A young Russian dressed in Western garb applauded wildly whenever the actor playing Lenin appeared on stage. He poked me in the ribs. “It’s true, isn’t it,” he asked, “that Lenin was the greatest man of the twentieth century?” I paused, realizing there was no point in debating Lenin’s role in history with a Russian so committed to the party line. He continued, content with his reverie, “Even the most biased Westerner must admit Lenin’s genius, for he was indeed the greatest man of the twentieth century.” The Russian, whose name was Kostya, short for Constantine, smoked American cigarettes and loved the new American monthly called Amerika, 50,000 copies of which had just been published and distributed. They sold out overnight. As we left the theater, walking into a drizzly night, he complimented me by calling me a shtatny baron, which in Moscow at the time meant a “classy guy from the United States.”
Kostya wanted to talk. All I had to do was listen. We talked for a long time. He was a compelling character, with an interesting story, and I tried to remember every word. Later that evening I typed it all up. “I have had an easy life,” he said. “My father is a topflight engineer, and he makes a lot of money. I have never been in need of anything. We have always had the two most important things in Soviet Russia: money and connections.” He told me that during the summer he had spent three months in the “virgin lands” of central Asia “gathering in the harvest,” as he put it. He was especially proud of his decision. “Most of my friends did not wish to go to Siberia, but I did.” He wanted to help the people. “I want to see them live much better than they do now.” Then, sounding like the nineteenth-century narodniki—the guilt-stricken, idealistic young noblemen who went to the countryside to educate the peasants, to teach them the virtues of democracy, only to see their efforts spurned by the “dark masses”—he explained, “I wanted to talk to the peasants, to tell them what is their due, what they should expect from the [communist] system…. We went to the people.” I reminded Kostya that in their day many of the narodniki returned from the farms disappointed and despondent, believing the peasants to be hopelessly locked in their own small worlds, unable or unwilling to learn about the revolutionary changes rushing through their country. “I hope that will not be your experience,” I said.
Kostya and I walked along Gorky Street, which was almost empty because of the dispiriting drizzle. Occasionally a woman covered in a heavy shawl would pop out of a doorway, look around, and then disappear. “Possibly, you are right,” Kostya whispered. He seemed deep in his own thoughts. “You see, we have a society that is based on good, humanitarian principles, but that functions on base, narrow principles,” he continued. “The entire administration stinks of bureaucracy. Fat bureaucrats with fat mugs and fatter rears sit around for weeks, months, years, simply fulfilling quotas.” Kostya spat in disgust, stopping for a moment at the foot of the Pushkin statue.
“All my life my father has brought such people into our house. Are they interested in the principles of the revolution? No, they are interested only in themselves. They want more money and a second dacha and maybe a second car. These are the people I have seen all my life, and I must admit my father is the same way. I still believe in the principles, which I feel sure Lenin believed in. I want to see our people happy.”
“How will they be happy?” I asked.
Kostya focused on the Russian peasant. “The way my friends and I view our country—Russia is still a peasant country. About 65 percent of the people are peasants. These are the people the government should be concerned about. But instead they push them into collective farms, which they couldn’t care less about. They want their own little piece of land. They want to be masters of their fates and their harvests. They want to deliver grain to a person, a dealer, who they know and can talk to, not a collective agency…. And, you know, this is the strangest thing: from birth, people are taught to think and to act in a collective way. Yet the farmers only want their plot of land. They couldn’t care less about the collective land.”
Kostya felt he was speaking for his generation. “Our feeling, and I mean the feeling of the overwhelming majority of my friends at the institute,” he continued, “is that the peasants, the ordinary people, must begin to get a fair portion of our national production and profit. This has not happened to date, and it is about time. The Soviet system has existed for thirty-eight years—soon we shall celebrate our thirty-ninth anniversary—and still there are enormous shortages. How many times can we be told to wait until tomorrow?”
“Well, how many times indeed?” I asked.
“I don’t know. My friends don’t know. And I’m sure that Khrushchev, ‘the sorcerer’s apprentice,’ as we call him, doesn’t know either, just as nobody in Russia these days has a real image of the future. Lenin had his image. His image was prosperity for all people, but his image has been distorted by Stalin and his friends, like the present collective leadership.”
Kostya was an idealist, a kind, decent, and intelligent young Russian who tied his dreams of political and economic prosperity to a totally unrealistic reading of Lenin’s policies and plans. Lenin wanted power to achieve revolutionary change in Russia and then the world. His vision was communist by design and universal in application. Kostya’s was more modestly limited to Russia. He understood that something was profoundly wrong with Russia’s system of government. He did not want to go so far as to repudiate the system, for that would have meant repudiating Lenin himself, for many young Russians an unimaginable idea at the time. But he did want to see fundamental reform. He did not know quite how to define the reform, nor how to achieve it, but he yearned for it with a passion he could not quite contain.
Kostya then told me about a recent meeting at the Institute of Art, where he studied. The meeting sounded similar to meetings I had attended at the Lenin Library. The meeting as Kostya described it was run by a “very sharp” communist leader named Ivanov. It started in a traditional way. The leader listed the “new tasks” facing students “today, tomorrow and the day after.” In fact, they were not new at all—they were the usual tasks of yesterday and the day before. “We all knew them by heart.”
Then an older student stood up, “a man of about thirty-five who had been wounded six times during the big war.” He wanted to know “what he had fought for.”
Ivanov answered, predictably, that the older student “had fought for Russia and the Soviet system.”
“No,” the student shot back, “I fought only for Russia. I did not fight for the Soviet system.” Kostya said that he and his friends broke into loud cheers.
Ivanov felt the need to restore order. “The reason things are not really so right in Russia today,” Kostya quoted him as explaining, “is that many mistakes had been made, but they are all now being corrected.” Sighing, Ivanov said, “It is the fault of the Stalin tragedy.”
One student yelled out, “That is no answer. A Marxist explanation demands that the system itself is at fault.” Kostya continued, “All the students then stood up, stamped their feet and shouted that Ivanov indeed had not really answered the question which was raised.” Ivanov decided at that moment that it would be the better part of valor to say nothing more. He hurriedly collected his notes, stashed them into his briefcase, and left the room. “Fled the room” might have been a more accurate description.
Kostya and a group of students then went to a friend’s house and continued their discussion. “We ranged over the entire issue,” Kostya disclosed. “Some of my buddies called for inciting an uprising. Others called for assassination of the leaders and the convocation of a representative government. But others, and I am one of these, thought force and violence would get us nowhere. If I thought that it would, I swear to God I would go to Red Square tonight with all my friends and stage an uprising. But it would yield no beneficial results.” Again he paused, deep in his own thoughts. “The Russian people are a frightfully inert mass,” he said. “They do not move easily. And we cannot do it alone. There must be a way, but so far we don’t know the way. We have no image of tomorrow. All we want is a happy Russia where people get a fair share of a powerful industrial machine, but the bureaucracy stands in the way. What we need now is leadership. We need another Lenin desperately. He could lead a revolution. Without leadership, we are nothing, and our dreams remain dreams.”