فصل 19

PART III

REVOLUTIONARY DAYS

CHAPTER 19

“TOMORROW THERE WILL BE A BATTLE”

The facts of history evolve into the mythologies of history, but I had never realized just how quickly. Everything I was watching in Moscow, Vilnius, Siberia, and beyond instantly transcended “the facts”—the meetings, the demonstrations, the newspaper accounts, the transcripts and videotape. No part of the narrative, no conflict or uprising, was without its mythic dimension: the revenge drama of Gorbachev-and-Yeltsin, the David-and-Goliath drama of Lithuania-and-the Kremlin, the ironic drama of the coal miner proletariat. Most mythic of all was the presence of a saint among the foolish and the vain, among the insulted and injured. Sakharov was the founder of fire (the hydrogen bomb) who renounced his gift; who dedicated himself to the rescue of the Land of Nod when rescue seemed quixotic; who returned from exile to reveal his wisdom and prod the czar.

But there was the man, too, and, by the end of 1989, Sakharov looked as though he had wrung the last ounce of blood and energy from his body. He was sixty-eight and his face was delicate as parchment. He spoke in a slurred mumble. He had trouble walking up more than seven or eight stairs before gasping for breath; he was stooped, listing a little to the right. And yet the demands on his time and energy only increased. There were more visitors now to the apartment on Chkalova Street than there had been in the seventies when Sakharov’s kitchen table was the crossroads of the human rights movement. Now no one had reason to be afraid to come, and so they all did, reporters, filmmakers, friends, foreigners on the make, acolytes, deputies, scholars from abroad.

In bringing home Sakharov from Gorky, an act that met with much grumbling in the Party nomenklatura, Gorbachev felt himself to be the kind and benevolent czar. He was proud. But Sakharov refused to indulge Gorbachev’s vanity. Even in that first telephone conversation from Gorky, he quickly reminded Gorbachev of the death of one political prisoner, his dear friend Anatoly Marchenko, and then pressed for the release of a long list of others. Sakharov did what saints do; he lightly complimented the czar when he did right, but never let him relax. Sakharov’s support was conditional; his decisions were based not on intra-Party realities—though he understood them well—but on a set of moral standards that could be etched on two small tablets of stone.

Sakharov respected Gorbachev as a brave politician, but he was not in awe of him. During the first session of the Congress, Gorbachev had given Sakharov the floor immediately and often, but when Sakharov tried to press Gorbachev into endorsing a “decree on power” that would end the Communist Party’s guaranteed ascendancy, Gorbachev’s response was haughty disdain. Saints annoy, and Sakharov annoyed Gorbachev profoundly. Even the transcript, devoid of the glares, the peremptory, bullying tone of Gorbachev’s voice, showed that much: GORBACHEV: Anyway, finish up, Andrei Dmitriyevich. You’ve used up two time allotments already.

SAKHAROV: I’m finishing. I am leaving out arguments. I have left out a great deal.

GORBACHEV: That’s it. Your time, two time allotments, has run out. I beg your pardon. That is all.

SAKHAROV: [Inaudible]

GORBACHEV: That’s all, Comrade Sakharov. Do you respect the Congress?

SAKHAROV: Yes, but I respect the country and the people even more. My mandate extends beyond the bounds of this Congress.

GORBACHEV: Good. That’s all!

SAKHAROV: [Inaudible]

GORBACHEV: I ask you to finish. I ask you to conclude. That’s all! Take away your speech, please! [Applause in the hall] I ask you to sit down. Turn on the other microphone.

There was part of Gorbachev that could not help but respect Sakharov, even envy him; but it rankled him, too, that the man he had deigned to release was, somehow, untouchable, uncontrollable. Sakharov seemed, somehow, to float above politics even as he was engaged in the most critical debates. When an Afghan vet attacked him and Sakharov was booed and whistled at by the hard-line majority, some viewers called in worried that Andrei Dmitriyevich would suffer a heart attack. But he was serene, absolutely serene. Perhaps it was that quality that helped drive Gorbachev to distraction. When the weekly tabloid Argumenti i Fakti published a poll showing that Sakharov was, by far, the most popular politician in the country, Gorbachev was incensed. He even threatened to fire the editor.

It was very simple: Sakharov represented the hard and inescapable truth. One evening during that first Congress session, Sakharov requested a private audience with Gorbachev. In his memoirs, Sakharov remembers waiting for the meeting: “I could see the enormous hall of the Palace of Congresses, semidark and empty. There were guards at the distant doors. Finally, around a half hour later, Gorbachev came out with [his deputy, Anatoly] Lukyanov. Lukyanov had not been part of my plans, but there was nothing that could be done about it. Gorbachev looked tired, as did I. We moved three chairs to the corner of the stage at the table of the Presidium. Gorbachev was very serious throughout the conversation. His usual smile for me—half kindly, half condescending—never appeared on his face.

“I said, ‘Mikhail Sergeyevich! It is not for me to tell you how serious things are in the country, how dissatisfied people are and how everyone expects things to get worse. There is a crisis of trust in the country toward the leadership and the Party. Your personal authority and popularity are down to zero. People cannot wait any longer with nothing but promises. A middle course in situations like these is almost impossible. The country and you are at a crossroads—either increase the process of change maximally or try to retain the administrative-command system with all its qualities. In the first case you must use the support of the ‘left,’ you can be sure there will be many brave and energetic people you can count on. In the second case, you know for yourself whose support you will have, but you will never be forgiven the attempt at perestroika.” In other words, side with the radicals, who you know are right; the Party apparatchiks, the military-industrial complex, are enemies no matter what you do. They will betray you no matter how long you coddle them. Do not delude yourself. But Sakharov could not break through to Gorbachev.

Just after the strikes broke out in Siberia, Sakharov, Yeltsin, Yuri Afanasyev, and the economist Gavriil Popov put together a radical opposition faction in the legislature, the Inter-Regional Group. That development only increased the tensions between Gorbachev and Sakharov at the next session of the Congress in December 1989. To his credit, once more Gorbachev made a point of calling on Sakharov to speak, but when the speech was too radical, he dismissed him summarily. “That’s all!” Gorbachev barked as Sakharov tried to present him with tens of thousands of telegrams sent him in support of eliminating the Party’s monopoly on power. At home, Sakharov despaired so of Gorbachev’s “half-measures” that he wrote out in a thick spiral notebook his own proposed constitution envisioning a Eurasian commonwealth in which participation was voluntary and the Communist Party was one among many. Just as his essays in 1968 anticipated the ideas of perestroika, his constitution envisioned what would one day seem like sense itself. (“If we had only listened more carefully to Andrei Dmitriyevich, we might have learned something,” Gorbachev would say three years later.) Late in the afternoon of December 14, the Inter-Regional Group held an open caucus at the Kremlin. Sakharov looked worn out, and he dozed off during some of the other speeches. Yeltsin would say later that Sakharov was “obviously suffering,” but no one said a word at the time and the session dragged on. Sakharov delivered a typically understated speech. He said he despaired of the current policy of half-measures and an opposition force was the only way to accelerate the reform process. Gorbachev’s government, he said, was “leading the country into catastrophe and dragging out the process of perestroika over many years. During this period it will leave the country in a state of collapse, intensive collapse.… The only way, the only possibility of an evolutionary path, is to radicalize perestroika.” Once more he pressed Gorbachev to repeal Article 6 of the Constitution, which gave the Communist Party a guaranteed monopoly on power. Instead of heading home when the session was over, Sakharov agreed to meet with some Kazakh journalists at a hotel near the Kremlin for a long interview.

Back at his apartment, Sakharov told his wife, Yelena Bonner, that he was going downstairs to his study. He wanted to take a nap and then get up to write another speech. He asked Bonner to come wake him at nine. He had a lot of work to do before morning. “Tomorrow,” he said, “there will be a battle.” When Bonner went downstairs to wake her husband, she found him in the hallway on the floor, dead. “The totalitarian system probably killed him,” Vitaly Korotich said later. “I’m only glad that before he died Sakharov dealt the system a mortal blow. If God sent Jesus to pay for the sins of humankind, then a Marxist God somewhere sent Andrei Sakharov to pay for the sins of our system.” By nine in the morning of the 15th, as the deputies milled around in the vast foyer of the Palace of Congresses, everyone knew, was finding out, or was about to know. The men and women closest to Sakharov looked stricken. They stood alone or with friends, saying nothing, smoking and staring through the windows that looked out on the churches and spires of the Kremlin. Yuri Karyakin, the Dostoevsky scholar who had helped found the Moscow Tribune study group with Sakharov, told me the country had lost its “perfect moral compass.” Yeltsin wandered the hall, loose-limbed and aimless, until a few of us asked him about Sakharov. Yeltsin seemed relieved to have a task, to deal with the cameras and the notebooks. “We must come to the end of the path that Sakharov began. Our duty is to Sakharov’s name, to the persecution he suffered,” he said, sounding very much like a man talking to himself.

Gorbachev, in his constant need to appeal to the majority of deputies in the room, played politics. It would take him years to admit fully to Sakharov’s influence, and now he chose not even to announce the news himself or comment from the rostrum. He expressed his regrets to the liberal weekly Moscow News, but would not do the same in front of this audience. He lost the moment. Instead, one of the thickest men in the Politburo, Vitaly Vorotnikov, was in the chairman’s seat and his gavel came down at ten o’clock. Vorotnikov stood and droned that “one of the country’s greatest scientists and a prominent public figure,” Andrei Dmitriyevich Sakharov, was dead. “His contribution to the defense capability of the state was great and unique,” he allowed. But when it came to politics, Vorotnikov was all euphemism: “The objective analysis of various aspects of his activities is the province of history.” No mention of the dissident movement or the new opposition, nothing of his moral leadership or example.

Then we all rose for a minute of silence.

From there, Gorbachev just let Vorotnikov go on with business. Members of Sakharov’s circle found it astonishing that the session was not called off for the day or that the day of the funeral was not declared a day of national mourning. Ilya Zaslavsky, the thirty-year-old engineer crippled by a childhood blood disease, hobbled on his crutches to the podium. He represented the October Region of Moscow. Before the session, Zaslavsky had approached Gorbachev and asked that he declare a day of mourning in honor of Sakharov. Gorbachev refused, telling him it was “not the tradition.” And so now Gorbachev knew very well what Zaslavsky wanted to say, and before the young deputy could open his mouth, Gorbachev said firmly, “Sit down!” But Zaslavsky would not move. Again, Gorbachev told him to sit. And again Zaslavsky stood his ground and waited only for the deputies to stop their murmuring and hear him out. From the side of the stage came a flunky who tried deftly to “help” Zaslavsky down the steps. Zaslavsky cast him a withering look, the look of a boxer staring across the ring at a presumptuous opponent. The flunky slunk away. And so now Gorbachev had the choice of either forcing a young cripple to his chair for the crime of wanting to speak out for a fallen saint, or to give in. It was an amazing standoff, and even from my gallery seat, I could see (with a pair of binoculars) the fury in Gorbachev’s eyes. But he gave in. Zaslavsky demanded a day of mourning, and the chairman said the suggestion would be taken under advisement. It never was.

Later, Zaslavsky told me about the encounter. “I considered it my duty not to sit down,” he said. “Sometimes a person has to say his piece. Sakharov was the conscience of our country. I have admired him since childhood and I felt this was my duty to him. At the beginning of the session I approached Gorbachev and asked him to call for national mourning, but he said he could probably not do that because it would defy tradition. We have a procedure, it seems, for this: a general secretary gets three days of mourning, a Politburo member one, and none for an academician. Gorbachev said that according to precedent, there should be no such mourning. But all the other countries will be in mourning. What about us?” Meanwhile, the hard-liners in the Congress could not restrain their scorn for Sakharov. They, too, played their part in the mythic narrative, the unbelievers, the heathen raging against the saint. They had jeered him when he was at the rostrum and now they disdained him in death. Tatyana Zaslavskaya, a sociologist who had given Gorbachev invaluable advice on public opinion before he came to power, told me she was filled with shame and disgust hearing the “mocking, filthy remarks made by the apparat” about Sakharov. When it was finally announced that the session would be suspended for a few hours on the day of the funeral, the conservatives hissed. There was hypocrisy everywhere. Tass, which had slandered Sakharov in his lifetime as a “foreign agent” and “moneygrubber,” was now spitting out shameless tributes over the wires. And by the way, came one announcement, exclusive videotape of Sakharov’s last days is available to foreign television stations—for $1,500, hard currency only. There were other squalid moments, too. Yevgeny Yevtushenko scurried around the Congress buffet, handing out to correspondents (in Russian and English) a copy of the poem that he had written, instantly, in honor of Sakharov. “Maybe you will print it on your editorial page?” he said.

The people of Moscow were fast turning 48 Chkalova Street into a shrine. They came alone and in groups and heaped carnations at the doorstep. Someone tacked a photograph of Sakharov to the wall, and, as if this were not icon enough, others put lighted candles and flowers around it. One of the first mourners at the building put out a thick notebook for the people to write out messages of farewell. “We are orphans,” one entry said. “Without you, there is no one to defend us and our children.” “Shame on the murderers,” said another. “Forgive us for all the misfortune that we caused you. Forgive us for the fact that now only good things will be said of you by those who did not do so while you were alive. Words will not help, and we did not safeguard your life. But I believe we will safeguard your memory. Forgive us.” Upstairs, Bonner was frantic with grief. With her husband’s body still in the apartment, she had to go through the ordeal of planning the funeral with Gorbachev’s man, Yevgeny Primakov. Finally, an ancient and humpbacked ambulance pulled up in the slush near Primakov’s limousine. Three medics in dirty smocks went up to Sakharov’s place. They strapped the body to a stretcher and carried him down seven flights of stairs to the car. Then Bonner had to deal with the reporters out on the stairs. She stuck her head out the door and lost it: “You all worked hard to see that Andrei died sooner by calling us from morning till night, and never leaving us to our life and work. Be human beings! Leave us alone!” Bonner did have a terrifying temper, but she, too, had to be admired deeply. She was indispensable to Sakharov, his lion at the gate. She protected him, inspired him, and he loved her ferocity. In their human rights work, Sakharov and Bonner were a team. They suffered, physically and psychologically, as equals. The KGB harassed the Sakharovs every way they could, even mailing them “Christmas cards” with grotesque images of mutilated bodies and monkeys with electrodes stuck in their skulls. There were threats against their children and grandchildren. Tass, Izvestia, and Pravda spewed reams of slander. In Gorky, thugs broke into the apartment waving pistols. After threatening to turn the apartment “into an Afghanistan,” one of the men turned to Sakharov and said, “You won’t be here long. They’ll take you to a sanatorium where they have medicine that turns people into idiots.” A “historian” named Nikolai Yakovlev wrote a book insulting Bonner as a “sexual brigand … who foisted herself on the widower Sakharov.” In the most memorable moment in the history of Russian chivalry, Sakharov—good, gentle Andrei Dmitriyevich—confronted Yakovlev and slapped him square in the face.

“A year ago, Yelena Georgiovna and I went to Paris together for a conference on human rights,” Lev Timofeyev told Esther at the wake. “Andrei Dmitriyevich was coming from the States and had met us at the airport. They hadn’t seen each other for a month and a half, and when they saw each other, their faces lit up like young newlyweds. Such clear young faces. They saw nothing except one another. All the journalists who were waiting there seemed out of place, and I felt like an interloper at a meeting of two lovers.” Primakov offered Bonner a general secretary’s funeral for Sakharov. He could lie in state at the Hall of Columns across from the Kremlin—the same place where the corpses of the various Bolshevik leaders had been put on display in their time. Bonner said no. She wanted something less official, and unique to Sakharov. She chose the Palace of Youth, an enormous hall on Komsomolsky Prospekt.

The next morning it was so desolate and cold that it hurt to breathe. Esther and I picked up Flora and Misha Litvinov and some of their friends and walked along the ice to the Palace of Youth. We were an hour early for the wake and were stunned to see that a line of thousands of people had already formed. We found people in line who had flown from Leningrad, Armenia, and Siberia. There were Azeris and Crimean Tatars, teenagers and children, old men and women who suffered terribly in the cold. Some of them waited three or four hours, their faces red and chapped—but they waited.

Inside, Sakharov was laid out on a coffin festooned in red and black crepe. Within moments after the doors had opened, mountains of flowers accumulated at his feet. Yelena Georgiovna sat off to the side with her children and other family from Russia and the United States. Yeltsin, Timofeyev, Sergei Kovalev, and many others stood near the coffin as honor guards. And for the next five hours the long flow of people streamed by at a slow, unceasing step.

“Forgive us!” one woman cried out as she passed. “Forgive us, Andrei Dmitriyevich!” Yelena Georgiovna walked over to the coffin and bent over her husband, kissed his forehead, smoothed his cheek with the back of her knuckles. She stood a long time there, her elbow draped over the coffin and her face buried in her hands.

If the day of mourning at the Palace of Youth had shown the general grief set off by Sakharov’s death, the next day made clear the political dimension of his loss.

At nine-thirty on December 18, a string of black limousines pulled up to the front entrance of the Academy of Sciences building on Leninsky Prospekt. Gorbachev and a half-dozen other Politburo members got out of their cars and walked up the stairs past a banner of Lenin that read: “Under the Banner of Marxism-Leninism, the Leadership of the Communist Party, Forward Toward the Victory of Communism! Proletarians of the World, Unite!” It had gotten slightly warmer, and there was a mix of drizzle and fat snow-flakes that melted when they hit the ground. A few minutes later, the funeral train arrived, a police Mercedes leading a few decrepit yellow buses. As Sakharov’s coffin was unloaded from the back of one of the buses, Bonner spoke briefly with Gorbachev and the other members of the Politburo. She told Gorbachev that with the death of Sakharov he had lost his most loyal opponent. He asked if there was anything he could do for her. Yes, she said. Memorial had still not been registered as an official national organization. It will be done, Gorbachev said.

A member of the honor guard lifted the lid of the coffin. Gorbachev took off his gray fur hat and stepped to the foot of the casket. The other members of the Politburo took off their hats and flanked their general secretary. They stood in silence for two or three minutes, all of them staring at Sakharov’s pale and regal face. Someone held a black umbrella over the coffin. Then, with two quick nods of the head, as if to say, “Okay, enough,” Gorbachev signaled that the moment was over. The group went inside the Academy of Sciences and signed a memorial book. The general secretary wrote “M. S. Gorbachev” in a bold script and the rest of the Politburo signed below in more modest hands.

Before Gorbachev left, a reporter asked him a question about Sakharov’s Nobel Prize for Peace in 1975, an event that the Brezhnev regime had taken as a humiliating international endorsement of state treason.

“It is clear now,” Gorbachev said, “that he deserved it.”

Early in the afternoon, the funeral cortege slowly wended its way from the physics institute where Sakharov had once worked to the parking lot of the Luzhniki sports complex near the Moscow River. I was just a few yards behind the lead bus. The back door was open and Bonner sat on a bench next to the coffin. Yeltsin was walking just ahead of me. Even then it was clear that if anyone was going to take the lead of the political opposition, it was Yeltsin; and yet he knew that Sakharov and the people closest to Sakharov regarded him with apprehension. Yeltsin was not one of them. He was, after all, a former member of the Politburo. But while Yeltsin already had tremendous support as a populist, he wanted badly to widen his appeal, to learn from the radical democrats and to get their support. By walking just behind Sakharov’s casket he was not so much grandstanding as he was keeping himself as close as possible to everything he was not, but wanted to be.

The march went on for hours. It was not until we reached Luzhniki that I could see how many people had come to say farewell to Sakharov. No fewer than fifty thousand people had packed into a vast parking lot. And there was something far more striking about the crowd than its mere size. It was the first time that I got any sense that there could ever be a unified democratic movement in the Soviet Union. Until now, the miners, the Baltic independence groups, the Moscow and Leningrad intelligentsia had all seemed spread out, loosely knit at best. But now I saw Baltic flags, a Russian tricolor, banners supporting the Rukh independence movement in Ukraine, miners from Vorkuta, students. There were placards with a huge “6” crossed out—meaning that Article 6 of the Constitution, which guaranteed the Party’s “leading role” in society, should be eliminated.

Oginsky’s “Farewell to the Motherland” played through the loudspeakers. The speakers included former political prisoners—Kovalev and dissident priest Father Gleb Yakunin among them—and the politicians who would now have to begin filling in the enormous vacuum: Yeltsin, the Lithuanian independence leader Vytautas Landsbergis, the Leningrad law professor Anatoly Sobchak, Ilya Zaslavsky, Yuri Afanasyev, Gavriil Popov. Sakharov’s casket was hoisted up in front of the flatbed truck where the speakers stood, and Bonner, wearing Sakharov’s gray fur hat, stood near the microphone smoking cigarettes. She stepped up to speak only once, asking everyone to make room so that the ceremony would be peaceful and safe. Only a non-Soviet would have missed the reference: in the days after Stalin’s death, the crowd outside the Hall of Columns was so dense and emotional that hundreds of people were crushed to death—a fitting tribute.

Dmitri Likhachev, the scholar of Russian literature and the oldest of all the deputies in the Congress, was the first to speak: “Most respected Yelena Georgiovna, relatives, friends, colleagues, and students of Andrei Dmitriyevich! Respected comrades! We are gathered here to honor the memory of a very great man, a citizen not only of our country, but of the whole world. A man of the twenty-first century, a man of the future. This is why many did not understand him in this century.

“He was a prophet, a prophet in the ancient sense of the word. That is, he was a man who summoned his contemporaries to moral renewal for the sake of the future. And like every prophet, he was not understood. He was driven from his own city.” Afanasyev said that in the future the union of democratic forces should be named for Sakharov. Father Gleb Yakunin compared Sakharov to a holy man; others mentioned Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Tolstoy. Landsbergis said that on Cathedral Square in Vilnius, church bells were ringing out in tribute to Sakharov. As they listened to the speeches, many people held candles and wept. As darkness gathered, the service broke up. The huge crowd shuffled to the metro stations and the bus stops. I have never heard so many people be so quiet.

The burial was an hour later on the outskirts of Moscow at Vostryakovskoye, a cemetery cut out of a pine forest. The snow was falling once more, and everywhere was the smell of pine and snow. A military band played Chopin’s “Funeral March” and Schumann’s dirge “Traumerai.” Sakharov’s grave, fresh and deep, was dug out next to two straight pines and the grave of Bonner’s mother, Ruf. Bonner let a cigarette drop from her hands into the wet earth. She pulled back the thin white cloth that covered Sakharov’s face, kissed him one last time, covered him, and stepped away. But she could not bear it. She came back, kissed him once more, and lingered there. I was near Timofeyev, who stood at attention, tears flowing into his beard. Finally the music stopped. Two workmen closed the coffin and lowered it into the grave. Bonner threw a bit of dirt down onto the coffin. Others did the same, with dirt and pine branches still dusted with snow, and everywhere there was quiet except for the thud of the dirt and the branches on the coffin. The gravediggers filled in the hole and Bonner watched, smoking. Soon the mourners, carrying candles, covered the grave over with flowers, red carnations and yellow roses. Then they stepped back and lingered. There was nothing left to do. Once more the rain began to fall.

I felt hollow that day and for days after. I have never felt that way about anyone’s death except the death of those whom I have loved. Many people I knew in Moscow felt the same, and even more strongly for having lived their lives under the regime. In March 1953, the bewitched people of the Soviet Union learned of Stalin’s death and asked themselves, “What now?” Now, the spell was finally gone, but the question was the same. “What now?” Sakharov was just better than the rest of us. His mind worked on an elevated plane of reason, morality, and patience. Valentin Turchin, one of Sakharov’s closest associates both in physics and the human rights movement, remembered one typical episode: “It was September 1973, soon after the infamous letter of forty academicians condemning Sakharov. I was sitting with the Sakharovs—in their kitchen, as usual—and discussing the letter. The Sakharovs had just returned from a Black Sea resort, and Yelena told me about a funny occurrence which took place a couple of days before they left. They were taking the sun at the beach when a short man ran up to Andrei Dmitriyevich, said how glad he was to meet him, shook his hand, and several times repeated how fortunate it was that such a person was among them.

“ ‘Who was that?’ Yelena asked when the short man departed. Andrei Dmitriyevich answered that it was Academician so-and-so. Three days later, when the letter of forty was published, that academician was among the signers. Yelena, who is generally emotional, spoke with contempt and indignation, which were certainly well justified. I looked at Andrei Dmitriyevich: what was his reaction? It was very typical of him. He was not indignant about the episode. He was thinking about it.” The Soviet Union could ill afford to lose such a man.