I had decided against getting a ticket at the hotel that would have allowed me to jump to the front, for I hoped to find people who spoke English. As luck would have it, the man in front of me possessed English he wished to exercise. He was in his late forties, I would guess, a Moldavian who took frequent trips to Moscow but had never before made the pilgrimage to see the father of the Revolution and the Soviet state. His nine-year-old daughter was with him, dressed in a kind of ski suit, with her long blonde hair tied back with pieces of bobbin lace. She kept staring at me for the exotic foreigner that I was but reverted to excessive shyness when I smiled in response or tried to speak with her. My companion also had a son, of 22, who had recently made him a grandfather. This was an important holiday for the family, though the man went on with genuine sadness about how Moscow was looking so decrepit these days, not full of life and freshly painted as it was when he began coming here 15 years ago. I couldn’t determine to what extent it was his own—our own—advancing years he saw reflected in the surroundings.
The line now stretched for blocks and was suddenly made longer by the arrival of scores of Second World War veterans, some in uniform and others not, some with canes and crutches, most with at least a few medals or decorations, who placed roses on the monument to the unknown soldiers, a place where, on other days, brides and bridegrooms traditionally have their photographs taken. A children’s marching band stood to attention, and the old soldiers were then given priority in the slow march around the corner and up the hill towards Red Square and another part of the Kremlin wall. “They no doubt feel bad at being made to go ahead of us,” my friend said. But I saw only that they were caught up in their private memories. It is mildly shocking, yet somehow reassuring, to find one’s clichés about a country so often revealed true—never wholly true, mind you, but true nonetheless in their sheer accessibility. First all those peasants at the airport in Montreal, struggling with parcels as lumpy as themselves, and then the fact that the Second World War, in which 20 million Soviets were killed, was still a palpable reality in everyone’s life—and I hadn’t even got as far as Leningrad where the fighting had been worse.
As we filed into Red Square, the people grew quiet. Hands came out of pockets. One woman quickly combed her hair and straightened her clothes. The clock on the Spasskaya Tower struck 11:00 a.m., and outside the mausoleum there was a changing-of-the-guard ceremony. The soldiers goose-stepped; I had already seen many soldiers, but these were the first ones whose boots were polished. Two others, on either side of the entrance when we arrived, were armed with old bolt-action rifles with bayonets fixed. Others made last-minute inspections of people’s handbags, looking for cameras, which were forbidden inside, while another soldier moved up and down our part of the line photographing obvious foreigners (he snapped me twice, once, I suppose, because I was taller than most of the others, and again because I wear a beard). The interior was dark and cool and made of polished granite. We shuffled down some steps, turned a corner, and there he was, illuminated in his glass coffin, wearing a blue silk tie with white dots. He was a small man, and his goatee and the fringe of hair around the sides of his head were sandy red, which surprised me. By no stretch of the language could the corpse be called lifelike, though the fact that it had been preserved as well as this since 1924 does speak kindly of scientific method. Insensitive foreigners are renowned for remarking that the face and hands look like those of waxwork. On the contrary, it seems to me, the effect suggests wood carving.
One exits the sacred place to walk under a stretch of the Kremlin wall where state heroes, including John Reed, the Harvard alumnus who wrote Ten Days That Shook the World, are buried. Revolutionaries, artists, cosmonauts including Yuri Gagarin, have plaques set in the wall and small memorial stones in the turf below. A few foreign names catch the eye, such as that of Big Bill Haywood (1868–1928), the Wobbly from Chicago. Other figures of even higher rank are memorialized by a row of stone busts. Konstantin Chernenko is one of the most recent additions. Stalin is there, too, though he used to rest next to Lenin; Khrushchev had him demoted in 1961.
When I got back to my room, I turned on my little shortwave radio to hear Radio Moscow’s report of the day’s events. Gorbachev was quoted as saying, somewhat pointedly so in the faintness of his praise, “We shall rely on everything lasting in Lenin’s intellectual heritage.” But the people I was with, young as well as old, seemed to me to be genuinely moved, perhaps even awed, not much ready for revisionism insofar as the cult of Lenin’s personality is concerned—a cult that is of course not justified in Lenin’s own teachings but not difficult to explain in a culture where icons are such an important form of art. In the ensuing weeks I would meet people who cynically contradicted this first impression of mine.
Later in the day I fell into conversation about what I had seen with a woman who told me that she was first taken to see Lenin by her mother when she was a small girl and so took her own daughter there when the child was about the same age and expected her grandchildren to go one day as well. The notion of such deliberate continuity—as distinct from the unending sameness over which one has no control—seemed quite at odds with the mood of the moment, when everything in the society appeared to be either improving quickly or just as quickly getting worse but, in any event, changing. Two days later, a 49-year-old Lithuanian stood where I stood and threw two fire bombs in the direction of Lenin’s body. No damage was done. He was arrested.
Events were moving so rapidly, in fact, that our memory of the present chronology is understandably jumbled. So perhaps I should pause here to give a more exact context to these remarks and observations.
At the time of which I write, Gorbachev was settling into the new presidential powers he had given himself and recently had gone so far in the direction of Western politics as to create the post of presidential press secretary. Politically and economically, chaos was barely being restrained. Ethnic tensions in Azerbaijan might have cooled, but the Lithuanians had declared themselves independent, forcing Gorbachev to cut off most shipments of natural gas and virtually all their supply of oil. His legal grounds for doing so were unclear, as there was simply no legislation on the matter one way or the other, but the action was better than sending in tanks; everyone was on tenterhooks waiting to see whether he could force the Lithuanians into a referendum on the succession question followed by a slow transition over five years. The Lithuanians had just responded with an embargo of their own involving those products, such as small electric motors and television tubes, on which their factories had been given a near monopoly long ago.
Back in Moscow, Gorbachev’s adversaries were snapping at him, not only the communist old guard who distrusted reform, a group we heard less about in the West, but also the more highly profiled radicals who felt that the reforms were not proceeding nearly so quickly as they might. The most conspicuous of these was of course Boris Yeltsin, the brusque one-time construction foreman and former mayor of Moscow who periodically would accuse Gorbachev of becoming a dictator and who clearly wanted to set himself up as president of the core state, the Russian Federation that accounted for half of the Soviet Union’s population and four-fifths of its territory. At this time, a few months before he succeeded in that goal, his image in the West was still coloured by the visit he had paid to the United States and elsewhere in 1989, when he drank and talked prodigiously, and coloured, too, by an incident in Moscow shortly afterwards when he claimed he was abducted by thugs and thrown in the river. In Britain, therefore, he was being seen by some in much the same light as George Brown was regarded in the 1960s, while in Canada his big square head and