Papa Knew Best

...Any Russian child of reasonable intelligence and sensitivity, he insisted, could sense the moral contrast...

...He read the Russian classics legally, and Aleksandr I. Herzen in tamizdat, as a gymnasium student in Vilnius...

...I thought of the escapees from Stalinism whom my brother Boris assembled at Radio Liberty in the 1950s, and the dissidents I knew as a Moscow correspondent in the late 1960s...

...Joe had been there, covering the Bolshevik Revolution for United Press...

...With abiding admiration for the Russian titans of the last century, I think as well about some of the Russian types depicted by less exalted writers, from the buffoons and gargoyles of Gogol and Saltykov-Shchedrin to the alcoholics, cowards and lickspittles portrayed lately by Vastly Aksyonov, Vladimir Voinovich and Venedikt Yerofeyev...

...she had talked to others by phone...

...He also had three encounters with Lenin (first impression: "a typical Volga cattle merchant...

...But, as time passed, he was increasingly affected by Tolstoy's prophetic letter to Alexander III in 1881, urging the Tsar to forgive his father's assassins...

...Not yet 18, Papa had already read enough to be wary...

...The heart of the Russian intelligentsia was—is—clearly where it has always been...

...and they would pass it on, in whispers if necessary, to their families and perhaps a friend or two...

...Besides, the intelligentsia are leaving in droves...

...What saved them was that the Alpha division of the KGB decided not to obey orders...

...From 1988 on, liberal Soviet media presented thousands of such personal accounts, plus photos, films and documents, in a "return of the repressed" on a truly epic scale...

...Never again will the Russian people be on its knees," he told the great anti-coup rally in Palace Square, heart of the city whose name he had campaigned to restore: St...

...Therewere only a couple of thousand people there at the most dangerous [twilight] hour...

...Yes, and most of them were drunk...

...In short, Communism was a malignant transplant, essentially alien to Russian society and culture, and therefore certain to be rejected or expelled sooner or later...

...If any man could speak for both its finest traditions and its trials since 1914, it was Academician Dmitri Likhachev, the venerable scholar of ancient Russian culture...

...And yet, a shadow of a doubt lingers...

...Anyhow, that crowd couldn't have stopped the coup...

...He was turned off forever when he heard Lenin at a meeting, "withflashing eyes and a crooked smile," denounce the erudite Plekhanov as "a political adventurist...

...the following summer, surviving witnesses testified to the NKVD murder of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest...

...Who knows what'll happen next time...

...Are you kidding...

...Six years later, Lenin's brother was hanged for another regicide plot...

...And, watching the empire dissolve, how could I fail to think of my friend Andrei Amalrik and his Can the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984...

...Nor was it an accident that Mstislav Rostropovich flew in from Paris to join the vigil inside the Russian parliament building in Moscow...

...Twenty-two years after seeing it, I also remain haunted by the images of Andrei Tarkovsky's great film, Andrei Rublyov...

...Solzhenitsyn left Russia echoing Tolstoy: "Live not by lies...

...His reasoning was deceptively simple: "First, he can't kill everybody...

...At a family dinner, he once saw Bukharin demonstrate his superiority to "bourgeois prejudices" by plucking a cockroach off the wall, lifting it to his mouth and gulping it down...

...Papa would talk about the splendid peasant deputies to the Second Duma and the jury of peasants that acquitted Mendel Beilis in the notorious "ritual murder" trial...

...Even Stalin, he noted, sneaked into the imperial box of the Bolshoi Theater, time and again, to watch the Pushkin-Mussorgsky Boris Godunov, with its climactic scene of the dying usurper haunted by the blood of the innocents...

...Papa's second point was that the Russian classics (Pushkin, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov) constituted both a standing reproach and an antidote to the cruelty, mendacity and intellectual vulgarity of Bolshevism...

...Most of the provinces were quiet...

...In fact he did, more than 40 years ago...

...he refused to admit Bolshevism to either the Russian historical or the Marxist sociologicalmainstream...

...In Geneva in August 1906, Papa met the legendary founders of Russian Social Democracy, Georgi V. Plekhanov, Pavel B. Akselrod and Vera I. Zasulich, whom he admired...

...Regina has been in the United States since 1988, but she remains in telephone touch with le tout Moscou as well as legions of friends who come through...

...Mikhail S. Gorbachev's conduct before theAugust 19-21 coup recalled (the personally far more appealing) Aleksandr F. Kerensky and his ambiguous role in the Kornilov coup of August 1917...

...A few days after the coup failed, I got a call from my own Russian friend, Regina Kozakova, my loyal colleague in Moscow in 1967-69...

...One need not believe in historical justice, nor even in Newton's third law, to understand the connection between this avalanche of revelations and the collapse of the regime...

...Anything but work...

...In the Middle Ages," Papa would remind me...

...Indeed, in 1988 surviving peasants led Byelorussian historians to the mass graves on the outskirts of Minsk...

...What kept it under censors' lock so long was its pitiless portrayal of the Russian people—save for a saintly few (mostly scribes and icon painters) —as craven pagan brutes...

...Eduard A. Shevardnadze invited comparison with an older and bolder Georgian, the princely Menshevik Irakli Tseretelli (who often asked: "Why is it that everyone complains about lack of money and no one complains of lack of brains...

...Most of them are trying to come here...

...With glasnost, weeklies rushed to reprint Tolstoy's gospel of nonviolence, Moscow theaters competed in producing Dostoyevsky's The Possessed, etc...

...In contrast, the lively Nikolai Bukharin enjoyed giving Boris piggyback rides in those days...

...Joe (who moonlighted by writing weekly lead articles for The New Leader under the pseudonym "Malcolm Hastings") shared Papa's love of the Russian intelligentsia and often put himself out to arrange practical help for the penniless exiles...

...Who was it that murdered [the liberal ministers Andrei] Shingarev and [Fyodor] Kokoshkin in their hospital beds...

...Born and raised as a cultivated Petersburger, he barely escaped the firing squad in the Solovetsky Islands labor camps and death by starvation in blockaded Leningrad...

...Papa never thought the October Revolution had been inevitable...

...But there were tens of thousands defending the building at midday, and even more that night...

...Tolstoy had argued that revolutionary ideals could only be defeated by a higher ideal (in his view, Christian love)—and that retributive violence would breed 100 times more revolutionaries and far greater violence...

...But the question he kept firing at Papa, in his inimitable basso, was: "And what about the goddamn Russian muzhik...

...That was one lesson we all learned for good," I was told in Moscow in 1988 by Larissa Bogaraz, one of the "seven" who had demonstrated in Red Square against the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968...

...To be sure, these Russian writers (unlike, say, Brett Easton Ellis) do not identify themselves with such revolting characters but feel compelled to call attention to their presence...

...Regina cried...

...Six weeks after Stalin's death, he had already deduced in these pages that Soviet secret police chief Lavrenti P. Beria had done in his mentor...

...He viewed it as "somewhat of a historical mutation, spawned fortuitously by the desperation of World War I and the unique personality of Lenin— a disintegrating force of devilish proportions, incapable of creative, constructive or humane effort...

...He settled in the U.S...

...This insight of Papa's has, I think, been vindicated too...

...A flight attendant friend of Regina's had been on the barricades at the Russian Parliament and had just comeback...

...My ex-husband is in Israel...

...Regina, it must be said, topped world-class standards for getting things done even in Brezhnev's sullen Moscow...

...the sequel is well known...

...he absorbed Eduard Bernstein's evolutionary socialism on his first trip (via Berlin and Hamburg) to New York in 1904...

...Moscow has 9 million people, for God's sake...

...To stay alive, his freezing, hungry family lay huddled around a candle and took turns reading poetry to one another...

...Papa's lifelong convictions were formed in his teens, at the start of this century...

...for good in 1907...

...Didn't I tell you this would happen...

...I should have known she would share the unease of Andrei Tarkovsky and Joe Shaplen...

...When the revolution of 1905 broke out, he worked his way on a cattleboat to Southampton, and thence onward to London, Paris and Geneva before crossing into Russia with a suitcase full of revolutionary newspapers...

...God knows why...

...The most important word in the Russian language was not "Soviet" but soviest: conscience...

...At the height of the terror, isolated, Nadezhda Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova committed whole volumes of poetry to memory...

...In 1916 in New York, my brother Boris, age four, refused to shake hands with Trotsky because he "looked like the devil...

...Now, at least, the people are free to begin solving their own problems...

...As did Regina...

...Papa conceded Bukharin's journalistic talent but considered him a perennial campus radical...

...Boris N. Yeltsin's occluded Russian accent echoed that of another big bear from the Urals, the father of all Kremlinologists, Boris I. Nicolaevsky...

...This has been, of course, the historic nightmare of the Russian intelligentsia since the days of Pushkin and Chadayev —the obverse of the limitless faith in the common people that led both the 19th-century narodniki ("populists") and the democrats of 1917 to grief...

...When I was a boy, Papa carried on a running argument with his best friend, Joseph Shaplen, the Russian-speaking labor reporter of the New York Times until his sudden death in 1946...

...They're all over Europe— Berlin, Paris, you name it...

...Papa was confident of this (as were Kerensky and many other democratic exiles of 1917) when Stalin's power was at its apogee...

...Point one meant that, even in an empire of fear, some people who knew some part of the truth from experience would survive...

...Those guys are professional killers—you know what they did in Afghanistan—and they're still there...

...Second, he can't burn all the books...

...Terrible...

...As did Papa, for that matter...

...I was, however, emotionally overwhelmed, in part by memories of the many splendid Russians I had known who had kept the faith in the worst of times...

...Same story...

...He was playing the flute in a regimental band in Irkutsk when a Russian officer warned him that the Okhrana was closing in and "covered" his escape for 24 hours...

...For most of his life, Papa's heroes were the aristocratic revolutionaries of the 19th century who had sacrificed themselves, often through terrorist acts, in the people's cause...

...Most of them are standing around complaining, waiting for Gorbachev or Yeltsin to hand them everything, like the Tsar...

...Bulat Okudzhava sang of Pushkin during the Khrushchev "thaw," the human rights movement began with demonstrations in Pushkin Square...

...I thought of my father's friends—the democrats of 1905 and 1917—refugees from Bolshevism who came here after the fall of France (and to whom their former comrade, Sol Levitas, opened the pages of The New Leader...

...Surely, she would concede, this was a historic victory for the Russian intelligentsia...

...Some weeks later, he sidestepped the police by reporting for Army service...

...Most often, though, watching the Russian tricolor unfurl and hearing the chanting of "Svo-bo-da...

...But how much support did they really get outside the big cities...

...Petersburg...

...Regina said...

...You remember what happened when they [Petersburg and Moscow university students] went out 'to the people' in the 1870s...

...Svo-boda...

...In five visits to the USSR since 1987, I had sensed a climax building...

...I had heard her before on the themeof Russian sloth (right out of Saltykov-Shchedrin...

...I heard the voice of my father, David Shub (1887-1974), saying: "See...

...Oh, yeah, sure...

...Moreover, the moment the regime eased up—for, as Marx well knew, slavery was counterproductive— people would speak up...

...Ten-year-olds recited pages of Pushkin and Lermontov by heart at an American exhibit in 1988 to earn five minutes at a Macintosh computer...

...For various reasons, Papa had even less respect for Trotsky, whom he knew better...

...Joe would boom back: "What about the soldiers and sailors in 1917 and 1918...

...they're arriving there so fast, no one knows where to put them...