The workers were enraged. They blew the shop floor whistles and started gathering in the courtyards. There they talked of a strike and drew up placards: “Give Us Meat and Butter,” “We Need Places to Live.” They ripped down portraits of Khrushchev and burned them. Terrified, the plant managers locked themselves in their offices. The local Communist Party officials refused to meet with any of the strike representatives.
Meanwhile, the regional military command had been on alert for weeks in anticipation of the announcements of price hikes and wage cuts. According to Shaposhnikov, the regional military commander, General Issa Pliyev, received a stream of coded orders from the Ministry of Defense and Khrushchev himself. That first night, KGB officers and police arrested some of the most outspoken factory workers in an attempt to head off a potential strike.
Two members of Khrushchev’s inner political circle, Anastas Mikoyan and Frol Kozlov, were already in the city. Shaposhnikov, who had been put in charge of the armed detachments stationed near the locomotive factory, told the two Politburo members that he was “gravely concerned” that the troops were carrying guns. A confrontation, he said, could lead to bloodshed.
“Commander Pliyev has been given all the instructions he needs,” Kozlov replied angrily.
On the morning of June 2, at around eleven o’clock, seven thousand workers and other demonstrators began their protest march from the locomotive plant to the center of Novocherkassk. They ignored the troops and tanks that surrounded the plant. As they marched, some workers tried to block the railway line leading into town as a further show of protest. “But people were unarmed, peaceful. They even carried portraits of Lenin,” said Vladimir Fomin, one of the region’s deputies in the Russian parliament. The greatest offense of the marchers was their willingness to question Moscow. “Khrushchev for sausage meat!” the protesters chanted.
Anticipating violence, Shaposhnikov told all his soldiers to empty the ammunition from their guns and for the tank brigades to do the same. As the column of demonstrators passed, Shaposhnikov stopped one worker and asked where they were going.
“Comrade General,” the worker said, “if the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad will go to the mountain.” They were headed for the police station and Communist Party headquarters. Shaposhnikov radioed ahead to Pliyev and told him that the column of protesters was now moving across the Tuzlov bridge and into town.
“Stop them! Don’t let them pass!” Pliyev shouted into his radio.
“I haven’t got enough men to stop seven thousand people,” Shaposhnikov said.
“Send the tanks! Attack them!” Pliyev said.
Shaposhnikov said, “Comrade Commander, I see no enemy that our tanks ought to attack.”
Pliyev slammed down the receiver in a rage. In that moment of dead air, Shaposhnikov sensed disaster, but he thought he might be able to head it off. He jumped in a jeep and tried to catch up with the protesters. But by the time he neared the city’s central square, the marchers were at the gates of the police station, demanding that the strike leaders be let out of jail. Suddenly, soldiers started firing into the crowd. Some witnesses said the troops were issued dumdum bullets, which expand on impact. In a panic, the crowd turned and started to flee up Moskovskaya Street. The troops continued firing at their backs. One woman lay in a flower bed bleeding to death. Her arm had been shot off.
By the time the crowd was gone, Solzhenitsyn wrote, “the soldiers looked around for trucks and buses, commandeered them, loaded them with the dead and wounded, and took them to the high-walled military hospital. For a day or two afterward these buses went around town with bloodstained seats.”
News of the killings spread to other factories. Workers left the plants and staged an even bigger rally in the center of town. “Trucks full of workers arrived from everywhere,” one witness recalled. “It was a torrent of human bodies. No force on earth could have stopped them.”
“Khrushchev! Khrushchev! Let him see!” the crowd chanted.
Soon Mikoyan was on the radio. He spoke of “hooligans” and “the tragic accident.” The police issued a curfew order and sent the crowd home. The army left its troops and tanks in the city for weeks. Within two days, the official press ceased all mention of the Novocherkassk affair. And so it stayed for decades.
General Shaposhnikov was a loyal Party member with memories of the first days of the Revolution. He could not understand why the local Communists had not simply met with the workers as “comrades” and negotiated with them. He thought that he should write a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Maybe they would understand. After all, he thought, the Soviet army simply did not attack its own people. You could read it in Lenin, in all the Party rulebooks! He remembered how the Party always referred to “Bloody Sunday” when the czarist police in 1905 attacked a crowd of peaceful petitioners. The Party and its army would never act that way.
Shaposhnikov asked to speak with the Party officials. He was refused. Even after a few months went by, the general could not let the killings pass. He began sending anonymous letters to the Soviet Writers’ Union in Moscow in the naive hope that their “great humanism” would be of help to him. And so Shaposhnikov, a Hero of the Soviet Union in his sixties, wrote: “The Party has turned into a car which is steered by a reckless, drunken driver who is always breaking the traffic rules. It’s high time to take away the driver’s license and prevent a catastrophe.… Today it is extremely important that the working people and the intellectuals should see clearly the essence of the political regime under which we live. They must realize that we are under the rule of the worst form of autocracy which rests on an enormous bureaucracy and an armed force.… It is necessary that people learn to think. Our blind faith is turning us into mere living machines. Our people have been deprived of all political and international rights.”
Once more Shaposhnikov’s idealism was betrayed. The Writers’ Union was a hopelessly corrupt organization, a swamp of toadies, and its officers turned Shaposhnikov’s letters over to the KGB. Shaposhnikov said his intentions were never “anti-Soviet” but rather “anti the bureaucrats and their arrogance.” Somehow the KGB did not see it that way. The general began noticing that his mail was arriving already opened. He soon confirmed that he was under surveillance. In 1966, with no explanation, the army forced him out of active duty. In 1967, police searched his apartment and confiscated his archives. Without even pretending to secrecy, they also installed a listening device in the bedroom wall. “I was basically under house arrest, and I was followed by men in dark glasses all the time,” Shaposhnikov said. “There was nothing I could do. Some friends remained loyal, but it was very hard for them, especially in a provincial place like this. They saw what was happening. People tried to avoid me. They would actually cross the street just to avoid saying hello to me in town.”
Finally the KGB called Shaposhnikov to local headquarters for a prolonged interrogation. Over and over they demanded that he confess to “anti-Soviet” activities, and Shaposhnikov always described his work in the countryside teaching illiterate workers to read, his work in the mines for 20 kopecks a shift, his long and celebrated career in the army. “How could I have been anti-Soviet when I gave Soviet power everything?” he said. “If anyone had been dedicated to building Communism, it was me.” He was stripped of his army rank and his membership in the Communist Party. Only by writing an impassioned letter to the KGB chief, Yuri Andropov, did Shaposhnikov save himself from jail.
Through the Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko years, there was not much for the general to do except live in shabby retirement. While other Soviet generals had generous benefits—dachas, special food orders, generous pensions—Shaposhnikov lived no better than a retired factory worker. To pass the time and make a few extra rubles, he wrote memoirs of the war, about the tank assaults on the Nazis on the Ukrainian front. The books were published, but, of course, they had nothing to do with the massacre at Novocherkassk.
Through
out the sixties and seventies, the general never connected with the underground political ferment in Moscow and Leningrad. The truth was, the dissident movement confused him. It seemed directed not only at the leadership, but also at the foundations of Leninist ideology. “I could never understand that,” he said.
When Gorbachev came to power in 1985, Shaposhnikov wrote five letters to the Kremlin. They all went unanswered. Finally, in 1988, he got an imperious letter from the Supreme Court: “Your case has now been dismissed in view of the absence of corpus delicti.… The acts perpetrated by you in the sixties provided ample grounds for bringing charges of anti-Soviet propaganda against you. It is only in the context of perestroika and the democratization of all spheres of life in the Soviet Union that it has become possible to find you not guilty.”
It would be hard to find a more egregious example of indirection and self-righteousness in the service of simple justice. But Shaposhnikov was only relieved. He began going once more to his local Party meetings—“I am sixty years a Communist!” But his faith is of a certain kind. In 1990, when a group of young officers in the army scandalized the generals by forming the reformist group called Shield, they made Shaposhnikov their honorary chairman. They even asked him to speak at a huge antigovernment rally in Moscow just as troops were killing Azerbaijanis on the streets of Baku. “I thought a long time about what I wanted to say that day,” Shaposhnikov said. “I thought about that afternoon in Novocherkassk and everything that is going on now, and so I said the army has to vow that they are always with the people and not against them. We can never shoot at our own people. Otherwise we are nothing. Otherwise, we have no future. We’d better remember that.”
MOSCOW
Even after “Bloody Sunday” in Vilnius, the hard-liners wanted still more blood. They wanted to provoke a confrontation with the opposition forces that would require force; they wanted an incident so ugly that they would finally have the pretense they needed to step in, declare a state of emergency, and put an end to the strikes and the defiant leaderships in the Baltic states, Moldavia, Georgia, Armenia, and, most of all, Russia.
Gorbachev was showing no signs of relaxing his position. In early March 1991, he proclaimed victory in a referendum to preserve the union, but he knew well that he had been trumped by Yeltsin. Yeltsin added a second question to the ballot asking voters of the Russian Republic if they wanted direct elections for a Russian president. They voted overwhelmingly for a June election. Until now, Yeltsin had been the Russian leader, but only because he had been elected chairman of the republican parliament, and then only by a narrow margin. But Yeltsin knew two things: first, that he would run and win; second, that such a victory would force Gorbachev, who had never been elected to anything by the people, to deal more seriously with the opposition.
But for now, as president of the country and general secretary of the Party, Gorbachev still thought his power was with the Party, the KGB, and the military. He listened to them almost unquestioningly, even to their wildest deceptions. Shevardnadze, whose instincts and judgments had proved uncanny since the day of his resignation speech, saw in his friend Gorbachev a man who was a prisoner “of his own nature, his conceptions, and his way of thinking and acting.” All through 1991, Shevardnadze wrote in his memoir, it was “none other than Gorbachev himself [who] had been spoon-feeding the junta with his indecisiveness, his inclination to back and fill, his fellow-traveling, his poor judgment of people, his indifference toward his true allies, his distrust of the democratic forces, and his disbelief in the bulwark whose name is the people—the very same people who had changed thanks to the perestroika he had begun. That is the enormous tragedy of Mikhail Gorbachev, and no matter how much I empathize with him, I cannot help but say that it almost led to a national tragedy.”
Yakovlev told me that Gorbachev believed the chiefs of the KGB and the Interior Ministry police when they informed him that the reformers were actually planning to storm the Kremlin walls using “hooks and ladders.” To tighten the screw, Pravda’s deputy editor, Anatoly Karpychev, repeated the same rumors in print, writing that the radicals were making “preparations for the final storming of the Kremlin.” Yakovlev exploded, telling Gorbachev that these so-called intelligence reports were sheer nonsense and that he was making a fatal error in listening to all the sycophants and double-dealers around him. But Gorbachev was sure he knew better.
“You exaggerate,” he told Yakovlev.
Against Yakovlev’s advice, Gorbachev ordered a ban on demonstrations in Moscow from March 26 to April 15 and gave Boris Pugo’s Interior Ministry control of the Moscow police force, taking it out of the hands of the liberals who ran city hall. Gorbachev authorized all law enforcement bodies to “use all necessary measures to ensure appropriate public order in the capital.”
The battle had reached a point of no return. Yeltsin called a demonstration for March 28. In his own legislature, he was facing a vote of no confidence from the orthodox Communist deputies. In February, Yeltsin had gone on television blaming Gorbachev for driving the country “to the edge of the abyss” and for flirting with military dictatorship. Gorbachev, he said, had to step down and power must be transferred to the collective rule of the republican leaders.
By March 27, the center of Moscow looked like an armed camp. Like the czars who once kept a cavalry unit stabled near Red Square in case of an uprising by university students, the Soviet police meant to deny the center of the capital to the pro-democracy demonstrators. More than fifty thousand Interior Ministry troops positioned water cannons and tear-gas launchers along the streets. Row after row of empty buses and troops cut off all access roads to Manezh Square outside the Kremlin.
The hard-line press and Tass ran ominous warnings, including the threat to use “all means at our disposal” from the KGB chief of Moscow, Vitaly Prilukov. Democratic Russia’s leaders realized that they would never get to the Manezh, where they had held so many rallies before, but they did not call off the demonstration. Instead, they said, people should gather at two alternative spots: the Arbat metro station and Mayakovsky Square near the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall.
On the morning of the 28th, I walked with my friends Masha and Seriozha to the statue of Mayakovsky. We were more than an hour early, and while we waited to meet some other friends, we saw people selling pro-Yeltsin and anti-Gorbachev buttons; others listened to the new pro-opposition radio station, Echo of Moscow, which was describing the troop positions along Gorky Street and all around the Manezh. Like the Chinese demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in 1989, the demonstrators were going out of their way to seem casual, as if pretending that the worst could never happen. A bunch of teenagers were taking the afternoon as a tusovka, a hangout, and they were listening to a tape of Exile on Main Street on their boom box. For once, Mick Jagger’s voice of threat seemed like more than puffed-up theater. As more and more people crowded onto the square, I was getting jumpy. What would prevent these generals from picking a fight? They had made a mess of their coup in Vilnius, it was true, but the KGB still had the means to provoke a conflict, to make it seem as if the demonstrators were out of control, and then “restore order.” It hadn’t been many weeks before that I was talking to General Boris Gromov, the last Soviet commander in Afghanistan and now Pugo’s deputy, and he was telling me that one “can stand back and be polite for only so long. But sooner or later, you have to take action.” Not long before that I interviewed fifteen generals and admirals at the Congress of People’s Deputies one afternoon, and all fifteen said they thought Viktor Alksnis, the “black colonel,” had the right idea.
The demonstration began. The usual speakers—Afanasyev, Popov—spoke. There were the usual banners—“CPSU to the Ash Heap of History!”—and the usual chants. We marched a little this way, a little that way, but mostly we stood still. The simple fact that so many people had ignored the threat of violence was demonstration enough. We heard from other marchers, and even from an American senator who happened to be there, David Boren of Ok
lahoma, that plainclothes police, probably KGB, had punched and beaten a few demonstrators who had ventured too close to the armed cordon near the Manezh. But the incidents were few. The demonstration turned out to be boring, blissfully boring.
On the face of it, the day had been a political draw. The soldiers held their ground and the demonstrators marched in defiance of Gorbachev’s order and avoided any serious provocations. But in this case, victory belonged to the opposition. The whole stew of opposition forces—urban intellectuals, teenagers, pro-independence people from the republics—proved that they were willing to face down a threat with their bodies as well as their slogans. As we walked home, my friends and I noticed that the crowd was full of itself. They were celebrating a great victory. If the attack on the Lithuanian television tower was the rehearsal for a coup, the protection of the Lithuanian parliament and now this demonstration were rehearsals for the resistance. The resistance looked far more impressive. How could the KGB ignore that? What’s more, how could Gorbachev?
MAGADAN
For the first time in their thousand-year history, Russians were about to elect a president. In those last days of the old regime, in the last few days of the June 1991 campaign, I went to the farthest shore of the empire, to Magadan, where Stalin’s slave ships docked and the labor camps of Kolyma began. I had never seen a city so desolate. In the days of the Great Purge and for years after, prisoners called the rest of the country the “mainland,” as if Magadan and the wastes of Kolyma beyond were an island in the sea of nowhere. Even now it seemed to me a ghostly place, a landscape of the dead. Mornings, the water was the color of iron, the sky the color of milk. The black-green hills were shrouded in a dense mist and long wisps of smoke trailed into the sky from the tin-shack slums known as Shanghai. Even in the center of town, the loudest sound was from the desultory passing of beat-up cars, Ladas, Volgas, and Zhigulis, their tires smearing the slush.
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