The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (17 page)

1930s and 1940s were over: the war

was won, and the great new

industrial cities were built.

After Stalin died in 1953, most

of the gulag camps were closed.

Stalin’s

successor

Nikita

Khrushchev felt able to condemn his

methods, and tried to introduce a

more humane form of communism,

sacking incompetent and corrupt

officials,

altering

the

system,

chivvying people along rather than

murdering them.

In 1956, he gave what was called

the Secret Speech, though its

contents were known across the

country and beyond in weeks. In it,

he

criticized

Stalin’s

cult

of

personality and the great purges of

1937 and 1938. He did not admit to

all the regime’s crimes – perhaps

because he was implicated in most of

them – but it was still the first

admission that the Soviet Union had

done anything wrong, and it jolted

communists all over the country.

Some 98 of the 139 members

and candidates of the Central

Committee elected at the 1934 party

congress had been arrested and shot,

he said. And 1,108 of 1,966

delegates at that congress had been

arrested on charges of counter-

revolutionary crimes.

‘Many thousands of honest and

innocent communists died as a result

of this monstrous falsification of

such “cases”, as a result of the fact

that

all

kind

of

slanderous

“confessions” were accepted, and as

a result of the practice of forcing

accusations against oneself and

others,’ Khrushchev said, even

singling out individual judges for

censure. ‘He is a vile person, with

the brain of a bird, and morally

completely degenerate. And it was

this man who decided the fate of

prominent party workers,’ he said of

one.

He urged ordinary communists

and other Soviet citizens to believe

that the party was now back on the

right track, but the shock of finding

out even a partial truth about what

had happened caused many people

to see the country with fresh eyes.

Leonid Plyushch, for example,

was a member of a unit of the

Young Communist League, targeting

crime and prostitution. He was

rocked by the Secret Speech, almost

as much as he was when the head of

his unit raped a prostitute.

‘I was a very active member of

the Komsomol and a communist by

conviction, but when I learned of the

exposure of Stalin’s crimes it had a

tremendous impact . . . I felt the

ground had moved from under me,

and then the idea: it should never

happen again – which stayed with

me for many years.’

Khrushchev attempted to allow

such disoriented citizens to speak

out, and even permitted the reality of

the gulag to appear in print.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel of

an ordinary peasant in the camps,

One Day in the Life of Ivan

Denisovich
,

was

published

in

November 1962. Khrushchev was

mercurial, but this was concrete

proof that he intended to open

discussions on previously forbidden

themes.

But all of this alienated the senior

bureaucrats. They too had been

implicated in Stalin’s crimes and felt

Khrushchev was going too far.

Besides, they disliked the prospect of

being sacked and no longer feared

rebelling if they would not be killed

for it. Khrushchev had promised

communism would be built, more or

less, by 1980. But then he was

forced out in 1964, and replaced by

Leonid Brezhnev, who promised

stability. Under Brezhnev, change

stopped altogether. Communism was

postponed and replaced by the

concept of ‘developed socialism’.

The state would not wither away, as

Marx had predicted it would, for

many many years. The party was

needed to guide the revolution for

the foreseeable future, which meant

everyone got to keep their jobs. The

class of 1937 dug in on the summit

of the state. It would rule the Soviet

Union until Mikhail Gorbachev.

Young people were frustrated that

their paths to promotion were

blocked by increasingly old men.

Ogorodnikov was eager to start

down the track of his life story but

kept being derailed by the glorious

confusion of his kitchen. His wife

was trying to spoon soup into

Andrei, their three-year-old, who

had a mass of hair, no trousers and

lots to say.

Then an Uzbek man arrived to

discuss the reception centre for

homeless men he and Ogorodnikov

had set up. After a couple of minutes

of that, we switched to police

corruption. We all had anecdotes to

tell, but the Uzbek beat us flat with a

story about being randomly detained

in Astrakhan and forced to work in

the police chief’s garden for three

days until his non-existent debt to

society was deemed paid.

Lunch was soup and bread, and

Ogorodnikov recited a long grace.

He and the Uzbek then vanished to

talk business, and I made faces at

Andrei whenever he peeked around

the corner of the corridor.

At last I had Ogorodnikov to

myself: his wife went out, the Uzbek

left, and Andrei lay down for a nap.

I studied Ogorodnikov while he

made more tea. He had the long hair

and beard of an Orthodox priest but

none of their over-ripe sleekness. He

was born in 1950. He looked burned

by the sun, and hardened by it.

‘My

generation

was

the

generation of the change. You

understand,’ he started.

Growing up in the 1960s, the

post-war children, he and his friends

were part of the global wave of

protest. Like their counterparts

around the world, they were living

in unprecedented prosperity and

peace. Obviously, their wealth did

not

compare

to

that

of

contemporaries in North America or

Western Europe. There was no mass

ownership of cars for Soviet citizens,

no transistor radios or cheap fashion.

But they were still considerably

more prosperous than their parents

or grandparents had been. The

generation before them had suffered

the privations caused by World War

Two. The generation before that had

struggled through collectivization.

Ogorodnikov and his friends had

food and clothes, and could be

proud

of

their

country’s

achievements:

sputnik,

Yuri

Gagarin, the hydrogen bomb.

Ogorodnikov

grew

up

in

Chistopol, a little railway town on

the edge of Siberia, and was not

immediately a dissident. Indeed, as a

child, he had no cause to complain

about his life at all. He was far away

from the rarefied world of Moscow

intellectuals, and was a pure product

of the Soviet system. If the country

had a future it was in people like

him: bright and committed. It took

him a long time to rebel.

‘We were all raised in Soviet

ideology,’ Ogorodnikov went on. ‘I

was completely devoted to the Soviet

idea and Marxism. For me, I had the

ideals of communism. To understand

how deep this went into me, when I

was sixteen a girl wrote me a note, a

love letter, in which she chided me,

telling me that Pavka Korchagin

would not have behaved the way I

had done. And for her it was a real

example of how to live.’

Korchagin was the hero of

Nikolai Ostrovsky’s socialist realist

n o v el
How the Steel was Forged
,

which presented a glorious narrative

of the Bolshevik victory in the Civil

War. Young Russians were inspired

by his example to dream of building

the new world order just as

Westerners of the same generation

were dreaming of running away and

heading for the horizon like Jack

Kerouac. Members of the Young

Communist League signed up in

their thousands to work on massive

construction projects like the Baikal–

Amur railway line. Many young

Russians at the time would have

jumped at the kind of offer

Ogorodnikov received when he was

eighteen: to hold a senior post in a

Young

Communist

detachment

helping build a new truck factory on

a

tributary

of

the Volga

at

Naberezhnye Chelny.

Through mass education, which

reduced

illiteracy

from

near

universal to almost non-existent, the

Soviet Union succeeded in inspiring

its youth to great feats of effort.

Stalin called writers the ‘engineers of

the human soul’, and he was right.

Books like Ostrovsky’s created a

loyal army for the state, and

Ogorodnikov at the time was

completely unaware of how cleverly

he had been indoctrinated by heroes

such as Pavka Korchagin.

‘For me he was a serious realistic

life model, you understand. She was

condemning me by saying that I was

not behaving like a revolutionary

hero. This was my girlfriend, in a

love letter.’

Ogorodnikov was bright, driven

by the desire to improve his country

and rescue it from its enemies. He

joined the Pioneers – where children

paraded in red neckerchiefs and

boasted of being ‘Always Ready’

just like Boy Scouts in the West

were told to ‘Be Prepared’ – and

then the Young Communist League.

But that was not enough for him

and, aged fifteen, he and his friends

formed the Young Communists’

Militant Wing. They wanted to clean

up their rough railway town, where

too many people drank and fought

and swindled, far from Moscow’s

watchful eye.

‘We fought with non-socialist

remnants, with non-Soviet ways of

life,’ he said, mocking the Soviet

jargon. ‘There were these fops, these

dandies, and we had a lot of

authority. But don’t laugh; this was

very serious. Two of my comrades

were killed by bandits. They tried to

kill me too. We risked our lives.’

On

15

November

1968,

Komsomolskaya Pravda
, the daily

newspaper for Soviet youth, with

millions of copies printed daily,

devoted the centre of its front page

to one of those deaths. Sasha

Votyakov, the paper wrote, had

remonstrated with two ‘boorish,

arrogant, and drunken’ men who

refused to buy bus tickets. They

followed him off the bus and killed

him.

‘Imagine what
Komsomolskaya

Pravda
was, there were 60 million

copies printed every day across the

whole country, the youth paper. And

imagine, there was an article about

me on the first page with the

headline “Valour Patrol”.’

He might be from a small and

remote town, but this was enough to

qualify him as a high-flyer. In the

late 1960s, he was already living the

communist dream, creating his own

legend. He was defending the

revolution. Once he beat up a friend

who had had sex with a female

classmate in the Pioneers’ room.

They were welcome to have sex of

course, that was their business, but

they should never have used the

Pioneers’ banner as a sheet. They

had fucked on the flag, and needed

to be taught a lesson.

Another time, some locals were

out in the middle of town in winter.

It was cold and they were warming

their feet on the eternal flame, which

burned to commemorate those who

had died defending the Soviet