فصل 33

PART V

THE TRIAL OF THE OLD REGIME

For two days after the fall of the coup, the dictators of the proletariat and their assistants at Central Committee headquarters ransacked their desks and emptied their safes. They fed one incriminating document after another into the shredding machines. To destroy everything in the archives would have taken months or years, yet there was a chance, at least, that they could eliminate all evidence of the Party’s support of the coup and other recent embarrassments.

There was so little time. Thousands of furious demonstrators were shouting up at the windows of the Central Committee, demanding the destruction of the Party, the confiscation of its properties. The same crowds of students, housewives, workers, and intellectuals who had defended the White House now fanned out across the city, toppling the monuments of the regime and carrying signs reading “Smash the KGB!” “Send the Party to Chernobyl!” “Bring the Party to Trial!” But then the shredders began to jam and break, one after another. In their haste, the men of the Party had failed to remove the paper clips.

With the shouts from the street throbbing in their ears, some panicked officials suggested building a huge bonfire in the courtyards. Their juniors, however, advised them that if the demonstrators saw smoke coming from the Central Committee, they would know what was happening and would storm the building. What could they do? Party workers were already driving truck-loads of material away through the hidden tunnels and back exits of the Central Committee building, and even that was not enough. There was so much to destroy and hide! And so now these ashen men—men who had ruled an empire with an inimitable blend of insouciance and banality—began tearing apart documents with their bare hands. They would sooner die of paper cuts than leave the evidence to the hordes.

The Party men, of course, were not interested merely in history’s judgment. They refused to leave anything to the masses. To the very end, their serene sense of entitlement guided them. They stole telephones, computers, fax machines, television sets, video recorders, stationery. Anatoly Smirnov, an aide in the Party’s International Department, said that his superior, Valentin Falin, gave him 600,000 rubles in cash and told him to stash it in his personal safe. Immediately.

And change the nameplate on my door, Falin ordered. Falin was sure that if he identified himself as a “People’s Deputy” rather than as Central Committee secretary he would be immune from future prosecution.

Falin had a great deal to answer for. His office was in charge of dispensing millions from the state purse to “brotherly parties” or terrorist organizations in Greece, Portugal, the United States, Angola—nearly one hundred countries in all, according to the Russian government. He ran the secret workshop within the Central Committee that produced fake passports, beards, and mustaches for operatives on the road. Falin eventually took refuge in Germany, lecturing to the university students of Hamburg.

“Those were awful days for us,” Vladimir Ivashko, the deputy general secretary of the Party, told me. “We were all terrified. We were suffering terribly inside the Central Committee. The Party was in the midst of reform, but no one would listen to that! It was terribly unfair!” Even after he returned from captivity to Moscow following the fall of the August coup, Gorbachev defended the Communist Party. He was its son, its protector, and he would neither abandon nor kill it. At his first press conference after the putsch, Gorbachev spoke earnestly about his allegiance to the “socialist choice” and the Party’s “renewal.” He told all who would listen that he had returned to a “different country,” but he did not seem to know what that meant.

Gorbachev’s closest adviser, Aleksandr Yakovlev, grew furious as he watched that mystifying session with the press. For six years, Yakovlev had prodded Gorbachev to abandon the hidebound nomenklatura and join forces with the urban intelligentsia, the pro-independence forces in the Baltic states—with all those who actually sought a transformation of the old order. But Gorbachev refused, insisting that the party had “begun perestroika and would lead it.” Even now, after falling victim to a putsch, Gorbachev failed to see what was right and necessary.

“You have given the worst press conference of your career,” Yakovlev told Gorbachev privately. “The Party is dead. Why can’t you see that? Talk about its ‘renewal’ is senseless. It’s like offering first aid to a corpse!” Yeltsin catered even less to the sensibilities of Mikhail Gorbachev. Their personal battle had gone on for so long and contained so many seriocomic incidents that they seemed paired in eternal tension and dependence. Yin and Yang. Punch and Judy. On August 23, at a raucous session of the Russian parliament, Yeltsin clearly had the upper hand, and he used it to flay and humiliate his opponent. He forced Gorbachev to read aloud a transcript of the August 19 Council of Ministers meeting at which all but two of the ministers whom Gorbachev himself had nominated pledged their hearty support of the coup.

Gorbachev looked small and weak, but Yeltsin was not finished. “And now on a lighter note,” he said with a jack-o’-lantern grin, “shall we now sign a decree suspending the activities of the Russian Communist Party?” “What are you doing?” Gorbachev stammered. “I … haven’t we … I haven’t read this …” But it was too late. Gorbachev was powerless. And on August 24, he resigned as general secretary of the Communist Party, dissolved its Central Committee, and declared, in essence, an end to the Bolshevik era.

The people of Moscow did not celebrate Gorbachev for his announcement. He could have done no less. Perhaps one day they would come to recognize and revere Gorbachev’s contribution, but not now, not yet. Now they celebrated themselves and the ruin of the System. All around the city, young people smeared statues of Old Bolsheviks with graffiti and uprooted them with crowbars or, when necessary, cranes. The Moscow city government sponsored the removal of the huge statue of “Iron” Feliks Dzerzhinsky from the square outside KGB headquarters, thus creating the ultimate image of the regime’s demise: the founder of the secret police dangling from a noose as the crowd cheered. Within a few days, the field next to the Tretyakov Gallery had become a Communist mortuary; children climbed on toppled statues of Sverdlov, Dzerzhinsky, and other fallen revolutionaries. The Museum of the Revolution put up a display honoring the resistance to the coup, and the Lenin Museum simply closed down “pending reconstruction.” For a while, the celebration was mixed with the macabre.

Marshal Akhromeyev, Gorbachev’s military adviser, was found dead in his office, his neck in a noose, a series of suicide notes laid out neatly on his desk. The first described how he had botched a first attempt: “I am a poor master of preparing my own suicide. The first attempt (at 9:40) didn’t work—the cord broke. I’ll try with all my strength to do it again.” Another letter was addressed to Gorbachev, and in it Akhromeyev explained why he had rushed home from vacation to support the coup; in closing, he asked forgiveness for having broken military regulations. And in a letter to his family, the marshal wrote, “I cannot live when my Fatherland is dying and all that I have made my life’s work is being destroyed. My age and all I have done give me the right to leave this life. I struggled to the end.” Investigators arrived at the apartment of Boris Pugo to arrest him for his role in the coup and instead found a revolting scene of carnage. Pugo, dressed in a blue track suit, was dead, a gaping bullet wound in his head; his wife was also shot, but half alive. Pugo’s aged father-in-law, in a late stage of dementia, wandered around the small apartment, as if nothing had happened. Pugo left a suicide note for his children and grandchildren: “… Forgive me. It was all a mistake. I lived honestly, all my life.” Nikolai Kruchina, a Communist Party official who had administered the finances of the Central Committee, jumped from his apartment window to his death. The newspapers speculated that Kruchina knew better than anyone else about the Party’s foreign bank accounts, its funding of foreign Communist parties, its secret squandering of gold reserves and other resources. According to Russian journalists, the official news wire Tass was aware of at least fifteen other suicides but did not report them.

Under arrest, the chief conspirator, the now former chief of the KGB, was cool and unrepentant. “My heart and soul are full of various feelings,” Kryuchkov told a reporter for Russian television. “I recall the entirety of my life, the way I lived it, and if I had the chance, I would take the same course. I believe I’ve never done anything in my life my Motherland could blame me for. If I could turn back the clock five or six days, I might have chosen a different way and I would not be behind bars. I hope the court will pass a fair decision, an optimal judgment, that will allow me to work in conditions of freedom and serve my Motherland, whose interests mean everything to me.” After his plea of innocence failed in the Supreme Soviet, Anatoly Lukyanov also went to jail—isolation cell No. 4 of Matrosskaya Tishina, “Sailor’s Rest,” one of the most notorious prisons in Moscow. And as he waited for the prosecutors to prepare their case and begin a trial, he turned once more to poetry. He still believed in “the cause,” and that the people of the Soviet Union should trust in him. His new theme was self-pity: Human gratitude! There will be none of that!

Do not wait for it, do not torment or mourn,

All trust is now in ashes,

And there are glib slanders in all the papers,

But I know that there will be rewards,

There will be an honest trial in our souls,

There will be new shoots, like the gifts of spring.

Andrei Karaulov, the cultural editor for Nezavisimaya Gazeta, visited Lukyanov and heard him complain about Gorbachev. “I love him. I can’t change him, though. Speaking openly, I know his weaknesses, his shortcomings,” Lukyanov said. “Of all the people who made perestroika, I alone stayed next to Gorbachev, the rest left, from the left and right.… Time will show I was loyal.… I will remain a Communist, maybe without a Party membership card, but all the same.… I am to blame before the parliament, because this dealt it a blow. These are my children, my pain, my creation. This is very painful. I feel my blame before my mother, who lost her husband, lost her first son, and now is losing me. She is eighty-five and I love her very much. I am to blame before my wife, a great scholar, a corresponding member of the Academy of Medical Sciences, before my daughter … I am to blame before my grandson, my greatest pleasure, but to him and to all people I can say that I lived honestly, worked, without complaining, sixteen hours a day. And maybe they will remember some good poetry I wrote.… I don’t know if I’ll write again, but I … well, I’ll say that my book closes with these words: “ ‘And yet, and yet,

I hurried to turn

The final page …

I believed in our shining destiny …’

“No, no, that’s not it. Now … now I remember …

“ ‘I believed in our shining destiny,

I never avoided the hard work,

I was ashamed to work poorly …

And if …’ ”

But Lukyanov gave up. “I’ve forgotten it,” he said. “I’ve forgotten.…” With time, Gorbachev himself began to admit that he had played a dangerous game with the Party for far too long. In interviews he seemed a kind of political analysand, rambling on, finding moments of self-discovery among the ego, the pride, the self-deception: “Do you think I did not know that the Party’s conservative circles, which had united with the military-industrial complex, would make a strike? I knew, and I kept them beside me,” he said. “But they procrastinated. They, too, were also afraid that the people would not follow them, and they waited for the people’s discontent.… I will tell you: if [the conspirators] had acted twelve or eighteen months earlier the way they did in August, it would have come off. It is worth realizing this.…” He was right. Had the leaders of the KGB and the Central Committee wanted in 1988 or 1989 to get rid of Gorbachev and return to an Andropov-style regime of modest reform and bitter discipline, they could have succeeded. At least for a while. But now they had to deal with an elected leader of Russia and tens of thousands of people who now felt themselves to be citizens, empowered. Gorbachev had to admit that he had failed to understand the fury of the hard-line opposition. “I certainly did not think they would go as far as a putsch,” he said. “At some point, I misjudged the situation. For all the importance of strategy, it is important in politics to make the right decision at the right moment. It like a battle in war.… I should have forged a strong common front with the democrats.… I should have realized that earlier, in August 1990. I should have looked for some form of cooperation then, held a roundtable discussion or some other meeting. I missed that opportunity and paid dearly for it.” In early September, Gorbachev assembled the Congress of People’s Deputies at the Kremlin for what would be its last session. It would be the last time, in fact, that the Kremlin would function as “the center.” The session itself was an elaborate ruse, a last bit of political theater directed by Mikhail Gorbachev. While the Baltic states, Moldavia (now Moldova), and Georgia already considered themselves independent, the remaining ten republican leaders decided with Gorbachev to dissolve the Congress and create the basis for a new decentralized Union. Gorbachev envisioned the new Union with Moscow retaining some key functions as a coordinator of the common defense and foreign policy. Yeltsin differed and said that the Union presidency would be ceremonial, “something like the Queen of England.” What was most remarkable was the way Gorbachev and his newfound allies rammed the interim proposals on a new Union through the Congress, a body, after all, that was packed with Communist Party apparatchiks. Gorbachev was so eager to get what he wanted and finish the Congress that he promised the deputies that even after the dissolution of the legislature, they would still get salaries and priority access to plane and railway tickets. That was enough to win their votes.

On December 26, 1991, at his dacha in the woods outside Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev climbed into the backseat of his Zil limousine and headed north toward the Kremlin. Suddenly the Soviet Union was a half-remembered dream and its last general secretary a pensioner. Ukraine’s decision to pull out of the negotiations for a new Union finally ended Gorbachev’s hopes for a place for himself as its president. Instead, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Byelorussia patched together a sketchy plan for a new commonwealth. There was no role left for “the center.” The republican leaders voted on Gorbachev’s retirement package.

Now, in Moscow, Gorbachev wanted to take care of some last-minute meetings and clean out his desk before leaving for a few weeks of vacation. The Russian government had promised him a peaceful boxing day before they took up residence. But when Gorbachev arrived at the Kremlin, he saw his nameplate had already been pried off the wall. “Yeltsin, B. N.” gleamed brassily in its place. Inside the office, Boris Nikolayevich himself was behind the desk. For days there had been the air of self-pity about Gorbachev, and this petty incident, a gaudy exclamation in the intricate narrative of these revolutionary days, magnified his fury. Never mind Gorbachev’s own assaults on Yeltsin over the years. “For me, they have poisoned the air,” he complained. “They have humiliated me.” Comeuppance was what it was. In 1987, Gorbachev had dragged Yeltsin from a hospital bed and made him stand before the Moscow city Party organization for hour after hour of denunciations. Yeltsin spent the next several weeks under a doctor’s care, suffering from nervous exhaustion. When given the chance to humiliate Gorbachev, Yeltsin grabbed it.

In their last meeting, Gorbachev had promised Yeltsin he would stay away from politics. He would not be an opposition figure. He had, it seemed, no other choice. “Yeltsin had Gorbachev by the balls,” said Sergei Grigoriyev, who had been deputy spokesman for Gorbachev. All the KGB, Communist Party, and military archives were now in Yeltsin’s hands. KGB officials told me that in the days before and after the coup, secret police workers were dumping crates of documents into underground furnaces, but the few files that did leak after the coup could only have embarrassed Gorbachev. There were documents showing Gorbachev’s approval of secret funding of the Polish Communist Party even after Solidarity came to power. Another file showed him maneuvering to prevent the German government from opening the old East German archives. Yeltsin also came into possession of transcripts of his own phone calls from the days when the Gorbachev government and KGB tried desperately to discredit him. Gorbachev’s handwritten notes were in the margins.

Moreover, few believed anymore that Gorbachev was merely an innocent bystander during the worst moments of the perestroika years: the military attacks on peaceful demonstrators in Tbilisi, Vilnius, Riga, and Baku. When his popularity was at its height, he escaped blame. He was out of the country or out of the loop. But now even those closest to him admitted otherwise. “I am sure Gorbachev knew all about what was going on in Vilnius and Riga,” said Nikolai Petrakov, who had been Gorbachev’s chief economist. Other top-ranking officials, sympathetic to Gorbachev, agreed.

But that was all past, and now Russia faced a great historical moment, an elected president occupying the Kremlin for the first time in the thousand-year history of Russia, the hammer and sickle gone from the flagpole, the regime and empire dissolved. And yet it all had the pallid, made-for-television feel of Washington ceremony. History felt like nothing more than a miserable winter day, the sky as empty and wan as the butcher shops. The Western press corps roamed Red Square in desperate search of passion or comment. “You care, we don’t,” a fist-faced old woman from the provincial city of Tver told a clutch of reporters. With that the woman stormed off in search of potatoes and milk for her family.

In the afternoon, Gorbachev’s press secretary, Andrei Grachev, invited a small group of aides, foreign reporters, and Russian editors to a reception at the Oktyabrskaya Hotel. A farewell party, Grachev billed it, and he could not have chosen a more appropriate stage. For years, the hotel across from the French embassy had been a symbol of the Communist Party’s opulence, heavy on the marble and mirrors.

At a few minutes before five o’clock, the reporters and editors stood waiting at the top of the marble stairs for the guest of honor to arrive. By chance, I took my place near Len Karpinsky, who was now the editor in chief of Moscow News, and Vitaly Tretyakov, whose Nezavisimaya Gazeta was now, with Izvestia, the most respected paper in the country. Gorbachev’s resignation meant a transition from the intellectual idealists of Karpinsky’s generation to a breed of younger men and women like Tretyakov—business neophytes, scholars, hustlers, and, in this case, newspaper editors—who would perhaps build a new world not so much out of the jagged ruins of the old experiment, but on a model, faintly perceived, from the West, from Europe and America. As Gorbachev was leaving center stage, so, too, was Karpinsky. Moscow News, which had broken one taboo after another in the first years of perestroika, was a tired paper: still interesting at times, still honest, but one that spoke to a generation that now seemed, like Gorbachev, exhausted.

“It’s good that Gorbachev’s leaving now, but I am moved to the core of me,” Karpinsky told me. “How can I deny that I have just finished the most important chapter of my life?” In the spring of 1992, Gorbachev toured the United States in the Forbes corporate jet, The Capitalist Tool. He saw nothing odd or ironic in this. The crowds tossed garlands at his feet, plutocrats deposited checks in his name. He spent an afternoon with Ronald Reagan drinking wine and eating chocolate-chip cookies. They reminisced about the cold war, long over. It seemed to all the victory tour of the century’s last great man.

But in Russia, Gorbachev was unwanted, hated by the Party men he had betrayed and ignored by the democrats he had abandoned. Many were ready to think the worst of him. Izvestia, the most authoritative daily in Russia, published a front-page item in May saying that Gorbachev was getting ready to walk out the very doors he had opened. The first and last president of the Soviet Union, Izvestia said, had bought a two-story house in Florida “with a lot of land” for $108,350 in a development called Tropical Golf Acres.

In fact, Gorbachev had not bought land abroad and denied any plans to emigrate. “I repeat, for anyone who is still willing to listen,” he said, “I have no dacha in California, nor in Geneva, nor in Tibet with tunnels leading to China.” And yet some of Gorbachev’s closest friends and confidants admitted to me that he was angry and on edge, harboring both terror and grand illusions about his future. “Gorbachev fears he may have to flee the country one day like some kind of Papa Doc Duvalier,” said the playwright Mikhail Shatrov, who was helping Gorbachev write his memoirs. “He knows only too well that eleven of the fourteen coup plotters have testified against him, claiming he somehow encouraged the August putsch. Gorbachev knows the situation is unpredictable. At the same time, Gorbachev has delusions of returning to power. Not right away, but someday. But it won’t happen. He cannot return to power.” Gorbachev’s new base of operations was now a plush building in northern Moscow once known as “the School with No Name.” Foreign Communists from nonsocialist countries once came to this institute to learn their ideological catechism. Under Gorbachev, the institute was intended as half think tank and half nonprofit foundation. But it wasn’t much of either. Gorbachev was restless and open for anything, it seemed. For a sequel to Wim Wenders’s The Wings of Desire, he played himself, wandering around a soundstage improvising a soliloquy on Dostoevsky and the state of the world. For 300,000 pounds, he sold the world television rights to his life story to an independent British company, Directors International, promising interviews, archives, and other access for a four-part series.

Naturally, Gorbachev’s enemies in the press were prepared to attack him as a carpetbagger. “Those who are responsible for this country’s catastrophe and smeared the word ‘Communist’ are now making a cozy nest for themselves at the expense of ordinary people,” wrote Sovetskaya Rossiya.

Gorbachev was furious. “ ‘Yesterday’s men’ are a vengeful breed,” he said in a long interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda. “Before, they tried to steer us away from the democratic path, and now they are after me personally. Well, to hell with them! What am I supposed to be afraid of? The firing squad? The courts? I am not going to tolerate accusations coming from people who have spent too much of their time believing in the slogans of the thirties.” Unfortunately, many commentators in Russia and in the West thought it necessary to choose sides, to be “pro-Gorbachev” or “pro-Yeltsin.” They failed to see the beauty of what history had provided. Without Gorbachev, the agony of the system might have gone on indefinitely, not forever, surely—there was no money for that—but another ten, twenty, who knows how many years. What would the world look like in that case? But without Yeltsin, Gorbachev might well have dallied more than he did, the radical democrats might never have found a single, strong leader, the coup might have succeeded. As much as they had come to despise each other, Gorbachev and Yeltsin were linked in history.

Some of the best minds in the urban intelligentsia—the constituency that Gorbachev courted and ultimately lost—now regarded their former leader with a certain air of superiority. “His speech is that of an uncultured man. He whips the air,” said Leonid Batkin, one of the leaders of the Democratic Russia movement. “Yet he is an outstanding man in his way, a great apparatchik. After Stalin, Gorbachev was the most skillful of all the apparatchiks. But when the time came for a real politician, Gorbachev did one stupid thing after another. He played his great role by yanking the stopper from the bottle. Now, he is not really interesting.” Natalya Ivanova, a literary critic, compared Gorbachev to “the man who gave the orders to begin the fateful experiment at Chernobyl. He wanted to refine the machine, but the machine went out of control and exploded.” And the novelist Viktor Yerofeyev said that Gorbachev was “like Valentina Tereshkova, the first female cosmonaut. She fainted right away and was dangling in orbit but still managed to press the right buttons at the right time just because she was dangling in the exact right place. She took off, she dangled, and she didn’t die. That was her triumph. The same with Gorbachev. Gorbachev pressed the buttons he needed to and the combination of wrong and right buttons turned out to be just right. That created a metaphysical figure—a divine provident for Russia. Gorbachev guided Russia to its historical fate. He has entered the pantheon of Russian history and gradually he’ll come to be seen as that great figure. But not soon. Russians are an ungrateful people.” Even Gorbachev’s most sincere critics missed the point of what he was and who he was. Gorbachev was not Andrei Sakharov. He was not a moral prophet or an intellectual giant. He was not even a man of exceptional goodness. Gorbachev, above all, was a politician. He combined a rough sense of decency with a preternatural ability to manipulate a system that had seemed, from the outside, unbendable. If, in the language of the Greek fable, Sakharov was the fox, a man with a singular sense of moral and political ideals, then Gorbachev was the hedgehog, a man capable of deceit and cruelty, a man of shifting values and ideas, but a genius at a nasty game. An irreplaceable man in his moment.

From March 1985, when he began, until June 1989, when he presided over the first elected legislature of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev chipped away at the totalitarian monolith. From there, his personal story became tragic. He was dragged along by events and never seemed able to decide how to maneuver from one day to the next without losing himself entirely. “Watershed moments in history are not particularly pleasant to live through,” Gorbachev said many times. “Before you stands a man who has been through a lot.” While he was in Palo Alto in 1992, Gorbachev delivered a speech at Stanford University that echoed that moment in November 1987 when perestroika really began in earnest. It was the seventieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and Gorbachev used the occasion to declare the crimes of the Stalin era “unforgivable.” At the time, he had to speak in euphemisms, he had to celebrate six ugly incidents to denounce one. But, now, in California, with power long gone, Gorbachev wanted us to feel as though he had always been a democrat, a liberal in his heart. Instead of quoting Lenin endlessly, he referred to Tocqueville, Solovyov, Jefferson, and Berdyaev. He even thanked the dissidents for their “contribution to the intelligentsia and even parts of the Party apparatus.” “Politics is the art of the possible,” he said. “Any other approach would be voluntarism.… There were failures, mistakes and illusions, but the task was to unfetter the democratic process.… I tried to use tactical means to gain time, to give the democratic movement a chance to get stronger. As president, I had powers, including emergency powers, that people tried to push me into using more than once. I simply could not betray myself.” When I returned to Moscow at the end of 1992, the relics of Soviet Communism were passing quietly into the museums of the world and into the flea markets where kitsch is sold. “The Great Utopia,” a vast exhibition of early revolutionary art, drew enormous crowds in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and New York. On the main pedestrian mall in Moscow, the Arbat, young capitalists were conducting a bankruptcy sale of the fallen regime. They sold jackboots, epaulettes, Warsaw Pact compasses, thick tomes on dialectical materialism and scientific Communism. Maps of the Soviet Union were now sold as arch amusements, like bowling shirts or lava lamps. One student I met on the Arbat was making a killing with his stunning array of silk and velvet Communist Party banners. “I buy them cheap from retired apparatchiks,” he said. “They dig them out of the closets, and then I sell them for five times the price.” In the triumphant days following the defeat of the coup in August 1991, the newspapers were filled with speculation over what was to become of the Lenin Mausoleum, that transcendent model of Soviet kitsch. Surely Lenin’s waxy remains should be given a decent burial. Surely a better use could be found for the neo-cubist tomb on Red Square. A museum? An office building? A Pizza Hut? Boris Yeltsin hinted broadly that he, too, would just as soon put Lenin’s corpse in the ground and get on with the new era.

At first, the leading figures of the Communist Party gave Yeltsin little reason to fear. He could afford a sense of irony. A few old apparatchiks gave interviews voicing muted resentment that Yeltsin had “undemocratically” outlawed the Communist Party and seized its properties in a series of three decrees issued in August and November 1991. But their voices were strained, wan, not quite convincing. Viktor Grishin, a former member of the Politburo who had made a feeble attempt to challenge Mikhail Gorbachev for the top Communist Party post in 1985, created a pathetic and fitting symbol of the old order’s sorry fate: he dropped dead while waiting in a long line at his local pension office. He was hoping for a raise.

The Russian earthquake, however, for all its drama and ruthless speed, was far from complete. Much of the old regime survived. The smartest of the Communist Party men had long ago hired themselves out as “biznesmeny” and “konsultanty.” The average apparatchik hardly left his chair. Although the headquarters of the Communist Party’s Central Committee had become the headquarters of the Russian government, the personnel inside were much the same. A few weeks after the fall of the coup, one of Yeltsin’s aides visited the commandant of the Central Committee, Aleksandr Sokolov, and asked for a copy of its old phonebook. The Yeltsin government needed experienced bureaucrats. “The result is that most of the same people are sitting in the same offices as they did a year ago,” Sokolov told Michael Dobbs of The Washington Post. “When we were forming the new structures, we had to hire people from the old structures. Our supporters—the people who came to rallies and street demonstrations—didn’t know anything about how to run a country.” In the Russian parliament, the most influential block of deputies was aligned with Civic Union, a band of moderate to conservative collective-farm chairmen, bureaucrats, and provincial bosses. A more reactionary alliance of nationalists and Communist ideologues known as the National Salvation Front controlled another sizable block of votes. The Communists in the Russian legislature never really renounced their allegiance to the Party. Hard-liners like Sergei Baburin talked of the “renewal” of the “old ideals,” and vengeance for the destruction of the Party. The conservative newspaper Dyen (“The Day”) wrote openly of seizing power, “by any means.” Yeltsin could count on the firm support of no more than 25 percent of the deputies in parliament.

Somewhere to the side of the daily political struggles that dominated post-totalitarian Russia, a historical sideshow had begun—a judicial battle over the life, death, and potential resurrection of the Communist Party. After members of the old regime had recovered from the shock of the coup and its humiliating aftermath, a group of thirty-seven Communist deputies petitioned the newly formed Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation in late 1991 for a hearing, declaring that Yeltsin’s decrees outlawing the Party were unconstitutional. Wasn’t Yeltsin acting as a dictator while pretending to be a democrat? A group of fifty-two anti-Communists—Yeltsin’s supporters in the parliament—filed a counterpetition, claiming that the Communist Party was an unconstitutional organization. They agreed with Yeltsin’s November 6, 1991, decree that the Party “was never a party” but rather “a special mechanism for the creation and realization of political power.” On May 26, 1992, Valery Zorkin, the chief justice of the new Constitutional Court, decided to try the suits simultaneously. After all, he declared, the issue was the same: was the Communist Party of the Soviet Union a constitutional political party, or something else?

Since late 1987, with the rise of such historical societies as Memorial and the publication in the press of the atrocities of the Stalin era, scholars and human rights activists had wondered if a time would ever come in the Soviet Union for a legal accounting, a Nuremberg-style trial. The mere mention of a trial was revolutionary, for one of the fundamental principles of the Bolsheviks had been to deny the primacy of civil law. Constitutions were written, celebrated in the pages of Pravda, and ignored: the Party was above the law. Or as Lenin put it in 1918, the dictatorship of the proletariat “is unrestricted by law.” Within months of taking power, Lenin liquidated the fragile legal system that had been in place since the czarist reforms of 1864 and commenced a system of state terror that was designed to intimidate the population and ensure the survival of the regime. “We must execute not only the guilty,” Lenin’s commissar of justice, Nikolai Krylenko, said. “Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more.” Despite their hunger for historical judgment, even some of the best-known democratic activists in the country worried about the wisdom of a trial centered on the Communist Party. With the economy in collapse, with political structures so unsettled and moral questions of responsibility and repentance so painful and raw, where would such a trial lead? “Finally, the time has come now for this reckoning, and for repentance, but our circumstances are so peculiar in Russia that such trials are bound for failure,” Arseny Roginsky, one of the founders of Memorial, told me one evening. “Nuremberg was a trial on war crimes, and the criminals were being judged by the victors, the victims of those crimes. Here we must judge ourselves. We judge each other. And who is unsullied? Who was a pure victim of the Party? Who was not complicit? I realize that is not the stated purpose of the Constitutional Court, but those are essential questions.” Such a trial was certain to be hopelessly confused—a political event in which old rivalries and resentments would be at issue. The Communists wanted the forum to charge Gorbachev with the betrayal of the Party and Yeltsin with the collapse of Soviet power. Yeltsin’s team wanted to discredit Gorbachev—to take the shine off his historical reputation—and make sure that the old men of the Party had no easy access to building a conservative opposition. What was more, this was, in essence, a Constitutional Court without a constitution. The post-Communist state was still operating under the old Soviet Constitution while waiting for a new one to be written and approved.

Gorbachev, for his part, had become a bitter, deluded man, unable to understand why his fellow Russians would want to do anything but celebrate him. From the first announcement of the trial, he declared unequivocally that he would refuse to testify in court. It offended his dignity, his stature, his sense of propriety. He would not be questioned. In public, in private meetings, and in an interview with me, he wore his resentment like a pistol. “Look,” he said, “I am not going to take part in this shitty trial.” The Constitutional Court convened on the morning of July 7, 1992. The courtroom was a remodeled meeting room in a part of the Central Committee complex that was once the offices of the Party membership committee. Thirteen judges, all but one of whom were former members of the Communist Party, sat at a curved dais in front of the Russian tricolor, the czarist-era flag. They wore long black robes, a strangely elegant and ecclesiastical outfit. The court had bought the fabric from the headquarters of the Russian Orthodox Church, and then Slava Zaitsev, the best-known fashion designer in Moscow, shaped it for judicial purposes. The haphazard mixture of symbols underscored the historical jumble prevalent in the court—the looming presence of the past, the fragility of the future.

Instead of brandishing a gavel to preserve order in the court, Chief Justice Valery Zorkin tapped his pen against a golden plate that dangled before him, gonging the lawyers into silence. Zorkin’s task was as complicated as any jurist’s in modern times. In a country with such a dubious legal history, he had to invent the procedures and decorum of the Constitutional Court just as he was presiding over what would surely be its most sensational trial for years to come. Zorkin himself had been a member of the Communist Party until October 1991—a fact that initially gave the pro-Communist side some relief—but he did not much romanticize the country’s regard for law. “We have always swung from the icon to the ax,” he said. “Everyone who came to power tried to make himself into an icon, but then they were cut down by the ax, metaphorically speaking. Every ruler liked to wield state power, but no one really tried to build a rule-of-law state. It is too soon to talk of Russia as a democratic state. Only these first few steps have been taken toward the rule of law.” On that first day of the trial, an angry crowd of pro-Communist demonstrators gathered outside the building. They screamed at the police, demanding to be let in. This was largely the same crowd that staged regular weekend protests outside the Lenin Museum near Red Square. They sold hard-line, neo-Stalinist newspapers and carried such placards as “Gorbachev and Yeltsin: To the Gallows!” Inside, the Communists, who had initiated legal proceedings in the first place, argued, in tones of injury and outrage, that they were “on trial” only because they had had the bad luck to lose power after the coup. One of the first speakers for the Communist side was Viktor Zorkaltsev, a Communist deputy in the Russian parliament, who shifted from ornate respect to high indignation within seconds: “High court!

“Esteemed chairman!

“The Party that is banned here is the Party that consolidated society and rallied it to battle against fascism, thus ensuring the victory in the Great Patriotic War and sustaining, together with the people, irreplaceable human losses.… This does not mean that there have been no mistakes or negative moments in the Party’s activities. There was the dramatic phase of Stalinism in the thirties; there was suppression of dissent in the seventies; and there was the apostasy of the Party elite during the [Gorbachev] period. All of this happened. At the same time everyone knows that there have always been forces within the Party that rose up against these vices. And so it renewed itself, cleansed itself of this scum—sustaining losses, restoring its ranks, maintaining its ideals. And now, once again, this process is interrupted and it is banned at a turning point.

“Having shackled the party, the [democrats] have destroyed the national economy and the Union itself. They have changed the social system. The carving up of Russia has begun. The country has arrived at a dead end. What Hitler, world fascism, and capitalism were not able to accomplish has now become possible after the banning of the Party. The ban on the CPSU is also a signal to other parties: ‘Beware! You are next!’ And many parties feel this danger. Therefore only those who pathologically hate democracy and do not accept the socialist idea are gloating on this occasion. Thoughtful politicians do not approve of the president’s decrees and do not support them.…” And so on. The Party would be shameless to the end. Its members would argue their case on the basis of civil liberties, political pluralism, and the historical record. The Party men said now that the country had triumphed under their rule and gone to ruin in their absence. Such was history as they were prepared to present it in court.

When that high-minded tactic did not seem convincing to the court, or perhaps to themselves, the Communists’ tone shifted from mock-heroic to threatening. At one point, another of the Party’s representatives, Dmitri Stepanov, said that if Yeltsin’s decrees were declared constitutional in court, then the Communists were prepared to use “the same methods” as the members of the August putsch to grab power.

“Emergency committees are nothing out of the ordinary,” he said. “We have them all the time.” He also defended the “alleged” brutality of the Party by saying that more people are killed in a couple of years in traffic accidents in Russia than were killed by Stalin. And besides, he added, the Party was never as brutal as the U.S. Army: “The Americans mowed down whole villages in Vietnam, whereas in the Baltic states we just exiled people to Siberia.” Sergei Shakhrai, Yeltsin’s lead advocate in the Constitutional Court, was also prepared to argue the historical record. Shakhrai, a celebrated jurist in his mid-thirties, had written nearly all of Yeltsin’s legal decrees during the siege of the White House. With the help of two other lawyers, Andrei Makarov and Mikhail Fedotov, Shakhrai set out to establish a case against the Communist Party based on a historical record of dictatorship, deception, and violence.

“The organization that called itself the CPSU was neither a de facto nor a de jure party,” Shakhrai said after a court session one day. “According to every canon of the Marxist-Leninist theory of the state and the law, we had a state that called itself the CPSU. There was a particular group of persons who dealt with the government and had a monopoly on the state: the one and a half million people in the Party nomenklatura, several million civil servants, and, finally, the special apparatus of coersion. The KGB was the armed detachment of this organization that called itself the CPSU and it was even used for the physical destruction of dissidents. Essentially we had a regime in which the basic law of the state and society were the rules of the Communist Party.” Among Shakhrai’s first witnesses were three well-known political dissidents and former political prisoners: Lev Razgoh, a writer who spent more than a decade in forced labor camps under Stalin; Vladimir Bukovsky, who was in the camps under Brezhnev from 1967 until he was finally traded to the West for the Chilean Communist leader Luis Corvalán in 1976; and Gleb Yakunin, a dissident Russian Orthodox priest who was imprisoned and later banished from practicing in Moscow. All three men provided firsthand testimony to the Party’s brutality. To supplement the historical record, Richard Pipes, a historian at Harvard University and the author of Russia Under the Old Regime and The Russian Revolution, submitted into evidence an eighteen-page essay outlining the Communist Party’s assumption of absolute state power within three months of the October coup.

“From the point of view of historical science,” Pipes wrote, “the so-called party of the Bolsheviks was, of course, not a party, but an organization of a wholly new type, which had some features of a political party: Its structure was without precedent, an organization which was beyond government, which controlled the government and controlled everything, including the country’s wealth. It was beyond any outside control. In no sense of the word was it a political ‘party,’ nor a voluntary social organization.… This political organization of an absolutely new type … was a precedent for the Fascist party of Mussolini and the Nazi party of Hitler and the countless so-called political parties of a totalitarian character which, beginning in Europe and then spreading throughout the world, established single-party government.… Never, in all its years of activity, did the Communist Party consider itself responsible to the law or constitution. It always considered its will and its goals the decisive factor; it always acted willfully, that is, unconstitutionally.” Although the testimony of former political prisoners, legislators, and Western historians was impressive enough, Shakhrai and his team meant to build an even more specific case. As a bureaucratic machine, the Party and the KGB left behind a paper trail of tens of millions of documents. Shakhrai petitioned the Russian government’s new committee on the declassification of Party and KGB archives in order to provide documentary, and not merely anecdotal, proof of the way the Communist Party wielded and abused power. “Every kid in school now knows about the horrors perpetrated by the Communist Party, but we want to prove our case legally, with documents, so it cannot be denied,” said Andrei Makarov.

When they first considered using the archives, Shakhrai’s team had no idea what would be available to them. There was no telling what was lost—the tradition of destroying documents began early on when Lenin is said to have ordered the archive on the Red Terror cleaned out—but tens of millions of papers are now in government hands.

The Shakhrai team, of course, could not possibly hope to read even a fraction of the available documents, but they were able to obtain files describing in painful detail the purges of the 1930s, the repression of dissidents in the 1960s and 1970s, even transcripts of Politburo meetings at which the invasion of Afghanistan was discussed.

During the court’s August recess, Shakhrai, Fedotov, and Makarov read through tens of thousands more pages of documents marked Soversheno Sekretno, “Top Secret.” They were preparing for the climax of the trial scheduled for late September and early October when some of the biggest names of the Gorbachev era were scheduled to testify, Politburo members and Central Committee secretaries known mainly by their grainy portraits and the rumors of their politics and personalities: Yegor Ligachev, Nikolai Ryzhkov, Vladimir Dolgikh, Valentin Falin, Aleksandr Yakovlev, Ivan Polozkov.

Gorbachev, for his part, was still warning the court that he had no intention of testifying, that he would not appear “even if they dragged me there in handcuffs.” (For this latter remark, the puckish daily Nezavismaya Gazeta published a front-page cartoon featuring Gorbachev being dragged to the court, hands cuffed.) The lawyers on Yeltsin’s side certainly wanted to question Gorbachev, mainly to establish the idea that no one was above or beyond the legal system, but they also felt they could do without testimony from him. Mainly, it was the Communists who wanted the opportunity to put their former general secretary on the stand, to lacerate him for what they said was his betrayal of the Party. “Gorbachev had evil plans,” Dolgikh said. “He destroyed the Party in 1989. Sure, the Party made mistakes. But the whole world recognized our power. When there was a Party, this country was not falling apart.” Ligachev, who had been the number-two man in the Party from 1985 to 1990, called Gorbachev a “revisionist,” the same word Stalin once used like a branding iron on his doomed opponents. “Gorbachev started us on the path of anti-Communism,” said Ligachev. “Perestroika lost its way and headed toward bourgeoisism.” After the first few days of the trial in July, most Russian and foreign journalists stayed away. They had more urgent things to do than cover this curious epilogue to the Communist era. There were wars in Abkhazia, Nagorny-Karabakh, and Tajikistan. There were breadlines and no electricity in Armenia. Vast hunks of Russia, from the northern Caucasus to Yakutia, were threatening to break away from Moscow’s rule. The crime rate was spiraling almost as quickly as inflation. Shady businessmen were exploiting the new economic chaos and were exporting billions of dollars in capital out of the country. The Russian army was threatening to go to war in Moldova. The West was worried that the republics were still playing politics with the control of nuclear weapons. There were reports of arms deals with Iran and China. In Latvia and Estonia, few of the heroes of the independence movements showed themselves as nasty racists, forcing Russians, Poles, and other non-Balts into the status of second-class citizenship. In anger, Yeltsin put a halt to the withdrawal of troops from the region just weeks after it began.

So, no, the former Soviet Union was not wanting for more urgent issues and tragedies. For most, the trial was an afterthought. But, still, I wanted this last glimpse of the old regime—the last exhausted generation of Communist leaders. I could not resist it. For so many years, Soviets had seen these men as distant antigods, men with rumpled faces and dark fedoras, possessed of immense power, and silent. In the first years of the perestroika era, their unearthly quality faded somewhat as Gorbachev stripped the city of the old ubiquitous portraits and slogans. But they were still accountable to no one, available to no one. By the end of the decade, the press, both foreign and domestic, began to learn more about these elusive shades from their opponents, from rumor, even from actual interviews. But until now, they manipulated interviews the way they did the state. They were perfectly capable of listening to a reporter’s question and then reeling off a pompous, hour-long speech, then dismissing the guest, his tea now cold in its china cup. But in court the Party men were nonentities, tired men in bad suits. In the audience, they mumbled angrily during testimony they did not approve of, and, like Baptist parishioners, they barked agreement to urge on their compatriots at the lectern.

On a day when Nikolai Ryzhkov was testifying on his five years as prime minister under Gorbachev, I spent the two-hour afternoon recess with Ivan Polozkov, a Party chieftain from the southern Russian city of Krasnodar who in 1990 had become the leader of the Russian Communist Party and Ligachev’s successor as the conservative “dark prince.” At Central Committee meetings in 1990 and 1991, Polozkov had been openly critical of Gorbachev, but even then there was something guarded about his speech. A glimmer of traditional Party discipline, to say nothing of simple desire for self-preservation, prevented him from saying the things he was saying now.

“I am free now,” he said, “free now to vent my spleen.” Like the other Party men who came to court every day, Polozkov operated on the fuel of resentment. He was, in his mind, a great man made small by the deceptions of Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the Central Intelligence Agency.

I asked him why he thought the Communist Party and the Soviet system had collapsed with such stunning speed after seeming to all the world to be unconquerable, a monolith of power and strength.

Polozkov’s eyes widened, more in surprise than in anger. “They had so much and we … we had nothing!” he said.

“What do you mean?” I said. “That the Communist Party had nothing and the opposition had everything?” “Precisely,” Polozkov said, with a satisfied little nod. “We know the CIA financed parties here. You gave them Japanese cameras, German copying machines, money, everything! You had your dissidents who worked for you, the liars, the diplomats, the military double agents. Gorbachev, Yakovlev, Shevardnadze, these men were all yours, too. They were yours! Look at the book contracts they’ve gotten! Millions! One of our secretaries in the Russian Communist Party, Ivan Antonovich, was in the United States and he was invited to speak at a conference. Shevardnadze was on the bill, too. Shevardnadze spoke first, and then he left. Then Antonovich spoke. Afterward they gave him a souvenir: a copper coffee cup. Someone came up to him from our embassy and said how unfair it was, that Antonovich had only gotten a mug and he spoke in English while Shevardnadze spoke in his bad Russian and got five thousand dollars!

“Look, I understand what it was all about. It was a confrontation of two systems. Reagan called us an ‘evil empire’ and other Western leaders were judged according to how anti-Soviet they could be. The putsch was just a culmination of this struggle. And I will admit this: so far you have been winning this war. But I want to emphasize—’so far.’ Remember this: Napoleon was in Moscow, but France did not defeat us. The Nazis were near Moscow, but look what happened. But I must tell you—and listen carefully—the war is still on and, in the end, you will not be able to endure in this competition with Communism.” I asked Polozkov if he thought that Gorbachev was a paid traitor. He began nodding, rapidly, crazily.

“Look,” he said, “who do you think is on Gorbachev’s level, historically speaking? What sort of stature do you think he has?” I said that I’d just read an article in the French press comparing Gorbachev to de Gaulle.

“What?” Polozkov barked. “How can you compare Gorbachev to de Gaulle? Pétain is more like it! He lies like Pétain! He betrayed his country like Pétain! De Gaulle did not bend low before Hitler the way Gorbachev did to the West. It’s an insult to our people to compare Gorbachev to de Gaulle. Gorbachev fled the Party like a coward. For his first couple of years, Gorbachev did well. But then he began to travel. He was praised abroad. They celebrated him as a great leader, and this tickled his ambition. He lost a sense of who he was, where he came from. He became vain, always out for his own career. And then they gave a Nobel Prize to a man who destroyed his country with wars and collapse. They made a mockery of that prize.” After talking with Polozkov and several other Communist Party chieftains who came to the small courtroom every day to watch the proceedings, I realized that these men had processed the August coup in their own minds, first as tragedy and now as farce. That is, they were so shaken by the way it changed the world that when they recovered from the shock of losing power, they began to excuse the putsch as a mockery, a nonevent. It simply never happened.

Vladimir Ivashko, the former deputy general secretary of the Party, was typical in the way he regarded the coup as “no coup at all.” He had served the Party so long, and so well, he had lived by its myths so thoroughly, that he could not, and would not, think of the “August days” as the study in betrayal and incompetence that they were. “I know these men who are in prison,” he said. “I know them as well as one man can know another. They are capable men, the top men in the Party. Honest men. Do you think they are fools? Yeltsin was never arrested. There were tanks, yes, but they never fired. People put flowers in the gun barrels. This is a coup? No, I am sorry. This was a drama, designed to crush the Communist Party and create bourgeois power in Russia.

“In the West, even here, they try to say that the Communist Party was reactionary, that it was against change. Those in power—and I knew them all well—none of them were against change. The discussion was always about the pace of change, about the retention of the Union. The members of the so-called putsch acted in the interest of a native power. To say they acted as opponents of reform is groundless. The Party kept this country together. Look at the Balkans, look at Ireland. Why were we able for so many years—until now—to avoid such conflict? Because there was unanimity from the top to the bottom. The tragedy of Gorbachev and of Yeltsin is that they destroyed the Party mechanisms but created nothing in their place. Nothing will take the place of the Party. Nothing. Never.”