From the issue dated March 12, 2004
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Gucci Shoes and Khachapuri: Power and Belief in Russia Today
You cannot compromise with revanchists," Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev tells me as we sit and talk in his office at the International Democracy Foundation, in a renovated mansion located on Malaya Gruzinskaya Street in Moscow, not far from the city center. Yakovlev is 80; his gray hair is swept neatly back, revealing jagged lines of thought that converge on his forehead like a geological formation. He limps from a World War II injury and possesses penetrating black eyes. Formerly the Soviet ambassador to Canada and educated at Columbia University, he speaks good English, but there is a practiced distance in his manner. His tone of voice turns easily to irony, deflecting familiarity. After some topics of general conversation, such as America's intentions in Iraq, its isolation from Europe, and the crisis of leadership throughout the world, he gestures with his hand. "Now let's return to our own lambs," he says in Russian, thus drawing us back to the purpose of my visit, which is to clarify my press's commitment to copublish, with his foundation, seven or eight volumes of documents that he is preparing from what is termed Stalin's Personal Archive. The architect of perestroika during the Gorbachev years, Yakovlev was granted the high privilege of publishing the material by Boris Yeltsin, soon after the then-president took office in 1991, for his exceptional service in helping to engineer the collapse of totalitarian rule. Culled from a vast number of documents, the first volume of more than 900 pages, published in a Russian-language edition last year, chronicles Stalin's seizure of supreme power through his co-optation and manipulation of the security services from 1922 to 1936, and the onset of the Great Terror. It helps explain why the system, established by Lenin, inevitably instituted strakh -- fear -- as the ruling element in the psychology of the Russian people. That fear, Yakovlev believes, continues to this day in all but the youngest generation. His publishing project is despised by the revanchists, who would like to see a return to the old Communist system. It will, Yakovlev hopes, help stave off such a return. He is desperate to get the material out as quickly as possible because, as he has repeatedly told me, the windows of reform have been closing gradually over the last several years. Gleb Pavlovsky's recent statement in Expert suggests why Yakovlev is anxious. Pavlovsky, a political adviser to the presidential chief of staff, has asserted that President Vladimir Putin governs only with the indulgence of forces greater than himself. Yakovlev points out that Pavlovsky could not have made that statement without permission. But permission from whom? Was it a provocation? A warning? A poll in September 2003 indicated that 77 percent of the Russian population would vote for Putin's removal, suggesting that underlying the present apparent stability of the country, contradictory forces of destabilization remain at work. Putin's recent abrupt dismissal of his prime minister, which some observers see as a victory for the security services over reformers, further hints at the direction of the regime. Putin seems intent on restoring the personnel and prestige of the security services, and the governmental muddle that has resulted from the cabinet shuffle will give him additional opportunities. That evening I stroll to the Arbat, not far from my hotel, for coffee. Moscow's bohemian district explodes with curiosities and Soviet kitsch. Old and new are jammed together helter-skelter as in a Rauschenberg collage: Kiosks sell portraits of Lenin and huge quantities of army-surplus gas masks, Red Army medals, knives, hats, and belts, alongside Matrioshka dolls, scarves, and other folk-art keepsakes. A fire-eater entertains a circle of edgy onlookers; a child violinist plays Tchaikovsky near a row of sedated small animals put on sale by their sleepy owners. Moonbeam women in designer clothes and high heels part the crowd like apparitions, while a scruffy guitar player, sitting on a wooden box, plays the "Moonlight Sonata," not far from a group of punk rockers with spiked hair, chains, black leather, tattoos, and amplifiers. A diminutive and elderly Chinese man sways back and forth on the arm of a slim young lady as he leads an entourage of sightseers from Russia's mighty neighbor to the east. His head is dwarfed under the enormous black plush Red Army hat he has just purchased. The following morning, punctually at 9, Sasha (whose real name cannot be disclosed) shows up for our appointment. A former general in the KGB, Sasha is gray-haired, a little stooped, and frail from his recent heart operation, but still quite handsome. He has a genial, soft-spoken manner and is a master of the major European languages. He looks about at the crowded lobby, then up at the ceiling. "Do you see the beautiful design?" he asks. "This was always a very fine hotel. I have many memories here. This is where I would meet [X]. I was his handler, you see." He smiles, then frowns; his tone changes. "It is essential we meet here, unfortunately. My apartment is bugged. I know it. They know I know it. It's an annoyance, nothing more, but why should I give them that satisfaction? They do it to let you know they're still around." "Is it bugged here?" "Certainly. But probably nobody is listening just now." He stifles a laugh. "It's partly just a habit," he explains. "They want to know everything, but they don't know why. Information is leaking out -- they don't know what or how, and they don't know how to stop it, or even if they should stop it, but there are powerful forces in this country that want to be prepared in the event something might happen. "But partly it's still a kind of," he searches for the right word, "a kind of implied intimidation." "For what purpose?" "As yet, nobody knows." As we step into the elevator, a repairman gets in with us. Sasha eyes him carefully, and when we exit on the sixth floor he says, "You have to be very careful these days. They're watching everywhere. Undoubtedly, they know all about our meeting." But our meeting is about nothing -- handing over a signed contract for Sasha's memoir, looking at some illustrations, discussing schedules. What is all this fuss about? Just bad habits, or is Yakovlev's creeping revanchism truly under way? Later that day I visit the Stalin exhibit at the Museum of the Revolution, where a large assortment of historical materials are set out in roughly chronological order: posters praising Stalin side by side with denunciations, with no indication of how to judge the man or his accomplishments. No guiding point of view is evident. Stalin the hero of the Revolution, the hero of industrialization, the hero of the Great Patriotic War stands next to horrific images from the Gulag. The past is dead, but not dead enough. In the lobby the carpets breathe stupefying dust and decay at every step. The old lady attendants keep a fierce eye on the two or three tourists who have made their way to the otherwise empty exhibit hall. Henry Ford's accomplishments could be on display, not those of perhaps the greatest criminal of the 20th century. A recent survey found that more than half of the Russian population still thinks favorably of Stalin. Such "objectivity" is the cloak that the inability to render judgment wears. Behind it, looming just out of sight, is the memory of a time when the Russian people stood atop a high mountain looking down, an exalted time of triumph and unimaginable power, albeit consecrated by innocent blood. And not easy to relinquish. Outside, the image of that past instantly disintegrates. Gone amid the Nike T-shirts and Reebok sneakers, the Volvos, Mercedes-Benzes, and Audis, the Vogue magazines, the Marlboro cigarettes, Gucci shoes and silk suits, the Pizza Huts and McDonald's restaurants, the cellphones and computers, the fancy new bicycles, the pornography and the "Dzhak-Pot" gambling casinos that light up the city after dark. "What is essential is invisible to the eye," said the fox in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince. But penetrating to what is essential is very difficult. Over the weekend I visit the dacha of Vladimir Pavlovich Naumov, the senior member of Yakovlev's scholarly team researching the Stalin archive, a man I have known for some 12 years. Vladimir Pavlovich is paler and more frail than when I saw him last almost a year ago. He wears a blue-and-white-striped flannel shirt and carries his portable Panasonic telephone in the front pocket. His wife, Valentina Ivanovna, is heavier but also frailer than when I last visited. It is hard for her to walk and to bend down. She has prepared a long time for this visit with blini and khachapuri, cakes, smoked salmon, caviar, borscht, and numerous other treats from her kitchen. This is the magical time of year when mushrooms appear everywhere and never in the same place twice. Behind the house are mountain ash with bright red berries, wild currant and gooseberry bushes, intermixed with a kind of wide-leafed bamboo. After a week of solid rain, the cool air sparkles in the golden afternoon sun. After lunch Valentina Ivanovna and I stroll to the river. A friend of hers, who once lived nearby, moved to Leningrad some time ago, she says. The NKVD, a forerunner of the KGB, may still own the property, on which a children's sanatorium now stands not far from the river. The NKVD? "They change their names so often," she chuckles, "it hardly matters what you call them." The slender topol trees, or aspens, are beginning to lose their leaves, but it is still a few weeks before the "golden snow" begins that will flood Valentina Ivanovna's garden. "What more do I need?" she asks. At dinner Vladimir Pavlovich tells a story about a man in a small village who had an ugly daughter he couldn't marry off. One day a matchmaker came to persuade the man that this homely girl without looks or dowry should marry the grand Prince Pototsky. The father was stupefied. But after long negotiation with the matchmaker, he finally consented to the union. Delighted, the matchmaker clapped his hands and exclaimed, "Now the deal is half done." So much of what is happening in Russia today, Vladimir Pavlovich comments, is like that -- "If only Prince Pototsky will agree." Behind the mask of normal conversation, he observes, is a residue of a bitter witticism that made the rounds in the 1930s: A man looks in the mirror while shaving and thinks, "One of us is a traitor." That evening I return to Moscow for final meetings with Yakovlev. An almost unprecedented historical figure, he provided Mikhail Gorbachev with the theoretical framework for the demise of the Soviet system because he thought it was better voluntarily to give up power than to retain it illegally and ineffectively. His journey has been as much internal as political. As Anton Chekhov said about the serf in himself, Yakovlev has had to squeeze the Communist out drop by drop. His country's "slow turn toward truth," as he puts it, brought about the collapse of an entire system of belief. Truth is dangerous still, and the masses of people remain empty and disoriented. Nothing yet has taken the system's place. There is need for a new mythology. That is partly why Yakovlev believes that only the complete debolshevization of the country can save Russia from sliding backward. "The struggle today," he tells me, "is not over how to fix the economy. That is not so difficult. It is over who controls the economy." The universal corruption is not, he insists, an attack on the government or a sign of weakness; rather, by encouraging corruption, the central government weakens the rule of law, which is the biggest threat to its power. Putin's appearance last September in New York City, opening up the first Russian gasoline station in the United States, was not a random good-will gesture. Rather, it signaled the extent to which his government has laid claim to the country's vast fortunes in oil, natural gas, diamonds, and gold. The "capitalist barons" are now being brought to account for corruption the government once encouraged -- an old Stalinist ploy. The son of a peasant, Yakovlev remembers the time before collectivization when the people had potatoes but didn't have socialism. Afterward, they had socialism but no potatoes. Putin may not be a "bad" man, Yakovlev emphasizes, but his promise of potatoes may come at a high price. Sensitive to world opinion and probably a democrat at heart, Putin, in Yakovlev's view, profoundly distrusts the people, an age-old characteristic of Russian government, and relies entirely on elites. In the end, Yakovlev fears, he may simply be unable to cope with the massive forces bearing down on him, because his support base is too small. An important sign of Putin's difficulty is the absence of transparency in his administration. He has wrapped himself in secrecy, closed down the only liberal television station, and changed the way elections for the State Duma are conducted -- all of which, Yakovlev points out, no one intent on democratic reform would have done. The last elections, marginalizing the liberal parties and endorsing Putin's vision of a strong central government, suggest that the people themselves may want despotism in the guise of democracy. A tragic outcome. Yakovlev understands that true democracy cannot be based on force -- only on the shared values of an educated public. Although the Russian population enjoys an exceptionally high level of education in many areas, history is not among them. Knowledge of the history of the Stalinist past and the cold war is particularly lacking. Yet, when I proposed that Yakovlev and Naumov write a textbook on Soviet history, they declined. Yakovlev said that an honest textbook on Soviet history could not be written for at least a generation. Why? People are still too afraid of the consequences of telling the truth, as the Stalin exhibit amply attests. Publishing documents on which such a textbook might eventually be based is, in Yakovlev's view, the first essential step. But the window of opportunity closes more with every passing day. Only recently, for instance, have the border guards, formerly under the control of the Ministry of the Interior, returned to the jurisdiction of the FSB (the Federal Security Service, domestic successor to the KGB). That step, invisible to most people, suggests to Yakovlev that the menacing organ of the Soviet, and now Russian, government is positioning itself to assert ever greater authority in the daily life of the people. Fascist newspapers are no longer publicly on sale in Red Square, but more than 100 publish openly in Russia today. Calls for limiting the influence of Jews and members of other minority groups are a steady feature of that literature. In the absence of an established political center, such otherwise fringe phenomena have larger importance than many people in the West suspect. The recent bombing of the apartment of the journalist who dared write a book critical of Putin is widely taken to be the work of the FSB and is another instance of the intimidation Sasha referred to. Under the shadow of these developments, and the terrorism perpetrated in Russia by Muslim insurgents and Chechen separatists, the democratic reforms enacted some years ago with high hopes may, in retrospect, be seen as evanescent as mushrooms under aspen trees. Like many others, Yakovlev is searching for a basis on which to build a democratic culture that can give heart to democratic policies. But Russia is vast, its history is long and dark, and the work of one man, or 100 men, can be swallowed up in an instant by a tide of intimidation, threat, and terror. If that happens, a precious moment for Russia and the world will have been lost. Yakovlev, a man schooled in Soviet bureaucracy, changed his mind because he learned new facts at the time of Khrushchev's "Secret Speech to the Closed Session of the Twentieth Party Congress" in 1956, in which the Soviet leader criticized Stalin's violence, capriciousness, and despotic character. Yakovlev's change of mind produced his resolve some 40 years later, under auspicious circumstances, to change his country. The point at which knowledge is transformed into action is the nexus of education and political commitment. But neither knowledge nor political commitment can be sustained in a vacuum. The self-critical, democratic culture that Yakovlev seeks depends on traditions of thought that extend far be-yond Russia's borders. If reform is to prevail, Russia cannot remain isolated from the West, he says. He sees Russia's sinking back into isolation as the greatest danger. As we end our interview, Yakovlev notes that the stalemate between government and the interests of private citizens in Russia may last another generation. "Russia is waiting," Yakovlev says. "We must wait. I have only one thing to ask of the West. "Do not forget Russia. It would be a tragic mistake." Jonathan Brent is associate director and editorial director of Yale University Press and co-author, with Vladimir P. Naumov, of Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (HarperCollins, 2003). In 1992 he established the Annals of Communism Series at Yale, which to date has published 25 volumes of material from the former Soviet archives. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 27, Page B10 |
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