Lenin's Tomb
by David Remnick
Summary
David Remnick arrived in Moscow as The Washington Post's correspondent in 1988, near the start of the changes Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of openness and restructuring had already set moving, and Lenin's Tomb is his account of the years that followed, as the Soviet Union's political and economic system, and eventually the country itself, came apart. Remnick reports the period largely through direct, on the ground observation rather than after the fact analysis, describing what the unraveling of decades of Communist rule actually looked like to the people living through it, party officials, dissidents, workers and ordinary Muscovites alike, as institutions many had assumed were permanent lost their authority within a few compressed years.
The book's title points to its central image, the mausoleum on Red Square holding Lenin's embalmed body, treated by Remnick as a monument to a system whose founding myths were losing their hold on the country even as the physical shrine itself remained standing. Remnick builds the narrative from firsthand reporting gathered during his posting, giving the book an immediacy that later, more distanced histories of the same collapse do not share, since he was filing dispatches on events whose outcome he did not yet know while he was covering them.
Reading it means following recent history as it was still unfolding rather than as a settled narrative with the ending already known, and it suits a reader who wants the Soviet collapse conveyed through direct observation and reported detail rather than through retrospective political analysis. Remnick's background in literary journalism gives the reporting real narrative shape without smoothing over how uncertain and confusing the period actually was to live through.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave Remnick the 1994 award for general nonfiction. That year's other finalists were Peter Gay's The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud and John Lukacs's The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age.
The book established Remnick's reputation well beyond his newspaper reporting from Moscow, and he went on to become editor of The New Yorker in 1998, a position he still holds. He followed the book in 1997 with Resurrection, on the Yeltsin years, and Lenin's Tomb remains the work most closely tied to his early reputation as a chronicler of the Soviet Union's final years, written by a correspondent still working from directly inside the events he describes rather than looking back on them.