فصل 27

CHAPTER 27

CITIZENS

YAGUNOVSKO

In the summer of 1989, when the miners brought the revolution to Siberia, Anatoly Shcheglov walked me back from his village to the tram for Kemerevo and invited me back. “I’ll take you fishing in the taiga,” he said. Now, a year and a half later, the miners were on strike again and I was back in Siberian coal country. Most of the government’s promises had been broken and conditions were as dismal as ever. Along the road to Shcheglov’s hut on Second Plan Street, the snow was crusted black, the air was cold and gassy.

Anatoly Shcheglov had no phone. I just assumed he’d be at home. When he opened the door, he greeted me as if I’d been away a week and coming back to Yagunovsko were the most ordinary thing in the world for an American. He looked cleaner, more relaxed, but a good deal older. A lace-work of wrinkles ate deep into his face. “I’m retired now,” he said. “The expected happened.” He said that the winter after we’d met, as he settled his huge frame into a chair one night after dinner, he had a heart attack. Like a horse kicking him in the chest, he said. He was fifty years old. “It’s the usual thing for us underground men,” Anatoly said. “You quit at fifty and you’re lucky to make it to fifty-five. I doubt if I’ll be around much longer.” Shcheglov now spent his days standing in lines at empty village stores, shuttling from one filthy hospital to the next looking for doctors, aspirin, glycerin pills. “An old man’s life,” he said. But what brightened him, he said, was the nerve and determination of his fellow miners across the country. The strikes now had nothing to do with the issues of July 1989. “It’s not about soap or vacation pay anymore,” he said. The miners wanted nothing less than the resignation of Gorbachev’s government and the dismantling of the system of state socialism. “There are no more illusions left, no more socialist dreams,” Shcheglov said. “The first strikes were for a crust of bread, a cut of meat. We got nothing that was promised us. Life just got worse. Now we know the secret. The system has to go.” Since the beginning of March 1991, over 300,000 miners had gone out on strike. The remaining 900,000 miners worked only to avert a complete collapse of the national economy. The strike leaders figured they would gain no supporters if it came to that. Their strategy was measured and effective. In the coming weeks there were warning strikes by machinists in Leningrad, electricians in Samara, Black Sea dockworkers in Odessa.

The strikes terrified the Kremlin hard-liners. They knew that the radicalization of the workers—the proletariat’s evolving consciousness, to borrow from the Marxist phrasebook—could be the finishing blow to a tottering regime. Soviet power seemed able to withstand the demonstrations of urban democracy movements, but the workers had the power to turn the lights out in the Kremlin. And they were not kidding. “No more games,” Shcheglov said. “No more games.” At a session of the Russian Republic’s legislature, most of the deputies did little more than echo softly Yeltsin’s latest demands for Gorbachev’s resignation. But late in the session, the Kuzbass strike leader, Anatoly Malikhin, took the floor and announced, “We are prepared to flood the mines.” The miners, he said, had lost all tolerance for the system that had bled them white. Lead the attack, he told the Russian deputies, or the miners will.

A few days after the speech, I met Anatoly Malikhin at the Rossiya Hotel in Moscow. There were remnants everywhere of late-night strategy sessions: leaflets, stuffed ashtrays, and dirty glasses. Strike headquarters was wherever Anatoly Malikhin happened to be. His phone rang incessantly: strike committees from Siberia, Ukraine, the far east, and Vorkuta in northern Russia called with congratulations, questions, advice, more plans.

“Well, then fuck ‘em,” he said at one point on the line to the Kuzbass. “We’ll go back when the demands are met. Not sooner.” Malikhin showed more certainty, more sense of purpose, than any of the liberal intellectuals in Moscow and Leningrad. He was absolutely serious; there was no theater to him, no veneer of irony. He and the other strike leaders had taken Gorbachev at his word when they negotiated a settlement to the strikes in 1989, and they would not repeat the mistake. Simple as that.

“No one is belittling what Gorbachev has already done, but every person has his moment, his moment of peak operation, like a machine,” Malikhin said. “But Gorbachev thinks he is unique. At the beginning, he really did do a lot, and we take our hats off to him. But he should have changed the system radically a year or more ago. Then he could have found himself a place for himself in that new structure. But he didn’t. He was stuck with his socialist principles. Now he is doing more harm than good. If Gorbachev is so smart, why is he still trying to protect the Party? There is a rumor that he is getting ready to send army troops to the mines. Well, believe me, if he does that the soldiers will die there by the thousands.” NOVOCHERKASSK

No one knew where the dead were buried. There were rumors: the KGB had pushed the corpses down a mine shaft or into a swamp, or the police had brought the bodies to a series of unmarked graves in cemeteries spread across the Black Earth zone of southern Russia. But no one knew.

For nearly thirty years, the story of the Novocherkassk rebellion was a secret of the state. The strike in June 1962 over price rises and wage cuts at the city’s Electric Locomotive Works was the first workers’ uprising in Russia since the fitful years immediately after the Revolution. At Moscow’s orders, the military turned its machine guns on the unarmed demonstrators in Novocherkassk. At least twenty-four were killed, dozens more injured. Not long after, the Kremlin’s judges ordered the execution of seven “ringleaders” who had survived. Within three days, all mention of Novocherkassk disappeared from the state-controlled press. Even Western specialists knew almost nothing of the bloody affair. Solzhenitsyn published a few pages of rough description in the third volume of The Gulag Archipelago, but that, of course, was considered “anti-Soviet propaganda” and banned until 1990.

Now, with the miners on strike once more, with the KGB, the army, and Gorbachev himself feeling threatened by nationalists and political opponents, in a time of increasing food shortages and ethnic division, there was constant talk of conflict, of civil disobedience, of the possibility of bloodshed. The massacre of demonstrators in Tbilisi, Baku, and Vilnius made it clear that the regime, despite all the reforms, could be expected to bring out the tanks and machine guns, even poisonous gas, if that was what it took to survive. What had changed, if anything, since that summer afternoon in southern Russia in 1962?

In addition to the twenty-four people killed in Novocherkassk, the massacre claimed at least one more victim: Soviet Army General Matvei Shaposhnikov, a true believer in the Bolshevik ideal who was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union after leading a tank division to victory in some of the bloodiest fighting in World War II. Years before the emergence of Sakharov and the dissident movement, Shaposhnikov had done the unthinkable. Ordered to attack the demonstrators at Novocherkassk, he refused.

When I met him, the general was eighty-four years old. His political superiors forced him to retire three years after the Novocherkassk massacre, but he was active and strong. With his grip he could have crushed a walnut. His apartment in the city of Rostov-on-Don, which he shared with his daughter and son-in-law and their children, was military-neat, his books and memorabilia perfectly arranged and dusted.

“Let’s talk, face to face,” Shaposhnikov said, lifting a heavy chair and setting it down for his guest. He was older than the regime. “I remember clearly singing revolutionary songs as an eleven-year-old boy in 1917: ‘Oh, march, march forward, working people …!’ I believed all my life in Soviet power, and now I was being told to shoot at my own people, unarmed people. I had to pay for my decision with everything. They stripped me of my rank, my decorations, my membership in the Communist Party. They told me to retire for ‘health reasons.’ And my wife, my dear, dear wife, finally paid for it even more deeply. She died a few years ago, and I am convinced she died from the attacks on us. Finally, she just could not bear it.” There was not one hour, even now, the general said, when he did not think back to the days of the massacre. On the morning of June 1, 1962, the Communist Party press in Novocherkassk announced that the prices of meat and butter would go up at least 25 percent. When workers at the Electric Locomotive Works arrived at the plant, they discovered that their wages would be cut by as much as 30 percent. Both local newspapers, the Hammer and the Banner of the Commune, assured the people that these were merely “temporary measures,” all in the name of “social progress.” Somehow, the workers were not prepared this time to believe the usual doublespeak. Their anger was so intense that they forgot themselves. They forgot for a moment their “party discipline” and confronted the plant director, an odious bureaucrat named Kurochkin.

How would they live now? the workers demanded.

“You’re used to wolfing down meat pies,” Kurochkin replied. “Now you can stuff them with jam instead.” The workers were enraged. They blew the shop floor whistles and started gathering in the courtyards. There they talked of a strike and drew up placards: “Give Us Meat and Butter,” “We Need Places to Live.” They ripped down portraits of Khrushchev and burned them. Terrified, the plant managers locked themselves in their offices. The local Communist Party officials refused to meet with any of the strike representatives.

Meanwhile, the regional military command had been on alert for weeks in anticipation of the announcements of price hikes and wage cuts. According to Shaposhnikov, the regional military commander, General Issa Pliyev, received a stream of coded orders from the Ministry of Defense and Khrushchev himself. That first night, KGB officers and police arrested some of the most outspoken factory workers in an attempt to head off a potential strike.

Two members of Khrushchev’s inner political circle, Anastas Mikoyan and Frol Kozlov, were already in the city. Shaposhnikov, who had been put in charge of the armed detachments stationed near the locomotive factory, told the two Politburo members that he was “gravely concerned” that the troops were carrying guns. A confrontation, he said, could lead to bloodshed.

“Commander Pliyev has been given all the instructions he needs,” Kozlov replied angrily.

On the morning of June 2, at around eleven o’clock, seven thousand workers and other demonstrators began their protest march from the locomotive plant to the center of Novocherkassk. They ignored the troops and tanks that surrounded the plant. As they marched, some workers tried to block the railway line leading into town as a further show of protest. “But people were unarmed, peaceful. They even carried portraits of Lenin,” said Vladimir Fomin, one of the region’s deputies in the Russian parliament. The greatest offense of the marchers was their willingness to question Moscow. “Khrushchev for sausage meat!” the protesters chanted.

Anticipating violence, Shaposhnikov told all his soldiers to empty the ammunition from their guns and for the tank brigades to do the same. As the column of demonstrators passed, Shaposhnikov stopped one worker and asked where they were going.

“Comrade General,” the worker said, “if the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad will go to the mountain.” They were headed for the police station and Communist Party headquarters. Shaposhnikov radioed ahead to Pliyev and told him that the column of protesters was now moving across the Tuzlov bridge and into town.

“Stop them! Don’t let them pass!” Pliyev shouted into his radio.

“I haven’t got enough men to stop seven thousand people,” Shaposhnikov said.

“Send the tanks! Attack them!” Pliyev said.

Shaposhnikov said, “Comrade Commander, I see no enemy that our tanks ought to attack.” Pliyev slammed down the receiver in a rage. In that moment of dead air, Shaposhnikov sensed disaster, but he thought he might be able to head it off. He jumped in a jeep and tried to catch up with the protesters. But by the time he neared the city’s central square, the marchers were at the gates of the police station, demanding that the strike leaders be let out of jail. Suddenly, soldiers started firing into the crowd. Some witnesses said the troops were issued dumdum bullets, which expand on impact. In a panic, the crowd turned and started to flee up Moskovskaya Street. The troops continued firing at their backs. One woman lay in a flower bed bleeding to death. Her arm had been shot off.

By the time the crowd was gone, Solzhenitsyn wrote, “the soldiers looked around for trucks and buses, commandeered them, loaded them with the dead and wounded, and took them to the high-walled military hospital. For a day or two afterward these buses went around town with bloodstained seats.” News of the killings spread to other factories. Workers left the plants and staged an even bigger rally in the center of town. “Trucks full of workers arrived from everywhere,” one witness recalled. “It was a torrent of human bodies. No force on earth could have stopped them.” “Khrushchev! Khrushchev! Let him see!” the crowd chanted.

Soon Mikoyan was on the radio. He spoke of “hooligans” and “the tragic accident.” The police issued a curfew order and sent the crowd home. The army left its troops and tanks in the city for weeks. Within two days, the official press ceased all mention of the Novocherkassk affair. And so it stayed for decades.

General Shaposhnikov was a loyal Party member with memories of the first days of the Revolution. He could not understand why the local Communists had not simply met with the workers as “comrades” and negotiated with them. He thought that he should write a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Maybe they would understand. After all, he thought, the Soviet army simply did not attack its own people. You could read it in Lenin, in all the Party rulebooks! He remembered how the Party always referred to “Bloody Sunday” when the czarist police in 1905 attacked a crowd of peaceful petitioners. The Party and its army would never act that way.

Shaposhnikov asked to speak with the Party officials. He was refused. Even after a few months went by, the general could not let the killings pass. He began sending anonymous letters to the Soviet Writers’ Union in Moscow in the naive hope that their “great humanism” would be of help to him. And so Shaposhnikov, a Hero of the Soviet Union in his sixties, wrote: “The Party has turned into a car which is steered by a reckless, drunken driver who is always breaking the traffic rules. It’s high time to take away the driver’s license and prevent a catastrophe.… Today it is extremely important that the working people and the intellectuals should see clearly the essence of the political regime under which we live. They must realize that we are under the rule of the worst form of autocracy which rests on an enormous bureaucracy and an armed force.… It is necessary that people learn to think. Our blind faith is turning us into mere living machines. Our people have been deprived of all political and international rights.” Once more Shaposhnikov’s idealism was betrayed. The Writers’ Union was a hopelessly corrupt organization, a swamp of toadies, and its officers turned Shaposhnikov’s letters over to the KGB. Shaposhnikov said his intentions were never “anti-Soviet” but rather “anti the bureaucrats and their arrogance.” Somehow the KGB did not see it that way. The general began noticing that his mail was arriving already opened. He soon confirmed that he was under surveillance. In 1966, with no explanation, the army forced him out of active duty. In 1967, police searched his apartment and confiscated his archives. Without even pretending to secrecy, they also installed a listening device in the bedroom wall. “I was basically under house arrest, and I was followed by men in dark glasses all the time,” Shaposhnikov said. “There was nothing I could do. Some friends remained loyal, but it was very hard for them, especially in a provincial place like this. They saw what was happening. People tried to avoid me. They would actually cross the street just to avoid saying hello to me in town.” Finally the KGB called Shaposhnikov to local headquarters for a prolonged interrogation. Over and over they demanded that he confess to “anti-Soviet” activities, and Shaposhnikov always described his work in the countryside teaching illiterate workers to read, his work in the mines for 20 kopecks a shift, his long and celebrated career in the army. “How could I have been anti-Soviet when I gave Soviet power everything?” he said. “If anyone had been dedicated to building Communism, it was me.” He was stripped of his army rank and his membership in the Communist Party. Only by writing an impassioned letter to the KGB chief, Yuri Andropov, did Shaposhnikov save himself from jail.

Through the Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko years, there was not much for the general to do except live in shabby retirement. While other Soviet generals had generous benefits—dachas, special food orders, generous pensions—Shaposhnikov lived no better than a retired factory worker. To pass the time and make a few extra rubles, he wrote memoirs of the war, about the tank assaults on the Nazis on the Ukrainian front. The books were published, but, of course, they had nothing to do with the massacre at Novocherkassk.

Throughout the sixties and seventies, the general never connected with the underground political ferment in Moscow and Leningrad. The truth was, the dissident movement confused him. It seemed directed not only at the leadership, but also at the foundations of Leninist ideology. “I could never understand that,” he said.

When Gorbachev came to power in 1985, Shaposhnikov wrote five letters to the Kremlin. They all went unanswered. Finally, in 1988, he got an imperious letter from the Supreme Court: “Your case has now been dismissed in view of the absence of corpus delicti.… The acts perpetrated by you in the sixties provided ample grounds for bringing charges of anti-Soviet propaganda against you. It is only in the context of perestroika and the democratization of all spheres of life in the Soviet Union that it has become possible to find you not guilty.” It would be hard to find a more egregious example of indirection and self-righteousness in the service of simple justice. But Shaposhnikov was only relieved. He began going once more to his local Party meetings—“I am sixty years a Communist!” But his faith is of a certain kind. In 1990, when a group of young officers in the army scandalized the generals by forming the reformist group called Shield, they made Shaposhnikov their honorary chairman. They even asked him to speak at a huge antigovernment rally in Moscow just as troops were killing Azerbaijanis on the streets of Baku. “I thought a long time about what I wanted to say that day,” Shaposhnikov said. “I thought about that afternoon in Novocherkassk and everything that is going on now, and so I said the army has to vow that they are always with the people and not against them. We can never shoot at our own people. Otherwise we are nothing. Otherwise, we have no future. We’d better remember that.” MOSCOW

Even after “Bloody Sunday” in Vilnius, the hard-liners wanted still more blood. They wanted to provoke a confrontation with the opposition forces that would require force; they wanted an incident so ugly that they would finally have the pretense they needed to step in, declare a state of emergency, and put an end to the strikes and the defiant leaderships in the Baltic states, Moldavia, Georgia, Armenia, and, most of all, Russia.

Gorbachev was showing no signs of relaxing his position. In early March 1991, he proclaimed victory in a referendum to preserve the union, but he knew well that he had been trumped by Yeltsin. Yeltsin added a second question to the ballot asking voters of the Russian Republic if they wanted direct elections for a Russian president. They voted overwhelmingly for a June election. Until now, Yeltsin had been the Russian leader, but only because he had been elected chairman of the republican parliament, and then only by a narrow margin. But Yeltsin knew two things: first, that he would run and win; second, that such a victory would force Gorbachev, who had never been elected to anything by the people, to deal more seriously with the opposition.

But for now, as president of the country and general secretary of the Party, Gorbachev still thought his power was with the Party, the KGB, and the military. He listened to them almost unquestioningly, even to their wildest deceptions. Shevardnadze, whose instincts and judgments had proved uncanny since the day of his resignation speech, saw in his friend Gorbachev a man who was a prisoner “of his own nature, his conceptions, and his way of thinking and acting.” All through 1991, Shevardnadze wrote in his memoir, it was “none other than Gorbachev himself [who] had been spoon-feeding the junta with his indecisiveness, his inclination to back and fill, his fellow-traveling, his poor judgment of people, his indifference toward his true allies, his distrust of the democratic forces, and his disbelief in the bulwark whose name is the people—the very same people who had changed thanks to the perestroika he had begun. That is the enormous tragedy of Mikhail Gorbachev, and no matter how much I empathize with him, I cannot help but say that it almost led to a national tragedy.” Yakovlev told me that Gorbachev believed the chiefs of the KGB and the Interior Ministry police when they informed him that the reformers were actually planning to storm the Kremlin walls using “hooks and ladders.” To tighten the screw, Pravda’s deputy editor, Anatoly Karpychev, repeated the same rumors in print, writing that the radicals were making “preparations for the final storming of the Kremlin.” Yakovlev exploded, telling Gorbachev that these so-called intelligence reports were sheer nonsense and that he was making a fatal error in listening to all the sycophants and double-dealers around him. But Gorbachev was sure he knew better.

“You exaggerate,” he told Yakovlev.

Against Yakovlev’s advice, Gorbachev ordered a ban on demonstrations in Moscow from March 26 to April 15 and gave Boris Pugo’s Interior Ministry control of the Moscow police force, taking it out of the hands of the liberals who ran city hall. Gorbachev authorized all law enforcement bodies to “use all necessary measures to ensure appropriate public order in the capital.” The battle had reached a point of no return. Yeltsin called a demonstration for March 28. In his own legislature, he was facing a vote of no confidence from the orthodox Communist deputies. In February, Yeltsin had gone on television blaming Gorbachev for driving the country “to the edge of the abyss” and for flirting with military dictatorship. Gorbachev, he said, had to step down and power must be transferred to the collective rule of the republican leaders.

By March 27, the center of Moscow looked like an armed camp. Like the czars who once kept a cavalry unit stabled near Red Square in case of an uprising by university students, the Soviet police meant to deny the center of the capital to the pro-democracy demonstrators. More than fifty thousand Interior Ministry troops positioned water cannons and tear-gas launchers along the streets. Row after row of empty buses and troops cut off all access roads to Manezh Square outside the Kremlin.

The hard-line press and Tass ran ominous warnings, including the threat to use “all means at our disposal” from the KGB chief of Moscow, Vitaly Prilukov. Democratic Russia’s leaders realized that they would never get to the Manezh, where they had held so many rallies before, but they did not call off the demonstration. Instead, they said, people should gather at two alternative spots: the Arbat metro station and Mayakovsky Square near the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall.

On the morning of the 28th, I walked with my friends Masha and Seriozha to the statue of Mayakovsky. We were more than an hour early, and while we waited to meet some other friends, we saw people selling pro-Yeltsin and anti-Gorbachev buttons; others listened to the new pro-opposition radio station, Echo of Moscow, which was describing the troop positions along Gorky Street and all around the Manezh. Like the Chinese demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in 1989, the demonstrators were going out of their way to seem casual, as if pretending that the worst could never happen. A bunch of teenagers were taking the afternoon as a tusovka, a hangout, and they were listening to a tape of Exile on Main Street on their boom box. For once, Mick Jagger’s voice of threat seemed like more than puffed-up theater. As more and more people crowded onto the square, I was getting jumpy. What would prevent these generals from picking a fight? They had made a mess of their coup in Vilnius, it was true, but the KGB still had the means to provoke a conflict, to make it seem as if the demonstrators were out of control, and then “restore order.” It hadn’t been many weeks before that I was talking to General Boris Gromov, the last Soviet commander in Afghanistan and now Pugo’s deputy, and he was telling me that one “can stand back and be polite for only so long. But sooner or later, you have to take action.” Not long before that I interviewed fifteen generals and admirals at the Congress of People’s Deputies one afternoon, and all fifteen said they thought Viktor Alksnis, the “black colonel,” had the right idea.

The demonstration began. The usual speakers—Afanasyev, Popov—spoke. There were the usual banners—“CPSU to the Ash Heap of History!”—and the usual chants. We marched a little this way, a little that way, but mostly we stood still. The simple fact that so many people had ignored the threat of violence was demonstration enough. We heard from other marchers, and even from an American senator who happened to be there, David Boren of Oklahoma, that plainclothes police, probably KGB, had punched and beaten a few demonstrators who had ventured too close to the armed cordon near the Manezh. But the incidents were few. The demonstration turned out to be boring, blissfully boring.

On the face of it, the day had been a political draw. The soldiers held their ground and the demonstrators marched in defiance of Gorbachev’s order and avoided any serious provocations. But in this case, victory belonged to the opposition. The whole stew of opposition forces—urban intellectuals, teenagers, pro-independence people from the republics—proved that they were willing to face down a threat with their bodies as well as their slogans. As we walked home, my friends and I noticed that the crowd was full of itself. They were celebrating a great victory. If the attack on the Lithuanian television tower was the rehearsal for a coup, the protection of the Lithuanian parliament and now this demonstration were rehearsals for the resistance. The resistance looked far more impressive. How could the KGB ignore that? What’s more, how could Gorbachev?

MAGADAN

For the first time in their thousand-year history, Russians were about to elect a president. In those last days of the old regime, in the last few days of the June 1991 campaign, I went to the farthest shore of the empire, to Magadan, where Stalin’s slave ships docked and the labor camps of Kolyma began. I had never seen a city so desolate. In the days of the Great Purge and for years after, prisoners called the rest of the country the “mainland,” as if Magadan and the wastes of Kolyma beyond were an island in the sea of nowhere. Even now it seemed to me a ghostly place, a landscape of the dead. Mornings, the water was the color of iron, the sky the color of milk. The black-green hills were shrouded in a dense mist and long wisps of smoke trailed into the sky from the tin-shack slums known as Shanghai. Even in the center of town, the loudest sound was from the desultory passing of beat-up cars, Ladas, Volgas, and Zhigulis, their tires smearing the slush.

I was also here to visit my friend Arnold Yeryomenko. We’d first met in Moscow during the Nineteenth Party Conference in 1988, and we saw each other whenever he returned to the capital. I sent a telegram to Arnold telling him I was on the way, but I knew he’d never get it. He was still a marked man in his hometown. The Party press in Magadan wrote denunciations of him as if he held it in his power to topple the regime and steal all its daughters. He was still the anti-Soviet devil.

After the nine-hour flight, I walked to Arnold’s building and stuck a note under the door telling him where he could find me. The building was appalling. The concrete looked wet and ancient all at once and the yard outside was a sea of mud and abandoned construction junk. Kids had nothing at all to play with. They threw rocks against a wall, and when they tired they just sat down on a thick stick stretched across a sheet of abandoned concrete.

The next morning, Arnold found me at the Hotel Magadan. We took a long walk to the sea, and then headed back up the hill, the same path the prisoners took fifty years ago. “You see where that ship is now?” he said, pointing down a hill into the port. That was where the lines of prisoners began their march from the sea to the holding camps. Many of them would be marched hundreds of miles to camps throughout Kolyma. Arnold said, “Our house was fifty meters from a labor camp—now it’s a movie theater. I could see them from my room, from the kitchen. None of it was ever out of my sight, and it went on from the time I was a baby until I was a young man. And I remember every day in school we ran to the windows and watched the prisoners go by in their chains: the Russians, later the Japanese POWs and the Vlasovites. I remember we’d come up to them and one might say, ‘Boy, go get me some fish.’ And he’d slip us a few rubles to buy it. But everyone knew they’d soon be dead. Getting them fish: it was like some horrible joke.” Magadan really was the history of the Soviet Union, its proper spiritual capital. Magadan and the vast territory of Kolyma had been all but wild, unsettled before the Revolution. Magadan was an invention of the Kremlin and the NKVD, an administrative center for mass murder throughout the Kolyma region in eastern Siberia. As a project of centralized planning, Magadan fulfilled and overfulfilled its five-year plans. In the one hundred camps of Kolyma, an area six times the size of France, around three million people were slaughtered between 1936 and 1953. They were shot, stabbed, beheaded, thrown into pits, or starved. Three million in just one corner of a country that was itself a vast network of concentration camps. There was no way to shove it out of the mind; in Magadan, the dead were everywhere, in the abandoned mine shafts, under the taiga, under the seabed. One of the roads to the northern camps was built on a bed of bones. The main street, Lenin Prospekt, was a road to oblivion. Starting from the center of downtown, the prisoners walked to their camps, sometimes to an outpost a thousand miles away. You could walk all the way to Yakutia, where the reindeer run. And now nearly all the living in Magadan slept in the houses of the dead. Eighty percent of the standing structures in Magadan were once barracks or headquarters for the secret police administration or “shooting halls.” Varlam Shalamov was the poet of Kolyma. He survived seventeen years in a camp there, all for the crime of declaring Ivan Bunin, who had won the Nobel Prize, a “classic author.” Shalamov’s own classic stories, quick narratives, sharp and glinting as mica, so pierced Solzhenitsyn that the younger man invited Shalamov to help him with the massive project of The Gulag Archipelago. Shalamov was too old and sick. He declined. But the work he did leave behind provided the clearest picture of the Kolyma nightmare that exists. In one story, he described the officer Postnikov, who made a blood sport of hunting down escapees: “Drunk with murder, he fulfilled his task with zeal and passion. He had personally captured five men. As always in such cases he had been decorated and received a bonus. The reward was the same for the dead and the living. It was not necessary to deliver the prisoners complete. One August morning a man who was going to drink at a stream fell into an ambush set by Postnikov and his soldiers. Postnikov shot him down with a revolver. They decided not to drag the body to the camp but to leave it in the taiga. The signs of bears and wolves were numerous.

“For identification, Postnikov cut off the fugitive’s hands with an ax. He put the hands in his knapsack and went to make his report on the hunt.… In the night the corpse got up. Pressing his bleeding wrists to his chest, he left the taiga following the trail and reached the prisoners’ tent. With pale face and blue eyes, he looked inside, holding himself at the opening, leaning against the doorposts and muttering something. Fever devoured him. His padded coat, his trousers, his rubber boots were stained with black blood. They gave him warm soup, wrapped his chopped-off wrists in rags, and took him to the infirmary. But already Postnikov and his men came running out of their little hut. The soldiers took the prisoner. He was not heard of again.” As late as 1988, the Communist Party allowed no monument to the dead of Kolyma. In fact, the Party chief, Aleksandr Bogdanov, did unveil one monument in 1988: a bust of Reingold Berzin, the founding director of the Far Northern Construction Trust and the concentration camps of Kolyma. Berzin himself was purged after Stalin’s Central Committee decreed in 1937 that prisoners could no longer be “coddled.” But by June 1991, times had changed. For one thing, foreigners were allowed to visit, and I saw Russians on the streets wearing their old plastic overcoats and the new trucker caps that the exchanges across the water had brought: “Alaska Airways,” “I Love Anchorage.” There was a video store renting Terminator and a complete line of Bruce Lee movies. I saw one man wandering in an empty butcher shop wearing the official jacket of the Seattle Seahawks.

Perhaps most alien of all, this Russian city, this museum of brutality, was taking part in a presidential election. On the streets, there was something otherworldly about standing near a building that was once a camp barracks and listening to sidewalk political arguments that in spirit, if not content, sounded like primary-year debates on the street corners of Nashua or Sioux City. It did not take a computer poll to figure out where the votes were. Boris Yeltsin was going to win, and, more important, the Communist Party was doomed. Outside a shoe store, people milled around in the cold and debated the election. A few young men in leather jackets and scarves handed out Yeltsin leaflets printed by the Democratic Russia group in Moscow. Another kid held up the red, white, and blue tricolor, the flag of czarist Russia. “The point is to get rid of the Communists in Russia, once and for all,” Tamara Karpova, a housewife who was with the Yeltsin group, told me. “My parents and grandparents lived in the Ukraine until the Communists sent them here to the camps,” Karpova said. “Why should I vote for anyone in the Communist Party?” Bogdanov had been replaced as head of the Magadan Party organization, but his successors were no smarter. Their only cause was survival. They printed one article after another in their newspapers describing Yeltsin as a “wrecker” and his Communist Party rival in the race, Nikolai Ryzhkov, as the voice of “unity” and “justice, honesty and order.” Ryzhkov was the man to help the Party men keep their jobs. Without Ryzhkov, they would lose their offices with the baize tables and red runner carpets at Party headquarters. Without Ryzhkov, they would lose their dachas in “Snow Valley” outside of town. Yeltsin represented a new order and, most likely for them, unemployment.

In totalitarian society, habit replaces happiness, and habits were in jeopardy. “My father was a Party member, my husband is a Party member, and that is how I will vote. The rest are all adventurists,” said Svetlana Murashkina, a woman who passed out Ryzhkov leaflets on the same street corner.

In the village of Palatka, I spoke to Boris Sulim, who had worked in one of the camps when he was a teenager and was now serving on the local raikom, the Party committee. Sulim was a sawed-off shotgun of man with a broad, meaty face. He was a Ryzhkov man—“fast and firm.” But the longer we talked, the sadder he got. He seemed exhausted, uncertain. All he had believed in, all he had worked for, was finished, and he knew it. His local Party committee, which had always ruled Palatka, had no influence now, “and I guess I know that.” Under Stalin, Sulim worked in the Omsuchkan camp, about four hundred miles from Magadan. “I was eighteen years old and Magadan seemed a very romantic place to me. I got eight hundred eighty rubles a month and a three-thousand-ruble installation grant, which was a hell of a lot of money for a kid like me. I was able to give my mother some of it. They even gave me membership in the Komsomol. There was a mining and ore-processing plant which sent out parties to dig for tin. I worked at the radio station which kept contact with the parties.

“If the inmates were good and disciplined they had almost the same rights as the free workers. They were trusted and they even went to the movies. As for the reason they were in the camps, well, I never poked my nose into details. We all thought the people were there because they were guilty. Why should I have believed anything else? In 1936, when I was still in the first grade, our teacher made us blot out the pictures in history books of the generals Tukhachevsky, Blucher, and Yegorov, and we had to cover them over with swastikas and write in the margin, ‘enemy of the people.’ ” Sulim said that after watching a few television documentaries on the Stalin era he would admit there had been “mistakes” and “abuses.” I asked him if he had ever seen any of the prisoners executed or any of them die from the cold and the endless work in the mines. “Deaths?” he said. “I don’t know. I wasn’t interested then. But I think death is a natural phenomenon under any circumstances. Look, I was not part of the gulag system, so I have no intention of repenting.” MOSCOW

Sulim was a man of the old regime: ignorant, angry, unrepentant. But even in his worst moments, Gorbachev held firm to his better self, his ability to change, if only to survive. On April 23, with Yeltsin clearly headed for victory and his own percentage in the popularity polls nearing single digits, Gorbachev had yielded to the obvious. Despite the bad information he was getting, despite the betrayals around him and his own tragic vanity, even he could look out the window and see. He could see that the people were no longer his. They were Yeltsin’s, and Landsbergis’s, and Nazarbayev’s in Kazakhstan … but not his. And so Gorbachev moved once more to the left. He did not announce a favorite candidate—many people assumed he would vote not for Yeltsin or Ryzhkov, but for Vadim Bakatin, the former interior minister—but he did sign a “nine plus one” agreement. The document, drafted jointly by Gorbachev and the republican leaders, was an agreement to agree: republican leaders (so far, the Baltic states, Georgia, Armenia, and Moldavia declined to participate) were announcing their intention to form a new Union Treaty, under which the republics would acquire vastly more political power.

In June, Yeltsin won the election, as Gorbachev and everyone else knew he would. For his inauguration at the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses, Yeltsin planned a ceremony, both moving and pompous, clearly intended to distance the new office from Soviet history and align it with a kind of liberal Russian nationalism. He stripped away all signs of the Bolshevik state in the Kremlin hall. In place of the massive picture of Lenin that had always been the backdrop for ceremonies of state, there was simply a red, blue, and white Russian flag. Priests, rabbis, muftis, and ministers sat in the front row. Patriarch Alexy II, with his flowing robes and Tolstoyan beard, blessed Yeltsin with the sign of the cross and said, “By the will of God and the choice of the Russian people, you are bestowed with the highest office in Russia.… We will pray for you.” Russia, the patriarch said, “is gravely ill.” An actor from Leningrad, Oleg Basilashvili, read a long speech describing the degradation of the country through seventy years of Bolshevik rule.

Introduced by regal trumpeters and a blaring fanfare, Yeltsin swore himself in. At times he seemed overwhelmed by the occasion, and his voice broke once or twice with nervousness. He did not begin with the traditional tovarishchi, “comrades.” “Citizens of the Russian Federation … Great Russia is rising from its knees …” he began. “The president is not a god, not a monarch, not a miracle worker. He is a citizen … and in Russia, the individual will become the measure of all things.” Gorbachev, for his part, tried to appear gracious at the ceremony, but he did not quite bring it off. He made a clumsy speech and even clumsier attempts at humor about the strangeness of a country with two presidents. At one point he said, “People on all continents are watching with great interest what you and I are doing.” The intonation was such that people in the hall understood it to mean that the two men were up to some sort of shenanigans. The hall fairly buzzed with discontent until Gorbachev moved on.

But even as he was trying to assert his power, Yeltsin was hoping that his presidency would help Gorbachev realize that there could be no future in an alliance with Kryuchkov, Yazov, Pugo, and the old guard. He needed to seduce and bully Gorbachev at the same time. And so when Gorbachev was finished with his speech, Boris Yeltsin was the first out of his seat to lead a standing ovation.

But in 1991, nothing was stable. You couldn’t relax for a moment, you could never think for an instant that all would be well. As Sobchak had said, the side-by-side existence of a totalitarian regime (no matter how subdued compared to the Stalin era) and a fledgling democracy was impossible. Something would have to give.

In June, there were clues once more that the hard-liners were prepared to act, no matter what sort of marriage—of convenience or conviction—existed between Gorbachev and Yeltsin. The Soviet Prosecutor’s Office, backed up by a report by Marshal Yazov, said, “In the course of the examination of the events [in Novocherkassk in 1962], it was established that arms were used by the military in accordance with the law, in order to defend state property from criminal attack and for purposes of self-defense.… The shooting started only after the unruly crowd attacked the soldiers and tried to seize their weapons.” To most Soviet readers, the report was a justification not only of an event thirty years past, but of the assaults in Tbilisi, Vilnius, and Baku. And perhaps they were a threat, too; a threat of more violence to come.

Yeltsin answered that veiled threat with a veiled warning. He sent a representative to Novocherkassk with a message from the Russian president: “The truth about the tragedy of Novocherkassk is a stern warning to anyone who tries to resolve social problems by means of military force.” Like General Shaposhnikov, the people would resist.

Two weeks later, on June 17, the Soviet prime minister, Valentin Pavlov, went before the parliament and asked to be given many of Gorbachev’s powers. Pavlov, who clearly had the backing of Supreme Soviet Chairman Anatoly Lukyanov, said he was making the proposal out of consideration for Gorbachev’s onerous schedule. “There are just not enough hours in the day,” Pavlov suggested sweetly. What he forgot to say was that he was acting without Gorbachev’s knowledge.

“I heard about it and told Gorbachev,” Aleksandr Yakovlev told me. “Gorbachev was outraged. It was the first he had heard about it.” But before Gorbachev had a chance to act, Pugo, Yazov, and Kryuchkov all went before a closed session of the Supreme Soviet and read out speeches accusing the leadership (they would not say “Gorbachev”) of selling out the Party and leading the country to ruin. Yazov complained that hundreds of thousands of young men were refusing to obey their draft notices. Pugo railed on about “disorder” and “lawlessness.” Kryuchkov was most vicious of all, saying that the reforms of the leadership and the fondest wishes of the CIA seemed to coincide. He was charging treason. That gave the delegates from the Soyuz faction the cue to rise from their chairs and call for resignation.

“Away with Gorbachev! And away with his clique of liberals!” cried Leonid Sukhov, a cabdriver from Kharkov and a deputy in the Soyuz faction.

“A great power has been reduced to the lowly status of a beggar standing by others’ doors with outstretched hands instead of working out its problems here where its problems are,” charged Yevgeny Kogan, a Russian speaker from Estonia and another member of Soyuz.

Gorbachev was slow to react, but when he finally came to the Supreme Soviet to respond on June 21, he was able to summon for the occasion one of his vintage performances, full of indignation. Still he could not go all the way. Just as he would never admit to any conflict with Yegor Ligachev in 1988, he said he had no differences with Pavlov. The prime minister’s proposals, he said, were “not well thought out.” When the session was over, Gorbachev came out of the chamber to meet the press. He was surrounded by none other than Messrs. Yazov, Pugo, and Kryuchkov. The three ministers were stone-faced and silent. “The coup is over,” Gorbachev said. He was laughing. He meant it as a joke. And it was.