48 Aleksandr Yakovlev, second interview with the author (March 29, 2004). On the process, see Natal’ya Rostova, “Vozhdi ochen’ toropilis’” (The leaders were in a big hurry), Nezavisimaya gazeta, October 26, 2001.
49 A variation on the theme that would have been more relevant to Russia was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. But it was appointed only in 1995, after the Russian debate had peaked, and I am unaware of any serious exploration of its applicability. In Latin America after military rule, there have been similar efforts in countries such as Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, and Uruguay.
50 When the communists first presented their suit in the spring, parliamentary deputy Oleg Rumyantsev launched a countersuit signed by more than seventy legislators. The court combined the two cases in May. In November it declined to rule on the legislators’ suit. The litigation is ably analyzed in Kathleen E. Smith, Mythmaking in the New Russia: Politics and Memory in the Yeltsin Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 11–29; and Jane Henderson, “The Russian Constitutional Court and the Communist Party Case: Watershed or Whitewash?” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 40 (March 2007), 1–16.
51 Victor Yasmann, “Legislation on Screening and State Security in Russia,” RFE/RL Research Report 2 (August 13, 1993), 11–16; Kieran Williams, Aleks Szczerbiak, and Brigid Fowler, “Explaining Lustration in Eastern Europe: A Post-Communist Politics Approach,” European Institute, University of Sussex, Working Paper 62 (March 2003).
52 Yevgenii Krasnikov, “Protivostoyanie” (Opposition), Nezavisimaya gazeta, May 7, 1993; Sheinis, Vzlët i padeniye parlamenta, 699.
53 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 165.
54 Ibid., 166.
55 Smith, Mythmaking, 48.
56 Second Yakovlev interview.
57 The removal of the body was kept secret. The mausoleum was draped in a tarpaulin to fool German bombers, and sentries were still posted. “Ordinary Russians assumed that Lenin was still there, a symbol of resistance and eventual victory.” Rodric Braithwaite, Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War (London: Profile, 2006), 95; and more generally I. B. Zbarskii, Ob”ekt No. 1 (Object No. 1) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2000).
58 For comparisons, see Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Examples would be Hungary, Rumania, and the post-Yugoslav countries.
59 Most details here are from my second interview with Yeltsin (February 9, 2002); first interview with Georgii Satarov (June 5, 2000); and interview (January 21, 2004) with Jonathan Sanders, who advised the Reed family. Stalin’s office and personal rooms in Building No. 1 were also emptied and the pieces put in storage or sold off.
60 Glinka’s song had finished second in a contest for an anthem for the empire in 1833. The contest was won by “God Save the Tsar” by Aleksei L’vov (1798–1870). “The Internationale” was the Soviet anthem until 1944, when the composition by Aleksandr Aleksandrov (1883–1946) and Sergei Mikhal’kov (1913–), its lyrics approved by Stalin, was instated.
61 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 172. On the number of awards, see Vladimir Shevchenko, Povsednevnaya zhizn’ Kremlya pri prezidentakh (The everyday life of the Kremlin under the presidents) (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 2004), 67. The biggest batch of new orders and medals was the several dozen instituted by presidential decree on March 2, 1994. Fifty-two Soviet honorary titles were renewed as Russian awards on December 30, 1995. The Order for Services to the Fatherland, instated on March 2, 1994, was roughly equivalent to the Order of Lenin. The Order of Honor substituted for the Soviet Badge of Honor, the first state award Yeltsin had received in Sverdlovsk in 1966. The most significant reinstatement of a pre-1917 award was of the Order of St. Andrei in 1998.
62 The Prisekin painting can be viewed at http://prisekin.ru. The Ioganson canvas had replaced a pre-1917 portrait of Alexander III, the second-last of the tsars, by Il’ya Repin of the Wanderers school. Alexander Nevsky was known to all Russians of Yeltsin’s generation from schoolbooks and from the 1938 film by Alexander Eisenstein, which climaxes in thirty minutes of fighting on the ice, with the music of Sergei Prokofiev in the background.
63 The price tag is unknown. Officials stated that the Grand Kremlin Palace project in Yeltsin’s second term cost $335 million. I very much doubt this was all that was spent. Even if it was, other projects would have pushed the total over the $500 million mark.
64 Boris Grishchenko, Postoronnyi v Kremle: reportazhi iz “osoboi zony” (A stranger in the Kremlin: reportage from “the special zone”) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2004), 82–83.
65 “U nas tut vsë nastoyashcheye” (Everything here is genuine), interview with Pavel Borodin in Kommersant-Daily, March 24, 1999.
66 Naina Yeltsina, second interview with the author (September 18, 2007); and “U nas tut vsë nastoyashcheye.”
67 Aleksandr Gamov, “K dnyu rozhdeniyia Yel’tsina v Kreml’ zavezli bulyzhniki iz Sverdlovska” (For Yeltsin’s birthday they have brought cobblestones from Sverdlovsk), Komsomol’skaya pravda, January 29, 1999.
68 “Vse govoryat—strana v nishchete, a tut takiye khoromy” (Everybody says the country is impoverished, but here we have such mansions), interview with Pavel Borodin in Kommersant-Daily, June 19, 1999.
69 The work in the Kremlin had many critics. According to some, preservationists in the Ministry of Culture were not consulted on the contract for Building No. 1 and it was implemented hastily and roughly. Others insisted that many corners were cut both there and in the Grand Kremlin Palace, some ersatz materials were employed, and chandeliers and other objects were sold off below market value. There were also allegations of graft involving the Swiss firm Mabetex. See on this issue Chapter 16.
70 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 196–97.
71 Richard J. Samuels, with a debt to the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, in Machiavelli’s Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).
72 Five Moscow streets named after Lenin were renamed in the Yeltsin years, and six were unchanged. Of forty-three other Soviet figures after whom streets were named, all references were dropped to nineteen and to twenty-four they were not (for eight of the twenty-four the name was changed in some cases but not in others). Graeme Gill, “Changing Symbols: The Renovations of Moscow Place Names,” Russian Review 64 (July 2005), 480–503.
73 During his first official visit to France, in February 1992, Yeltsin spoke at Versailles and asked the French to invite persons of Russian origin, many of them members of Parisian high society, to the event. He spoke from the prepared text for a few minutes and then addressed the local Russians directly, pronouncing them welcome in their country of origin and thanking France for having sheltered them. “It was a fantasy moment,” recalled one participant, as protocol was abandoned and guests embraced Yeltsin and the Moscow delegation. Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, interview with the author (September 11, 2007).