Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

The book is a compilation of short stories (each chapter a dozen pages or so) about the author's first-hand experiences in the Gorbachev's Soviet Union. From Baltic to Sakhalin and from coal miners to Gorbachev himself, from Stalin to Yeltsin and from Solzhenitsyn to Sakharov, the book paints the picture of the monolith's fall. This colorful collage describing the critical period in Russian history, combined with keen commentary, creates for the reader the distinct flavor of the time. For Russia, it was the age of confusion and disillusionment. Gorbachev's half-hearted reforms (the interest in truth ended where the Party interests were concerned, the pursuit of democracy gave way to the pursuit of the runaway republics etc.) were matched by the half-hearted '91 coup (no real plan, no propaganda with the military, Lenin wouldn't have approved). For generations, Russian people did not know much of the sad history of their country and less still about the life in the West. The blissful ignorance was one thing that helped them in their miserable existence. Their various degrees of belief in the grand ideals were the other. With glasnost, Gorbachev aimed at opening the gates of truth while preserving the faith. In all honesty, it was impossible: the foundation for the faith was thoroughly rotten and relaxing the state control of mass media could only reveal it. All of a sudden, millions of people had to face hard evidence showing that the glorious history of their country never was. That the Bolshevik revolution was but a ruthless coup followed by a bloody terror. That many national heroes, all the way to Lenin, were privilege- and power-hungry maniacs. The Russian people had to go (and are still going) through an incredible adjustment of their understanding of right and wrong, brought about by a mere possibility of truth in the phrase of Molotov (himself not the most impeccable politician): "Compared to Lenin Stalin was a mere lamb". Similarly, it was a hard realization for many a soviet man that in the late 80's "an average Soviet had to work 10 times longer than the average American to buy a pound of meat". The full awareness of their tragic history and miserable reality must make it so much more difficult for Russian people to live in the country which is overwhelmingly corrupt, lawless and poor. Remnick's parents and in-laws, all four having escaped from the old empire, could not imagine going back even for a visit, apparently having no faith in the Russian democratic changeover. On the other side of the ocean, the Russian military colonel excavating the Katyn massacre site, by disobeying direct orders from a KGB general to stop the work, believed in the prevalence of positive change in Russia. Today's Russia, with its authoritarian government and shady political and legal process, still leaves its democratic future a matter of faith. By way of some criticism, Gorbachev brought about an incredible change. His glasnost and personal presence revived the anemic (or galvanized the non-existent) political forces unheard of in a largely Brezhnev-era Russia. He fought many of the first battles alone. The book does not make a case for that. Glasnost provided food for the hungry Soviet mind, but perestroika, restructuring, was supposed to change the way Soviet people live. The book could have benefited from taking on perestroika in some detail. Overall, very enjoyable and engaging.

David Remnick reported on site for the WASHINGTON POST during the Soviet Union's last days. He interviewed many persons, from society's bottom to society's top, from homeless derelict to Mikhail Gorbachev. That and his readable prose help explain how he won the Pulitzer. Of course it also helped that he was against totalitarianism and for humanity. When I read history I prefer a firm grip on the date. Overall, this story does flow in chronological order from 1988 to 1992, or to 1994 if you get the most recent edition with its afterword. But the story jumps backward occasionally when Remnick tells the history of a character, and at other moments I was vague on the date. I think chapters should have been subheaded with dates, and more spots within chapters should have stated the date. Nevertheless, do not let my preceding quibble deter you. I think this book is already something of a classic, and I'll be darned if I'm going to give it anything less than five stars. Does another book do as well as what this book does, which is put you into the scene of the collapse of the vast Soviet empire? I would have advised Mr. Remnick to include a double-paged map of the U.S.S.R. and a glossary of names, events, and institutions. We do get source notes, bibliography, index, a list of interviews, and twenty-two pages of relevant photos. The Vintage trade-paperback edition is over five hundred pages in small font. So be ready for something to settle back with. It will be worth a portion of the limited time you have in life. The story and the people are phenomenal, and they will expand your existential horizon.

“In the years after Stalin’s death, the state was an old tyrant slouched in a corner with cataracts and gallstones, muscles gone slack. He wore plastic shoes and a shiny suit that stank of sweat. He hogged all the food and fouled his pants. In the mornings his tongue was coated with the ash taste of age. He mumbled and didn’t care. His thoughts drifted like storm clouds and came clear only a few times a year to recite the old legends of Great October and the Patriotic War. The state was nearly senile but still dangerous enough. He kept the border key in his pocket and ruled every function of public life. Now and then he had fits and the world trembled. A magnificent life support system of agents, informers, police, wardens, lawyers and judges worked at his bedside to keep the old tyrant breathing.” - David Remnick, ‘Lenin’s Tomb’ ************ David Remnick won the Pulitzer Prize for ‘Lenin’s Tomb’ in 1994, and became editor of the New Yorker in 1998. Prior to that he wrote as a Washington Post Moscow correspondent for four years, from 1988 through the end of the Soviet Union. He draws from interviews and personal experiences of his time in Russia, as well as historical research. The book is a journalistic account and benefits from it. Remnick begins with the 1991 exhumation of 22,000 Polish people who were murdered by Stalin’s KGB in 1940. The work is ordered to stop as a coup against parliament is staged by right wing military forces. Russians became deluged with information that had been suppressed about the Stalinist dictatorship. Glasnost Remnick tells of his arrival in Moscow at an apartment with bugged rooms, little heat or hot water, slush and ice eight months of the year. He has a casual voice, at times comic, which doesn’t detract from the serious issues that he covers; endless wait lists for apartments, lack of services and empty shelves. With glasnost came protests and criticism of the government, something unheard of before. People read about wars in Chechnya and Afghanistan, the literature of George Orwell, and Robert Conquest on the Great Terror and Famine. Children of Khruschev’s thaw, Politiburo members were intent to save the structure of socialism, but cheating, loafing and double dealing were endemic to the system. Dissidents Remnick attends meetings in 1988 of Moscow intellectuals who give speeches and debate a future society. He discusses the ‘return of history’ during Gorbachev’s tenure. Without an assessment of the past a transition to the future wouldn’t be sustainable. It was proven in Khrushchev’s 1956 reforms being reversed by Brezhnev in 1964. A historian collects the data of people who died in state custody. A filmmaker shoots a movie where a daughter digs up the dictator’s corpse who killed her father. On the 70th anniversary of the Revolution Gorbachev gives a speech denouncing Stalin for eliminating ten of thirteen original Bolshevik leaders, two thirds of the Central Committee and thousands of Red Army commanders. Survivors Remnick meets with the Litvinov family, whose grandfather had been a foreign minister under Stalin, and his dissident grandson. Leading a protest in Red Square against the 1968 invasion of Prague, he was exiled to Siberia for five years. In an upscale apartment block reserved for Party apparatchiks is the last member of Stalin’s inner circle. Remnick pursues an interview with Kaganovich, the People’s Commissar who had deported millions to labor camps. He was then a 96 year old blind man. Remnick’s grandparents escaped Russia on foot, fleeing from the Tsar’s pograms of Jews. When they heard he was learning Russian in high school, and planned to live in Moscow, they concluded he was out of his mind. Terror Remnick visits Anna Larina, the wife of Nicolai Bukharin, a General Secretary executed by Stalin in 1938. Gorbachev and others co-opted his ideas for a mixed economy and a limited pluralism as a model for perestroika reforms. She had waited decades for his rehabilitation, imprisoned as the wife of an enemy of the people. Bukharin’s confession in the 1936 show trial was an indictment of Stalin, used by Arthur Koestler in his ‘Darkness at Noon’. Anna remained in exile until the late 1950’s for refusing to denounce her husband. During 1988 Bukharin and nineteen of his ‘conspirators’ had convictions posthumously overturned. The news made world headlines, Anna emerged for interviews, publishing a memoir in 1991. Repression Remnick describes a play that mocked Lenin, sanctioned by the liberal faction. A controversial letter from an old Stalinist woman is circulated in papers, approved of by conservatives. Meeting her in St. Petersburg, she argues ‘If Gorbachev was alive in the 1930’s we would have put him up against a wall.’ The right wing answered criticism of Stalin with widespread attacks against Jews and the intelligentsia. In 1989 100,000 Jews emigrated to Israel and the West. Remnick meets with a physician who survived Stalin’s ‘Doctor’s Plot’. He describes his experiences from the Tsar’s time until 1989. Stalin was preparing mass deportations of Jews to labor camps when he luckily died in 1953. Nothing much had changed for the Jews. Perestroika Remnick follows activists for a memorial to Stalin’s victims. In the five years after 1935 twenty million were arrested; of those seven million were executed. They were supported by Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear scientist and 1975 Nobel Peace Prize winner who promoted nuclear disarmament, peace and human rights. The economy was in shambles, the Politburo divided between hardliners and reformers. At a democracy conference Boris Yeltsin called for more radical change but Gorbachev stood by his belief in socialism. Baltic movements for independence were a threat to the Soviet Union, calls for private property a betrayal of ideals. By 1990 polls showed only 20% of Russians believed socialism was still viable. Connections Remnick provides sketches of Gorbachev and Sakharov, meeting with their families and friends. Gorbachev came from a poor village the Caucasus, a hardworking farmer’s son and top scholar who migrated to Moscow to study law. Sakharov was the co-inventor of the nuclear bomb that first exploded in Kazakhstan in 1953, five months after Stalin’s death. Both had family connections with people who died in labor camps, and Stalin’s demise marked a turning point in their lives. Each were believers in communist doctrine who began to question Stalinism. Gorbachev released Sakharov from exile in 1986 and he returned to Moscow, resuming his dissident activities, as Gorbachev worked within the system. Corruption Remnick revisits the years after Khrushchev was overthrown by Brezhnev in 1964. A pervasive system of corruption took the place of ideology. From the lowest levels of industry and agriculture, kickbacks flowed all the way up to the Kremlin and Brezhnev himself. Positions in government and business were for sale at established prices and the Politburo was run like the mafia. Remnick meets Party bosses in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan who had been ousted by Gorbachev. Yeltsin, fired from the Politburo for criticizing slow paced reforms, denounced corruption within the Party. His popular appeal sparked protests and political action groups. The rise of private enterprise was another threat to Party business. Poverty Remnick notes a great oil boom had kept the economy afloat until the mid ‘80s. By 1988, destitution, homelessness and decrepitude were everywhere. Before the Revolution Russia had been ranked 7th in per capita consumption, now 77th. The large majority lived below the poverty line and began to connect it with failure of the Party. Glasnost made mention of its failures permissible. In Central Asia infant death rates were as high as 1 in 10, typically underreported. Remnick visits Turkmenistan to see the conditions for himself. Even with glasnost the local Party bosses repressed free speech. Planners in Moscow had turned cotton into a monoculture, drained the Aral Sea and poisoned people with pesticides. Elections Remnick travels around to the first elections for Gorbachev’s new Congress in 1989, as demonstrating students in Beijing were massacred. It was still a one party system, often with one candidate in rural areas, but in Moscow and large cities democracy fever ran high. Party Congress was a two week affair, televised for the first time. Nearly everyone in Russia had state issued televisions, essential in past propaganda. A month later massive demonstrations and strikes rocked the Kremlin from Ukraine to Siberia, dispelling the illusion of a gradual revolution. Workers who had lived in desperate conditions and never dared to protest rose in hundreds of thousands, overflowing into the city squares and streets. Dissolution Remnick recounts rebellion of Soviet Republics from Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan. Gorbachev thought that he could replace local leaders with Russians, but this only increased the calls for independence. His visit to East Berlin sparked a revolt that tore down the Wall within weeks. With Lech Walesa in Poland and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia socialist states began to secede one by one. Nationalists in Ukraine’s city of Lviv promised the second largest republic of the USSR would be independent. Lenin had once written: “For us to lose the Ukraine would be to lose our head”. Ukrainian disillusionment had reached its limit in 1986 with the handling of the disaster at Chernobyl. Collapse Remnick relates how after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize Gorbachev began to move to the right as the KGB, police and army pressured him to end political and economic reforms. The old dictatorship and new democracy existed side by side, the danger of a military coup was imminent. Massacres in the Baltics and Caucasus destabilized the Republics. In 1991 Yeltsin was elected President. Gorbachev remained Secretary, but the right wing cabal demanded that he agree to martial law. Refusing, he was arrested, emergency declared and key institutions seized. Yeltsin barricaded Parliament and rallied a resistance. Soldiers and civilians began to ignore orders of the leaders and the putsch collapsed along with the Party. As a journalist, Remnick’s chapters are almost like extended newspaper features or magazine articles. They could be read as stand alone pieces, although there is a common thread throughout. This could be good or bad, depending on your preferences. Some of the characters he interviews are very interesting and others less so. If you weave the people and events in this book together it is a tapestry that makes a coherent whole, but requires some effort. A criticism may be Remnick seems to include every incident from his four year stay, many that are likely outtakes from his Washington Post reports. Most of these concerns are alleviated by Remnick’s writing, which is usually very good and at times excellent.

Despite the book's Pulitzer Prize, I'm a little ambivalent about saying this in one of the best books I have read. For sure, some of the best parts are that Remnick seemingly has open access to all the major Soviet political players while he was there. And he doesn't even brag about it. The titans of Soviet politics seem to be open to all who want to speak with them, though Remnick's day job as the Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post certainly helped...a large part of his life in Russia then that he totally did not to write about. It's fun to follow him track down figures and weasel his way to get access to whoever he wants to talk with. He clearly is excited to be there during the transition and is personally invested in the story, as he speaks Russian and both his parents and his parents-in-laws have Russian ancestry. On the other hand, the book is a rag tag, contemporaneous collection of personal reporting and interests, lacking to some degree the broad overview that only comes with the passage of time. Doubtlessly, you get the feeling of what it was like living in the Soviet Union during the Gorbachev years and the transition to Yeltsin and the end of the Communist Party....with the addition of having Remnick magically inserting himself in front of whoever he wants to talk with to fill you in on the inside story. Enjoy it.

An excellent book, worthy of the Pulitzer Prize.

Wow. I wanted to buy a noteworthy book that was definitive re: old USSR. I looked to award winning books on the subject and then, as always, checked with Amazonian's ratings. Before I started the book I assumed I would read some, scan some and re-educate myself on the subject. It was GREAT READING. A book that describes despair, fear and degradation of an entire nation of people. One asks onself, again and again throughout history, what conditions of the mind must exist that have throughout time enabled those in power to justify the destruction of the human spirit. Of course that begs the question as to how those STAY in power for decades on end. Author Remnick writes wonderfully and easily of tough experiences and yet they are not so horrific when laid on the page by this author, rather this book does read like a novel and thus it is easlily digested and hard to stop reading. Fascinating stuff which includes how the book itself was researched and written. Read this book, you won't be sorry. I would love to find another non-fictional account on any subject matter that rivals this. I'd love to know if there are any good suggestions.

The 1994 Pulitzer Prize winning "Lenin's Tomb" is a must-read for anyone interested in modern Russian history. David Remnick was a Washington Post reporter living in Moscow during the late 80's and early 90's and was thus a first-hand witness to Gorbachev's rise and fall and the final weakening of Stalin's horrific legacy. (Remnick is now a staff writer for the New Yorker). Fluent in Russian and a first rate wrier and intellect, Remnick shows us a dramatic historical event unfolding as seen from the trenches and above, told through his own first person experience and densely complimented by research and interviews with leading Russian political figures and the common man alike. If you've ever wondered what life was like in totalitarian Russia under Stalin, this work unveils the gruesome details. The book reads much like a journal, with fairly brief chapters devoted to single events and perspectives and, although the story does unfold and weave together, this technique lends a slightly choppy feel to the reading at times. This is a very minor complaint, however, for a book that is grand in scope and beautifully written.

11/30/1992 CONSTITUTIONAL COURT DECISION regarding trial of the COMMUNIST PARTY: "... Communists were free to meet on a local level but the Communist Party, as a national entity, was illegal" (p. 530). The Russian court ruling was a result of in-depth analyses of the arbitrary actions deployed by the Communist Party, including, the controversial 1939 Soviet/Nazi Molotov-Ribbentrop Nonagression Pact, containing secret conditions, and the consequent rebellious stance of the Baltic independence movement affecting Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia. Collage of interviews, historical research, and, personal impressions, in a rambling narrative, concerning the individuals who affected the unexpected collapse of Communist Soviet Union. The extensive insidious corruption pervasive throughout every industry contributed to its dismemberment: "The Communist Party apparatus was the most gigantic mafia the world has ever known ... backed it up with the force of the KGB and the Interior Ministry police ... no economic transaction was untainted ... it was impossible to be honest" (pp. 183-185). A rambling discourse; nonetheless, essential to comprehend the upheavals experienced during the early 1990's. [To further supplement, suggest the following book: Roger Moorhouse, "The Devil's Alliance--Hitler's Pact With Stalin, 1939-1941".]

This book is not just informative, it makes the story it's telling come to life. Great for anyone with deep or casual interest in Soviet history.

David Remnic takes you to Soviet era and makes you feel as living and seeing the events unfolding...a Live account of tragic history...must read

Very interesting history of how we arrived at the Russia of today.

Muito bom livro, escrito por jornalista que viveu na URSS na época de Gorbatchev. Estilo caro e clima de romance,

Remnick's writing and analysis is superb. Given today's new Cold War, I was anxious to see if this pre-Putin book would still hold up. Indeed it does, and provides invaluable background that seems remarkably current.