فصل 11

CHAPTER 11

THE DOUBLE THINKERS

A very popular error: Having the courage of one’s convictions; rather, it is a matter of having the courage for an “attack” on one’s own convictions!

—FRIEDERICH NIETZSCHE, notebooks

On a winter’s night in 1986, two electricians and their KGB escort installed a “special telephone” in the apartment of Andrei Sakharov. For six years, Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner, had been living in the industrial city of Gorky under government edict, and the phone seemed at first just another Orwellian moment in the day of exiles. Maybe the Soviet press would call for an interview, Sakharov thought. Two magazines had already put in requests. Turning the moral equations in his mind, Sakharov arrived at a finely calibrated stand of principle: he would refuse all interview requests until there was no longer a “noose around my neck.” The KGB agent merely turned to Sakharov and said, “You will get a call around ten tomorrow morning.” The next day, the phone rang. A woman’s voice said, “Mikhail Sergeyevich will speak to you.” Now Gorbachev was on the line, telling Sakharov that he and Bonner could return home to Moscow.

“You have an apartment there,” Gorbachev said without a word of apology or regret. “Go back to your patriotic work!” Sakharov said a brief word of thanks, then wasted no time in going back to his “patriotic work.” He told Gorbachev that for the sake of “trust, for peace, and for you and your program,” the Kremlin was obliged to release the political prisoners included on a long list he had mailed to the leadership from Gorky. The Soviet leader said he did not quite agree that all the prisoners Sakharov was speaking for had been tried illegally. Then the two men said their awkward good-byes.

One week later, Sakharov arrived by overnight train at Moscow’s Yaroslavl Station, an event of such moral and political importance that it evoked another homecoming decades earlier—that of Lenin at the Finland Station. But no one could have predicted what was ahead for Sakharov in the three years left to him. Exile had worn him down. KGB threats, a painful hunger strike, forced feedings, random attacks, thefts of his diaries and manuscripts—all of it had taken a toll on his health. Now, as he answered questions into the swarm of tape recorders and television lights, his voice was mumbly, hesitant at times. He walked with a stoop and had to catch his breath every few steps on flights of stairs. Bonner said at the time that Sakharov would limit his activities. He would read up on developments in cosmology and work on specific human rights cases. That seemed like more than enough.

A few days after his return to Moscow, Sakharov was sitting at the kitchen table of his close friend the human rights activist Larisa Bogoraz. Another of the guests, the historian Mikhail Gefter, turned to Sakharov and said, “How are you feeling, Andrei Dmitriyevich?” Sakharov said sadly, “It is difficult to live now. People write me, they visit, and they are all hoping that I will be able to help somehow. But I am powerless.” For months Sakharov mulled over his role, tried to find his political voice. Some younger dissidents were impatient with Sakharov’s hesitation and what they saw as his naive, uncritical support of Gorbachev.

Those young dissidents probably should have known better, but the rest of the country knew Sakharov hardly at all. They could not have known what sort of man he was. Until Sakharov returned from exile, most people knew nothing more about him than the slanders they had read for years in the press. Even intellectuals with some connection to the human rights movement knew little about him. “We knew he was out there, but for years Sakharov was almost like a myth,” said Lev Timofeyev, one of the political prisoners freed shortly after Sakharov’s return from Gorky. But when Sakharov did return home, his gift for judgment became an open secret and a public trust. Many ordinary people who had been instructed to despise Sakharov came to love and trust him. Through him they saw the hollowness of the old propaganda and the system itself. There was a sense of the uncanny about Sakharov. In 1988, at a discussion sponsored by and published in Ogonyok magazine, a group of Soviet and American intellectuals went around the table trading opinions on the myriad issues of perestroika. For nearly an hour, Sakharov seemed half asleep, but when it came his turn, he found all the inherent faults in the latest wave of political reforms. He zeroed in especially on the “unhealthy” way Gorbachev continued to control both the government and the Communist Party. No one had ever said that before, and yet, as we all left the room, Sakharov’s brief exposition seemed like sense itself.

For anyone living in Moscow in those years, Saturday mornings were a time to listen to this voice. Sakharov was everywhere. He inevitably became either the chairman or the spiritual leader of all the key groups to the left of Gorbachev: first Moscow Tribune, then Memorial, and, later the Interregional Group of radical deputies in the parliament. Nearly every Saturday morning, Sakharov would sit in some dim auditorium, usually the House of Scholars on Kropotkinskaya Street, or the Filmmakers’ Union near the Peking Hotel, and for half an eternity he would doze, his great dome of a head nodding off as the speeches went on. When it was his turn at last, Sakharov would take the lectern, and in a few minutes of very formal, incisive Russian, he would make the point that most needed making, invariably pushing public thinking ever closer to the creation of a civil society.

With the authority of his life and the clarity of his thinking, Sakharov became a one-man loyal opposition, a moral genius who was now, at last, able to speak directly to the people. “Sakharov was the only one among us who made no compromises,” said Tatyana Zaslavskaya, a leading sociologist whose views helped shape the early reforms. “For us, he was a figure of the inner spirit. Just the bare facts of his life, the way he suffered for all of us, gave him authority that no one else had. Without him, we could not begin to rebuild our society or our selves. Gorbachev may not have understood it quite that way when he let Sakharov come home, but he would understand it eventually.” What made Sakharov unique was not his suffering alone. Others had suffered much more. And what made him unique was not his ideas. He shared his ideas with men and women who were dissidents even before he was—Larisa Bogoraz, Pyotr Yakir, Pavel Litvinov, Solzhenitsyn, and, for that matter, the first opponents of Russian totalitarianism, Aleksandr Herzen, Nikolai Berdyaev, Vladimir Solovyov. “My father’s ideas were not original,” Sakharov’s son Efrem told me. “His ideas of morality and liberty had all been said before. It was his fate to bring received wisdom to a place where it did not yet exist.” The story of the perestroika years—the years between the rise of Gorbachev and the collapse of the Soviet state—was, to a great extent, the story of change inside the hearts and minds of individuals. Sakharov’s life and thought prefigured that change in such a dramatic way that I would not hesitate to call him a saint. He was the dominant moral example of his time and place.

Sakharov was a scientist whose metaphors and sense of truth were rooted in an understanding of cosmology, the “magic spectacle” of a thermonuclear explosion, the calculus of the Big Bang. His unerring sense of rightness, like that of scientist-moralists from Galileo to Oppenheimer, was steeped in his understanding of the scientific problems of light and time, his firsthand appreciation of both the laws of the universe and man’s tragic tendency to turn progress into catastrophe. He held in mind, it seemed, a picture, even a music, of eternity. Sakharov once turned to his wife and said, “Do you know what I love most of all in life?” Later, Bonner would confide to a friend, “I expected he would say something about a poem or a sonata or even about me.” Instead, Sakharov said, “The thing I love most in life is radio background emanation”—the barely discernible reflection of unknown cosmic processes that ended billions of years ago.

Sakharov was a man inclined toward the purities of theoretical physics but who became the conscience of the Soviet Union, a political actor in spite of himself. His physics and his politics grew out of the same mind, the same sense of wholeness and responsibility. “Other civilizations, perhaps more successful ones, may exist an infinite number of times on the preceding and following pages of the Book of the Universe,” Sakharov wrote in his Nobel Prize lecture. “Yet we should not minimize our sacred endeavors in the world, where, like faint glimmers in the dark, we have emerged for a moment from the nothingness of unconsciousness into material existence. We must make good the demands of reason and create a life worthy of ourselves and of the goals we only dimly perceive.” For almost every young man and woman who would one day join the circle of Communist Party liberals around Gorbachev, the death of Stalin was the pivotal event of moral and intellectual life. The same was true for Sakharov. Like Gorbachev, Sakharov knew well the horrors of the age. When he was a boy, his aunt Zhenya received news of her husband’s death in the camps when one of her letters was returned “Addressee relocated to the cemetery”; later one of Sakharov’s friends died in the gulag, the authorities announced, owing to a “chilling of the epidermal integument.” And yet, Sakharov’s response to the death of Stalin was utterly typical. He heard the news while he was working on the Soviet bomb project and wrote home to his first wife, Klavdia: “I am under the influence of a great man’s death. I am thinking of his humanity.” Even in his memoirs, written three decades later, Sakharov could not pretend to understand his own reaction: “I can’t fully explain it—after all, I knew quite enough about the horrible crimes that had been committed—the arrests of innocent people, the torture, the deliberate starvations, and all the violence—to pass judgment on those responsible. But I hadn’t put the whole picture together, and in any case, there was still a lot I didn’t know. Somewhere in the back of my mind the idea existed, instilled by propaganda, that suffering is inevitable during great historic upheavals: ‘When you chop wood, the chips fly.’ … But above all, I felt myself committed to the goal which I assumed was Stalin’s as well: after a devastating war, to make the country strong enough to ensure peace. Precisely because I had invested so much of myself in that cause and accomplished so much, I needed, as anyone might in my circumstances, to create an illusory world, to justify myself.” Sakharov’s sense of patriotic urgency after the American attack on Hiroshima and also the sheer seduction of the scientific world involved left him “no choice,” he once said, but to move to a desolate weapons research center in Kazakhstan known only as the Installation, the Soviet Los Alamos. Even though he was immersed in what he called the “superb physics” of nuclear weaponry—“the sustenance of life on Earth but also the potential instrument of its destruction were taking shape at my very desk”—Sakharov still saw the gulag through the fence. The Installation, where Sakharov lived for eighteen years, was near a slave labor camp, and every morning he watched long lines of prisoners trudge to and fro, guard dogs at their heels.

Nevertheless, there was a determined innocence about Sakharov in those first years at the Installation. The prisoners and the guard dogs were a background that could be overlooked. But five months after Stalin’s death, Sakharov began a personal and political conversion ignited by nothing less than the explosion of the first Soviet thermonuclear bomb. On August 12, 1953, twenty miles from ground zero, he watched the explosion, his eyes protected by dark goggles. The test was a success, and in his memoirs Sakharov describes the vision only in its incandescence, without a trace of regret: “We saw a flash, and then a swiftly expanding white ball lit up the whole horizon. I tore off my goggles and though I was partially blinded by the glare, I could see a stupendous cloud trailing streamers of purple dust.” The government awarded Sakharov and his partner, Igor Tamm, 500,000 rubles each, dachas in the countryside outside Moscow, and the title of Hero of Socialist Labor. Marshal Kliment Voroshilov spoke for the state at the awards ceremony in the Kremlin: “I have been told that Sakharov’s work was especially outstanding,” he said. “Let me kiss you.” In the months to come, Sakharov grew more and more concerned about the effects of nuclear fallout. Secretly, he was beginning to make calculations, trying to figure out how many innocent people would likely be hurt by every nuclear test. Roald Sagdeyev, the former head of the Soviet space program, visited Sakharov at the Installation after the test and noticed how “this young, distant god of physics” drew little offhand doodles of airplanes dropping bombs as he talked. “Those were the first real doubts,” Sagdeyev told me. The accidental deaths of a young girl and a soldier at the test site also startled Sakharov. Then, after another successful test in 1955, Sakharov’s sense of complicity in these few accidents began to torture him.

At a banquet after the test, Sakharov gave the first toast, and said, “May all our devices explode as successfully as today’s, but always over test sites and never over cities.” The table fell silent, Sakharov recalled, “as if I had said something indecent.” Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, the ranking military man at the banquet, rose to give a countertoast, the rebuke.

“Let me tell a parable,” he said. “An old man wearing only a shirt was praying before an icon. ‘Guide me, harden me. Guide me, harden me.’ His wife, who was lying [in bed], said, ‘Just pray to be hard, old man, I can guide it in myself.’ Let’s drink to getting hard.” Sakharov turned pale. He understood well that Nedelin’s joke was a parable. “He wanted to squelch my pacifist sentiment, and to put me and anyone who might share these ideas in my place,” Sakharov wrote. “The ideas and emotions kindled at that moment have not diminished to this day, and they completely altered my thinking.” Finally, Sakharov understood. His moral protests were nothing to the men of the Communist Party. The Party was way beyond the control even of a Hero of Socialist Labor. So gradually, Sakharov became a dissident, and the ideas of his dissidence, which crystallized in his 1968 manifesto Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom, anticipated the ideas of perestroika.

But while Sakharov was the moral leader of the era, he was not a man of raw political power. There may have been no Gorbachev without Sakharov, no perestroika without the efforts of the dissidents to keep the idea of truth alive in a dead time, but there were other figures, less easy to love, more ambiguous, who had the political power to make something out of ideas.

Gorbachev and the most influential people around him were contradictory men, politicians, academics, and journalists whose lives were filled with doubt, small victories, and sorry compromises. They had done things of which they were ashamed or should have been. For the sake of ambition, they told themselves lies and half-truths. They served brutal masters and tried not to care too much. There was Vitaly Korotich, the crusading editor of Ogonyok, who had once been only too glad to write a scurrilous book about America called The Face of Hatred. There was the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, preternaturally vain, slippery, periodically brave. And there were the Gorbachev advisers who had worked in the Central Committee staff under Yuri Andropov and still remembered it as an oasis of free thinking: the Americanist Georgi Arbatov, the policy advisers Anatoly Chernayev, Georgi Shakhnazarov, and Oleg Bogomolov, the journalists Aleksander Bovin and Fyodor Burlatsky.

These were the shestidesyatniki—those who came of age during the thaw under Khrushchev, and grew disillusioned when Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring in 1968. They were the generation that woke to the horror of the Stalin era after Khrushchev’s “secret speech” of 1956 denouncing the “personality cult.” They harbored the dream of a humane socialism in Russia. They did not dare take the risks of full-blown dissidence, as Sakharov had, but they found a measure of independence and sanity in their work. There were scholars, like Abel Aganbegyan and Tatyana Zaslavskaya, who fled the oppressive scrutiny of Moscow for the relative academic freedom of Novosibirsk. There were journalists like Yegor Yakovlev and Yuri Karyakin who fled Pravda for Prague and wrote for the slightly liberal magazine Problems of Peace and Socialism. The shestidesyatniki, especially those from Moscow and Leningrad, were like an enormous floating club in which everyone had a nodding acquaintance with everyone else. They scrutinized each other’s compromises and drew fine distinctions that would appear to be nonsense to anyone outside. The gossip in this crowd was as thick as it is in official Washington or the studios of Hollywood. Whether they worked in academia, for the press, or inside the Central Committee, it was all the same: every day they were faced with questions of what to say, whom to protect, when to withdraw. They thought one thing and said another, and sometimes, after speaking lies long enough, they believed them and were beyond redeeming.

“Gorbachev, me, all of us, we were double-thinkers, we had to balance truth and propaganda in our minds all the time,” said Shakhnazarov, an elfin intellectual who was at Gorbachev’s side from start to finish. “It is not something I’m particularly proud of, but that is the way we lived. It was the choice between dissidence and surrender.” Westerners were often fast to judge these people. They came from countries where liberty was almost a given, and still they mocked men and women in the Soviet Union who looked foolish in the act of trying to save both their families and their souls. The system made beasts of them, and it was a sorry sight. When the atmosphere of fear began to fade under Gorbachev, there were those who grabbed the public stage shamelessly, as if all that they had done in the past was of no matter. Some had trimmed their ideological sails for so many years that it was hard to take them seriously. They were indecent. But there were also quite a few who not only relished their new power, they understood their contradictions. They were complicated men and women who had done the best they could and knew their best was far from exemplary. Len Vyacheslavovich Karpinsky, a columnist and later editor in chief of Moscow News, was among the most likable because his case was one of the most complicated and tragic.

Len Karpinsky’s parents were Old Bolsheviks. He was named in honor of his father’s mentor and friend Lenin. “The name Len was pretty common then and so was Ninel, Lenin backward, or Vladilen for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin,” Karpinsky said. “I’m just glad I didn’t get a name like Elektrifikatsiya or some others my friends got stuck with.” Karpinsky’s father, Vyacheslav Karpinsky, belonged to a generation of revolutionary romantics, the fin de siècle Communists. He joined the Communist Party in 1898, and in 1903, after his activities as a political organizer got him into trouble with the police in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov, he went into exile. In Switzerland he was Lenin’s aide and copy editor. In Moscow, after the Revolution, he helped Lenin assemble his personal archives from exile and held various posts at Pravda and the Central Committee’s Department of Propaganda. He received three Orders of Lenin and in 1962 became the first journalist ever named a Hero of Socialist Labor.

For the Karpinsky family, a life in revolution provided an elevated sort of existence. From 1932 to 1952, they lived in the House on the Embankment with the Kremlin elite: generals, Central Committee members, agents of the secret police. There were billiard halls, swimming pools, and, for the children, Special School No. 19. When Len Karpinsky was a boy, he was even friendly with a couple of Stalin’s nephews. At a birthday party once, the playing stopped as the runty, pockmarked man with the withered left arm—the Mountain Eagle, the Friend of All Children—stood in the doorway. “Children!” one of the adults announced. “Iosif Vissarionovich is here!” Stalin waved and smiled. The children all waited in silence until he left, and then resumed their games.

That was in 1935. In the coming years, Len watched dumbstruck as one acquaintance after another in the building lost parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and friends to the great furnace of Stalin’s purges. Nearly every night, secret police vans would arrive and there would be arrests—an admiral, a lecturer on Marxism-Leninism, the sisters of a spy in a foreign embassy. “There was a knock and then they disappeared,” Len said. It had been the world of Yuri Trifonov’s novella The House on the Embankment—a world where “a life went on that was utterly different” from the life of ordinary people. Now it was a world where the most devoted revolutionaries, the most obsequious ministers, suddenly found themselves declared “plotters” and “infiltrators” and “enemies of the people.” Karpinsky’s family was, by the standards of the building, not hard hit. One of his aunts and her two brothers were sent off to the camps. To this day, Karpinsky does not quite understand why his father, the very sort of Lenin loyalist who so threatened Stalin, was never arrested and executed. The only reason he can think of now, he said, is that by 1937 or 1938, his father was semiretired and out of politics.

From the moment that the leadership installed Karpinsky’s old friend Yegor Yakovlev as editor in chief, Moscow News became the paper of the thaw generation, subtly breaking taboos formed over seventy years. From time to time I visited Karpinsky at the Moscow News office, on Pushkin Square, and he always seemed to me an honest man, if a limited writer—a representative figure whose life had been, as he put it to me, “the inner conflict between the ambition to be a boss in the Communist Party and the almost involuntary development of a conscience.” His appearance, waxen and drawn, spoke of that struggle. He looked exhausted at every minute of the day. His face was long, lined, and worn. The fingers of his right hand were yellowed up to the first knuckle from tobacco. More often than not when I called and asked how he was, he would say dryly, “My health is awful. I’m spending the week in a sanatorium. I may die.” Karpinsky was so unassuming, so ironic about his own failures and hesitations, that it was hard to believe he was once, in the culture of Soviet politics, as ambitious as any flaxen-haired kid who takes a job as a Senate intern and starts talking about “the day I run for office …” He believed deeply in Communism and in himself, in his entitlement to success. After entering Moscow State University in 1947, he began working as a “propaganda man” at factories and construction sites during the days before the Party’s single-candidate elections. “My assignment was to make the workers get up at six in the morning and go to the polls,” he told me. “There was a competition among the propaganda men over whose group would be the first to finish voting. The limit was midday, by which time the whole Soviet people was supposed to have voted. That was a decision of the Party. We eighteen-year-olds were supposed to conduct propaganda among the workers, and the only tool was the promise to improve their housing conditions. They lived in horrible slums, railway cars with no toilets, no heat. I loved the work, thought it was a great service and, yes, a stepping-stone. At the university, Yuri Levada, who is now a well-known sociologist, wrote an article about me called ‘The Careerist.’ And it was true. I did it all with the idea of getting to the top. That was what it was all about: to be one of the bosses.

“But having said that, I have to say a few words in self-defense. Society during the Stalin era left open no real opportunities for self-realization or self-expression except within this perverted system of the Communist Party. The system destroyed all the other channels: the artist’s canvas, the farmer’s land. All that was left was the gigantic hierarchic system of the Party, wide at the base and growing narrower as one climbed to the top. You had to have a Party membership just for admission. That was the only opportunity. When you are engaged in that work, you forget about the social and political implications, and just do it. Gradually, this sort of life bifurcates your mentality, your intellect. You can begin to understand that life is life and it’s better to do something good for thy neighbor than to climb upward stepping on their bones. But it all depends on moral principles. I suppose my first doubts came when I went to Moscow State University in 1948. A Jewish friend of mine named Karl Kantor was attacked at the university’s Party committee at the start of Stalin’s anti-Jewish campaign. That was just the start of a long transformation.

“After graduation, I was sent to the city of Gorky for Komsomol work. It was in 1952 and Stalin had one more year to live. I got to know the working class and the peasants there. I saw the utter degradation, the ruin. I saw Soviet society as it had really emerged. This ‘intellectual conscience’ that I talk about began to emerge. Some people still think, erroneously, that the life of the apparatchik breeds only conformists and subjects loyal to the regime. Actually, the regime splits people into two opposing factions: those who believe they can make it only through conformism and time-serving, and those who, thanks to a different structure of mind, dare to question the surrounding reality.

“So when Stalin died, I realized perfectly well what he had been all about. Still, I went to the funeral in Moscow out of curiosity. I felt like one of those prisoners in the camps who threw his hat in the air and cried, ‘The man-eater has finally kicked the bucket!’ My father’s reaction to Stalin’s death was interesting. By then he was retired, working for the Central Committee only as a consultant. He sat there in his office typing on an old Underwood which he had brought from the offices he had in Switzerland with Lenin. He called me into his study and said, ‘Son, Comrade Stalin has passed away. And having been an epigone of Lenin, he created all the necessary conditions for our cause to triumph.’ It was so strange. My father had never talked so formally before to me in his life. I think he talked that way because his generation had always carried a burden to promote at all times the Party line and he felt it was his duty to pass that down to his children. But in a way, this was a man, eighty years old, who had conceived of his idea of the Party before the Revolution and while living in exile. He had to convince not me, but himself. He was talking to himself.” When Karpinsky returned from Gorky to Moscow for good, in 1959, the thaw was in full swing. Novy Mir, Aleksandr Tvardovsky’s monthly journal of literature and opinion, was publishing texts critical of the old regime. Khrushchev himself read a manuscript copy of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and sanctioned its publication in Novy Mir. Karpinsky’s friends Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky were winning a following with their lyrics and public performances. In various pockets of the Central Committee apparatus, young apparatchiks wrote proposals and outlines of economic and political reform—though all within certain boundaries of ideology and language. For his part, Karpinsky worked as head of the Komsomol’s Department of Propaganda and Agitation and as the editor of Molodoi Kommunist (“Young Communist”). Then in 1962 he joined the empyrean of the adult Communist world. He was promoted to Pravda’s editorial board heading the department of Marxism-Leninism. He had made it.

“Once I was back in Moscow from Gorky, my critical approach weakened somewhat,” Karpinsky said. “I was part of the elite again, and not merely as my father’s son but as a real member. I was part of the top nomenklatura, and the nomenklatura is another planet. It’s Mars. It’s not simply a matter of good cars or apartments. It’s the continuous satisfaction of your own whims, the way an army of boot-lickers allows you to work painlessly for hours. All the little apparatchiks are ready to do everything for you. Your every wish is fulfilled. You can go to the theater on a whim, you can fly to Japan from your hunting lodge. It’s a life in which everything flows easily. No, you don’t own a yacht or spend your vacations on the Côte d’Azur, but you are at the Black Sea, and that really is something. The issue is your relative well-being. You are like a king: just point your finger and it is done.” Karpinsky’s potential as a man of the Communist Party elite was unlimited. It is conceivable that he could have won election to the Politburo one day. He was a Soviet Ivy Leaguer: bright, ambitious, a legacy. One afternoon, at a Kremlin ceremony, two of Khrushchev’s most powerful partners in the leadership, Mikhail Suslov and Boris Ponomarev, complimented Karpinsky as their golden boy, their comer. One of them said Karpinsky was like a “son of the regiment” to them and they saw for him a great future in the ideological department of the Communist Party. “We are pinning our hopes on you,” Suslov said.

Working in that rarefied atmosphere, Karpinsky got to know nearly every figure who would make a difference (one way or another) during perestroika. He was friendly with Yegor Yakovlev, the Lenin biographer who became the editor of Moscow News; Yuri Karyakin, a Dostoevsky scholar who was among the leading radical deputies in the Congress of Peoples Deputies; Aleksandr Bovin, the gargantuan journalist at Izvestia who promoted the “new thinking” in foreign policy; the reform-minded economists, Gavriil Popov and Nikolai Shmelyov and the sociologist Yevgeny Ambartsumov; Otto Latsis, the son of an Old Bolshevik and an editor at Kommunist; Gennadi Yanayev and Boris Pugo, who helped lead the August coup; and even the leading triumvirate of reform, Eduard Shevardnadze, Aleksandr Yakovlev, and Gorbachev himself.

“I first met Gorbachev in the sixties when I was working at Pravda and he was in Stavropol working in the Komsomol organization there,” Karpinsky said. “He was not very well known at the time, but I must tell you that Gorbachev was saying the same things then that he did at the beginning of perestroika. He was in Moscow on some business trip or another—I forget what it was all about—but we met for a couple of hours, and I was impressed. He talked about the outrage of paying combine operators by the mileage and not their output. In a nutshell, he spoke about the absurd system of incentives, or lack of them, in the economy. He was excitable, but somehow very rational. And for the first two or three years of perestroika, Gorbachev was the same sort of innovator he was when he was young. The innovative projects were always limited, within certain boundaries, and that, of course, was telling later on. Well, I understand him. Like all of us, Gorbachev had to have a dual nature. It was in his mind and soul. He knew well that the idea of reward for work well done was considered out of the ordinary but not quite heretical. You could experiment with something limited like that. But we were not allowed to make any political or philosophical conclusions that the system itself was a failure. In your mind you avoided such conclusions. You were simply incapable of thinking that way. To think that way was not only career suicide, it was a form of despair. And so, like the rest of us, Gorbachev hedged—outwardly, and within himself.” Karpinsky and his friends were, at first, not greatly upset with Brezhnev and Suslov’s overthrow of Khrushchev in 1964. When Karpinsky heard the news, he and Yegor Yakovlev celebrated over a bottle of cognac. Khrushchev had long since tightened restrictions on the press and the arts, and he had become prone to unpredictable decisions—a manic “voluntarism,” as the Party language had it. It was only years later, when Khrushchev was a sad old man living in the exile of his dacha, that Karpinsky called him to wish him well on his birthday. Karpinsky said he was calling on behalf of the “children of the Twentieth Party Congress” and that Khrushchev should know that one day history would make clear to everyone the importance of that session, in 1956, at which he leveled his first attacks against Stalin’s “cult of personality.” “I have always believed this and I am very pleased that you and your relatively young generation understand the essence of the Twentieth Congress and the policies I initiated,” Khrushchev replied. “I am so happy to hear from you in my twilight years.” It did not take Karpinsky or anyone else long to realize that Brezhnev had no intention of instituting reforms. Just the opposite—a neo-Stalinist movement was in the works. One night at dinner with Yevtushenko and Otto Latsis, Karpinsky began to pronounce aloud what was happening to his generation, to its way of thinking. “Our idea was this: when one has an education in philosophy and a certain intellectual background, one begins to understand the inner properties of reality, something I termed ‘intellectual conscience.’ It’s not a natural, inborn conscience, yet a conscience that stems from a kind of thinking that links you with a moral attitude to reality. If you understand that everything in this society is soaked in blood, that society itself is heading toward collapse, that it is all an antihuman system—if you understand this instinctively and intellectually—then your conscience cannot remain neutral. Look, I never really took any risks, and didn’t want to. I was sort of compelled to take the steps I did by my conscience. And once compelled to take those steps, I could never foresee the bad consequences. Every time I thought I’d get away with it. And every time I didn’t.” Karpinsky made his first real foray into the netherworld of what he called “half-dissent” in 1967, and it was a personal disaster. He and a friend at Pravda, Fyodor Burlatsky, wrote an article in Komsomolskaya Pravda calling, in a euphemistic way, for an easing of censorship in the theater. Karpinsky now says the piece was “half rotten,” especially its solipsistic arguments that the best way to eliminate anti-Soviet sentiments from the theater would be to let the people, and not the official censors, decide. That way, the authors said, the playwrights would have no right to complain about the government, and so would be deprived of a source of anger and subject matter. But the article, “On the Road to the Premiere,” contained one idea, plainly stated, that caused an uproar when it appeared: the personality cult, Karpinsky and Burlatsky said, had been criticized only lightly, and the censors were preventing anything deeper.

Brezhnev, who had already begun the ideological rehabilitation of Stalin, was furious when his aides brought the article to his attention. He took it as a personal attack. By chance, the article appeared on the same day that a member of the Central Committee criticized the country’s enormous arms industry, which had been Brezhnev’s province before he became general secretary. Karpinsky, Burlatsky, and the editor of Komsomolskaya Pravda were all fired. Karpinsky was quickly appointed to a job at Izvestia, but after he made a few critical remarks at a meeting of that paper’s Communist Party committee, he was eased out of that post, too.

Despite his inherited romantic view of Bolshevism and his own pleasure in the perquisites of power, Karpinsky could no longer hide his disaffection. The invasion of Czechoslovakia, in August 1968, was, for Karpinsky and many of his friends, a breaking point. He did not join the seven young protesters who went to Red Square. Nor did he form any close links with Sakharov or other leading intellectuals who had decided, once and for all, to give up their lives in the hierarchy for the dangers of political dissidence. But he did act. Under the pen name L. Okunev, Karpinsky wrote a long article titled “Words Are Also Deeds,” for circulation only among a select group of friends and would-be reformers within the world of the Party and its official academies. (The pseudonym was an inside joke—“Karpinsky” derives from “carp,” and “Okunev” from “perch.”) In the article, Karpinsky argued that free thought—and not “rows of armed soldiers, insurgent crowds, columns of revolutionary sailors, or a volley from the cruiser Aurora”—would one day challenge the Soviet system. Furthermore, the state structures and ideological machinery would not be able to resist, for the system “lacks any serious social basis. It cannot convince anyone of its viability and only hangs on by the instinct of self-preservation. The face of neo-Stalinism we are passing through is just the outward expression of the ‘uneasy forebodings’ the petty tyrants feel. They long for the old regime, the ‘Stalin fortress,’ but they find only decrepit foundations too weak to support such a structure.” The article, like nearly all of Karpinsky’s writings, is clogged with indirection and filler, great clots of undigested verbiage typical of a Party apparatchik. But this piece was remarkable not only for its points of clarity and daring but also for its prescience. Here was an apparatchik (“We are pinning our hopes on you,” Suslov had said) who now believed no more in the viability of the Bolshevik state than did Sakharov himself.

“Our tanks in Prague were, if you will, an anachronism, an ‘inadequate’ weapon,’ Karpinsky wrote. “They ‘fired’ at—ideas. With no hope of hitting the target. They ‘dealt with’ the Czechoslovak situation the same way that at one time certain reptiles ‘dealt with’ the coming age of mammals. The reptiles bit at the air, gnashing their teeth in the same ether that was literally seething with the plankton of renewal. At the same time, fettered by their natural instincts, they searched for ‘hidden stocks of weapons’ and diligently occupied the postal and telegraph offices. With a fist to the jaw of thinking society, they thought they had knocked out and ‘captured’ its thinking processes.” Karpinsky also provided an insider’s view, identifying within the monolith of the Party structure “a layer of party intellectuals.” He went on to say, “To be sure, this layer is thin and disconnected; it is constantly eroded by cooption and promotion and is thickly interlarded with careerists, flatterers, loudmouths, cowards, and other products of the bureaucratic selection process. But this layer could move toward an alliance with the entire social body of the intelligentsia if favorable conditions arose. This layer is already an arm of the intelligentsia, its ‘parliamentary fraction’ within the administrative structure. This fraction will inevitably grow, constituting a hidden opposition, without specific shape and now aware of itself, but an actually existing and widely ramified opposition at all levels within the administrative chain.” It was this “layer” that made itself known when Gorbachev came to power. The dissidents were the bravest and most clear-minded of all, but in the early Gorbachev years they did not constitute, in numbers or in force, an adequate army. As if from nowhere, intellectuals within the Party, the institutes, the press, and the literary, artistic, and scientific worlds slowly took a Soviet leader at his word when he said that this would be a different age. For once, the purposes of a Kremlin leader and the liberal intelligentsia intersected.

The tragedy was that by the time Gorbachev came to power there were so many broken lives: great minds lost to emigration, drink, suicide, despair, or sheer cynicism. It was a miracle, after seven decades of murder and repression, that there was any intelligentsia left at all. “So many people had been destroyed,” Karpinsky said. “One can behave in that split way of thinking for a while, but then you begin to degenerate and start to speak only what is permitted and the rest of the conscience and soul decays. Many people did not survive to perestroika. We had to create an internal moral system, and not everyone could sustain it indefinitely. Solzhenitsyn spoke about this in his essay ‘Live Not by Lies.’ I understood his viewpoint, and we tried not to live by lies, but we couldn’t always manage it. If you ignore the regulations of the state completely, and go into complete dissidence, then you can’t have a family, you don’t know where you will get rent money, and your children would have to go into the streets to scrape up money. To fulfill this principle of living not under a lie in every aspect is just impossible, because you live in a certain time.

“Compared to the people who were not afraid of prison, my friends were not heroes. We abstained from direct acts. This position was itself a compromise. But it was like the sort of compromises you make when you are in the same cage with a lion. It is understandable, though nothing to be proud of. When I myself was in the position of having to say what I felt, I said it. I just didn’t deliberately try to put my head in a noose. I used Aesopian language. I had to use hints about progress, but nothing more. What we did publish only hinted at our real thoughts.” But Karpinsky’s “Words Are Also Deeds” went far beyond Aesopian language. In 1970, Karpinsky gave a copy of his text to Roy Medvedev, the Marxist historian. One night, Medvedev called Karpinsky and told him that the KGB had ransacked his apartment and taken every manuscript in sight, including “Words Are Also Deeds.” For a few years, Karpinsky was oblivious to the trouble he was in. He bounced around from job to job, from a sociology institute to editing Marxist-Leninist works at Progress Publishers. But in 1975, when he was caught working on the manuscript of his friend Otto Latsis’s book On the Eve of a Great Breakthrough, an analysis of collectivization and Stalinism, the KGB called him in. Naturally, the interrogator was an old friend: a Komsomol buddy named Filipp Bobkov, who had become one of the most infamous figures in the Soviet secret police. Karpinsky tried to soften up Bobkov. “When you came to me there was tea and cookies,” he told him. “You don’t even offer me tea. It’s not very polite.” Bobkov was not amused. He had passed along the damning documents to the Communist Party Control Committee, and Len Karpinsky, son of Lenin’s friend and the Party’s great hope, was expelled. Suslov, for one, viewed Karpinsky’s transgressions as a personal betrayal.

Now Karpinsky did whatever he could to make a living—among other things, commissioning paintings and monuments for a state agency, for which he received a minuscule salary. He kept up his friendships, talked politics, lived awhile at the dacha he had inherited from his father. The moment of reckoning he had written about in “Words Are Also Deeds,” the advent of dissent as a cultural and political fact of life, seemed years and years off.

Even after Gorbachev took power, Karpinsky never dreamed change could come so quickly. And at first it did not. Although the liberals in the Politburo secured the editorship of Moscow News for Karpinsky’s friend Yegor Yakovlev and told him to transform this tourist giveaway sheet, published in Russian and several foreign languages, into a “tribune of reform,” glasnost was initially a process of hints, insinuations. To read now through a stack of Moscow News issues from 1987 and 1988 is to get lost in a blur of nonlanguage. The barriers were immense at first, the victories almost unbearably difficult. When the editors of Moscow News wanted to print a simple obituary of the émigré poet Viktor Nekrasov, the Politburo itself had to give permission, and did so only after long debate.

“But, still, the change was tremendous,” Karpinsky said. “The difference between ‘the thaw’ and ‘glasnost’ was a difference in temperature. If the temperature under Khrushchev was two degrees above zero centigrade, then glasnost pushed it to twenty above. Huge chunks of ice just melted away, and now we were talking not only about Stalin’s personality cult, but of Leninism, Marxism, the essence of the system. There was nothing like that under Khrushchev. It was just a narrow opening, through which only Stalin’s cult could be seen. There were no real changes. And as we saw, it could all be reversed. The bureaucracy, the Party, the KGB, all the repressive apparatus in charge of the intelligentsia and the press, remained in place.” For Karpinsky, Moscow News provided the opening to a public hearing and a rehabilitation. In March 1987, he published a long article, “It’s Absurd to Hesitate Before an Open Door.” Like his other liberal pieces of the past, it was a mixed performance. Karpinsky made sure to blast the West for what he thought was its phony concern for the Soviet dissidents, but he also made a crucial point that was getting close consideration within the government but was rarely voiced in public: the critique of Stalin begun in 1956 would have to go deeper. Reform without a thorough consideration of the country’s “core” problems, the rottenness of its history and foundations, would be meaningless.

Karpinsky wanted to rejoin the Party not only as personal vindication but also to play a role in what was still the central institution of political power. At a meeting with the chairman of the Party’s Control Commission, however, the hard-liner Mikhail Solomontsev mocked Karpinsky. From a thick stack of papers that had obviously been compiled by the Party and the KGB, Solomentsev pulled out a copy of “Words Are Also Deeds” and, holding it up, he shouted, “You still have not disarmed ideologically! Nothing has changed in our party!” But things had changed. The sharp ideological divisions within the Party had now become an open secret, an open struggle, and the trick was to get the support of powerful liberals within the structure. Three old friends—Yuri Afanasyev, Nikolai Shmelyov, and Yuri Karyakin—brought to the Nineteenth Special Party Conference, in June 1988, a petition demanding Karpinsky’s rehabilitation. With the help of his old acquaintances Aleksandr Yakovlev and Boris Pugo, the tactic worked. By the next year, Len Karpinsky was in the regular rotation as a columnist at Moscow News—a golden boy, he says, “of a certain age.”