Mikhail Gorbachev had become the leader of the Soviet state in March 1985. He had spent the first year of his reign solidifying his base in the Politburo. In his second year in office, he floated the term
To be sure, Gorbachev did not intend to dissolve the Soviet Union, or to end the Communist Party’s rule, or, really, to change the regime in a radical way—though he himself was fond of using the word
Five years before the tectonic shift, subtle subterranean tremors began. Gorbachev had dangled the carrot of possible change—and so people began to talk about change as if it were possible. Cautiously, people began to allow these conversations to spill out of their kitchens and into other people’s living rooms. Loose alliances began to take shape. For the first time in decades, people were seriously discussing politics and pressing social issues neither as members of a dissident movement nor within the confines of formal Communist Party structures—which is how those who took part in these conversations became known as the “informals.” A majority of the informals belonged to a specific generation: those born during the Khrushchev thaw, the brief period in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Stalinist terror had lifted and Brezhnev’s stagnation had not yet set in. The informals had no common political platform, or a common language for the discussion of politics, or even a common understanding of the place of such a discussion, but they shared two things: a distaste for the ways of the Soviet state, and an abiding desire to protect and preserve what little was left of their beloved historic city.
“The people of our generation saw only a dead end ahead: if you did not escape, you’d face degradation,” Yelena Zelinskaya recalled twenty years later. Zelinskaya put out one of several samizdat publications that united the informals. “We could no longer breathe among the lies, the hypocrisy, and the stupidity. There was no fear. And as soon as the first rays of light seemed to break through—as soon as people whose hands had been tied were allowed to move at least a few fingers—people started to move. People weren’t thinking about money, or about improving their standing in life; all anyone thought about was freedom. Freedom to conduct your private life as you wish, freedom to travel and see the world. Freedom from hypocrisy and the freedom not to listen to hypocrisy; freedom from libel, freedom from feeling ashamed for one’s parents, freedom from the viscous lies in which all of us were submerged as if in molasses.”
But whatever the informals were saying in the privacy of their homes, the state machine of mindless destruction kept moving. On March 16, 1987, a rumor spread through the city: The Angleterre Hotel was about to be razed. Informals of every stripe began to gather in front of the building. The leader of an informal preservation society, Alexei Kovalev, went inside the city government building, conveniently located in the same city square, and attempted to negotiate with a high-level bureaucrat there. She assured him the building was safe and implored him to “stop misinforming people and spreading panic.” Barely half an hour later, the blast sounded, and the building the size of a city block turned into a huge cloud of coarse dust.
This was when something entirely unprecedented happened. “It seems, after the dust and smoke settled where the hotel had been, all that should have remained were memories,” recalled Alexander Vinnikov, a physicist turned city activist. “That is what happened, but the memories were outstanding. Never before this moment could people have imagined that they could protest the actions of authorities and remain intact, not end up behind bars or at least out of work. We carried away the memory of an amazing sense of being right, the sense that comes to a person who stands among like-minded people in a public space, listening to a speaker giving voice, convincingly and precisely, to everyone’s shared thoughts. And most important, we felt the full humiliation of the authorities’ utter disregard for our opinion, and a sense of personal dignity began to well up, a desire to affirm our right to be heard and to have an impact.”
So the crowd did not disperse. By the following afternoon, several hundred people were gathered in front of what used to be the Angleterre. The fence surrounding the demolition site was covered with homemade posters, fliers, poems written right on the fence, and simply the names of people who had taken part in the protest—and had bravely chosen to make their names known.
“We all found one another in St. Isaac’s Square,” read a prescient article written by Zelinskaya, then thirty- three years old, and posted on the fence. “We have set out on a difficult path…. We will probably make a lot of mistakes. Some of us will probably lose our voices. We will probably fail to accomplish everything we will set out to do, just as we failed to save the Angleterre. There really is a lot we do not know how to do. Can people whose opinion no one ever asked really be expected to argue well? Can people who have long been kept out of any sort of public activity be expected to have honed their fighting skills while sitting in their basements? Can people whose decisions and actions have never had tangible consequences even for their own lives be expected to calculate the trajectory of their activities?”
Hundreds of people continued to rally at the site for three days. The protest that would not end became known as the Battle of the Angleterre. And even after that, the fence, with its many posters and articles, remained, and so did an ongoing small gathering in front of it. People would now come to the Angleterre to find out what was happening in their city and their country, or to tell others; the site became known as the Information Point. The kitchen and living room discussions had come out, and the fence turned into a living page on which scores of samizdat publications were emerging from the underground.
Elsewhere in the city, other discussion venues were taking shape. In April, a group of young Leningrad economists formed a club. At their gatherings at the Palace of Youth, they took up unprecedented topics, such as the possibility of privatization. Before the year was out, one of them would float the idea of privatizing state enterprise by issuing stock vouchers to every Soviet adult. The concept was not well received at the time, but years later, this is exactly what would happen, and most of the club’s participants would go on to play key roles in shaping post-Communist economic policy.
To those on the inside, Soviet society seemed to be changing at breathtaking speed. But the motion was two steps forward, one step back. In May, Soviet authorities stopped the jamming of most Western radio programs; on May 31, Leningrad city authorities shut down the Information Point in front of the Angleterre. In June, the local council elections contained a small but revolutionary experiment: in 4 percent of the districts, instead of the usual single name, two appeared on the ballot; for the first time in decades, a few voters were allowed to choose between candidates, even if both were advanced by the Communist Party. On December 10, Leningrad saw its first political rally that was not broken up by police. At least two of the speakers were men who had served time in the camps for opposing the Soviet regime.
THE PROCESS CONTINUED the following year. More discussion groups gradually formed, and their activities became more structured. Over time, actual leaders—people well-known and trusted outside their small social circles—emerged. In a couple of years, they would become the first post-Soviet politicians.
In the spring, some Leningrad residents announced they were launching what they called “Hyde Park” in the Mikhailov Gardens in the center of the city. One afternoon a week, anyone could make a public speech. “The rules were, anybody could speak for five minutes on any topic, excepting the propaganda of war, violence, and xenophobia of any sort,” recalled Ivan Soshnikov, who was a thirty-two-year-old taxi driver at the time, and one of the masterminds behind the outdoor debating space. “You want to talk about human rights? Go right ahead! One man brought the 1949 Declaration of Human Rights with him. Myself, I had already read it in samizdat, but people who had never seen it before were just beside themselves. And this went on for four hours every Saturday, from twelve to four. It was open mike. I should mention that this was before there was freedom of the press. So a lot of journalists would come and listen, but they could not publish what they heard.”
After a few months, the police kicked “Hyde Park” out of the Mikhailov Gardens. The organizers took their show to the Kazansky Cathedral, a grand structure on Nevsky Prospekt, the city’s main avenue. No longer shaded by
