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,
51 Victor Yasmann, “Legislation on Screening and State Security in Russia,”
52 Yevgenii Krasnikov, “Protivostoyanie” (Opposition),
53 Yel’tsin,
54 Ibid., 166.
55 Smith,
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,
58 For comparisons, see Katherine Verdery,
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,
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,
65 “U nas tut vsë nastoyashcheye” (Everything here is genuine), interview with Pavel Borodin in
66 Naina Yeltsina, second interview with the author (September 18, 2007); and “U nas tut vsë nastoyashcheye.”