فصل 5

CHAPTER 5

WIDOWS OF REVOLUTION

Two months after Gorbachev’s history speech, my wife, Esther, and I moved from Washington to a two-room apartment on October Square in central Moscow. No. 7 Dobryninskaya Street was a titanic L and had the hulking gravity of Co-op City in the Bronx, but little of its charm. Except for the foreign cars in the parking lot and the armed guards protecting them, the building looked like most others in the city. It was a ruin the day it went up and it was always threatening to come down. Concrete fell away from the walls in chalky little chunks. The elevator slammed shut like a cattle-car door. At $1,200 a month, my masters at The Washington Post were paying hundreds of times more in rent than the average Muscovite did for a similar place. This may be counted as the last vestige of state socialism. The Communist Party bureaucracy that ran the building—an agency of harpies and spooks called UPDK—gouged foreigners for hard currency whenever they could. I once asked if I might have a phone line capable of calling abroad, a maneuver that should cost about $15. This would cost $20,000, UPDK replied. So you had to love them for that.

Across the street from us was the city’s biggest statue of Lenin, a bronze behemoth that had run the workers’ state more than $6 million. It was a glorious thing to see. A mythic wind bulged Lenin’s bronze coattails and billowed his trouser legs as he pointed toward the “shining future.” The city was littered with horrific monuments, and each had its own nickname and local following. The husky statue of the poet Mayakovsky was known as “Mr. Big Pants,” and the soaring, silver phallus paying tribute to the Soviet space program was known as “The Impotent Man’s Dream.” But Lenin was ours, our rendezvous, as in “Let’s meet near Lenin’s left shoe.” He was irresistible. Tourists were forever coming to stare up the great man’s skirts and take a picture. Nearly four years after we arrived, local engineers were measuring Lenin for destruction. The best strategy, they felt, was to saw him off at the ankles and bring him down with a crane. But that’s getting ahead of the story.

The weather when we arrived was filthy: a drizzly cotton-wool sky, muddy snow humped along the curbs. The ancient cars slogged like hippos along the swampy streets, their movement barely perceptible through the fog. The world of Russia moved in slow motion. A light snow or rain would fall and the sidewalks would be iced for days. Just to stay upright, you had to walk with a certain slide and push, your feet never quite leaving the ground. Here and there you would see someone—invariably a block-sized babushka, knees sore and numbed from hours waiting on lines, her nerves frayed with the rub and bump of shopping in stores with nothing in them—suddenly slip fiercely, flipping a couple of feet in the air and landing square on her hip. A fall like that could kill you. Usually it just left black-and-green bruises the size of dessert plates. Soon I had two myself, one for each side, the insignias of arrival.

I had imagined a winter out of David Lean’s (not Pasternak’s) Doctor Zhivago, a CinemaScope vista of whiteness and cold. But real winter was endless and foul, a gray slog that began in late September and ended with the even uglier spectacle of late April, known euphemistically as spring. The melting snow, the dun-colored landscape, the buses so caked in mud that you could not see out the windows, the sudden appearance of defeated-looking weeds, all reminded one Russian friend of “an old whore disrobing.” If the sky was blue over Moscow ten or fifteen days between September and May it was a lot. Living without light was like living on another planet, another realm, and by the time we’d been there a year, we both felt like mushrooms, mushy and beige. I once asked a painter I knew why he did not emigrate when his work was starting to sell for thousands of dollars in Europe and America. “For the light,” he said.

The rooms were bugged, of course. Not that we ever saw the mikes. But doubting their existence was both stupid and bad form. Stupid, because I didn’t want to say anything that would get a Soviet friend in trouble; bad form, because I felt that if our offices did not think we were under “psychological pressure” we might lose the cost-of-living allowance. No successor would forgive me that. In the bad old days, a foreigner’s apartment was pretty much off-limits to ordinary Soviets. Our predecessors, “pre-Gorbachev,” would never have dreamed of having Soviet friends over for dinner. The only Soviets you had as guests were people you couldn’t stand: low-level officials, shady instituteniks, and hack journalists, all of whom were spooks, or at least extremely cooperative with “the organs.” They were safe. But the prospect of having a real friend show his documents to the militiaman stationed at the compound gate was too grim. Now, under Gorbachev, that was gradually changing. Friends now pointed to the chandelier and said, “I hope the microphone is on, because I have something very important I want to say. Gorbachev sucks.” Or doesn’t suck. Whatever. Fear was slowly on the way out.

As a resident of the October Region—a cigar-shaped ward running south along the length of Leninsky Prospekt—I thought it wise to visit the men who ran the place. This was something no reporter would ever have dreamed of doing before. But glasnost, this curious striptease of ideology and language, was now at center stage. With each week another taboo fell to the floor. It hardly mattered that Gorbachev’s committee-written speech on history had been an exercise more in evasion than revelation. One day it was all right to know that Stalin was “rude,” as Lenin put it in his last testament; then it was all right to know he had slaughtered millions during the collectivization of Ukraine. Gorbachev was also making political performance a form of glasnost. In foreign capitals and Soviet cities, he ordered his limousine to stop, got out on the streets, and worked the crowds. No one had ever seen such a thing: a modern Soviet leader who walked without an aide at each elbow.

“Who is Gorbachev’s chief supporter?” the joke went.

“No one. He can stand up all by himself.”

The puffy gray men in the lower ranks of the Communist Party, men who had run the cities and towns like feudal princes, were beginning to get the idea that a little contact with the serfs they commanded just might prolong their dominion. And so it was that I was extended a warm welcome to the Regional Communist Party Committee of the October Region.

“Please come by,” Mikhail Kubrin, the Party secretary, said over the phone in that extra-casual tone so in vogue in 1988. It was a tone, at once nervous and flip, that wanted you to get the idea that these fellows had been doing nothing but chatting up the constituents since the days of Lenin. Then, as a flourish of confidence, Kubrin said, “Bring a notebook.” I arrived at the October Regional Party Committee, a gray concrete hulk. In the lobby, an old woman with legs wrapped in elastic bandages mopped the floor with filthy water. She kept missing the same spot, over and over. There was the overpowering smell of disinfectant, bad tobacco, and wet wool. This was the winter smell of Russia indoors, the smell of the woman in front of you on line, the smell of every elevator. Near an abandoned newsstand, dozens of overcoats hung on long rows of pegs, somber and dark, lightly steaming, like nags in a stable.

Suddenly, Kubrin appeared, all smiles and handshakes, a real glasnost man.

“Welcome, Comrade Resident!” he said.

Kubrin led me up a flight of stairs to his office. He was a New Age sort of Soviet leader with a European tie and a good haircut. He was at that middle rank in Moscow where loyal service to the state might bring a trip to the Bulgarian coast in summer. And there, too, was Yuri Laryonov, the head of the municipal government apparatus, a meaty fellow with Gorbachevian rhetoric and a Brezhnevian brow. Laryonov spoke sweetly enough, but his handshake made it clear that he was capable of crushing a Volga sedan or at least a petty bureaucrat when and if the occasion demanded. His face was as worn and gray as steel wool.

We sat down at a huge table of polished blond wood. A secretary, jittery and quick, served tea and cookies all around. She set down a chipped amber bowl filled with the wrapped candies produced down the road by the Red October chocolate factory.

“Well, what is it you would like to know?” Laryonov said, smiling and rolling his candy wrapper into a tight little spear.

“To tell you the truth,” I said, “I come as a resident as well as a reporter. I’d love to know why every year you shut off the hot water in the district for a month. A whole month at least. The heat is nothing to write home about, either.” This tack was known at the time as “exploring the limits of glasnost.” Laryonov leaned forward in his chair and smiled the smile of a hungry cheetah spotting a gazelle with a sprained ankle. “I’m glad some of our foreign friends live in our district,” he began, “but, sir, if you write a lousy article, we’ll not only turn off your hot water, we’ll turn off your lights and turn your sewage pipes around.” We all laughed, but it was clearly time to change the subject. The talk turned to the trials of running a city district of 230,000 people, forty-four schools, eleven technical colleges, the Academy of Sciences, the Gubkin Institute of Oil and Gas, the Red Proletariat machine-tool factory. To say nothing of the chocolate plant. Like every politician I have ever known, the men of the October Region wanted you to feel sorry for them, to feel for a moment their terrible burden. And for the next hour or so, the two of them, Laryonov and Kuprin, whined about their common plight. For the first time, people were calling them on the phone and complaining about the garbage pickups that never came, the ten-year waiting lists for a phone, the fifteen-year waiting list for an apartment. There was a couple, divorced for more than five years, calling to say that they were forced to live together in a one-room apartment and if the Party couldn’t find them another room somewhere the Party would have “blood on its hands, as if it needs more of it. You pigs. Goodbye.” The two of them, Laryonov and Kubrin, sighed magnificently. I mentioned that there had been a great many articles in the press about the privileges of the party apparatus—the cars, the apartments, the vacation retreats.

This was not the right thing to say, apparently.

“The only privilege we have,” Laryonov said angrily, “is working weekends. And the privilege of people calling us on the phone and telling us we are petty bureaucrats. And that is not the worst thing they say!” “Not the worst,” Kubrin said, his head in his hands. “Not the worst thing at all.” It was not easy getting the feel for Moscow that winter of our arrival. One freezing morning, Esther and I decided to visit the Kremlin churches. We took the metro to the Lenin Library. As we were coming out of the train, I saw a man with no legs pushing himself along on a dolly cart. What hell it was to live disabled in Moscow: no ramps, elevators that gave out every other day. You hardly saw anyone on crutches or in a wheelchair, though. The state packed most of them off from childhood and stuck them in “internats,” dismal homes outside of town. And now this man was wrist-deep in slush, the commuters rushing around him or bumping him with their knees and net shopping bags stuffed with potatoes and beets. His face, angular with a slight gray beard, seemed familiar. I thought I remembered his picture from an old book about the dissident movement.

I badly wanted to write something about the disabled and began to introduce myself. But before I could go on much further, he said, “Help me up these stairs, would you? There is a demonstration in fifteen minutes.” As Esther and I helped him, he said he was in fact the man in the book: Yuri Kiselyov, the founder of the Initiative Group for the Defense of the Rights of Invalids.

When we got to the top of the stairs, Kiselyov pointed to the front of the library and a small crowd milling around. “Well, there they are,” he said. “The demonstrators. And the rest of them. This should be something to see.” I had no idea what he was talking about. All I could see was some students and passersby, a few buses parked on the street.

“What demonstration?” I said.

Yuri rolled over to a slight young man with a black beard who was passing out a mimeographed newspaper.

“This is Sasha Podrabinek,” Yuri said. Podrabinek had been jailed twice for his protests against the regime’s use of psychiatric hospitals as prisons. Now he was editing a unique newspaper called Express-Khronika, a mimeographed weekly paper filled with short news items: a taxi drivers’ strike in Chekhov, an emigration case in Kharkov, a mass rally in Yerevan. It was as if Podrabinek had developed an underground Associated Press in a country that had never had such a thing. All week long, he and his staff took dictation from their far-flung correspondents. On Saturday mornings, when the police were not too much in evidence, Podrabinek passed out his paper on the Arbat and in Pushkin Square.

“You see those people on the top step?” Podrabinek said now. “They’re Crimean Tatars. At noon they’re going to unroll a banner.” It was a strange feeling, as if we had wandered onto a backlot at Universal or MosFilm and we were waiting for the crew to fix the lights before the big scene.

Podrabinek turned to the street.

“Now. See those yellow buses?” he said. “With the tough guys sitting in them? They’re all KGB and hired goons. Just before noon they’ll come out and try and stop the whole thing.” We were all standing on the library plaza, glancing from one side to the other. I checked my watch. It was 11:58.

The KGB made the first move. An officer in an enormous blue overcoat and black felt boots climbed out of the first bus, three others trailing behind him.

Surrounded now by KGB men, Podrabinek lowered his voice and continued narrating for my education this sidewalk guerrilla theater: “Watch how they circle behind the Tatars.… Notice the cameras.…” The lead officer tried to dip his head closer to listen. One of the other agents lifted his lapel to his mouth and started muttering.

“Would you like me to talk a little louder for your microphone?” Podrabinek said.

The agent did not smile. He looked down and spotted Kiselyov on his cart.

“You are anti-Soviet, aren’t you?” he said. We all waited for Yuri’s answer.

“It’s you who are anti-Soviet,” he said.

Then the officer pointed to the Tatars waiting for the noon bell on the library steps. They were just a few of the many thousands who had been deported during the Stalin era, all under the pretense that they had supported Hitler during the war. Stalin wanted to destroy any sort of national movement or feeling in the Soviet Union in his quest to create a “Soviet man.” He was prepared to kill him to do it. Gorbachev, for his part, told his comrades on Revolution Day that all this had been a triumph. Multinational harmony had been achieved.

“Why do you bother with them?” the officer asked me, this time using a confiding between-us sort of tone. “It’s their problem, not yours.” At noon, the KGB plainclothesmen, goonish young men with strips of orange cloth tied around their sleeves, poured out of the buses. A few started snapping pictures with Instamatics, and one guy panned the scene with a Sony videocamera.

Now the protesters took their cue as well, unfurling a banner that read: “Let Us Go Back to Our Homeland.” The officer told them they were in violation of a recent order of the Moscow Communist Party banning demonstrations without authorization.

“They denied us permission,” one of the Tatars said.

“Then that’s it,” the officer said, throwing up his hands and signaling to his charges. The KGB men ripped the banner to shreds. The Tatars did not put up much of a fight as they were led away to the buses.

Meanwhile, another officer demanded our passports and documents and wrote it all down. Then the officers with the cameras took our pictures.

The whole demonstration lasted no more than three minutes. Esther and I tried to flag down a cab with Podrabinek and Kiselyov. We waited a long time and no taxi. After a while one of the KGB officers came up behind us and, sweet as could be, said, “You might have better luck getting a cab on the other side of the street.” Then he walked away.

Kiselyov laughed and said, “The KGB want us to think they’re just people with a job to do.” The protesters were kicked out of Moscow. Most of them went back to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, where their families had been shipped in railroad cars in 1944. They were planning another series of demonstrations for the spring.

But for all the demonstrations and local politics in those early days of glasnost, the greatest changes so far were not on the streets, but on the pages of the weeklies Moscow News and Ogonyok, the thick journals Novy Mir and Znamya, and in those tentative but startling speeches of Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Reading was the thing. Every day, the papers were filled with the ghoulish and the heartbreaking; novels were serialized in the monthly journals after a wait of decades; history and literature were now breaking news. It would be a mistake to think that the outpouring of articles, the publication of long-banned books and poems, was a phenomenon limited to the Moscow and Leningrad intelligentsia. “The truth was that by the time Zhivago and Brodsky and all the rest came out, the intellectuals had already read them in samizdat editions,” the fiction writer Tatyana Tolstaya told me. For Tolstaya, glasnost meant that she no longer had to hide her foreign books in her ground-floor flat in central Moscow. “Glasnost,” she said, “is wonderful for the intelligentsia, but, first and foremost, it is a revolution for the proletariat.” What was really incredible in 1988 and 1989 was to ride the subways and see ordinary people reading Pasternak in their sky-blue copies of Novy Mir or the latest historical essays in the red-and-white Znamya. For a couple of years, stokers, drivers, students, everyone consumed this material with an animal hunger. They read all the time, riding up escalators, walking down the streets, reading as if scared that this would all disappear once more into the censor’s black box. A people that had been deprived for so long of all that was best in their language consumed classics on the installment plan: Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem one week, Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur the next. So many people would read one copy of Novy Mir that they would have to wrap it in a makeshift bookcover to protect it from fraying. Often they used Pravda, giving it, at last, a worthy purpose. A few foreigners also had places in that early pantheon, especially the British historian Robert Conquest for his work on the purges and, most of all, George Orwell for his uncanny description of the totalitarian state. “People read Nineteen Eighty-four for the first time and they discovered that Orwell, who got his education at Eton and on the streets of colonial Burma, understood the soul, or soullessness, of our society better than anyone else,” the philosopher Grigori Pomerants told me.

In the dailies, there were articles on prostitutes, drug addicts, KGB informers, hippies, motorcycle gangs, nudists, mass murderers, rock stars, faith healers, and beauty queens, and all of it was new. No one had ever read anything like it. The weekly Ogonyok was publishing startling stuff on the war in Afghanistan by Artyom Borovik, a journalist in his late twenties who used his connections to get to the front. His father, Genrikh, had a more than passing relationship with both the KGB and Gorbachev himself. While his father was working as a “journalist” in New York, Artyom was prepping at the Dalton School. Artyom’s English was as good as it gets. He said his models for his reports on the troops in Afghanistan were Michael Herr’s book on Vietnam, Dispatches, and Hemingway’s journalism from the front. Eventually, he wound up with free-lance assignments from Life and an on-air job with 60 Minutes.

For a reader, the hardest business was dealing with political prose. Until the very end, the prose of the Communist Party and its journalistic organs was clogged with the “Novoyaz”—the Newspeak—formed over dozens of years, great clots of language that had no purpose other than meaninglessness, the putting off of meaning, the softening of meaning. Gorbachev had given his crucial speech on history showing an uncanny ability to go on and on, for paragraphs, in the language of ritual: “… unforgettable days of October … a new epoch of human progress and the true history of mankind … mankind’s hour of genius and its morning dawn … the rightness of the socialist choice made by October … a higher form of social organization …” This was language from the Newspeak appendix of Orwell’s novel, gobs of pseudo-elevated language that expressed the sentiments of almost no one. Gorbachev was still operating in the hermetic culture of the Communist Party, a world in which the Leader had only to communicate to the members of the Party and, especially, its leaders. To speak directly and honestly to the people about the true state of deterioration in the Soviet Union would have been to risk the fury and revenge of the nomenklatura. The people hardly listened anymore to the old clichés. Who, after all, still believed that a new “epoch of human progress” began in October 1917? Certainly not the farmers of southern Russia humping hay on their backs while their tractors lay rusting in the mud. Who believed this was a “higher form of social organization”? Certainly not the workers and patients at the hospital in Krasnoyarsk, where the head physician said that the only way to get needles was to “scrape the rust” off the old ones and use them again. No, this was the old ritual in which the leadership spoke a dead language—a colorless, lying Latin—and the people spoke the vulgar tongue. The Party language had a ruinous effect on Russian, so much so that when people heard a speech by Sakharov, one of the first things they would comment on—even before the inevitable wisdom of it—was the purity of his Russian. Orwell would have loved that.

In the history speech, Gorbachev was also capable of self-deception. “Comrades,” he said, “we justly say that the nationalities issue has been resolved for our country.” That sentence alone reflected the Party’s most suicidal illusion, that it had truly created a Soviet man, a multinational state in which dozens of nationalisms had all dissolved. Within a year, events in Yerevan, Vilnius, Tallinn, and beyond would prove otherwise. At least in public, Gorbachev seemed to have no idea of where events would lead, no idea, even, what the general movement of history was. “In October 1917 we departed the old world and irreversibly rejected it,” he said. “We are traveling to a new world, the world of Communism. We shall never deviate from this path. [prolonged and stormy applause]” In retrospect, it appears that the speech was a crucial moment in the intellectual and political history of the empire’s decline and fall. But at the time, Gorbachev seemed intent on replacing a clearly odious, untenable official history with a more liberal one, a model that proposed revised catchwords and icons for his stated goal: reforming socialism. Looking at the period after Lenin’s death, Gorbachev saw an opportunity lost, a dream betrayed. His rejection of Stalinism and embrace of socialist “alternatives” was the basis of his original vision as well as the long-held hope of an entire generation of party officials and intellectuals who became idealists during the Khrushchev thaw.

These shestidesyatniki—“men of the sixties”—were half-brave, half-cynical careerists, living a life-in-waiting for the great reformer to come along and bring Prague Spring to Moscow. While they took few of the risks of the dissidents, the best of them refused to live the lie and found subtle ways of declaring at least a measure of independence from the regime. Some hurt their careers by refusing to join the party. Others joined research institutes or publications in the provinces or Eastern Europe where they could express themselves a bit more freely. They kept something alive within themselves. When Gorbachev took power, he put members of this thaw generation in positions of power. They edited key newspapers and magazines, led influential academic institutes, and even made policy recommendations to the leadership.

For about a year after the speech, Gorbachev was the country’s principal historian, and he wanted to control the flow of revelations, keep them within certain bounds. Yuri Afanasyev, the rector of the Historical Archives Institute, soon discovered that while archives on the Stalin era were forthcoming, papers critical of Lenin and other first-generation leaders were not. A popular documentary released in early 1988, More Light, made a demon of Stalin but trod lightly around Lenin and the Red Terror. Later, Gorbachev’s Party ideologist, a dense character named Vadim Medvedev, told reporters there was no way the Politburo could allow publication of Solzhenitsyn, especially considering the anti-Leninist heresies in The Gulag Archipelago and Lenin in Zurich.

In its way, Gorbachev’s schematic view of the Soviet past was as ideologically driven—though not nearly as pernicious—as the old Party version. To legitimize his plans for a liberalized socialism, Gorbachev and his generation in the Party intelligentsia even created a new set of icons. They emphasized the “late Lenin” of the less draconian New Economic Policy of the early 1920s; Khrushchev, as the initiator of the anti-Stalinist thaw; Yuri Andropov, as a general secretary of the Party and technocratic reformer who “died too soon”; and, perhaps most of all, Nikolai Bukharin, the relatively flexible Bolshevik ideologist who was executed by Stalin in the purges.

Gorbachev, as general secretary of the Party, had no choice but to find a Lenin of his own. But if Gorbachev intended to appear the humanist Party man, a Soviet Dubcek, he could not look to the fury of Lenin’s State and Revolution or his bloody-minded letters and cables (“We must kill more professors!”) after the Bolshevik coup. To highlight a slightly more forgiving spirit in the Leninist canon, Gorbachev’s circle leaned on a few late essays such as “On Cooperation” and “Better Fewer, but Better,” in which Lenin seemed willing to endorse a less centralized, coercive economic and political system. Gorbachev’s Lenin was represented perfectly in the historical plays of Mikhail Shatrov, Dictator of Conscience and Onward, Onward, Onward. In those plays, Lenin was the infinitely wise and patient revolutionary, humane, willing to change; Lenin as both Mensch and Ubermensch.

Khrushchev represented good intentions betrayed by political stupidity. He was the bumptious peasant who dared to undercut the Stalin cult but then lost his way in the 1960s with a series of capricious decisions that so upset the conservatives in the Politburo that they overthrew him. Until the moment of the August coup, Gorbachev remained obsessed with the example of Khrushchev, repeating to his aides, as if it were a mantra, that “the most expensive mistakes are political mistakes.” He would try to balance forces, stay in the middle, and survive. He would be wiser than Khrushchev and finish the vague, improvisational reform he had begun.

Andropov, the KGB chief before he became general secretary, was important to Gorbachev for two reasons. First, Andropov believed that the first step toward an efficient, working socialism was to eliminate cheating, loafing, and double-dealing in the workplace and the bureaucracy. As a KGB man, he knew just how deep the problem was, and he was prepared to do something about it. In his short reign, Andropov upset the hard-core Brezhnevites by firing the lazy and arresting a few of the corrupt. The second reason was Andropov’s unstinting promotion of the career of Mikhail Gorbachev. Andropov greased Gorbachev’s graduation from provincial secretary to the Central Committee, and he never stopped campaigning on Gorbachev’s behalf. As he was dying of kidney disease at a hospital for the Kremlin elites, Andropov even dictated a testament to be read to the Central Committee asking that his protégé assume his powers in his absence. But, as Andropov’s aide Arkady Volsky told me, the party elders made sure that the testament was never revealed at the Central Committee plenum, and another Party mummy, Konstantin Chernenko, won the post instead. “Kostya will be easier to control than Misha,” one of the Politburo members said as he left the room where they had settled the issue.

For Gorbachev, the most meaningful new icon of all was Nikolai Bukharin. While Gorbachev was on vacation and writing his history speech, one of his aides sent him a copy of a biography of Bukharin written by a historian at Princeton University, Stephen Cohen. (There was no Soviet biography of Bukharin at the time; his name was mentioned officially only as a criminal, a backslider.) Cohen’s book takes the view that Bukharin represented the road not taken—a more liberal alternative to Stalinist socialism. Such a figure could only be attractive, even an inspiration, to Gorbachev and many other reformers of his age in the party and among the intellectuals. The Bukharin alternative showed that all was not lost, that the line from Marx to Lenin did not lead necessarily to economic failure and genocide—to Stalin. Bukharin had forcefully rejected Stalin’s “Genghis Khan” plans and endorsed a far less brutal collectivization, a more mixed economy, and a limited pluralism. He was no democrat, but no butcher, either. His ascent (unlikely as it was) would not have led to a civilized state, necessarily, but it might have saved countless lives. Although he spoke of mass-producing “standardized” socialist intellectuals “as if in a factory,” Bukharin was also remembered as the one Party leader willing to protect the poet Osip Mandelstam from the secret police.

In his Revolution Day speech, Gorbachev broadcast what seemed to be a series of mixed signals on Bukharin: “Bukharin and his supporters, in their calculations and theoretical attitudes, effectively underestimated the significance of the time factor in the construction of socialism in the thirties.…” Meaning that Stalin was right to enforce an accelerated push to collectivize the farms and build gargantuan industrial plants in the Urals, northern Kazakhstan, and elsewhere.

But then, later in the speech, Gorbachev said, “In this connection it is worth recalling the description of Bukharin given by Lenin: Bukharin is not just a most valuable and major theoretician of the party. He is also legitimately considered to be the favorite of the whole party. But his theoretical outlook can only be regarded with very great doubt as being fully Marxist, for in him there is something of the scholasticist. He has never learned dialectics, and I don’t think he has ever fully understood it.” There it was: the breakthrough compliment, appropriately outfitted in Leninist language, and then the ridiculous modification. As if there were more than a dozen men in the Palace of Congresses who had an idea—or gave a damn—what “dialectics” meant.

In a cramped apartment in south Moscow, a woman in her seventies watched the history speech on television. She listened carefully to Gorbachev’s every word, and when she heard the word “Bukharin,” she edged closer to the set. Anna Larina, who was Bukharin’s young wife when he was sentenced to death at the 1938 Moscow show trials, had been waiting a half century for this moment. She hoped for justice. When Gorbachev finished, Larina leaned back, exhausted and feeling let down. Would Bukharin be rehabilitated? There was no clear signal at all.

“I felt like I was back in limbo again,” she said.

When I first met her that year, Anna Larina seemed improbably young for a woman whose life spanned nearly all of Soviet history. Her face was deeply lined, her hair a gray nimbus, but she moved easily and her eyes had the shine of polished stone. In pictures from the 1930s, she was stunning. She poured out the tea and served a plate of biscuits as she ruffled through the old photographs.

“I grew up among professional revolutionaries,” she said, showing me a picture of her father, Yuri Larin, a close comrade of all the Old Bolsheviks. “Life was very intense and they all believed in their own saintly ideals. I’d even say they were fanatics. That’s what brought them to their deaths.” When she was a child, Larina’s father was sick, so weak he could not lift a phone receiver, and so the old revolutionary received Lenin, Bukharin, Stalin, and other Bolshevik leaders in his rooms at the Metropole Hotel. Little Anna met them all.

“Of course, I saw Lenin when I was a little girl,” she said. “There was one episode when Bukharin and Lenin were both in my father’s room. After Nikolai Ivanovich left the room, Lenin said that Bukharin was the golden boy of the Revolution. I didn’t know what this meant and said, ‘No, no, he’s not made of gold, he’s alive!’ ” What seemed so strange to me was how Larina remembered those years as an intimate arrangement, the way one might remember childhood Thanksgivings. When Larina was ten, she watched Bukharin and the rest weeping at Lenin’s funeral. She remembered standing in the Hall of Columns, near the coffin and Lenin’s sisters, across from all the makers of the Revolution. Outside it was incredibly cold. There were fires burning on the streets, funeral marches everywhere, huge crowds coming to see Lenin.

Larina and her family lived in room 205 of the Metropole. Bukharin lived just upstairs. By the time she was sixteen and Bukharin was forty-two, she had a terrific crush on him. One day she wrote Bukharin a love letter finally confessing her feelings. As she climbed the stairs to slip the letter under Bukharin’s door, she saw Stalin’s boots ahead of her. He was clearly headed for Bukharin’s room. She gave Stalin the letter and asked him to deliver it; for a moment, at least, one of the great murderers of the twentieth century played mailman for a young girl in love.

For three years, Bukharin saw Anna all the time but worried that she was too young, that to marry her would ruin her life. Anna had her father’s blessing: “Ten years with Nikolai Ivanovich would be more interesting than a lifetime with anyone else.” Anna never got ten years. She married Bukharin, and they lived in the Kremlin in an apartment that Stalin had abandoned after his wife committed suicide. Bukharin soon admitted to his bride that for the past few years he had considered Stalin a monster bent on destroying the Party of Lenin and ruling through sheer force of terror and personality. Though she had grown up around Stalin, Anna now tried to keep her distance from him. She remembered hearing how one day Bukharin had taken a stroll with Stalin’s wife and Stalin hid in the bushes, watching the two of them. Suddenly, he darted into the clear, screaming, “I’ll kill you!” For years, Stalin kept Bukharin off-balance, as he did everyone else in the Party hierarchy. Many of the major Bolsheviks opposed Stalin, but never quite at the same time. At a Party meeting in the late 1920s, Stalin said, “You demand the blood of Bukharin? Well, you shall not get it.” Then, in 1935, Stalin once more pledged his friendship to Bukharin at a banquet. Raising a glass, he said, “Let’s all drink to Nikolai Ivanovich.” “It was strange,” Larina said. “As late as 1936, it looked as if Bukharin’s position was more stable. He was appointed editor of Izvestia, he was on the constitutional commission, and it even looked as if there could be a democratization process going on in the country. But Stalin played his chess game very cleverly. Bukharin figured that Stalin might kill him politically—that was fine, but Nikolai Ivanovich figured he was a talented man and he would survive. Or so he thought. He thought he could work as a biologist. It didn’t scare him.” Perhaps the only one who anticipated Bukharin’s fall was a fortune-teller in 1918 in Berlin who told him, “You will one day be executed in your own country.” It was increasingly clear by the end of 1936 that Stalin was about to wage a mass purge against his enemies, a campaign that would wipe out millions of political rivals (real and imagined), military leaders, and ordinary people. Bukharin’s illusions about his own survival dissolved. After a Party meeting at which it became evident that his arrest was imminent, Bukharin sat at his desk and wrote a letter, eight paragraphs long, and brought it to his wife.

“He read it to me very quietly. We knew the rooms were bugged,” Larina said. “I had to repeat the words back to him and to learn it by heart, because he was afraid that if the letter was found during a search, I would be hurt. He couldn’t imagine that they would persecute me all the same.” With tears in his eyes, Bukharin dropped to his knees and begged Larina not to forget his appeal. Read today, it gives an eerie sense that it was addressed directly to Mikhail Gorbachev: “I am leaving life. I bow my head, but not before the proletarian scythe, which is properly merciless but also chaste. I am helpless, instead, before an infernal machine that seems to use medieval methods, yet possesses gigantic power. In these days, perhaps the last of my life, I am confident that sooner or later the filter of history will inevitably sweep the filth from my head.… I ask a new young and honest generation of Party leaders to read my letter at a Party plenum, to exonerate me.… Know, comrades, that on this banner, which you will be carrying in the victorious march to Communism, is also a drop of my blood.” Larina was terrified as she listened, but she memorized the letter and never forgot it.

Bukharin’s trial was an exercise in the surreal. The Central Committee had already condemned him thirteen months before with a simple instruction: “Arrest, try, shoot.” Stalin’s lead prosecutor in the purge trials, Andrei Vyshinsky, compared Bukharin to Judas Iscariot and Al Capone, a “cross between a fox and a pig,” and accused him of leading a bloc against Stalin, of working as a foreign agent, of organizing a plot to murder Lenin. “The weed and the thistle will grow on the graves of these execrable traitors,” Vyshinsky said in the courtroom. “But on us and our happy country, our glorious sun will continue to shed its serene light. Guided by our Beloved Leader and Master, Great Stalin, we will go forward to Communism along a path that has been cleansed of the sordid remnants of the past.” Larina could not attend the trial. She had been arrested as a “wife of an enemy of the people” and sent off to Astrakhan, the start of a twenty-year odyssey of prisons and exile all over Russia. The Bukharin’s thirteen-month-old son, Yuri, was put in the care of relatives. It was the last time Anna saw Yuri as a child. And as for Bukharin, Anna knew he was dead from the day he was arrested.

In court, Bukharin played an astonishing linguistic and moral game with Vyshinsky, admitting to generalities but denying every specific trespass. Bukharin at once confessed and conducted his own countertrial of the Stalinist regime, all in the accustomed Party language of indirection and euphemism. Fitzroy MacLean, then in the British embassy, attended the trial, and believed then that Bukharin meant his general confession as a “last service” to the party. The same assumption is the basis for Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon. Cohen, however, makes the case that Bukharin confessed to the general charges to save his wife and child but made it clear to everyone in his testimony that he was not guilty at all.

While Larina sat in a cell in Astrakhan, MacLean observed the drama from the Hall of Columns: “On the evening of March 12, Bukharin rose to speak for the last time. Once more, by sheer force of personality and intellect, he compelled attention. Staring up at him, row upon row, smug, self-satisfied and hostile, sat the new generation of Communists, revolutionaries no longer in the old sense, but worshipers of the established order, deeply suspicious of dangerous thoughts.… Standing there, frail and defiant, was the last survivor of a vanished race, of the men who had made the revolution, who had fought and toiled all their lives for an ideal, and who now, rather than betray it, were letting themselves be crushed by their own creation.” Bukharin was sentenced to die after a six-hour “deliberation” at 4:30 A.M., March 13, 1938. According to the death certificate, the date of execution was March 15, 1938. No place or cause of death was given on the document.

In her apartment, fifty years later, Larina’s eyes filled with tears as she talked about those hellish days. She had no idea how her husband died or where he was buried, but it was probably safe to say that, like so many victims of the purge in Moscow, he was shot in the Lubyanka prison and cremated at the Donskoi Monastery.

From prison, Anna wrote a letter to Stalin: “Iosif Vissarionovich, Through the thick walls of this prison, I look you straight in the eyes. I don’t believe in this fantastical trial. Why did you kill Nikolai Ivanovich? I cannot understand it.” The letter may never have reached Stalin. Larina’s wardens told her she would be set free if she would denounce Bukharin. She refused. She spent eight years in prison and was in internal exile until the late 1950s, well after the rise of Khrushchev. For years she lived adjacent to a Siberian pig farm.

When the authorities finally agreed to let her son visit her in exile, Yuri was already twenty years old and had never been told who his father was. Anna and Yuri arranged to meet on a railway platform near the Siberian village of Tisul. On the platform that morning, Larina looked all around for a face she could recognize, a sign of her own face, of Bukharin’s. But Yuri recognized her first. Only seconds after they embraced, he wanted to know who his father had been.

“I put the answer off one day after another,” Anna told me, smiling now. “Then he said, ‘I’ll try to guess, and you just say yes or no.’ ” Yuri’s grandparents had already told him he was the son of a revolutionary leader. But who? Trotsky? Radek? Kamenev? Zinoviev? When he finally guessed Bukharin, Larina said, simply, “That’s it.” “I told Yuri he couldn’t spread this news around,” Anna said. “When necessary, he told his friends that his father had been a professor.” While she was in jail, Anna had never dared write down her husband’s last testament. Instead, she lay awake at night in her cell reciting it “like a prayer.” But by the time she returned home—weak and sick from tuberculosis—Khrushchev had delivered his speech denouncing the Stalinist “cult of personality.” At last, she wrote down the testament. “Finally,” she said, “I had to get rid of this burden.” Larina lived in Moscow with her mother, who herself had been in prison and was now very sick, and Yuri, who was suffering from a life-threatening tumor. They all lived on Anna’s tiny pension. “Despite my sufferings and the camps, I always thought we would live through this, that this terrible business was just something on the surface and the real thing, socialism, would prevail in the end. I always felt that Bolshevism had been liquidated by one person, Stalin.” Larina tried to win rehabilitation for her husband under Khrushchev. Years later, dictating his memoirs in retirement, Khrushchev said that he regretted rejecting the application. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Bukharin became a kind of banner for relatively liberal Communist parties in Europe, especially in Italy. But in Moscow, Brezhnev and his neo-Stalinist ideologists held out no hope. Once more, Anna Larina would have to wait.

On February 5, 1988, the foreign ministry announced that the evidence for the 1938 purge trials had been “gathered illegally” and the “facts had been falsified.” Bukharin and nineteen other Bolshevik leaders were rehabilitated. The Party was immensely proud of itself. “I do think we are witnessing a grand and noble deed,” said Gennadi Gerasimov, the spokesman who made the announcement at the foreign ministry press center.

This was front-page news around the world, and for good reason. Bukharin’s rehabilitation was not so much an act of kindness or justice as it was a theoretical justification for the reformist principles of Gorbachev’s perestroika. Trotsky, with his call for “world revolution,” provided nothing of the kind, and to the day of the regime’s collapse, Trotsky was never officially rehabilitated.

Bukharin’s name, which once carried with it the awful ring of “Nicholas II” or “Hitler” in official Soviet history books, was now glorified. Bukharin’s essays and Cohen’s biography were published officially. Anna Larina emerged from obscurity with a series of interviews to the press and appearances at “Bukharin evenings.” One afternoon at the Museum of the Revolution on Gorky Street, I saw Larina and Cohen walking together through the latest exhibit: the world of Nikolai Bukharin. The rooms were filled with Bukharin’s papers, his mementos, even his watercolors.

“I believed,” Larina said. “I believed. I wrote letter after letter. I kept going. But I was never sure that this would happen in my lifetime. Nikolai Ivanovich suffered so much because he thought that he had destroyed my life. It was awful for him. He loved me so.”