فصل 26

CHAPTER 26

THE GENERAL LINE

May the god of history help me.

—STALIN, 1920

As 1991 dragged on, the fury of the hard-liners deepened with every week; with every victory they won, the more brazen their demands became. There was no mystery about what was going on. In meetings public and private, Gorbachev was hearing the full-throated cry of the generals, the military-industrial complex, the Communist Party apparatus, and the KGB. They demanded he turn away from his most reform-minded advisers, and he did. They blamed him for the “loss” of Eastern Europe, the “triumphs” of Germany and the United States, the “ruin” of the union and the Communist Party, and the “degradation” of the armed forces. The KGB chief, Vladimir Kryuchkov, made speeches asserting that the policies of perestroika had evolved into a road map for the destruction of the Union, plans that were no less anti-Soviet than the darkest designs of the CIA. In a meeting in Moscow with Richard Nixon, Kryuchkov said, “We have had about as much democracy as we can stomach.” There was an acrid smell in the air, a sense of panic, fear of the past returning. The Moscow Spring of 1988 was long gone. Privately, Aleksandr Yakovlev told his friends that they would soon see each other in Siberia, “against a wall somewhere.” There may have been something to his gallows humor. The press printed rumors that the KGB had even ordered the “reconstruction” of labor camps in eastern Siberia.

Gorbachev counseled calm, but you could see he was thoroughly spooked. At an afternoon session of the Congress that winter, I saw him mounting a short flight of stairs and, in the hasty, idiotic way of such encounters, I blurted, “Mikhail Sergeyevich, they say you are moving to the right.” Gorbachev stopped walking and fixed his eyes on me. His mouth clenched in a pained, ironic grin. The truth is, he said, “I feel as if I am going around in circles.” It was the impish explanation of the confused schoolboy, the harried parent. But in Gorbachev’s mouth, it was sad. What more was he willing to do to mollify these people? While Gorbachev may well have thought he was finessing the hard-liners and playing for time, he was ruining himself forever. The more he attacked Yeltsin and Landsbergis, the more he made cult figures of them. The man who had mastered his own personality and the tactics of the Communist Party now found himself unable to master the new form of politics he had set free. Gorbachev’s compromises, his ugly language, betrayed him. A great man now looked weak, mean-spirited, and confused. There he was, in prime time, railing against the “so-called democrats” who got their marching orders from “foreign research centers.” What fresh hell was this? Yeltsin accused Gorbachev of betraying the people, and who now was rushing to the defense of Mikhail Sergeyevich?

The generals, for their part, were so confident of their hold on power and the flow of events that they were ready at last to turn back history. They would reassert a “balanced” version of the past and rescue history from the historians. The hard-liners even had a new icon. Colonel Alksnis, Ligachev, and conservatives of all varieties wrote articles and gave interviews extolling the late KGB chief and general secretary Yuri Andropov for seeing the need for technocratic reform and for modernizing the economy. Andropov, they all said, had been a man of stability, one who never challenged the principles of socialism or the state.

To chart a new historical orthodoxy would not be easy for the hard-liners. The debate on Soviet history had long since gone beyond the boundaries set out by Gorbachev in 1987. Every leader, not merely Stalin, was now under question. The taboo against criticism of Lenin had weakened to such a degree that now even conservatives like Ligachev had to admit, with the gravity of sudden revelation, “Vladimir Ilyich was a man, not a god.” Even Khrushchev and Bukharin were no longer held out as “alternatives.” At street demonstrations, however, there were signs calling for the criminal indictment of the Party and the KGB. The slogans of the old order gave way to a new irony and sense of repentance. “Workers of the World Forgive Us!” one banner read. The liberal intellectuals no longer debated whether the seventy-year history was a disaster; the argument was over the roots of that disaster. Igor Klyamkin, a leading economist, blamed Lenin for setting the tone of Soviet power with the Red Terror and the first labor camps. Aleksandr Tsipko, a former Central Committee official, argued that Marxism was the cause.

Of all the major events in Soviet history since 1917, the one that was preserved the longest as an unquestionable victory of the regime was the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany. Not even the Revolution held such an important place in the collective psyche of the Soviet people.

The May 9 victory parades were just one element in the cult of the war. Even in the mid-eighties, you could turn on the television any day of the week and there was a better than even chance that a group of veterans, old and festooned with medals and ribbons, would be talking about the Battle of Stalingrad to a group of theatrically interested schoolchildren. The war was the touchstone, the regime’s lingering reason for being. When Gorbachev defended his allegiance to socialism in early 1991, he said, yes, his grandfathers had been persecuted, but how could he betray his father, who fought bravely at the Dniepr and was wounded in Czechoslovakia? Gorbachev recalled his train ride in 1950 from Stavropol to Moscow and looking out the window at mile after mile of devastation and misery. If he abandoned socialist principles now, he asked, would he not be betraying the memory of the twenty-seven million Soviet citizens killed during the war?

For the hard-liners, the meaning of the cult of the war went even deeper. Victory in the war served to legitimize the brutal collectivization and industrialization campaigns that went before it. Although these men no longer celebrated Stalin, at least not in public, their view of history was surely Stalinist. In textbooks and on television, the Party’s propagandists portrayed the war as proof of the system’s ultimate strength—the system that saved the world! Of course there had been excesses, the Stalinist pamphleteer Nina Andreyeva once told me, but without collectivization “we would have starved during the war,” and without industrialization “where would the tanks have come from?” Even as late as 1991, the military leadership held on to the habit of sponsoring official histories, and few projects were more important to the hierarchy than the writing of a new history of the war. This would be the third multivolume official history of the Great Patriotic War since Stalin’s death. But the Ministry of Defense, which was in charge of the project, knew that this time, several years into the glasnost era, a completely bogus history was out of the question. The committee-written project would have to address the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the purge of the officer corps in the late thirties. The new official history would have to answer the question why the Nazis were able to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941 with such ease.

The man in charge of the first volume, tentatively titled On the Eve of the War, was General Dmitri Antonovich Volkogonov. Marshal Dmitri Yazov, the defense minister, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, the leading military adviser to Gorbachev, General Valentin Varennikov, the commander of all ground forces, and the other hard-liners at the top of the army accepted Volkogonov as editor knowing they would not get a warmed-over version of the old histories of the war. His biography of Stalin, Triumph and Tragedy, published with the encouragement of the Gorbachev leadership in 1988, was the first objective study not written by a dissident. As the director of the military’s main history institute, he had had access to all the major archives of the Party, the KGB, and the military while they were still closed to almost everyone else. He was the logical man for the job. They were prepared for a history that was more critical than those published under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. But they were not prepared for what they got.

In late 1990, Volkogonov’s team turned in a draft that coolly assessed the relative evils of Stalin and Hitler and described in full detail the “repressive command system” which carried out, at Stalin’s direct order, the wholesale slaughter of thousands of officers before the war. The draft explored the roots of Stalin’s Terror and its origins in the Red Terror that followed the Revolution. They wrote critically of Stalin’s negotiations with the Nazis that allowed Moscow to annex the Baltic states and other key territories. Most appalling of all to the hard-liners, Volkogonov’s draft concluded that the Soviet Union had won the war almost “by chance”—despite Stalin, not because of him. They implied that perhaps the death of twenty-seven million Soviet people was in vain, that the victory of the Soviet Union represented the victory of one brutal regime over another.

The Ministry of Defense sent copies of the draft history around to various “reviewers”: generals, admirals, officials in the Communist Party, and the heads of the major institutes. Their reaction was angry and quick. Akhromeyev gave an interview to the reactionary Military Historical Journal that accused Volkogonov of acting as a “traitor.” “Had Volkogonov succeeded in publishing the work, with its obviously false positions as set out in the first volume, it would have done great harm, and not only to history,” Akhromeyev said. “The lies about the war would have been used for undermining the integrity of our country and the socialist choice, and for the constant defamation of the Communist Party. This could not be allowed.” Volkogonov, he said, was an anti-Communist “turncoat” serving just one master: the equally anti-Communist Russian president, Boris Yeltsin.

The denunciations had only just begun. On March 7, at an elegant meeting hall in the Ministry of Defense, fifty-seven generals, Central Committee officials, and official academics gathered to review Volkogonov’s work. The chairman of the editorial committee, General A. F. Kochetov, opened the session by reminding everyone that “when the original conception of the ten-volume work was discussed, everyone agreed with the idea that the driving force [of the victory] was the Soviet people, the people’s army, the toilers, all led by the Party. But today, proceeding from the interests of the moment, everyone insults and blames the Party. Suddenly the people are to blame.… Many of the reviews asked the question: ‘If things were so awful before the war, why did we win?’ ” Kochetov pointed out incredulously that in the book there was an implicit (and intolerable) comparison of socialism with fascism. He said that some of the reviewers had also complained that Volkogonov betrayed the intentions of the volume by discussing the origins of the system leading up to the war, and others simply objected to the titles of chapters such as “The Political Regime Grows Stricter” and “The Militarization of Spiritual Life.” Kochetov then opened the session for “general discussion”: an invitation to a beheading. General Mikhail Moiseyev, chief of the general staff, attacked Volkogonov, saying that he was merely out to inspire “today’s destructive forces”—meaning Yeltsin and the pro-independence activists in the republics.

“Defend the army!” came the calls from the hall.

Later, Valentin Falin, the head of the Central Committee’s International Department, took the floor. “We must point out the insufficiencies of this volume, its thousands of mistakes,” he said. “I have not seen such fantastical stuff in thirty or forty years.… To waste government money on this is out of the question!” Volkogonov turned pale. He had grown away from these men, but he was only now aware by how much. After more than an hour of denunciations, he finally demanded the floor.

“Respected comrades!” Volkogonov began. “My voice in this hall will no doubt be a lonely one. There is not likely to be a real scholarly discussion here. This is a tribunal on scholarship, on history, on a large group of writers. Instead of an analysis of the issue, there is just unbridled criticism.… In the atmosphere that has been created here I cannot write a new history. To write only about the victory of 1945 means to talk nonsense about 1941, about the four million prisoners, about the retreat to the Volga. It is impossible to reduce history to politics.” Volkogonov had only begun, but now Varennikov, one of the most reactionary generals in the Ministry of Defense hierarchy, broke in, shouting, “There is a suggestion to deny him the floor!” Volkogonov refused to back down.

“I am no less a patriot than Falin and love the Motherland no less than he,” he said. “But you cannot change the consequences of history. I agree with those who say there are many faults in this volume.… But let’s discuss and debate them. We’ll give our points of view. But, no, Comrade Falin and some others do not engage in scholarly debate, but rather make accusations about a lack of patriotism.” “Enough!” one general shouted. “Listen to this!”

Somewhere in the hall came the shout “Stop his speech!”

Volkogonov kept going, arguing that unless the book and the Soviet people dealt with all the cruelty and misery that had preceded the war, there could be no understanding of what happened after the opening volleys of the Nazi invasion.

“How else can we look at the fact that forty-three thousand officers and other army officials were purged?” he said. “And what of the other victims? We don’t need blind patriotism. We need the truth!… Mine is a lonely voice in this hall, but I want to see what you say about it all in ten years.” The chairman was appalled. He took personal offense.

Finally, the swarm overtook Volkogonov. The generals shouted him down, and he did not speak again. But the ritual was far from over. Two and a half hours after the session had begun, Marshal Yazov, the minister of defense, arrived. Yazov, with his lumpy face and bulbous nose, was none too bright. When it came time to appoint a new defense minister after a German teenager, Mathias Rust, managed to land his little plane on Red Square in 1987, Gorbachev went way down the ladder and found Yazov, the chief of military operations in the far east. The man had a reputation for mediocrity. But that was the point. Gorbachev wanted a man utterly without cunning. He wanted a pleasant mutt, a loyal friend.

But that was years ago, and now, with the conservatives in the midst of a full-fledged counterrevolution against radical reform, Yazov was showing his strength. He despised the direction perestroika had taken. Hundreds of thousands of young men in the Baltic states, the Caucasus, and other regions were ignoring their draft notices. Gorbachev was cutting troop levels and other liberals wanted even more reductions. Meanwhile, officers returning from Eastern Europe and Germany were living in crowded dormitories and even tents.

Yazov quickly addressed the group, and there was no doubt that his anger went far beyond any rough draft or a three-star general named Volkogonov. The battle over the book represented to him nothing less than the overall struggle for power in the Soviet Union.

“The ‘democrats’ now have made it their goal to prepare and carry out a Nuremberg II on the Communist Party,” Yazov said. “The volume has in it the outlines for an indictment for such a trial.” “This book has at its foundation a libel of the Party,” Varennikov pitched in.

“In this hall,” Yazov continued, “I think, everyone is a Communist. And Communists cannot spit on their Party.” It was over. Volkogonov was dismissed from the editorial committee and his draft was “returned to the board for fundamental reworking.” Another victory for the hard-line coalition. Five months later, in August, Yazov, Varennikov, Moiseyev, and other men in the room would go even farther and attempt a coup d’état.

I first met Volkogonov in 1988 when he was still in the official fold and about to publish his biography, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. (The English translation did not appear until 1991.) The publicity flaks around the foreign ministry were pitching him as their “breakthrough historian”—which caused immediate suspicion. For the liberal intelligentsia in Moscow and Leningrad, Volkogonov was not an inspiring choice. He had published dozens of books and monographs on military ideology, and none of them even hinted at independence, rigor, or critical thought. Here was a military man who had played the game; if he harbored dissident thoughts, he had not yet committed a whisper of them to paper.

But at a meeting with journalists at the Foreign Ministry, Volkogonov was impressive. He spoke without bluff or euphemism. He was familiar with all the major Western scholarship on Stalin, making detailed and admiring references to a number of books, especially Robert C. Tucker’s multivolume biography-in-progress. As a way to defend himself against official Party historians who would attack his use of foreign scholars, Volkogonov wrote in the introduction, “Without realizing it, Stalin did far more to blacken the name of ‘socialism’ than anything written by Leonard Schapiro, Isaac Deutscher, Robert Tucker or Robert Conquest.” Volkogonov clearly had full access to the spetskhran—the “special shelves” of Soviet libraries where banned books were secreted away. In his bibliography, he cites books that were, until glasnost, unavailable for ordinary Soviets: Adam Ulam’s biography of Stalin, Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky, Richard Pipes’s Russia Under the Old Regime, Milovan Djilis’s Conversations with Stalin, and the memoirs of Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva. In addition, Volkogonov read and made reference to the works of Stalin’s enemies, the men he defeated and executed: Bukharin, Trotsky, Rykov, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Tomsky.

If Volkogonov had merely cribbed the Western biographies of Stalin and published the result under his name in the Soviet Union, his book would have had a certain notoriety. The mere notion of a Red Army general laying bare the awful facts of the Stalin era would have been an astonishing advance in the Soviet Union’s attempt to recover its historical memory. But he did much more. Volkogonov will be remembered not so much as a great thinker or writer but rather for the uniqueness of his access, the way he made scholarly use of his political position. Volkogonov alone had the chance to exploit the paperwork of the totalitarian regime, and he went everywhere: the Central Party Archives, the USSR Supreme Court Archives, the Central State Archives of the Army, the Ministry of Defense Archives, the Armed Forces General Staff Archives, and the archives of several important museums and institutes, including the Institute of Marxism-Leninism.

On those shelves, Volkogonov found no definitive answers to the remaining riddles of history. For example, he did not come up with a “smoking gun” in the 1934 murder of the Leningrad Party chief Sergei Kirov. Nearly all Western scholars assume, with good circumstantial reason, that Stalin ordered Kirov killed in order to eliminate a potential political threat and to set the stage for the Great Terror. Volkogonov assumed the same and wrote: “The archives that I have searched do not provide any further clues for making a more definitive statement on the Kirov affair. What is clear, however, is that the murder was not carried out on the orders of Trotsky, Zinoviev, or Kamenev, which was soon put out as the official version. Knowing what we now know about Stalin, it is certain that he had a hand in it. The removal of two or three layers of indirect witnesses bears his hallmark.” But while Triumph and Tragedy made no sensational advances, while it did not “solve” the enigma of Stalin’s motives or produce a definitive death toll for the repressions of the era, the book was in no sense a failure. By providing excerpts from hundreds of memos, telegrams, and orders that had never been seen by scholars before, Volkogonov allowed the reader a terrible intimacy with the Soviet despot; Triumph and Tragedy gave new texture, at once horrifying and bland, to our knowledge of one of the worst passages in human history.

In his portrayal of Stalin, Volkogonov was more critical than many of his liberal critics might have expected. Triumph and Tragedy showed Stalin to have been a coward, a miserable commander in chief during the war, a “mediocrity but not insignificant,” as Trotsky once put it. Volkogonov provided the conclusive documentary evidence that Stalin, using blue or red pencils, personally ordered the deaths of thousands in the same offhand tone as a man ordering a drink at a bar.

“… According to I. D. Perfilyev, an Old Bolshevik who had spent many years in a concentration camp and who told me the story, once, in Molotov’s company, while discussing a routine list with [secret police chief Nikolai] Yezhov, Stalin muttered to no one in particular: ‘Who’s going to remember all this riffraff in ten or twenty years time? No one. Who remembers the names now of the boyars Ivan the Terrible got rid of? No one.… The people had to know he was getting rid of all his enemies. In the end, they all got what they deserved.’ “ ‘The people understand, Iosif Vissarionovich, they understand and they support you,’ Molotov replied automatically.” In Moscow, I got to know Volkogonov fairly well, first in his incarnation as a military historian, then as a political outcast, and, finally, when he became a radical deputy in the Russian parliament in 1990 and a top military adviser to Russian President Yeltsin. Even early on, when he had to take great care in how, and with whom, he talked about his work, Volkogonov never concealed just how deeply his days in the archives had moved him.

“I would come home from working in Stalin’s archives, and I would be deeply shaken,” Volkogonov told me. “I remember coming home after reading through the day of December 12, 1938. He signed thirty lists of death sentences that day, altogether about five thousand people, including many he knew personally, his friends. This was before their trials, of course. This was no surprise. This is not what shook me. But it turned out that, having signed these documents, he went to his personal theater very late that night and watched two movies, including Happy Guys, a popular comedy of the time. I simply could not understand how, after deciding the fate of several thousand lives, he could watch such a movie. But I was beginning to realize that morality plays no role for dictators. That’s when I understood why my father was shot, why my mother died in exile, why millions of people died.” Volkogonov was born in the Siberian city of Chita in 1928 and later moved to the Pacific coast of Russia. His father was an agrarian specialist and his mother cared for the three children. In 1937, at the height of the purges, Anton Volkogonov was summoned to the local Party committee, where he was arrested for the crime of possessing printed matter of a “politically questionable” origin—a pamphlet by the “right deviationist” Nikolai Bukharin. Volkogonov’s father was never seen again. “He just disappeared into the meat grinder of the purges,” Volkogonov said. “When I was older, my mother whispered to me, ‘Your father was shot. Never, never speak of it again.’ ” This family of an “enemy of the people” was exiled to the village of Agul in the Krasnoyarsk district of western Siberia, near an ever-growing complex of forced-labor camps. When he was a child, Volkogonov saw long columns of prisoners marching from the rail stations fifty miles away to the camps. Guard dogs, barbed wire, and watchtowers were all part of his childhood landscape. With each passing month, NKVD workers cordoned off more land and built more camps. The guards dug huge trenches in the pine forest and carried the corpses to the trenches at night on old-fashioned Russian sleds. Schoolchildren would go looking for pine nuts in the forest and they would hear gunfire, Volkogonov recalled, “like the sound of canvas being ripped apart.” Volkogonov’s mother died just after the end of the war. Like many other orphans, Dmitri Antonovich entered the military as a draftee and never left. His brother and sister were adopted by other families. As a young private and officer during the late forties and the fifties, Volkogonov got a thorough education in political orthodoxy. He learned quickly that no diversion was too small to be noticed. Toward the end of Triumph and Tragedy, Volkogonov let himself enter the portrait of the system, here as a student of military equipment and state ideology: “… Students were tested first and foremost for their ability to summarize Stalin’s works. I remember being kept back by the teacher when I was attending the Orel Tank School. He was a lieutenant colonel, no longer a young man, and was very much liked by the class for his good nature. When we were alone he handed me my work, which was a summary of sources, and said to me in a quiet and fatherly voice: ‘It’s a good summary. I could see right away you hadn’t just copied it down and had given it some thought. But my advice is, summarize the Stalinist works more fully. Understand, more fully! And another thing. In front of the name Iosif Vissarionovich, don’t write “Com.” Write “Comrade” in full. Got it?’ That night one of my roommates told me they’d all had similar conversations with the teacher of Party history. The exams were coming up and there were rumors that in a neighboring school ‘they had paid attention’ to the sort of ‘political immaturities’ I had shown in my summaries.” As an officer, Volkogonov was prepared to do anything for the Motherland. At a nuclear test site, he was ordered to drive a new-model tank straight through the area that had just been the epicenter of an atomic bomb test. And he did. “There was nothing I would not do,” Volkogonov told me. “I was a young lieutenant when Stalin died and I thought the heavens would fall without him. The fact that my father had been shot and my mother died miserably in exile, that didn’t seem to matter: it was destiny, incomprehensible. My mind was contaminated. I was incapable of analyzing these things, of putting the pieces together.” In the Komsomol and the Communist Party organizations of the Lenin Military Academy in Moscow, Volkogonov became such a master of the standard texts of dogma that he gained a reputation among the senior officers as an especially reliable polit rabotnik, a political propagandist. Volkogonov got a doctorate in philosophy—which, in those days, meant Marxist-Leninist philosophy—and in 1970 was transferred to the army’s Department of Propaganda. There he climbed the ladder steadily; he was promoted to general at forty, won a professorship at forty-four, and made it to deputy chief in charge of political instruction. Along the way, he also earned a doctorate in history.

With his high rank and credentials, Volkogonov was allowed access to all the most important—and closed—archives in the capital. “But make no mistake about who I was,” Volkogonov said. “I was not a closet radical. I cannot distort history to suit my needs. The fact is, I was an orthodox Marxist, an officer who knew his duty. I was not part of some liberal current. All my changes came from within, off on my own. I had access to all kinds of literature. You know there were many people, especially young officers of the KGB, who thought liberally because they had more information than anyone else. That’s why there have always been a lot of thinking people in the KGB, people who understand the West as it really is and what our own country really was.

“I was a Stalinist. I contributed to the strengthening of the system that I am now trying to dismantle. But latently, I had my ideas. I began asking myself questions about Lenin, how, if he was such a genius, none of his predictions came true. The proletarian dictatorship never came to be, the principle of class struggle was discredited, Communism was not built in fifteen years as he had promised. None of Lenin’s major predictions ever came true! I confess it: I used my position. I began gathering information even though I didn’t know yet what I would do with it.” While working in a KGB archive during the thaw, Volkogonov even read his father’s file and learned that what his mother had whispered had been true. Anton Volkogonov had been shot in 1937 just after his arrest.

Almost as a dream, Volkogonov decided he would write a trilogy on Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky. By the late seventies, Volkogonov was secretly working on the Stalin volume. His apartment was crammed with tens of thousands of photocopied documents and books, many of them banned. As time passed and times grew a bit more liberal, Volkogonov made little secret of what he was doing. The military hierarchy, however, decided that Volkogonov’s historical research was not “consistent” with his position as a propagandist. He was shunted aside and installed at the Institute of Military History, a move that represented a demotion, Volkogonov said, of “three steps down the ladder.” For a soldier, perhaps. But for a historian, the demotion was a gift. Now Volkogonov had more time and access to the archives. When the leadership finally came looking for a biography of Stalin, Volkogonov was there, ready to write.

Using his position as a general, Volkogonov was able to realize the dreams of such outsiders as Dima Yurasov. Volkogonov’s work in the archives not only provided him international fame, it also shattered whatever last illusions he might have had about Soviet history. Now Volkogonov, like so many other intellectuals throughout the union, saw the roots of catastrophe in the ideology itself, in Leninism. “Abstract ideas give rise to fanatics, and such was Trotsky,” he wrote. The utopianism, the ferocity, of Bolshevism gave rise to the totalitarian state.

In the spring of 1991, Volkogonov invited me to meet with him in his hospital room. He was exhausted by his battle with Yazov and the other generals. The hospital was tucked away on a side street off Kalinin Prospekt. Compared to other Soviet hospitals I’d seen, with their filthy floors, their crowded rooms, this special clinic for the military elite was a wonder. There were private rooms, wood-paneled hallways, a clean and efficient staff. Volkogonov told me he was ill and not sure how long he had to live. He had stomach cancer and would go for surgery to Western Europe. But he did not seem shocked or sad and wanted only to pick up on what we had talked about in his various offices.

“You see, I am now convinced that Stalinism created a new type of man: indifferent, without initiative or enterprise, a person waiting for a messiah, waiting for someone to come alive and solve all of life’s problems. The most awful thing about it is that this cannot merely be shed, like taking off an old raincoat and donning a new one. There are many aspects of this mentality still inside me, and I lose them only slowly. This whole period we are living in now is about scrubbing this mentality from our minds. We are all becoming revolutionaries when it comes to our own individual way of thinking. For you it is so hard to understand. You are indifferent as to who will be in power in your own country. Democrats or Republicans, America is America. Only some nuances of the system change. For us, a mutiny is going on. The Revolution was one sort of mutiny, and we are on the threshold of another. We are making our way through an intellectual and spiritual fog and all around us is collapse.

“The generals in the army reproach me for being a chameleon. They say I am a traitor or a renegade. But personally I think it is a more courageous stance to abandon honestly something which has been devalued by history instead of carrying it to the end in your soul. There are people among them who criticize me in public and in private say I am right but they can’t say so.

“Now I am in complete isolation. I get support from the grass roots, from junior officers, and a couple of generals even support me secretly. The majority despise me. Even when I meet generals here in the hospital they pretend not to notice me. Others want to talk to me, but they fear the consequences.

“These people are frozen in the past. Even truth will not change them. Stalin died physically, but not historically. The image of Stalin lives because it has so many allies. No less than fifteen percent of the letters I get are from Stalinists, and the worse the situation gets, the more of those I get. The Party has sixteen million people in it. Thirty percent are like Akhromeyev or Nina Andreyeva. They won’t change. Another thirty percent see the Party as a modus vivendi. They can’t advance in their careers if they are not members. And the rest could leave at any moment.

“The army and the KGB were never for real perestroika. They were for minor repairs of the system, a little camouflage. They wanted to preserve the system intact by getting rid of the most obviously odious features: super-bureaucracy, corruption, and so on. Yet none of them wants to question the essence of the system. The Party ought to be in control, they say.

“Totalitarian systems usually absorb people absolutely. As I have come to realize, very few people have been able to transcend such a system, to tear themselves away from it. Most people of my generation will die imprisoned in this system, even if they live another ten or twenty years. Of course, people who are twenty or thirty are free people. They can liberate themselves from the system quite easily. The only thing I have to offer is my experience. Maybe my example will be valuable in tracing the crisis, the tragedy, and the drama of Communist ideas and utopia played out over the generations.” Volkogonov was getting tired. And at the same time, his mood was changing. The full weight of the news he had just gotten was beginning to hit him, and he began to talk about working “at full speed” to finish the volumes on Lenin and Trotsky and perhaps write a memoir. When we got to talking about the dark mood in Moscow, I finally asked him what he thought was ahead.

“Democratization is irreversible on the historic, strategic scale,” Volkogonov said. “But on the tactical plane, in the short run, the right-wing forces still have a chance. They may even come to the head of the country and hustle us all back into the barn for another five or ten years. They could try. They are that crazy and that angry.”