Lenin's Tomb by David Remnick

Author:David Remnick [Remnick, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-7358-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

After the coup, a couple of workers play dominoes at a foundry that used to make busts of Lenin. The factory now operates for the tourist industry.

(Reuters/Bettmann)

PART III

REVOLUTIONARY DAYS

CHAPTER 19

“TOMORROW THERE WILL BE A BATTLE”

The facts of history evolve into the mythologies of history, but I had never realized just how quickly. Everything I was watching in Moscow, Vilnius, Siberia, and beyond instantly transcended “the facts”—the meetings, the demonstrations, the newspaper accounts, the transcripts and videotape. No part of the narrative, no conflict or uprising, was without its mythic dimension: the revenge drama of Gorbachev-and-Yeltsin, the David-and-Goliath drama of Lithuania-and-the Kremlin, the ironic drama of the coal miner proletariat. Most mythic of all was the presence of a saint among the foolish and the vain, among the insulted and injured. Sakharov was the founder of fire (the hydrogen bomb) who renounced his gift; who dedicated himself to the rescue of the Land of Nod when rescue seemed quixotic; who returned from exile to reveal his wisdom and prod the czar.

But there was the man, too, and, by the end of 1989, Sakharov looked as though he had wrung the last ounce of blood and energy from his body. He was sixty-eight and his face was delicate as parchment. He spoke in a slurred mumble. He had trouble walking up more than seven or eight stairs before gasping for breath; he was stooped, listing a little to the right. And yet the demands on his time and energy only increased. There were more visitors now to the apartment on Chkalova Street than there had been in the seventies when Sakharov’s kitchen table was the crossroads of the human rights movement. Now no one had reason to be afraid to come, and so they all did, reporters, filmmakers, friends, foreigners on the make, acolytes, deputies, scholars from abroad.

In bringing home Sakharov from Gorky, an act that met with much grumbling in the Party nomenklatura, Gorbachev felt himself to be the kind and benevolent czar. He was proud. But Sakharov refused to indulge Gorbachev’s vanity. Even in that first telephone conversation from Gorky, he quickly reminded Gorbachev of the death of one political prisoner, his dear friend Anatoly Marchenko, and then pressed for the release of a long list of others. Sakharov did what saints do; he lightly complimented the czar when he did right, but never let him relax. Sakharov’s support was conditional; his decisions were based not on intra-Party realities—though he understood them well—but on a set of moral standards that could be etched on two small tablets of stone.

Sakharov respected Gorbachev as a brave politician, but he was not in awe of him. During the first session of the Congress, Gorbachev had given Sakharov the floor immediately and often, but when Sakharov tried to press Gorbachev into endorsing a “decree on power” that would end the Communist Party’s guaranteed ascendancy, Gorbachev’s response was haughty disdain. Saints annoy, and Sakharov annoyed Gorbachev profoundly. Even the transcript, devoid of the glares, the

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