Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  Malikhin was an eloquent tunneler from Novo-Kuznetsk. He had the muscular, squashed-down, weary look of a man who had played fullback for one year too many. He was in his early thirties and looked ten years older. All that was left of his hair was a kind of monk’s tonsure. Malikhin said he was a “congenital enemy of the people,” a bitter joke. His grandfather, a Cossack, was arrested in the purges of 1937, and his father, as a child of an “enemy of the people,” was deported to Siberia. Malikhin’s mother, a Ukrainian, was also a political deportee.

  For years, he said, he had led the same “unconscious existence” his father had, that everyone around him did. There was never any thought of protest, much less mutiny. Miners were serfs in a patrimonial system in which the lord was the Communist Party and its instruments were the schools, the trade unions, the mine directors. “Our system and our propaganda didn’t allow people to grow as individuals, to ask questions. We were raised to be uninterested,” Malikhin told me. “We had no idea how the state was run. We went to elections having no idea what they were about. They told us, ‘You are a small man, a punk, and why should you care? You just do what your boss tells you.’ The principle was this: ‘I am the boss and you are an idiot.’ If you tried to argue, even slightly, you were immediately thrown to work in the worst spots. You were crushed, humiliated. We are still dogs with three different kinds of collars: green, yellow, and red. They are the colors of the passes to the mine, and they can be changed or taken away for the slightest violation. Everyone violates the rules sometimes—that is the only way you can work with the equipment we have—so if they don’t like you, they seize on that and you’ll never work again. People who tried to preserve their dignity were crushed and thrown away.

  “This is not a life for human beings. We have no time for leisure. We have no decent clothes. We spend our entire lives making just enough to feed ourselves and our children. The shift starts at six A.M., so you have to be up at four-thirty. You go to the mine, work eight hours underground, and all your life is work. When you come home you are too exhausted to do anything but collapse. On the weekend there are chores to do at home. About the only leisure we have is a mug or two of beer in the morning after the night shift. That’s it. And then you quit—if you haven’t already been killed in an accident. A few years later, your lungs give out, or your heart goes. Bye-bye. You’re dead.”

  In the coming months, I went to mines in Ukraine, Sakhalin, and Kazakhstan. As it became clear that Moscow would not—and, probably, could not—come through on the economic deal, I heard more and more miners and other workers talking about a political strike. They were giving up on the system. But I had also heard those very things on the afternoon before I went back to Moscow from Kemerovo. Another of the workers at mine No. 6, Ivan Narashev, invited me home. His hut, at 6 Krupskaya Street, was smaller and even plainer than Shcheglov’s. He could barely control his anger. He had voted against going back to work. “We should have stayed out until there was money on the table,” he said. “We should have been like bulls and waited until we got exactly what we wanted.” Hunched forward in his pine chair, Narashev talked about how the “party big shots” were trying to break the strike with “sweet words and no deeds.” He remembered being on the town square in Kemerovo one afternoon at the height of the general strike meetings and seeing the local KGB chief hovering near the speaker’s platform.

  “I’ll tell you, I’m only thirty-seven but I’m ready to go for early pension,” he said. “I’ve had it. Ten years underground is enough for me. I’d like to get a car and put my wife and kids in it and drive away from here, somewhere where the air doesn’t burn your eyes. We should have had these strikes years ago. We’ve been destroyed by Stalinism and Brezhnev’s cronies. I’m ready now for a leader other than Gorbachev. Someone more like Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin’s a man of concrete deeds. How is it possible that until now our leaders eat all the pork and we chew on the bones? If Yeltsin were sitting where Gorbachev is, maybe it would be different.”

  What seemed to burn in him most was the feeling that the strike would turn out to be not the glorious victory that everyone at mine No. 6 was saying it was, but another humiliation, like gray sausages and no electricity. It was not yet clear that the miners’ strike of July 1989 was the first and most dramatic step in the creation of a link between the revolt of the intelligentsia in the cities and the nationalists in the republics with the political uprising of workers across the country. “Think about this country for a minute,” Ivan Narashev said as the room began to darken. “Our leaders have always divided us, kept us down. I think they’re doing that now, and they will rule again.”

  CHAPTER 15

  POSTCARDS FROM THE EMPIRE

  Valentin Falin, a rumpled, weary man high up in the Central Committee apparatus, was always prepared to serve the Party. But now he had an impossible task. With Eastern Europe beginning its democratic revolution, with evidence of the same in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, he was instructed to go before the press and deny the existence of a Soviet empire.

  The Kremlin had long since given up trying to rein in Eastern Europe. “We made that decision in 1985, 1986,” Yegor Ligachev, of all people, told me. “We already had the example of Afghanistan before us.” That is not to say the Kremlin was overjoyed with the triumph of Solidarity or other non-Communist parties in Eastern Europe. Officials in the Kremlin simply could not believe that the Eastern Europeans were rebelling on their own. Ligachev told me that had it not been for Western “provocateurs,” the Eastern Europeans would have chosen “reformed socialism” and not “bourgeois” democracy. The leadership had hoped for Eastern Europe what it hoped for itself: the victory of the Communist Party’s liberal wing. “I am confident,” Gorbachev said in an interview with The Washington Post in the spring of 1988, “that the vast majority of people in Poland favor continuing along the path on which the country started after World War II.” But no matter how disappointed the Soviet Communist Party was in the nature of the Eastern European revolution, it could not afford intervention—not if it was going to get Western support for rebuilding the Soviet economy.

  Moscow, however, was absolutely determined to hold together the union, the “internal empire.” The preservation of the union, Gorbachev said repeatedly, was “a last stand,” and yet his strategy was all muscle-flexing and expulsion of wind, the threat of force and a fraudulent argument that all the republics, including the Baltics, had joined the Soviet Union willingly and happily. For all his democratic pretensions, Gorbachev never saw the Soviet Union as an empire, a product of czarist and Bolshevik conquest, but rather as a “multinational union.” He saw the union as inexorably linked not only by economic ties, shared history, and intermarriage, but by an ineffable sense of commonality. Gorbachev portrayed himself as a kind of Soviet one-worlder and the proponents of republican independence as retrograde nationalists doomed to the tribal battles of centuries past. “We are looking ahead,” he told the Lithuanians, “and you are looking to the past.”

  To preserve the union, the Party was still willing to use its airbrush on history. The leaders of the Baltic independence movement, backed up by nearly every reputable Western historian, argued that Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania came under the Soviet sphere of influence as the result of a secret deal between the Kremlin and the Nazis. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 surreptitiously divided Europe into Soviet and German spheres of influence. One of the secret protocols gave Moscow control over Latvia, Estonia, and parts of Poland and Romania. A second protocol, signed a month later, gave the Kremlin control over Lithuania. In 1940, Stalin annexed the Baltic states and forced their puppet legislatures to “request admission” into the union. And now Valentin Falin, chief of the Party’s international department, was on the stage of the Foreign Ministry press center telling us that even if there had been such protocols, so what? They had nothing to do with “present realities.” Falin’s excuses would have shamed a schoolboy. The dog, he seemed to say, had ea
ten the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

  When perestroika began, Gorbachev had at least some sense of the deterioration of the national economy and the difficulty of creating semidemocratic politics in a totalitarian state. But he and his colleagues started out nearly oblivious to the nationalities question. In December 1986, Gorbachev fired the Kazakh Party chief, Dinmukhamed Kunayev, and replaced him with an ethnic Russian, Gennadi Kolbin, never anticipating that the people of the republic would object. The ensuing riots in the republic’s capital, Alma-Ata, eventually forced Gorbachev to replace Kolbin with a Kazakh, but the incident did not seem to impress the Kremlin very strongly. Even the massive demonstrations in Armenia and Azerbaijan in early 1988 seemed to Gorbachev a matter of local interest, a petty squabble over Nagorny Karabakh that could be resolved by replacing the local Party leadership. He saw no threat there. After all, hadn’t the protesters in Yerevan carried portraits of Gorbachev?

  But the Balts spoke more clearly; their demands were easier to discern. They began with demonstrations about the environment, then about the need to preserve Baltic languages and cultures. Step by step, the Baltics grew more political, more self-confident. By early 1989, the most popular politicians in the region were non-Communists, and by May the parliaments of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had all declared their sovereignty. It was unclear what sovereignty meant, or could mean. Even the leaders of the main opposition groups—Sajudis in Lithuania, the popular fronts in Estonia and Latvia—were careful not to talk of outright independence as anything other than a remote goal; when they spoke of independence it was in the wistful tones of scientists planning on the colonization of Mars. “We cannot afford illusions,” said Marju Lauristan, a leader of the Estonian Popular Front. Lauristan least of all. Her father had been a leader of the Estonian Communists who welcomed Stalin’s annexation in 1940 with open arms.

  At first, the Kremlin had not seemed so threatened by the Baltic republics. They were, after all, a “special case,” minuscule states absorbed into the Soviet Union more than twenty years after the Bolshevik Revolution. And just as important, there was the matter of temperament. The Balts were calm and measured, reasonable. Their demonstrations—next to the huge and noisy marches in Yerevan, Baku, or Tbilisi—were as gentle as a Save the Whales march on a summer’s day in Sausilito. The Balts were “more European” somehow than the rest of the Union, and their traditions of small-scale farming and business, Gorbachev supposed, might even set a healthy example in Russia.

  But the Baltic example became the model not for the revitalization of the Union, but rather for its collapse. In the three years it took to win independence, the Balts were never violent, only stubborn. It was that very temperament—Sakharov’s calm confidence on a mass scale—that characterized their revolution. None of the other republics organized quite so well or thought with such precision and cool.

  At first glance, the idea of Lithuania standing up to Moscow sounded like an episode from The Mouse That Roared. It was too comic to consider. Sajudis headquarters, a small building near the main Catholic cathedral in the capital city, Vilnius, was filled with well-scrubbed volunteers. They had a couple of PCs, a fax machine, satellite phones, and sweet wall posters showing Balts holding hands and singing songs. One afternoon I watched as a young woman, wearing Birkenstock sandals and humming a Tracy Chapman song, pumped press releases through the telex machine and sent them to news bureaus all over the world. She was announcing a demonstration for August commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. I thought of how blithe she seemed next to the traditional Bolshevik image of “real” revolutionaries: sweaty, bearded men in the Smolny denouncing “factionalism,” Lenin speaking from an armored car, the stink of bad cigarettes. And yet she was their master; here she was, playing a vital role in the creation of a mass movement that would eventually liberate Lithuania and give the rest of the Soviet Union … ideas.

  In their public statements, the leaders of the Baltic popular fronts had a knack for echoing Gorbachev’s own rhetoric and then applying the principle to their own situation. When the Central Committee issued a threatening statement directed at the Balts, the popular front groups in the region issued a counterstatement that sounded much like Gorbachev’s address to the United Nations: “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.” The Latvians, Estonians, and Lithuanians were keenly aware that for Moscow, the price of violence would be much higher than it had been in 1956 or 1968; this time Moscow made no secret that it needed the help of the West to survive. A bankrupt empire would be forced to shrink. That equation gave the Balts their confidence, a confidence that was shaken only when the governments of the West were weak, or tardy, in their support. “How can there be a ‘threat’ of tanks when there have already been Soviet tanks in the Baltic states for fifty years?” said Trivimi Velliste, president of the Estonian Heritage Society. “Tanks will not help them, even if they do move them into our city streets. The only thing they will do is cause a lot of trouble for our road repairmen. India used a passive resistance and India became independent in the end. In terms of that kind of strategy, we can learn a lot from India.”

  In Lithuania, especially, you could see with the greatest clarity the Baltic strategy. The Estonians, the saying went, were the brains of the movement, the Latvians the organizational spine, and the Lithuanians the heart, the moral force. The key leader of Sajudis, and eventually the president of the republic, was Vytautas Landsbergis, a man of almost infuriating confidence and righteousness, a moody academic who drove Gorbachev and even George Bush to distraction with his disdain for “playing politics” and moral compromise. A musicologist at the Vilnius conservatory, Landsbergis was no less a pedant than Gorbachev himself. When the Lithuanian parliament—in what seemed like a moment of fantasy—took up the question of a national anthem, Landsbergis went into a long discourse about how the song could not be sung, as it had been traditionally, in the key of F sharp. “No one can sing that high,” he said, and thus launched into a long disquisition.

  Like many other intellectuals in the Baltic states, Landsbergis had not lived the dangerous life of an outright political dissident. But unlike the older Moscow intellectuals who worked within the Party and saw its reform as the only avenue of change, Landsbergis kept his distance from officialdom. In the years before Gorbachev, he saw the preservation of the Lithuanian culture as the only possible political act. “If we could keep alive the language, our religion, the culture, everything Moscow was trying to kill, then we had a chance,” he said. Landsbergis’s cultural dissidence was a family trait. His maternal grandfather, Jonas Jablonskis, was a linguist who fought for the primacy of the Lithuanian language after it was banned by the czars; his paternal grandfather, Gagrielus Landsbergis, was arrested and deported by the czarist government for the crime of writing for an underground newspaper; his father, Vytautas Landsbergis, Sr., was an architect during Lithuanian independence who fought in the resistance against the Nazi occupation. In the “years of stagnation” under Brezhnev, Landsbergis himself tried to preserve Lithuanian culture by studying the music of the composer Mikalojus Ciurlionis.

  When the political opportunity came in 1989, Sajudis and Landsbergis led a cultural revolution, a revival of historical memory. I was in Vilnius to see a political act that would, in the next few years, become the ultimate symbol of the return of history. I saw members of Sajudis, after a vote of parliament, ripping down the signs reading “Lenin Street” along the main drag in Vilnius and replacing them with signs reading “Gediminais Street,” named for one of the great dukes of Lithuanian history. The highway between Vilnius and Kaunas was changed from Red Army Avenue to Volunteer Avenue, celebrating the volunteers who fought for Lithuanian independence in 1918. On Su
nday mornings, Lithuanian television broadcast Catholic mass on a new program, Glory to Christ. The young quit the Komsomol and the Young Pioneers. The Lithuanian Communist Party even conducted its sessions in Lithuanian, a great departure from the days when sessions were held in often clumsy Russian, the “Soviet language.”

  Western visitors, still flush with Gorbymania, would, with increasing frequency, come to Vilnius and hope that they could bridge the differences between the Kremlin and Sajudis. No matter how distinguished the visitor, Landsbergis would greet such attempts only with weary condescension. “We are an occupied country,” he told me once. “To pretend we are grateful for a little democracy, to go through some sort of referendum to prove our commitment to independence, to talk with Mr. Gorbachev as anything other than a foreign leader, is to live a lie.… It is very simple. We are an occupied land. Only now we can say it, of course, but we have never considered ourselves a genuine part of the Soviet Union. That is something that Gorbachev does not quite understand. We wish his perestroika well, but the time has come for us to go our own way.”

  In the end, the Baltic strategy was excruciatingly simple. They would speak the truth and then press the Kremlin to make good on its own moralistic rhetoric. As Gorbachev himself had done, the Balts defined their direction by first clarifying the facts of history. The secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact made clear that the Baltic states were occupied as part of a geopolitical deal with the Nazis. The second step was a matter of logic: if the occupation was illegal in 1939, then it had always been such; therefore the Baltic states need only reaffirm their independence. Once they had established this logic of revolution, the other Baltic leaders followed Landsbergis’s strategy and spoke of Moscow as a foreign state. Nearly all the Baltic representatives in the Soviet parliament suddenly declared themselves “interested observers” rather than deputies. They also played a kind of moral game with Gorbachev, insisting on his goodness, his distinctiveness. “We in the Baltics look on Gorbachev as the ‘good czar’ and try to pretend that the ‘czar doesn’t know,’ it’s his ministers who are up to mischief,’ ” said Andres Raid, a television journalist in Tallinn. “In a way, we are playing a political game, using Gorbachev’s name. He is an anchor for us, a shield, a shelter. Of course, we disagree with him on some things, but we try not to be too harsh about it. We have no one else looking out for us in the political hierarchy. We have nowhere else to go for help.”