Present At The Collapse

By Bruce W. Nelan

TITLE: LENIN'S TOMB: THE LAST DAYS OF THE SOVIET EMPIRE

AUTHOR: DAVID REMNICK

PUBLISHER: RANDOM HOUSE; 576 PAGES; $25

THE BOTTOM LINE: Great journalism answers Lenin's question: Who did what to whom?

During the astonishing, bewildering years when the Russians were dismantling their steel-clad Eurasian empire, David Remnick was not content to be an eyewitness to history. He waded into it, hip deep, and interviewed hundreds of politicians, generals, intellectuals and workers. Remnick, then a Washington Post correspondent, now at the New Yorker, saw his job as going where the action was, talking with the key figures and checking out the details.

His efforts resulted in superb reporting, first for his newspaper and now at greater length in Lenin's Tomb. His book provides both an intellectual history of the fall of the U.S.S.R. and a travelogue through its terminal illnesses, from corruption in the Kremlin to the deadly pollution of the Urals and the haunted desolation of Kolyma, center of the Siberian gulags. The book's powerful sense of place and its clarity about events that confused many of the participants will shame those who dismiss books written by reporters as "mere journalism."

The end of Soviet days began, Remnick believes, not with perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev's attempt to restructure socialism, but with glasnost -- the readiness to face facts -- and Gorbachev's call to fill in the "blank spots" of history. By losing control of the past, the Communist Party began to lose control of its present -- and future. "The return of history," Remnick writes, "was the start of the great reform of the twentieth century and, whether Gorbachev liked it or not, the collapse of the last empire on earth."

First to take Gorbachev at his word were the intellectuals and opinion leaders who had long known that the Soviet structure was crumbling but had kept their head down and mouth shut. They began speaking and writing about the old taboos: the crimes of Stalin, of the KGB and even of Lenin. Soon the daily and weekly press was bursting with stupefying revelations and admissions. It was "wonderful for the intelligentsia," the writer Tatyana Tolstaya told Remnick, but most of all "it is a revolution for the proletariat."

That revolution was taken over in July 1989 by the Siberian coal miners when they began a strike that shook the economy and the communist bosses. The grimy miners, Remnick reports, were forging a link between the urban intellectuals, the nationalist movements in non-Russian republics, and "the political uprising of workers across the country."

Remnick concludes that Gorbachev's propensity to reform faded when he lost control of political events and his former followers became leaders. A "bitter, deluded" Gorbachev increasingly put his faith in old comrades from the party, the army and the KGB, who flattered him, warned him of dark plots and then betrayed him.

When the old hacks, led by KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, launched their putsch in 1991, Remnick spent the crucial August days and nights with Boris Yeltsin and his backers at the Russian Parliament Building. For the most part, the thousands who stood up for democracy at the Russian White House did it for the man they had elected, Yeltsin. "It wasn't about Gorbachev," one woman told Remnick. "Gorbachev got what he deserved."

For all his travels and interviews, Remnick is modest about conclusions and predictions. He cites many thoughtful Russians who are worried that Soviet attitudes, even the black ice of Stalinism, still lie deep inside them. He asks Stanislav Shatalin, a liberal economist, how long it might take to modernize the system. "My optimistic scenario?" Shatalin replies. "Generations."

In Lenin's Tomb, Remnick defined his task as explaining not where Russia is headed but how it arrived, against all expectations, at where it is today. He accomplishes that with great narrative skill and a refreshingly cool, unadorned style. Though it is his first book, Lenin's Tomb sets a high standard for journalists and historians alike.