Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  Before an audience of Party members, intellectuals, and foreign guests, Yakovlev deepened his scrutiny of the past. Gorbachev had already denounced the “crimes” of Stalin, but now his intellectual alter ego was launching a public attack on the founding myths of the Soviet Union. The Bolshevik Revolution, he told his audience, quickly dissolved into a reign of terror, one that far outstripped the Jacobin use of the guillotine.

  “The idealization of terror was starkly evident during the October Revolution,” Yakovlev said. The Bolsheviks looked back on the terror of 1793 as a model and “faithfully believed in violence as a cleansing force … a salvation for the country and the people.… The edifying thirst for freedom degenerates into the delirious fever of violence which ultimately extinguishes the flames of the revolution.”

  Then Yakovlev made a connection between Lenin and Stalin that was still considered radical even for non-Party intellectuals. To hear it from the main ideologist of glasnost, perestroika, and the “new thinking” in foreign policy was absolutely stunning: “Today, when we are asking ourselves the excruciating question of how it was possible for this country and Lenin’s Party to accept the dictatorship of mediocrity and put up with Stalin’s abuses and the shedding of rivers of innocent blood, it is obvious that one of the factors that nurtured the soil for authoritarian rule and despotism was the morbid faith in the possibility of forcing through social and historical development, and the idealization of revolutionary violence that traces back to the very sources of the European revolutionary tradition.”

  In other words, the appearance of Stalin was no aberration, but rather the direct result of Lenin’s “revolutionary romanticism” that idealized violence as an instrument of class struggle and a force of purification. Until perestroika, even the most radical underground historians in the Soviet Union denied this. Roy Medvedev saw Stalin only as a pathological rupture with Leninism. Some Western historians tended to play down, or deny, Lenin’s ruthlessness. But the evidence was undeniable, and no one knew it better than Yakovlev, the chairman of the Politburo’s commission on history. As the émigré scholars Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich point out, it was Lenin and Trotsky who were the first Europeans to use the term “concentration camp” and then use the device to such effect. Three months after Trotsky used the term, Lenin sent a telegram to the Penza Executive Committee on August 9, 1918, demanding the local Red leaders carry out “ruthless mass terror against the kulaks, priests, and White Guards; confine all suspicious elements in a concentration camp outside the city.”

  Yakovlev demanded that the Party recognize its past and renounce the old methods. “History cannot be different but we must be different,” he said. “The idea of violence as the midwife of history has exhausted itself, as has the idea of dictatorial power based on violence.”

  It was a terribly difficult speech for Yakovlev to make. He had been working in one capacity or another in the Communist Party since just after the war. He said his first doubts about the Soviet leadership came when he saw how Stalin greeted returning prisoners of war by sending them directly to labor camps for fear of their “foreign influence.” His thinking had developed radically since those days, and so had the thinking of many men and women of his generation; but he knew all too well that the majority of Party officials had changed only slightly. Despite their outward obedience to the vocabulary of the Gorbachev era—“perestroika,” “acceleration,” “democratization,” and all the rest—they were deeply resistant to a fundamental change in the political system. In the French Revolution speech, Yakovlev acknowledged as much. “The need for radical renewal is born of the times, but, on the other hand, is always ahead of them,” he said. “A rise to a new spiral of civilization does not occur without pain. Acute dramas are generated by the inertia of the outgoing social structures, the refusal to accept the new things, and revolutionary impatience.”

  Yakovlev even tried, in an oblique way, to address “the problem” of how revolutions consume their children, to reassure the right-wingers that there would be no hunt for enemies. He did not lash out at his antagonists; rather, he warned them. “A party that revels in myths and vain illusions,” he said, “is doomed.”

  By the beginning of 1990, the collapse of the Communist Party monolith was at hand. Sakharov was gone, but his demand to eliminate the Party’s guaranteed hold on power had become a banner of the growing democratic opposition. Nevertheless, Gorbachev needed convincing. The proposals of Sakharov or Yakovlev—and the rise of dozens of new parties across the country—were not enough for him. He had to be beaten over the head before he dared make a move on the Party. Lithuanians, as usual, were only too pleased to provide the drubbing.

  In January 1990, Gorbachev went to Vilnius, confident that he could find a way to finesse the alarming developments there. He was sure he could slow down the sprint to independence and convince the republic’s Party organization to come back into the fold. Yakovlev had already been to Vilnius and said it would be “immoral” to deny the Lithuanian argument that Moscow was still running a coercive empire. Gorbachev plainly disagreed. He berated the Lithuanian Party leader, Algirdas Brazauskas, for splitting with the all-union organization and for letting the “romantic professors” of the Sajudis popular front assume such power there. In Vilnius, Gorbachev’s fury and confusion were obvious at every meeting and encounter. As long as the progressive elements of the country followed him, Gorbachev had been happy; but now his erstwhile followers were in the lead, and this was intolerable. Gorbachev had lost control of the political world.

  At one point on the trip, Gorbachev confronted an elderly factory worker who was carrying a sign reading “Total Independence for Lithuania.”

  “Who told you to write that banner?” Gorbachev asked angrily.

  “Nobody. I wrote it myself,” the worker said.

  “Who are you? Where do you work?” Gorbachev said. “And what do you mean by ‘total independence’?”

  “I mean what we had in the 1920s, when Lenin recognized Lithuania’s sovereignty, because no nation is entitled to dictate to another nation,” the worker replied.

  “Within our large family, Lithuania has become a developed country,” Gorbachev said. “What kind of exploiters are we if Russia sells you cotton, oil, and raw materials—and not for hard currency either?”

  The worker cut off Gorbachev. “Lithuania had a hard currency before the war,” he said. “You took it away in 1940. And do you know how many Lithuanians were sent to Siberia in the 1940s, and how many died?”

  Gorbachev finally could not bear this impudence. “I don’t want to talk to this man anymore,” he said. “If people in Lithuania have attitudes and slogans like this, they can expect hard times. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

  Raisa tried to calm down her husband.

  “Be quiet,” he snapped.

  On the last day of his trip to Lithuania, Gorbachev finally conceded the obvious. A year before he had called the idea of a multiparty system chepukha—rubbish. Now, he said, “We should not be afraid of a multiparty system the way the devil is afraid of incense. I don’t see a tragedy in a multiparty system if it serves the people.”

  By now, Gorbachev knew that tragedy might come if he did not make his run at the Communist Party. From a distance, he watched what had become of Jaruzelski in Poland, Honecker in East Germany, and, most vividly, the Ceauşescus in Romania. Gorbachev did not need to strain very hard to see the same rage gathering at home. Everywhere there was an urge to clean house. In the northern Ukrainian city of Chernigov, crowds gathered around a car crash and discovered that the drunken driver of one car was a leading Party official. It turned out the official was carrying around a trunkload of various delicacies that had not been seen in the city in years. The official resigned. In Volgograd, the entire Party leadership was forced to quit when tens of thousands of people protested the construction of special housing for the local officials. In the Siberian city of Tyumen, the entire Party leadership resig
ned after it was accused, en masse, of corruption. And in Leningrad, the former Politburo member and local Party chief Yuri Solovyov was expelled from the Party after hundreds of people demonstrated outside his home demanding to know just how he was able to buy a Mercedes-Benz sedan for 9,000 rubles when the usual price was more like 120,000.

  On February 4, 1990, a bitter cold day in Moscow, around a quarter-million people marched halfway around the Garden Ring Road, down Gorky Street, and toward the Kremlin for a rally on Manezh Square that could only have scared the wits out of the denizens behind the great brick walls. It was the biggest demonstration in Moscow since the rise of Soviet power, and there was nothing polite about it. The banner “Party Bureaucrats: Remember Romania!” was just one of the helpful reminders they provided. While the crowd clapped their gloved hands and stamped their feet to keep warm, Yuri Afanasyev climbed onto the bed of a flatbed truck and shouted into the microphone, “All hail the peaceful February revolution of 1990!” The reference was lost on no one: it was the February Revolution that toppled the established order, the czar, in 1917. The Central Committee was scheduled to gather for a plenum a few days later and a vote on the fate of Article 6, the clause guaranteeing the Party primacy in public life. For the first time, the opposition seemed sure of a great victory. “When the [members of the Central Committee] show up at the Kremlin Monday morning they had better have in mind the image of hundreds of thousands of people you see here today,” Vladimir Tikhonov, the head of the Union of Cooperative Businesses, said. In his speech, Yeltsin barked that this would be Gorbachev’s “last chance.” And the crowd—the vast brew of democratic socialists, social democrats, greens, monarchists, Hare Krishnas, veterans, housewives, and students—roared its approval.

  At the plenum, Ligachev and various other members of the Central Committee complained about the “loss” of Eastern Europe, the “chaos” on the streets. But then they fell into line. On February 7, 1990, the Central Committee passed a platform that effectively opened the way for a multiparty system. They really had no choice. They had seen the crowds. They had read the placards and the future they promised.

  Yakovlev never gave up his loyalty to Gorbachev, but now they were clearly split over matters of ideology and tactics, especially where the Party was concerned. “I am a convinced Communist,” Gorbachev kept saying. But for Yakovlev, socialism meant little more than the idea of a welfare state, a government that could “protect people against calamity and misfortune.” His attitude toward Lenin also grew more and more critical. “Oh, yes, it did change,” he told me. “As the Bible says: there is much grief in wisdom.… [Lenin] was an extremely talented politician. There is no question about it. But he was geared only toward power and power alone. Everything else was subordinate to that. He thought morality was of no value in the proletarian revolution.”

  The Party scheduled a congress for July—a congress that Yuri Afanasyev predicted would be its “funeral.” In the weeks before the event, the Party press steadily increased its attacks on the reformers in the Party, describing them as “traitors” to socialism and the state. Invariably, the named targets were Yeltsin and Yakovlev. At the congress itself, deputies were handed leaflets allegedly reporting Yakovlev’s comments at a meeting with the radical and conservative factions. The “answers” made Yakovlev seem disloyal to Gorbachev, insulting to the army, and even more radical than he was. Later, an investigating committee discovered that the organizer of the leaflet was General Igor Rodionov, the military commander who won national fame for leading the assault in Tbilisi against a crowd of peaceful Georgian demonstrators.

  Yakovlev had rarely stepped out in public over the years, preferring to stay at Gorbachev’s side and influence events with his advice. But at the congress he took the rostrum in his own defense, and his performance was devastating. After debunking the leaflet attacking him, he held up yet another leaflet that had been circulating among the Party delegates, a photocopy from the newspaper Russky Golos (“Russian Voice”). It said, “We need a new Hitler, not Gorbachev. We are badly in need of a military coup. There is still a lot of undeveloped space in Siberia waiting for the ‘enthusiasts’ who have buried perestroika.”

  “My name is there,” Yakovlev said. “So, Siberians, await the arrival of new gulag inmates. That’s what’s happening, comrades. A massive attack has been launched and all means, including criminal ones, are being used in this campaign. True, all this leaves scars on the heart, but I want to say this to the organizers of this well-orchestrated campaign and those who are behind it: you may shorten my life, but you can’t silence me.”

  Yakovlev’s despair over the Party led to even more probing about the viability of Marxism itself. Soon he would be telling all who would listen that Lenin’s intolerance was matched by Marx’s irrelevance. “A great deal has been rejected by life,” he told the newspaper Rabochaya Tribuna (“Worker’s Tribune”). “Marx said, for instance, that revolutions would take place in several industrialized European capitalist countries at the same time. That did not happen. A revolution took place in Russia, but even there it resulted from a queer concurrence of circumstances. Marx said that capitalism was a rotting society that impeded scientific, technological, and social progress. He was wrong about that, too.… But this is not even the main point. Life corrects many a theory. The problem is that a rash experiment was performed on Russia. An attempt was made to create a new model of society and put it into practice under conditions that were unfit for socialism. No wonder the new way of life was imposed by terror.”

  On August 20, 1990, Gorbachev had signed a decree rehabilitating all those who had been repressed in the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties and repealed any orders that had stripped dissidents of their citizenship. The Party, of course, thought it was being awfully generous in this. But then Yakovlev came on the evenings news program Vremya and made a short statement worthy of Sakharov or Havel.

  The president’s two decrees, he said, “are, in my view, acts of repentance.… When we say that we are rehabilitating someone, as if we are mercifully forgiving him for the sins of the past, this smells of cunning and hypocrisy. We are not forgiving him. We are forgiving ourselves. It is we who are to blame that others lived for years both slandered and oppressed. It is we who are rehabilitating ourselves, not those who held other thoughts and convictions. They only wanted good and freedom for us, and the leadership of the country answered with evil, prisons and camps.

  “As we breathe the air of freedom, it is already becoming difficult today for us to remember what happened in the distant and not so distant past. There were hundreds of thousands of brutal trials, people who were shot and killed, people who killed themselves, people who did not even know what they were charged with, but who were destroyed.…

  “For us, they are not a reproach but a harsh reminder to all those who still have a yearning nostalgia for the past, for those who would turn everything back to the fear.… I want to pay special attention to the tragic fate of our peasantry, which paid the price in blood for the criminality of the Stalinist regime. This is not only an unprecedented reprisal against the peasantry, which disrupted the flow of the society, but it also brought the development of the state into crisis. History has never known such a concentrated hatred toward man.”

  CHAPTER 21

  THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION

  As the Party was collapsing, I got to know one of its last high priests. Vyacheslav Shostokovsky, an ally of both Yakovlev and Yeltsin, ran the Moscow Higher Party School, the ultimate training ground for young Leninists. In a matter of months, he undid the work of a thousand ideologues, firing faculty, bringing in new, younger teachers, revising the curriculum to include every possible idea and thinker. Suddenly, the students were reading Mill and Locke along with Marx and Lenin. Much of what they read of Soviet history came from foreign and underground editions; there was no time to wait for the Party publishing houses to catch up with the world. It was a desperate mission. Either Shostokovsky would
revive the Party with a new crop of young social democrats, he told me one afternoon, “or we die.”

  “We’re moving toward a multiparty democracy, to a political marketplace, and the Communist Party is just not ready for that,” he said. “I’m afraid even Gorbachev himself is not ready for this marketplace.”

  After my meeting with the dean, I headed for the exit. On my way out, I noticed a handwritten sign advertising a showing of “an American movie tonight in Lenin Hall.” No title given, but I went anyway. Lenin Hall was packed. The lights dimmed and the familiar faces of Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen flickered on the screen: the Communist Party Higher Party School presents Wall Street.

  If I hadn’t known then that Communist ideology was dead, I knew it by the final credits. The young acolytes, presumably the next generation of Leninist priests, reacted to this morality play of American finance in a way that would have made poor Oliver Stone weep. They did not see it as a warning about the perils of greed, not a propaganda cartoon meant to steer the best and the brightest toward a life of goodness and social work. Not at all. They audibly lusted after the goods on display: the stretch limo (with bar and TV), the sushi-making machine, the steak tartare at “21,” the fabulous cuffs on Michael Douglas’s Turnbull & Asser shirts. God, they loved those shirts. When Charlie Sheen, the young stud stockbroker, first checked out his new East Side apartment, with the wraparound windows and the view to die for, you could hear the sighing of the young Leninists.