1990

First published in the Russian language by New Literary Observer in two volumes: “1990: opyt izucheniia nedavnei istorii” (“1990: an attempt to study recent history”), vol. 1, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, No. 83 (1/2007); “1990: opyt izucheniia nedavnei istorii” (“1990: an attempt to study recent history”), vol. 2, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, No. 84 (2/2007)

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

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Copyright © Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (New Literary Observer), Moscow, 2007 English translation copyright © 2013 by Arch Tait Foreword © Bridget Kendall Introduction and Afterword © Irina Prokhorova Copy-edited by Andrea Belloli

The publication was effected under the auspices of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation TRANSCRIPT Programme to Support Translations of Russian Literature

The moral right of the authors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

The translator asserts his moral right to be identified as the translator of the work.

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Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Contributors

Foreword by Bridget Kendall

Introduction by Irina Prokhorova

LATE 1989: A TIMELINE

“If Lenin Were Alive Today, He Would Know What to Do” – Aleksey Yurchak

JANUARY

My Diary for January 1990 – Mark Kharitonov

FEBRUARY

The Year of Utopias Realised: Schools, Teachers and Educational Reformers in 1990 – Tamara Eydelman

MARCH

The Irrational in Society: Diagnoses of 1990 – Pavel Romanov and Yelena Yarskaya-Smirnova

APRIL

The Shock of Irrevocability – Hasan Guseynov

MAY

Ends and Means: Initial Ideas, Institutions That Win – Vitaliy Yelizarov

JUNE

The Beginning of the End: Notes of an Eyewitness, Edited by an Historian, Being the Same Person – Marietta Chudakova

JULY

Ideological Construction of a Party Spectrum: The False Start of 1990 – Vadim Goncharov

Free Flight: The Rebirth of Soviet Aeronautics – Svetlana Koroleva

Trade Unions in 1990: An Involved Observer’s View – Sergey Khramov

AUGUST

The Funeral of Food, or The Soviet Shopping Basket in 1990 – Sergey Karnaukhov

SEPTEMBER

The Russian Orthodox Church in 1990 – Nikolai Mitrokhin

OCTOBER

An Interview with Vladimir Pozner

Frozen Experiences, or Local Television Reporting in 1990 – Pavel Pavlov

NOVEMBER

The Miners in 1989–90: A Venture into National Politics – Sergey Turkin

DECEMBER

History as Economics, or A Journey from 1921 to 1906 via 1990 – Olesya Kirchik

Afterword: The Challenge of Recent History – Irina Prokhorova

Appendix: Illustration Source Notes

Index

List of Illustrations

“Let Lenin Speak”. Poster designed by V. Chumakov

Kommunist’s “bureaucratic” look

Kommunist in Lenin’s handwriting

Train station, Stepanakert, Nagorno-Karabakh. Kalachevsky Brigade of interior troops training, Spring 1990

Production line, Istra-Senezh Broiler Production Association, Moscow Province, November 1990

Workers, Istra-Senezh Broiler Production Association, Moscow Province, November 1990

Poster of the Tsar, displayed in Pushkino (formerly Tsarskoye Selo) in May 1990

Moscow “business card”, 1990

Zelenograd food-ration coupons from 1990

A rally, winter 1990

Labels of low-quality alcoholic beverages which people were obliged to drink in 1990 because of the vodka shortage

Leningrad meeting in support of Gdlyan and Ivanov, 17 April, 1990

“The start”, Moscow, 1 May, 1990

Palace Square, Leningrad, 1 May, 1990

Protest meeting on Palace Square, Leningrad, 1 May, 1990

Protest march on Nevsky Prospekt, Leningrad, 1 May, 1990

“Long live independent Lithuania!”, protest meeting on Palace Square, Leningrad, 1 May, 1990

Team of the former chairman of Moscow City executive committee, Valeriy Saikin, Red Square, Moscow, May or June 1990

The arrival of mobile shops in 1990, Istra-Senezh Broiler Production Association, Moscow Province

Postage stamps from Ukraine, released in 1991 after the adoption of the Declaration of State Sovereignty

“Tobacco!”, Leningrad, summer 1990

The International Aerostat Festival, Leningrad, 1990

The Soviet hot-air balloon prepares for take off, International Balloon Festival, France, 1990

The first balloon fiesta in Ryazan, 1990

Celebrating Assault Troops Day, Park of Culture, Moscow, 2 August, 1990

Celebrating Assault Troops Day, Park of Culture, Moscow, 2 August, 1990

Lithuania, August 1990

Vilnius, Lithuania, August 1990

The beach under the bridge near Sportivnaya metro station, Moscow, August 1990

A typical scene during the “Coupon Economy”

Hunger strike by staff of Smena (“Next Shift”)

“They aren’t leaflets, they’re coupons for manna from heaven!” Cartoon from the satirical magazine Crocodile, 1990

Andrey Sakharov, frame from A Day of Mourning and Hope

Tatyana Taiganova, frame from the programme In Conversation

Frame from the programme Traces

Official rally on Palace Square, Leningrad, 7 November, 1990

Official rally on Palace Square, Leningrad, 7 November, 1990

Democrats’ demonstration, Leningrad, 7 November, 1990

Democrats’ demonstration, Leningrad, 7 November, 1990

Food coupons, receipts and labels from 1990

The Lancôme salon on Nevsky Prospekt, Leningrad, November 1990

Banquet to celebrate Agricultural Workers’ Day, Istra-Senezh Broiler Production Association, Moscow Province, November 1990

Agricultural Workers’ Day, Istra-Senezh Broiler Production Association, Moscow Province, November 1990

For copyright information, see Illustration Source Notes

List of Contributors

Marietta Omarovna Chudakova – Literary critic, historian, Doctor of Philological Sciences, columnist, writer, memoirist, editor-in-chief of the Tynyanov Collections, public figure

Boris Vladimirovich Dubin – Translator, sociologist, director of the Levada Centre’s Department of Socio-political Research in Moscow

Tamara Natanovna Eydelman – History teacher at Grammar School No. 1567 (Moscow), chairwoman of the History Teachers’ Association, Distinguished Teacher of Russia

Vadim Eduardovich Goncharov – Associate Professor of social and political science at Bonch-Bruevich State University of Telecommunications, St Petersburg

Hasan Chingizovich Guseynov – Professor in the Philological Faculty of Lomonosov Moscow State University, author of books on Classical culture and the philosophy of language

Sergey Gennadievich Karnaukhov – Research fellow at the Centre for Independent Social Research, Irkutsk, postgraduate student in the History Faculty of the European University, St Petersburg

Mark Sergeyevich Kharitonov – Prose writer, essayist, translator, winner of the Russian Booker Prize (1992)

Sergey Vladimirovich Khramov – Inspector-general of the Union of Trade Unions of Russia

Olesya Igorevna Kirchik – Research fellow at the Higher School of Economics, St Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod and Perm

Svetlana Sergeyevna Koroleva – Sociologist, researcher at the Levada Centre, Moscow

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Mitrokhin – Historian, fellow at the Research Centre for East European Studies, University of Bremen

Pavel Vladimirovich Pavlov – Reporter and producer at the South Urals state broadcasting company, postgraduate student in the Department of the Theory of Mass Communications of Chelyabinsk State University

Vladimir Vladimirovich Pozner – First President of the Russian Television Academy (1994–2008), presenter and producer of the talk show The Times (Vremena) (2000–2008), presenter of Pozner on Russia’s national Channel 1 (2012)

Irina Dmitrievna Prokhorova – Founder and editor-in-chief of the New Literary Observer publishing house

Pavel Vasilievich Romanov – Professor of socio-economic systems and social policy at the Higher School of Economics, St Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod and Perm, director of the Centre of Social Policy and Gender Research, Saratov, editor of the Journal of Social Policy Research (Zhurnal issledovanii sotsial’noi politiki)

Eduard Amvrosievich Shevardnadze – Former President of Georgia

Sergey Anatoliyevich Turkin – Political scientist, senior analyst of the Lukoil Inform Analysis Centre, Moscow, head of political projects at the Centre for Economic and Political Research and Development, Moscow

Yelena Rostislavovna Yarskaya-Smirnova – Professor, head of the Department of Social Anthropology and Social Work at Saratov State Technical University (1997–2006), lecturer at the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Science (2004–7), co-editor of the Journal of Social Policy Research (Zhurnal issledovanii sotsial’noi politiki)

Vitaliy Pavlovich Yelizarov – Associate Professor of the theory and history of the state and law at the State University of Economics and Finance, St Petersburg

Aleksey Vladimirovich Yurchak – Associate Professor of socio-cultural anthropology, University of California, Berkeley

FOREWORD

Bridget Kendall

B.B.C. Moscow Correspondent 1989–1993

There is little doubt that the disintegration of Soviet Communism in the second half of the 1980s and early ’90s was one of the most important episodes of the late twentieth century. But even for those of us who had a ringside seat, how much do we remember?

I arrived in Moscow as B.B.C. Correspondent in the summer of 1989 and was instantly plunged into a reporting job that left little time to eat and sleep. Scrambling to keeping up with the frenzy of political developments was exhilarating and exhausting.

There was no shortage of interest in what I was witnessing: the world’s attention was on the Soviet Union. I recall a comment from one of my London news editors at the time: “If one of our four world headlines does not reflect some aspect of what is happening in the Soviet Union right now, we must be missing something.” Every fresh law and decree, every rally and every pronouncement by a senior politician was of interest to the news desk.

But it was not only the developments in Moscow which drew interest. By early 1990 a mood of insurrection was beginning to emerge in many of the republics. The Baltic states led the way, and the ever-unruly Caucasus. It was not long before Ukraine began to wake up too.

I remember an unsanctioned rally held in Western Ukraine in support of the Uniate Church, which was still illegal. News reached Moscow reporting that the police had set dogs on the crowds. Two weeks later I travelled to the region myself, to attend another rally.

This time there were no dogs and no police either. The crowd was huge. One incident remains clear in my mind: a local party official pushed his way forward, saying he wanted to give the B.B.C. an interview. Sinking to his knees, he spoke in Ukrainian into my microphone, appealing to the crowd for their forgiveness; he had betrayed them by working for the Communist Party. It was a mesmerising moment.

But even as I felt I was living through revolutionary times, I was also wary of where these changes might be heading.

My arrival in Moscow coincided with several of my colleagues in the British media being expelled in a tit for tat espionage scandal. It was a reminder that the Cold War was not yet over. For all the dizzying pace of change, many Soviet rules and attitudes were still in place. The authorities regarded us Western journalists as objects of suspicion. Bureaucratic hurdles ensnared us. Yes, there was plenty of talk of openness, but our movements were still restricted.

I first recognised that conditions had changed less than the rhetoric suggested when one Sunday I set off to drive out of the city and into the countryside for some fresh air. I did not get beyond the first police checkpoint on the ring road before I was turned back. A new directive was in force, requiring all foreigners to stay inside the Moscow perimeter unless they had express permission to travel.

More seriously, in January 1990 we were blocked from flying to Azerbaijan to cover the riots and subsequent emergency crackdown in Baku, which left more than a hundred dead. The department of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs which oversaw foreign journalists declared it would only issue visa support once we had bought air tickets. But the state airline Aeroflot would not issue tickets unless we first had visas.

It was a typical Soviet “catch-22”, and also an effective means of censorship. As this volume reveals, that appalling massacre in Baku dismayed many in Moscow and contributed to a feeling that Mikhail Gorbachev’s commitment to reform might be wavering.

But the incident made far less impact abroad (unlike the crackdown in Vilnius a year later). This was the era before mobile phones. There was no internet, no Twitter or Facebook. If a journalist was not present at an event to report on it themselves, the chances were that no-one else would hear about it. The official Soviet media was still heavily controlled and gave away little. With no foreign journalists in Baku, there were no compelling television pictures or eyewitness reports sent abroad, so the outside world took little note of it.

*

As the year 1990 progressed, mounting economic chaos and intensified political battles meant old rules began to break down. It became easier to travel and easier, too, to gain access to those at the top of the political hierarchy.

For decades the governance of the Soviet Union through the Communist Party had been conducted in secret. The nearest you could get to the main Central Committee building next to the Kremlin was the other side of a public square. Even the pavement nearby was cordoned off by police. What went on when the ruling Politburo gathered inside the Kremlin was even more of a mystery.

But in 1990 the process of government was no longer inaccessible to all but the party elite. A journalist’s pass would get you into the press gallery of the Soviet parliament (or Supreme Soviet), which held its sessions in a red velvet furnished hall inside the Kremlin complex. It also gave you access to M.P.s (or Deputies) as they hung about in the foyer during breaks. And as most government ministers and many prominent reformers were also members of parliament, and as Mikhail Gorbachev (as chairman) regularly ran the sessions and frequently used them to release political bombshells, it was the swiftest and most effective way of finding out about political developments.

I spent a lot of my time there, listening to the fractious debates or seeking reactions from politicians during the breaks. It was extraordinary to be able to go up to the Interior Minister to ask for a quote; access was significantly easier than it would have been in London. Much of my focus was therefore on politics, rather than on the broader social changes. But it was incredibly illuminating, both in an anecdotal way, and for tracking major political changes.

I remember I spent one morning in late 1990 watching K.G.B. chief Vladimir Kryuchkov as he perched on his seat near the Praesidium. While monitoring the parliamentary debate, he silently worked his way through a mountain of documents, scrutinising each one carefully before adding his signature and placing it on another pile. Who knows what he was authorising? But his cold-blooded and methodical precision stuck in my mind – it was so out of step with the passionate speeches from the floor, and spoke so eloquently of his disdain for the whole parliamentary process. Only later did it transpire that he was one of the main instigators of the hardline conspiracy in 1991 who tried to overturn reforms. Watching him in parliament had been a valuable forewarning.

Perhaps the most significant parliamentary moment of 1990, however, came in May, at the convening of the first Russian parliament. This was also held in a Kremlin hall, a long, awkward, echoing chamber in which it was difficult to see or hear speakers if you were standing at the back.

Most telling was the presence of Mikhail Gorbachev, a lonely figure seated on his own on a balcony halfway along the hall. You might have thought that the Soviet President would have better things to do than to watch parliamentary proceedings. But day after day he sat there in silence, following the vote to decide who would win the election to head the new Russian parliament.

In the end Boris Yeltsin scraped through, winning by only four votes. It was an early sign that Mr Gorbachev had recognised from the outset that this would be a crucial moment, the emergence of a rival who was to pose a mounting threat to his own continued power as Soviet leader.

*

The increasingly embittered political battle at the top was only one strand of the story of 1990. What is especially valuable about this anthology of timelines and essays is that it seeks to paint a broader picture and make sense of some of the trends which marked this year as a moment of transition.

Month by month, each chapter provides a catalogue of selected events. Diary excerpts and reminiscences add colour and context. Essays explore different ways in which 1990 was pivotal.

Some contributors focus on politics. One describes how the waning legitimacy of the Communist Party was echoed in mounting criticism of Lenin and Leninism. Another looks at the sidelining of political parties once the Soviet Communist Party had relinquished its leading role, as a power struggle ensued between rival presidents. Another essay explores the re-emergence of the Russian Orthodox Church as a political and social force. A further essay explains the dwindling influence of Russian miners and other blue-collar workers, whose strikes and rallies began to lose support in 1990, irrelevant in a country engulfed in full-scale economic chaos.

Other essays reflect the mood of the time. There is the mismatch between endless discussions of grand economic plans and the frightening pace of economic collapse, which saw ration cards become a way of life for most people, as food output dropped and the heavily centralised system of the Soviet planned economy fell apart. There is the curious explosion of interest in faith healers from a bewildered, anxious public, which had lost its faith in “scientific materialism” and now clung to miracles to provide certainty and meaning. Reminiscences from teachers from around the country reinforce this sense of uncertainty, some grimly hanging on to old orthodoxies, others groping for new ways of teaching that would reflect the giddy times they were living through.

And perhaps the most poignant of all are the thoughts of members of the liberal intelligentsia, revealing their growing disillusionment with Mikhail Gorbachev’s ability to keep pace with the demands for change, their alarm at the stirrings of an ugly anti-Semitism and racism, and their mixed feelings about the flood of Russian intellectual talent being lost to emigration. We can see an anguished recognition that scholarship and literature were losing their central position in Russian life, and that Russian writers, once the revered prophets of society, risked becoming peripheral.

*

It is true that at first glance 1990 might seem an odd year to profile; some might question if it really was a turning point.

For those who look back on the perestroika era from abroad, some pinpoint 1985 as the key moment: the year in which Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and launched his reforms from the top down. Others identify 1991 as most significant – the year of the abortive coup by Kremlin hardliners, which precipitated the U.S.S.R.’s final implosion. And inside Russia not everyone even remembers the proper sequence of events. As Irina Prokhorova notes in her Introduction, recollections can be blurred or tinged with confusion.

Travelling through villages and former collective farms in the northern region of Vologda a few years ago, I was puzzled to hear locals talking dismissively of perestroika as a catastrophic event which took place at the end of 1991. “But what about the earlier years of perestroika reform from 1985 onwards?” I asked them, “What about ‘glasnost’, or openness, the lifting of censorship? What about the laws that sanctioned private enterprise? What about the political battles that ended seventy years of the Communist Party’s monopoly on power and rocked the Kremlin’s authority? And yes, the food shortages and ration cards.”

They remembered the ration cards, but the empty shelves which so horrified Muscovites in 1990 were for the people of Vologda just an extension of the chronic shortages which provincial Russian towns and villages had endured for decades.

As for the other changes in Soviet society in the perestroika era, these were dismissed as simply the latest meaningless party slogans. “We didn’t pay much attention,” the Vologda villagers told me. “Our kolkhoz director would tell us perestroika and glasnost were important, but why would we believe him? We watched the rallies and speeches on television, but it was nothing to do with our lives.”

One essay in this volume analyses the role played by local television, and concludes that although media organisations in the provinces could have galvanised Russia’s grass roots by unearthing local stories people really cared about, in fact they lagged behind the national media. As the essay argues, and as I found in Vologda, in the provinces “many people felt detached from what they watched”. The sometimes scarcely credible events unfolding in Moscow were for them little more than empty political theatre.

What they did not realise at the time was that they too were about to be affected. When at the end of 1991 the Soviet Union ceased to exist and a Russian reformist government embarked on shock therapy, lifting price controls overnight to speed up the transition to a market economy, everyone was suddenly confronted with a new, frightening reality: rampant inflation, plummeting industrial output, the alarming prospect of job losses and the shock of finding that relatives in Ukraine and Belarus now lived in another country. That, for the villagers of Vologda, was why 1991 was the year of perestroika.

So 1990 is often a forgotten year, a year of progression rather than endings or beginnings. But it is the process of what ordinary people went through which is so fascinating: their private thoughts on this “revolution without shots”, which in six short years transformed the world in which they lived.

This book goes some way to telling their story.

Bridget Kendall

January 2013

1990

INTRODUCTION

Irina Prokhorova

This book began its life as a two-volume special issue of Moscow’s New Literary Observer, in which the journal’s editors set out to study a single year in Russian history: 1990. Why did we choose this unspectacular year for scrutiny rather than, for example, 1989, a year crucial for the whole of Europe as the Berlin Wall came down? Or at least 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, and with it the Communist hold over many other lands?

The project arose not only out of an academic interest in recent history, but also as a result of profound personal experiences. I was privileged to be a witness and active participant in the historic events of the late 1980s. I spent three unforgettable days on the barricades defending the Russian government’s White House during the August 1991 coup attempt, and came away from that experience a free, no longer Soviet, person. In all the years which have passed since then, I have never ceased to wonder that the great and terrible Evil Empire could fall apart overnight, and to wonder also why no-one foresaw that it was going to happen. What explains the fact that the militaristic Soviet Union collapsed peacefully and almost blood-lessly, while Yugoslavia, which, compared to the U.S.S.R., seemed a much better adjusted country, became mired in a bloody civil war?

A religious person might see this as a miracle, the working of divine Providence, but the intellectual, the researcher, needs more rational explanations. The obvious conclusion is that we have precious little understanding of how a “closed society” is structured and functions, of what concealed transformations may be taking place beneath that deceptive mantle of totalitarian “stability”, or of which, sometimes quirky, paths it may choose to follow in order to move towards democratic changes. The recent wave of Arab revolutions, which so astonished the world, only confirms my idea.

This close study of 1990, the last year of the Soviet Union’s existence, is one attempt to answer these questions. My initial hypothesis was that this year, which had slipped Russian society’s cultural memory and been overshadowed by the more dramatic years of 1989 and 1991, was in fact a turning point in the modern history of Russia, and that the events which occurred during it had determined the country’s future development. In order to test that hypothesis, we compiled a comprehensive chronicle of 1990, which reads like a thriller. Around it we set articles analysing aspects of life in Russia at the time: the transformation of the economy, of politics and daily life, of the artistic and scholarly communities, of public consciousness and institutional structures. We interviewed major players of the period, we tracked down diaries and memoirs of eyewitnesses.

Our “total” description of 1990 bore out my initial belief that this brief period was truly revolutionary, with a critical mass of changes in every sphere of life making the collapse of the Soviet empire irreversible. A whole new way of life, all the achievements and shortcomings of the two decades that followed, stemmed from 1990. For us, however, the most important discovery concerned the character of late-Soviet society. In flat contradiction of a widespread belief that the peoples of Russia had shown themselves disastrously unready to display constructive initiative, our researches revealed that, at this critical moment in history, the country succeeded in averting catastrophic developments. This resulted from the efforts of diverse social groups, the courage and creative endeavour of individuals, and the general spirit of the times which demanded change. After taking a close look at the dire experience of its existence under totalitarianism, our people found the strength of mind to build a new social system.

It has to be said that, as we worked on the project, we encountered a whole raft of problems, both social and professional. We had naively supposed that historians would find this an attractive and rewarding prospect, recent history having an abundance of the kind of sources they can only dream of when studying more distant periods. Alas, we soon found that some major social, economic and cultural processes of the late 1980s had simply not been registered by Soviet and foreign media or commentators, and, if they had, then often tendentiously. A further blow was the chaos that engulfed the Russian nation’s memory banks as the Soviet empire disintegrated, funding dwindled, and ideological assumptions were undermined. Most depositories lack, or have only very incomplete holdings of, the non-official press from the latter years of perestroika. In 1990–91, television and radio stations repeatedly recorded over earlier tapes “in order to save money”, we were told, but perhaps also because diehards were taking revenge by imposing a kind of retrospective censorship. Many broadcasts are simply not preserved where you would expect to find them.

As regards the testimony of those actively involved in the events of the time, we encountered blanket social amnesia. There was a marked reluctance to revisit “the follies of youth”. The remorseful tone in which brave, idealistic actions, creative initiatives and political commitment to the cause of democracy were recalled, and a stubborn repudiation of the undeniable achievements of the 1990s, were unexpected. A similar block had frustrated historians and journalists in the perestroika period when interviewing war veterans and former prison-camp inmates. Instead of receiving searing, authentic accounts of lived experience, interviewers were fobbed off with platitudes and the weary clichés of Soviet propaganda. We came to see that no less sophisticated methods of reconstruction were called for when researching recent history than when researching the history of the distant past.

While respecting the cultural historian’s traditional tools, we felt a need to seek new approaches to studying the recent Soviet past. The difficulty of describing 1990 stems from the short-lived, unstable coexistence at every social and symbolic level of the old and the new, from elites to the economy, from public to institutional consciousness, in discourse and in art. Analysing this situation called for a sound grounding in the peculiarities of Soviet discourse and an ability to read between the lines. This was something all Soviet citizens were brilliantly able to do, in both the Brezhnev “Era of Stagnation” and the perestroika period. Russian society has gradually lost this ability, which was essential to survival in the freewheeling 1990s. It has yet to be generally recognised that it remains an essential tool for anyone researching the Soviet era.

This deficiency made it easier to manipulate public opinion in the 2000s, inducing a wave of witless nostalgia but also leading researchers in the humanities, especially younger ones, to idealise the “grand style” of the Stalinist past and the Soviet era generally. The result has been that academics, instead of creating an alternative history of Russia, essentially repeat the mental processes behind the official Soviet version, concealing this lamentable fact behind an intricate screen of fashionable terminology. The lack of new approaches for analysing Soviet civilisation makes it difficult to characterise 1990, a year on which many look back as merely a time when the continuity of Russian history was disrupted and society degraded.

Today’s cultural elite like to reproach the late 1980s as a time when “professionalism” was lost, across the board. The latter years of perestroika were indeed an era of idealistic, almost militant, amateurism: in the economy, with its home-grown cooperatives, independent farmers and joint ventures; in politics, with the carnivalesque proliferation of political parties; in culture, obsessed with eroticism and denigration of both past and present; in literary language, “desecrated” by mockery, anglicisms and prison slang; and in the new mass media, with their programmes tossed out seemingly without any awareness of international best practice.¹

If we take a different perspective and link the anarchic birth of the new media with the Russian tradition of the singer-songwriter, the ways of the artistic underground, and the tradition of comedy skits, where “sincerity”, artlessness, self-irony and depiction of run-of-the-mill life were potent aesthetic weapons against the totalitarian factory of lies, we can see that there was more to the society and culture of this period than meets the eye. Its apparent amateurism was no mere dilettantism but a hard-hitting alternative to the castrated “professionalism” of the Soviet epoch.²

Another problem we encountered was a shortage of researchers who were comfortable working with different media. To this day, scholars in the humanities can be divided into the respectable readers of paper archives and more frivolous listeners to and watchers of audio-visual materials. In order to understand this transitional period, however, we needed analysts able to compare the presentation of events across different media. If we had restricted ourselves to traditional periodicals and personal diaries of 1990, we would have concluded that the dominant mood was one of foreboding, bewilderment and disillusionment. Giving due emphasis to the new radio, and in particular television, stations we found a quite different, positive, dynamic perception of reality.

Thanks to the recent appearance of satellite T.V. channels like Nostalgia, Retro T.V., Times Far and Near, and the thoroughgoing “retromania” of present-day television, we had a unique opportunity to view large numbers of programmes from the latter half of the 1980s. In next to no time, the presentation and design of programmes changed, along with the body language and appearance of presenters. The lifeless blue backdrop of the Time (Vremya) news programme gradually retreated under the onslaught of colourful special effects. The hairstyles and clothing of newsreaders lost their severity until, after 1988, “professional” readers were replaced by presenters whose diction was barely comprehensible and whose facial expressions were entirely unexpected in the context of ideological programmes. The camera would pan over the auditorium during concerts and discussions, infallibly registering the physical transformation of the audience, the disappearance of tell-tale signs of “Sovietness” in their deportment – relaxation of the facial muscles, a wider repertoire of individual gestures, an open, friendly look, unconstrained movement. These visual clues provide irrefutable evidence that the humanising and liberation of Soviet society were very real, that the overall thrust of this period was constructive rather than destructive.

Finally, and most crucially, we confronted the predicament of the researcher. When studying the present, how do you combine the traditional requirement of scholarly objectivity, the historian’s impartial gaze, with the observer’s personal experience of events, their emotional and intellectual baggage, indeed their political convictions? Being experienced in surviving a totalitarian society with its “professionally” perfected system for discrediting and devaluing everything possessing value and meaning, shall we not restore to the guild of historians their ancient, long-forgotten privilege of travelling in the wake of the army as impartial and enlightened chroniclers, preserving our shared past, however diverse and individual, and thereby giving meaning to the present?

LATE 1989: A TIMELINE

9 November

The Council of Ministers of the German Democratic Republic decides that it will allow “all who wish to” to leave the G.D.R. temporarily or permanently without restriction. (In the summer of 1989, a large number of its citizens had escaped to the Federal Republic of Germany.) On the night of 9 December, residents of East and West Germany began jointly to demolish the Berlin Wall.

15–19 November

At the U.S.S.R. Student Forum held at the Palace of Youth in Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev, asked about the introduction of private property rights in the Soviet Union, replies, “I stand by the Communist Manifesto. That does not stop me from making proposals to reform the structure of industry and property relations. I do not believe the working class supports those who are calling for our society to choose the path of capitalism” (Komsomol’skaia pravda, 17 November). The students also meet Andrey Sakharov, who says, “I believe now is a critical moment in our history. It is vitally important to get some fundamental laws passed at the Congress [of People’s Deputies of the U.S.S.R.], or at least to discuss them. We are not sure the Congress will do this. The first priority is a law on land and a law on property. It is essential to discuss the Communist Party’s monopoly on power in order to have a political guarantee that perestroika will go forward irreversibly. If economic change is not introduced in 1990, everyone will lose confidence in perestroika. I do not think it is too late yet for a peaceful transition to a new set of mutual relationships” (Komsomol’skaia pravda, 16 December).

17 November

In Prague, the Velvet Revolution grows out of an anti-Communist student demonstration joined by townspeople. The demonstrators’ main demands are for free elections; the resignation of Miloš Jakeš, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia; and abolition of the Party’s monopoly on political power. The demonstrations continue for several weeks, and, although periodically dispersed by the police, the crowds grow more numerous, finally causing the downfall of the regime.

19 November

The Supreme Soviet of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic passes an amendment to the Georgian constitution giving it the right to veto U.S.S.R. laws and declaring its own natural resources the property of Georgia. It reaffirms Georgia’s right to freely secede from the U.S.S.R. (L’Année internationale [Paris, 1992], p. 268).

22 November

Boris Gidaspov, First Secretary of the Leningrad provincial Party committee and Leningrad municipal soviet, organises a mass rally in Leningrad against perestroika (Ogonek, 50 [1989], p. 26). A report shown on national television produces strong reactions throughout the U.S.S.R. “I was in Moscow at the time and saw just a fragment of the 22 November meeting on television. The ferocity and atmosphere of mob hatred horrified me” (Anatoliy Sobchak, Khozhdenie vo vlast’ [Leningrad, 1991]; http://fragments.spb.ru/sobchak_1.html).

29 November

Death of Natan Eydelman (b. 1930), the outstanding historian, author and political commentator.

The parliament of Czechoslovakia deletes the article in the country’s constitution relating to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power.

1 December

A meeting takes place between Gorbachev and Pope John Paul II, during which both sides express their wish to establish diplomatic relations between the Vatican and the U.S.S.R. (which duly occurred). From Gorbachev’s speech at the Vatican: “I have to say, Your Holiness, that I was astonished by the way the people responded to our proposals and reflections. We are not so arrogant as to suppose we bear some exalted redemptive mission. One cannot claim to possess absolute truth, or try to impose it on others. Some people are claiming that Europe should be renewed solely on the basis of Western values, and that everything that differs from those should be excised. It is wrong to treat peoples, their history, traditions and identity like that. The U.S.S.R. used to be accused of exporting revolution. Now, however, attempts are being made to export other values. That is not the right path. In this, as in other issues, the supreme authority for us is the people. Everything depends on what choice it will make” (Mikhail Gorbachev, Gody trudnykh reshenii [Moscow, 1993], pp. 166–72).

2–3 December

Gorbachev and George Bush meet on the Maxim Gorky, off the coast of Malta.

9 December

At a meeting of the Interregional Group of Deputies, formed in the summer of 1989 and the most democratic group in the U.S.S.R. Supreme Soviet, members call for abolition of the Communist Party’s monopoly on power and the introduction of a multi-party system.

A plenum of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (C.P.S.U.) Central Committee considers issues arising at the forthcoming Second Congress of People’s Deputies of the U.S.S.R., the formation of a Russian Bureau of the Central Committee etc. It reaffirms the desirability of retaining a one-party system.

12 December

The Congress of People’s Deputies rejects a draft resolution on the introduction of a multi-party system by 1,138 votes to 939.

12–24 December

The Second Congress of People’s Deputies of the U.S.S.R. During the Congress, many workers’ groups hold a token two-hour strike on the initiative of Andrey Sakharov in favour of abolition of Article 6 of the U.S.S.R. Constitution (which enshrined in law the “leading role of the Communist Party”).

14 December

Sakharov (b. 1921) dies suddenly in Moscow. He had been a physicist, political activist, one of the leaders of the dissident movement in the U.S.S.R. and, in 1980, won the Nobel Peace Prize. On 27 November, Sakharov had given Gorbachev, who was Chairman of the Constitutional Commission, a draft “Constitution of the Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia”, a voluntary association of sovereign republics (Novoe vremia, 52 [1989]). In his final days Sakharov was still making amendments to the draft.

Presidential elections in Chile end the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, who had come to power in a military coup in September 1973.

20 December

The Democratic Workers’ Movement is established, based on the strike committee of the Vorgashorsk coal mine. It had only forty or so members but was very active in the 1989–90 election campaign. All the candidates it supported were elected people’s deputies (http://www.nasledie.ru/oborg/2_16/t2/14.htm).

U.S. troops invaded Panama to overthrow the dictatorial regime of Manuel Noriega. The U.S. government had earlier accused Noriega of personal involvement in the drugs trade and suppression of democratic freedoms (Ivan Konovalov, “‘Pravoe delo’ Pentagona”, Voenno-promyshlennyi kur’er, 22 [2005]; http://vpk-news.ru/articles/471).

In Romania, massive popular uprisings topple the dictatorial regime of Nicolae Ceauescu. Power passes to the Council of the National Salvation Front.

24 December

The Congress of People’s Deputies approves a directive “Concerning the political and legal assessment of the Soviet–German non-aggression pact of 1939” (i.e., the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact). The congress acknowledges the existence of secret protocols to the pact regarding “spheres of influence” in Europe which, even in 1989, the Soviet leadership had been denying. It condemns and declares them null and void from the moment of signing. The Congress also condemns the invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 on political and moral grounds (Pravda, 26 December).

25 December

In Romania, former dictator Ceauescu and his wife Elena are executed by firing squad.

Gorbachev sends a message to the Chairman of the Council of the National Salvation Front of Romania, Ion Iliescu, which reads, “Understanding the complexity and importance of the challenges facing the National Salvation Front, I wish to assure you that our friends, the people of Romania, will enjoy the support of the people and leaders of the Soviet Union on their path of renewal” (Pravda, 27 December).

The Federal Assembly of Czechoslovakia elects as president Václav Havel, leader of the dissident movement, human rights activist and playwright.

The Polish Sejm amends the republic’s constitution to abolish the Communist Party’s monopoly on power, introduce a multi-party system and protect private property. The name of the country is changed to the Republic of Poland (Mezhdunarodnyi ezhegodnik. Politika i ekonomika: 1990 [Moscow, 1990], p. 411).

31 December

How Is Perestroika Doing?

(from surveys conducted by the U.S.S.R. Centre for the Study of Public Opinion)

1988
1989

What was the past year like for you?

More Difficult than last year

42.5

55.6

Easier than last year

11.4

13.6

The same as last year

46.1

30.8

1988
1989

What was it like for our society?

More Difficult than last year

79.6

83.4

Easier than last year

7.1

4.3

The same as last year

13.3

12.3

1988
1989

How did the availability of food change in the past year?

For the better

15.6

6.0

For the worse

46.3

78.4

No change

33.7

13.9

Don't know

4.4

1.6

1988
1989

How did the availability of manufactured goods change in the past year?

For the better

8.2

3.1

For the worse

58.8

83.3

No change

27.5

9.5

Don't know

5.5

4.1

1988
1989

How did the relations between people of different nationalities change in the past year?

For the better

19.5

7.0

For the worse

37.6

71.5

No change

26.5

10.9

Don't know

16.4

10.6

1988
1989

How has the personal security of citizens changed in the last year?

For the better

4.5

For the worse

58.6

No change

21.0

Don't know

16.1

1988
1989

How has the influence of ordinary people on the state of affairs changed in the past year?

Increased

25.5

Decreased

7.7

No change

41.0

Don't know

25.8

1988
1989

What, in your opinion, are the reasons for our present difficulties?

Low vocational and professional qualifications

26.4

24.1

Technological backwardness

42.0

42.9

Corruption, drunkenness, profiteering, thieving

56.8

58.5

The legacy of Stalinism

12.7

13.8

Too much power in the hands of bureaucrats

41.4

39.1

Loss of faith in the ideals of socialism

15.6

18.3

Destruction of national traditions

10.7

15.3

People are work-shy

28.0

27.3

Incompetence of bosses

18.7

17.9

Failure of morality

13.3

15.9

Hidden enemies

5.9

8.8

Errors by the country's political leaders

23.7

31.2

Degeneration of the population

3.2

5.5

Politics of envy, suppression of people with initiative

22.7

19.5

Loss of religious faith

7.4

10.3

Policies of imperialist countires

1.9

2.1

Lack of concern for problems of federalism and autonomy of peoples

12.7

Mafia and organised crime

35.9

One-party system

20.2

Don't know

5.4

6.4

1988
1989

Who is mainly benefiting from the changes taking place in the country?

People who work conscientiously

30.0

19.4

Windbags

7.4

14.1

Peasants

6.9

4.9

Executives

8.3

18.3

Owners and workers of cooperatives

39.6

41.8

Skilled workers

9.1

7.5

Sole traders

13.6

16.9

The working class

7.1

5.7

Other private traders

10.8

22.9

People who have moved to full-cost accounting

15.2

10.1

Intellectuals

3.6

2.0

Scam artists, swindlers

20.7

38.7

Don't know

15.8

11.7

1988
1989

Who, then, in your opinion, is losing out?

Bureaucrats

23.2

11.3

Low-income families

30.4

46.0

Lonely people, old people

25.4

36.8

Ordinary hard-working people

15.7

23.6

Layabouts, drunkards

23.0

10.8

Honest white-collar workers

10.3

22.5

Former bosses who have been demoted

9.4

5.3

People with no education or training

12.9

9.7

Employees made redundant

16.1

15.0

Don't know

15.8

11.6

(Est' mnenie! Itogi sotsiologicheskogo oprosa [Moscow, 1990]).

“IF LENIN WERE ALIVE TODAY, HE WOULD KNOW WHAT TO DO”

Aleksey Yurchak

Throughout the history of the U.S.S.R., Lenin was the main legitimising symbol, the “master-signifier”, of Soviet ideology, external to the ideological discourse.³ In other words, the postulate that Lenin’s ideas were correct and incontrovertible was the premise underlying all ideological statements, and hence could not be called into question by them. As a result, all reforms and changes in the Soviet system were carried out under the pretext that they were combating perversion of Lenin’s ideas in order to revert to what he really meant.

This was also the task which perestroika initially set itself. In 1990, however, the Communist Party press changed the way in which the the task was formulated. If in the past the speeches of Party leaders had explained that distortion of Lenin’s ideas had occurred during particular periods (under Stalin or Brezhnev), the suggestion now was that Lenin’s ideas had been distorted throughout the whole of Soviet history. This cast doubt on the authenticity of any of Lenin’s statements to be found in Soviet sources. That apparently minor shift in 1990 created a paradox within Party discourse. On the one hand, it was declaring that the main task of the perestroika reforms was to return to the ideas of the real Lenin, while on the other it was asserting that the real Lenin was unknown.

A typical early 1990 article in Kommunist, the Central Committee’s official theoretical journal, begins in familiar vein: the main task of perestroika is to “rid socialism of Stalin’s perversions, to restore to it the ideals of Marx and Lenin, its heart and soul, which Stalin had cut out …”⁴ Later, however, the article formulates the task of perestroika somewhat differently: “to proceed by way of experimentation rather than dogma, enriching the ideals of socialism with new, hitherto unknown meaning”.⁵ Returning to the ideals of Marx and Lenin was going to be a leap in the dark. The emergence of this contradiction in Party discourse in 1990 was one of the most significant events of that eventful year. It greatly hastened the undermining of the principle that legitimised Soviet ideology, and accelerated the irreversible collapse of the Communist Party and the Soviet system as a whole.

This process began and ended in 1990.

I

Admitting that Lenin’s words and ideas had been distorted throughout Soviet history created the necessity to establish the Leader’s authentic, undistorted identity. The first step was to understand how and why his words had been distorted. Party writers, debating the issue in the spring of 1990, noted that this had been done by all manner of commentators, paraphrasers and editors. Some had done it as a result of misunderstanding, some with the best of intentions and some maliciously. Other people’s reports of what Lenin said had occasionally been treated as tantamount to what he actually said. Kommunist observed that, “Sundry views, opinions and statements by the authors of reminiscences” of Lenin were still being treated as “fundamental propositions by Lenin himself.”⁶ For example, the journal continued, although in a well-known publication on the Party’s cultural policy, Clara Zetkin was only reporting a conversation she had had with Lenin, her paraphrase was treated “as if the words were written by Lenin himself “. Moreover, “… for many years we have been using a far from perfect translation”, even of the paraphrase. In this instance, Lenin’s words and ideas were doubly distorted, having been inaccurately reported and then inaccurately translated. If these strictures apply to the account of one of Lenin’s closest “comrades-in-arms”, what must be the situation where people wrote down and edited what Lenin said for reasons of political expediency during a particular historical period? “Is it not time we found out?” Kommunist asked. That is, was it not time to check the authenticity of everything Lenin is reported to have said, in order finally to identify his real voice? The journal proposed not merely to improve the accuracy of particular statements but to carry out a complete “inventory of texts, records and interpretations” of what the Leader said.⁷

It soon became apparent, however, that merely compiling an inventory would not solve the problem. Lenin’s words were distorted, not only by inaccurate paraphrasing and interpretation but also because he had been canonised by Soviet history, and everything he said along with him. Living speech had been transfigured into a set of quotations. Lenin’s discourse had been frozen and rendered unable to develop in tandem with the advance of history. This, Kommunist observed, was the source of the greatest distortion of Lenin’s words.

Gorbachev began an official speech marking the 120th anniversary of Lenin’s birth in April 1990 by saying, “Lenin remains with us as a leading thinker of the twentieth century.” He immediately added, “We need to reinterpret Lenin, his theoretical and political legacy, shaking off distortions and the canonisation of the conclusions he came to. It is time to put a stop to a mindless attitude towards the name and image of Lenin which treats him as a figure in an icon.”⁸ Since the canonical doctrine established on the basis of Lenin’s ideas is Leninism, a movement away from that and a return to a more authentic Lenin was tantamount, blasphemous as it might sound, to a rejection of Leninism. In an attempt to fudge this considerable issue, Gorbachev went on to explain that Leninism was a term coined by the Mensheviks as a means of ridiculing the Leader’s ideas.⁹

The real Lenin, unlike the canonical image, Kommunist explained, often changed his mind and corrected errors in the light of changing historical circumstances. What he had to say was not static but had evolved. Building on this idea, Aleksandr Yakovlev, a Party theoretician, member of the Politburo and the ‘foreman of the perestroika building site’, wrote in Kommunist that spring that the real Lenin was to be found, not in particular political positions but in the ability to change one’s position in accordance with the situation. “Something which I personally greatly admire in Lenin’s personality,” Yakovlev explained, “is his ability to revise his position when that was what life itself called for.”¹⁰ Two other writers in Kommunist developed this by noting that, in the light of the practical experience of building socialism, Lenin was constantly correcting not only his own errors but those in the theoretical works of Marx and Engels.¹¹

These assertions in the spring of 1990 led naturally to the conclusion that, since Lenin’s practical experience of building socialism had been limited to a few years, he could not have corrected every error and adapted every policy. Consequently, Kommunist argued, those views in his works and those of the Marxist classics which he was unable to correct were continuing to mislead us. This was because “… until the epistemological mechanism of error is revealed and understood, thought is unable to argue with and correct itself “.¹² In other words, Party theorists had to learn to correct and augment Lenin’s texts in the spirit of Lenin himself. They had to correct and add to them as Lenin would have done if he had still been alive. The old formula of Party ideology claimed “Lenin is more alive than the living”. It celebrated a canonical, changeless and hence, paradoxically, dead Lenin. The new ideological formula introduced in 1990 can be summarised in a catchphrase which became current in the latter years of perestroika: “If Lenin were alive today, he would know what to do”. The task facing the Party’s ideologues was becoming increasingly fanciful. They needed to recreate a living Lenin, able to reflect on today’s problems in today’s language. If the Party’s publications and pronouncements in 1990 did not call directly for the physical resurrection of Lenin, that is transparently what they desired.

An example of this wishful thinking is a propaganda poster titled “Let Lenin speak!” and issued in 1990 by the Central Committee’s Plakat publishing imprint (figure 1).¹³ The centre of the poster is taken up by a massive red podium with microphones and the Soviet crest, which represents the canonical quoting of Lenin in official party speeches. Lenin himself is depicted in a deliberately non-monumental way. A small, hunched figure in black and white, he crouches to one side in the lower part of the poster, beneath the podium, intently jotting down his thoughts about the current situation in a notebook. We cannot see his thoughts, and to know what they are we have to let Lenin speak, to allow him to come to the podium and hear him “live” in the present day.

Another example is the new look of Kommunist itself, which was unveiled in April 1990.¹⁴ For decades, the cover had had a conservative, bureaucratic look, like the cover of most other Soviet Party and academic publications. The title had been printed in a clunky Soviet font on a blue-grey background (figure 2). In April 1990, the magazine had a sudden facelift (figure 3). In a letter to its readers the editors explained, “This issue of Kommunist, dedicated to the 120th anniversary of the birth of V. I. Lenin, has been redesigned by Vladimir Panteleyev. The title on the cover is a magnified facsimile of Vladimir Ilyich’s handwriting. Our intention is to indicate our attitude to the legacy of the founder of the Soviet state and the legacy of Marxism generally, on which the journal today bases its theoretical and political work.”¹⁵ The title thus becomes part of an authentic Lenin manuscript and of his revived, topical, dynamically developing discourse.¹⁶

Above: Fig. 1 “Let Lenin speak!”

Right: Fig. 2 Kommunist’s “bureaucratic” look.

Fig. 3 Kommunist in Lenin’s hand-writing

II

In talking of the need to let Lenin speak, both the Party poster and the new cover of Kommunist were thinking subjunctively: “If Lenin could speak …” But how was that to be achieved in practice? How could Lenin’s voice be replicated so that he was not just repeating the old, familiar quotations but making new, up-to-date pronouncements which would still really be coming from Lenin? How could you not just go back to the thoughts of a long-dead Leader, but instead formulate new ideas from Lenin for the present day? Throughout 1990, the Party’s theoreticians ransacked their brains for a solution to this less-than-obvious problem. The Central Committee theorist Georgiy Shakhnazarov proposed to solve it by injecting into the familiar discourse of Lenin the ideas and utterances of other thinkers about socialism, thinkers to whom Lenin had turned, and to whom he would doubtless have had recourse again, had he been living in the 1990s. Shakhnazarov instanced Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, Kant and Hegel, offering a solution not so much discursive as organic, even agronomic, grafting the sayings of other thinkers on to the familiar texts of Lenin. The outcome of this hybridisation would be the appearance of entirely new statements by Lenin, different from what he had already said and yet genuinely by him. It would not be so different from a tree which, having received a graft, produces entirely new fruit which nevertheless belongs to it. According to Shakhnazarov, this modelling of Lenin’s thought would be tantamount to “a revolution in our theoretical consciousness”. “No-one,” he averred, “would approve of such a revolution” more than Lenin – if he had been alive at the time.¹⁷

The search for the real Lenin was gradually moving in a biological direction, which doubtless explains the growing interest in his pedigree, health, psychology and physical features, and the details of his death. These were unquestionably authentic aspects of his existence, free from outside interference and the myth-making of the past, and hence available for endowment with new and topical meaning.

An increasing number of articles and broadcasts in 1990 related the details of Lenin’s last days, hours and even moments, when he was ill and helpless, dying but not yet dead, suspended for an instant between life and death. In this intermediate state he was no longer a political player or the Leader but a “bare” human being. There is increasing interest in that part of Lenin’s nature which Giorgio Agamben terms the “bare” or “naked” life of an individual, the physiological component of a human being that remains when the citizen’s political life has been reduced to nothing.¹⁸

Unlike political life, bare life is outside history and politics, free from political distortion. Hence it seemed that here it should at last be possible to find the true, undistorted Lenin.

Of all his political pronouncements, Lenin’s last, made literally when he was at death’s door, suddenly appeared to be the most authentic, most expressive of his real, biological identity. Gorbachev said in April 1990 that it was by turning to “Lenin’s last works” that he drew “confidence that [we] have embarked on a correct, if difficult, path”.¹⁹ Ogonyok magazine published Lenin’s last texts under the general heading of “Lenin’s political testament”, including in it “eight short letters and articles dating from late 1922 and early 1923”.²⁰

This increase of interest in the Leader’s bare life took a variety of forms. For decades before 1990, Lenin was principally commemorated on the anniversary of his birth, 22 April. The anniversary of his death, 21 January, was observed, but more modestly, and had less symbolic impact.²¹ Pravda’s coverage of the topic was printed not on the front page but on the inside of the newspaper. The emphasis was less on Lenin’s death than on his role as Leader of the world revolution. Many Soviet citizens did not know the significance of the date, which was certainly not the case with 22 April. In 1990, however, the priority was again suddenly changed: for the first time since the mid-1950s, Lenin’s death was commemorated as extensively as his birth, with Pravda devoting its entire front page to the anniversary under the heading “Remembering that January”.²²

This reflected increased interest not so much in the diagnosis of Lenin’s final illness, or in the political situation surrounding his death, as in the details of the physiological process of his dying and the undistorted, “organic” nature of the man, his bare life suddenly revealed. Publishing little-known eyewitness accounts, the front page of Pravda described his death in unfamiliar, straightforwardly physical terms. The emphasis in a passage from Nikolai Bukharin’s memoirs was on the Leader’s physical features. “Never again shall we see that great brow, the magnificent head which radiated revolutionary energy in every direction, those lively, piercing, attentive eyes, the firm, powerful hands, his whole sturdy, powerful figure …” These accounts seem sometimes not to be describing death but an existence between life and death. In an excerpt from the memoirs of Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, we read: “The right hand is clenched, the grey stain of a small bruise on the right ear relentlessly holds our attention. Look, his eyes seem to be opening. His cheek is trembling slightly …”²³

Interest in these physical details became part of the process of decanonisation of Lenin which Gorbachev had called for. The other side of this process, however, was that the Leader ceased to be sacrosanct. Deprived of his political aura, he also lost his status as the infallible superman you just knew was always right. There was still little overt criticism of Lenin in the media in 1990, but increasingly he was discussed in terms which presented him as neither good nor bad, merely human.

In one of the 1990 issues of Ogonyok, the magazine’s editor Vitaliy Korotich describes a recent visit to the Lenin Mausoleum, writing that, in place of his usual sense of religious awe, he was surprised to register the complete banality of the ritual surroundings and the body in the coffin. On this occasion, Red Square was closed to the public, and Korotich entered the mausoleum without the usual stream of visitors: “For the first time I was face to face with Lenin in the semi-darkness of his public tomb, dimly lit and melancholy, as are all resting places of the dead.”²⁴ For Korotich, Lenin no longer appeared as the Leader “alive for all eternity” but as a man whose fate was to have been stranded between life and death. In this condition, he was deprived of his political status and its associated grandeur and reduced to his bare life, a life not only banal but tragic, because it has not been allowed to proceed to its natural end: “A short man in his best suit was lying in a bulletproof coffin in the middle of a chamber, one hand clenched and the other with its fingers outstretched. ‘Poor Lenin,’ I thought. ‘A man not allowed to rest in peace. In every age, one of the most terrible humiliations was not to have your body consigned to the grave. How [had] he deserved such a fate?’”²⁵

In the eyes of most Soviet citizens, the totem of Lenin was still, at the end of 1990, revered and unassailable. Desacralising the Leader was, nevertheless, gradually rendering him more vulnerable to overt criticism. In December 1990, Oleg Moroz wrote in Ogonyok that “for our readers today, the idea of debunking Lenin is almost as shocking as debunking Christ would be to Christians, a thoroughly dubious enterprise in every respect. People have become accustomed to believing that Lenin is God, and have no wish to have that belief questioned.”²⁶ “It is time to tell the truth about this person,” Moroz’s fellow contributor Vladimir Soloukhin added.²⁷ The “truth” that most of Lenin’s critics wanted to reveal, however, was to be found not so much by analysing his views on particular historical events as by revealing secrets and mysteries about his ancestry and physiology. Calls to tear away his mask and expose his true colours took the form of demands to reveal his human nature. A. A. Matyshev suggested abandoning the “false” name of Lenin and using his real surname, Ulyanov. The time had come, he wrote, to reveal people’s “real names and surnames”. That would make it “easier to say goodbye to myths”.²⁸

III

This interest in real names points to a wish to dig deeper into the real Lenin’s ancestry and ethnic origins, and indeed his “hidden roots” were discussed more and more freely. In April 1990, the newspaper Arguments and Facts published a pioneering interview with his niece on the subject of the Ulyanov family’s antecedents. Rumours were already circulating in the press about Lenin’s un-Russian pedigree, and his elderly niece went out of her way to emphasise that the family “through the line of Ilya Nikolayevich [Lenin’s father] were Russian people. Vladimir Ilyich and his sisters always wrote in official forms that they were Russian and that their native language was Russian. I can’t tell you anything definite about the line through Mariya Aleksandrovna. She was Russian too, although there has been talk of a Swedish branch. There is no documentary evidence of that, though.”²⁹

In October 1990, Man of Letters (Literator), a Leningrad newspaper, published previously unknown facts uncovered in secret archives of the Central Committee’s Institute of Marxism-Leninism. At the request of its readers, Word, a magazine with a much larger circulation, reprinted the information,³⁰ and it was subsequently also reported in Book Survey, a literary newspaper.³¹ The article focused particularly on the continuing investigation into Lenin’s Swedish roots, which had been mentioned only as unsubstantiated rumour. Although there was now more information, the newspaper reported, the full facts were not yet known: “Carl Reinhald Östedt, a glove-maker in Uppsala, and Grigory Ulyanin, a serf, are the earliest forebears to whom researchers have traced the family tree (albeit without dates for their births and deaths).”³²

The stream of articles and broadcasts about Lenin’s antecedents increased. Most are a cross between the investigation in a detective novel and a scientific enquiry into secrets of nature which were expected to show the entire course of Soviet history in a new light. The apotheosis of the genre is Stanislav Govorukhin’s documentary The Russia We Lost. He began shooting at the Mosfilm studios in 1990 when interest in this issue was at its height.³³ The film contrasts the pre-revolutionary Russian empire with contemporary Soviet Russia, partly through a comparison of two opposing families: that of Tsar Nicholas II and the Ulyanovs. Govorukhin acts as the film’s main narrator, walking through archives, viewing newsreel footage and quoting from previously classified documents. He stresses that both families had complex, non-Russian antecedents. The roots of the tsarist royal family were West European: “All the tsars of Russia, from Catherine the First onwards, had German blood in their veins. Nicholas II also had Danish blood. His mother, Mariya Fyodorovna, was a Danish princess. Here he is with his cousin, King George V of England [shows photo]. His wife, Aleksandra Fyodorovna of Hesse-Darmstadt, was a German princess brought up at the English court.”³⁴ Despite their origins, Govorukhin continued, members of the royal family were genuinely Russian in their culture and religion. The tsar’s wife voluntarily converted to Russian Orthodoxy, refused to have her children taught German, and even employed simple Russian nannies who told them Russian fairy tales and taught them to speak like ordinary Russians.

Govorukhin then comes to Lenin’s family. Sitting in the Leningrad History Archive, he comments,

For many decades Lenin’s ethnic background has been shrouded in mystery. And understandably so, because there is plenty in it to knock the feet from under any true-believing Communist. On the paternal side we find his father, Ilya Nikolayevich [shows photo]; Lenin’s grandmother, Anna Smirnova, was a Kalmyk; his grandfather, Nikolai Ulyanin, was a Chuvash. The maternal line is even more problematical. This is his mother, Mariya Aleksandrovna [shows photo]; Lenin’s grandmother, Anna Groschopf, was German with an admixture of Swedish blood. Pay attention, now, anti-Semites: Lenin’s grandad, Aleksandr Blank, was a Jew. Here we have a register of Department of Medicine staff. We know Lenin’s grandfather, Aleksandr Blank, was trained as a medic and graduated from the Academy of Medicine. Pages 520–23 are missing, and it took us six months to find them.³⁵

Govorukhin was only able to track down the missing pages the following year, in 1991, when, after the failed August putsch, the Communist Party archives were declassified. Sitting in a room at the archive, he continues his story:

Here we found documents removed from the History Archive in St Petersburg. What terrible secret did the Party need to conceal from its members? There is a document explaining why the Blanks, who were Jewish, converted to Christianity. It reads, “Information regarding Dmitriy and Aleksandr Blank, Jewish children who accepted the sacrament of baptism, pupils of the Imperial Academy of Surgery and Medicine. The aforementioned Blanks are descended from burgers of Starokonstantinovo and are children of the Jew Moshka Blank.

“That’s all there is to it,” Govorukhin remarks pensively, before concluding, “The brothers Abel and Israel Blank took the Christian names of Dmitriy and Aleksandr. They were forced [Govorukhin emphasises the word] to convert to Russian Orthodoxy because higher education institutions did not admit Jews.”³⁶

The film offers a simple conclusion. Despite the complex antecedents of the two families, members of the royal family can be considered genuinely Russian and with a good European pedigree. Those who were not born into Orthodoxy voluntarily adopted it. The ethnic origins of Lenin’s family are less straightforward and contain “problematical” facts. While some of Lenin’s ancestors were said to be Russian, they were in fact Kalmyks, Chuvashes and Germans “with an admixture of Swedish blood”. Lenin’s Jewish ancestors, moreover, did not convert to Orthodoxy and take Russian names willingly but only for tactical reasons.

This sub-genre of investigative journalism in which Lenin was unmasked and his true nature revealed, and the influence this had on how Russian history was explained, became very familiar to readers and viewers in 1990–91.

IV

The whiff of nationalism and anti-Semitism some of these reports gave off generated a counter-discourse of parody and satire. The most substantial, but not the only, “counter-investigation” is a hoax brilliantly perpetrated by Sergey Kuryokhin in a popular programme broadcast on the Fifth (Leningrad) T.V. channel, which at the time was carried nationwide.³⁷ It was conceived by Kuryokhin in late 1990 in response to the mounting interest in the mysteries surrounding Lenin’s identity.³⁸

At the beginning of the programme, the compère, Sergey Sholokhov, introduced Kuryokhin as “the well-known politician and movie actor” who had recently returned from Mexico, where he had been studying the influence of hallucinogenic drugs on social revolution. Kuryokhin explained that this was to be the first in a series of programmes offering a “completely new approach to familiar events of Russian and world history, and to some familiar facts”.³⁹ He then proceeded to employ his favourite technique, starting with an entirely serious talk and gradually reducing it to total absurdity, remaining earnest and po-faced all the while. As practised by Kuryokhin, this provoked a mixture of puzzlement, fascination, a desire to believe and complete uncertainty as to whether or not he was serious.⁴⁰ This was the style in which he delivered to camera a lengthy academic lecture about Lenin’s secret nature and its influence on the Bolshevik Revolution. He began: “My talk today concerns the most important secret of the October Revolution of 1917. Not everything in the revolution was quite as straightforward as it might seem.”⁴¹ Kuryokhin explained that Lenin, like his fellow revolutionaries, liked going out into the woods to gather mushrooms for the table. Many Russian fungi, the mukhomor, or fly agaric, in particular, alter consciousness no less than the famous Mexican hallucinogenic peyote cactus, Lophophora Williamsii.⁴² After consuming these mushrooms over a period of many years, “a human being’s personality is subtly displaced by the personality” of the mushroom; the fungus “very gradually takes over his being. To put it another way, the individual is little by little turned into a mushroom”. Kuryokhin then went on to make what was to become his most famous pronouncement: “I have incontrovertible evidence that, from start to finish, the October Revolution was the work of people who for years had been using the fungi referred to. The mushrooms being used by these individuals drove their personalities out of them and they themselves became fungi. Quite simply, not to mince words, Lenin was a fungus.”⁴³ Citing philosophical treatises and running a pointer over various diagrams, Kuryokhin adduced an immense weight of evidence to show that, unquestionably, Lenin’s personality was transformed from that of a human being into that of a mushroom. Throughout the broadcast, this highly original discovery was presented elegantly and with Kuryokhin’s trademark solemnity and persuasiveness.

Many viewers phoned the studio in a panic to ask for clarification. Not only less educated viewers but reputable intellectuals, most of whom had never heard of Kuryokhin, fell for the hoax. Among them was the satirical actor Konstantin Raikin, which suggests that what was operating was not mere naivety on the part of the audience but an acceptance by this time that it was natural to be investigating the mysteries of Lenin’s personality and physiology, and that these had influenced not just his own destiny but Russian history itself.⁴⁴ Raikin recalls that he was fooled

as an ordinary Soviet citizen accustomed to take on trust anything presented in a serious tone of voice. Kuryokhin’s acting was brilliant. I fell for it completely. We all like to think no-one can make a fool of us and that we will spot when we are having our leg pulled, but this was about Lenin. It was still very daring at that time. Kuryokhin is one of the people who made me feel a new era in our national life was beginning. When I saw what was possible, and that it could be done so cleverly, and that you could have a big laugh at something we had believed was unshakeable and beyond the reach of humour, and at the whole lot of us into the bargain, it was amazing. It was a wonderful feeling, a breath of freedom.⁴⁵

Kuryokhin’s skit was a kind of summing up of 1990, a year in which the image of Lenin in Party and public discourse was transformed. From a canonical Leader above criticism, he morphed into an unknown entity whose very nature concealed mysteries and secrets which had influenced the course of history.

In conclusion, let us return to our initial thesis. Throughout Soviet history, “Lenin” the ideologeme occupied a special, outside position in relation to the Soviet ideological construct. From this external point it legitimised that ideology. During 1990, however, Lenin’s privileged position in the structure of ideological discourse was lost. At the outset, the notion was articulated in the press that Lenin’s words and ideas had been distorted throughout Soviet history. This questioning of the authenticity of his pronouncements published in Soviet primary sources led to a contradiction in the structure of the ideological discourse. On the one hand, it was being claimed that the main aim of perestroika was to return to the real Lenin, while on the other hand it was being said that the real Lenin was unknown.

The main result of the changes in how Lenin was perceived was to accelerate a structural crisis in Soviet ideology that was already underway. The ideology ceased to be able to appeal to Lenin as a source of absolute, external, unquestionable truth. It began rapidly to lose legitimacy in the eyes of society and became just one of several, more or less equal truths which could be publicly called into question. Accompanying this was a questioning of the legitimacy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union itself. Its right, as the vessel of Soviet ideology, to lead and guide was also losing its absolute and indisputable status. Among the events of the latter years of perestroika, it was perhaps the loss of Lenin’s legitimising function during 1990 which most facilitated the rapid collapse of the entire system.

Lenin’s loss of status was dramatically illustrated by the renaming of Leningrad. Although early in 1990 several members of the new, democratically elected Leningrad City Soviet tried to raise the question of returning to Leningrad its historical name of St Petersburg, most of the deputies, including the city’s first mayor, Anatoliy Sobchak, voted against even putting the issue on the agenda. At the end of 1990, however, it was raised again, and in May 1991 the Soviet voted in favour of holding a referendum within the city. In June of that year, a majority voted in favour of restoring the original name.⁴⁶

In March 1990 the Third Congress of People’s Deputies of the U.S.S.R. voted to delete Article 6 of the Constitution (on the leading and guiding role of the C.P.S.U.). In June a conservative section of the Party attempted to re-assert the legitimacy of Soviet ideology and the guiding role of the Communist Party by forming the Communist Party of the R.S.F.S.R. In July the C.P.S.U. held its twenty-eighth (and final) Congress. A group of democratically minded participants failed to convert the C.P.S.U. into a parliamentary-type democratic party, and a number, including Boris Yeltsin, Anatoliy Sobchak and Gavriil Popov, announced that they were resigning from the Party. In fact, throughout Russia there was a sharp increase in the exodus from the Party. In 1989, 140,000 members resigned. In 1990, particularly in the second half of the year, the numbers increased vastly, reaching a total of 2.7 million.⁴⁷

In the autumn of 1991, the U.S.S.R. Supreme Soviet adopted two decrees: one renaming Leningrad as St Petersburg, and another banning the Communist Party. Although the immediate cause was a failed attempt by conservative forces in the Party leadership to organise a putsch, the very possibility of formulating them was due to the lost legitimacy within state ideology of the authority of Lenin and the Party. These decrees gave legislative form to a transfer of legitimacy which had already largely occurred the previous year. In 1990.