Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  “We tread through it very lightly,” he said with a waxen smile.

  And, as if to underscore his point and my own, some of Pugo’s men slaughtered eight Lithuanian border police during the Bush visit. Pugo denied any knowledge of the incident. He just had no idea.

  Gorbachev was humiliated. “It’s hard to say what has happened,” he told the press, with the American president sitting next to him.

  In the meantime, Kryuchkov had tapped Gorbachev’s phones and everyone with even the remotest access to the president—even Raisa Gorbacheva’s hairdresser. The eavesdropping logs had Gorbachev as “110,” Raisa as “111,” and dozens of other codes. Kryuchkov could tolerate the president no longer. “Gorbachev is not reacting adequately to events,” the KGB chief said repeatedly to his fellow conspirators.

  Maybe it was the weather that confused everyone, the bright sun and cool wind that duped one into thinking that soon all was going to be just fine. Or maybe it was the news that Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin’s last surviving lieutenant, had dropped dead.

  For nearly four years I had been trying to meet Kaganovich, all to no avail. “I see no one,” he said over the phone in a voice like worn leather. He had been duped once. A Soviet pensioner, pretending friendship, had come by to talk, and the old and lonely man had let him in, answered his questions. He never suspected his remarks would be published in Sovetskaya Kultura. In that conversation, Kaganovich made no apologies for his life, and described the reform of the Stalinist state in a tone of wan disgust. He thought it incredible that people could still blame Stalin for the rotten state of the country.

  “Stalin died thirty-five years ago!” he said. And besides, how could they attack a man who “saved the country from fascism”?

  Kaganovich complained about his health, his heart attacks, his sleepless nights. But one thing, he said, kept him going: “Socialism will be victorious. Of this I am sure.” It was outrageous, he said, that we were letting Hungary and Poland and the rest “return to a bourgeois line.” Here, in the Soviet Union, such a reversal was impossible.

  “I believe in the strength of our party,” Kaganovich said. “And socialism will be victorious. This is for sure.”

  Even in death, Lazar Moiseyevich managed to insult his country’s dignity. In the 1930s, the secret police used to bring the bodies for cremation to the Donskoi Monastery. At the height of the purges, as many as one thousand victims were cremated there every day. And now Kaganovich, who oversaw much of this industry, was going to be cremated at Donskoi.

  While I was off doing summit business, my friend Masha Lipman managed to sneak into Kaganovich’s apartment and had a long talk with the old man’s nurse. The poor women smelled as if she’d downed at least a bottle of vodka. The apartment was like the library of a ghost, shelves packed with dusty volumes of Communist Party proceedings from long ago.

  At Donskoi, Kaganovich’s mourners did not seem much interested in the man’s victims. They crowded around a dilapidated bus as it pulled onto the grounds, the long, ribbon-covered coffin laid out in the rear end. Kaganovich’s daughter, Maya, an old woman herself, led the relatives into the chapel. Before the eulogy, someone opened the coffin lid to reveal the face of Stalin’s loyal henchman: black suit, flabby neck, long nose, a fine gray mustache, a huge and withered corpse. The mourners listened as they heard the brief eulogy lauding the great man’s construction of the Moscow subway. No one mentioned that he had played a leading role in collectivization. When the eulogy was over, the coffin somehow sank below floor level and automatic doors closed over it. The furnace, I was told, was downstairs. Soon Kaganovich would be a handful of ash.

  Outside, afterward, Kaganovich’s nephew Leonid told me, “History is still being debated. But what is evil? You must understand the times he lived in.” Besides the family, there were about a hundred Stalinists there to bury their last great hero. People were weeping. “He was a man who never changed his mind,” said Kira Korniyenkova, one of the Stalinists in town I knew best. “He was a great Marxist-Leninist.” Another mourner told me, through his tears, that this was a great man, but “if it were Gorbachev laid out dead here today, I wouldn’t lay down a single flower, I can tell you that.”

  As we left the monastery, Masha and I saw Ales Adamovich. A few years before, Adamovich had been sued by the Stalinist lawyer Ivan Shekhovtsov for slander. It was Adamovich who had warned Gorbachev in the Congress of the generals who would one day commit bloodshed and wipe the evidence on his suit. He could not resist going to the funeral of Lazar Kaganovich. “Stalin and Hitler and Nero: I think Kaganovich fits into the list,” he told me. “This represents the fall of Stalinism. So who will be next to die? The Communist Party itself?” I’d never met a man at a funeral in a better mood.

  Maybe what made the men of the regime seem so vulnerable that summer was that they had long ago lost the Mystery.

  The Mystery—the theological notion that the acts and purposes of the deity are unknowable—was always a critical part of the pseudo-theology of the atheist state. Stalin must have gotten the idea during his failed career in the seminary. One of the keys to his own mystery was to stay out of sight; hence, a pockmarked mediocrity becomes a god. For decades, the Thursday-morning meetings of the Politburo were more mysterious than sessions of the College of Cardinals; transfers of power were more difficult to decipher in the Kremlin than in the Vatican. The catechism language of Vremya, the iconic posters of the great leaders, all added to the Mystery. And now it was all but gone. Now we learned from the press the details of the Lenin Mausoleum; it turned out that there were other floors beneath the holy of holies, and on one of them there was the gymnasium for the guards and a bathroom and buffet for visiting luminaries; beneath that there was a “control room” which carefully monitored the temperature and deterioration of Vladimir Ilyich. Yeltsin’s memoir, Against the Grain, became an underground best-seller precisely because it hacked away at the Mystery. He revealed what the mighty talked about in private, their petty greed, their weakness. He described for all Gorbachev’s taste for luxury, his marble bathrooms and swimming pools.

  One morning, Komsomolskaya Pravda ran a story about a woman who had worked for many years as a seamstress in the secret tailor shop the KGB maintained for the use of the country’s highest leaders. Klava Lyubeshkina stitched suits for everyone, from the entombed corpse of Lenin (“every eighteen months the cloth begins to lose its original splendor”) to Gorbachev. “The tailor dummies of the Politburo members were kept in special closets which nobody except us, the cutters and tailors, dared ever to touch,” she told the paper. “We always worked behind closed doors and surrounded by armed guards.… Two or three times a year a KGB specialist would go abroad, usually to Scotland or Austria, to buy material for the suits.”

  The secret police had opened the shop in 1938, the height of the purges. Klava saw her customers only on Vremya and referred to them, mysteriously, as “units.” She was devoted. She would watch the leaders on television expressly “to see if their suits fit them well or if there were wrinkles.” She remembered how she worked night and day for three days to get ready the gold-embroidered laurel leaves and stars in heavy gold thread for the new defense minister, Marshal Ustinov. She remembered Andrei Gromyko’s stinginess (“He always sent in for repairs, never a new suit”) and Mikhail Suslov’s temper tantrums when the fit was not quite right.

  Klava’s sense of the Mystery ended one day when three men in white smocks attacked her, twisted her arms behind her back, and dragged her off to a psychiatric clinic. The KGB had mistaken her for a dissident. Klava asked to be released, saying that she was making a suit for Yuri Andropov which had been left “unattended” at the studio. The agents let her use the phone and she was able to tell her colleagues where she was. Soon the KGB released her. For the “moral damage” committed, the state awarded Klava a Japanese watch. Just before she retired in 1987, she had the pleasure of making a suit for Gorbachev. The new Soviet leader rewarded her with a box of
chocolates.

  In her old age, Klava received a poverty-level pension of 100 rubles a month. She wrote the Kremlin for more but got nothing. The Bolsheviks, however, could not be counted as unfeeling men. In 1991, Kryuchkov mailed all the seamstresses cards wishing them well on International Women’s Day. Klava, for her part, took her pleasure in revealing her trove of secrets from the Kremlin sweatshop to the twenty-five million readers of Komsomolskaya Pravda. “We worked there for so long in silence,” she said, “and all along we wanted to reveal the mystery.”

  Most of the apparatchiks who still came to work at the Central Committee that summer were tired and old and deeply worried. They were hanging on, hoping to get another year on the gravy train. The smart ones had all become businessmen.

  Arkady Volsky had been a loyal servant to the Party. He was an aide to Andropov, a captain of socialist industry, an adviser to Gorbachev. And he knew what was coming. So Volsky and some of his semiliberal and ultra-clever friends started to take a look around at the new world. They saw how the Young Communist League, once the incubator of rising ideologues, had become the Harvard Business School of the new culture, turning out entrepreneurs who moved quickly into everything from video-game concessions to computer sales to publishing. With access to government connections, extraordinary tax breaks, and hundreds of millions of rubles in Party funds, Komsomol leaders set up huge commercial banks that began to dominate the Soviet financial scene. Some of the older liberals in the Party were cashing in, too. Svyatoslav Fyodorov, an internationally known ophthalmologist and member of the Central Committee until 1990, set up a modern, independent clinic and made a fortune. When Prime Minister Pavlov visited Fyodorov’s clinic and demanded 80 percent of the clinic’s hard currency earnings, Fyodorov told him, “Fuck off.”

  “The political fight for power now is the fight for property,” Fyodorov told Komsomolskaya Pravda. “If people get property, they will have power. If not, they will forever remain hired hands.”

  Volsky and an experienced factory manager named Aleksandr Vladislavlev started the Scientific Industrial Union. The idea was that they would act as fixers between potential foreign investors and the existing enterprises in the Soviet Union. As if to make sure that everyone understood the kind of connections he had within the Party and the world of Soviet industry, Volsky rented office space for 750,000 rubles a year in a building adjacent to the Central Committee. “We’re here for the same reason a bank in New York wants to be on Fifth Avenue,” Vladislavlev told me. It was brilliant. The union was the place to go for high-powered access. “We link our resources and cheap labor with your brains and technology,” Vladislavlev said. “You come to us because we know where the best deals in privatization are.” Thirty-nine Soviet industrial associations, such as the Association of Military Factories, paid 10,000 rubles annually to be members. Another two thousand individual enterprises paid a percentage of their profits as dues.

  It was a sweet deal, and I wrote an article for the Post about the emerging class of Communists-turned-capitalists in the spring. When a couple of my editors came for the Bush summit, I had to find places for them to go, people for them to see. They mentioned they might like to see Arkady Volsky. Why not?

  We arrived, three of us, at Volsky’s office for what we thought would be an interview about the economy.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Volsky greeted one editor.

  “Pleased to meet you,” he said to the next.

  And then to me, “Less pleased to meet you.”

  He glared and flared his nostrils like a bull. This was not going to be easy, I thought. I had no idea why.

  For a few minutes, Volsky complained that my article had been unfair, that it made fun of a “normal” process of creating a market economy. But then his complaints took an ugly turn. Volsky noted that I had written that one of his main “konsooltants” was Rodimir Bogdanov, a well-known KGB officer. Through the late stagnation and early glasnost years, Bogdanov was one of the few people visiting foreigners could come to for an interview. What’s more, Volsky pointed out, I had written that Seagram’s chairman Edgar Bronfman and the real estate and publishing magnate Mortimer Zuckerman had met with Bogdanov and other people at the union in hopes of completing possible business deals.

  “You are the worst kind of anti-Semite!” Volsky barked. Why had I besmirched the reputation of such a good man as Bogdanov, why had I mentioned two such obviously Jewish names as Bronfman and Zuckerman. “Don’t you realize what people will do with this?”

  I could not quite tell yet whether Volsky, in his fury, knew that I was Jewish. To be frank, a Malawi tribesman could take one look at me and say, “This man is a Jew.” But Volsky was off on a flight.

  “This is ridiculous,” I said finally. “Don’t you realize I’m no different from Zuckerman or Bronfman? Just poorer. Where do you get off lecturing me on anti-Semitism?”

  I did not understand what it was all about until Volsky finally said, “Don’t you realize what those people up the hill can do with this?”

  “Up the hill” from us was Lubyanka, the headquarters of the KGB.

  Volsky, for all his financial cleverness, for all his guile and connections to the military industrialists, was one of the moderates in the upper echelons of the apparat. He helped found in August, with Yakovlev, Shevardnadze, Popov, and Sobchak, the new Movement for Democratic Reforms. And like the others, he had a sixth sense for what was brewing in the minds of the men who would make the coup. Volsky was a nervous wreck, and he had taken a little bit of it out on me.

  The liberals who still had some access to Gorbachev were hopeful about the new alliance with Yeltsin, but they saw ominous signs that summer. They had always known, despite their public assurances, that an open counterrevolution was a possibility. The truth was, Shevardnadze told me, “We have always had difficulties since the very first days of the April plenum in 1985 and the beginning of perestroika. If someone thinks that Pavlov, Kryuchkov, and Yazov’s predecessors were more progressive, they are mistaken. There were also very strong conservatives back then. It’s important to have at least a general idea of the sort of struggle there was in the political leadership for the ‘general line’ and for perestroika.”

  Shevardnadze said that after his resignation as foreign minister in December 1990, he still got calls from his conservative rivals in the leadership on matters of practical politics: how to deal with the Afghans, who was who in the various Western governments. But he said he noticed by about June 1991 that he was no longer being consulted as he had been. He got the sense that a vacuum was growing around him and that his phone was bugged. “A shadow power was forming,” Shevardnadze said.

  Yakovlev, too, said he watched helplessly as Lukyanov, Kryuchkov, and the rest surrounded Gorbachev with deceptive advice. “These are toadies,” Yakovlev told me. “They will look at you with these honest blue eyes and say, ‘We’re with the people, we’re your only saviors, the only ones who love and respect you. And these democrats, they criticize and insult you.’ Gradually, it affects a person. Lukyanov would pretend to be a democratic cohort, and then at Politburo sessions he would be a bigger hawk than anyone. Lukyanov would say, ‘Suppress them totally! Mercilessly!’ He would say, ‘You know, Mikhail Sergeyevich, they are aiming at you, they are trying to get you, to overthrow you.’ ”

  In July, just before he left Gorbachev’s staff for good, Yakovlev told Gorbachev, “The people around you are rotten. Please, finally, understand this.”

  “You exaggerate,” Gorbachev said.

  Shevardnadze and Yakovlev, the two men who had been closest to Gorbachev at the peak of perestroika, now watched helplessly as the storm clouds gathered. “Gorbachev is a man of character. A person with no character could not have started perestroika himself,” Shevardnadze wrote in his memoir. “Gorbachev will enter history as a great reformer, a great revolutionary. It was not so easy to begin. But he enjoyed maneuvering too much.… Of course, a major politician has to know how to maneu
ver, but there must be limits. There comes a moment when one has to say that tactical considerations are not the most important thing, that this is my strategy, my stake is with democracy and the democratic forces. And in this, he was too late, my dear friend.”

  The hints of betrayal were everywhere that summer. Gorbachev’s press secretary, Vitaly Ignatenko, picked up little clues of impertinence and over-confidence among the conservatives that worried him. He saw how on August 2, before there was any order from Gorbachev, someone cut off Yakovlev’s Kremlin phone lines and government communications systems. Meanwhile, the darling of the apparatchiks, Yegor Ligachev, who had been retired for a year, still had Kremlin phone lines … in his apartment.

  Ignatenko also said that while he was on vacation in Sochi in the days before the coup, he noticed that Politburo member Oleg Shenin moved into dacha No. 4 on the special compound, a separate personal residence. “He was vacationing not according to his rank,” Ignatenko said, “but in a huge dacha which had not been occupied in six years or more.… Only the president had the right to his own dacha there, or maybe the prime minister.”

  For those in the know, the clues were unending. Aleksandr Prokhanov told Nezavisimaya Gazeta that the time had come for the “patriotic forces” to seize power “by the throat.” Prokhanov said that the movement allying “Marxist-Leninists, Marxist-Stalinists, Russian Communists, social democratic liberals, extremist pro-fascist organizations, writers, artists, the military industrialists, monarchists, and pagans” was forming fast to prevent the disintegration of the country. “Our nation should have a real leader,” he said. “People cannot be left to the mercy of fate at a time like this.”