Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  It came as no shock to Zaslavsky that a lot of the negative letters he got in the mail, to say nothing of the articles in the nationalist press, were anti-Semitic. As the business explosion intensified and the average wage bought less and less, resentment eventually made its way toward that fine end. Anyone with a little extra was a Jew. You heard the grumbling on the buses, on the streets, on park benches. Sometimes it became the stuff of public meetings and demonstrations. On June 6, 1990, at the Red October cultural hall in Moscow, seven hundred members of something called the People’s Orthodox Movement met, and the level of hatred was startling. “We declare that the Jews bear collective responsibility for the genocide of the Russian people and other peoples of our country!” said one speaker, Aleksandr Kulakov. “And we demand that Jews be forbidden to leave the country until a tribunal of the Russian people decides their fate. We express solidarity with the Arab world, which struggles with this evil! We also express solidarity with the German people. The Jews were never victims of the German people. The Germans were the victims of Jewish deception!”

  Groups like the United Workers’ Front, Motherland, and Unity all emitted similarly horrifying grunts, all in the name of “proletarian justice” and the call for a class war. Zaslavsky showed me some of his mail, where the word Zhid—Yid—appeared more frequently than commas. It was as if he had ended up on the wrong side of a perverse class war, a focus of class resentment. Nash Sovremenik, Moscow Worker, and Molodaya Gvardiya were the main publications supporting this strange amalgam of nationalism, neo-Stalinism, and pure resentment that was fast becoming known as National Bolshevism. “We face a paradox,” wrote Richard Kosolapov in the Moscow Worker. “An actual ban on the class approach and its false contrast with universal human values is happening at a time when the gap between rich and poor is widening. We are stubbornly being told that there is a need for fraternization between striking coal miners and the growing ranks of millionaires … despite the fact that our entire historical experience is literally crying out about the inevitability of conflict.”

  Zaslavsky had begun his term in early 1990 with the support of more than a hundred of the 150 October Region deputies. But by winter, he could rely on only forty or so. The rest, with help from various Communist Party organizations, began to plot against him. Articles began appearing in the Russian Communist Party paper Sovetskaya Rossiya accusing Zaslavsky of incompetence, of “aggressive anti-Communism,” of taking power out of the hands of the people and putting it in the hands of a few young millionaires. “Zaslavsky was not the man we thought he was,” said Alla Vlasova, a conservative on the council. “He turned arrogant. He would only listen to the inner circle around him. He has to go.”

  Inexperience and a measure of arrogance also gave Zaslavsky’s enemies ammunition for the approaching political battle. Some members of the city’s executive committee, it turned out, were also businessmen. Vasiliyev’s deputy, Shota Kakabadze, for one, was president of the law firm Assistant, which did legal work for the region. Although the lawyers said they did their municipal work free, the impression of a conflict of interest became indelible. “We started falling victim to our own stupidity and inexperience,” Chegodayev said.

  The biggest mistake was in the way Zaslavsky handled the privatization of several thousands parcels of land and new enterprises. The Municipal Property Board was in charge of holding auctions and selling off land in order to help create businesses, hotels, or plants that fit in with the October Region’s plans for the future. Zaslavsky saw the dilemma of mixing the state and the private sectors, but he argued that this was often done in other developing countries. “And that,” he said, “is what we are, let’s face it. A developing country that happens to have nuclear weapons.” Upper Volta with rockets. Zaslavsky’s enemies pounced all over him, accusing him of funneling profits to his cronies. And while the charge was never proved, it hurt him badly. Suddenly, the young politician who had started with a pristine image was stained.

  To make matters worse, Zaslavsky took a hit from a powerful corner. For months, Zaslavsky had been telling the press and even audiences abroad that Gorbachev was a “lost cause” who was getting far too much credit for even beginning perestroika. He said that it was Ronald Reagan’s strategy of negotiation through strength that brought the Kremlin to its knees. “I will never forget what Gorbachev did at the start,” Zaslavsky said, “but it would be a mistake to put all our hopes in one man anymore. Thank God, we’re beyond that.” Gorbachev, who was then turning sharply to the right, went before a meeting of the Moscow Communist Party organization and railed against the “so-called democrats.” It was one of his most conservative speeches during a conservative winter in the Kremlin. Zaslavsky in particular, Gorbachev said, had “disappointed” him.

  On the bitter cold afternoon of February 13, 1991, Zaslavsky’s opponents called a council session and put a no-confidence vote on the agenda. To bring down Zaslavsky, however, they needed a quorum of ninety-nine deputies. Zaslavsky’s only remaining strategy was to block the quorum, to keep his people outside the hall. As he sat in his second-floor office, his opponents hammered him in the auditorium.

  “All summer Zaslavsky was in the United States. He is learning to destroy our political, economic, and ideological system!” said Alla Zhokina.

  “Zaslavsky’s emissaries took their training in the United States!” said Gennadi Markov. “All his people now have cushy jobs.” Yuri Mazenich said Zaslavsky’s team “tried to establish a totalitarian regime based on the arbitrary seizure of regional property.”

  The denunciations went on from five to nearly midnight. Although the deputies were five short of a quorum, they held a no-confidence vote anyway, with seventy-eight voting for Zaslavsky’s resignation. It was beginning to look as though the October Revolution would not lead to the shining future of “capitalism in one district.” Zaslavsky sat in his office exhausted. He was surrounded by the mementos of his rise to fame: the bric-a-brac from his trip to the United States, the aides who doted on him, the map of the future—the gleaming region he saw in his mind’s eye. The revolution was at a stalemate. “It turns out this is going to be a very long game,” he said.

  CHAPTER 22

  MAY DAY!

  MAY DAY!

  I woke early on May Day, 1990, the annual festival of labor, sunshine, and kitsch. The weather was perfect, a sweet astonishment in the perpetually dreary city of Moscow. Rumor had it in the past that the Communist Party, in its constant attempt to tame the heavens and the earth, seeded the clouds so it would rain before and after—but never on—the parade.

  May Day was a cartoon of what was happening in the country. You could just plant yourself on Red Square and watch it all go by. Under Stalin, May Day raised the cult of personality to the level of communal entertainment. Every float and billboard, every song and banner was devoted to the worship of his greatness. Under Khrushchev and Brezhnev the atmosphere was still grotesque, but more jolly. Unsurpassed achievements of the workingman at least equaled the unsurpassed wonderfulness of the Leader.

  By 1988, there were still some portraits of the Politburo leaders and Central Committee-approved slogans (“Acceleration!”) floating by, but Gorbachev had reduced the ceremony mostly to a bit of tacky fun, a production worthy of halftime at the Sugar Bowl: strongmen flinging golden dumbbells into the air, gymnast-nymphets jackknifing at the waist in honor of the working class. Harmless Sovietiana. The banners were more in the spirit of self-help than national vanity. The country was collapsing, after all, and everyone knew it. It was in the papers every day. That year I also managed to run into Yeltsin as he wandered toward his modest car. He had not been seen around Moscow since his fall from power nearly a year before, and this was probably his last moment of shyness. Oh yes, he said with a fantastically broad smile, he was quite healthy. We would hear from him soon.

  By 1989, the slogans had turned to a sugary mush. “Peace for Everyone!” one said. Or the touching “We’re Trying to Renew Ou
rselves!” It was all so innocent, a Fourth of July barbecue without the hot dogs. Ideology had disappeared. There were no “our rockets are bigger than your rockets” signs anymore, no boasting of magnesium production rates, no Uncle Sams stepping on the neck of the Third World. An empire with thousands of nuclear warheads was eager to show just how toothless it had become. The Soviet Union was in the midst of a self-actualization craze.

  For 1990, Gorbachev decided to account for the new wave of young politicians in the various legislatures, city halls, and town councils. The Kremlin announced that the liberal mayor of Moscow, Gavriil Popov, would be on the reviewing stand of the Lenin Mausoleum along with the Politburo and a few selected government honchos. Yuri Prokofiyev, the astonishingly dense leader of the Moscow Party organization, also declared that factory workers would no longer be compelled to celebrate. This year May Day would be “completely voluntary,” he said. Only banners bearing “anticonstitutional” slogans would be discouraged. “What a gesture!” everyone was supposed to think. “What a kind and liberal leadership!” But, as usual, the Party was acting more out of anxiety than generosity. They opened up the parade only in exchange for an agreement from Democratic Russia, Memorial, and other opposition groups that there would be no embarrassing “countermarches” across town. In Leningrad, the Party was taking no chances; it canceled the parade altogether.

  The morning was reliably gorgeous—a hard bright sun and a cool breeze washed along faces that had turned the lightest shade of pale after the long winter. Along the walk north from October Square to Red Square, I saw a few people carrying a Lithuanian flag and some rolled-up banners. I didn’t think much of it. I got to the reviewing stand early, bought an ice cream, and gossiped with some of the other reporters. The public address system pumped out some treacly Soviet pop tunes and Pete Seeger’s “We’ll See That Day Come Round.”

  Finally, it was time for the ceremonies to begin. As always, the reporters took careful note of the order in which the various leaders walked up the stairs of the Lenin Mausoleum to the reviewing stand. Yeltsin and Geidar Aliyev had told me how Gorbachev, like a baseball manager, would give everyone his place in the order just before showtime. “Usually, it was written on a little card or piece of paper,” Yeltsin said. He also said that at lunch breaks during Politburo sessions, everyone sat in his usual May Day order.

  For the reporters, it was still considered slightly important who chatted with whom, who wore a fedora, who a homburg, and, above all, who was missing. This was called “Soviet watching.” At least for me, the ritual lost its aura with the discovery that underneath the mausoleum there was a laboratory charged with monitoring the temperature and rate of deterioration of “the living Lenin.” Below that, there was a gymnasium where the guards could work out on off hours. The idea of some pimply kid from Chelyabinsk doing squat thrusts in the bowels of sacred territory somehow erased all mystery from the grand procession and the leaders who watched it.

  For about an hour, May Day was as calm and uneventful as the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. One merely had to substitute images of heroic labor for Underdog and Bullwinkle. Gorbachev watched with a bored, kingly smile, as if he were pleased to live through this hour of his life without crisis. The first marchers were mostly factory workers and members of official unions, and the signs they carried reflected their fear that a market economy would leave them without money or a job. “Enough Experiments,” one said. “A Market Economy Is Just Power to the Plutocracy,” said another. “Down with Private Property.” Even while they mouthed the slogans of the right wing, those workers demanded our sympathy. They had lived for decades in a world of guarantees (however meager) and absolute truths (however false), and now everything had been denounced, undercut, found out. They felt threatened to the core.

  The crowd moved from left to right, from the brick Museum of the Revolution across the cobblestones of Red Square then down the slope past St. Basil’s Cathedral and toward the steely Moscow River, glinting now like the oiled barrel of a .38. But suddenly, the march seemed to run out of marchers. We all looked left and saw that another wave had gathered, but they were waiting, and they looked … different. What was this? There were red, yellow, and green Lithuanian flags, black, blue, and white Estonian flags, Russian tricolors from the czarist era. There was shouting, more young people, an entirely different feel. Something was about to happen. You could feel it. Everyone could. These were the very people who would have gone off to “counterdemonstrations” had the Party not cut a deal with them. Soon the Party would wish it had never had this stroke of genius.

  The democrats started marching onto the square, and now their placards became visible from the reviewing stands. I’d seen the same ones at other demonstrations, but on Red Square? With Gorbachev watching?

  “Socialism? No Thanks!”

  “Communists: Have No Illusions. You Are Bankrupt.”

  “Marxism-Leninism Is on the Rubbish Heap of History.”

  “Down with the Politburo! Resign!”

  “Ceauşescus of the Politburo: Out of Your Armchairs and Onto the Prison Floors!”

  “Down with the Empire and Red Fascism!”

  There were no portraits of the Politburo members, but there were numerous posters featuring Yeltsin (“Tell ’em, Boris!”) and Sakharov (“Conscience of the Nation”). Then came the most chilling symbol of all: red Soviet flags with the hammer and sickle ripped out—an echo of the opposition flags on the streets of Bucharest during the uprising of December 1989. The demonstrators all stopped and turned toward the Lenin Mausoleum. The square was filled with tens of thousands of people now, waving their fists, chanting “Doloi KPSS!” (“Down with the Party!”) “Doloi Gorbachev!” “Doloi Ligachev!” I borrowed a pair of binoculars and glimpsed the faces of the men on the reviewing stand. (Later I got a closer look on television.) Ligachev glared and nodded, his face hard as a walnut. Yakovlev was impassive, Yoda-like; Popov looked utterly serene, even pleased, though hesitant to let it show in such company. Gorbachev, as always, was a master of his emotions. As tens of thousands of people denounced him, he never let the minutest flicker of anger crease his face. I remembered other men in similar situations, how confused and frightened Ceauşescu had looked when he listened to those first demonstrators from his balcony in Bucharest. Gorbachev’s performance was as amazing as the demonstration itself. He watched and watched and occasionally chatted with those next to him, as if this were the most common May Day parade in memory. As if it were normal!

  The confrontation seemed as if it might go on endlessly. The demonstrators were ready to stay in Red Square all day. We all stood there, watching, still as lizards in the sun. The men on the mausoleum did not move. They merely stood there, as if they were watching something else, some other parade, instead of their own last judgment. Finally, someone ordered the Kremlin loudspeakers turned up and they started churning out patriotic slogans and marching music. But it was no match for the chanting on the square, a surge that grew louder with every minute. This was their square and there was not a goddamn thing anyone could do about it. At the center of the crowd stood a Russian Orthodox priest, his beard from the pages of Dostoevsky; he carried a seven-foot-high crucifix and shouted, “Mikhail Sergeyevich, Christ Has Risen!”

  Finally, after a full twenty-five minutes of this, Gorbachev nodded, turned on his heels, and walked off the tribune. What else could he do? Everyone, Popov included, followed. Later, I visited Popov at city hall and asked him how he and Gorbachev had felt standing there on the mausoleum.

  “For me, it was interesting,” he said. “For Gorbachev? I would say the word is … uncomfortable.”

  I also spoke to Yegor Ligachev, who told me that he had been deeply disturbed by the incident. “Not just me, but Mikhail Sergeyevich, everyone had this feeling,” he said. “On the one hand, we gave the chance for any force to march on Red Square and express themselves. On the other hand, we witnessed such extremist outbursts, such blatant aggressiveness, that
if they would come to power and we would organize such a demonstration, we would be sent directly to jail from Red Square. No doubt about that. I watched for a long time and Mikhail Sergeyevich came up to me and said, ‘Yegor, probably it’s time to finish it.’ And I said, ‘Yes, it’s time.’ And we left, with me walking beside him. It was uncivilized. I said to Mikhail Sergeyevich, ‘Once again we are seeing what a deplorable state the country is in.’ These were my exact words.”

  After Gorbachev and the rest left the reviewing stand on Lenin’s tomb, I walked into the square and joined the march at its tail end. Everyone was jazzed with a sense of power. “The leadership may try to dismiss what happened here today as just some extremists blowing off a little steam, but it runs deeper. Gorbachev has done a lot of good, but when it comes to us, the radical, he turns away from his natural allies,” one demonstrator, Aleksandr Afanasyev, told me. His face was streamed with sweat, flush with the thrill of the standoff. A young man named Vitaly Mindlin, who was carrying a pro-Lithuanian banner, told me, “I’ve been forced to go to these rallies for years, and this is the first time I’ve come voluntarily, acting from my own soul. Gorbachev may have been insulted by our openness, but we have to take that risk. We can’t afford to act as if we were someone’s subject. We are our own masters. The people dictate the moment now, not Gorbachev.”