Russia: Eulogy for Alyosha

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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.