Fourteen Little Red Huts and Other Plays

by Andrei Platonov

  13. Platonov, Duraki na periferii, 705.

  14. Personal communication from Maria Bloshteyn, to whom I am indebted for many of the thoughts in this paragraph.

  15. Nikolai Leskov, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, trans. Robert Chandler (London: Hesperus, 2003), 5.

  16. John Berger, A Season in London 2005 (London: Artevents, 2005), 87.

  THE HURDY-GURDY

  1. A term used to denote a member of the proletariat recently promoted, as part of a campaign to replace “bourgeois specialists,” to a position of administrative responsibility. A large number of such workers were sent out into the Russian and Ukrainian countryside in the late 1920s, and still more in 1930.

  2. Not a traditional Russian name but an acronym for International Youth Day, observed every year on the first Sunday in September. This was understood as a day of struggle for worldwide revolution.

  3. Stervets is the masculine form of sterva, which has the obsolete meaning of “carrion” or “dead animal.” “Stervetsen” could perhaps be translated as something like Maggotsen or Stinkersen. E. A. Yablokov understands the name to mean “son of death” or, simply, “death” (Khor solistov [St. Petersburg: Bulanin, 2014], 383).

  4. The Society for the Promotion of Defense and the Establishment of Aviation and Chemistry (Osoviakhim or Obshchestvo sodeistviya oborone i aviatsionno-khimicheskomu stroitel’stvu), founded in 1927, was a “voluntary” civil-defense organization; its declared aim was to promote patriotism, marksmanship, and aviation skills. It sponsored clubs and organized contests throughout the USSR and soon had around twelve million members. Stalin described it as vital to “keeping the entire population in a state of mobilized readiness against the danger of military attack, so that no ‘accident’ and no tricks of our external enemies can catch us unawares.”

  5. This handshake, symbolizing the close alliance of Soviet peasants and workers, was a common image of the time.

  6. The Hurdy-Gurdy is evidently set in the early autumn of 1930, during a brief period when “cultural brigades” such as Alyosha’s were being sent out into the countryside; from October that year, they were sent mainly to large factories and to railway stations and depots.

  7. Much in Platonov’s stage directions appears to be addressed more to a reader than to an actor or director. Most likely this is because of the play’s being unfinished. There is, however, an interesting similarity between the shifts of perspective in these stage directions and the way the narrative point of view shifts in Platonov’s prose. Sometimes the narrator appears to merge with a particular character; sometimes the narrator steps forward with views of his own. In any case—whatever Platonov’s intentions—reading some of the stage directions aloud is a possible solution for difficulties that might otherwise make the play difficult to stage. For an interesting discussion of this, see Maria Bogomolova, “Remarki i ikh funktsii,” in Strana filosofov (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2011), 7:103–17.

  8. There were frequent references at this time, in political speeches and in the Soviet press, to “the completion of the foundation of a socialist economy”—for example, during a Party plenum held December 17–21, 1930, reported on the front page of Izvestiya, December 22, 1930.

  9. The “reading hut”—a village minilibrary—was the center for propaganda work and campaigns for the eradication of illiteracy.

  10. In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels wrote, “The bourgeoisie…created vast cities…and so wrested part of the population out of the idiotism of village life.” The last words of this sentence were adopted by Soviet propagandists. In an article in the first issue (1930) of the journal Village Theater (Derevenskii teatr) D. Shilov wrote, “It seemed that many years would have to pass before this terrible icy wilderness of the stagnant ‘idiotism of village life’ would be melted by the sun of socialism.”

  11. Two crops, neither of them traditionally grown in Russia, the cultivation of which was being actively encouraged.

  12. During 1929–1930 there was a great increase in the number of foreigners visiting the USSR. See the introduction.

  13. Peasants accused of being kulaks were shot, their property confiscated, and their families sent into internal exile. Stervetsen has evidently read some garbled account of all this.

  14. The Nagant M1895 revolver was designed and produced by the Belgian industrialist Léon Nagant for the Russian Empire. After 1917, it was used by the Red Army and by members of the Soviet security agencies. To be presented with a Nagant revolver was a great honor for a Party member.

  15. On November 15, 1930, during the trial of members of the Industrial Party, Maxim Gorky published an article in Pravda titled “If the Enemy Does Not Yield, He Will Be Destroyed.” The trial ended with the accused confessing their guilt but being assured by the authorities that they would be treated mercifully.

  16. The fox-trot was, at this time, an emblem of bourgeois decadence. On April 18, 1928, Maxim Gorky referred to it in Pravda as “the amorous croaking of a monstrous frog,” as “the cries of a raving camel,” and as “the music of degeneracy” (cited in S. Frederick Starr, Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union, 1917–1980 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1983], 90–93).

  17. There were frequent complaints in the press about the mismatch between the goods available from cooperatives and people’s real needs.

  18. The verb “to procure” (zagotovit’) was a key word of the time. Shchoev and Yevsei repeatedly use it in absurdly inappropriate contexts; this reflects the government’s more sinister abuse of the same euphemism (see section 3 in the introduction).

  19. During the 1920s and 1930s there were regular fund-raising campaigns among the Soviet population. The first German airship flew into Moscow on September 10, 1930, and Pravda immediately announced a fund-raising campaign for a Soviet airship. From October 1, cooperatives were urged to join in this campaign; Shchoev is being characteristically quick to respond to the Party’s demands. See A. P. Platonov, Duraki na periferii (Moscow: Vremya, 2011), 692.

  20. Shchoev may be saying, “Hello,” or he may be addressing either a woman called Alla or a Supreme Being. The original is almost certainly intended to be ambiguous.

  21. A free translation of the idiomatic uzkoe mesto. This phrase—literally, “a narrow place”—was often used at this time with regard to trouble spots in the economy.

  22. Egypt was, at the time, a British colony. Anti-British protests there, seen as heralding a true proletarian revolution, were followed eagerly by the Soviet media. See, for example, N. Yermakov, “Yegipet volnuetsya,” Ogonyok, no. 22 (1930): 1.

  23. See note 20. This doorway was previously referred to as a “narrow place” or “bottleneck”—a phrase associated with the “rightist” Mikhail Bukharin and his more moderate policies. Bukharin had argued for industrialization to be carried out more slowly, so as to allow time to find a way around problems resulting from “narrow places,” or shortages of some essential item. Stalin’s line—the so-called general line—was more direct. In the words of a Pravda editorial of November 3, 1929, “We force our way through narrow places and blow them up, actively overcoming them at every step. Panic mongers and opportunists look for ways around problems…instead of struggling with them and overcoming these obstacles and contradictions” (quoted by Natalya Duzhina in “ ‘Deistvuyushchie lyudi,’ ” in Strana filosofov, 4:572). Kuzma’s behavior parodically enacts the “general line”—though the evident urgency of his need to go to the toilet casts doubt on the nature of his motivation.

  24. The introduction of new foodstuffs was a theme of the time. There were several scientific institutes devoted to “the rationalization of nourishment”; in Moscow, for example, there was a new Higher Institute of Nourishment (Vysshii institut pitaniya).

  25. A lack of containers of all kinds—casks, sacks, nets, baskets—was often cited by cooperatives as a reason for their inability to provide their members with adequate quantities of food.

  26. The sudden appearance of these f
ish and birds is reminiscent of the biblical account of Jehovah feeding the Israelites in the wilderness: “Though he had commanded the clouds from above, and opened the doors of heaven, and had rained down manna upon them to eat, and had given them of the corn of heaven. Man did eat angels’ food: he sent them meat to the full…He rained flesh also upon them as dust, and feathered fowls like as the sand of the sea: And he let it fall in the midst of their camp, round about their habitations. So they did eat, and were well filled” (Psalm 78:23–29).

  27. Another biblical allusion, this time to Christ’s words in the Garden of Gethsemane: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46).

  28. As always, Shchoev’s words and actions are in line with the Party’s demands. On September 7, 1929, Pravda published a Central Committee decree to the effect that the director, and the director alone, was responsible for the fulfillment of an enterprise’s promfinplan (industrial-financial plan). Until then this had been the joint responsibility of “the triangle”—that is, the director, the trade union representative, and the relevant Party member. This decree evidently proved difficult to put into effect—a great many people did indeed forget that the director’s authority was now supposed to be complete.

  29. “Rationalization”—in an entirely positive sense—was a catchphrase of the time, constantly repeated both in the press and in bureaucratic decrees.

  30. Platonov never prepared a final version of his manuscript. A number of minor inconsistencies remain. The hyphens here, for example, do not accord with those in the cast list.

  31. In 1922 Lenin had said that “we must either perish or else catch up with the leading countries and surpass them economically.” The words “catch up with…and surpass” were taken up by Stalin and became one of the most frequently used slogans of the First Five-Year Plan.

  32. These are not empty words. This particular kind of “cooperative” system—a network of small stores centered on a district town and with several thousand members (paishchiki, “dues payers”)—existed only from August until December 1930.

  33. The mention of locusts, together with the earlier mentions of wild honey, alludes not only to John the Baptist, who survived in the wilderness “on locusts and wild honey,” but also to recent attacks on the trade-union leader Mikhail Tomsky (1880–1936), a close ally of Bukharin’s. In a speech to the Sixteenth Party Congress on July 2, 1930, Stalin referred to Tomsky’s “absurd allegation” that Stalin was threatening him with exile to the Gobi Desert “to live on locusts and wild honey.” Tomsky’s allegation, Stalin asserted, was beneath the dignity of a revolutionary.

  34. The late 1920s was, at the time, often referred to as a “transitional epoch” between capitalism and socialism.

  35. A haunting waltz, inspired by a disastrous defeat for the Russian forces in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905); it was composed in 1906 and won great popularity. Platonov’s mention of it may be an allusion to the Manchurian Crisis in 1929 over the Chinese Eastern Railway.

  36. The word vreditel’ can mean both “harmful insect” and “saboteur” or “wrecker.” Both meanings are relevant. Much was written at this time about the need to improve agricultural production by eliminating harmful insects. See section 4 in the introduction.

  37. Here Platonov alludes to a then well-known quotation from Ludwig Feuerbach: “A man is what he eats.” The Russian translation is memorably neat: Chelovek est’ to, chto on est. See section 4 in the introduction.

  38. The Second International collapsed in 1914, when the main European socialist parties chose to support their respective governments’ decisions to go to war. The Third, or Communist, International (the Comintern) was founded by Lenin in 1919.

  39. In 1930 the French government banned imports from the Soviet Union on the grounds that the Soviets were overproducing and then “dumping” products on world markets at throwaway prices. Other countries followed the French example. All this received considerable attention in the Soviet media; the standard explanation was that France and its allies were preparing to wage war against the Soviet Union. As for Opornykh, he is simply confused; probably he has heard the word “dumping” on the radio and is repeating it without understanding its meaning.

  40. Purges of cooperatives in 1929–1930 led to tens of thousands of “alien” people being—in effect—cast out of Soviet society.

  41. The idea of “pan-Europe” was much discussed during the second half of the 1920s. One of its most vocal proponents was the French prime minister Aristide Briand. The project had three central aims: (1) to avoid further conflicts between France and Germany, (2) to counter the economic threat from the United States, and (3) to counter the political threat from the USSR. The Soviet press focused, unsurprisingly, on the last of these aims.

  42. There was a huge difference between market prices for grain, livestock, and the like and the prices that government procurement agents forced the peasants to accept for these products. See section 3 in the introduction.

  43. This parodies an early Soviet slogan: “A woman, too, is a human being.”

  44. The Soviet press published regular appeals for suggestions of new goods that the Soviet Union could be exporting. Stalin’s program of crash industrialization required the purchase of foreign technical and engineering equipment, and so the Soviet Union needed hard currency.

  45. Another minor inconsistency in the Russian text. Platonov has, it seems, forgotten to tell us that Serena, after fetching the suitcases, has returned to sleep.

  46. By 1930 Stalin had consolidated his control of the Party. Trotsky, the leading “leftist,” had been sent into foreign exile in February 1929, and the so-called right deviationists—Bukharin, Tomsky, and Alexei Rykov—had been discredited by the end of the year. Platonov’s nonsensical “rightist-leftist element” parodies Stalin’s use of such equally nonsensical phrases as “Trotskyist-Bukharinite.”

  47. A mass campaign, carried out during the summer and early autumn of 1930, to eradicate illiteracy.

  48. A composite figure: Nikolai Alexandrovich Uglanov and Mikhail Pavlovich Tomsky were—along with Bukharin—the leaders of the “right deviation.” Stalin attacked them during the Twenty-Sixth Party Congress in June–July 1930.

  49. See note 19. Like Shchoev, Opornykh remembers what he reads in the press. In late 1930 a great many articles, and even books, were published about the need to construct a Soviet zeppelin. Its importance as a means of transporting freight over long distances was especially emphasized.

  50. The poor quality of the matches stocked by cooperatives was a favorite topic of the satirical journals of the time.

  51. In a report to the Sixteenth Party Congress in the summer of 1930 Stalin had claimed that “our annual population growth exceeds three million people.” There were no censuses between 1926 and 1937 and Stalin had no basis for such claims, which he made repeatedly—evidently as a way of denying the huge population losses resulting from collectivization (see Andrei Platonov, Arkhiv A. P. Platonova [Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2009], 248).

  FOURTEEN LITTLE RED HUTS

  1. In 1929 Stalin had launched his policy of forced collectivization. By 1932 nearly all individual holdings of land had been abolished and replaced by collective farms, or kolkhozes.

  2. IS 20 locomotives were produced between 1932 and 1941. I. S. stands for Iosif Stalin.

  3. There were three mass organizations in the Soviet Union for children and youth: the Octobrists, for children aged seven to nine; the Young Pioneers, for children aged ten to fifteen; and the Komsomol, for teenagers and young adults aged fourteen to twenty-eight. Membership of these organizations was, in effect, compulsory.

  4. See note 31 to The Hurdy-Gurdy.

  5. For more about all three writers, see the introduction. Boris Pilnyak, on whom Latrinov is modeled, traveled a great deal—to Greece, Turkey, Japan, China, Mongolia, and the United States, where he spent six months in 1931. In 1932 he returned from a visit to Japan with a young Japanese woman.
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  6. In a speech to the First Congress of Kolkhoznik Shock Workers (February 19, 1933) Stalin had emphasized that “the kolkhoz movement has brought forward to positions of leadership a great many remarkable and capable women” (A. P. Platonov, Duraki na periferii [Moscow: Vremya, 2011], 707).

  7. A unit of payment on a kolkhoz. Workers were paid according to how many “workdays” they completed. By working hard, it was possible to complete more than one workday during a day.

  8. According to an addendum to the Soviet Constitution introduced on August 7, 1932, the theft of a kilogram of millet was to be punished by death, or—in case of mitigating circumstances—ten years in the camps.

  9. An allusion to Platonov’s controversial, somewhat anarchistic story “Doubting Makar” (1929).

  10. This alludes to one of the tropes of official Soviet art: Lenin pointing the way to the future.

  11. A Russian stove was a large brick or clay structure taking up between one-fifth and one-quarter of the room it stood in. Old people often spent much of their time sleeping on the top of the stove; this might be a few feet above the ground or as high as a person.

  12. A reference to Stalin. There was public concern at this time about his health.

  13. An expanded version of a sentence from Stalin’s speech to the First Congress of Kolkhoznik Shock Workers: “Chatter less—work more.”