‘We, the reformers of 1985, tried to destroy the Bolshevik church in the name of a true religion and a true Jesus not realizing yet that our religion was false and our Jesus was an imposter,’9 wrote Alexander Yakovlev. Yakovlev himself went further than anyone else of that tribe. His evolution from a Soviet apparatchik to liberal freethinker was perhaps the most deliberate of any high-ranking Soviet official, Gorbachev included. ‘I came to hate Lenin and Stalin – these monsters who had cruelly deceived me and crushed my romantic world of hopes.’10 In a country that had never fully repented for its crimes against its own people, Yakovlev embarked on – and completed – his own journey of repentance and atonement.
The fact that the reformation began with print also attested to its almost religious nature. The communists destroyed and defaced churches but borrowed from religion its attitude to the written word. Texts by Lenin and Marx were studied in every high school and university: they defined the approach to history and the view of the world. The battles on the pages of Soviet newspapers were conducted with the aid of citations from their sacred texts.
From the very beginning of the Bolshevik rule in 1917, words were nationalized and guarded by the party. Nothing could be printed without its permission. The first ‘black’ lists of banned books were compiled by Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, and included the Bible as well as many children’s books. In the 1930s a librarian was tried and exiled for issuing philosophical works that were not even banned, but which simply did not fit into the Marxist view of the world. Libraries had ‘closed’ sections and special permission was required for reading books there. Some books were marked with a stamp: ‘not to be issued’. Subscriptions to literary magazines and newspapers were strictly regulated by the state. A death sentence during Stalin’s Terror was euphemistically called ‘ten years without the right to correspondence’. The fear of the written word penetrated deep into the system. The secret police that carried out arrests and executions were specifically banned from issuing written statements to the relatives of those who were murdered. The relatives could only be told verbally (lied to) that a father, a wife, a son, a sister, had been sentenced to ‘ten years without the right to correspondence’ when he or she was in fact dead.
By the mid- and late 1940s – when the ten-year sentences were supposed to have expired – the families began to ask what had happened to their dear ones, and they were told (again verbally) that the relative had died while serving their sentence. The practice remained in place after Stalin’s death. Only in 1989 – three years into Perestroika – did the KGB (the initials stood for ‘Committee of State Security’) allow the true dates of and information about executions to be printed in formal documents and death certificates.11 The letters of those who were not executed and who were sent to the Gulag were censored. Words equalled life. The denial of words equalled death.
Words, like people, were kept behind the Iron Curtain. Publishing a book in the West without the permission of the state was considered no less a crime than illegally crossing the frontier without a special ‘exit’ visa. In 1958 Boris Pasternak was expelled from the Writers’ Union and viciously vilified for the publication of Doctor Zhivago in the West. The poet Joseph Brodsky, who was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972, acknowledged the magic ability of words to transcend closed borders: being effectively barred from seeing his parents before their death, he wrote about them in English – a language they did not understand – as ‘their only chance to see me and America’ and ‘the only way for me to see them and our room’.12
In the 1980s the main ideological battles unfolded in print – rather than on television or the radio waves. All the men who led this new reformation were men of letters. Yegor was a student of history and archives; he was Lenin’s biographer which gave him strength in ‘theological debates’ about the purity of the teaching. Otto Latsis worked as an editor of a magazine called Kommunist. Alexander Bovin was a speech writer for Brezhnev. The list goes on. These men were members of one generation known as shestidesiatniki – the men of the 1960s, when they became most active. They were almost exact contemporaries of Gorbachev, born within a few months of each other in 1930 or 1931. They shaped the narrative of Perestroika and articulated the values of their generation. In the West, Gorbachev is often seen as a visionary historic figure solely responsible for the liberalization of the Soviet Union. In fact, he was a man of his generation, which determined his sensibilities and choices.
These men shared childhood memories of Stalin’s repressions, but their teenage years were overwhelmingly shaped by the Second World War and the Soviet victory which gave legitimacy to Soviet rule. They graduated from universities in 1953, the year of Stalin’s death, which had profoundly changed the country, and began their professional careers at the time of Nikita Khrushchev’s historic speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in 1956, where he denounced Stalin’s repressions and his cult of personality. Khrushchev’s Thaw gave them encouragement and a chance to pursue political careers without becoming either murderers or victims. To belong to the shestidesiatniki was not just a matter of age, but of background and values. Most of the members of this club were well-educated, like-minded liberal intelligentsia, largely pro-Western, certainly anti-Stalinist. They moved together as a group, seeking out and helping each other along the way. Some of the most active members and ideologists of that generation were born into the families of Old Bolshevik revolutionaries, many of whom were purged by Stalin. Their raison d’être was to restore socialist justice and clear the names of their fathers.
In the early years of Perestroika, young journalists keen to find their own roots turned to these men for their experience. A few years later, as is often the case with fathers and sons, they were to reject and ridicule them.
Fireglow
Every person bears the reflection of history. On some it glows with a hot and fearsome light, on others it is barely visible, barely warm, but it is there on everyone. History blazes like a huge bonfire, and each of us throws into it our own brushwood.
A cardboard folder with Yegor Yakovlev’s personal file; a snapshot for a Soviet-passport-sized photograph; a serious-looking Soviet man in a dark suit and thick-framed glasses. ‘Yakovlev, Yegor Vladimirovich, born 1930, member of the Communist Party from 1953. In 1954, graduated from the Moscow State Historical Archival Institute, writes articles on the subject of party propaganda, Soviet development and Communist ethics; pays particular attention to the subject of Lenin.’ A standard sign that stated: ‘politically literate, morally stable and ideologically sound’.14