Lenin's Tomb

In his evocative nonfiction work Lenin’s Tomb: Russia and the Fall of Communism (1993), David Remnick, an American writer, journalist, and print editor, weaves together his experience with these different expository valences to give an intricate account of how the political empire of the Soviet Union collapsed. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction in 1994 and has a sequel, Resurrection, which focuses on the creation of the post-Soviet Russian state.

Comprised loosely using both historical data and eyewitness accounts, the book begins with accounts of the excavation of the corpses of Polish intelligence officers killed by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), Soviet Russia’s secret police. Only in the distant wake of this atrocity were the mass graves discovered in Russia’s Katyn Forest. Remnick offers several similar accounts of inhumane acts committed by the Soviets to point at the underlying structural flaws of Russia that enabled it to commit and attempt to normalize such terrible human rights abuses.



Remnick claims that the most critical determinant of the collapse of the Soviet Union was the translation into contemporary life of the historical trauma inflicted by Stalin’s state-sponsored terrorism. He draws on the wealth of narratives assembled from his tenure as bureau chief for the Washington Post in Moscow, where he worked during the Gorbachev era. He argues that the Russian public’s memory of Stalin was too fresh to allow the Soviet regime to successfully normalize these historical traumas using the typical avenues of propaganda and appeals to national identity. Millions of people living during the Soviet Union’s time had also lived during Stalin’s time and retained the tools they had learned for recognizing these emerging examples of fascism and state violence. Because of these conceptual tools, Remnick argues, the Russians were largely immune to Soviet smokescreen and rhetoric.

Yet, Remnick argues that the historical precedent Stalin set also, in some ways, enabled the Soviet regime to stay in power. He argues that the public approval of the Soviets remained artificially inflated by the “heroic” 1930s and 1940s, in which Russia, under Stalin, warded off Hitler, who was perceived as a more dire threat. The 1950s began to break this illusion, as new insights to old figures such as Alexander Yakolev, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Edward Shevardnadze revealed that Stalin had committed atrocities against their own elite family dynasties. The dysfunctional Brezhnev regime that emerged at the time ostensibly was what had allowed those families to rise higher. The truth, Remnick asserts, is that the knowledge of these repressed memories of Stalin’s terrorism provoked many of them to acknowledge a systemic malaise in the Brezhnev regime. Remnick notes a moment in 1983 when Gorbachev told Yakovlev, “We can’t go on living like this.”
When Gorbachev took power in 1985, he inaugurated the flooding back of historical memory. Remnick points to this feature of his leadership as the very bane of his political career. Gorbachev wrongly believed he could control memory’s broad and disruptive force, thinking that revealing his insights into the character of Stalin’s regime could salvage the reputation of socialism in Russia. Remnick argues that Gorbachev’s naivety stemmed from his lack of exposure to the world outside the government apparatus he had been embedded in for decades. Immediately upon invoking the memory of Stalin, the public began to recognize similar actions committed by the Soviet regime. They uncovered terror camps, exhumed bodies, and compiled lists of the missing who could be presumed dead. Rapidly, the Soviet Union lost its legitimacy, which had ironically validated the tools which undid its power.

In the wake of the ousting of Gorbachev’s regime, the Russian public underwent a renewal of courage, citing the examples of the wrongly imprisoned and killed to confront the government. Soon, the working-class party, especially the mining communities, were examining their living environment and other socioeconomic conditions that kept them in place and began to ask why the socialist rhetoric they believed in seemed so starkly opposed to the reality which their government was telling them was a socialist ideal. Concurrently, scholars began a cascade of investigative historical research, seeding the ground for a public rejection of the regime.



Remnick concludes his book in the era of Soviet dissolution, which progressed at a speed proportionate to the public’s civic courage. When Remnick attended an event at the Russian Parliament in 1991, during the time of leader Boris Yeltsin, a woman told him that the complacency she had learned to accept for most of her life had vanished and been replaced by extreme resolve. Remnick finally notes that it is ultimately this transformation and enlightenment at the individual level that accomplished Russia’s political change. He looks forward with hope to Russia’s evolution in the 1990s.

Remnick’s book is a synthesis of many different voices concerned with different features and moments of Russian social and political history. He paints political upheaval and a continued trend toward equality as inevitable in a world that is broadly becoming increasingly acquainted with information and memory.