general secretary was recommending that Gorbachev be his inheritor. Volsky made a photocopy of the document and put the copy in his safe. He delivered the original to the Party leadership and assumed, naively, that it would be read out at the plenum. But at the meeting neither Chernenko, Grishin, Romanov, nor any of the other usual suspects in the Brezhnev circle made mention of Andropov’s stated wishes. Volsky thought there must have been some mistake. “I went up to Chernenko and said, ‘Sir, there was an addendum in the text.’ He said, ‘Think nothing of any addendum.’ Then I saw his aide Bogolyubov and said, ‘Klavdy Mikhailovich, there was a paragraph from Andropov’s speech …’ He led me off to the side and said, ‘Who do you think you are, a wise guy? Do you think your life ends with this?’ I said, ‘In that case, I’ll have to phone Andropov.’ And he replied, ‘Then that will be your last phone call.’ ”

  Andropov was furious when he heard what had happened at the plenum, but there was little he could do. Even Lenin did not have the power to name his successor, and the Brezhnevites in the Politburo were just too powerful. When Andropov died in February 1984, Chernenko became general secretary, the ventriloquist’s dummy of the Party mafia.

  As a concession to the Andropov faction and over the objections of some of his own confidants, Chernenko made Gorbachev the nominal number-two man in the Politburo. This turned out to be a serious tactical mistake. Chernenko held office for only thirteen months, and much of the time he was sick and powerless. As Chernenko wasted away, Gorbachev was carefully consolidating power. He ran Politburo sessions and won the support of two critical figures—the foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, and the KGB chief, Viktor Chebrikov. He also took his famous trip to Britain, where he made a lasting impression on Margaret Thatcher and the world press. When Chernenko finally died in March 1985, Gorbachev had the backing of the younger Party secretaries and a few key members of the old guard, including Gromyko. He was in a position to head off any potential opposition from the mafia dinosaurs.

  Gorbachev, for his part, took office without taint of blood or corruption, a first for a leader of the Soviet Union. But even this was relative. As the Party leader of a resort region in the Caucasus, a neighbor of the notorious Krasnodar region, he must have known about the Party way of doing business, both with Moscow and within the local structure. At best, it is unlikely that he could have avoided toadying to Brezhnev either as the Party chief of the Stavropol region in southern Russia or in Moscow as a member of the Central Committee. Roy Medvedev, a Gorbachev loyalist to the last, told a reporter for La Stampa, “I believe that presents for Brezhnev even arrived from Stavropol.”

  “Did Gorbachev give Brezhnev diamond rings the way Aliyev did? Of course not,” Arkady Vaksberg told me. “But on the other hand, no provincial Party secretary could survive, much less advance, by ignoring the birthdays and so on of those superior to him. Even an ‘honest’ Party secretary coming to Moscow would have to bring gifts for his superiors: a few cases of good wine. You couldn’t get away from that. Gorbachev included. That was life in the Communist Party.”

  On New Year’s Eve 1989, the censors canceled an installment of the popular television program Vzglyad (“View”) for “aesthetic reasons.” Vaksberg claims that the aesthetic reason in question was that Brezhnev’s daughter, Galina, had told an interviewer that Raisa Gorbachev had tried to curry favor with the Brezhnev family when Leonid Ilyich was in power and had given them a number of presents, including an expensive necklace. But Vaksberg is also quick to recount how after publishing a piece called “Spring Floods” in Literaturnaya Gazeta about the negligence of ministers while the harvest rotted in the fields, the paper got a dressing-down from the Ideology Department of the Central Committee. Just as the editor was instructing Vaksberg to print a retraction, Gorbachev called the paper to express his compliments for its crusade against corruption.

  But Gorbachev knew that he could not conduct a genuine investigation into the Party’s corruption. First, the Party, of which he was the head, would sooner kill him than allow it. Second, even if he could carry out such an investigation, Gorbachev would be faced with the obvious embarrassment: the depths of the Party’s rot. Instead, taking a page from Andropov’s style manual, he made a grand symbolic gesture. Yuri Churbanov, Brezhnev’s son-in-law and a deputy chief of the Interior Ministry, was indicted and tried for accepting more than $1 million in bribes while working in Uzbekistan. At his trial, Churbanov admitted accepting a briefcase stuffed with around $200,000. “I wanted to return the money, but to whom?” he said. “It would have been awkward for me to raise the question with Rashidov,” the Party chief of the republic. Churbanov was sentenced to twelve years in prison at a camp near the city of Nizhny Tagil. Brezhnev’s personal secretary, Gennadi Brovin, was sentenced to nine years in prison, also for corruption.

  Like Andropov before him, Gorbachev believed in his ability to master the Party and reform it. Over a five-year period, he fired and replaced the most obvious mafiosi in the Politburo: Kunayev, Aliyev, Shcherbitsky. But just as he could never distance himself enough from a discredited ideology, Gorbachev’s inability to jettison the Party nomenklatura and his political debts to the KGB spoiled his reputation over time in the eyes of a people who had grown more and more aware of the corruption and deceit in their midst.

  In the meantime, a new wave of politicians saw Gorbachev’s equivocations as an opportunity. Telman Gdlyan and Nikolai Ivanov, investigators who helped convict Churbanov, became two of the most popular legislators in the parliament purely on the strength of their public attacks on the Party. In their investigations of corruption under Brezhnev, Gdlyan and Ivanov were known for mistreating witnesses, manufacturing evidence, and committing other illegalities. They dismissed such charges with a smirk. Gdlyan, especially, was a wild man. He told me one day that Yegor Ligachev, the number-two man in the Politburo, had “definitely” accepted at least 60,000 rubles in bribes from an Uzbek official. When I asked for proof, Gdlyan laughed, as if such things hardly mattered.

  Boris Yeltsin was the master of the populist attack, using the issue of Party perks and corruption as a way to discredit everyone at the top, Gorbachev included. In his memoir, Against the Grain, which was terrifically popular in Russia, Yeltsin writes about the “marble-lined” houses of the Politburo members, their “porcelain, crystal, carpets, and chandeliers.” For an audience living in cramped communal apartments, he described his own house when he was in the Party leadership, with its private movie theater, its “kitchen big enough to feed an army,” and its many bathrooms, so many that “I lost count.” And, he wrote, “why has Gorbachev been unable to change this? I believe the fault lies in his basic cast of character. He likes to live well, in comfort and luxury. In this he is helped by his wife.”

  At times, Yeltsin seemed the Huey and Earl Long of Soviet politics, a theatrical populist. Relying on the politics of resentment, he won an angry public’s affection. After he’d been fired from the Politburo for daring to confront the leadership in October 1987, Yeltsin was still a member of the Central Committee, with all the privileges that entailed. But in an interview with me at his modest office at the Ministry of Construction, Yeltsin swore that he had voluntarily given up his dacha, his grocery shipments, and his car. “All finished!” he said with the pride of the converted. For a very short while Yeltsin made sure that Muscovites saw him tooling around the city in a dinky sedan. Later, when he returned to power, however, Yeltsin lived no worse than Gorbachev did. He commandeered a splendid dacha, org
anized a regal caravan of limousines, and made a public show of his love for that proletarian game—tennis. Yeltsin’s new double-breasted suits and silk ties were also, one supposed, not available for rubles.

  Like Gorbachev, Yeltsin was an ambitious provincial who made good in the Communist Party. Like Gorbachev, he made absurd speeches at various meetings praising the wisdom of Leonid Brezhnev and the eternal goodness of the Party. But while Gorbachev spent all his working life in the Party, Yeltsin began late. He became a member of the Party to get ahead at the state construction agency in Sverdlovsk. 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.”

  After his fall from the Politburo, no statement, no amount of bombast, was out of bounds. In interviews, Yeltsin would suggest with a burlesque arch of the brow that the KGB could yet kill him with a high-frequency ray gun that would stun his heart. “A few seconds,” he told me, “and it’s all over.” His paranoia was comic, but understandable. The Kremlin leaders despised him. They formed a commission within the Central Committee to investigate him and ordered wild stories in the state-run press to disgrace him.