Remnick sat by the Soviet deathbed from early 1988 to the end of 1991 as a Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post. Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (576 pages. Random House. $25) is the best group portrait yet produced of the people who, wittingly or otherwise, brought down the Soviet Union: the daring reformers, the stoic dissidents, the nostalgic Stalinists, the diehard apparatchiks. Remnick, 34, who now writes for The New Yorker, is a gifted storyteller and a master of the short profile. His account is almost devoid of systemic analysis; he deals in people and anecdotes, painting an epic canvas one small figure at a time.
Among his most memorable portraits are those of Andrei Sakharov, the towering moral figure of the time; Yevgeny Djugashvili, Stalin’s bombastic grandson, and Aleksandr Yakovlev, the mastermind of perestroika, who eventually abandoned both Gorbachev and communism. Remnick even portrays the state itself as an all-too-human creature: “In the years after Stalin’s death, the state was an old tyrant slouched in the corner with cataracts and gallstones, his muscles gone slack. He wore plastic shoes and a shiny suit that stank of sweat. He hogged all the food and fouled his pants.”
As communism crumbled, it lost the power to command belief in its own version of history. Glasnost turned a merciless light on both the vast atrocities of the regime and its small, shabby lies. Even Lenin’s tomb on Red Square was revealed to be a Potemkin shrine, with the founder’s pickled body hooked up to laboratory monitors while guards worked out in an underground gym. “The idea of some pimply kid from Chelyabinsk doing squat thrusts in the bowels of sacred territory somehow erased all mystery,” writes Remnick.
The principal agent for Moscow’s fatal loss of innocence was Mikhail Gorbachev. A genius at manipulating the levers of Soviet power, he did not intend to destroy the system; he wanted to reform it in order to save it. But Gorbachev “opened the gate… And the lion of history came roaring in,” Remnick writes. Until it was far too late, Gorbachev remained a Party man, caving in to the hard-liners when he should have sided with the advocates of real democracy. By the time of the abortive coup in August 1991, Leonid Batkin, a leader of the democrats, could dismiss him as “an outstanding man in his way, a great apparatchik,” adding: “Now, he is not really interesting.”
Remnick’s vivid description of the coup, and Boris Yeltsin’s heroic resistance to it, is one of the high points of the book. But it is Gorbachev’s epochal miscalculation that has the most poignance. Even after the coup, he was still doggedly promoting perestroika. “The Party is dead,” Yakovlev told him angrily. “Why can’t you see that? Talk about ‘renewal’ is senseless. It’s like offering first aid to a corpse!” Describing the breakup of a monolithic system, Remnick persuades us that the collapse of communism was above all a human failure.
