فصل 6

CHAPTER 6

NINOTCHKA

The season of Anna Larina’s euphoria turned quickly into the season of a coup. Not a coup with soldiers and tanks. That would wait. This was a quiet counterrevolution that the public hardly noticed, a struggle at the highest level of the Communist Party over the most vital questions of ideology and history. The only visible evidence of the coup was scraps of paper: a very dull play about Lenin, a pair of conflicting newspaper articles. But if this “silent coup” had succeeded, the drive for reform could have been stifled once more, perhaps for years. The process was still, as it had been thirty years before during the Khrushchev thaw, reversible.

The conservatives in the Communist Party did not pounce on the high art of the season. Their targets were not Joseph Brodsky’s lyrics or Andrei Platonov’s prose. They worried more about the transmission of heresy through cartoons, tabloid journalism, television, and dramatization. They worried, in short, about what they still called so lovingly “the masses.” In their January 1988 issue, the editors of the monthly journal Znamya published Mikhail Shatrov’s play about Lenin and Stalin, Onward, Onward, Onward. To a Western ear, Onward, Onward, Onward seems yet another example of the classic “Lenin play,” a form of staged ideology and glorification that had been described and endorsed by a meeting of the Party Central Committee as early as 1936. It was a Bolshevik version of the miracle and passion play, a ritualized epic of a savior’s arrival, his life and afterlife. In Shatrov’s work, as in all such plays, the characters take center stage and give long speeches; they are cardboard.

But now it was clear to the ideologues of the Party, led by Yegor Ligachev, that millions of Russians would see the subtle heresies within Shatrov’s version. They would read the play as a total denunciation of Stalin as a destroyer of all that was fine and good in Lenin. They would understand contemporary Soviet life as a tragic failure and the men who ruled them as inheritors of a tyrant’s system. They would see the play as an endorsement of the “liberal Lenin,” the gentler revolutionary figure who died “too soon.” The critical moment in Onward, Onward, Onward comes when Rosa Luxemburg steps center stage and reads a letter she wrote from a German prison cell in 1918. She celebrates the Bolshevik Revolution but then predicts disaster ahead: “Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of the press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life in every public institution dies out, becomes a mere appearance, and bureaucracy alone remains active. Public life gradually falls asleep; a few dozen extremely energetic and highly idealistic Party leaders direct and govern; among them, in reality, a dozen outstanding leaders rule, and an elite of the working class is summoned to a meeting from time to time to applaud the speeches of the leaders and to adopt unanimously resolutions put to them. In essence this is the rule of the clique, and of course their dictatorship is not the dictatorship of the proletariat but the dictatorship of a handful of politicians.… Socialism without political freedom is not socialism.… Freedom only for active supporters of the government is not freedom.” When Luxemburg finishes, Shatrov has his Lenin cry out, “Bravo, Rosa!” An incredible moment. Shatrov had given theatrical shape to the new, approved, Gorbachev-version of things. If only Lenin had lived! A life of tolerance, the shining future! Historically, it was preposterous. While Luxemburg’s prophecy could not have been more accurate, Lenin’s approval of a Bolshevik Bill of Rights is, and was, pure fantasy. Lenin was a theoretician of state terror. In January 1918, he sent sailors from the Baltic fleet to put down the elected Constitutional Assembly—the Bolsheviks had lost in multiparty elections. And in 1921, Lenin eliminated official opposition, even within the Communist Party. But those were facts, details. They hardly mattered. Interpretation of history had always been politics in the Soviet Union, and Shatrov and Gorbachev bent the facts as long as the narrative had a pleasing conclusion. There was a noble end: to discredit Stalin and Stalinism. Other questions would have to wait.

Shatrov, a man of Gorbachev’s generation, not only sympathized politically with the idea of a socialist “alternative,” he was related to it by blood. He was five years old in 1937 when his uncle Aleksei Rykov, the former premier, was arrested and later sentenced to death alongside Bukharin. Shatrov’s father was also arrested and shot, and twelve years later his mother was jailed as a wife of an “enemy of the people.” Because of his own status as son and nephew of discredited Bolsheviks, Shatrov studied at a mining institute rather than at a more prestigious university. When he began writing, it was with a definite political purpose. Using the powerful vehicle of the ritual Lenin play, he would ever so slightly expand the form, drop hints, make rehabilitations and accusations of his own. Like the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Shatrov was vain, at times rather loud about his moments of genuine daring; and like Yevtushenko, he had his privileges and patrons within the Party. Shatrov lived in a vast apartment with antique furniture in the famous House on the Embankment, once a stronghold of the Party elite. His dacha was next door to Pasternak’s house in Peredelkino, a village just outside Moscow where the cultural elite spent weekends and summers. But for all his privileges, Shatrov was a figure the gray apparatchiks despised. He was a wooden writer and an unexceptional thinker—next to him, Neil Simon is Euripides—but he had the political skills to make himself a presence, the dramaturge of a threatening new script.

On January 8, at a meeting of Party leaders and newspaper editors, the editor of Pravda, Viktor Afanasyev, attacked Shatrov’s play, telling Gorbachev that the text was filled with “inaccuracies” that “blackened” Soviet history. Afanasyev, like the majority of the members of the Central Committee, was a relic of the Brezhnev era, a self-proclaimed Marxist philosopher with an aristocratic passion for water skiing. He was not an editor in the Western sense. As editor of the Party daily, Afanasyev was an immensely powerful figure in the Communist hierarchy, a member of the Central Committee who often attended meetings of the Politburo. “Of course, I don’t vote,” he told me. But on his desk there was a cream-colored phone which provided the ultimate access. There were no buttons or dial on the phone, only the printed word “Gorbachev.” “All I do,” he said, “is pick it up and I’m connected.” But Gorbachev was clearly not in synch with Viktor Afanasyev. Two days after the meeting, Pravda published an attack on Shatrov, excoriating the playwright for “mistakes” and unthinkable “liberties.” On February 1, the letters department of Sovetskaya Rossiya, a particularly conservative Party paper, received a letter from a reader named Nina Andreyeva, a chemistry teacher in Leningrad and a Party member of two decades’ standing. The letter approved the paper’s own negative review of Shatrov’s play and said that an “internal process in this country and abroad” was out to “falsify” the “history of socialism.” Andreyeva wrote that the play proved that the author had “turned away from Marxist-Leninist theory” and ignored the “objective laws of history” and the “historic mission of the working class and its role in a party of the revolutionary type.” Sometime in the first week of March, the editor of the paper, Valentin Chikin, came to Vladimir Denisov’s office with a small stack of papers. Denisov was the science editor, but lately he had been handling ideology. He had good connections, too. Denisov had spent years working in the Siberian city of Tomsk when Yegor Ligachev was the party secretary there.

“Read this,” Chikin said, giving Denisov a photocopy of the original Andreyeva letter. “Let me know your opinion.” Denisov knew Chikin had undoubtedly made up his mind. Chikin was not the sort to care about an underling’s opinion.

The letter began with a scathing critique of Shatrov. Nothing unusual on the face of it. Sovetskaya Rossiya, which clearly spoke for the most conservative wing of the Communist Party, had been getting many such letters since the publication of Onward, Onward, Onward in Znamya. But Chikin came clean, according to Denisov’s account. He told Denisov that he had been forwarding the letters to Ligachev at the Central Committee’s ideology office. One morning, Chikin said, Ligachev called him on the Kremlin’s secure phone-line system—the vertushka—and said, “Valentin, what are you planning to do with this letter? It must be used in the paper!” Ligachev, for his part, would deny this. Years later, he made a great show of being honest about his role in what came to be known as the “Andreyeva Affair.” Speaking imperiously in the third person, Ligachev lied like a thief. “Okay, I’m ready to answer everything,” he told me. “The first thing is, as for the publication of this material, Ligachev had nothing to do with it.… Ligachev learned about Nina Andreyeva’s article like all readers—from reading Sovetskaya Rossiya.” But not only did Ligachev “advise” Chikin to print the letter, Denisov recounted, he also sent him an annotated copy with certain passages underlined.

Still, the piece needed improvement, sharpening, expansion. Chikin ordered Denisov to go to Leningrad and meet Andreyeva to work further on the letter. On March 8, Denisov called Andreyeva and arranged to meet her the next day. She told him to meet her on a square outside the institute where she taught.

“How will I know you?” he said.

“I’ll find you,” she said.

On the 9th, Denisov’s train pulled into Leningrad station ahead of schedule early in the morning. He was exhausted. Not to worry. Someone had reserved a room for him at the plush Smolenskaya Hotel, the hotel of the Party bosses. It would not have been in the power of an obscure chemistry teacher to make such a reservation. The Central Committee apparatus was on the case and leaving nothing to chance.

Rested now, Denisov came to the square at the appointed hour. Then he heard a voice behind him.

“Are you Denisov?”

“I’m Denisov.”

“Then let’s go,” said Nina Andreyeva.

For the rest of the day, they worked on expanding the ideas in the original letter. Denisov was no great liberal, but he was shocked to discover the depths of Andreyeva’s conservatism.

“I’m a Stalinist,” she told him in the matter-of-fact way an American might say she was a Democrat.

“Well, what about the Stalinist economic system?” he said. “Hasn’t it shown its lack of viability?” “Just the opposite. The system hasn’t had a chance to show its real capabilities.” Denisov decided not to argue. It was going to be Andreyeva’s name on the piece, not his, he figured.

The next day, on the 10th, Andreyeva gave Denisov additional material in typescript. He was surprised at how quickly she had come through. He should not have been. Nina Andreyeva was, after a fashion, a woman of letters. Years before she had been thrown out of her institute’s Party cell for writing a stream of anonymous letters condemning her colleagues for various ideological shortcomings. More recently, she’d written letters to Pravda, Sovetskaya Kultura, and other papers condemning the drift of the Gorbachev line. Just before he left for Moscow, Andreyeva told Denisov, “I trust you and the editors to make whatever changes you think are necessary. Sovetskaya Rossiya is not the sort of paper that would meddle with my thoughts.” Then she asked whether the piece really would be published.

“I am sure of it,” Denisov said. He did not reveal the source of his confidence.

The next morning at the newspaper’s offices in Moscow, Chikin said, “Have you brought it?” Chikin seemed as excited as a schoolboy on his birthday.

“I’ve got it,” Denisov said.

“Good. We’ll put it in Sunday’s paper.” That was just two days away, March 13, just as Gorbachev would be preparing to leave for an important trip to Yugoslavia. Aleksandr Yakovlev, Ligachev’s ideological opponent, would be leaving for Mongolia. In Gorbachev’s absence, Ligachev was the first among equals in the Politburo. His influence in the Central Committee was, perhaps, even greater. Gorbachev had put Ligachev in charge of personnel, and there were dozens of men in the Central Committee who owed their jobs to Yegor Kuzmich Ligachev.

Chikin himself came up with the headline for the piece: “I Cannot Forsake Principles.” With unguarded irony, Andreyeva had used the phrase in her piece. It came from Gorbachev’s speech to a Central Committee plenum in 1987: “We must act, led by our Marxist-Leninist principles. Comrades, we can never forsake our principles under any pretext.” At the Saturday-afternoon editorial meeting, Chikin told the staff he’d be putting the Andreyeva piece on page three of the Sunday edition. No one gave it much thought. It was a relatively lazy day at the office, a day to chat, drink tea, and keep the paper moving along. Some of the editors did not bother even to read the proofs. They should have. The text, a full page in the paper, was a complete contradiction of everything Mikhail Gorbachev, Aleksandr Yakovlev, and the liberal intelligentsia had been saying for more than a year. The Andreyeva article, Yakovlev would say later, was “nothing less than a call to arms, a counterrevolution.” “The subject of repressions,” Andreyeva wrote, “has been blown out of all proportion in some young people’s imagination and overshadows any objective interpretation of the past.” Stalin may have made some “mistakes,” but who else could have built the country so quickly, prepared it for the great victory against the Nazis? The country, she said, was suffering from “ideological confusion, loss of political bearings, even ideological omnivorousness.” Shatrov, of course, came in for scathing criticism for daring to deviate “substantially from the accepted principles of socialist realism.” “They try to make us believe that the country’s past was nothing but mistakes and crimes,” Andreyeva wrote, “keeping silent about the greatest achievements of the past and the present.” There were also some less-than-subtle anti-Semitic remarks, especially to carve up Trotsky, émigrés, and the intelligentsia. “There is no question that the [Stalin era] was extremely harsh. But we prepared people for labor and defense without destroying their spiritual worlds with masterpieces imported from abroad or with home-grown imitations of mass culture. Imaginary relatives were in no hurry to invite their fellow tribesmen to the ‘promised land’ turning them into ‘refuseniks’ of socialism.” The piece ran on Sunday, March 13, and within hours, telegrams of support started pouring into the Sovetskaya Rossiya offices from war veterans and local Party offices. Chikin boasted to Denisov that even Gorbachev’s own military adviser, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, had phoned to say that he “fully supported” the piece.

On the same day, in Ligachev’s home city of Tomsk, Shatrov’s play had its national stage premier. A great battle for history had begun.

On the morning of the 14th, with Gorbachev in the air to Belgrade, Ligachev used his position as ideologist to call a meeting of the leading editors and broadcast agencies. He did not invite the two best-known liberal editors, Yegor Yakovlev of Moscow News and Vitaly Korotich of Ogonyok magazine. Chikin came back from the meeting at the Kremlin beaming. He told Denisov and other editors that Ligachev had told everyone to read the article by Nina Andreyeva, which “in all respects,” Ligachev had said, “is a wonderful document.” Ligachev also told the head of the Tass news agency to put out the word to all provincial papers across the country that the leadership “recommended” they reprint the Andreyeva letter. By the by, Ligachev said, he was hoping that the Central Committee would soon pass a resolution “not allowing destabilization in the country.” “I was in Mongolia and Mikhail Sergeyevich was in Yugoslavia,” Yakovlev recalled years later on Russian TV. “They phoned me from Moscow that the article had appeared. It was quickly sent to me; my aide telephoned Irkutsk, and they sent it and I read it. Well, my reaction was understandable.… I know the ways of the apparatus—and I knew it had been clearly sanctioned. Such an article could not appear without being sanctioned by the leadership, because this was indeed an anti-perestroika manifesto. It was meant to overturn everything that had been conceived in 1985. What especially surprised me was the form in which it was done.… It had a firm, sort of Stalinist accusatory form as in the style on the front pages of our old newspapers. In other words, there was a shout of command. You know, if this had been an average article based on this theme, I would not have paid any attention. But this was a harsh bellow of a command: ‘Stop! Everything is over!’ I returned to Moscow the same day.…” For the next three weeks, as the infighting within the Politburo developed, the liberal intelligentsia fell into a state of despair. Ogonyok’s editor, Korotich, half in jest, but only half, told friends he was keeping a packed bag handy in case there was a knock at the door. A few editors went to Aleksandr Yakovlev saying they wanted to respond. Cryptically, Yakovlev told them to wait.

There was really only one instance of outright protest. On March 23, a friend of Shatrov’s, the playwright Aleksandr Gelman, stood up at a Party cell meeting at the Filmmakers’ Union and said the neo-Stalinist attack in Sovetskaya Rossiya was designed to prolong the current system and its millions of Party bureaucrats. The Party apparatchiks, Gelman said, wanted only a slight tinkering with the system, a moderate, technocratic liberalization instead of a genuine democratization which would redistribute power. Such a liberalization, he said, was merely an “open fist,” a kinder, gentler version of business as usual. The Filmmakers’ Union, by far the most liberal in Moscow, endorsed Gelman’s statement and sent it on to the Central Committee.

Provincial editors, though, understood the Andreyeva letter to be an official change of course, and very few dared ignore it. As Ligachev had hoped, the article ran in papers across the Soviet Union. One signal that the old Communist guard was on Ligachev’s side came from as far away as East Berlin. East Germany’s version of Pravda, Neues Deutschland, published “I Cannot Forsake Principles” in its April 2 edition. The Party apparatus in Moscow also gave signs of waging an underground agitprop campaign. Moscow News reported that conservatives were passing out unsigned leaflets, including one called “Information for Reflection” that said that perestroika would lead to “economic disaster and social upheaval and then to the country’s enslavement by imperialist states.” “It was a terrifying time,” said Yegor Yakovlev, the editor of Moscow News. “Absolutely everything we had ever hoped for and dreamed of was on the line.” Lost in all of this was the woman herself.

Nina Aleksandrovna Andreyeva lived on Komintern Street in the Leningrad suburb of Peterhof. All day tour buses roared to and from the czar’s summer palace about a mile away. On Komintern Street, though, it was quiet. The shops were empty. The air was still and redolent of gasoline.

I knocked at her door.

Andreyeva opened the door and invited me in. Somehow she did not fit the role of a polemicist, not physically anyway. With her hair swept up in a loaf, her eyes narrow and darting deep within the plump meat of her face, she looked rather more like a head nurse, a starched and angry woman of fifty trying, when the occasion demanded, to be nice. I’d called ahead, but she seemed to have forgotten my last name. I reminded her. Smiling stiffly, she repeated the two syllables, sifting through them for ethnic clues, shifting the accent fore and aft, searching for a nugget of recognition. She was too polite, though, to ask any questions. Finding nothing, she smiled and invited her guest to sit down to tea and a box of candy.

I had decided on the way that it was best not to break with the custom of foreigners visiting Russians. Nina Andreyeva was nothing if not a traditionalist. And so I presented her with a box of German chocolates and a $7 bottle of Bordeaux.

“How lovely,” Nina Aleksandrovna said.

She lived in the smallest apartment I had ever seen. There was a minuscule kitchen and, next to it, a room the size of a king-size bed that served as living room, dining room, and bedroom. There were books all over, Party histories and the like, and a huge box of letters. Seven thousand of them, she said, and nearly all in support.

For a while, the discussion buzzed this way and that, confused, frenetic, like a wasp caught between double-paned windows. The train trip from Moscow. The weather. The remarkably low price of books. The train trip again. Finally the talk alighted, somehow, on rock-and-roll.

“Do you like it much?” I asked.

Nina Aleksandrovna’s eyes widened just a bit, scandalized. Rock was “mindless rhythms,” she said, songs that were “half-animal, indecent imitations of sex.” She’d read in the Leningrad magazines about a singer named Yuri Shevchuk. “He sings a song called ‘Premonition of a Civil War.’ What in God’s name is that? I saw this picture of him, showing him dancing, and he’s wearing a pair of cutoff jeans and a waistcoat with his belly button showing. Okay, let him do it, but excuse me, everything was unbuttoned so his chest was showing and, down below, his male dignity was protruding! He is dancing with his male thing jutting out in front of all those young girls. How can you talk about purity anymore after that?” The question seemed to ring in the air, unanswered. Then Nina Aleksandrovna enlarged on her point. “The thing is, we may not need an iron hand, but in any state there must be order,” she said, her voice rising to meet the higher theme. “This is not a state we have now, it is like some anarchistic gathering. When there is such a gathering, there is no state, no order, no nothing. A state, above all, means order, order, order.” The labels of public life had long ago become meaningless in the Soviet Union. If Mikhail Gorbachev had been a politician in the late 1920s and had gone around Moscow peddling privatization of farms, democratization of the government and the Communist Party, free markets, and the rest of the pretty-colored bottles in the sales case called perestroika, he would have been branded, with Bukharin, a right-wing deviationist. And then they would have put him up against a wall.

“Now ‘right’ is left and ‘left’ is right and no one knows what anything means anymore. Who is who?” Nina Aleksandrovna said. She rolled her eyes like an exasperated teenager.

Her husband, Vladimir Ivanovich Klushin, a whey-faced scholar of “Marxist-Leninist concepts,” sat across the small card table, interrupting every so often until his wife resumed her train of thought and cut him off. He tried to put in his two cents on the left-right problem, but she would not hear of it.

“Volodya, quiet. I’ll tell it, thank you,” she said.

“You see, if Bukharin had been our leader,” she went on, “there would have been no Soviet Union today. The Soviet Union would have been destroyed completely during World War II. Bukharin as a personality was fine, a good man. He went skiing with his students in the hills, and anyone could talk with him. But he lacked character and principles. He was for collective farms, but only step by step. He would have dragged it out until the fifties. But if there’d been no collective farms in the beginning of the thirties, then in 1941 we would have been destroyed. Demolished.” And with that, Nina Aleksandrovna smiled queerly and poured out tea and a few tiny glasses of cognac.

Since 1985, she said, the country had been awaiting the results of Gorbachev’s reforms. Where were they? “During four years of Lenin, the country succeeded in revolution and won the Civil War and we were saved from foreign invaders. In four years under Stalin, the people rebuffed the Nazi attack and became a part of the vanguard of nations. Approximately the same amount of time was needed to heal the wounds after the war and achieve the prewar levels of production.” And what of perestroika, the “brainchild of the liberal intelligentsia”? Humbug. “The political structure of an antisocialist movement is taking place in the form of democratic unions and popular fronts. The number of ecological disasters is growing. There is a decline in the level of morality. There is a cult of money. The prestige of honest, productive labor has been undermined. We have also aggravated the situation of our socialist brethren. Poland and Hungary are running ahead of us, straight toward the abyss.” It was these feelings of horror, the fearful sense that the country had lost its way and was sprinting hellbent for oblivion, that caused Nina Aleksandrovna Andreyeva to write her famous letter. In her way, she was a defender of “traditional values”—the homey Stalinist verities of collectivization, central authority, the dictatorship of the proletariat. She said she had begun thinking about writing after reading two articles on politics and Afghanistan by Aleksandr Prokhanov in the conservative tabloid Literaturnaya Rossiya and the labor paper Leningradsky Rabochy. Prokhanov romanticized the Afghan adventure, made it seem like a great imperial quest. She approved, but found them “wanting.” Nina Aleksandrovna left me with her husband, tied an apron around her thick waist, and retreated to the kitchen. She prepared an enormous lunch of salads, roast potatoes, vegetables, and meat and only occasionally ducked her head into the sitting room to punctuate her husband’s sentences.

While Nina Aleksandrovna cooked, the windows steamed and Vladimir Ivanovich came to life once more. He had been mostly silent in her presence, having learned the price of his wife’s celebrity and severity. In her absence he was unbound. As he unleashed a great tirade on the “tremendous value of Stalin,” I had the feeling that he was speaking for them both. Where she would temper her comments about Stalin, Vladimir Ivanovich was unapologetic. His lack of fame loosened his tongue.

“What is the younger generation learning from the liberal magazines like Yunost and Ogonyok? That Stalin was a paranoiac, a sadist, a skirt-chaser, a drinker, a criminal. They try to equate him with Mao Zedong, as if there were no achievements under Stalin.

“As for the repressions, I cannot talk about their scale. Because now people just feel free to present any old figure. Khrushchev, when he was working on the commission about those times, found that eight hundred and seventy thousand were repressed in this country. This is a lot, but it is not a million, not twenty million or fifty million as some people are trying to say it was. Everything now is based on inventions and concoctions.

“Look,” Klushin said sternly, “in a struggle there are always victims. But I was at the front in 1943. I knew common soldiers, officers. And they treated Stalin differently.… The majority of our farmers and intellectuals respected Stalin. At any holiday, people drank their first drink to the commander in chief, to Stalin. No one was forced to do that.

“My own father was repressed according to Article 58 of the criminal code. So what of it?” Vladimir Ivanovich told the story of how his father, an engineer, had lost “some kind of state secret or another” during the war. He was sent to a labor camp for ten years. It was harsh punishment for “a slip-up,” he conceded, “but, after all, he was to blame for something.” “You,” he said, pointing at me with a wagging finger, “you represent a younger generation. Ask your parents who might have fought in the war. During that time, man’s life was not as valuable as it is now. In this country, we had war from 1914 to 1917, then again in 1918 to 1921. In wartime, when perhaps a simple punishment is enough, people are executed. This is very cruel … but had there not been such cruelty, everyone would have just run around in different directions. Sometimes brutality can be justified.” The lunch was hot, long, and filling. Russian reactionaries, I had been discovering, were fine cooks. Nina Aleksandrovna was exceptional. Considering Leningrad was almost empty of food and the provinces were worse, the lunch was a miracle of shopping and preparation.

As she savored her own meal, Nina Aleksandrovna sat back in a hard chair and talked of her life.

“I was born October 12, 1938, in Leningrad to a simple family,” she began. “I was baptized and still remember the church bells at Easter. They elevated you to great heights. But I believe in reality. Religion is just a wonderful fairy tale that while we suffer here, tomorrow will be better. Communism is based on your real actions, on what you have done today.

“My parents were peasants from the Kalinin region of central Russia. In 1929, when the famines started, they escaped to the city. My father, my mother, and my elder brother all joined the ranks of the proletariat. My father had only four years of education and my mother less. My mother’s family had been considered middle-class. They had ten children, they had a horse and a rowboat with a little motor. There was a cow, too, but the children were always half-starved.

“At the start of the war, my mother dug trenches in Leningrad. She and one of my sisters worked in a hospital where the wounded soldiers came. I was three years old when I was evacuated from the city with two of my brothers and their school class. Mama left Leningrad on the very last train out of the city. After that, all links with Leningrad were broken.

“My eldest sister went to the front and was killed in 1943 at Donbass. Her husband, a commissar with an antitank battalion, was killed a week after she was. My father was at the Leningrad front, and my eldest brother was also at war.

“My sisters and mother and I lived in a place called Uglich until 1944. It was a communal apartment, twenty-two or twenty-four square meters, that we shared with two other families. There was a table—I always wondered why it wasn’t used for firewood—and an empty bed and nothing else. No bowl, no spoon, no glasses. Absolutely zero. We were loyal and kept a ‘red corner,’ a place for a portrait of Lenin; the same place where Christians used to keep their icons. One day they came and told us that my brother and my father, who had been in the artillery battalion, had been killed at the front.

“In 1953, back in Leningrad, we heard the news that Stalin had died. I was in the sixth or seventh form. It was a time of total mourning. All the children stood in a line as the director spoke to us about Stalin. All the teachers were crying. The deputy master of the school was sobbing so hard she could not speak. We all stood there, holding back our own tears. It was a gloomy day, a spring day without sun. We put on our coats and went out onto Nevsky Prospekt to the monument of Catherine the Great. Funeral music was playing on all the radios. Everyone was sad, and everyone was thinking about the same question: What will we do now?” There was a catch in her throat. For a moment, Nina Aleksandrovna could not go on telling the story of her life. Then she raised her head and waved it all off, half angry, half sad. Why continue the story, after all? It seemed that nothing would fulfill Nina Aleksandrovna’s hopes. Khrushchev was a failure, a debunker of Stalin. Brezhnev was corrupt and a fool. Now she was living through an age when dissidents were suddenly dominant, legal voices, and Stalin was compared to Hitler on national television. When Nina Aleksandrovna considered it, her eyes narrowed; a stony anger overtook her.

“Stalin is the leader under whose leadership the country built socialism for thirty years,” she said. “We were poor, illiterate people shod in slippers. The majority of the peasants were so poor they could hardly exist from harvest to harvest.

“Our media are lying about Stalin now. They are blackening our history and erasing the world of millions of people who were building socialism in terrible conditions. We are saying, ‘Look at how awful our lives were.’ Well, our lives were hard, but everyone had the belief that we would live better and our children and grandchildren would live better still. People with nothing could achieve something. And now what? Now do we have such trust and faith in the future? I think in the four years of perestroika, they have undermined the trust of working people—I emphasize working people, decent, normal people—because they have spit on our past.

“An unpredictable future cannot be a basis for a normal working existence of the current generation. In the past, a person going to bed at night knew that in the morning he’d go to work and have free medical care—not very skilled care, but free nonetheless. And now we don’t even have these guarantees.” We cleared the dishes and took a walk along Komintern Street. The meal had been fine, the talk clear and frank, but by now something had gone very wrong. For a while Nina Aleksandrovna’s opinions seemed mainly those of a woman of her particular age and circumstances. She had been poor, she’d lost a brother, her father. She had survived, and all in the name of Stalin. Guarded from real accounts of history, Nina Aleksandrovna made sense to herself, just as so many people had made sense to themselves for so long. But now she was faced with an avalanche of contradictions, an army of “pseudo-intellectuals” telling her that the history of Bolshevism was a litany of horror, and this she could not, and would not, accept. Although she was merely a tool, a curiosity, in a greater political struggle, Nina Aleksandrovna seemed to think that she herself was the lead crusader of the party, its Saint Joan.

Late afternoon was coming on, the long-shadowed moment in the day. But just before the conversation turned into the timeworn suburban ritual of helping the guest figure out the quickest way back to the city—the electric train? the ferry across the gulf?—Nina Aleksandrovna somehow slid into the subject of Jews. She had not been asked. She knew there were subjects to avoid with a stranger, especially an American journalist. It was as if she had been driving and had suddenly fallen asleep and lost control: “Switch on Leningrad TV,” she said. “If you watch it you see that they are mainly praising Jews, whether you like it or not. They may call the person ‘Russian,’ but that is only for naive people. If they show a Russian on TV, they’ll always find a fool with horrible bug eyes and protruding teeth. A caricature. Then they’ll show an artist, a painter, who is supposedly a representative of Russian art. But excuse me, he is not Russian. He is a Jew.

“In our society there are less than one percent Jews. That’s just a very few. So then why is the Academy of Sciences in all its branches, all the prestigious professions and posts in culture, music, law—why are they almost all Jews? Look at the essayists and the journalists. Jews, mostly. At our institute, people of all different nationalities defend their theses. But Jews do it illegally. We can see that the work they hand over is a simple dissertation, but they insist that they have made a world-class discovery. And there’s nothing in it at all. This is how the department is formed.

“Certain Zionist organizations are carrying out their work here. You have to take that into account. They are clever conspirators. I know that our Leningrad professors—I got this information from someone who is no longer at the institute—they go once a month to the synagogue and give them money on the day they get their salary. This goes on. This is constant mutual aid. In such a way, the Jewish people keep getting into the institute.

“You are not even allowed to say someone is a Jew. You aren’t even supposed to pronounce the word! You can say Russian, Ukrainian, so why not Jew? Does it diminish the person? Why hide him behind some other nationality? ‘Jew’ and ‘Zionist’ mean different things, but all Zionists are Jews. Life has proved this, and not just to me.

“Among our friends, there are some wonderful Jews. In our society, there are some interesting Jews, clever professors, economists, and they don’t accept the political positions now being advertised. Do you understand?” Of course, I said. I understood.

Nina Aleksandrovna looked around a bit. At first she seemed a bit surprised by her own outburst, and then she gave a quick nod, as if to say, “Well, so I said it. So what?” We kept walking. In the czar’s summer gardens, no one knew Nina Aleksandrovna. They knew her name, perhaps, but not her face. In high heels and a white outfit that made her seem even more the head nurse, she had a proud strut, and her husband kept pace, describing this fountain, that historic bench. At one point the talk was of beauty and then beauty contests in the Soviet Union, a new phenomenon. Nina Aleksandrovna made a face that one would have thought she saved specially for rock-and-roll.

“The most beautiful thing in a woman is her charms and femininity, the richness of her soul, her purity. She must clean and purify a man, to lead and raise him to something higher, to take away from him all that is wild and animal. In the sex act, she must enrich him, raise him above animal desire. These girls, they strip themselves down to their God-knows-what, and wiggle their backsides.” After that, we walked along in silence. What more could be said? This was the woman, I thought, who was the ideologist’s ideologist. She was both pawn and theoretician, no more ignorant than her sponsors, just less of a politician. At last, we reached the ferry dock. As I climbed into the boat, Nina Aleksandrovna waved and then turned toward home, her face to the palace of the czars and her back to the West.

By the beginning of April, Gorbachev and Yakovlev were beginning to win their battle. Perhaps for the last time, they were able to rely on the key authoritarian principle of the Party—Party discipline—to bring the conservatives to heel. Even though the reformers were in a minority in both the Politburo and the Central Committee, Gorbachev was able to manipulate the situation so that defiance of the general secretary would be impermissible. They still had control over the main party newspaper, Pravda, and they began to prepare an article that would make it clear that the “Andreyeva coup” and its sponsors had lost.

“The Politburo spent two days going over this article,” Yakovlev said. “All the members of the Politburo had their say and expressed their views. Mikhail Sergeyevich’s opening remarks were very harsh—he gave a severe assessment of the article—and as a result, as it always happens with us, with our very high sense of principle and probity, everyone agreed with his view!” Ligachev recalled that two-day-long session of the Politburo as a “witch-hunt in the spirit of [Stalin].” He said that before the meetings began, several members of the Politburo expressed support for the Andreyeva article, but folded under pressure from Yakovlev and Gorbachev.

Gorbachev’s article, as drafted by Yakovlev, denounced those who would “put the brakes” on perestroika or indulge in “nostalgia” for the old order. It ran on page three of Pravda on April 5. As they read the text that morning, the liberals in Moscow, from Dima Yurasov to Yuri Afanasyev to Yegor Yakovlev, all breathed a little easier for the first time in three weeks.

“It has proved harder than we had presumed to rid ourselves of old thoughts and actions, but there is no turning back,” Yakovlev wrote in the Pravda piece. “The [Sovetskaya Rossiya] article is dominated by an essentially fatalistic perception of history which is totally removed from a genuinely scientific perception of it, by a tendency to justify everything that has happened in terms of historical necessity. But the cult [of Stalin] was not inevitable. It is alien to the nature of socialism and only became possible because of deviations from fundamental socialist principles.” Just after the affair was over, Gorbachev and Yakovlev pretended it had never happened. When asked about Ligachev, they said that all was well and unanimous in the Politburo. To state otherwise would be to mouth the lies of the Western press and its intelligence organs. But long after, Yakovlev would be more candid. “Did you notice that the article against Nina Andreyeva in Pravda didn’t even mention her name? That’s not by chance,” he told me. “It was all part of a process that snowballed. Besides, we knew how the whole thing had been organized, who was behind it, who revised the article, who went to see her in Leningrad. Had it been just some lady named Nina Andreyeva writing an article that somebody published, it would have been different. The article in response did not mention her because it was not addressed to her.” In private, Yakovlev urged Gorbachev once more to reconsider his attitude toward the Communist Party. In December 1985, Yakovlev had written a confidential memo to Gorbachev asking him to consider splitting the Communist Party and then siding with the more liberal faction. After all, the Andreyeva affair had already proved just how deep the splits actually were. There could be no acceleration of change while the dead weight of the Party apparatchiks hung on the shoulders of the reformers. Eventually, Yakovlev insisted, they would have to consider the idea not only of two or three Communist parties but of a true multiparty system.

Sooner or later, Yakovlev knew, the Party would have to break with its own history, or it would collapse entirely. The Party was filled with ministers and apparatchiks who swore their fealty to the general secretary, but they were always prepared to betray him in the name of the System. Years later, in retirement, Gorbachev would admit that even he did not understand fully the “monster” he was trying to transform. “At least Ligachev was out in the open,” he would say. There were others who would pretend loyalty and then send tanks into the streets of Moscow.