فصل 9

CHAPTER 9

WRITTEN ON THE WATER

Just as Memorial’s demonstration outside the sports area was ending, Arnold Yeryomenko’s plane was landing. Yeryomenko lived in Magadan, the city that had once been the “capital” of the Kolyma region of the gulag archipelago in the Soviet far east. The rest of the passengers were worn out from the ten-hour flight to Moscow aboard Aeroflot’s cramped and creaky liner. The one meal served had been a Dixie cup of green mineral water and a greasy chicken wing. Somehow, Arnold bounded off the plane “refreshed,” he said. He’d come to Moscow on a mission.

Yeryomenko was the leader of Democratic Initiative, the first non-Communist political group ever in Magadan. The group’s membership decided to send him as a “delegate” to the Nineteenth Party Conference. “We figured that if democracy is starting in this country, then we ought to be heard, too,” he said. The membership passed a hat and collected his 800-ruble round-trip airfare.

Before he left, Arnold called me in Moscow. He said he had heard my articles read in Russian on Radio Liberty. Could we meet? Of course. Not only had Yeryomenko managed to sound engaging at a distance of six thousand miles, I was also eager to talk to someone from Magadan. Magadan had always defined distant to me, an almost mythical outpost, closer to Los Angeles than Moscow, where the winters are ten months long and a mild day in January is forty degrees below zero. Magadan is the setting for two of the best books ever written about Stalinism: Yevgenia Ginzburg’s memoirs Journey into the Whirlwind and her son Vasily Aksyonov’s novel The Burn. Magadan “was, in a sense, the freest town in Russia,” Aksyonov wrote. “In it there lived the special deportees and the special contingent, which included those categorized SHE (Socially Harmful Elements) and SDE (Socially Dangerous Elements), nationalists, social democrats, Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists … people who recognized themselves as the lowest slaves and who, therefore, had challenged fate.” In June 1988, Magadan was still closed to foreigners. The only way to get there was on an official Potemkin-village tour with the Foreign Ministry. It was on such a trip in the summer of 1944 that Vice President Henry Wallace decided that Kolyma was wonderful and the regional secret police chief, the infamous General Goglidze, was “a very fine man, very efficient, gentle and understanding with people.” I met Arnold at the Lenin statue on October Square near my building. He was in his early fifties with the silver hair and fine features of Cesar Romero, quick and jaunty as a bantamweight.

“You are Remnick?” he said. “Well, come, I’ve got great things to show you.” Arnold spoke such good English that when we switched to Russian I had the odd sensation that he had an American accent. Probably he was just dumbing down his Russian for my sorry self. He told me he had learned his English in school “but mostly from listening to ‘the foreign voices,’ ” Radio Liberty, the Voice of America, and, especially, the BBC. Evidently the jamming system had been less efficient in Magadan than in Moscow. On the short walk to my apartment, Arnold told me he was born in 1937, the year the purges really began. His father was an engineer who had been assigned to Magadan for his technical expertise. In those days, Magadan was still short on barracks and ports for the slave ships that came in every few days from Vladivostok.

“It was kind of a gulag boomtown,” Arnold said with a terrific smile; it was the “gateway to hell.” Even in late spring, the ice was thick near the shore. It was on days like those that the tramp steamers could not make it through to the docks. The prisoners, many of them barefoot and dressed in rags, had to walk on the ice for the last mile to shore. A camp orchestra would assemble on the ice and play for the new prisoners, usually a march or a waltz.

In a way, arrival was a relief, the journey had been such hell. The train trip to the far east from Moscow and European Russia was in cattle cars, and it took a month at least. The prisoners were packed together so tightly that it was said there were those who starved to death and were found still upright at the end of the journey. At the embarkation points on the Pacific, inspectors went up and down the line looking for slaves. Like horsemen before an auction, inspectors checked the prisoners’ teeth and eyes. They pinched their biceps and buttocks to see how much muscle tone there was left after more than a month in the cattle cars. At Vanino in the late 1940s the NKVD had a contract to supply some state firms for 120,000 slave workers a year.

The rest of the prisoners were then packed into the holds of tramp steamers headed for Magadan. As the purges became a permanent condition of state in the thirties and forties, rumors of the sea journey reached Moscow and the other big cities on the “mainland.” But no rumor could capture the horror of the voyage itself. Michael Solomon, a Romanian prisoner, wrote of his shock as he was herded into the hold of the ship Sovlatvia headed north to Magadan. It was a scene, he said, “which neither Goya nor Gustave Doré could ever have imagined”: thousands of men and women, dressed in rags, half-dead and covered with boils and blisters. “At the bottom of the stairway we had just climbed down stood a giant cask, on the edges of which, in full view of the soldiers standing on guard above, women were perched like birds, and in the most incredible positions. There was no shame, no prudery, as they crouched there to urinate or empty their bowels. One had the impression that they were some half-human, half-bird creatures which belonged to a different world and a different age. Yet seeing a man come down the stairs, although a mere prisoner like themselves, many of them began to smile and some even tried to comb their hair.” Later, the officers would load on board even more prisoners—not more “politicals,” but murderers, thieves, rapists, whores: “When I saw this half-naked, tattooed apelike horde invade the hold,” Yevgenia Ginzburg wrote, “I thought that it had been decided that we were to be killed off by mad women. The fetid air reverberated to their shrieks, their ferocious obscenities, their wild laughter and their caterwaulings. They capered about incessantly stamping their feet even though there appeared to be no room to put a foot down. Without wasting any time, they set about terrorizing and bullying the ‘ladies’—the politicals—delighted to find that the ‘enemies of the people’ were creatures even more despised and outcast than themselves. Within five minutes we had a thorough introduction to the law of the jungle.” Feeding time came and the warders dumped a cartload of bread down the hold and into the gaping mouths of the beasts.

The killing went on and on, day after day, and in every form. The ships would often get caught in the ice far from any shore, and the crew had no choice but to wait out the weather and keep the rations for themselves. The wait could go on for weeks, even months. Thousands of prisoners would die of hunger and disease. Sometimes the guards left the corpses in the hold with the living. Sometimes they pitched the dead over the rails onto the ice, where they stayed, day after day, rotting, until the thaw came and the sea swallowed them and the ship sailed on, to Magadan.

That was the world Arnold Yeryomenko grew up in, the landscape of his childhood and youth. “The ships would come in to shore all the time,” he said as we sat down to some coffee in my kitchen. “I remember seeing the prisoners in huge lines, five, six thousand men and women in rags, exhausted, being marched from the ships and onto the shore and up to the barracks. The guards were always beating them in the street, and sometimes you heard the pistols going off. Sometimes you’d see a dead man in the street. Maybe no one had time to cart him off.” Arnold’s professional life never really got going. He studied engineering and foreign languages in the early 1960s. But he was broke, and, to make some extra money, he tried to trade on the black market. He was arrested and put in jail for ten years. When he was freed, he was not allowed to live in Moscow, and he moved back home to Magadan. The humiliation of his arrest and imprisonment and his growing sense that the cruelty he had seen as a child was still an essential part of the social order of the Soviet Union helped make Yeryomenko an angry man, a political man. In 1981, he wrote a book condemning the Communist Party and circulated it in samizdat editions. For that he got two more years in prison.

When perestroika finally started in Moscow, Arnold was impudent enough to think that reform ought to come to Magadan as well. He started Democratic Initiative. He stood outside KGB headquarters—he and a few kids and housewives—shouting slogans into a bullhorn. He was summarily fired from his construction job. The local Party committee and the KGB began to treat this out-of-work engineer and his younger friends in Democratic Initiative like an invading army. They bugged, harassed, and occasionally jailed the members on false charges.

Arnold said I should come see for myself. I told him I’d always wanted to go to Magadan, but it was still a closed city.

“Well, you don’t have to go,” he said. “I can show it to you on television.” He took a videocassette out of his briefcase and said, “Do you have Beta or VHS?” He explained that one of the members of Democratic Initiative had bought a videocamera on a trip to Alaska. “It’s better than having a newspaper, which of course, we can’t,” he said.

The tape flickered and jerked and then finally found its focus on a crowd of about 2,500 people on the city’s main square. Lenin Square, of course. There were signs protesting that the city’s leading Communist Party officials had grabbed up all the delegate seats to the Party conference in Moscow. There was Arnold shouting into a bullhorn, demanding that the Party, the “sole possessor of power in this country,” let representatives from outside the Party apparatus represent Magadan in Moscow. Another speaker pointed to the “White House,” the relatively elegant-looking building that was the Party headquarters, and asked why the “Communists always hogged all the wealth.” “That’s where the mafia lives!” the speaker shouted. “That’s why they have to be guarded day and night by the militia! They’re criminals!” Another speaker demanded that a special hotel for visiting Party officials be converted into a kindergarten. It wasn’t easy to make out all they said. The police had hooked up a set of speakers near the demonstration and played deafening Soviet pop music to drown out democracy.

The most dramatic moment came when Ludmila Romanova, a local Party official, accepted Arnold’s invitation to address the crowd. The young woman spoke with a kind of hyped-up spirit, but she could only talk in the old Party way. She told the anti-Party demonstrators that they had assembled “without proper permission from the Party.” But she did say that workers would be “invited to participate” in discussions about new schools and other civic improvements.

“We’re sick of your promises!” “We don’t want your words!” came some of the more polite replies.

Then Romanova ended with a prim reminder of “Soviet legality.”

“You must know,” she said, “that according to the Constitution, the political rights given to the people should not damage the rights of others.” The crowd was less than impressed with her insinuation and booed her off the platform.

Now Arnold was laughing. He got up from his chair and pointed to a building and a set of windows in the top right-hand corner of the screen.

“There,” he said. “Look at that building. You can see the KGB guys in the windows taking our picture.” The next day, Arnold tried to deliver Democratic Initiative’s manifesto and petitions to the Party conference. We stood about half a mile from the Kremlin and watched one black limousine after another ferry the visiting Party hacks to the conference.

“They won’t let me near the place,” Arnold said.

After he dumped off his documents at a Party “reception hall,” he booked a seat back to Magadan. Back at my place, we watched some of the conference on television. We were like football fanatics on New Year’s Day. We could not take our eyes off the set. Arnold hissed the hacks and cheered on the liberals.

“You know what will bring these people down?” he said. “Embarrassment. One day they will just slink off the stage.” Like most of the liberals in Moscow, Arnold was all for Gorbachev’s scheme to create a new legislature, but suspicious that it would be rigged and loaded with Party leaders. He loved watching Yeltsin’s confrontation with Yegor Ligachev, his plea to the Party for rehabilitation and his call for a faster, more radical, program of democratization. Looking dazed by the task ahead, Yeltsin jutted his jaw and barged on, evoking in speech if not in manner nothing less than the return of Nikolai Bukharin and other Old Bolsheviks who had been shot in the purges and restored to the Party ranks under Gorbachev: “Comrade delegates! Rehabilitation fifty years after a person’s death has now become the rule, and this has a healthy effect on society. But I am asking for political rehabilitation while I am still alive.” Yeltsin also lambasted Ligachev for trying to railroad him and obstruct reform, in general. Ligachev had his chance at the podium and replied, “Boris, you are wrong!” To Yeltsin’s barrel-chested, hangdog heavyweight, Ligachev came across on television as a street-tough middleweight. He was furious, accusing Yeltsin of sitting mute at Politburo meetings. The nomenklatura in the hall roared their approval while most of the country made a hero of Yeltsin.

Yeryomenko reveled in this liberating theater. Like millions of others, he was delighted to see the Party begin, at last, to feed on itself, to expose its corruptions and splits, live on television. But most of all, Arnold was thrilled that Memorial had won its great victory at the conference. By allowing the construction of a memorial to the victims of the regime, the Party, largely in spite of itself, had begun a period of national repentance.

“At least the conference wasn’t a complete loss,” he said from the airport. I told him I still wanted to come to Magadan. “I’ll see you soon,” I said. We both laughed. The possibility still seemed very far away.

Memorial’s victory at the Party conference was sweet, but even its leaders knew that there was something too easy and superficial about it. “Stalin Died Yesterday” was the title of Mikhail Gefter’s contribution to the “There Is No Other Way” collection and by that he meant that Stalinism infected everything and everyone in the Soviet Union. Every factory and collective farm, every school and orphanage was built on Stalinist principles of gargantuan scale and iron authority. In every relationship—in trade, on buses, in almost any simple transaction—people treated each other with contempt and suspicion. That was Stalinism, too. Only now were people beginning to wonder out loud about the efficacy of such a life. Only now were they permitted to express those doubts in the papers, in books, on television. “Stalinism is deep inside of every one of us,” Afanasyev told me after the Party conference. “Getting rid of that spirit is the most difficult thing of all. Next to that, getting the Party to permit a monument is nothing.” I met a filmmaker named Tofik Shakhverdiyev, an Azerbaijani who had made a documentary called Stalin Is with Us. He interviewed Stalinists all over the country: a Cossack on the Don River, a cab driver in Tbilisi, the man who was Bukharin’s guard during the purge trial. At one point in the film, a group of veterans is sitting around a table singing songs in praise of Stalin. The old soldiers seem transported.

I told Tofik about my Kaganovich obsession, and instead of giving me a patronizing look, he laughed and said, “Me, too. But he just won’t answer the door.” Lately, Moscow News and a few other papers had been trying to figure out, through interviews and polls, how people felt about Stalin. Just the idea of political opinion was new. But the polls were primitive, and I thought Tofik would have as good a sense as anyone what it meant now to be a Stalinist. Who were they? What did they want?

“The number of people who openly defend Stalin, really admire him, is limited,” Tofik said. “But if you talk about people whose first instinct is a passion for order, then I think you are talking about not less than half the people in the Soviet Union. You see, we use fashionable words like ‘democracy’ and ‘pluralism’ now, but so few people can really live without the security of complete order and control.

“In a perverse sense, the dissidents and the nonconformists of today are Stalinists. We democrats have become like-minded in a way. We ignore or ridicule what’s really out there. But off to the side, the Stalinists are going against the current, and this halo of being dissidents, strange as it seems, gives them a sort of dignity. They believed in their great cause and the creation of a great society, of Communism. They see democracy and capitalism as a matter of the rich exploiting the poor, while in our system, we are all poor. For them, the lack of an iron hand means prostitution, AIDS, emigration to the West. Stalinists derive their sense of themselves from their connection to the memory of the great man himself. When a slave kisses the hand of the master who whips him, he is getting some of the power of the master. A belief in his greatness appears.” That spirit remained on view, at least physically, in the Republic of Georgia, among other places. Like all reporters in Moscow, I eventually made a trip to Gori, Stalin’s hometown. As if that would tell me much. Gori was about an hour’s drive through the mountains from the Georgian capital, Tbilisi.

The centerpiece of the town was one of the most spectacular bits of kitsch on earth. The Gori Party authorities, with some funding from Moscow, had moved Stalin’s ancestral house—a tiny two-room structure—to the center of town in 1936. In an attempt to make a hut into Olympus, the Party had built neoclassical columns to frame the great man’s childhood home. The rooms themselves were intended to speak for Stalin’s Leninist modesty. One room had a simple wooden table, the other a portrait of Stalin with his beady-eyed, black-shrouded mother. Next door, the vast Stalin Museum, as grandiose as the columns, was closed—“pending reconsideration,” the guard told me.

People who had finished looking around the Stalin house sat outside in the park under the trees eating sausages and apples. Not a single visitor I spoke to said he had any problem with Stalin. They said the country needed someone just like him to put an end to all the “confusion.” A factory worker I talked with showed me the tattoo on his chest. It was an impressive double portrait of Lenin and Stalin. I asked the worker about Gorbachev. Was there room for him?

“Gorbachev?” he said. “I wouldn’t tattoo his name on my ass.”

Stalin was born Iosif Vissarionovich Djugashvili on December 21, 1879. His father was a drunk and beat his wife. He died young. When he was a boy, Stalin’s favorite story was Aleksandr Kazbeg’s The Patricide, the tale of an avenging hero of Georgia named Koba. After he read the book, Stalin demanded that all his friends call him Koba. “That became his ideal,” wrote a childhood friend. Stalin’s closest comrades in the party called him Koba—sometimes until the day he had them shot.

Stalin studied at a Russian orhthodox seminary. The monks said he was “rude and disrespectful.” His mother always wanted him to enter the clergy. When he visited her in 1936—by then he was already the Soviet leader and planning the Great Purge—she said, “What a pity you did not become a priest.” In 1895, Stalin wrote:

Know this: He who fell like ashes to the ground

He who was never oppressed,

Will rise higher than the great mountains,

On the wings of a bright hope.

In 1926, Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda, left him. He begged her to return, and at the same time had her followed by the secret police. Six years later they fought over Stalin’s brutal treatment of the peasantry in Ukraine. When the row was over, Nadezhda left the room and shot herself. Her daughter, Svetlana, later said, “I believe that my mother’s death, which he took as a personal betrayal, deprived his soul of the last vestiges of human warmth.” Stalin lived for years by himself in the Kremlin. One of his guards said that Stalin bugged the phones of all his advisers and spent long periods of the day listening in on their conversations. Aleksei Ribin, a secret police officer and Stalin’s guard, wrote in Sociological Research magazine that Stalin loved to tell his limousine driver to pull over to the side of the road to give old women rides home. “He was just that kind of man,” said Ribin.

In the Homeric tradition, Pravda used countless titles to refer to Stalin: Leader and Teacher of the Workers of the World, Father of the Peoples, Wise and Intelligent Chief of the Soviet People, the Greatest Genius of All Times and Peoples, the Greatest Military Leader of All Times and Peoples, Coryphaeus of the Sciences, Faithful Comrade-in-Arms of Lenin, Devoted Continuer of Lenin’s Cause, the Mountain Eagle, and Best Friend of All Children.

There were many Western intellectuals who were all too willing to indulge Stalin in his cruelties. In the midst of a state-imposed famine, George Bernard Shaw looked up from his plate at the Metropole Hotel and said, gaily, “Do you see any food shortages here?” Later he added that he “took his hat off” to Stalin “for having delivered the goods.” In a meeting with Stalin, Shaw’s traveling companion Lady Astor asked, “How long will you go on killing people?” “As long as necessary,” Stalin replied.

Lady Astor quickly changed the subject, asking Stalin if he could help her find a good Russian nanny for her children.

After his own audience with Stalin, H. G. Wells reported he had never “met a man more candid, fair and honest.” The American ambassador in Moscow, Joseph Davies, wrote of Stalin that “a child would like to sit on his lap and a dog would sidle up to him.” Stalin, who was five feet four, wanted a court portrait done showing him as a tall man with powerful hands. The painter Nalbandian complied by portraying Stalin from a flattering angle with his hands folded, powerfully, across his belly. Stalin had his other portrait painters shot and their paintings burned. Stalin rewrote the official Short Biography of Stalin, personally adding the passage “Stalin never allowed his work to be marred by the slightest hint of vanity, conceit, or self-adulation.” Stalin died of a stroke on March 5, 1953. He once said that those revolutionaries who refused to use terror as a political tool were “vegetarians.” According to Roy Medvedev, Stalin’s victims numbered forty million. Solzhenitsyn says the number is far greater—perhaps sixty million. The debate continues even now.

It was the trial of the season. Since the rise of Gorbachev, a retired lawyer from Kharkov named Ivan Shekhovtsov had filed repeated lawsuits against various intellectuals and newspapers for “slandering Stalin.” He made a career of these suits. Sixteen so far. This time his opposition was Vechernaya Moskva, the city’s evening newspaper.

STALIN IS THE FATHER OF OUR PEOPLE.

SLANDER IS THE DIRTY WEAPON OF THE ANTI-STALINISTS.

“Get those signs out of here,” said the judge.

At the witness table, Shekhovtsov sat taking notes. He wore a suit and a row of military medallions. He had been a tank gunner on the Baltic and Ukrainian fronts in the war and had lost part of a lung in a firefight. There were a half-dozen benches, all crammed with Shekhovtsov’s supporters. Most of them were older men and women, and nearly all wore ribbons and medals from the war. They were angry that they had to get rid of their banners, but they made up for it with loud gossiping. There were some nasty remarks about the Jews and Armenians, about Raisa Gorbachev, about Memorial. They carried copies of right-wing journals, Nash Sovremenik (“Our Contemporary”), which was hard-line Russian nationalist, and Molodaya Gvardiya (“Young Guard”), which was hard-line Stalinist. There was a lot of whispered speculation about whether the representative from Vechernaya Moskva was a Jew. Of course, they concluded. She must be.

“We spent our lives building socialism, and now these people—Afanasyev, Adamovich, Korotich—they are getting rid of socialism and they are succeeding,” a woman named Valentina Nikitina told me as we waited through the lull in the proceedings.

She, too, was a decorated veteran of the war. She said she had lost many friends and relatives in the war—“half the people I knew,” she said—and the idea of reforming, much less dismantling, the system was unconscionable. “These people are like the Hungarians in 1956. They are staging a counterrevolution. The majority of our people support Stalin as a builder of socialism. The kulaks, most of them, were Jews. The secret police at the Belomor Canal were Jews. The leader was a Jew! The chief engineer was a Jew! If the Jews would only move to an autonomous region, they would have a wonderful life!” I thanked her for sharing her thoughts with me and turned to Shekhovtsov himself. He looked imperious and bored. He drummed his fingers on the witness table, making sure the three judges could observe his superiority even as they conferred. Shekhovtsov had no lawyer. He was his own advocate.

A few yards away, the woman from Vechernaya Moskva finally stood and told the judges that her lawyer could not make the session. Could she have a continuance?

“He’s on vacation,” she said uncertainly.

Shekhovtsov rolled his eyes. The crowd chuckled and hissed. The judge set another court date.

“A lot of rubbish that is!” my seatmate muttered. We all stood to leave. As the woman from Vechernaya Moskva left the crowded little room, she kept her head down and took quick, purposeful steps toward the door.

“Slanderer!” the crowd hissed at her. “Shame on you!”

Out in the parking lot, Shekhovtsov’s supporters unfurled their banners and celebrated. I introduced myself to Shekhovtsov.

“Then I suppose you want to interview me,” he said. “Well, I could use a lift to the train station. And maybe something to eat, if you don’t mind too much.” I asked Shekhovtsov why he bothered. Why was he spending all his money and energy filing suits and always losing? He looked at me, not angrily, but with a sort of kindly eye. I was a foreigner and didn’t know any better.

“It is I who is restoring the historical truth,” he said. “I didn’t know anyone who was repressed. In the press now they are saying that in every house everyone at least knew someone who was repressed. In Kharkov, I investigated one hundred and fifty households and not one said it was waiting for a knock on the door. These numbers you are hearing are all sensations, pure libel. During collectivization in 1929, my grandfather was kicked off his land and exiled. But people gave us clothing and food, and after six months we returned to the land. During the exile, my brother died of an inflammation of the lung, but my mother never blamed Stalin. It was the local officials! My mother is eighty-six and she understands this with her woman’s mind!

“From the point of practical deeds, Stalin did more than even Lenin. But that, of course, is probably a matter of longevity. I get letters all the time from people nostalgic for the life under Stalin—their joy in labor and love of the Motherland, how they lived with heads raised high and sang patriotic songs. Right now we don’t hear anyone singing. And it’s not that there is an absence of songs to sing. There is an absence of faith. You see, people forget. They need to be reminded. In the thirties, when I was in the Young Pioneers and in Komsomol, there was unprecedented patriotism in this country. There was a willingness to sacrifice personal needs for the good of the nation. People had in mind great aims and a wonderful future, and so they endured. Stalin is with us and Stalin will come. That is the mind-set of a generation. We went into battle with his name on our lips. He took Russia, which had a wooden plow in its hands, and he left it with an atomic bomb. Such a man cannot be slandered. The young should learn their history.” In his most celebrated suit, Shekhovtsov charged that Ales Adamovich, the Byelorussian writer and one of the leaders of Memorial, had slandered Stalin in a film called Purification. To Shekhovtsov, Adamovich represented the “worst kind of liar,” a “man old enough to know better” who was trying to lead the youth of the Soviet Union astray.

“People have lost the ability to learn the truth for themselves,” Shekhovtsov said. “They listen to Korotich and Yevtushenko. They don’t read the truthful histories that have been published by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism.” And what about Sakharov? After all, Sakharov was now the nominal chairman of Memorial. Could he not be trusted either?

“Under Brezhnev, Sakharov was exiled to Gorky so that he would not have the chance to talk about nuclear secrets or slander the system,” Shekhovtsov said. “Now, under Gorbachev’s instructions, he has been returned. But in revenge, Sakharov is trying to slander us, and he is guiding the greatest power in the country—Memorial. Memorial can one day turn into an alternative party.” Shekhovtsov said he knew Nina Andreyeva and thought her a “good worker.” Their acquaintance seemed confirmed when he said he was quite convinced that “the majority of people who slander Stalin and the homeland are Jews.” A few weeks later, Shekhovtsov called to tell me he had some news. He’d won his suit against Vechernaya Moskva. Not that it had slandered Stalin. But the court did rule that the paper had libeled Shekhovtsov when it said that he had used “Stalinist methods” when he was working as a prosecutor. The paper printed a long apology, and Shekhovtsov said he had won a great victory for himself and, most of all, for “Stalin’s good name.” “The day I stop my fight,” he said, “is the day I die.”

In the courtroom, I’d gotten a dinner invitation from a woman who described herself as a “great lover of Stalin,” Kira Korniyenkova. She was a matronly woman in her late fifties. Plump and stern, she wore wire-rimmed glasses, and her hair was done up in a bun. She looked like a teacher who specialized in handwriting and never gave an A. Her apartment was dim, dowdy, crammed with books. She lived with her two parakeets, Tashka and Mashinka. “My children,” she called them as she poked the cage. She had never married. Never wanted to. “I wanted to be free,” she said. “When you have close relatives living with you, they get in the way. They are a hindrance. I’ve got my plan and I am fulfilling that plan.” If she ever had a passion, it was Stalin. “I have always loved him. I have dedicated my life to him and his memory.” Kira Alekseyevna was a woman unstuck in time. She spent countless days at the Lenin Library researching the “scandalous” charges of Western and Soviet scholars writing on Stalin. Medvedev, Solzhenitsyn, Afanasyev, Roginsky—they were all “enemies” to her. She wanted to disprove “everything they say about how Stalin killed millions. He didn’t. He only attacked enemies of the people.” Sometimes she wrote letters to the Central Committee to complain about one point or another in the avalanche of articles in the liberal press.

“Feel right at home,” she said, and left me in the dining room with the parakeets. She went off to cook. The room was decorated with dozens of pictures of Stalin. Stalin as a boy. Stalin with Lenin in Gorky. Stalin on the front page of Pravda. Stalin in white military dress. She had hundreds more photographs in albums and shoeboxes. She had stacks of photos wrapped with purple silk ribbons.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” I said, shouting politely down the hall as if I were admiring my hostess’s Matisse.

“Oh, I’ve got lots of them!” she said, shouting back from the kitchen. “Look, look …” She came running down the hall, flushed. She started shuffling through a stack of pictures.

“Look!” she said, thrusting them a few inches from my eyes. “Each one shows a different emotion, every stage of that great man’s life.” Kira glowed.

Like a lover of Wagner who goes every year to Bayreuth, Korniyenkova took an annual pilgrimage to Gori. Sometimes, she said, she went twice a year: once on the anniversary of Stalin’s death, once to celebrate Victory Day. “There are a lot of people who think as I do. In 1979, we gathered there for the centenary of his birth. I think more than thirty thousand people visited the Stalin Museum that day. People who want to build a monument to the so-called victims of Stalin should think about that a little. It’s not necessary to build a monument to people who were imprisoned. They had something to answer for. It’s not necessary to build monuments for rich peasants who were purged. They should build monuments to the Communists. Traitors don’t deserve monuments.” Kira served pot roast and potatoes. By the by, it seemed, she said that two of her relatives had been sent to the camps during the purges. Their crime had been being late to work.

“They were properly judged,” Kira said. I didn’t say anything at all. Tashka and Mashinka twittered in their cage. Kira’s voice rose in anger. “Was it Stalin’s fault that my uncles were out late drinking and came in late for work? They had to be punished for that. I am a person who loves order. I am for real order, an iron hand or some other kind of hand. I am for a situation in which people are answerable for their deeds.” The food was delicious, but Kira Alekseyevna did not eat. She lectured. She swooned. She ascended to rapture. “I only wish we could be living in such merry days as we had then,” she said. “When you see the documentary films, you can see how animated people were, how happy they were. Their faces glowed. They had poor tools, but they worked and they loved working. And now we are supposed to think that labor is ‘monkey’s work.’ It was always so wonderful for the people to tell Stalin about their successes. I was only eighteen when Stalin was alive, but I could see how my mother worked in those years. She didn’t work because she was afraid of anything, but for the sheer pleasure of it. Those parades on Red Square were some of the happiest days of our lives.” I asked her if she had ever actually seen Stalin. Kira’s eyes watered as if she had suddenly been swept by a wave of memory, love recalled. “The last time I saw Stalin was in 1952. I remember the mood of the workers when, at first, Stalin could not be seen standing on the Lenin Mausoleum. They mourned. But then he appeared, and you cannot quite imagine the happiness we felt. He was quite old by then, and we greeted him with such joy. We were all fulfilling the tasks he had set out for us. We were ready to go to the moon for him. We loved Stalin, we believed in him with all our hearts.” When I asked Kira how she had reacted to Stalin’s death, she told me, and cried all the while. After she heard the news, she said, she felt ill and would not leave the apartment for several days.

“On the day of the funeral I went out into the street, and you could hear all the factory sirens wailing,” she said. “They used to do that when a worker left a plant forever, and now they were wailing for Stalin. Nowadays we have no such passion for our leader. Everyone gets his salary, but there is no food. How can I believe in these rulers? I believe in real things.” After dinner, Kira told me that she had once been friends—“oh, well, not friends, but comrades”—with a few of Stalin’s relatives. She had even visited Molotov at his dacha. Molotov, she said, had “the eyes of wisdom.” Until he died in his nineties, Molotov would tell all his visitors that Stalin had acted rightly. There had been enemies, and enemies, he said, had to be eliminated.

But hadn’t there been mistakes? I asked Kira Alekseyevna. Did Stalin never commit a mistake?

“Mistakes?” she said. “Yes, he made one. He died too soon.”

There was one other visitor to the Stalin trial I wanted to see: Stalin’s grandson, Yevgeny Djugashvili. There were four Stalin grandchildren still living in Moscow: a housewife, a surgeon, a theater director, and Djugashvili. The first two begged off from a meeting. I spoke with the director, a slender and quiet man named Aleksandr Burdansky, at his office at the Soviet Army Theater, a vast building shaped like a star. All his life, he had done what he could to distance himself from Stalin. He changed his name. (“I think Burdansky sounds better than Stalin. Don’t you agree?”) He quit military school and always tried to look at Stalin “the way an artist would.” “I have to carry a burden, but I am not to blame for having such a grandfather. I think and act like a normal man. I have no extreme views about Stalin. I try to understand him as a phenomenon. Shakespeare’s Richard III helped me understand Stalin. Not the play so much as Richard’s biography. Richard was born a hunchback, but he had talent and a quick mind. So the man wanted to prove his right to be on an equal footing with everyone else.” If Burdansky had not pushed Stalin off to the boundaries of his mind, then he certainly liked to think he had. I had never known anyone to talk about Stalin with such an air of boredom and abstraction. “Looking at it from a civilized point of view,” he said professionally, “it would be naive to regard Stalin as pure evil after he was portrayed by everyone as the friend of all peoples, children, and animals, the most outstanding personality of the age, and so on. I think he correctly translated Marx’s ideas into life. It was the only way to carry them through, alas.…” Burdansky did have one public moment of pique—an appearance on television in which he made it plain that he despised his grandfather. He outraged the Stalinist wing of the Stalin family. When I called Yevgeny Djugashvili on the phone, he said, “Just one thing. Don’t talk to me about that faggot half brother of mine. He betrayed Stalin. His grandfather.” Djugashvili was the son of Yakov, who was captured by the Nazis and, when Stalin refused or failed to win his release, was executed. The day I met him, Djugashvili was preparing to retire from his job in the Defense Ministry in Moscow and retire, at the age of fifty-five, to Tbilisi. The man who opened the door looked exactly like Stalin: a little thinner, perhaps, his mustache more a pencil line than a hairbrush, but, still, the resemblance was chilling. He was in full military dress and, at first, conducted himself with the formality of a Politburo member. We entered a room that had several portraits of Stalin on the wall and a bookcase crammed with Party and military histories published in the Stalin era. There was a simple table and on it a stack of fresh paper and several sharpened pencils.

“So, what is question number one?” he said as he stared hard at me across the table. This was not a naive man. He was not so foolish as to think that an American reporter was visiting in order to do anything other than harm—and, in this, I suppose, he was right. But there was no point in confronting him. I simply asked him what he thought about his grandfather, what he thought of the attacks in the press and within the Party. It was the question he had expected.

“I always adored Stalin,” he said. “No congress, no book or magazine article is ever going to change that and make me doubt him. He is my grandfather, first of all, and I adore him.” Solzhenitsyn was “an immoral scum,” and, as for Gorbachev, “The Party’s authority has fallen, this is obvious. They say the fish rots from the head. And when the fish is rotten, people throw it away. Everything is moving in that direction. In the end, I think the party will be disbanded.” Djugashvili had a nasty word to say for all the obvious people—Shatrov, Afanasyev, Sakharov, Yeltsin, the leaders of Memorial. He went on for a while, too, about the latest plays and television programs that had slandered his grandfather. He clearly kept up with it all. The only thing that seemed to lift his mood was his own recent appearance, as Stalin, in a Georgian film production.

“They say I’m a real chip off the old block!” And then he stopped and stared at me once more. For a moment it really felt as if Stalin were there. But Djugashvili broke the spell.

“Enough!” he said, slamming his hand down on the table. His face broke into a weird grin. “I like you! I have decided that! Now I will make you my real guest!” In Georgia, a good host usually shows his guest around the farm and the farmhouse. Stalin’s grandson showed me his kitchen, then his bathroom shelves.

“I built these myself!” he said, waving his hand across them lovingly as if they were a prize in a game show.

“And here is the bedroom … and over here … the living room!… By the way, you know, I never got anything out of being Stalin’s grandson. But, of course, when I needed an apartment I wrote a letter to Brezhnev. They gave me this place. And they jumped me ahead on the waiting list for a car, too. So it hasn’t all been bad.

“And this,” he said, entering the kitchen, “is the kitchen again.”

Djugashvili yanked a jerry can out from under a table. “Here is cha-cha,” he said, lifting the moonshine. Then he put a watermelon in my arms, and we marched back to the living room.

“Pour out two glasses of cha-cha,” he said. Djugashvili cut thick slices of the watermelon with a curved dagger and salted them. He stood and lifted his glass and waited. I stood.

“We shall drink to friendship between nations!” he said. Fair enough, I thought, and we both downed the cha-cha, a home brew from Tbilisi. On first gulp, the drink did not seem as obvious or as strong as Russian vodka.

Djugashvili stood again. “In a Georgian house,” he said, “the host makes all the toasts, and in my house, the second toast is always to Stalin!” I felt a wave of nausea sweep through me and weaken my knees. But I kept my glass high and my eyes fixed on my host’s. “The Soviet Union took on the brunt of the war, and Stalin was at the head of all that,” he went on. “He took a backward country, with peasants in felt boots, and made it great. And yet we still curse him. These people should be punished and their lies exposed! I think there will come a day when the Soviet people will give their evaluation. And so … to Stalin!” “To Stalin,” I said. And may God forgive me.

By the end of 1988, there were chapters of Memorial in over two hundred Soviet cities. A debate was beginning between members who wanted to limit Memorial’s attention to the repression during the Stalin period and those who thought it should widen to include all acts from the first arrests and executions under Lenin to the death of the dissident writer Anatoly Marchenko in a prison camp in December 1986. In other words, some Memorial members were beginning to speak not merely of the “aberration of Stalin” but of a criminal regime.

Novy Mir, Neva, and other journals began to publish articles critical not only of Stalin, but of Lenin and even the Revolution. In January 1989, Yuri Afanasyev presided over a two-day constituent congress of Memorial. Vadim Medvedev, a leading member of the Politburo, tried to shut down the session before it ever began, citing obscure reasons of “permission” and “sanction.” Sakharov called Medvedev and informed him that the Politburo had no business getting involved. “If you shut us out of our meeting hall, we will hold the congress in apartments all over Moscow,” he said. Medvedev gave up, and the congress went on. The Communist Party was beginning to lose control of history, and a Party that could not be sure of its hold on the past had to be nervous about its future.

But even as Memorial expanded its definition of the past, its essential purpose remained the same: to honor the dead, to give them back their names. Some of the younger historians and volunteers worked on their own to accumulate more information on arrests, executions, exiles. Others made careful studies of existing history textbooks and won a series of critical victories when the Party decided to rewrite the schoolbooks, eliminate high school ideology exams, and make mandatory university courses in Marxism-Leninism and scientific socialism as optional as basket weaving.

No one took the mission of Memorial more literally than Aleksandr Milchakov. A journalist whose father had been the general secretary of the Young Communist League and head of one of the industrial ministries, Milchakov grew up in the House on the Embankment. When he was a child, he saw guards in the courtyard carrying what seemed to be violin cases. “In reality, they were cases for their machine guns,” he told me. “They were ready for action at all times.” Milchakov was in his fifties and still lived in the apartment of his childhood when I got to know him. As one of the leading figures of Memorial, he decided to narrow his journalism to a single investigation. According to Roy Medvedev’s Let History Judge, around one thousand people per day were killed during the height of the purges in the late thirties. Milchakov wanted to know where the dead of Moscow were buried.

Milchakov’s own father was arrested and spent fifteen years in internal exile. “During those arrests I was only around eight or nine, but I was a curious boy and liked to hang around the courtyard. I saw the reaction of the other boys when their parents were taken away. It was a time when you could hear the clomp of high boots on the staircase. The police were in the habit of never using the elevator. I remember clearly how they took my father down the stairs, not the elevator. And so we all listened every night for footsteps.

“Most of the parents truly believed that there were enemies in the Party and that there was a genuine political struggle going on. They were always surprised when someone was arrested. But their surprise was that someone who they thought was honest turned out to be a traitor. When my father was arrested and our belongings were confiscated, I remember how we children were ousted from our own apartment and we sat in the courtyard on wooden sleighs and no one, none of our old friends, would come near us or talk to us. To talk to a relative of an enemy of the people was the gravest sort of sin.” Using Western and Soviet published sources, Milchakov began researching the location of the biggest mass graves in the Moscow area: the Donskoi Monastery, the grounds of a KGB colony in the village of Butovo, the Kalitnikovsky Cemetery near the city pet market, the fourteenth-century Novospassky Monastery, the banks of the Moscow-Volga Canal.

Early one morning, my friend Jeff Trimble of U.S. News & World Report and I met Milchakov outside the House on the Embankment and headed for the Donskoi Monastery. The flower ladies in their blue canvas jackets sat near the entrances selling carnations, 5 rubles a bunch. Milchakov led us toward the main building on the cemetery grounds, the crematorium. We walked to the back of the building where an old man, an attendant, was watching over a small bonfire of garbage. A few broken tombstones lay on the ground.

“See this gate?” Milchakov said. “Well, every night trucks stacked with bodies came back here and dumped the dead in a heap. They’d already been shot in the back of the head—you bleed less that way—at the Lubyanka prison or at the Military Collegium. They stacked the bodies in old wooden ammunition crates. The workers stoked up the underground ovens—right in through that door—to about twelve hundred degrees centigrade. To make things nice and official they even had professional witnesses who countersigned the various documents. When the bodies were burned they were reduced to ash and some chips of bone, maybe some teeth. Then they buried the ashes in a big pit.” We walked for a few minutes up and down rows of tombs, elaborate monuments that would not have seemed out of place at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. We stopped at a tomb marked “The Grave of Unidentified Corpses, 1930–1942.” There were four white plastic tulips stuck in the ground and a stack of rotting carnations that smelled like spilled wine. Someone had also put a tiny icon of Saint George near the base of the monument. Milchakov said that the pit had been five yards deep and twenty feet square and when it was filled completely with ashes—“hundreds and hundreds of pounds of ash”—the secret police paved it over with asphalt. He said there were rumors that Bukharin was buried at Donskoi, but he was not sure.

“When the purges were at their peak,” he said, “the furnaces worked all night and the domes of the churches and the roofs of the houses here were covered with ash. There was a fine dust of ash on the snow.” We drove to Kalitnikovsky Cemetery, a dumping ground for thousands of corpses. There was a sausage factory nearby, a fetid place, and Milchakov said, “In the purges, every dog in town came to this place. That smell you smell now was three times as bad; blood in the air. People would lean out their windows and puke all night and the dogs howled until dawn. Sometimes they’d find a dog with an arm or a leg walking through the graveyard.” At the Novospassky Monastery, Milchakov showed us the steep bank near the pond where the NKVD buried the bullet-riddled corpses of foreign Communists: John Penner of the American Communist Party; Herman Remmele, Fritz Schultke, Herman Schubert, and Leo Fleig, leaders of the 842 German antifascists arrested in April 1938; Bela Kun and Laiosh Madyr of the Hungarian Communists; Vladimir Chopich of the Yugoslavian Party; Marcel Pauker and Alexander Dobrodzhanu of Romania.

“There used to be apple trees along the bank,” he said. “They burned them off. They took the prisoners to the monastery church to a room they called ‘the baths.’ They stripped the prisoners, weighed them, and shot them in the back of the head. In the records, this was called the ‘medical process.’ They had them shot in a sitting position. A little window would open behind the prisoner’s head and the executioner reached in and fired. They used that method so they could avoid strokes, heart attacks, and hysteria. They stacked the bodies like pencils in a box and carried them off in a horse-drawn cart to a crematorium.” Milchakov struggled constantly with the KGB to get permission to carry out excavations on all these sites. The “glasnost” KGB, under Vladimir Kryuchkov, was engaged in an extraordinary public relations maneuver. Kryuchkov tried to humanize the secret police, declaring to the press that he was a great lover of theater and dogs and children. At the same time, the KGB did what it could to deflate the likes of Aleksandr Milchakov. They rebuffed his requests for documents, denied him access to Butovo, and made sure he was followed and harassed when he went on one of his field trips. But the better-known Milchakov became, the more he publicized his findings in a series of articles in Vechernaya Moskva, the more he accomplished. The KGB didn’t help him much, but they did not stop him either.

A couple of weeks later, we went together to the very edge of town near a water-treatment camp on the banks of the Moscow-Volga Canal. Stalin ordered the construction of the nearly useless canal in 1932, and it was finished in 1937. The workers were slaves, prisoners, most of them peasant farmers who, because they owned a horse or a cow, were declared kulaks and arrested. Genrikh Yagoda, the secret police chief at the time, worked the prisoners to death.

Milchakov said that around 500,000 prisoners died working on the canal, most of them from cold and exhaustion. Even in winter they were given nothing more to wear than a thin jacket. The prisoners lived in shabby barracks next to the construction site. They built the 127-mile canal using shovels, picks, and wheelbarrows. Their diet was dismal. Scientists have done analyses of the teeth of the prisoners. From the way the enamel has worn off, it appears that many of the prisoners ate bark, roots, and grass to supplement the bread and thin gruel they were given.

Milchakov was not prone to superstition, but in order to find the graves along the canal he resorted to divining rods when witnesses and guesswork proved unavailing. He had arranged for us to meet with an expert diviner near a certain row of birches. Milchakov assured us that in the past he’d been able to dig up several long mass graves with this man’s help. And so for a couple of hours we watched in silence as the diviner paced and weaved through the woods and a flock of jays rioted in the trees.

“Someone else is meeting us here, too,” Milchakov said. He led me to a monument in the woods: a towering cross wrapped in barbed wire. Memorial had constructed it to honor the prisoners who died building the canal. Next to the cross stood an old, stooped man who introduced himself as “Sergei Burov, pensioner.” He said that when he was a child of ten or eleven, he had lived near the barracks. Every morning, on his way home from the store, the workers would call out to him to throw them pieces of bread.

“I’d wrap the bread in newspaper and throw it,” he said. “Sometimes I saw the guards catch them and beat them. I saw the burial teams, too. They were prisoners, and for their work they were given bottles of vodka to keep them drunk. I remember running around, quite innocently, playing, and seeing these men in their prison clothes throwing bodies into the ground. Our parents told us about it and they would say, ‘There is some sort of wildness going on.’ They just had no idea. They did not want to know.” One morning, years after the canal had been completed, Burov said, he was walking beside it and saw some families on the bank. They were all crying. They folded pieces of paper, letters, and put them in bottles. They corked the bottles and threw them into the water.

“I asked them what they were doing and they told me they were sending messages to people they had lost on the canal,” Burov said. “They said they hoped that sometime in the future people would find the bottles and read the letters and remember. They said they were sending the names of their loved ones into the future. They cast their names on the water.”