Volkogonov's journey.

• Author: McInnes, Neil
• Position: Russian biographer Dmitri Volkogonov

The "park of fallen heroes" is the ironical name Muscovites have given to the patch of waste land across Krymsky Val from Gorky Park, where the statues of Soviet leaders are dumped. Here lies a Stalin in polished red granite that once stood twelve feet high; but it was broken while being taken down, and the big red boots lie yards away in the long grass. Unable to stand, Stalin rests on his side on a makeshift bed of concrete blocks. The tyrant has his right hand stuck between two buttons of his great coat in the familiar Napoleonic pose; his nose has been smashed off.

Towering intact over him is the gigantic metal statue of Felix Dzerzinsky, banished hither from the square that once bore his name and where he used to contemplate the house of his creation, the Cheka (later the KGB). Now "Iron Felix" contemplates a massive marble torso of Brezhnev, stranded in the grass and looking very dead, just the way he did when he was propped up to make his last official speeches. Nearby lie this year's novelties in the park, two discarded white busts of Lenin.

Compared to what I saw here last year, the place has been spruced up to look more like a garden and less like a tip, and an effort has been made to alleviate the crude political symbolism. There are busts of nineteenth-century worthies that no one remembers anymore, and some egregious examples of socialist realism in sculpture, mainly workers with hammers. Mysteriously, someone has dumped here a bust of William Shakespeare. The creator of Richard III and Macbeth looks to be quite at home among these assassins and buffoons.

If those two marble Lenins are a sign of things to come, even these spacious grounds between the New Tretyakov and the President Hotel will not suffice, for there could be many more to follow. Bolshevism suffered from what Georges Sorel diagnosed in the Third Republic as statuemanie, the compulsive reproduction in stone, marble, and bronze of its heroes. Lenin's latest biographer has discovered an order he put out when his new government was still struggling to survive, requiring that all monuments to czarist figures be removed and replaced by statues of Bolshevik leaders. When that was not done as fast as he wished, Lenin put out another order demanding that those responsible for "this criminal inactivity" be identified. Russians had already learned that when Lenin muttered "criminal" someone was going to ge shot, so the busts and statues soon began to multiply. "In a country convulsed by civil war it was judged 'absolutely necessary' to have busts sculpted of Lenin and Trotsky, Kalinin, Radek, Chicherin, Rakovsky, Litvinov, Ioffe, Krasin, et al. . . . These mass monuments were the shameful landmarks of idolatry." Krupskaya, his widow, later protested at the plague of marble Lenins but to no avail; the bald head and wild eyes continued to sprout across the land and most of them are still in place today. Trotsky's abundant likenesses had disappeared by 1927 when he lost the power struggle to Stalin and in turn Stalin's, which numbered in the thousands, began to go soon after his death in 1953, and I doubt if any have survived outside his native Georgia.

How quickly the Lenins are dumped will depend in part on the reception being given to the work of the biographer just quoted, Dmitri Volkogonov, who died some months ago. A posthumous work entitled Seven Leaders, which is an account of Soviet leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev, appeared this year in Russian and will be out in English in early 1997. Volkogonov had already published a Stalin (1990), a Trotsky (1992), and a Lenin (1994).(1) Obviously, he believed that history can be told as biography. I wonder if he realized that his own biography would tell us as much about the Soviet Union as the lives of more famous men.

Volkogonov was born in a godforsaken corner of Siberia in 1928, the son of an agronomist and a rural schoolteacher. His father was declared an enemy of the people during the great purges and shot; his mother died in exile. The sixteen-year-old orphan joined the Red Army toward the end of the war and became a brilliant servant of the regime that had destroyed his family. That happened more than once in the Soviet Union, and Volkogonov managed to make it sound like a good thing about the regime. In his so far unpublished memoirs (which his daughter, Olga Volkogonova, has kindly shown me), he says, "I do not look back [on the Soviet Union] with bitterness, for although I was the son of an 'enemy of the people', I became a general, a scientist, and a deputy." Trained at the prestigious Tank School and then at the Lenin Military Academy, he specialized in "philosophy", which meant the mumbo-jumbo of dialectical materialism. He stayed on at the Academy as a professor of that subject, before transferring to the Political Administration of the Soviet army and navy, a somewhat sinister organization in which he rose to be number two. He now was a specialist in propaganda, disinformation, and counterintelligence. A book from that period, The Russian Soldier, glorified Soviet militarism.

Volkogonov had acquired a reputation as a hardline Stalinist, but somewhere along the way doubts began to gnaw at him. In notes for his memoirs he says his doubts began during foreign service in Ethiopia, Somalia, South Yemen, and Angola. There he saw total poverty equipped with Soviet tanks and missiles, corrupt leaders armed to the teeth being generously fed by Moscow because they had adopted its system - and yet this was a system that in seventy years had failed to feed and clothe its own people. Why then was it so unremittingly hostile to others? Until 1984 he clung to the belief that the system could be reformed but then he began to agonize over the thought that everything that had happened since 1917 had been a fatal mistake.

A colleague of his from those days, Alexander Orlov, who is...