Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  That night, workers arrived at the Yagunovsko mines for their first shift. They seemed happy to be back, but wary, as if they were already losing conviction in their decision to return. “I’m down in these mines for thirty-nine years, and I’ll walk out again without any hesitation if Moscow tries to go behind our backs,” said a tunneler named Leonid Kalnikov. “I believed in Communism, once our great dream, and now I believe in the power of our strike. We’re not very experienced with this, but we are ready to learn.” Kostya Doyagin, who had worked in the mines near Kemerovo for seven years, said that with the thirty-five-point settlement worked out between the Kremlin and the local strike committees, “we’ve won a small victory. But it’s still small. We have to wait and see if they deliver.” The miners did not get much done that night. Mostly they stood around in the offices and down in the shafts talking through what had happened in the days before.

  Even in the beautiful summer weather, the villages near the Yagunovsko mines were dismal places, more miserable than anything I had seen in West Virginia or the north of England. The miners and their families lived either in tiny wooden houses, shacks with a tin chimney, or, more often, two- and three-story apartment flats known as barracks. Families were packed into these dwellings, and somehow they could not keep them clean. No one took the garbage away. There was no hot water. Indoor plumbing was rare; in winter, that meant a trip to the outhouse in temperatures forty degrees below zero. Men confided that they and their wives were humiliated that they had to make love in rooms while their children were sleeping, or pretending to sleep. They had not been able to buy contraceptives of any kind for months. “The abortionist is the busiest man outside the mine,” one woman told me. The children in the villages seemed to have no toys and wandered through the streets, playing army, hurling sticks and stones. They were filthy and their teeth were already yellowing. Their parents’ teeth were rotten, and the lucky ones had caps made of brilliant silver or gold. They all looked older than they were. Men in their fifties who had just gone on pension were hunched over and sinewy from crawling through the mines and swinging a shovel since they were fifteen. They wore greasy jackets and caps. When you shook their hands, they felt like a fighter’s hands, rough and pillowy, swollen from too much work. Their eyes were vacant and filmed with rheum. The women, at least the ones who worked above ground, seemed to have more spirit in them, but not much. They were women who, after a certain age, had seen their husbands fall sick or break down and die.

  It was a miserable life. Near the mines, I saw a ten-year-old runaway begging for coins. There were ration coupons for cooking oil, butter, vodka, meat, macaroni, and fat. There were coupons, but not always the products themselves. The main grocery store near the Yagunovsko mines had nothing but canned tomatoes, oatmeal, and rotting cabbages. People didn’t go hungry, but they did not have enough. Many people told me they got by mostly on bread and macaroni. Sausage was a twice-monthly treat. One morning my cabdriver swerved crazily, nearly plowing into a tree. He pulled over to the side of the road. He was disoriented and knew it. He apologized, saying, “I haven’t eaten much in a while.”

  The drugstores were empty unless you counted the bottles of leeches and the jars of aspirin. An old woman named Irina Shatokhina, who worked twenty years underground as a ventilator specialist, told me that one of her friends had had a mild stroke and could not get the medicine he needed. “Because of that,” she said, “he is now a vegetable.”

  If there were pleasures in the life of the miners beyond those of good talk and family, I did not see them. The most obvious pleasure killed them: in the morning, retired miners lined up at a vodka truck, and seconds after they’d made their score, they drained the bottles. When they could not get the. real thing, they made moonshine out of everything from hair tonic to canned peas. I saw one drunk lying in the street drinking water out of a puddle.

  Everywhere, the air was thick with gas. Around the mines, the leaves on the trees were filmed with a gray dust. One pond in Kemerovo was so thoroughly contaminated with toxic waste that municipal workers got rid of dead stray dogs by throwing them in the water. After a few days, even the bones disintegrated.

  The mines themselves pretended to be offices. Blocking the view of the elevators and the open pits, there was invariably a brick office building where the engineers and administrators had their cubicles and the workers had their lockers and showers. There was the illusion of “going to work” instead of plunging straight down to hell.

  I met a few men outside the headquarters of the Yagunovsko mines one afternoon and asked where I could find the director. I wanted permission to go down the coal shaft.

  “Why do you want to bother with the director?” one of them said. “He’ll just tell you a lot of shit and send you on your way. Come with us.”

  The miners took me inside to the locker room. I stripped to my underwear and T-shirt and they gave me a full set of gear. Without a moment’s condescension or mockery, they showed me how to wrap my feet in long white bandages and pull on black rubber boots. The miners’ suits were made of heavy, fireproof cloth, a thick canvas, and felt strangely light; there were thick rubber gloves that made your hands sweat, a plastic helmet, an emergency oxygen supply, and an extra flashlight. The miners flipped on their suits easily; they had spent most of their waking hours dressed like this and underground since their mid-teens.

  We walked clunkily down a set of stairs and outside to the elevators for mine No. 6. The iron door slammed shut, and, packed shoulder to shoulder, we began our descent a quarter mile into the Siberian earth. Thirty miners dressed in greasy coveralls stared at their boots, then at the dents in the ceiling. Irritable, still half asleep, they shuffled and fidgeted. It took a while to get to where the coal was. Their helmet lamps darted nervously in the dark. There was no talk, only coughing and a few long yawns. The elevator went down and down, and my ears ached, then popped. The iron walls rattled against the shaft. Finally, we hit bottom and the door opened onto a labyrinth of dark halls of stone. A blast of cool air from the ventilators hit us in the face. It was the freshest air I had smelled since arriving in Siberia.

  “Sometimes this town stinks so bad that the air down here is better than the air up there,” said Leonid Kalnikov. Even before the day’s mining had begun, his face was black, and I supposed mine was, too. As we walked through a long tunnel, Kalnikov said he was sixty years old and kept working because his family could not survive on his pension. There was no other way for him. He had no illusions; “I’ll probably drop dead down here one of these days,” he said, without self-pity. Forty years before, he had been a young, muscular man and had helped build this shaft, digging through the stone and putting up steel struts. “Now almost all the coal is gone,” he said. “It’s got some years left, but it’s just about dead. I’m not so eager to stick around for the last lump. But I may have no choice.”

  During the strike, the mine had been neglected. The labyrinth of alleys and tunnels and chutes had filled with water, which made the walking all the harder. As we made our way down the main shaft we began to stumble along through water a foot deep. The bottom was like the muck at the bottom of a pond, and after a few minutes my boots were filled with bits of coal, sharp-edged chunks that began to slice my ankles and blister the soles of my feet. Not one of the miners said a word about it. Along the way, we passed men, many of them in their fifties and sixties, tucked into crevices and cracks only a couple of feet high. They lay on their backs, or in some other contorted position, chipping at the coal face or repairing some part of the support structure. When they opened their mouths, coal dust would fall in. The men who had been working for an hour or more were completely black, and all you could see in the half-dark was their flashlights, their eyes, and their teeth. I glanced into one corner and saw three miners, black figures in shadow-light, and they did not move or speak. They were on their ten-minute break.

  After a long walk—how far I could not tell—we reached a tiny railcar, a stee
l contraption that rides on tracks through the mine shafts. The “metro” took us another four miles farther along the mine, rumbling and rattling along like the Seventh Avenue local in New York. “It’s about the last chance you get to relax all day,” one of the workers said as he slumped in his seat and caught a nap. He slept soundly and then woke with a start when the brakeman put an end to the reverie.

  Once the work began there could be no relaxing. To relax, to let attention drift, could mean a horrendous accident, an explosion or a collapse. The miners lived with this fear all the time. Each year a few men died at every mine in “minor” accidents, the sort that are never reported in the news, the undramatic kind. It was November when the mine last blew up. Vladimir Gaponyuk, who put in twenty-four years “underground,” told me he remembered the strange muffled sound of it. “It was close to silence, but you knew exactly what had happened.” Someone broke a safety rule, then a stream of methane caught a spark, and, in the end, four miners were crushed to death. “We’ve got accidents like that all the time,” Gaponyuk said. “We lose a couple every year.” Outside the mine shaft there were two posters: “Hail to the Work of the Twenty-seventh Party Congress” and “We Need Your Hard Work, But What We Need Most Is You Alive.”

  Valentina Alisovna, a member of the mine’s Party committee, was one of my guides. She watched me listen and take down the long, numbing litany of complaints: the horrible work conditions, the danger, the disgust with a life that goes nowhere. Party leader or not, she seemed ashamed, and at one point her eyes filled with tears. “We live like pigs, I’m sorry to say it, but it’s true,” she said. “The mine is a century behind the times. When we go home we can’t count on electricity. The water goes out on us. I’m no capitalist, but it’s obvious this system has done nothing for us.” All the miners were listening and nodding. Alisovna’s comment hung in the dank air. I had thought this had not been a political strike. That is what I had been told. No one said anything, and we got down on our knees and crawled through another tunnel. The ventilator wind whistled across the stone.

  In the afternoon, while more teams of miners tried to clear the shafts of water and sludge and to get production moving once more, the Yagunovsko strike committee met in a wooden shack where the Communist Party committee had its offices. Across the country, the strike committees had become the center of political power at the mines. The Party and the official unions were doomed. Six men and Valentina Alisovna sat down to a table, the inevitable portrait of Lenin staring down over them. A poster on the wall read: “The Party is the mind, honor, and conscience of our epoch.” Everyone was anxious. They had some sense that all of the Soviet Union, and all of the world, had seen the images from the mines of Siberia, Ukraine, and beyond, but the strike committee had no idea of what would come next. There was no pleasure in their voices, only the suspicion that they were about to be betrayed, the conviction that there were more strikes, more trouble ahead.

  “Look, it’s a long time before we have any real money in our pockets from this strike,” one of them said. “We have to watch out.”

  The talk bounced around the room, picking up speed and fury all the time.

  “No one’s paying any attention to the fact that this mine is the worst around the Kemerovo region. It’s exhausted. There are two villages to feed, and we’re going to be out of coal in a few years. Some of the mines have no coal left in them at all.”

  “We’ve got to talk about redundant work. Sixty percent of us are working, and forty percent are standing around ‘supervising’ or smoking cigarettes upstairs.”

  “Not true. People are breaking their backs down there.”

  “We need a united front. Obviously, our union is nothing. And we can’t stand alone, we’re just one little committee. We miners have to unite, form a real union or something.”

  “The Politburo can’t do everything for us. Perestroika has to move faster. Maybe we need new tires.”

  “It’s time to get rid of the bosses. We don’t need them.”

  “We have to answer two simple questions: ‘How are we going to live?’ and ‘What do we do now?’ ”

  The meeting lasted an hour.

  Afterward, I walked with the shift leader of mine No. 6, Anatoly Shcheglov, a huge man with a broad smile and mouth filled with gold teeth. The day had begun for him at five forty-five in the morning. He woke in his izba, a small log cabin two miles from the mine, and took a look at the Kuzbass, the morning paper, for more news about the mines still out on strike. His address was 2 Second Plan Avenue. In the summer, Shcheglov said, it was easier to get out of bed. The sun was already high. “At least you can walk outside without snow up to the waist in the dark,” he said.

  Now the kitchen garden outside his door was rich, green with basil and cucumbers. Shcheglov said he ate a lot of cucumbers, “raw or pickled, there’s not much else.” He opened his refrigerator, a squat primitive thing that buzzed, and searched it for something for dinner. It was filled with food that he was lucky to have: a grayish roll of sausage, a few eggs, a cabbage, a cut of pork that was no less than three-quarters fat, a half-bottle of vodka. Lucky, because the stores were nearly empty. Nearby, at Fruit and Vegetable Store No. 6, known as the best in town, Anatoly went looking for something more to eat. The groceries available were these: half-brown cabbages, rotten tomatoes, cans of tomato juice and sardines, salt, and jars of pickled cabbage. And at the state “products” store off Johann Sebastian Bach Street there were more half-brown cabbages, more rotten tomatoes, smelts, five wan chickens, bins of white bread, and sacks of dried corn. To do better, they say here, you need blat, or connections. The only way to do better was to make a deal, to trade a bottle of home brew for a bag of decent carrots, an auto part for a cut of meat.

  “The only other way is to buy from the private market,” Anatoly said, “and the prices there are impossible for anyone but a Party big shot, the guys who have the dachas down the road.”

  About a half mile from Shcheglov’s place was a prison camp: Prison 1648-043. Every day the convicts—thieves, rapists, murderers—were shuttled in railway cars between their cells and the “zone,” the work camp. People in town despised the prison, mainly because when the convicts were released, they said, they took jobs at the mines and the factories nearby, and many of them went back into crime. “But I’m not so sure it’s a bad thing,” Shcheglov said. “We have three guys down in our mine who were prisoners there. One of them stabbed his wife in the stomach. Another beat someone over the head. I think he killed him. And another guy’s wife was involved in some sort of scandal, and so he beat her to death. But they served their time. They work all right.”

  During the Stalin years, Shcheglov’s father was thrown in a labor camp for ten years for no crime at all. Anatoly remembered the day Stalin died, and how everyone around, even those with parents and friends in the camps, wept as if the world were lost. “It was March 1953,” he said. “I was a Young Pioneer, and we always wore those orange scarves. They gave us black ones to wear. And when the teachers started crying, we cried, too. Children always imitate the emotions of their parents.”

  Shcheglov was no radical. He heard the news that the miners in Vorkuta in northern Russia were still on strike and demanding an end to the Party’s constitutional hold on power. “I’m not sure that’s right,” he said. He was a trusting man who spoke with only the slightest bit of irony when I asked him about the effect the dust had on him after working in the pits for so long. “My lungs?” he said, taking a long drag on a cigarette butt. “The doctors always tell us our lungs are fine. They give us a checkup every year. And why shouldn’t I trust the doctors? If you can’t trust them, who can you trust?”

  For years, his dream had been simple: finish working at fifty or so, take his pension, and move outside of town to the taiga, the vast Siberian forest. What he wanted from the strike, he said, was just the chance to live “decently,” to have a cake of soap or toothpaste when he needed, to eat a cut of meat worthy of t
he word, to wear a pair of shoes that could last six months, and to have the chance to earn a profit if, by some miracle, his work brigade could squeeze some extra coal out of mine No. 6. And then, when it was time, he’d move out to the forest, where the fishing was good, the air was clear, and life was lived above ground. “I’m used to the dark,” he said. “But enough is enough.”

  The Siberian miners had no single leader, no Lech Walesa. The unions were a farce. They did not protect the workingman so much as they ensured his passivity and obedience to the Party. That had been Lenin’s design. Lenin declared Western-style labor unions “narrow-minded, selfish, case-hardened, covetous, petty bourgeois.” The unions under socialism, he said, would be “conveyor belts” of the Party. One of the first thing the miners did during the strike was to box out the union leaders and set up strike committees. Taking their cue from the miners, all kinds of laborers set up “workers’ clubs” in the Baltics, Byelorussia, and Ukraine, and in Russian rust-belt cities like Magnitogorsk, Sverdlovsk, and Chelyabinsk.

  But there was no Walesa. Probably, Walesa had been a particularly Polish phenomenon, a figure able somehow to unite workers, Catholic clergy, and urban intellectuals. Anatoly Malikhin was as close as it came to a Walesa in the Soviet miners movement, but because of the vastness of the country, his influence was mainly in western Siberia.