Masha Gessen - The Man Without a Face

Two days later, a wave of police apartment searches swept through Leningrad. The five people whose apartments were raided were all radical pro-democracy activists; they included former political prisoner Yuli Rybakov and Ekaterina Podoltseva, the mathematician who had come up with the idea of eating lemons to silence the brass band. All five were listed in criminal proceedings initiated under Article 70 of the Soviet Penal Code, which provided for six months’ to seven years’ imprisonment for spreading anti-Soviet propaganda (more for repeat offenders). This would be the last Article 70 case in the history of the country.

The transformation of Soviet society, in other words, maintained its two-steps-forward, one-step-back mode: public rallies, which would have been unthinkable just two years earlier, were followed by search warrants, and the wrong kind of talk could still land one in prison for years. Censorship was lifting gradually: Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago was finally published in the USSR that year, but Alexander Solzhenitsyn was still off-limits. Andrei Sakharov, though now allowed to live his private life in peace, faced often insurmountable hurdles in his public life. In the summer of 1988, the dissident and Nobel Prize winner visited Leningrad; the city’s best-known television journalist taped an interview with Sakharov, but the censors kept it from the air. A producer decided to sneak it into the broadcast of a pioneering late-night public affairs program that was rapidly gaining popularity. She kept Sakharov’s name out of the script that had to be vetted by the censors, and they readily signed off on what seemed, on paper, like innocuous banter: “Tonight on our program you will see this.” “You don’t say!” “And this!” “Impossible! Seriously?” “It’s the honest truth!” “Can it be?” What the censors did not realize was that images of Sakharov would be flashing on screen as this dialogue went on, not only leaving no doubt as to what the producers planned to show but also giving viewers enough time to call everyone they knew to tell them to turn on the television.

No one was fired for fooling the censors, and this was perhaps one of the strongest indications that the changes under way in the Soviet Union were profound and possibly irreversible—and that they would transform not only the media but also the country’s seemingly intransigent political institutions. On December 1, 1988, a new election law went into effect, effectively ending the Communist Party’s monopoly on state power.

The year 1989 began with pro-democracy activists meeting in Leningrad to organize what had seemed unthinkable just months ago: an election campaign. A committee called Election-89 formed, led by Marina Salye, among others; it printed out fliers that explained how to vote: “There will be two, three, or four names on the ballot. These are candidates who are competing with one another. You need to choose only one name and cross out the rest.” It was, in fact, a convoluted system: 2,250 representatives were to be elected all over the Soviet Union, including 750 to be elected from territorial districts, 750 to be elected from administrative districts, and 750 to be elected by the Communist Party or institutions it controlled. Still, it was the first time voters in most areas could actually choose between two or more candidates.

In Leningrad, Communist Party functionaries were trounced. Galina Sarovoitova, the Leningrad anthropologist, was elected to represent Armenia in the Supreme Soviet. She joined a minority of the newly elected representatives—about three hundred of them—in forming a pro-democracy faction led by Sakharov. Once in parliament, the former dissident made it his goal to end the rule of the Communist Party, repealing the constitutional provision that guaranteed its primacy in Soviet politics. Other prominent members of the interregional group included rogue apparatchik Boris Yeltsin and Anatoly Sobchak, an extremely handsome and well-spoken law professor from Leningrad.

During the head-spinningly brief election campaign—less than four months passed between the passage of the revolutionary law on elections and the actual vote—Sobchak had made a name for himself as an outstanding public speaker. During one of his first appearances before potential voters, sensing that the audience was tired and bored, he set aside his prepared talk on city and national issues and made a conscious decision to dazzle the listeners with oratory. “I have a dream,” he actually said, “that the next election will be organized not by the Communist Party but by voters themselves, and that these voters will be free to unite and form organizations. That campaign rallies will be open to all who want to listen, with no special passes required to enter. That any citizen will have the right to nominate himself or another person for office, and that the candidacy will not have to go through a multistep approval process but simply will be placed on the ballot provided there are sufficient signatures collected in support of the candidate.” It was a decidedly utopian vision.

THE PEOPLE’S DEPUTIES, as members of the Soviet quasi-parliament were officially called, gathered for their first congress at the end of May 1989. The country’s streets emptied out for two weeks: every family sat immobile in front of a television set, watching political debate out in the open for the first time in their lives, watching history being made. The huge, unwieldy gathering quickly turned into a standoff between two people: Gorbachev, the head of state, and Sakharov, the ultimate moral authority of his time. Youthful, energetic, and now certain of his position and his popularity, Gorbachev projected confidence. Sakharov—stooped, soft-spoken, prone to stumble when he talked as well as when he walked—looked out of place and ineffective. He seemed to be making his greatest mistake when, on the last day of the congress, he took the floor and launched into a long and complicated speech. He was calling for the repeal of Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution, which granted the Communist Party rule over the Soviet state. He was speaking of the impending collapse of the empire—both the Soviet Union proper and the Eastern Bloc—and imploring the congress to adopt a resolution on the need for reform. The huge hall was growing restless and increasingly rude: the people’s deputies began stomping their feet and trying to shout Sakharov down. The old dissident at the microphone, straining to make himself heard, exclaimed: “I am addressing the world!”

Mikhail Gorbachev, sitting up on stage a few steps from where Sakharov was trying to give his speech, looked furious—both, it seemed, at the substance of Sakharov’s words and at the pandemonium that broke out in the hall in response. Suddenly the old man went silent: Gorbachev had turned off his microphone. Sakharov gathered the pages of his talk from the lectern, took the few steps toward the secretary general, and extended his shaking hand with the sheets of paper. Gorbachev looked disgusted. “Get that away from me,” he sputtered.

By humiliating Sakharov on television, Gorbachev went too far. Six months later, when the dissident died of a heart attack on the second day of the next Congress of People’s Deputies—having, in the interim, seen the Berlin Wall come down and the Eastern Bloc come apart, just as he had predicted—Sakharov was widely perceived as a martyr, and Gorbachev as his tormentor. Tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands turned out for his funeral in Moscow. City authorities tried, habitually and ineffectually, to prevent a mass gathering by shutting down subway stations near the graveyard and posting police cordons around the perimeter; people walked for miles in the freezing cold and then proceeded coolly to break through the cordons.