Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (23 page)

…It was dangerous tinkering with this edifice. Stalinist, Soviet, call it what you will…Our state has always been in a state of mobilization. From its inception. It was not built for peacetime. Again…you think we weren’t capable of spitting out some trendy women’s boots and pretty bras? Plastic VCRs. It would have been child’s play. But we had other objectives…And the people? [
A pause.
] The people want simple things. A surplus of ginger-snaps. And a Tsar! Gorbachev didn’t want to be Tsar. He refused. Compare him to Yeltsin…When, in 1993, he felt the presidential seat begin to rock underneath him, he kept his wits about him and gave orders to fire on the parliament. The Communists had been too sheepish to shoot in ’91…Gorbachev ceded power without any bloodshed. But Yeltsin fired from the tanks. He went into battle. So that’s that…and the people supported him. Our country has a tsarist mentality, it’s subconsciously tsarist. Genetically. Everyone needs a Tsar. Ivan the Terrible, as they call him in Europe, who drowned Russian cities in blood and lost the Livonian War, is remembered with fear and awe. The same goes for Peter the Great and Stalin. While Alexander II, the Liberator…the Tsar who gave Russia freedom, who abolished serfdom…he was murdered. The Czechs can have their Vaclav Havel, but we don’t need a Sakharov in charge here, we need a Tsar. The Tsar, the Father of the Russian people! Whether it’s a general secretary or a president, it has to be a Tsar. [
A long pause.
]

—

He shows me his notebook with quotations from the Marxist classics. I write down a quote from Lenin: “I would live in a pigsty as long as it was under Soviet rule.” I confess that I haven’t read Lenin.

…And then there’s something else…there’s another story to air…This conversation is, as they say, between friends. There was a chef at the Kremlin. All the members of the Politburo would order herring,
salo,
black caviar—Gorbachev preferred kasha. Salads. He asked not to be served black caviar: “Caviar goes well with vodka, but I don’t drink.” He and Raisa Maximovna dieted and fasted. He was nothing like any of the general secretaries who had come before him. He loved his wife in a tender, entirely un-Soviet manner. They’d take walks together, holding hands. Yeltsin, on the other hand, needed a pickle and a shot of vodka first thing in the morning. Now that’s Russian. [
A pause.
] The Kremlin is a terrarium. I’ll tell you a story…only don’t use my last name…let me be an anonymous source…I’m retired…Yeltsin put his team together, and they swept the “Gorbachevites” out; one way or another, he got rid of everyone. That’s why I’m sitting here with you—because I’m retired. Otherwise, I’d be as silent as a partisan. I’m not afraid of the tape recorder, but it does bother me. Just out of habit, you know. We were so heavily scrutinized; it was like being in an X-ray machine…[
A pause.
] It might seem like a little thing, but it’s telling…Akhromeyev moved to the Kremlin and right away, he refused the raise they offered him, even though it was several times his former salary. He asked to keep what he had: “It’s enough for me.” Who’s the Don Quixote here? And who would call Don Quixote sane? When the Central Committee and the government passed the decree on the compulsory relinquishment of any foreign gifts worth over five hundred rubles to the government (the war on special privileges had begun), he was the first and one of the only people to actually comply. Kremlin mores: serve, scratch backs, know who to inform on, and when to laugh at somebody’s joke. Whom to say hello to and whom to acknowledge with a slight nod. Calculating everything in advance…Where is your office? Is it close to the president’s office, is it on the same floor? If not, you don’t count, you’re small-time…What kind of phones do you have? Do you have a
Vertushka
?
^*10
What about a telephone labeled “President,” a direct line to “Himself”? Did they give you a car from the special garage?

…I’m reading Trotsky’s
My Life.
It takes you behind the scenes of the Revolution…Today, everyone blames Bukharin. His motto, “Prosper and accumulate,” is apt. Timely. “Bukharchik” (as Stalin christened him) proposed to “grow into socialism.” He called Stalin “Genghis Khan.” But he’s also an equivocal figure…He was prepared, like everyone else, to hurl people into the inferno of international revolution without counting the bodies. To educate with executions. Stalin didn’t invent that…All of them were military people—after the Revolution, the civil war. After all that bloodshed…[
A pause.
] Lenin once said that revolutions come when they want to, not when we want them to. Indeed…so…Perestroika, glasnost…We all let it slip through our fingers…Why? The upper echelons of the government had their share of smart people. They read Brzezinski…But their attitude was that they’d patch it up, give some parts of it a fresh coat of paint, and keep going. They didn’t understand how sick our people were of everything Soviet. It’s not that they had much faith in the “bright future,” but they believed that the people believed in it…[
A pause.
] No, Akhromeyev wasn’t murdered…Let’s ditch the conspiracy theories. His suicide was like a parting shot, a bold statement of the most essential fact: We were hurtling into an abyss. We had a great nation, it was victorious in a terrifying war, and it was collapsing. China didn’t fall. And neither did North Korea, where the people were starving to death. While little socialist Cuba stood, we were falling. And we weren’t defeated by tanks and missiles, we were destroyed by our own greatest strength: our spirit. The system and the Party rotted from the inside. And maybe, that’s why…that may have also contributed to why he did it…

…He was born in a remote Mordovian village and lost his parents when he was very young. He went to war while still a naval cadet. As a volunteer. On Victory Day, he was in the hospital with total nervous exhaustion, weighing thirty-eight kilograms. [
A pause.
] A tortured, sick, and dead tired army had triumphed. Emaciated, coughing. With spinal injuries and arthritis, gastric ulcers…That’s how I remember the victory…He and I are from the same generation, we’re the people who lived through the war. [
A pause.
] He rose from cadet to the very peak of the military pyramid. The Soviet state gave him everything: the highest military rank of Marshal, the Hero’s Star, the Lenin Prize…All that bestowed on a boy from a simple peasant family, and not some crown prince. From the middle of nowhere. The USSR gave thousands of people like him a chance. Poor, simple people…And he loved the Soviet state back.

—

The doorbell rings. An acquaintance of his enters. They discuss something for a long time in the hall. When N. returns, I can tell that he’s somewhat upset and not as eager to talk; luckily, a little while later, he becomes engaged again.

—

We used to work together…I invited him to join us, but he refused: These are Party secrets, it’s forbidden to reveal them. Why let outsiders in on them? [
A pause.
] I wasn’t a friend of Akhromeyev’s, but I knew him for many years. No one else took up the cross to try to save the country. Only him. The rest of us were too busy fussing over our personal pensions and doing whatever we could to hold on to our government dachas. I have to say something about this…

…Before Gorbachev, our people only saw their leaders on the Mausoleum rostrum: muskrat fur hats and stony faces. A joke: “Why have muskrat hats disappeared?” “Because the
nomenklatura
reproduces faster than muskrats.” [
He laughs.
] More jokes were told in the Kremlin than anywhere else. Political jokes…anti-Soviet…[
A pause.
] “Perestroika”…I don’t remember exactly when, but I think that the first time I heard that word was from foreign journalists while I was abroad. Here, we were more likely to say “acceleration” and “the Leninist path.” Abroad, the Gorbachev boom was in full swing, the whole world had caught Gorbymania. They called everything that went on here perestroika. All the changes. Wherever a motorcade bearing Gorbachev went, thousands of people lined up along the road. Tears, smiles. I remember all that…the people started loving us! The fear of the KGB dissipated, and, most importantly, they put an end to all of that nuclear insanity…For that, the world was grateful to us. For decades, everyone had been terrified of nuclear war, even children. We got used to watching one another from the trenches. Through the crosshairs…[
A pause.
] In European countries, they started teaching Russian. Restaurants started serving Russian food: borscht,
pelmeni
…[
A pause.
] I worked in Canada and the U.S. for ten years. When I came home during Gorbachev’s tenure in office, I met a great many sincere and honest people who wanted to take part in everything. The last time I’d seen people like that, with faces like that, was when Gagarin went into space…Gorbachev had a lot of ideological allies, but very few among the
nomenklatura
. Or the Central Committee, or the regional committee…They called him the “Resort Secretary,” because they had brought him to Moscow from Stavropol where general secretaries and members of the Politburo liked to go on vacation. The “mineral water secretary” and “son of a juice” because of his antialcohol campaign. The dirt on him was accumulating: While visiting London, he didn’t go to Marx’s grave…Unheard of! He came back from Canada singing its praises, saying how nice it was there. This was nice, that was nice…While here…you know what it’s like here…Someone couldn’t help themselves: “Mikhail Sergeyevich, it’ll be that way here, as well, in a hundred years or so.” “That’s pretty optimistic.” Incidentally, he was always trying to provoke people…[
A pause.
] I read an essay by a so-called democrat who said that the war generation…which is to say, us…was in power too long. We won the war, rebuilt the country, and after that, we should have left because we had no conception of how to live in peacetime. And that was the reason why we fell behind in the world…[
He snarls.
] “The Chicago Boys”
^*11
…“The boys in pink shorts”
^*12
…Where has our great country gone? If this had been a war, we would have won. If there had been a war…[
He takes a long time to regain his composure.
]

…Gorbachev became more and more like an evangelist instead of a general secretary. He was a TV star. Soon enough, everyone got sick of his sermons: “back to Lenin,” “a leap into developed socialism”…It made you wonder: What have we been building, then, “underdeveloped socialism”? What did we have…[
A pause.
] I remember that abroad, we saw a different Gorbachev who barely resembled the Gorbachev we knew at home. Over there, he felt free. His jokes landed, he articulated his thoughts clearly. At home, he played the game, walked the line. And these things made him appear to be weak. And a windbag. But he was not weak. And he wasn’t a coward, either. None of that is true. He was a shrewd, calculating politician. Why were there two Gorbachevs? If he’d been as open at home as he was abroad, the elders would have instantly torn him to pieces and eaten him alive. And there’s another reason. He…it seems to me…had stopped being a communist a long time ago. He no longer believed in it…Either secretly or subconsciously, he was a social democrat. He didn’t advertise it, but everyone knew that when he was young, he was a student at Moscow State University with Alexander Dubček, the leader of the Prague Spring, and his comrade-in-arms Zdeněk Mlynář. They were friends. In his memoirs, Mlynář wrote that when they were read Khrushchev’s address to the Twentieth Party Congress at a closed Party meeting at the university, they were so shocked, they spent the whole night wandering Moscow. In the morning, on Lenin Hills, like Herzen and Ogarev before them, they swore to devote their lives to fighting Stalinism.
^*13
[
A pause.
] Those are the roots of perestroika…It came out of Khrushchev’s thaw…

…We’ve already broached this topic…From Stalin to Brezhnev, our country’s leaders had all seen battle. Lived through the Terror. Their psychological makeup was forged under conditions of violence. In constant fear. They couldn’t forget 1941…the Soviet Army’s humiliating retreat to Moscow. How soldiers were sent into battle empty-handed and told that they’d win their weapons in combat. They didn’t count the people, but they did count the rounds of ammunition. It’s understandable…It makes sense that people with these kinds of memories believed that in order to defeat the enemy, we needed to keep pumping out tanks and fighter jets. The more the better. There ended up being enough weapons for the USSR and America to destroy one another a thousand times over. And yet they kept making more. Then a new generation came to power. Gorbachev’s entire team was made up of the children of the war years…The joy of peace had been impressed on them…Marshal Zhukov overseeing the Victory Parade on a white steed…It was a new generation and a different world. While the older generation didn’t trust the West and saw it as an enemy, the younger one yearned for the Western way of life. Of course Gorbachev spooked the elders! They were disturbed by his talk of “building a nuclear-weapon-free world”—goodbye, postwar doctrine of the “balance of fear.” He said that “there can be no victors in nuclear war,” so we started cutting back on defense, reducing the size of the military. The first-rate ammunitions plants were slated to start putting out pots and juicers…Was that how it was going to be? There was a moment when the top brass generals were practically at war with the administration. Specifically, with the general secretary. They couldn’t forgive him for the loss of the Eastern Bloc, our retreat from Europe. Especially from the GDR. Even Chancellor Kohl was taken aback by Gorbachev’s lack of calculation: We were offered huge sums of money to exit Europe and he refused them. His naïveté was astonishing. Russian simplicity. That’s how much he wanted to be loved…To have French hippies wearing T-shirts with his face on them…He represented our country’s interests worthlessly and humiliatingly. The army was forced to withdraw into the forests, into the Russian fields. Officers and soldiers lived in tents. In mud huts. Perestroika…It was like war, it was no renaissance…