فصل 20

CHAPTER 20

LOST ILLUSIONS

Aleksandr Yakovlev thought he was a dead man. He lay on a swampy battlefield outside Leningrad, his body and legs riddled by Nazi machine-gun fire. It was dark and cold and he was terrified. He was a village boy, so sickly as a child that his mother waited two years before she registered his birth. Now he was eighteen and a lieutenant in the Baltic marines’ 6th Brigade and he was going to die. His only chance for survival was the tradition of the Soviet marines: no one was to be left on the battlefield, not the wounded, not even the dead. Tradition saved him. Five of Yakovlev’s buddies sprinted onto the field to get him. The first four were shot down and killed. The fifth scooped Yakovlev up in his arms and ran. They made it. Yakovlev came home to his village outside Yaroslavl on crutches. His mother was so horrified at her son’s condition that he felt as if he had failed her. There were three younger sisters to feed and the country was a ruin. What was he going to do with his life?

A half century later, after he had become known as Gorbachev’s closest adviser and the intellectual architect of perestroika, Yakovlev told a group of students at Moscow State University how he, a wounded teenaged veteran of war, became a man of the Communist Party. He went to a pedagogical institute and dreamed of a career in teaching. But he had also become a Party member in 1944. With millions of Party activists dead or still in battle, the local bosses scrambled to train young Communists, to fill up the ranks. They urged Yakovlev into political work and out of academia. “Then, after a number of years, enrollment began for the Higher Party School,” Yakovlev told his audience. “I was invited for an interview to the regional Party committee. I didn’t know what they wanted of me. In those times, everything was done in an atmosphere of utmost secrecy. I was asked to sit for exams, which I passed to become a trainee of the Higher Party School. That was how I started.” For liberal students in Moscow in February 1990, Yakovlev was about the only figure in the Politburo who could be trusted—Gorbachev included. The Communist Party was, for them, a dead issue. No one took the old exams in Party history anymore; those who specialized in Party history did so with the dispassionate interest of anthropologists studying the lives of cannibals and fire-eaters. Downstairs, in the main lobby of the university, students pinned up the most notorious quotations of Lenin and Stalin; they started clubs in honor of the Beatles, Iron Maiden, banned Russian authors, and American baseball. But they were young and still wanted to know what it was like to have lived through a nightmare.

Yakovlev told the students he was a typical member of his generation. He and his buddies had run into battle shouting, “For Stalin! For the Motherland!” They believed in the “shining future” promised by the Party. In Korolyovo, the tiny village where Yakovlev grew up, no one could even begin to understand the great tragedy the country was living through. When one of Yakovlev’s great-uncles was thrown off his land and deported in the twenties, no one understood that this was part of a far greater collectivization campaign in which millions would die. There were few newspapers around, and the ones that could be found were filled with lies. Many of the people in the region, including Yakovlev’s mother, were illiterate; his father had four years in a Russian Orthodox school, his mother no schooling at all. It was only through an accident of kindness and loyalty that Yakovlev’s father did not disappear into the meat grinder of the purges.

“Our district military commissariat was headed by a man named Novikov. As it turned out, he was the commander of my father’s platoon during the Civil War. He was an extraordinary person. I remember how he would ride through our village high on his horse, talking with all the kids and conscripts. He was the only one we knew from the district leadership. One day he came and knocked on the window with his whip handle. My father was not home, and Novikov told my mother, ‘Tell him that he should go to the conference, which—only be sure to get this right—will last three days at least. I’ll come later.’ “Mama didn’t understand. When she went to tell my father, he questioned her several times—especially about that last phrase, ‘I’ll come later.’ My father packed some things in a bag and went to a neighboring district, to mother’s sister Raya—’to the conference.’ He told mama where he could be found, just in case. Mama was a quiet woman, a peasant.

“That night, there was a knock at the door and they asked where my father was. Mama said, ‘He went to the conference.’ “ ‘What conference?’

“ ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He didn’t say.’

“They left. They came again the next night.… And after three days, Novikov showed up. That’s what the friendship of the front meant. Not everything was inhuman. Then Novikov told Mama it was time to tell her husband to come home. The ‘conference’ was over! Mama sent me off to get him.” As Yakovlev well understood years later, the local Party committee probably had a “plan” to fulfill: kill X number of people in Y number of days. When Nikolai Yakovlev could not be found, they just found someone else.

By 1956, Yakovlev was living in Moscow and working at the Central Committee headquarters. As a young instructor—in fact, the youngest in the building—he received an “observer” invitation to attend the Twentieth Party Congress in the Kremlin. He sat in the balcony and listened to Khrushchev deliver his breakthrough report on Stalin’s personality cult. As Khrushchev described the purges of the Party and military ranks, the delegates sank into a state of shock. The complicit were humiliated, the ignorant stunned. “There was a deathly silence,” Yakovlev recalled. “People did not look at one another. I remember sitting in the balcony and from up there you could hear just one word spoken, the same word, one after the other: ‘Yes.’ You could hear only that: ‘Yes.’ There were no conversations. People went around shaking their heads. What we had heard did not quite penetrate right away. It was very hard, very hard. It was especially hard for those of us who had not become hardened by cynicism, who still had ideals and yet did not know the truth.” Khrushchev committed a heroic deed at that Twentieth Congress, Yakovlev told me. But the tragedy was that “he never could take the next step toward democratization.… Instinctively, he understood it was necessary to move forward, but he was thigh-deep in the muck of the past and he couldn’t break free. When he grew older in his memoirs he regretted that he had not gone forward. But memoirs do not make up for a man’s life.” By his early thirties, Yakovlev was the deputy head of the Central Committee’s Department of Science and Culture, and there he began to learn about “that cruel force” the Party apparat. He arrived an ideological romantic, a believer in Leninism and the new thaw. But he found himself inside the most Orwellian world of all, one of whispered threats, hermetic codes of behavior and privilege, black comedy. He was at one meeting at which a department chief accused someone of “Trotskyism” as it related to his supervision of animal husbandry. Yakovlev, too, was subject to the “petty brutalizations” of a life in the apparat. “For example, I once received a prize for a review of a film I never saw,” he said, recalling an incident in the Yaroslavl Party organization. “There came an order from ‘the center’ to publish in all the papers a review of the movie The Battle of Stalingrad. They called the editor and said the review had to be in the next day’s paper. The film hadn’t come to our region and no one had seen it. We called the local film purveyor and it turned out that he had a list of the actors and the plot of the film. I wrote off of that. I knew some of the actors from other films, and I could say how they had ‘profoundly revealed their characters’ or some such. It goes without saying that the review was positive.” Yakovlev’s career before 1985 was a mix of the academic and the apparatchik. After he won an advanced degree in history and philosophy, the Party thought him reliable enough to send to New York for a year of study at Columbia University. Yakovlev’s classmates in New York remember him as doctrinaire and defensive, but intellectually curious. He traveled around the northeast and midwest and wrote a thesis on the politics of the New Deal, a program that he would later take as a kind of inspiration for perestroika. Yakovlev enjoyed the experience, but he was also haunted for years by the ignorance of Americans about the Soviet Union. For many years to come he would tell people a story about a New Yorker who asked him if all Russians had horns.

As Brezhnev took power, Yakovlev’s work back in Moscow took a curious turn. He was highly valued in the propaganda department of the Party—the department that ran television and the press—but he was increasingly thought of as not quite reliable. In 1966, when the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were arrested, Brezhnev’s “gray cardinal,” Mikhail Suslov, asked Yakovlev to handle the “propaganda side” of the trial. The Sinyavsky and Daniel affair was one of the first major dissident trials, and Yakovlev, repulsed by the incident, found a way to keep his distance. He did not have rebellion in mind. He valued his career and comforts too much for that. But Yakovlev did tell Suslov that the trial should be handled by the some other department. “I said that I was not sufficiently ‘in the know’ to take part,” Yakovlev told me. “I wouldn’t exactly call that bravery of the highest order.” After that and similarly subtle “defenses” of dissidents such as Sakharov and Lev Kopelev, Yakovlev said, “the Brezhnev leadership treated me with the utmost distrust” and refused to make him head of the department instead of acting head.

In the 1970s, Yakovlev even helped protect a young Party leader in southern Russia, Mikhail Gorbachev, who was carrying out experiments by hiring student brigades during harvest time. “He was organizing these brigades and paying them, and this was thought to be ideologically unsound,” Yakovlev said. “He was obviously an impressive man and I did what I could for him.” As a polemicist for the Central Committee. Yakovlev wrote his share of agitprop monographs and books, wooden diatribes mainly about the American “empire” and “imperial ideology.” He even edited a volume of the Pentagon Papers. These labors were all greatly appreciated by the Central Committee. But Yakovlev ended his career as a Party propagandist by writing a long, and unusually pointed, article directed against Russian nationalism. In November 1972, the weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta splashed the article, “Against Anti-Historicism,” across two full pages. Yakovlev lashed out at the hard-line nationalists for making a “cult of the patriarchal peasantry,” for romanticizing the prerevolutionary past. The article was directed especially at writers for the journal Molodaya Gvardiya (“Young Guard”), who saw the rise of Western intelligentsia both inside and outside the Party as a grave threat to Russia’s “national spirit.” Yakovlev couched his argument in the ritualistic language of Leninism, attacking the writers for their “extra-class and extra-social approach,” but he also made a veiled defense of “intellectualism,” a term understood as thinking outside the boundaries of official dogma.

Brezhnev and his ideological guard dogs did not like the article at all. Yakovlev knew now for sure that he no longer had a place in the Central Committee apparatus. As if to head off the punishment from above, he invented his own. He asked about diplomatic work, perhaps in an English-speaking country. Within hours, it was done. Yakovlev was sent to Canada, and there he stayed for ten years, an ambassador and an exile.

At the embassy in Ottawa, Yakovlev improved his English and marinated in the books, articles, and pop culture around him. He met regularly with Canadian officials, diplomats, and intellectuals. And he continued to write. “Canada was wonderful for me. It was a way out,” Yakovlev told me. It was in Canada that Yakovlev also forged his relationship with Gorbachev. In May 1983, Gorbachev was a leading member of the Politburo. He came to Canada and traveled with Yakovlev across the country, from Niagara Falls to Calgary, in an old Convair prop plane. They visited farmers and businessmen, but the most important talks they held were with each other. According to both men, they spent hours talking about the disasters awaiting the Soviet Union, the rot at the core of the economic system, the self-crippling lack of openness in the press, the cultural and scientific worlds. “The most important common understanding,” Yakovlev told me, “was the idea that we could not live this way anymore.… We talked about absolutely everything, openly, and it was clear to me that this was a new kind of leader. It was a thrilling experience politically and intellectually.” Yakovlev wanted to return to Moscow, and Gorbachev had the power to give him his wish. Within a month, Yakovlev became the director of one of the most prestigious and liberal-minded think tanks in Moscow, the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO).

For Western Sovietologists trying to figure out the thinking of the team forming around Gorbachev both before and after he took power in March 1985, Yakovlev was a beguiling figure. Cold warriors took one look at Yakovlev’s book of the early Reagan era, On the Edge of an Abyss, and decided he was a hard-liner, a figure who would do nothing at all to ease Soviet-American relations in the near future. Scholars searching for flexibility in the nascent Gorbachev team found none in Yakovlev’s opus. On the Edge of an Abyss reads like the sort of tract the Young Spartacus League might have been passing out on college campuses twenty years ago. In a voice of rage inherited from What Is to Be Done? Yakovlev lit into the United States as a smug, soft, and warped country sporting a “messianic ideology” and the urge to police and “dominate the world.” John Wayne, TV evangelists, the “bourgeois press,” and Norman Podhoretz all made him sick. For Yakovlev, the United States was “a miserable sight. A miserable democracy. Unfortunately, many Americans still harbor illusions. They are used to believing that they elect law-givers, benefactors and defenders and are shocked to discover that some of them sold themselves out long ago. This is an indisputable fact. However, the bourgeois propaganda media go out of their way to prove the contrary.… The romanticizing of brutality, approval of violence, the relishing of sex exploits and the portrayal of murder as an ordinary and normal phenomenon are characteristic features of the mass media and culture.… The main hero Americans see everywhere—in the movies, on television, in books, magazines and newspapers—is a gangster, sleuth, or sadist.” And yet, read in retrospect, On the Edge of an Abyss showed Yakovlev was a consumer of rigorous books and articles about the United States. He read everything from Foreign Affairs and International Security to the memoirs of Henry Kissinger. He also had a better sense of humor than most ideological warriors: “Some say, for example, that of all the superficial roles Reagan played while a film actor, the most successful one was as the sidekick to a chimpanzee named Bonzo. This film has not been forgotten by the public.

Demonstrators in Toronto, Canada, who came out to protest Reagan’s militarist policies, carried placards admonishing Americans for having chosen the wrong chimpanzee.” Years later, when I asked him about his pre-perestroika books, Yakovlev said that they, like their author, were “prisoners of the time.” “Had I not been in the U.S.A. and Canada, I would never have written such books about America,” he said. “But being an impulsive man, when I read newspapers and books criticizing my country, well, this hurt me deeply. For example, I know that I am crippled. But when every day people tell me, ‘You are crippled, you are crippled,’ I get furious! And then I answer back: ‘You are the cripple! You yourself are the fool!’ ” From the moment Gorbachev took power, Yakovlev was an essential, if not lead, player in every progressive idea, policy, or gesture coming from the Kremlin. Yakovlev was a peculiar animal in the Communist Party leadership. Unlike most of the men in the Politburo, he never ran a republic or a region or even an industrial plant; he was never at the head of one of the major institutions like the army or the KGB. “The truth was he didn’t know anything about ordinary life or practical politics,” Yegor Ligachev, Yakovlev’s nemesis in the Politburo, told me.

Yakovlev was simply the man at the leader’s side, the homely intellectual with twitchy brows and goggly glasses whispering into the ear of the general secretary. “Seneca to Gorbachev’s Nero,” a Russian friend said. “Or maybe Aristotle to Alexander the Great?” In any case, it turned out that the obligatory language and fury of On the Edge of an Abyss masked a unique intelligence and a powerful urge to remake the Soviet Union. Yakovlev explored the New Deal, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the early socialists, and far less exalted texts for answers. One afternoon, Vitaly Korotich came to the Kremlin to see Yakovlev about an issue of Ogonyok and was amused to discover that the Communist Party’s chief ideologist had his team of aides spend the afternoon “studying” a video of Raiders of the Lost Ark—presumably to understand the peculiarities of American media and self-image. It is not known whether Yakovlev’s antipathy toward John Wayne extended to the more politically correct adventures of Harrison Ford.

Between 1985 and 1990, Yakovlev’s accomplishments were legion. He helped draft the foreign-policy principles of “the new thinking.” Because it dispensed with the classic Leninist approach of a class-based approach to foreign affairs, “the new thinking” gave an ideological rationale for everything from the withdrawal from Afghanistan to the rapprochement with the United States to the policy of noninterference in Eastern Europe.

Yakovlev engineered the cultural revolution known as glasnost by using his power to appoint liberal editors to publications like Ogonyok and Moscow News. Republican leaders from Armenia to the Baltic states found in Yakovlev a sympathetic ear. At one Politburo meeting in 1988, the KGB chief, Viktor Chebrikov, said that the Baltic national fronts were conspiring to create a counterrevolution, while Yakovlev, just returned from the region, said that there was no threat, “only the manifestations of perestroika and democratization.” As the Politburo’s house historian, he headed the commissions which rehabilitated political exiles and prisoners, investigated the Kirov murder of 1934, and “discovered” the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

As an ideologist, Yakovlev’s predecessors had been men like Mikhail Suslov, dogmatists, enforcers of the faith. Yakovlev was charged with changing that faith. He and Gorbachev began with the idea of “cleansing” socialism and the Party, but they had precious little idea of how they would do it and where it would all lead. The truth is that Yakovlev, Gorbachev, and Shevardnadze—the lead reformers in the Politburo after Yeltsin resigned in 1987—were flying almost blind, and against a terrific conservative headwind, from the start.

“Speaking generally,” Yakovlev said, “our baseline principle was that some things could be improved: more democracy, elections, more in the newspapers—limited, but slightly more open—the management system should be improved, centralization should be less strict, power should be redistributed somewhat, maybe the functions of the Party and the government should be divided. But you can find all of these democratic axioms since 1917, even under Stalin. ‘Socialist democracy’ was talked about as an ideal even then. But speeches are speeches. In 1985, for the first time, we started implementing things so that our words were matched by deeds. But as soon as these words became reality, a logic of development began to develop, and that dictated the next steps. Perestroika acquired its own logic of development, which dictated what to do. This logic of development led us to the ‘conclusion’ that the concept of improvement will not do us any good. One can fix up a car, add some oil, tighten some bolts, and you can drive on. But with a social organism you cannot always do this. It is not enough. It turned out that everything had to be made over.

“The ideological disputes began right away, in 1985. We clashed openly on questions of glasnost. The reformist wing had their own understanding of perestroika from the start. The conservative wing thought only that something needed to be changed. They thought we had to change a little bit, but always relying on the Party apparat. It was then that the tributes to the conservative spirit appeared: state factory inspections, the anti-alcohol campaign. They were all administrative methods and had nothing to do with a real economy. For example, we tried that—what did we call it?—khozrashchet … regional, or local, cost-accounting … whatever! It was rubbish!

“After losing two and a half years we began searching for new types of society, radical restructuring on entirely new principles, and we realized that it was a more formidable task than we had anticipated.… It was not the Party, it had nothing to do with the concept of perestroika. It was a limited group of people who started that.” By 1989, Ligachev and the orthodox wing of the Communist Party came to blame Yakovlev, Gorbachev, and Shevardnadze for radicalizing perestroika to the point of creating a “bourgeois” state, for abandoning the “class approach” to politics, for failing to provide a blueprint for the future. “Some of our conservatives now say that a group of adventurists began to restructure things without a concept,” Yakovlev replied. “But imagine what would have happened if we’d just gone into an office and created an entire scheme. Marx did that and look what it led to! One should take things from life, and adjust them every day. Our whole trouble is that we are inert, we think in dogmas. Even if reality tells us to change things, we always check first in a book.

“Let’s imagine if Ligachev had come to power. Would he have started perestroika? Yes. But it would have been of the Andropov sort: restore law and order in the economy, but only with administrative methods. But he would have done it. The result might even have been better. There might have been better conditions, more bread, more grain. But the old system of fear would have remained, the same lack of democracy and antihuman relations.” In the first years of perestroika, Yakovlev was careful about his terminology. As a political loyalist, he did not want to go too far beyond Gorbachev’s own public expressions. But still, there were times when Yakovlev played the role of stalking horse and outraged the Party apparat. “I was under constant attack beginning with those first careful speeches,” he said. “It was enough for me just to mention the word ‘market’ [in 1988] and there was an attack. Now everyone talks about the market. But back then you had to put your words in a special sort of wrapping paper.” Yakovlev’s most radical proposal in the early days of power was to dismantle the one-party system. In his secret memo to Gorbachev dated December 1985, Yakovlev suggested as a first step toward the creation of a democratic, multiparty system that the Communist Party be divided into progressives and conservatives. Such a split would acknowledge the obvious: the Party was unified by nothing but its pretenses and camouflage. Yakovlev hoped that such a move would either eliminate or silence the most hidebound elements in the Party. In the time-honored Russian tradition, it would show who was who. But Gorbachev knew the Party at least as well as Yakovlev, and he rejected the idea as out of the question, too dangerous. We could lose everything, he told Yakovlev. You’ll see, he said. The Party can be reformed. But slowly.

By July 1989, the Party was proving unchangeable. The leading reformers still in the Party talked about quitting; hundreds of thousands of members did just that. Komsomol chapters were closing or dying out. Yakovlev, for his part, was under constant attack in Pravda, Sovetskaya Rossiya, and the rest of the Party press. So he finally decided that it was time to dispense with the wrapping paper. It was time to deal with the Party’s dismal history and its dubious future. Yakovlev chose an extraordinary occasion for his “coming out”: a July 1989 speech given in honor of the bicentennial of the French Revolution.

Before an audience of Party members, intellectuals, and foreign guests, Yakovlev deepened his scrutiny of the past. Gorbachev had already denounced the “crimes” of Stalin, but now his intellectual alter ego was launching a public attack on the founding myths of the Soviet Union. The Bolshevik Revolution, he told his audience, quickly dissolved into a reign of terror, one that far outstripped the Jacobin use of the guillotine.

“The idealization of terror was starkly evident during the October Revolution,” Yakovlev said. The Bolsheviks looked back on the terror of 1793 as a model and “faithfully believed in violence as a cleansing force … a salvation for the country and the people.… The edifying thirst for freedom degenerates into the delirious fever of violence which ultimately extinguishes the flames of the revolution.” Then Yakovlev made a connection between Lenin and Stalin that was still considered radical even for non-Party intellectuals. To hear it from the main ideologist of glasnost, perestroika, and the “new thinking” in foreign policy was absolutely stunning: “Today, when we are asking ourselves the excruciating question of how it was possible for this country and Lenin’s Party to accept the dictatorship of mediocrity and put up with Stalin’s abuses and the shedding of rivers of innocent blood, it is obvious that one of the factors that nurtured the soil for authoritarian rule and despotism was the morbid faith in the possibility of forcing through social and historical development, and the idealization of revolutionary violence that traces back to the very sources of the European revolutionary tradition.” In other words, the appearance of Stalin was no aberration, but rather the direct result of Lenin’s “revolutionary romanticism” that idealized violence as an instrument of class struggle and a force of purification. Until perestroika, even the most radical underground historians in the Soviet Union denied this. Roy Medvedev saw Stalin only as a pathological rupture with Leninism. Some Western historians tended to play down, or deny, Lenin’s ruthlessness. But the evidence was undeniable, and no one knew it better than Yakovlev, the chairman of the Politburo’s commission on history. As the émigré scholars Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich point out, it was Lenin and Trotsky who were the first Europeans to use the term “concentration camp” and then use the device to such effect. Three months after Trotsky used the term, Lenin sent a telegram to the Penza Executive Committee on August 9, 1918, demanding the local Red leaders carry out “ruthless mass terror against the kulaks, priests, and White Guards; confine all suspicious elements in a concentration camp outside the city.” Yakovlev demanded that the Party recognize its past and renounce the old methods. “History cannot be different but we must be different,” he said. “The idea of violence as the midwife of history has exhausted itself, as has the idea of dictatorial power based on violence.” It was a terribly difficult speech for Yakovlev to make. He had been working in one capacity or another in the Communist Party since just after the war. He said his first doubts about the Soviet leadership came when he saw how Stalin greeted returning prisoners of war by sending them directly to labor camps for fear of their “foreign influence.” His thinking had developed radically since those days, and so had the thinking of many men and women of his generation; but he knew all too well that the majority of Party officials had changed only slightly. Despite their outward obedience to the vocabulary of the Gorbachev era—“perestroika,” “acceleration,” “democratization,” and all the rest—they were deeply resistant to a fundamental change in the political system. In the French Revolution speech, Yakovlev acknowledged as much. “The need for radical renewal is born of the times, but, on the other hand, is always ahead of them,” he said. “A rise to a new spiral of civilization does not occur without pain. Acute dramas are generated by the inertia of the outgoing social structures, the refusal to accept the new things, and revolutionary impatience.” Yakovlev even tried, in an oblique way, to address “the problem” of how revolutions consume their children, to reassure the right-wingers that there would be no hunt for enemies. He did not lash out at his antagonists; rather, he warned them. “A party that revels in myths and vain illusions,” he said, “is doomed.” By the beginning of 1990, the collapse of the Communist Party monolith was at hand. Sakharov was gone, but his demand to eliminate the Party’s guaranteed hold on power had become a banner of the growing democratic opposition. Nevertheless, Gorbachev needed convincing. The proposals of Sakharov or Yakovlev—and the rise of dozens of new parties across the country—were not enough for him. He had to be beaten over the head before he dared make a move on the Party. Lithuanians, as usual, were only too pleased to provide the drubbing.

In January 1990, Gorbachev went to Vilnius, confident that he could find a way to finesse the alarming developments there. He was sure he could slow down the sprint to independence and convince the republic’s Party organization to come back into the fold. Yakovlev had already been to Vilnius and said it would be “immoral” to deny the Lithuanian argument that Moscow was still running a coercive empire. Gorbachev plainly disagreed. He berated the Lithuanian Party leader, Algirdas Brazauskas, for splitting with the all-union organization and for letting the “romantic professors” of the Sajudis popular front assume such power there. In Vilnius, Gorbachev’s fury and confusion were obvious at every meeting and encounter. As long as the progressive elements of the country followed him, Gorbachev had been happy; but now his erstwhile followers were in the lead, and this was intolerable. Gorbachev had lost control of the political world.

At one point on the trip, Gorbachev confronted an elderly factory worker who was carrying a sign reading “Total Independence for Lithuania.” “Who told you to write that banner?” Gorbachev asked angrily.

“Nobody. I wrote it myself,” the worker said.

“Who are you? Where do you work?” Gorbachev said. “And what do you mean by ‘total independence’?” “I mean what we had in the 1920s, when Lenin recognized Lithuania’s sovereignty, because no nation is entitled to dictate to another nation,” the worker replied.

“Within our large family, Lithuania has become a developed country,” Gorbachev said. “What kind of exploiters are we if Russia sells you cotton, oil, and raw materials—and not for hard currency either?” The worker cut off Gorbachev. “Lithuania had a hard currency before the war,” he said. “You took it away in 1940. And do you know how many Lithuanians were sent to Siberia in the 1940s, and how many died?” Gorbachev finally could not bear this impudence. “I don’t want to talk to this man anymore,” he said. “If people in Lithuania have attitudes and slogans like this, they can expect hard times. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.” Raisa tried to calm down her husband.

“Be quiet,” he snapped.

On the last day of his trip to Lithuania, Gorbachev finally conceded the obvious. A year before he had called the idea of a multiparty system chepukha—rubbish. Now, he said, “We should not be afraid of a multiparty system the way the devil is afraid of incense. I don’t see a tragedy in a multiparty system if it serves the people.” By now, Gorbachev knew that tragedy might come if he did not make his run at the Communist Party. From a distance, he watched what had become of Jaruzelski in Poland, Honecker in East Germany, and, most vividly, the Ceauşescus in Romania. Gorbachev did not need to strain very hard to see the same rage gathering at home. Everywhere there was an urge to clean house. In the northern Ukrainian city of Chernigov, crowds gathered around a car crash and discovered that the drunken driver of one car was a leading Party official. It turned out the official was carrying around a trunkload of various delicacies that had not been seen in the city in years. The official resigned. In Volgograd, the entire Party leadership was forced to quit when tens of thousands of people protested the construction of special housing for the local officials. In the Siberian city of Tyumen, the entire Party leadership resigned after it was accused, en masse, of corruption. And in Leningrad, the former Politburo member and local Party chief Yuri Solovyov was expelled from the Party after hundreds of people demonstrated outside his home demanding to know just how he was able to buy a Mercedes-Benz sedan for 9,000 rubles when the usual price was more like 120,000.

On February 4, 1990, a bitter cold day in Moscow, around a quarter-million people marched halfway around the Garden Ring Road, down Gorky Street, and toward the Kremlin for a rally on Manezh Square that could only have scared the wits out of the denizens behind the great brick walls. It was the biggest demonstration in Moscow since the rise of Soviet power, and there was nothing polite about it. The banner “Party Bureaucrats: Remember Romania!” was just one of the helpful reminders they provided. While the crowd clapped their gloved hands and stamped their feet to keep warm, Yuri Afanasyev climbed onto the bed of a flatbed truck and shouted into the microphone, “All hail the peaceful February revolution of 1990!” The reference was lost on no one: it was the February Revolution that toppled the established order, the czar, in 1917. The Central Committee was scheduled to gather for a plenum a few days later and a vote on the fate of Article 6, the clause guaranteeing the Party primacy in public life. For the first time, the opposition seemed sure of a great victory. “When the [members of the Central Committee] show up at the Kremlin Monday morning they had better have in mind the image of hundreds of thousands of people you see here today,” Vladimir Tikhonov, the head of the Union of Cooperative Businesses, said. In his speech, Yeltsin barked that this would be Gorbachev’s “last chance.” And the crowd—the vast brew of democratic socialists, social democrats, greens, monarchists, Hare Krishnas, veterans, housewives, and students—roared its approval.

At the plenum, Ligachev and various other members of the Central Committee complained about the “loss” of Eastern Europe, the “chaos” on the streets. But then they fell into line. On February 7, 1990, the Central Committee passed a platform that effectively opened the way for a multiparty system. They really had no choice. They had seen the crowds. They had read the placards and the future they promised.

Yakovlev never gave up his loyalty to Gorbachev, but now they were clearly split over matters of ideology and tactics, especially where the Party was concerned. “I am a convinced Communist,” Gorbachev kept saying. But for Yakovlev, socialism meant little more than the idea of a welfare state, a government that could “protect people against calamity and misfortune.” His attitude toward Lenin also grew more and more critical. “Oh, yes, it did change,” he told me. “As the Bible says: there is much grief in wisdom.… [Lenin] was an extremely talented politician. There is no question about it. But he was geared only toward power and power alone. Everything else was subordinate to that. He thought morality was of no value in the proletarian revolution.” The Party scheduled a congress for July—a congress that Yuri Afanasyev predicted would be its “funeral.” In the weeks before the event, the Party press steadily increased its attacks on the reformers in the Party, describing them as “traitors” to socialism and the state. Invariably, the named targets were Yeltsin and Yakovlev. At the congress itself, deputies were handed leaflets allegedly reporting Yakovlev’s comments at a meeting with the radical and conservative factions. The “answers” made Yakovlev seem disloyal to Gorbachev, insulting to the army, and even more radical than he was. Later, an investigating committee discovered that the organizer of the leaflet was General Igor Rodionov, the military commander who won national fame for leading the assault in Tbilisi against a crowd of peaceful Georgian demonstrators.

Yakovlev had rarely stepped out in public over the years, preferring to stay at Gorbachev’s side and influence events with his advice. But at the congress he took the rostrum in his own defense, and his performance was devastating. After debunking the leaflet attacking him, he held up yet another leaflet that had been circulating among the Party delegates, a photocopy from the newspaper Russky Golos (“Russian Voice”). It said, “We need a new Hitler, not Gorbachev. We are badly in need of a military coup. There is still a lot of undeveloped space in Siberia waiting for the ‘enthusiasts’ who have buried perestroika.” “My name is there,” Yakovlev said. “So, Siberians, await the arrival of new gulag inmates. That’s what’s happening, comrades. A massive attack has been launched and all means, including criminal ones, are being used in this campaign. True, all this leaves scars on the heart, but I want to say this to the organizers of this well-orchestrated campaign and those who are behind it: you may shorten my life, but you can’t silence me.” Yakovlev’s despair over the Party led to even more probing about the viability of Marxism itself. Soon he would be telling all who would listen that Lenin’s intolerance was matched by Marx’s irrelevance. “A great deal has been rejected by life,” he told the newspaper Rabochaya Tribuna (“Worker’s Tribune”). “Marx said, for instance, that revolutions would take place in several industrialized European capitalist countries at the same time. That did not happen. A revolution took place in Russia, but even there it resulted from a queer concurrence of circumstances. Marx said that capitalism was a rotting society that impeded scientific, technological, and social progress. He was wrong about that, too.… But this is not even the main point. Life corrects many a theory. The problem is that a rash experiment was performed on Russia. An attempt was made to create a new model of society and put it into practice under conditions that were unfit for socialism. No wonder the new way of life was imposed by terror.” On August 20, 1990, Gorbachev had signed a decree rehabilitating all those who had been repressed in the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties and repealed any orders that had stripped dissidents of their citizenship. The Party, of course, thought it was being awfully generous in this. But then Yakovlev came on the evenings news program Vremya and made a short statement worthy of Sakharov or Havel.

The president’s two decrees, he said, “are, in my view, acts of repentance.… When we say that we are rehabilitating someone, as if we are mercifully forgiving him for the sins of the past, this smells of cunning and hypocrisy. We are not forgiving him. We are forgiving ourselves. It is we who are to blame that others lived for years both slandered and oppressed. It is we who are rehabilitating ourselves, not those who held other thoughts and convictions. They only wanted good and freedom for us, and the leadership of the country answered with evil, prisons and camps.

“As we breathe the air of freedom, it is already becoming difficult today for us to remember what happened in the distant and not so distant past. There were hundreds of thousands of brutal trials, people who were shot and killed, people who killed themselves, people who did not even know what they were charged with, but who were destroyed.… “For us, they are not a reproach but a harsh reminder to all those who still have a yearning nostalgia for the past, for those who would turn everything back to the fear.… I want to pay special attention to the tragic fate of our peasantry, which paid the price in blood for the criminality of the Stalinist regime. This is not only an unprecedented reprisal against the peasantry, which disrupted the flow of the society, but it also brought the development of the state into crisis. History has never known such a concentrated hatred toward man.”