Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  Gorbachev’s new base of operations was now a plush building in northern Moscow once known as “the School with No Name.” Foreign Communists from nonsocialist countries once came to this institute to learn their ideological catechism. Under Gorbachev, the institute was intended as half think tank and half nonprofit foundation. But it wasn’t much of either. Gorbachev was restless and open for anything, it seemed. For a sequel to Wim Wenders’s The Wings of Desire, he played himself, wandering around a soundstage improvising a soliloquy on Dostoevsky and the state of the world. For 300,000 pounds, he sold the world television rights to his life story to an independent British company, Directors International, promising interviews, archives, and other access for a four-part series.

  Naturally, Gorbachev’s enemies in the press were prepared to attack him as a carpetbagger. “Those who are responsible for this country’s catastrophe and smeared the word ‘Communist’ are now making a cozy nest for themselves at the expense of ordinary people,” wrote Sovetskaya Rossiya.

  Gorbachev was furious. “ ‘Yesterday’s men’ are a vengeful breed,” he said in a long interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda. “Before, they tried to steer us away from the democratic path, and now they are after me personally. Well, to hell with them! What am I supposed to be afraid of? The firing squad? The courts? I am not going to tolerate accusations coming from people who have spent too much of their time believing in the slogans of the thirties.”

  Unfortunately, many commentators in Russia and in the West thought it necessary to choose sides, to be “pro-Gorbachev” or “pro-Yeltsin.” They failed to see the beauty of what history had provided. Without Gorbachev, the agony of the system might have gone on indefinitely, not forever, surely—there was no money for that—but another ten, twenty, who knows how many years. What would the world look like in that case? But without Yeltsin, Gorbachev might well have dallied more than he did, the radical democrats might never have found a single, strong leader, the coup might have succeeded. As much as they had come to despise each other, Gorbachev and Yeltsin were linked in history.

  Some of the best minds in the urban intelligentsia—the constituency that Gorbachev courted and ultimately lost—now regarded their former leader with a certain air of superiority. “His speech is that of an uncultured man. He whips the air,” said Leonid Batkin, one of the leaders of the Democratic Russia movement. “Yet he is an outstanding man in his way, a great apparatchik. After Stalin, Gorbachev was the most skillful of all the apparatchiks. But when the time came for a real politician, Gorbachev did one stupid thing after another. He played his great role by yanking the stopper from the bottle. Now, he is not really interesting.”

  Natalya Ivanova, a literary critic, compared Gorbachev to “the man who gave the orders to begin the fateful experiment at Chernobyl. He wanted to refine the machine, but the machine went out of control and exploded.”

  And the novelist Viktor Yerofeyev said that Gorbachev was “like Valentina Tereshkova, the first female cosmonaut. She fainted right away and was dangling in orbit but still managed to press the right buttons at the right time just because she was dangling in the exact right place. She took off, she dangled, and she didn’t die. That was her triumph. The same with Gorbachev. Gorbachev pressed the buttons he needed to and the combination of wrong and right buttons turned out to be just right. That created a metaphysical figure—a divine provident for Russia. Gorbachev guided Russia to its historical fate. He has entered the pantheon of Russian history and gradually he’ll come to be seen as that great figure. But not soon. Russians are an ungrateful people.”

  Even Gorbachev’s most sincere critics missed the point of what he was and who he was. Gorbachev was not Andrei Sakharov. He was not a moral prophet or an intellectual giant. He was not even a man of exceptional goodness. Gorbachev, above all, was a politician. He combined a rough sense of decency with a preternatural ability to manipulate a system that had seemed, from the outside, unbendable. If, in the language of the Greek fable, Sakharov was the fox, a man with a singular sense of moral and political ideals, then Gorbachev was the hedgehog, a man capable of deceit and cruelty, a man of shifting values and ideas, but a genius at a nasty game. An irreplaceable man in his moment.

  From March 1985, when he began, until June 1989, when he presided over the first elected legislature of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev chipped away at the totalitarian monolith. From there, his personal story became tragic. He was dragged along by events and never seemed able to decide how to maneuver from one day to the next without losing himself entirely. “Watershed moments in history are not particularly pleasant to live through,” Gorbachev said many times. “Before you stands a man who has been through a lot.”

  While he was in Palo Alto in 1992, Gorbachev delivered a speech at Stanford University that echoed that moment in November 1987 when perestroika really began in earnest. It was the seventieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and Gorbachev used the occasion to declare the crimes of the Stalin era “unforgivable.” At the time, he had to speak in euphemisms, he had to celebrate six ugly incidents to denounce one. But, now, in California, with power long gone, Gorbachev wanted us to feel as though he had always been a democrat, a liberal in his heart. Instead of quoting Lenin endlessly, he referred to Tocqueville, Solovyov, Jefferson, and Berdyaev. He even thanked the dissidents for their “contribution to the intelligentsia and even parts of the Party apparatus.”

  “Politics is the art of the possible,” he said. “Any other approach would be voluntarism.… There were failures, mistakes and illusions, but the task was to unfetter the democratic process.… I tried to use tactical means to gain time, to give the democratic movement a chance to get stronger. As president, I had powers, including emergency powers, that people tried to push me into using more than once. I simply could not betray myself.”

  When I returned to Moscow at the end of 1992, the relics of Soviet Communism were passing quietly into the museums of the world and into the flea markets where kitsch is sold. “The Great Utopia,” a vast exhibition of early revolutionary art, drew enormous crowds in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and New York. On the main pedestrian mall in Moscow, the Arbat, young capitalists were conducting a bankruptcy sale of the fallen regime. They sold jackboots, epaulettes, Warsaw Pact compasses, thick tomes on dialectical materialism and scientific Communism. Maps of the Soviet Union were now sold as arch amusements, like bowling shirts or lava lamps. One student I met on the Arbat was making a killing with his stunning array of silk and velvet Communist Party banners. “I buy them cheap from retired apparatchiks,” he said. “They dig them out of the closets, and then I sell them for five times the price.”

  In the triumphant days following the defeat of the coup in August 1991, the newspapers were filled with speculation over what was to become of the Lenin Mausoleum, that transcendent model of Soviet kitsch. Surely Lenin’s waxy remains should be given a decent burial. Surely a better use could be found for the neo-cubist tomb on Red Square. A museum? An office building? A Pizza Hut? Boris Yeltsin hinted broadly that he, too, would just as soon put Lenin’s corpse in the ground and get on with the new era.

  At first, the leading figures of the Communist Party gave Yeltsin little reason to fear. He could afford a sense of irony. A few old apparatchiks gave interviews voicing muted resentment that Yeltsin had “undemocratically” outlawed the Communist Party and seized its properties in a series of three decrees issued in August and November 1991. But their voices were strained, wan, not quite convincing. Viktor Grishin, a former member of the Politburo who had made a feeble attempt to challenge Mikhail Gorbachev for the top Communist Party post in 1985, created a pathetic and fitting symbol of the old order’s sorry fate: he dropped dead while waiting in a long line at his local pension office. He was hoping for a raise.

  The Russian earthquake, however, for all its drama and ruthless speed, was far from complete. Much of the old regime survived. The smartest of the Communist Party men had long ago hired themselves out a
s “biznesmeny” and “konsultanty.” The average apparatchik hardly left his chair. Although the headquarters of the Communist Party’s Central Committee had become the headquarters of the Russian government, the personnel inside were much the same. A few weeks after the fall of the coup, one of Yeltsin’s aides visited the commandant of the Central Committee, Aleksandr Sokolov, and asked for a copy of its old phonebook. The Yeltsin government needed experienced bureaucrats. “The result is that most of the same people are sitting in the same offices as they did a year ago,” Sokolov told Michael Dobbs of The Washington Post. “When we were forming the new structures, we had to hire people from the old structures. Our supporters—the people who came to rallies and street demonstrations—didn’t know anything about how to run a country.”

  In the Russian parliament, the most influential block of deputies was aligned with Civic Union, a band of moderate to conservative collective-farm chairmen, bureaucrats, and provincial bosses. A more reactionary alliance of nationalists and Communist ideologues known as the National Salvation Front controlled another sizable block of votes. The Communists in the Russian legislature never really renounced their allegiance to the Party. Hard-liners like Sergei Baburin talked of the “renewal” of the “old ideals,” and vengeance for the destruction of the Party. The conservative newspaper Dyen (“The Day”) wrote openly of seizing power, “by any means.” Yeltsin could count on the firm support of no more than 25 percent of the deputies in parliament.

  Somewhere to the side of the daily political struggles that dominated post-totalitarian Russia, a historical sideshow had begun—a judicial battle over the life, death, and potential resurrection of the Communist Party. After members of the old regime had recovered from the shock of the coup and its humiliating aftermath, a group of thirty-seven Communist deputies petitioned the newly formed Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation in late 1991 for a hearing, declaring that Yeltsin’s decrees outlawing the Party were unconstitutional. Wasn’t Yeltsin acting as a dictator while pretending to be a democrat? A group of fifty-two anti-Communists—Yeltsin’s supporters in the parliament—filed a counterpetition, claiming that the Communist Party was an unconstitutional organization. They agreed with Yeltsin’s November 6, 1991, decree that the Party “was never a party” but rather “a special mechanism for the creation and realization of political power.”

  On May 26, 1992, Valery Zorkin, the chief justice of the new Constitutional Court, decided to try the suits simultaneously. After all, he declared, the issue was the same: was the Communist Party of the Soviet Union a constitutional political party, or something else?

  Since late 1987, with the rise of such historical societies as Memorial and the publication in the press of the atrocities of the Stalin era, scholars and human rights activists had wondered if a time would ever come in the Soviet Union for a legal accounting, a Nuremberg-style trial. The mere mention of a trial was revolutionary, for one of the fundamental principles of the Bolsheviks had been to deny the primacy of civil law. Constitutions were written, celebrated in the pages of Pravda, and ignored: the Party was above the law. Or as Lenin put it in 1918, the dictatorship of the proletariat “is unrestricted by law.” Within months of taking power, Lenin liquidated the fragile legal system that had been in place since the czarist reforms of 1864 and commenced a system of state terror that was designed to intimidate the population and ensure the survival of the regime. “We must execute not only the guilty,” Lenin’s commissar of justice, Nikolai Krylenko, said. “Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more.”

  Despite their hunger for historical judgment, even some of the best-known democratic activists in the country worried about the wisdom of a trial centered on the Communist Party. With the economy in collapse, with political structures so unsettled and moral questions of responsibility and repentance so painful and raw, where would such a trial lead? “Finally, the time has come now for this reckoning, and for repentance, but our circumstances are so peculiar in Russia that such trials are bound for failure,” Arseny Roginsky, one of the founders of Memorial, told me one evening. “Nuremberg was a trial on war crimes, and the criminals were being judged by the victors, the victims of those crimes. Here we must judge ourselves. We judge each other. And who is unsullied? Who was a pure victim of the Party? Who was not complicit? I realize that is not the stated purpose of the Constitutional Court, but those are essential questions.”

  Such a trial was certain to be hopelessly confused—a political event in which old rivalries and resentments would be at issue. The Communists wanted the forum to charge Gorbachev with the betrayal of the Party and Yeltsin with the collapse of Soviet power. Yeltsin’s team wanted to discredit Gorbachev—to take the shine off his historical reputation—and make sure that the old men of the Party had no easy access to building a conservative opposition. What was more, this was, in essence, a Constitutional Court without a constitution. The post-Communist state was still operating under the old Soviet Constitution while waiting for a new one to be written and approved.

  Gorbachev, for his part, had become a bitter, deluded man, unable to understand why his fellow Russians would want to do anything but celebrate him. From the first announcement of the trial, he declared unequivocally that he would refuse to testify in court. It offended his dignity, his stature, his sense of propriety. He would not be questioned. In public, in private meetings, and in an interview with me, he wore his resentment like a pistol. “Look,” he said, “I am not going to take part in this shitty trial.”

  The Constitutional Court convened on the morning of July 7, 1992. The courtroom was a remodeled meeting room in a part of the Central Committee complex that was once the offices of the Party membership committee. Thirteen judges, all but one of whom were former members of the Communist Party, sat at a curved dais in front of the Russian tricolor, the czarist-era flag. They wore long black robes, a strangely elegant and ecclesiastical outfit. The court had bought the fabric from the headquarters of the Russian Orthodox Church, and then Slava Zaitsev, the best-known fashion designer in Moscow, shaped it for judicial purposes. The haphazard mixture of symbols underscored the historical jumble prevalent in the court—the looming presence of the past, the fragility of the future.

  Instead of brandishing a gavel to preserve order in the court, Chief Justice Valery Zorkin tapped his pen against a golden plate that dangled before him, gonging the lawyers into silence. Zorkin’s task was as complicated as any jurist’s in modern times. In a country with such a dubious legal history, he had to invent the procedures and decorum of the Constitutional Court just as he was presiding over what would surely be its most sensational trial for years to come. Zorkin himself had been a member of the Communist Party until October 1991—a fact that initially gave the pro-Communist side some relief—but he did not much romanticize the country’s regard for law. “We have always swung from the icon to the ax,” he said. “Everyone who came to power tried to make himself into an icon, but then they were cut down by the ax, metaphorically speaking. Every ruler liked to wield state power, but no one really tried to build a rule-of-law state. It is too soon to talk of Russia as a democratic state. Only these first few steps have been taken toward the rule of law.”

  On that first day of the trial, an angry crowd of pro-Communist demonstrators gathered outside the building. They screamed at the police, demanding to be let in. This was largely the same crowd that staged regular weekend protests outside the Lenin Museum near Red Square. They sold hard-line, neo-Stalinist newspapers and carried such placards as “Gorbachev and Yeltsin: To the Gallows!” Inside, the Communists, who had initiated legal proceedings in the first place, argued, in tones of injury and outrage, that they were “on trial” only because they had had the bad luck to lose power after the coup. One of the first speakers for the Communist side was Viktor Zorkaltsev, a Communist deputy in the Russian parliament, who shifted from ornate respect to high indignation within seconds:

  “High court!

/>   “Esteemed chairman!

  “The Party that is banned here is the Party that consolidated society and rallied it to battle against fascism, thus ensuring the victory in the Great Patriotic War and sustaining, together with the people, irreplaceable human losses.… This does not mean that there have been no mistakes or negative moments in the Party’s activities. There was the dramatic phase of Stalinism in the thirties; there was suppression of dissent in the seventies; and there was the apostasy of the Party elite during the [Gorbachev] period. All of this happened. At the same time everyone knows that there have always been forces within the Party that rose up against these vices. And so it renewed itself, cleansed itself of this scum—sustaining losses, restoring its ranks, maintaining its ideals. And now, once again, this process is interrupted and it is banned at a turning point.

  “Having shackled the party, the [democrats] have destroyed the national economy and the Union itself. They have changed the social system. The carving up of Russia has begun. The country has arrived at a dead end. What Hitler, world fascism, and capitalism were not able to accomplish has now become possible after the banning of the Party. The ban on the CPSU is also a signal to other parties: ‘Beware! You are next!’ And many parties feel this danger. Therefore only those who pathologically hate democracy and do not accept the socialist idea are gloating on this occasion. Thoughtful politicians do not approve of the president’s decrees and do not support them.…”