the trees or shielded by a fence, the speakers and the listeners became even more visible than they had been in the original location. Rather than chase them away again, city authorities apparently decided to drown them out with sound. One Saturday, “Hyde Park” participants showed up in front of the cathedral, only to discover a brass band playing in front of it. The band came complete with its own audience, whose members shouted at the debaters: “Look, the band is here so that people can relax, this is no time or place for your speeches.” During a break in the music, Ivan Soshnikov tried to chat up the conductor, who immediately volunteered that the band had been stationed in front of the cathedral by some sort of authority.
Ekaterina Podoltseva, a brilliant forty-year-old mathematician who had become one of the city’s most visible—and most eccentric—pro-democracy activists, produced a recipe for fighting the brass band. She asked all the regular “Hyde Park” participants to bring lemons with them the following Saturday. As soon as the band began playing, all the activists were to start eating their lemons, or to imitate the process of eating if they found the reality of it too bitter. Podoltseva had read or heard somewhere that when people see someone eating a lemon, they begin, empathetically, producing copious amounts of saliva—which happens to be incompatible with playing a wind instrument. It worked: the music stopped, and the speeches continued.
On June 13, 1988, the Supreme Court of the USSR reversed the more than fifty-year-old guilty verdicts that had launched Stalin’s Great Terror. The following day, a rally in memory of victims of political repression took place in Leningrad—the first such legal large-scale gathering in the history of the Soviet Union.
But the most important stories of 1988—not only in Leningrad but in all of the USSR—were the formation of an organization called the People’s Front and the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The People’s Front came into being more or less simultaneously and, it seemed, spontaneously in more than thirty cities all over the Soviet Union. Its avowed goal was to support perestroika, which was battling a growing backlash within the Party. But the People’s Front’s most important function was, probably, to conduct an experiment of unprecedented scope and scale: in a society that had almost no experience with social change or, for that matter, any other citizen activity that was not directed from the top, to form an organization, even a network of organizations, that was truly democratic in nature and structure.
“An organization that aims to democratize society must itself be democratic,” proclaimed a founding document of the Leningrad organization. “This is why the bylaws of the People’s Front will incorporate an effective firewall against bureaucratic and authoritarian tendencies. To this end, the coordinating council shall be elected by secret vote and may be reconstituted at any general meeting of the People’s Front. To this end, the coordinating council does not have a permanent chairman but all of its members shall serve as chairman by turn. To this end, no member of the People’s Front shall represent the organization’s position on any issue if the issue has not been discussed at a general meeting of the People’s Front. It is expected that all decisions taken by the coordinating council or by the general meeting shall be recommendations: members who are in the minority should not be obligated to participate in a decision with which they disagree but neither shall they have the right to counteract the actions of the majority in any way other than through the power of conviction.” In other words, the main purpose of the People’s Front was not to be the Communist Party.
Incredibly, it worked. Twenty years later, a mathematician who became an activist in the late 1980s recounted discovering the People’s Front: “They would gather at the Food Industry Workers’ House of Culture. Anyone could come. Some of those who came were not particularly mentally healthy people. The first impression was that of a complete madhouse: some of the speeches were totally nonsensical. This would go on for an hour or an hour and a half, discussions of god knows what, and then other people would start taking the mike—I later found out they were some of the leaders of the group. In the end, when they actually took a vote on some question or another, the resulting text of the resolution would be quite reasonable; it would have a definite political component and be written in good Russian. So it turned out that the people who were leading the organization at the time were people with whom one could really discuss things.” The ability to discuss things was still the most highly valued commodity in the Soviet Union.
A woman quickly emerged as the evident leader and most trusted de facto spokesperson for the Leningrad People’s Front. Marina Salye was unlike any politician the Soviet Union had ever known. In fact, she had little in common with any politician anywhere in the world. In her fifties, unmarried (she had long lived with a woman she called her sister), she had spent much of her adult life in the farthest reaches of the Soviet Union, studying rocks: she had a Ph.D. in geology. It was a path taken by many a member of the intelligentsia: find a profession that is not ideologically charged and get as far as possible away from the Soviet center of command. Never having joined the Communist Party, Salye was not part of any institution that had been discredited. At the same time, she had impeccable St. Petersburg credentials. Her great-great-grandfather was one of the most prominent residents in the history of St. Petersburg: Paul Buhre, watchmaker to the czar, made timepieces that are still working and highly valued in the twenty-first century. Two of her great-grandfathers had come to St. Petersburg in the nineteenth century, from France and Germany. Brilliant, well-spoken in the way of those who never mince words, Salye elicited instant trust and a desire to follow. “With a cigarette dangling from her lips, she could lead a crowd up and down Nevsky, stopping traffic,” a political opponent of hers recalled twenty years later. “I saw her do it once, and it made a very strong impression. No one had a chance competing with her.”
IN FEBRUARY 1988, conflict erupted between Azerbaijan and Armenia—the first of what would be many ethnic conflicts in the Soviet Caucasus. In relatively wealthy, overwhelmingly Muslim Azerbaijan, a region called Nagorno-Karabakh, populated mostly by ethnic Armenians, declared its intention to secede and join Armenia, a small, poor, mostly Christian republic of the USSR. With the exception of a few visionary dissidents, no one at the time could imagine that the Soviet empire would break apart—much less break apart soon. The events in Nagorno- Karabakh showed that the unthinkable was possible. Not only that, they showed exactly how it was going to happen: The USSR would break apart along ethnic lines, and the process would be painful and violent. But now pro- independence demonstrators came out into the streets of Nagorno-Karabakh in large numbers, and just days later, pogroms erupted in Sumgait, an Azerbaijan city with a sizable ethnic Armenian population. More than thirty people died; hundreds more were injured.
The Soviet intelligentsia watched in dismay as ethnic and religious enmities rose to the surface. In June, after Nagorno-Karabakh’s regional government officially declared the region’s intention to secede, more than three hundred people came out into a Leningrad square to demonstrate solidarity with the Armenian people. Toward the end of the summer, Leningrad pro-democracy activists arranged for Armenian children from Sumgait to travel to summer camps outside Leningrad. A Leningrad anthropologist named Galina Starovoitova—the one whose murder I would be covering ten years later—became the nation’s most visible spokesperson for Armenian issues. On December 10, 1988, most members of the pro-secession Karabakh Committee in Nagorno-Karabakh were placed under arrest.
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
