Memories of Perestroika

This year makes 25 since Mikhail Gorbachev embarked on his brave—and ultimately hopeless — attempt to rescue the Soviet system. The following are random memories of an ordinary visitor during those years.

⁋ The sudden death of my favorite morning routine — ice-cream with champagne at the Lyagushatik café on Nevsky Prospect. Orange punch was a lousy alternative.

⁋ Vehement and wildly incoherent street debates on the new “Speakers’ Corner” outside the Moskovskiye Novosti offices, where, to a Westerner, violence seemed imminent but, these being Russians, never happened. Though I did once flee, pursued by an acid-faced female pensioner-terrorist screaming “Trotskist!”

⁋ In 1987, in a Leningrad kitchen, listening to the BBC… un-jammed.

⁋ Long arguments with liberal stalwarts, especially Irina Osipova and Lev Razgon, about the obligations of the newly-liberated Russian intelligentsia. Party politics was anathema! Russian idealism and maximalism (irredeemably noble and frustrating to a Western sympathizer) scorned the practical politics of deal and compromise. The intelligentsia would thunder from the sidelines in its historic role as the conscience of the nation. But from about 1987 there was a radical shift in kitchen-table visions.  Memorial was founded as a human rights “conscience,” an educator of the people. But it rapidly accepted evolution into a single-issue pressure group and finally embraced despised party politics, entering the Inter-regional Group (later DemRossiya) in the elected Congress of 1989. Razgon, who was always more pragmatic, became Memorial president. But I always felt that the maximalist instinct would inhibit liberals like Yavlinsky and Afanasiev in a politics in which old CPSU street fighters (like Yeltsin) were far more adept.

⁋ Watching a sour-faced Yury Solovyov, Leningrad Party boss, demonstrating his conversion to democracy by abandoning his usual airy wave from the Winter Palace podium to march (flanked by bodyguards) in parade with the common people (in the unprecedentedly free elections of 1989, his was the only name on the ballot, but he still lost).

⁋ Joining a joyful crowd breaking through bewildered police lines into a sealed-off Red Square, with our leader brandishing the newly minted credentials of an elected “Narodny Deputat” (People’s Deputy). One of the delights of perestroika was the worried perplexity of the guardians of the law, previously so confident in their disregard of it.

⁋ An emotional first visit to the memorial to the victims of the Soviet regime, a rough block of granite from the prison islands of Solovki, set on a tree-clad traffic island directly confronting KGB headquarters in the Lubyanka and dedicated in an immensely moving ceremony in October 1990.

But the old ways don’t die easily. In 1961 I saw Stalin lying in the mausoleum next to Lenin and hoped his later eviction [October 31 that year] and humbler burial heralded great change. But during perestroika, flowers multiplied upon his grave. So I have less pleasant memories of the Gorbachev years.

⁋ Marching in the 1986 May Day parade in refreshing showers of radioactive rain from the five-day-old Chernobyl disaster of which we were blissfully uninformed (Gorby finally confessed to the nation on May 14).

⁋ An evening in January 1991, when Lev Razgon’s wife Rika burst in on us, shouting “You sit here drinking coffee, while they are murdering people in Vilnius.”

⁋ Out of Russia, helplessly watching British TV in August 1991. Nobody was confident that “we can’t go back.” We had panicked in March 1988 when Ligachev (in Gorbachev’s absence) gave Nina Andreyeva’s “Back to Bolshevism” letter full publicity and official approval. Now there was panic again and friends in Moscow were desperately trying to disperse the priceless Memorial archive to safe hiding places. Again it came out all right, but this time perestroika was over and what followed is a different history.