Eulogy for Alyosha

Moscow's crematory hall echoed with the somber notes of Chopin's Funeral March as the group of 200 mourners stood around the open coffin. They listened quietly as a tall, ramrod-straight man, his voice choked with emotion, eulogized its occupant. Suddenly, the cavernous hall's public-address system crackled out a brusque announcement that the group's time was up. Then, before more than a handful of mourners had been able to plant a parting kiss on the dead man's forehead, a woman in a black smock slid a cover on the wooden coffin, nailed it shut, and the casket vanished below into the furnace.

Unquiet Sleep. Thus last week did Russia bestow final rites on Aleksei Kosterin, a writer who, only a month before he died, had resigned from the Communist Party rather than face what he considered illegal expulsion for his views. Kosterin had protested a variety of Soviet repressions, including the recent trials of dissidents and the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Though that alone might have accounted for the brusqueness of his funeral, Soviet authorities were actually far more concerned with the living than with the dead in the crematorium. For Kosterin's eulogist was his old friend, Major General Pyotr Grigorenko, one of the most outspoken of Russia's dissenters. For his forthrightness he was once locked up in an insane asylum, a standard Soviet form of dealing with political troublemakers.

"In farewells, it is usually said, 'Sleep quietly, dear Comrade.' We will not say this," began Grigorenko, glancing down at the visage of his friend. "In the first place, he will not listen to me. He will continue to fight, anyway. In the second place, it is impossible for me without you, Alyosha. You sit inside me, and you will stay there. Therefore, do not sleep, Alyosha! Fight, Alyosha! Burn all the abominable meanness with which they want to keep turning eternally that damned machine against which you fought all your life."

Dark Days. Kosterin had fought against more than one machine in his 72 years. He became a Bolshevik a year before the Russian Revolution in 1917 and was a party member in good standing until arrested in Stalin's widespread purges of the mid-1930s. Not long after he was released from a labor camp, after Stalin's death in 1953, his daughter Nina gained posthumous fame in the Soviet Union as Russia's Anne Frank. At the age of 20, she had been executed by the Nazis for her part in a partisan raid, and her diary of the dark days of the German invasion, published in 1962, won wide acclaim. Once rehabilitated, Kosterin spent much of his time criticizing Russian officialdom for its treatment of minority groups, notably the Crimean Tartars, and, more recently, dissident intellectuals, until he died of a heart ailment.

For the intellectuals and artists attending Kosterin's funeral, he was the very symbol of uncompromising Leninism that was crushed mercilessly in Stalin's era--and is now imperiled again. Some brought wreaths bearing ribbons that read, "For his fight against Stalinism" and "From his comrades and friends in the prisons and camps." Grigorenko, an engineer whose libertarian views cost him his army rank in 1964, urged the mourners to work for "the persistent development of genuine Leninist democracy," and scathingly dismissed the current "totalitarianism that hides behind the mask of so-called Soviet democracy" as its antithesis.

A Thinking Being. Kosterin's recent dismissal from the Soviet Writers Union, said Grigorenko, placed him in the admirable company of Boris Pasternak. Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn was almost kicked out, he added, "although it is Solzhenitsyn who confers honor on the Union of Writers by being its member, while the union adds nothing to Solzhenitsyn." Then, returning to the hard life of his friend, he paid final tribute to a valiant spirit and, in the process, movingly described the source of intellectual discontent in today's Russia. "A person, in Kosterin's idea, is a thinking being. Therefore, nature has given to him a striving for knowledge, that is, for critically evaluating reality, drawing one's own conclusions and freely stating one's convictions and opinions. For this, he was terribly hated by those who believe that people exist to create a backdrop for leaders, to applaud and shout 'hurrah' for them, to believe in them blindly, to pray for them, to endure without murmur all scorn of them selves and to quack with pleasure when into his trough they pour more and richer fodder than into the other troughs."

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