Upon his return from Prague, Yegor went back to Izvestia but was advised to ‘write less’. Instead he turned to a subject that was hard to ban: Lenin. By the 1970s the official Soviet iconography had produced a Lenin who was completely devoid of any human or even historic features. He had turned into a vehicle, a device for carrying almost any political message. Citations from Lenin could be used to prove diametrically opposite points of view. In the 1930s, Lenin justified Stalinism, in the 1950s and early 1960s he justified anti-Stalinism. In the 1970s he was adopted by the liberal thinkers to show the inadequacies of the Soviet economic and political system.
To make the device workable and convincing, their Lenin had to be distinctly different from the official mummified version. Yegor was among those who used his talent to ‘enliven’ Lenin’s image, or as Solzhenitsyn put it more crudely, ‘sucked surreptitiously on one solace that “the ideas of revolution were good, but were perverted”’. As Yegor said himself: ‘I only needed Lenin for one thing: to show that the system in which we live has nothing to do with Lenin.’63 In fact, these intellectual games were dangerous and costly – not only to those who played them, but to the country’s future. They created a mythology about Lenin that lasted almost to the end of Soviet rule and held the country captive to an idea that had long been dead.
In the early 1980s few people thought that change would come any time soon. Time moved at a sticky pace, unaffected by the physical deaths of the country’s leaders. When Brezhnev died in 1982, he was succeeded by Yuri Andropov who lived for only eighteen months longer, and then by Konstantin Chernenko who, as the joke went, ‘gained office without gaining consciousness’. Soon he too was dead, on 10 March 1985. The rapid succession of general secretaries became known as ‘the hearse race’. It seemed it would never end.
The biggest frustration for people like Latsis, Bovin and Yakovlev during those years was not the food shortages or discomforts – their personal lives were perfectly comfortable – but the futility of their own work. By the time Brezhnev died they were in their early fifties. Born for an active life, they felt their energy seeping into the sand. They engaged in meaningless imitations of intellectual activity. This was both exhausting and humiliating, causing anguish and pain similar to that of Chekhov’s characters.
Latsis described this anguish in his memoirs. He was working on some useless document in one of the government sanatoria which offered the dubious comforts and petty luxury of Soviet bureaucratic life – better food, a large room with a television set, and a supply of fruit in a crystal bowl – when his thoughts started to wander. He gazed at important-looking people faking intellectual process, and his thoughts turned to his fourteen-year-old daughter who was ill. He was locked in the sanatorium, while she had been in intensive care; Latsis had no time to visit. ‘Suddenly came a thought which I had been trying to drive away for several years. There, at home, unfolds real life and a real drama: a person who is dear to me is suffering and fighting for her life. And I am sitting in the company of apparatchiks, who are engaged in useless talking, imitating their concern about important state affairs. Here nothing is real…’ Unable to bear it any longer, he snapped: ‘Nobody needs our work and I don’t want to take part in it any more.’64 His outburst resembled that of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya who rebels against the professor, whose meaningless articles he had been copying out for years: ‘I am clever and brave and strong. If I had lived a normal life, I might have become another Schopenhauer or Dostoevsky. I am losing my head! I am going crazy!’
Uncle Vanya was the play at the Moscow Art Theatre that the still little-known Mikhail Gorbachev went to see on 30 April 1985, the eve of May Day, a month after his appointment as general secretary of the Communist Party. A few days later he telephoned Oleg Yefremov, the director, to share his impressions. He liked Astrov, the doctor, but it was Vanya’s part that he found ‘simply heart-rending’. He also told Yefremov that it was time to ‘get our flywheel moving again’. In 1998, seven years after Gorbachev had ceased to be the president of the USSR and the country itself was gone, he described why that performance of Uncle Vanya had made such an impression on him: ‘I understood a lot while watching it. I realized that we, the whole of society, were seriously ill and that we needed immediate surgery.’65
TWO
New Beginning or Dead End
March is the hardest month in Russia. The snow which has been on the ground since November turns grey and slushy. The temperatures stay sub-zero, the winds pick up, making the country’s landscape look particularly desolate and hostile. The cold air, the lack of sunlight and the stubborn snowfall drain the body and the soul. The lack of fresh fruit and vegetables in Soviet days meant that people were starved of vitamins. The knowledge that somewhere – a flight away – birds are singing and spring flowers are blossoming makes the early Russian spring particularly depressing. This is how the country felt when Konstantin Chernenko died on 10 March 1985. Only that winter had lasted for nearly eighteen years. The next day Gorbachev was appointed the general secretary of the Communist Party.
Two months later, the country got a chance to have a good look at its new leader with his birthmark across his forehead. Gorbachev’s first trip to Leningrad – the cradle of the Bolshevik Revolution – occupied almost all of the state television news programme Vremya. It started in the usual staged and stale way: Soviet bureaucrats in grey suits meeting the general secretary off the plane, brightly dressed young pioneers saluting him on the tarmac, Gorbachev laying wreaths of flowers by a war memorial. But suddenly something changed in the picture: the new party boss walked briskly up to a crowd of onlookers and started talking to them. He smiled and told people about his plans to revive the economy and improve standards of living. Stunned by this impromptu engagement with the crowd, one woman uttered a Soviet cliché: ‘Stay close to the people and the people won’t let you down.’ Gorbachev, barely able to stretch his arms in the crowd, quipped: ‘Can’t get any closer.’ The crowd broke into laugher – not staged, but genuine.
After watching the ‘hearse race’ of gerontocratic general secretaries over the previous three years, such a display of human emotions by a relatively young, energetic, smiling leader won over the country. ‘We will all have to change,’ Gorbachev said in Leningrad. Long speeches about Perestroika came later, but it started there and then – in front of the television cameras. The first signs of freedom came not in the form of laws and manifestos, but in the form of sensations and impressions. It felt like a new start, the country slowly opening up, letting in fresh air from the West in the form of films, exhibitions, theatre productions. It was a period of ‘new thinking’ as Gorbachev defined it. Yet the thinking behind it was not very new.
In fact, one of the sensations of that period was that of déjà vu; one of the joys, the joy of recognition. Summing up his impressions of the theatrical season of 1985–6, Anatoly Smeliansky, the literary director of the Moscow Art Theatre and a theatre critic, wrote what many felt: ‘Something has changed in the literary climate. You open another issue of a thick literary journal, which you did not even feel like leafing through for the past few years, and you get glued. It is as if time has rewound its tape by some twenty years and has taken us back to the epoch of Alexander Tvardovsky’s Novy Mir.’1