فصل 15

CHAPTER 15

POSTCARDS FROM THE EMPIRE

Valentin Falin, a rumpled, weary man high up in the Central Committee apparatus, was always prepared to serve the Party. But now he had an impossible task. With Eastern Europe beginning its democratic revolution, with evidence of the same in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, he was instructed to go before the press and deny the existence of a Soviet empire.

The Kremlin had long since given up trying to rein in Eastern Europe. “We made that decision in 1985, 1986,” Yegor Ligachev, of all people, told me. “We already had the example of Afghanistan before us.” That is not to say the Kremlin was overjoyed with the triumph of Solidarity or other non-Communist parties in Eastern Europe. Officials in the Kremlin simply could not believe that the Eastern Europeans were rebelling on their own. Ligachev told me that had it not been for Western “provocateurs,” the Eastern Europeans would have chosen “reformed socialism” and not “bourgeois” democracy. The leadership had hoped for Eastern Europe what it hoped for itself: the victory of the Communist Party’s liberal wing. “I am confident,” Gorbachev said in an interview with The Washington Post in the spring of 1988, “that the vast majority of people in Poland favor continuing along the path on which the country started after World War II.” But no matter how disappointed the Soviet Communist Party was in the nature of the Eastern European revolution, it could not afford intervention—not if it was going to get Western support for rebuilding the Soviet economy.

Moscow, however, was absolutely determined to hold together the union, the “internal empire.” The preservation of the union, Gorbachev said repeatedly, was “a last stand,” and yet his strategy was all muscle-flexing and expulsion of wind, the threat of force and a fraudulent argument that all the republics, including the Baltics, had joined the Soviet Union willingly and happily. For all his democratic pretensions, Gorbachev never saw the Soviet Union as an empire, a product of czarist and Bolshevik conquest, but rather as a “multinational union.” He saw the union as inexorably linked not only by economic ties, shared history, and intermarriage, but by an ineffable sense of commonality. Gorbachev portrayed himself as a kind of Soviet one-worlder and the proponents of republican independence as retrograde nationalists doomed to the tribal battles of centuries past. “We are looking ahead,” he told the Lithuanians, “and you are looking to the past.” To preserve the union, the Party was still willing to use its airbrush on history. The leaders of the Baltic independence movement, backed up by nearly every reputable Western historian, argued that Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania came under the Soviet sphere of influence as the result of a secret deal between the Kremlin and the Nazis. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 surreptitiously divided Europe into Soviet and German spheres of influence. One of the secret protocols gave Moscow control over Latvia, Estonia, and parts of Poland and Romania. A second protocol, signed a month later, gave the Kremlin control over Lithuania. In 1940, Stalin annexed the Baltic states and forced their puppet legislatures to “request admission” into the union. And now Valentin Falin, chief of the Party’s international department, was on the stage of the Foreign Ministry press center telling us that even if there had been such protocols, so what? They had nothing to do with “present realities.” Falin’s excuses would have shamed a schoolboy. The dog, he seemed to say, had eaten the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

When perestroika began, Gorbachev had at least some sense of the deterioration of the national economy and the difficulty of creating semidemocratic politics in a totalitarian state. But he and his colleagues started out nearly oblivious to the nationalities question. In December 1986, Gorbachev fired the Kazakh Party chief, Dinmukhamed Kunayev, and replaced him with an ethnic Russian, Gennadi Kolbin, never anticipating that the people of the republic would object. The ensuing riots in the republic’s capital, Alma-Ata, eventually forced Gorbachev to replace Kolbin with a Kazakh, but the incident did not seem to impress the Kremlin very strongly. Even the massive demonstrations in Armenia and Azerbaijan in early 1988 seemed to Gorbachev a matter of local interest, a petty squabble over Nagorny Karabakh that could be resolved by replacing the local Party leadership. He saw no threat there. After all, hadn’t the protesters in Yerevan carried portraits of Gorbachev?

But the Balts spoke more clearly; their demands were easier to discern. They began with demonstrations about the environment, then about the need to preserve Baltic languages and cultures. Step by step, the Baltics grew more political, more self-confident. By early 1989, the most popular politicians in the region were non-Communists, and by May the parliaments of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had all declared their sovereignty. It was unclear what sovereignty meant, or could mean. Even the leaders of the main opposition groups—Sajudis in Lithuania, the popular fronts in Estonia and Latvia—were careful not to talk of outright independence as anything other than a remote goal; when they spoke of independence it was in the wistful tones of scientists planning on the colonization of Mars. “We cannot afford illusions,” said Marju Lauristan, a leader of the Estonian Popular Front. Lauristan least of all. Her father had been a leader of the Estonian Communists who welcomed Stalin’s annexation in 1940 with open arms.

At first, the Kremlin had not seemed so threatened by the Baltic republics. They were, after all, a “special case,” minuscule states absorbed into the Soviet Union more than twenty years after the Bolshevik Revolution. And just as important, there was the matter of temperament. The Balts were calm and measured, reasonable. Their demonstrations—next to the huge and noisy marches in Yerevan, Baku, or Tbilisi—were as gentle as a Save the Whales march on a summer’s day in Sausilito. The Balts were “more European” somehow than the rest of the Union, and their traditions of small-scale farming and business, Gorbachev supposed, might even set a healthy example in Russia.

But the Baltic example became the model not for the revitalization of the Union, but rather for its collapse. In the three years it took to win independence, the Balts were never violent, only stubborn. It was that very temperament—Sakharov’s calm confidence on a mass scale—that characterized their revolution. None of the other republics organized quite so well or thought with such precision and cool.

At first glance, the idea of Lithuania standing up to Moscow sounded like an episode from The Mouse That Roared. It was too comic to consider. Sajudis headquarters, a small building near the main Catholic cathedral in the capital city, Vilnius, was filled with well-scrubbed volunteers. They had a couple of PCs, a fax machine, satellite phones, and sweet wall posters showing Balts holding hands and singing songs. One afternoon I watched as a young woman, wearing Birkenstock sandals and humming a Tracy Chapman song, pumped press releases through the telex machine and sent them to news bureaus all over the world. She was announcing a demonstration for August commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. I thought of how blithe she seemed next to the traditional Bolshevik image of “real” revolutionaries: sweaty, bearded men in the Smolny denouncing “factionalism,” Lenin speaking from an armored car, the stink of bad cigarettes. And yet she was their master; here she was, playing a vital role in the creation of a mass movement that would eventually liberate Lithuania and give the rest of the Soviet Union … ideas.

In their public statements, the leaders of the Baltic popular fronts had a knack for echoing Gorbachev’s own rhetoric and then applying the principle to their own situation. When the Central Committee issued a threatening statement directed at the Balts, the popular front groups in the region issued a counterstatement that sounded much like Gorbachev’s address to the United Nations: “The time when military force can solve everything has long since passed. Tanks are not only an immoral argument, they are no longer omnipotent. The main thing is that such a turn of events could once and for all put the Soviet Union back into the ranks of the most backward of totalitarian states.” The Latvians, Estonians, and Lithuanians were keenly aware that for Moscow, the price of violence would be much higher than it had been in 1956 or 1968; this time Moscow made no secret that it needed the help of the West to survive. A bankrupt empire would be forced to shrink. That equation gave the Balts their confidence, a confidence that was shaken only when the governments of the West were weak, or tardy, in their support. “How can there be a ‘threat’ of tanks when there have already been Soviet tanks in the Baltic states for fifty years?” said Trivimi Velliste, president of the Estonian Heritage Society. “Tanks will not help them, even if they do move them into our city streets. The only thing they will do is cause a lot of trouble for our road repairmen. India used a passive resistance and India became independent in the end. In terms of that kind of strategy, we can learn a lot from India.” In Lithuania, especially, you could see with the greatest clarity the Baltic strategy. The Estonians, the saying went, were the brains of the movement, the Latvians the organizational spine, and the Lithuanians the heart, the moral force. The key leader of Sajudis, and eventually the president of the republic, was Vytautas Landsbergis, a man of almost infuriating confidence and righteousness, a moody academic who drove Gorbachev and even George Bush to distraction with his disdain for “playing politics” and moral compromise. A musicologist at the Vilnius conservatory, Landsbergis was no less a pedant than Gorbachev himself. When the Lithuanian parliament—in what seemed like a moment of fantasy—took up the question of a national anthem, Landsbergis went into a long discourse about how the song could not be sung, as it had been traditionally, in the key of F sharp. “No one can sing that high,” he said, and thus launched into a long disquisition.

Like many other intellectuals in the Baltic states, Landsbergis had not lived the dangerous life of an outright political dissident. But unlike the older Moscow intellectuals who worked within the Party and saw its reform as the only avenue of change, Landsbergis kept his distance from officialdom. In the years before Gorbachev, he saw the preservation of the Lithuanian culture as the only possible political act. “If we could keep alive the language, our religion, the culture, everything Moscow was trying to kill, then we had a chance,” he said. Landsbergis’s cultural dissidence was a family trait. His maternal grandfather, Jonas Jablonskis, was a linguist who fought for the primacy of the Lithuanian language after it was banned by the czars; his paternal grandfather, Gagrielus Landsbergis, was arrested and deported by the czarist government for the crime of writing for an underground newspaper; his father, Vytautas Landsbergis, Sr., was an architect during Lithuanian independence who fought in the resistance against the Nazi occupation. In the “years of stagnation” under Brezhnev, Landsbergis himself tried to preserve Lithuanian culture by studying the music of the composer Mikalojus Ciurlionis.

When the political opportunity came in 1989, Sajudis and Landsbergis led a cultural revolution, a revival of historical memory. I was in Vilnius to see a political act that would, in the next few years, become the ultimate symbol of the return of history. I saw members of Sajudis, after a vote of parliament, ripping down the signs reading “Lenin Street” along the main drag in Vilnius and replacing them with signs reading “Gediminais Street,” named for one of the great dukes of Lithuanian history. The highway between Vilnius and Kaunas was changed from Red Army Avenue to Volunteer Avenue, celebrating the volunteers who fought for Lithuanian independence in 1918. On Sunday mornings, Lithuanian television broadcast Catholic mass on a new program, Glory to Christ. The young quit the Komsomol and the Young Pioneers. The Lithuanian Communist Party even conducted its sessions in Lithuanian, a great departure from the days when sessions were held in often clumsy Russian, the “Soviet language.” Western visitors, still flush with Gorbymania, would, with increasing frequency, come to Vilnius and hope that they could bridge the differences between the Kremlin and Sajudis. No matter how distinguished the visitor, Landsbergis would greet such attempts only with weary condescension. “We are an occupied country,” he told me once. “To pretend we are grateful for a little democracy, to go through some sort of referendum to prove our commitment to independence, to talk with Mr. Gorbachev as anything other than a foreign leader, is to live a lie.… It is very simple. We are an occupied land. Only now we can say it, of course, but we have never considered ourselves a genuine part of the Soviet Union. That is something that Gorbachev does not quite understand. We wish his perestroika well, but the time has come for us to go our own way.” In the end, the Baltic strategy was excruciatingly simple. They would speak the truth and then press the Kremlin to make good on its own moralistic rhetoric. As Gorbachev himself had done, the Balts defined their direction by first clarifying the facts of history. The secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact made clear that the Baltic states were occupied as part of a geopolitical deal with the Nazis. The second step was a matter of logic: if the occupation was illegal in 1939, then it had always been such; therefore the Baltic states need only reaffirm their independence. Once they had established this logic of revolution, the other Baltic leaders followed Landsbergis’s strategy and spoke of Moscow as a foreign state. Nearly all the Baltic representatives in the Soviet parliament suddenly declared themselves “interested observers” rather than deputies. They also played a kind of moral game with Gorbachev, insisting on his goodness, his distinctiveness. “We in the Baltics look on Gorbachev as the ‘good czar’ and try to pretend that the ‘czar doesn’t know,’ it’s his ministers who are up to mischief,’ ” said Andres Raid, a television journalist in Tallinn. “In a way, we are playing a political game, using Gorbachev’s name. He is an anchor for us, a shield, a shelter. Of course, we disagree with him on some things, but we try not to be too harsh about it. We have no one else looking out for us in the political hierarchy. We have nowhere else to go for help.” The Balts were determined to prove that they were tougher than the Kremlin, that their moral certainty would result in either victory or annihilation. Perhaps what gave them their confidence, and what distinguished them from most of the rest of the Soviet Union, was that the Lithuanians, the Estonians, and the Latvians enjoyed and remembered a legacy of at least intermittent independence. The Lithuanians, for example, had been dominated by the Danes, the Teutonic Knights, the Swedes, the Russians, and the Nazis, but there were periods of freedom, most lately between 1918 and 1940. In the most recent period of domination, under the Soviet Union, Stalin deported hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians to Siberia and “replaced” them with Russian workers. But now the Baltic leaders would not accept a middle ground, for the middle ground meant continued occupation. And they were right. The Kremlin capitulated, slowly, step by step. On July 23, Aleksandr Yakovlev, as chairman of a legislative investigating committee, conceded the obvious: the secret protocols existed. Landsbergis could not help but be amused. “This announcement,” he said, “comes to us as a great shock.” History had once more been returned.

A few months after Yakovlev’s announcement, I had a chance to see glimpses of the worst nightmare of those who had once dreamed of an eternal Soviet empire.

In early October 1989, Gorbachev visited Berlin, ostensibly to help celebrate the anniversary of East German statehood. The cracks in the wall were already visible. Thousands of East Germans were fleeing across border points for West Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. But the East German leader, Erich Honecker, was as obstinate as any of the Eastern European dictators; he was the sort of tyrant who could begin a proclamation, “If I die …” He had every intention of outlasting Gorbachev and the pressure to change. To make himself understood, Honecker orchestrated a grand ceremony of state in Gorbachev’s presence: a day of speechmaking in the main government palace, a goose-stepping military parade, fireworks. One night, tens of thousands of the Party youth league members marched through the streets of Berlin carrying flaming torches and singing songs of socialist brotherhood. (In a few weeks, they’d be marching through the Berlin Wall to buy steaks and singing praises of the gods Nike and Reebok.) The Berlin visit was one of Gorbachev’s finest moments, the sort of subtle exchange that he was made for. A year later, when blunt decisiveness was needed at home, when democratic politics demanded an end to backroom maneuvering, Gorbachev would hesitate and fail. Boris Yeltsin would fill the vacuum. But Gorbachev was the man for this moment. In public, he played along nicely with the East German leadership. In his own speeches and comments, he never drifted far from his host. He kissed Herr Honecker firm on the lips. But in the end that kiss was the kiss of farewell. In private, Gorbachev hinted broadly that the leadership could either begin its own massive reforms or end up defeated and defunct. Gorbachev trotted out one of his favorite aphorisms for the occasion: “Life itself punishes those who delay.” He repeated it here and there, and his spokesman made sure to emphasize it at a press conference.

Such hints can spark a revolution. As the East German folksinger and dissident Wolf Bierman said of Gorbachev’s phrase, “the tritest common places, launched into the world at the right moment, become magic spells.” Many factors led to the collapse of the East German regime—the action along the border, dissension in the ruling Politburo, the rise of opposition groups—but Gorbachev’s hint surely let the people know where the Kremlin, the center of the empire, stood. Within hours after he left for Moscow, an uprising had begun, angry confrontations between demonstrators shouting “Freiheit! Freiheit!” and the Stasi police on the Alexanderplatz. According to reports on the radio, the demonstrations were far bigger in Leipzig. Erich Honecker may not have been listening to Gorbachev, but the people of East Germany were. On November 9, just one month after Gorbachev’s visit, the Berlin Wall collapsed.

To live anywhere between Bonn and Moscow in 1989 was to be witness to a year-long political fantasy. You had the feeling you could wander into history on the way to the bank or the seashore. Esther and I had bought cheap tickets to Prague for Thanksgiving week, thinking we’d have time to see the city and some friends and relax. There was little chance of that. The day we arrived, we checked in at the hotel and walked to Wenceslas Square, where there were no fewer than 200,000 people marching for an end to the Communist regime. A couple of days later at an even bigger demonstration, I was leaning out a window watching Alexander Dubcek, fifty feet away, declare his return to Prague after two decades of shame.

Dubcek’s return was remarkable enough—he was the living personification of the 1968 Prague Spring—but it was even more extraordinary that he now seemed antique. The crowds roared for him when he walked out on the balcony, but the enthusiasm faded steadily as they listened to him. His was still the old dream of “socialism with a human face.” The tens of thousands of students who led the 1989 revolution, who were pouring into factories and bringing the workers out to join them on the city squares, looked on Dubcek as a well-intentioned but slightly out-of-it grandfather. Dubcek sounded as if he had been frozen in time from the moment he was arrested by the Soviet authorities in 1968. His language was still stiff, his cadences metronomic. Like Len Karpinsky’s articles, Dubcek’s speech could not quite dispense with the Communist Party habit of euphemism, pomposity, and cliché. By the time he finished that day on Wenceslas Square, the applause was only polite.

With each demonstration Václav Havel’s voice grew more and more hoarse, but his expressions of liberty and passion transcended the dead language of the official newspapers and Party pronouncements. It was as if by writing and speaking clearly, honestly, Havel helped keep alive principles and a language that would inevitably triumph over the regime. His opposition was to act outside the system, to act decently. How lucky the Czechs were to have such a voice among them! Havel was no less a hero than Sakharov or Walesa, and his greatness, like theirs, was in his absolute belief in himself and the rightness of his cause.

In Prague I read a collection of letters Havel sent to his wife, Olga, from prison. They were filled with philosophical discussion, abstract exploration of the reasons for existence and faith, but I found myself just as moved by “overhearing” Havel describe the routine of prison life, his reading of Max Brod’s biography of Kafka and Bellow’s Herzog; his progress in English and German; his hemorrhoids; the pleasure of smoking two cigarettes a day and intensifying that pleasure by smoking slowly in front of a mirror; his reasons for living, his reasons for hope. Most of all, I found myself nodding with admiration at Havel’s description of the insidious way the Prague regime (or the Moscow or Beijing regimes) had made language “weightless” by twisting it, pacifying and corrupting it.

“Words that are not backed up by life lose their weight,” Havel wrote, “which means that words can be silenced in two ways: either you ascribe such weight to them that no one dares utter them aloud, or you take away any weight they might have, and they turn into air. The final effect in each case is silence: the silence of the half-mad man who is constantly writing appeals to world authorities while everyone ignores him; and the silence of the Orwellian citizen.” A man of the theater, Havel held his press conferences onstage during those weeks of revolution. On November 24, after Dubcek’s speech on the square, he and Dubcek answered the nightly questions from the press at the Magic Lantern Theater and even got into a mild debate on socialism. Dubcek was all for a “purified” socialism, once rinsed of Stalinist “deformations.” A familiar, Gorbachevian theme. Havel said he could no longer discuss “socialism,” that it was a word and idea that had been rendered meaningless. After about an hour of this meeting of the generations, Havel’s brother walked on the stage, which was still set for a production of Dürrenmatt’s play Minotaurus. He whispered in Havel’s ear. Havel smiled, a radiant smile. Dubcek was talking, and Havel interrupted with a polite gesture.

“The entire Politburo has resigned,” Havel announced.

Suddenly there was a bottle of champagne and glasses all around.

Havel and Dubcek rose and toasted a free Czechoslovakia.

Curtain.

In the epilogue a few weeks later, Havel appeared not onstage, but on state television. He was now president of Czechoslovakia. Citizens, he declared, “your government has been returned to you!” This was not theater. This was really happening.

Inside the Soviet Union itself, republican independence leaders celebrated the end of the external empire. Except for Romania, where the revolution ended in bloodshed and political ambiguity, the liberation of Eastern Europe seemed almost effortless. But they were careful not to let themselves believe that their own freedom would come soon. The Kremlin gave them every reason to think otherwise. Writing in Sovetskaya Kultura, the Kremlin’s arch spokesman, Gennadi Gerasimov, said that the West was showing “malignant pleasure” in the Baltic independence movements. Such movements, he wrote ominously, “threaten our reforms and are provoking use of the ‘iron fist.’ ” In early 1990, after the string of revolutions in Eastern Europe had come to an end, an American historian, Eric Foner, conducted a seminar with his history students at Moscow State University. Foner was a specialist in the American Civil War, and the afternoon I sat in on his class, he and his students discussed the parallels between Gorbachev and Lincoln and their quests to keep together a union. For a while, Foner and his students compared the two leaders, but soon the students began to talk about what they thought their country would look like in a few years. Every one of them predicted collapse, and every one was frightened that the old regime would resist to the end.

The Soviet Union is a great empire, and we are now watching its disintegration, Igor, a student from Byelorussia, said. “Assuming that by my early thirties I have not been killed in a civil war, I think what will be left will be Russia—the original core territory. And that is what happened to the Roman Empire, isn’t it? It shrank. I just hope that it all happens without haste, and peacefully.” “I’m frightened,” said another student, a Russian, Aleksandr Petrov. “Power is still in the hands of the Communist Party and the KGB. They can stir it all up if they want. And if there is violence, they’ll say they had to do it all to preserve peace.” Their fears and visions of the future differed, but all of Foner’s students fully expected the Union to collapse. “The old regime,” Petrov said, “is not just old. It’s dead.” As I traveled around the Union, opinions varied on when and where the old regime died. Uzbeks in Tashkent and Samarkand told me that the exposure in around 1988 and 1989 of the callous way Moscow had turned all of Central Asia into a vast cotton plantation—in the process destroying the Aral Sea and nearly every other area of the economy—was the turning point. In the Baltic states, the official “discovery” of the secret protocols to the Nazi-Soviet pact was the key moment. But it was in Ukraine that I found the most unifying event, the absolute metaphor for the explosion of the last empire on earth.

On a trip to the western Ukrainian city of Lvov in 1989, I met with small groups of nationalists who promised that “one day” their republic of over fifty million people, the biggest after Russia, would strike out for independence and do far more damage to the union than the tiny Baltic states ever could. They knew their history. “For us,” Lenin once wrote, “to lose the Ukraine would be to lose our head.” Bogdan and Mikhail Horyn, brothers who had spent long terms in jail for their pro-independence activities before Gorbachev took power, said that while an independent, post-Soviet Ukraine may be years off, the old regime collapsed, practically and metaphorically, at 1:23 A.M., April 26, 1986, the moment of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl. That devastating instant had from the start been wrapped in a mystical aura. Within weeks of the accident, people realized that “Chernobyl” meant “Wormwood” and then pointed to Revelations 8:10–11; “A great star shot from the sky, flaming like a torch; and it fell on a third of the rivers and springs. The name of the star was Wormwood; and a third of the water turned to wormwood, and men in great numbers died of the water because it was poisoned.” The accident at Chernobyl embodied every curse of the Soviet system, the decay and arrogance, the willful ignorance and self-deception. Before leaving for Chernobyl, I arranged to see Anatoly Aleksandrov, the physicist who designed the reactor model at Chernobyl. Aleksandrov was in his nineties, the dean of Soviet science. He was the former head of the Academy of Sciences and the head man at the Kurchatov Institute of Nuclear Energy. During the Brezhnev era, Aleksandrov had written that nuclear power plants were 100 percent safe and ought to be built as close to population centers as possible, the better to solve the country’s heating problems during the winter.

Aleksandrov’s office was grander than any I had seen before, grander even than most of the palatial offices at the Kremlin. He and a group of his top aides and engineers sat in a semicircle and he talked of the accident. No, he felt no remorse. Yes, the reactor was sound and reports of future accidents were absurd. “If there was a defect or two, we’ve fixed it, you see.” And as for reports that hundreds, if not thousands, of people would die over the years from the effects of radioactivity unleashed at Chernobyl, Aleksandrov lifted his enormous, aged hand and flapped it in derision.

“Oh, really now,” he said. “That’s wild exaggeration. Stop worrying so much!” There remains every reason to worry. The Chernobyl explosion released a radioactive cloud ten times more deadly than the radiation following the blast at Hiroshima. There were children in the region who absorbed radiation equivalent to a thousand chest X rays. More than 600,000 workers took part in the cleanup, a deadly job; more than 200,000 people were evacuated from the region, but only after a thirty-six-hour delay and after absorbing dangerous amounts of radioactivity. There are thousands of people in Ukraine, Byelorussia, and other republics who eat food grown in radioactive earth and drink contaminated water. At the Petrovsky Collective Farm in Narodichi, the farm directors reported that sixty-four farm animals were born with serious deformities in 1987: calves without heads, limbs, ribs, eyes; pigs with abnormal skulls. In 1988, the rate continued to rise. They recalled only three or four such instances before the accident. Moscow News said that the radiation readings in the area were thirty times greater than normal, but that local farm animals were still fed fodder from the contaminated fields. People in the region received 35 rubles a month from the state as a subsidy—money the people called the “coffin bonus.” The various bureaucracies seemed not to care about, or believe in, the perils of radiation. As late as 1990, more than 180 tons of contaminated meat was shipped to stores in Siberia and northern Russia from a processing plant in Bryansk where the sausage was being made from beef and pork with radiation levels ten times normal.

“Chernobyl was not like the Communist system. They were one and the same,” said Yuri Shcherbak, a physician and journalist who led the fight in Ukraine to publicize the medical and ecological hazards of the accident. “The system ate into our bones the same way radiation did, and the powers that be—or the powers that were—did everything they could to cover it all up, to wish it all away.” From the moment that the engineers in the control room of reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl reported a disaster beyond imagining, their superiors refused to act. The top bureaucrats at Chernobyl kept repeating the same fiction: that there had been a “mishap,” but nothing terrible, the reactor had not been destroyed. They quickly passed on this fiction to the leadership in Moscow. The next day, the people of Chernobyl, Pripyat, and the neighboring villages acted out their lives under a radioactive cloud. Children played soccer in radioactive dust. There were sixteen outdoor weddings sponsored by the Young Communist League. Old men fished in a contaminated river and ate the contaminated fish. When he was told by his engineers that the radiation at the plant was millions of times higher than normal, the plant director, Viktor Bryuchanov, said the meter was obviously defective and must be thrown away. For more than a day, Boris Shcherbina, a deputy prime minister, refused suggestions to carry out a mass evacuation. “Panic is worse than radiation,” he said. The world got word of the seriousness of the accident only when Scandinavian scientists reported dramatic increases in radiation levels. Even as they were evacuating their own families, Ukrainian Communist Party officials insisted on holding the annual May Day parade; the children of Kiev kicked up radioactive dust to celebrate the victories of socialism. After a long filibuster in the Politburo and strict controls on public information about the disaster, Gorbachev went on television to discuss Chernobyl a full sixteen days after the accident, and much of his talk was taken up with denunciations of the Western press.

“Meanwhile the reactor was burning away,” wrote Grigori Medvedev, an engineer who once worked at Chernobyl. “The graphite was burning, belching into the sky millions of curies of radioactivity. However, the reactor was not all that was finished. An abscess, long hidden within our society, had just burst: the abscess of complacency and self-flattery, of corruption and protectionism, of narrow-mindedness and self-serving privilege. Now, as it rotted, the corpse of a bygone era—the age of lies and spiritual decay—filled the air with the stench of radiation.” In the aftermath of the accident, Shcherbina, the deputy prime minister, issued a secret decree in force from 1988 to 1991 telling Soviet doctors they could not cite radiation as a cause of death. Shcherbina, who had himself been exposed to high doses of radiation, died in 1990. The cause of death was marked “unspecified.” One morning in Kiev, an official from Spetsatom, one of the cleanup bureaucracies, picked me up in a van and we drove north for Chernobyl. I had visited cities that were often described as “frozen in time”: Havana, with its faded hotels from the era of gambling and Battista; Rangoon, with its stopped clocks, reworked English cars, and the battered English silver at the Strand Hotel downtown. Usually it was a matter of faded colonialism matched against the poverty of the native regime. Chernobyl was something else again, a kind of ruin of the Soviet system, a horrible metaphor for the era that began with the Revolution in 1917 and was now ending. We passed a series of checkpoints, changed into a “dirty” radioactive van, and headed into the haunted “zone.” In the town of Pripyat there were abandoned apartment buildings, dilapidated as any other buildings in the Soviet Union. The workers and administrators of the power plant lived there. It was a moonscape of abandoned playgrounds, half-buried cars, buses, railroad wagons, abandoned fields. After the accident, people desperate for cash would dig up the buried cars and sell the radioactive parts or just drive the whole car off to Kiev. I met older people who had been evacuated but now had come back to the “zone” to live and die. They had never believed anything the state had told them, and why should they begin now? They drank poisoned tea and ate poisoned potatoes. A few hundred yards away was reactor No. 4, now encased in layers of concrete. Engineers were still trying to work out how they would finally eliminate the near-eternal danger posed by the core. The concrete would not hold forever.

Most of the people still living in “the zone” were cleanup workers, and most of them stayed “inside,” working for fifteen days, and then went home to Kiev and other towns for fifteen days of recuperation. That was the rule. But there were also some who were so dedicated to the cleanup project that they rarely left “the zone” except to visit family for a day or two every month. The Spetsatom director, Yuri Solomehko, and the chief engineer, Viktor Golubyev, spent nearly all their time in the zone and vowed to stay on until the Sarcophagus—the nickname for reactor No. 4—was “cleaned out.” Once, while I was interviewing the two men, Golubyev excused himself. He had another meeting. As soon as he left the room, Solomenko told me his friend “was all but finished.” After getting news of the Chernobyl accident while working at a reactor site in Cuba, Golubyev had volunteered to help put out the fire. In those rescue operations, he absorbed so much radiation that his skin turned deep brown and had to be peeled away. Solomenko explained that his friend’s body had been “utterly degraded.” And yet he would not leave Chernobyl until the damage was cleared away.

“Chernobyl was like everywhere else in this empire,” Yuri Shcherbak said. “The only thing that stood between us and total oblivion was a few good people, a few heroes who told the truth and risked their lives. If it weren’t for the danger, they should leave the Chernobyl plant standing. It could be the great monument to the Soviet empire.”