Word: remnick
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When the last chief of the Soviet Union's KGB published his memoirs last year, David Remnick went to see him in Moscow. He found that while Vladimir Kryuchkov had turned pallid and squinty, he was still a man with ambitions. "I think I have real potential," the spymaster said, urging Remnick to give his book a plug in print. Now there's a tidy tombstone for the cold war: the former jailer of the old "evil empire" scrounging for free publicity in the West...
...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...
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...