فصل 4

CHAPTER 4

THE RETURN OF HISTORY

Dima had good reason to worry. The new Soviet leadership did not come into power with much public daring.

Two months after Mikhail Gorbachev took office in March 1985, he delivered a speech celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany. There he proclaimed that “the gigantic work at the front and in the rear was led by the Party, its Central Committee, and the State Defense Committee headed by the General Secretary … Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin.” This passage inspired ringing applause from the members of the Central Committee. In February 1986, Gorbachev told the French newspaper L’Humanité that “Stalinism is a concept made up by opponents of Communism and used on a large scale to smear the Soviet Union and socialism as a whole.” The Party, Gorbachev assured L’Humanité, “had already drawn the proper conclusions from the past.” And finally, in a meeting with Soviet writers in June 1986, Gorbachev said, “If we start trying to deal with the past, we’ll lose all our energy. It would be like hitting people over the head. And we have to go forward. We’ll sort out the past. We’ll put everything in its place. But right now we have to direct our energy forward.” Communist Party officials across the country were simply in no mood for full disclosure, even if Gorbachev was. In mid-1987, the local Communist Party boss in Magadan, a city that was once the gateway to the notorious Kolyma labor camps in the far east, told a group of visiting Western reporters that the issue of the Stalinist purges “does not exist here for us. There is no such question.” “We lived through that period, and this page in history has been turned,” the official, Aleksandr Bogdanov, said. “It’s not necessary to speak constantly about that.” Nearly three million people were killed in Kolyma alone.

Gorbachev, who grew up inside the Party bureaucracy, knew well that to lose completely the support of such dinosaurs as Bogdanov—to say nothing of the dinosaurs of the Central Committee, the KGB, the military, and the police—would have meant an immediate end to his leadership. Years later, the liberal mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak, wrote, “A totalitarian system leaves behind it a minefield built into both the country’s social structure and the individual psychology of its citizens. And mines explode each time the system faces the danger of being dismantled and the country sees the prospect of genuine renewal.” Whether he relished the task or not, Gorbachev was acting as the keeper of the secrets, the chief curator of the Party’s criminal history. Just as the Soviet regime combined brutality and the technology of the totalitarian state to leave behind tens of millions of corpses and a perverse social order, it also used the completeness of the state, the pervasiveness of every institution from the kindergartens to the secret police, to put an end to historical inquiry. Stalin was not the first leader to enforce a myth of history, only the most successful. As the scholar Walter Laqueur points out, modern historiography, with its demands of integrity and evidence, is less than two hundred years old. Pariscop Villas of the Incan Empire was perhaps the first of many to assemble an official state history on the order of his dictator. In Russia, Nicholas I not only crushed the uprising of the Decembrists, he also tried, with some success, to expunge the threat to his authority from the history books.

Stalin inherited the tradition of manipulating human memory, and came closest to perfecting it. For the first ten years after the Bolshevik Revolution, there had been a degree of coexistence among historians, a debate between orthodox Marxists and their “bourgeois” opponents. That all came to an end at the first—and last—All-Union Conference of Marxist Historians held in 1928, the same year that Stalin became the unchallenged leader of the Bolshevik state. As the conference made clear, Stalin’s consolidation of power gave him absolute control over history. In 1934, the Communist Party Central Committee issued a decree calling for a strict ideological version of history to become doctrine in all textbooks, schools, universities, and institutes. Stalin himself supervised the writing and publication in a run of fifty million copies of the famous Short Course, an angry ideological tract that was, in the words of historian Genrikh Joffe, “like a hammer pounding nails of falsehood into every schoolboy’s and schoolgirl’s brain.” The Short Course was a textbook of determinist history with all events leading, necessarily, inexorably, to a glorious conclusion: the rightness and might of the present regime. In such a text, history is free of inner struggles, of ambiguity and choice, of absurdity and tragedy. The Big Lie always has an unfailing internal logic. Opponents are revealed as enemies of the state, slaughter as necessity. All is clear, all is expressed in the language of myth and epithet. Stalin’s rivals for power—Bukharin, Trotsky, and the rest—were “White Guard pygmies whose strength was no more than that of a gnat.” This was how history—the only history—of the regime was handed down to its subjects. An entire people’s understanding of themselves was meant to dwell within this text. To question or defy the dogma was to admit guilt before the criminal code.

After Stalin’s death in 1953 and the start of Khrushchev’s attacks on the “personality cult,” The Short Course was no longer the catechism. There was a new text, the revised History of the Communist Party, which made sure to play down the titanic role Stalin had assigned himself. A few historians even seized on the thaw as an opportunity to write more open appraisals of the crimes that Khrushchev had only touched upon. Viktor Danilov, for one, went ahead with work on a pioneering study of the collectivization campaign.

But when Brezhnev overthrew Khrushchev in 1964 and slowly began to institute a neo-Stalinist movement, the “gray cardinal” of ideology, Mikhail Suslov, turned his attention to history. The pendulum swung hard once more to dogma. Brezhnev and Suslov appointed Sergei Trapeznikov, a Party historian-apparatchik, as the head of the Central Committee’s Department of Science and Educational Establishments, putting him in charge, in effect, of every history textbook and school lesson from Estonia to Sakhalin Island. To make sure the “thaw” had been thoroughly eliminated from historical studies, Trapeznikov banned Danilov’s study of collectivization from publication. In the true Stalinist tradition, Trapeznikov saw collectivization as necessary and just. Trapeznikov decided that the glory of collectivization required a responsible historian. He appointed himself.

So complete was the Communist Party’s hold over the study of history that nearly all the historical works of any value written in the Soviet Union were by dissidents: Roy Medvedev’s Marxist study of Stalin, Let History Judge; Mikhail Gefter’s essays on Stalinism; and, far greater, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “literary investigation” of the camps in The Gulag Archipelago. Medvedev and Gefter, despite their devotion to the Revolution and Lenin, were cast to the margins of Soviet society and put under constant watch by the KGB. Brezhnev’s attempt to return to Stalin a measure of his former stature would not tolerate apostasy. Solzhenitsyn’s trespasses were far greater. He exposed the inherent illegitimacy of the regime and every Soviet leader including Lenin. This could not be tolerated. In 1974, Solzhenitsyn became the first man forcibly exiled from the country since Trotsky.

The repression of dissident writing and study was but a small part of the state apparatus that controlled history. Trapeznikov made sure that the Academy of Sciences, the Institute of History, the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, the universities, the journals, and the schools were all free of “other-thinking people.” Balts or Uzbeks or Ukrainians could not dare suggest that their histories or cultures were somehow different from Russian and Soviet history. That would undermine the myth of a common Soviet fate and Soviet man. All potentially explosive issues, from Lenin’s dissolution of the popularly elected Constituent Assembly just after the Revolution to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, required a stock fairy tale and a neutralized nonlanguage to prevent even the hint of debate or “other thinking.” When it came to the invasion of Afghanistan, for instance, historians wrote of “internationalist duty” and the “invitation” from “socialist brethren”—or they did not write at all.

“Only a fool or an ideologue would even think about making the study of Soviet history his profession,” said Sergei Ivanov, the Byzantine scholar. “Anyone with a genuine interest in history and a sense of honesty made sure to stay as far away from the Soviet period as possible. That’s why the only hints of criticism you could read in our scholarship were analogies or metaphors, historians writing about the fall of Constantinople or the French Revolution or the rise of fascism and at the same time providing a subtle undertone that maybe a few people would understand. But if you really made Soviet history your field, you were sure to lose—one way or another.” Small wonder then that the most effective spokesman, later on, for a radical reform in the study of Soviet history would be Yuri Afanasyev, who had been schooled almost too well in Party politics but whose specialty had been the history of France.

Moscow was home to many scholars of the Soviet period—not only Medvedev and Gefter and Afanasyev, but also professional ideologues, cynics, and liars. I spent an astonishing evening at Moscow State University with the head of the history department, Yuri Kukushkin. For hours, Kukushkin, one of the most celebrated time-servers in his profession, a man with close connections to the Central Committee and unusual access to Western books and Soviet archives, went on about how he had had “absolutely no idea” that Stalin’s collectivization campaign had been so “costly.” Everything in his voice and manner appealed for sympathy, as if he, too, had somehow been a closet dissident.

“I am afraid if I try to speak about what I feel inside, I will fail,” Kukushkin said. “Bitterness prevails. If only one man could do it all. If we had access to the documents. We worked in a situation that was like a chemist assigned to make a discovery, cure a disease, but he is only allowed to use the chemicals assigned to him by the keeper of the laboratory. The truth is, I didn’t know anyone who knew the real facts and consciously twisted them.” But for all his righteous desire to do the right thing, Kukushkin still wanted controls, he wanted the “right people” to do the scholarly work. “Of course we need balance in our studies, but now we are pouring nothing but sewage on Lenin’s bald head,” he said. “I am sure our state will survive this. I’m sure Lenin will, too. But if a people no longer believe in the future, if they can only see darkness in their common past, then they will go into a state of spiritual dystrophy, and I am not sure we can cure this. In order to inspire faith, we have to show not only the filth and the crime and the blood in our history, but also what there was to be proud of. We are a great and mighty state. We repelled foreign assailants. We must be proud of this. As a man and as a historian, I am concerned that we do not annihilate ourselves spiritually.” Courtesy of Trapeznikov, the academies and universities had been stocked with countless Kukushkins. But there were also men and women like Genrikh Joffe, who saw themselves somehow as honest though they knew all too well that the system was too strong, that it mocked their petty attempts to undermine or fool it. Joffe, the author of many books about the February Revolution and the Romanov dynasty, was in his early sixties, “so I was too young to have suffered through the worst, deadly assaults on historians under Stalin.” But he did receive the standard Stalinist education, the endless drilling in The Short Course by scared and ignorant teachers.

“That was our world, the structure we lived in,” he said one afternoon. “There was a slight euphoria in the postwar years, a slight thaw, but in 1949, 1950, they accused me of being a ‘preacher of bourgeois ideology.’ Whatever that meant. It turned out that two friends of mine—friends!—had stolen a couple of my notebooks. And in my notes on some lecture, I had written in the margin saying, ‘They must think we are idiots to believe all this.’ Nothing more. Just a private moment of frustration and doubt. Later on, I couldn’t find my notebooks and thought I’d probably lost them somewhere. I didn’t pay it much mind. But the next time I saw them was when I had to appear at a public meeting in front of one hundred people, students and friends at the university, the Komsomol committee people and all the rest. All my so-called friends were suddenly avoiding me as we walked into the hall. And then, from the podium, the Communist Party secretary pointed at me and cried out, ‘Look who sits here before us! Joffe! He thinks you are all idiots!’ ” For his sin, Joffe paid a relatively small price. He was sent to teach in the provincial city of Kostroma until after Stalin’s death.

Back in Moscow, Joffe worked at the Lenin Library and began working on his books. “There were certain small things you could do to make yourself feel at least a little honest,” he said. “One technique was to introduce foreign sources and then make sure you criticized the ‘bourgeois falsifiers.’ I am not sure now that I am ashamed of that. I did manage to amass a lot of material on the February Revolution. Maybe, if I’m very lucky, some readers might have gotten the sense that there was more to the February Revolution than just being an opening act for the October Revolution. Maybe they got the sense that it was the moment that overthrew the monarchy and flirted with a kind of democracy, however weak. But I doubt it.

“Unfortunately, I compromised too much, and this is hard to bear now. Truthfully, I don’t know if the way I negotiated my way through life was a completely conscious choice. I think it was just my nature. By nature I am a man of compromise, not an extremist. I am not a young man, and to live through these changes, this flood of information, is not easy. I sometimes feel guilty for changing my view of history so quickly. But how can it be otherwise? How can one fail to see what’s what? Should I ignore it all for some sort of foolish consistency? I remember the historian Eduard Burdzhalov, who had been perhaps the most important historian on the liberal side of things when Khrushchev made his revelations about Stalin in 1956. Before that, Burdzhalov had been an inveterate Stalinist, the editor of Culture and Life, which had attacked the Jews, the so-called cosmopolitans. I asked him, ‘How was it possible for a Stalinist, a party careerist, to turn around and change so abruptly?’ He couldn’t answer at first. But then he said, ‘If someone has the chance finally to express himself, to speak the truth, why should he miss the opportunity?’ ” The return of history first began with Khrushchev’s “secret speech” denouncing Stalin in 1956. But the “thaw” was extremely limited and, as it turned out, reversible. Without a full and careful assessment of the past, one that could not be crammed back into the genie’s bottle, real reform, much less democratic revolution, was impossible. Dmitri Yurasov and the democrats knew it, and Gorbachev knew it, too. The return of history to the intellectual and political life of the people of the Soviet Union was the foundation of the great changes ahead.

After two years of hesitation and the language of avoidance, Gorbachev used 1987 as his moment to begin what Khrushchev had started. He opened the door to history, and he did it first with a movie, then with a speech on the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution.

Tengiz Abuladze, a small and elegant man with piercing eyes, lived and made his films in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. By 1980, he had established his reputation as a filmmaker of extraordinary intelligence with two allegorical works: Supplication, which appeared in 1968, and The Wishing Tree, in 1977. Meticulous in manner and in his style of work, he spent years thinking and writing, letting his ideas mature, before he shot a single frame.

Unlike the musty cave-apartments of most Moscow intellectuals, Abuladze’s airy house in Tbilisi was a fine place “to live and breathe,” he said. Over a lunch of Georgian red wine—“Stalin’s favorite”—and the local variation of pizza called khachapuri, Abuladze talked of how he came to make Repentance, a film about the legacy of evil and the moral need—for both nation and individual—to confront the past. Although television and newspapers were the principal means of the glasnost explosion, Abuladze’s film was the bridge to the recovery of historical memory. More than any other work of the period—Mikhail Shatrov’s historical plays, Anatoly Rybakov’s and Vladimir Dudintsev’s novels—Repentance stunned a people into a state of awareness. The national screenings of Repentance in 1987 and 1988 had such a powerful effect that they can be compared to Lenin’s “agit-prop” trains that traveled throughout the provinces, bringing with them portable theaters to show propaganda films on the glory of the Bolshevik Revolution. As an artist or theorist, Abuladze might not be on the same level as the greatest of the early Soviet directors, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and Aleksandr Dovzhenko. But because of its political resonance, Repentance was the most important work of subversive art in the country since the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich during Khrushchev’s “thaw.” Abuladze did not have to travel far to get the spark for Repentance. “I got the inspiration from a true story, an incident that took place in a village in western Georgia,” he said. “A man who had been sent unjustly to prison was finally released. His entire life had been broken, destroyed. And when he came home, he found the grave of the man who had sent him to jail. One night he went into the graveyard and dug up the coffin. He opened the coffin, took out the corpse, and leaned it up against the wall. This was his act of revenge. He would not let the dead man rest. This awful fact showed us that we could show the tragedy of an entire epoch by using this device. That was the spark for the treatment and then the script.” With his daughter-in-law, Nana Dzhanselidze, Abuladze wrote an eighteen-page treatment and then a script in 1981 about a kind of Every-Dictator, a tyrant named Varlam who destroys one life after another in a time mirroring the late 1930s under Stalin. Varlam, a provincial mayor, promises to build a “paradise on earth” for his people. Instead he ravages them in fits of paranoia and sheer indifference. As an old man, he even tries to shoot down the sun with a pistol.

“The people need a great reality!” Varlam says, echoing the twisted paternalism of Lenin and Stalin. Later, he defends his own paranoia, saying, “Of every three people, four are our enemies! Yes, do not be shocked. One enemy is greater in quantity than one friend!” Varlam is so ruthless that in one scene he befriends an artist named Sandro and then sends him off to die in the camps, declaring him guilty of “individualism” and friendship with “anarchist poets.” Sandro’s daughter, haunted for decades by the memory of the martyrdom of her Christlike father, eventually digs up the grave of Varlam and leans the corpse against the wall. She will not forget, and she will not let those around her forget.

The film, which is filled with the sort of allegorical devices and local grotesques common in Fellini, is about the necessity of memory, the need not only to battle tyranny of the present, but also to deal with the insanities of the past. Varlam’s son Abel is little better than the father. He temporizes; he repeats the sins of the father. He has no conscience, no memory. And he prosecutes Keti, the daughter of Sandro, the woman who has repeatedly dug up the grave of the tyrant.

Tornike, Abel’s son, cannot comprehend the life he has inherited. He rages against his father. In perhaps the most important scene in the film, Tornike confronts Abel, a battle that can be read not only as the conflict of generations, but as the singular struggle of man against power, the struggle of memory against forgetting.

“Did you know all that?” Tornike asks his father.

“All what?” Abel says.

“About Grandpa.”

“Grandpa never did anything wrong. Those were complicated times. It is difficult to explain now.” “What do the ‘times’ have to do with it?”

“Plenty,” Abel says, getting angrier. “The situation then was different. It was a question of national survival. We were surrounded by enemies who wanted to crush us. Should we have just patted their heads?” “Was the artist Sandro Barateli an enemy?” the boy asks.

“He was. Perhaps he was a good artist. But he failed to understand many things. I’m not saying we didn’t make any mistakes, but what are a few lives when the well-being of millions is at stake? We had so much to accomplish. Look at it from that perspective.” “So you applied mathematics to human lives, with proportions paramount?” the boy says in disgust.

“Don’t be sarcastic,” Abel says. “It’s time you understood that a public official places the public interest above private considerations.” Tornike’s contempt for his father has deepened. “A person is born human,” he says, “then he becomes an official.” “Your head is in the clouds,” Abel says. “Reality is different. Varlam was guided by the interests of society, and sometimes what happened was not his doing.” “Tell me,” says the son, “would he have destroyed the entire world if so ordered?” At the end of the film, Tornike shoots himself in despair.

The year was 1981 and Leonid Brezhnev was general secretary and Eduard Shevardnadze was the most powerful man in Georgia. Abuladze brought the script to Shevardnadze. “Shevardnadze read the script and said we must find a way to do this,” Abuladze said. “He told me, ‘The year 1937 was in my home, too.’ He was a witness to all that happened. His own father was among those arrested. I remember it all, too. I was a child, and though I cannot remember all the specifics, I remember the emotion, the fear. My father was a doctor, and he always had a suitcase ready with some clothes in it. He had nothing to do with politics, but he knew there could be a knock at the door at any time. They made the arrest and you never returned.

“So Shevardnadze told us we must find a way to do something on this topic, by all means. But he said it had to go through Moscow. We went to Rezo Chkheidze, the manager of the film studios, and he told Shevardnadze that there were film programs for the republics and for the entire Soviet Union. For the republican program all we had to do was specify the topic of the film and the name of the director. So we sent a telegram saying, ‘Director Tengiz Abuladze wants to make a film on a moral and ethical problem.’ That was all. Moscow gave its permission, saying only that the film sounded ‘interesting.’ Then Shevardnadze had a good piece of advice. He told us, ‘The more general you keep it, the better.’ And so in a way he was an extra author to the film.” Abuladze made sure that Varlam was not simply a direct analog for Stalin. Varlam, as played by the brilliant Georgian actor Avtandil Makharadze, had a Hitlerian mustache and wore a pince-nez that immediately evoked the image of Stalin’s secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria. Abuladze dressed Varlam’s guards in medieval armor to deepen the sense of time. Finally, he gave Varlam the last name Aravidze, which is a bit like Kafka’s semi-anonymous K. In Georgian, there is no name Aravidze, but the root of the word, aravin, means “no one.” “We wanted even the name to hint at Varlam’s being the very image of the totalitarian, the dictator, anywhere or at any time,” Abuladze said. “They are all in there: Stalin, of course, but also Khrushchev and Lenin, too. A friend of mine met Molotov before his death and he told Molotov, ‘You know, it’s a pity that Lenin died so early. If he had lived longer, everything would have been normal.’ But Molotov said, ‘Why do you say that?’ My friend said, ‘Because Stalin was a bloodsucker and Lenin was a noble person.’ Molotov smiled, and then he said, ‘Compared to Lenin, Stalin was a mere lamb.’ ” Abuladze shot the film in five months in 1984. But Konstantin Chernenko, a protégé of Brezhnev, was still in power, and so the film simply remained “on the shelf,” along with the works of dozens of other filmmakers.

Soon after Chernenko died and Gorbachev came to power in March 1985, Abuladze’s old friend Shevardnadze was appointed to a position on the Politburo. The prospects for Repentance brightened. In the spring of 1986, Abuladze called Shevardnadze in Moscow and asked him if he could use his influence with Gorbachev to get the film shown in May at a big film festival in the capital. Shevardnadze felt a certain pang of guilt or obligation and met with Gorbachev.

“I owe a lot of people back home and I can’t repay them all now,” Shevardnadze told Gorbachev. “But there is one debt I must pay no matter what happens, and you can help me.” Shevardnadze arranged a screening of Repentance for Gorbachev. When the film was over, Gorbachev, whose grandfathers had both been imprisoned during the Stalin era, gave his approval to release the film.

But a crisis intervened: the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. The decision had to be put off.

At around the same time, Elem Klimov, a director and the new head of the Filmmakers’ Union, set up a “conflict commission” as a way to move some of those many films that had been banned under previous Soviet leaders off the shelf and onto the screen. Klimov realized that the themes of Abuladze’s Repentance were so explosive that it would require a decision at the highest level. He went to the liberal ideologist of reforms Aleksandr Yakovlev. Yakovlev was astonished by Repentance and called Abuladze into his office and revealed his plan. They would “leak” the film, showing it first to limited audiences in carefully selected venues. Then they would slowly increase the number of screenings, creating a certain inevitability about Repentance.

As it turned out, the interplay between the screenings of Repentance and the timing of major political events was uncanny. In October 1986 there were several showings of the film, mainly for audiences of well-connected intellectuals in Moscow, Tbilisi, and other major cities. Then in January 1987, Gorbachev presided over a breakthrough plenum of the Central Committee at which he gave the clearest indication yet that he was preparing a radical reform of the political and economic systems. Filled with self-confidence now, Gorbachev returned to the public stage a month later, this time telling a gathering of journalists and writers at the Kremlin that the “blank spots” of history must be filled in. “We must not forget names,” Gorbachev said. “And it is all the more immoral to forget or pass over in silence large periods in the life of the people. History must be seen for what it is.” Repentance played in thousands of theaters. Millions saw it—including the young man named Dima Yurasov.

After he’d been fired from his job in the archives of the Supreme Court, Yurasov had been working as a laborer, unloading trucks at a printing plant. The film helped raise his spirits. Now it seemed to him that change was no longer an empty promise. Yurasov discovered that he was not alone in his quest to learn more about the past. Groups of Moscow intellectuals, most of them old enough to remember the promise and the collapse of the thaw, began organizing discussion groups and public forums. With the sponsorship of Aleksandr Yakovlev, Yuri Afanasyev was appointed rector of the Historical Archives Institute. Afanasyev quickly launched a public campaign arguing for a radical revision of Soviet history and organized a series of lectures on the Stalin era. He invited scholars and the survivors of the purges to come forward at last and speak.

Yurasov, for his part, began thinking that he might “legalize” the work he had begun long ago in the stacks of the archives. He wanted to show people what he had done so far; he wanted their help to expand his collection of the names of the lost. He started going to these lectures and discussion groups, if only to be closer to people who had lived the life he had been reading about in the archives.

On April 13, 1987, Yurasov went to an “evening of remembrance” at the Central House of Writers. The first few speakers gave guarded talks about the crimes of the past. This was an older generation, one accustomed to using a language that hinted at truth, then retreated. They were trained in the art of euphemism and allegory. Their most direct complaint was about the lack of information.

Dima felt frustrated, stifled. Just before people got ready to leave, he asked for the floor and got it. With the angry, put-upon look of a petulant rock-and-roller, Yurasov described his work. He said he had collected 123,000 file cards of information from his own subterranean research. He said he knew from experience that there were at least sixteen million files in the archives covering arrests and executions. When he was rummaging in the files, Yurasov told the audience, he had discovered a confidential letter from the chairman of the Supreme Court of the USSR to Khrushchev reporting that between 1953 and 1957, 600,000 people, who had been executed during the Stalin era, had been rehabilitated posthumously. Another 612,500, Yurasov said, were rehabilitated between 1963 and 1967. He described how from 1929 on, all “anti-Soviet” crimes—the general term used during the purges and after—were recorded on a huge index card file in the archives of the Interior Ministry.

“I have statistical material,” Yurasov said. “Not complete, of course, but it gives a general idea.” The crowd was astonished, not only by the numbers but by Yurasov’s access to them and his precision. One of the evening’s main speakers, an older historian, took the microphone after Dima sat down and said the young man clearly “knows much more than I do and, I expect, more than anyone else in the hall. I am very grateful to him.” As the crowd was leaving the hall, one member of the audience asked Yurasov if he really thought his “sincerity” would lead to anything.

“Well,” he said, “it will soon become clear whether a perestroika has begun, or whether it’s merely words again.” In the summer of 1987, Gorbachev and Aleksandr Yakovlev began drafting a speech on history that would be delivered at a jubilee celebrating the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution.

This speech would involve one of the most difficult rounds of political and rhetorical maneuvering in Gorbachev’s career. To begin with, Gorbachev himself was still convinced of what he called the “rightness of the socialist choice.” He continued to see Lenin as his guiding intellectual and historical model. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that Gorbachev was out to undermine, much less destroy, the basic tenets of ideology or statehood of the Soviet Union. Certainly not in 1987. He also knew well that the Central Committee, the Politburo, and regional Party committees were dominated by men whose careers and very being were based on the persistence of a fossilized view of the world, one that did not challenge too hard the official version of Soviet history: the “necessity” of the brutal collectivization and industrialization campaigns, the “glory” of Stalin’s leadership in the war. To keep his hold on power, Gorbachev could begin with only small doses of truth.

In the summer and fall of 1987, the Politburo held numerous sessions on how best to approach the Revolution Day speech. Gorbachev had little choice but to play a game of strategy and euphemism. The Communist Party was not only the most powerful political constituency in the country, it was the only one. What later became known as the democratic opposition hardly existed. The broad range of pro-reform forces, from the former dissidents like Andrei Sakharov to the early “informal” groups like Democratic Perestroika, all put their hopes in Gorbachev. That was where the power was, and they wanted to keep it that way. Gorbachev faced a Politburo in which the committed reformers were a minority of four: Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Yakovlev, and Eduard Shevardnadze. Hard-liners like Yegor Ligachev and moderate conservatives like Nikolai Ryzhkov were in the clear majority. “It would be foolish to think that the conservatives then were any less conservative than the people who led the August coup,” Shevardnadze told me. Every word of the history speech was a potential battle, a political war. Yakovlev told me that when Gorbachev passed around a proposed draft, a majority of the members of the Politburo insisted that Gorbachev not call Stalin “criminal.” On that question, Gorbachev exercised his option and overruled his colleagues.

In October, Gorbachev went before the entire Central Committee in a closed plenary session for a trial run of the November speech. Like Khrushchev in 1956, Gorbachev gave specific figures to describe the Stalinist terror: how ten of the thirteen Old Bolshevik revolutionaries who survived until 1937 were purged; how 1,108 of the 1,966 delegates to the 1934 Party Congress and 70 percent of the Central Committee were “eliminated”; how “thousands of Red Army commanders, the flower of the army on the eve of Hitler’s aggression,” were killed; how the triumphs of the war came in spite of—and not because of—Stalin’s leadership. As he recited this bloody litany, Gorbachev noticed a kind of disturbed murmuring in the crowd. Breaking off from his text, he retreated slightly.

“Comrades,” he said, “please bear in mind that not everything I have stated here will go into the jubilee speech in detailed form. It will include only general, overall assessments of the complex periods in our history.” Some time before the anniversary and the public speech, Ligachev rang Gorbachev on the phone. Ligachev told me that his and his wife’s families had been “wounded” by the Stalinist purges, and, yes, he, too, supported the screenings of Repentance. But now he was beginning to fear that a strong speech from the general secretary would “blacken” Soviet history.

“This would mean canceling our entire lives!” Ligachev told Gorbachev in a rage. “We are opening the way for people to spit on our history.” Gorbachev knew his prerogatives, but he also recognized the delicate balance of power. At the end of the Central Committee plenum one of the strongest supporters of reform, Boris Yeltsin, resigned in a fury, accusing Ligachev of “bullying” and even Gorbachev of creating a “cult of personality” that permitted too little disagreement within the Politburo. Yeltsin’s resignation, and the furious, ritual denunciations that followed, made it clear that Gorbachev was operating in a political environment that he would one day compare to a “lake of gasoline.” In the coming months, as minutes of the plenum became public, people would learn just how volatile, even vicious, the atmosphere in the Party leadership could be. Even Yakovlev and Shevardnadze felt compelled to join the hard-liners in heaping abuse on Yeltsin. Gorbachev, too, showed little mercy. One day, Yeltsin’s bravado would be made to order for the historical moment. One day, the hard-liners would refuse to be manipulated and would launch a counterattack, first political, then military. That would be Yeltsin’s moment. But now as Gorbachev tried to manipulate the historical debate, subtlety and compromise were required. Yes, Gorbachev would spit on Stalin—but carefully.

On November 2, 1987, at the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses, Gorbachev delivered his speech to a national television audience and the great relics of the Communist world. Erich Honecker of East Germany, Wojciech Jaruzelski of Poland, Fidel Castro of Cuba, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Milos Jakes of Czechoslovakia, Nicolae Ceauşescu of Romania, Gorbachev’s own Central Committee: they were all there to hear what would, and would not, be said about the history of the regime. Soon, all of them would fall to revolution and election—all but Castro—and in large part, the reason was this speech. Bland, hedged, filled with the Communist Party Newspeak imagined by George Orwell and perfected by committees of cowardly men, Gorbachev’s speech nevertheless opened the gate. And the lion of history came roaring in.

To read it now, just a few years later, the speech seems like a relic from another world, an ideological incantation in which the descendants of the tyrant pay annual tribute to the past and the rightness of the Party’s course.

“Dear Comrades! Esteemed foreign guests! Seven decades separate us from the unforgettable days of October 1917, from those legendary days that became the starting point of a new epoch of human progress and the true history of mankind. October is truly mankind’s hour of genius and its morning dawn.… “The year 1917 showed that the choice between socialism and capitalism is the main social alternative of our age and that there is no way to advance in the twentieth century without moving toward a higher form of social organization, to socialism.” Only many paragraphs and rounds of applause later came the hint of real purpose, an almost apologetic break with the tone of ritual celebration.

“If today we look into our history with an occasionally critical gaze,” Gorbachev said, “it is only because we want to get a better, a fuller idea of our path into the future.” Gorbachev was in a pathetic patch here, and when he turned explicitly to Stalin, he promised even-handedness, a balanced view. “To stay faithful to historical truth, we have to see both Stalin’s indisputable contribution to the struggle for socialism, to the defense of its gains, and the gross political mistakes and the abuses committed by him and his circle, for which our people paid a heavy price and which had grave consequences for society.” Gorbachev even paid tribute to the notion of a determinist course of history and the very kind of historical thinking in The Short Course. “Looking at history through sober eyes and taking into account the totality of domestic and international realities, there is no avoiding the question: Could a course have been chosen in those conditions other than that put forward by the Party? If we wish to remain true to historic method and to life itself, there can be only one answer: No, it could not.” Only one answer possible! The applause was deafening.

But then came the reason for all this bilge, a moment of candor that Khrushchev in 1956 could only venture in secret. Finally, a Soviet leader had come before the public, before millions watching on television, to speak a few paragraphs of truth: “It is perfectly obvious that the lack of the proper level of democratization of Soviet society was precisely what made possible both the cult of personality and the violations of the law, arbitrariness, and repressions of the thirties—to be blunt, real crimes based on the abuse of power. Many thousands of members of the Party and nonmembers were subjected to mass repressions. That, comrades, is the bitter truth. Serious damage was done to the cause of socialism and the authority of the Party, and we must speak bluntly about this. This is essential for the final and irreversible assertion of Lenin’s ideal of socialism.

“The guilt of Stalin and those close to him before the Party and the people for the mass repressions and lawlessness that were permitted are immense and unforgivable.… even now we still encounter attempts to ignore sensitive questions of our history, to hush them up, to pretend that nothing special happened. We cannot agree with this. It would be a neglect of historical truth, disrespect for the memory of those who found themselves innocent victims of lawlessness and arbitrariness.” A few paragraphs submerged in this great stew. As if to save himself, to avoid going too far, Gorbachev quickly retreated to the tone of celebration and absolute self-confidence.

“Neither the grossest errors nor the deviations from the principles of socialism that were committed could turn our people and our country from the path they embarked upon in 1917.… “The socialist system and the quest and experience which it has tested in practice are of universal human significance. It has offered to the world its answers to the fundamental questions of human life and appropriated its humanist and collectivist values, at the center of which stands the workingman.… In October 1917 we departed the old world and irreversibly rejected it. We are traveling to a new world, the world of Communism. We shall never deviate from this path.” And, the transcript tells us, “[prolonged and stormy applause].”

At the time, many historians in the West called the speech a huge disappointment, if not a sellout. But for all the glaring insufficiencies of the speech—its unwillingness to criticize Lenin, its praise of the brutal collectivization campaign—Gorbachev opened the most important discussion of all. Intellectually, politically, and morally, the speech would play a critical role in undermining the Stalinist system of coercion and empire. The Kremlin’s reluctant “discovery” in 1989 of the secret protocols to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which signed over control of the independent Baltic states from Nazi Germany to Moscow, accelerated the liberation of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. A roundtable discussion published in Pravda simply arguing the merits of the 1968 invasion of Prague came just as hundreds of thousands of Czechoslovaks were demonstrating in Wenceslas Square. The Pravda article confirmed the Kremlin’s shifting attitude toward its own past and helped rob the Czech Communist Party of its last shred of “legitimacy.” The Polish people would learn the truth about the massacres in the forests of Kalinin, Katyn, and Starobelsk and the origins of their country’s subjugation to Moscow. There were dozens of other examples. History, when it returned, was unforgiving.