The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  ■ ■ ■

  A few days after Rachmaninoff’s departure, the newly elected delegates of the All-Russian Constituent Assembly were gathered in Tauride Palace in Petrograd. According to Trotsky, Lenin had argued for postponing the elections indefinitely, but “Sverdlov, more closely connected to the provinces than the rest of us, protested vehemently against the postponement.” Too much had been invested in the idea of a national legislative body, and too many promises had been made on its behalf (by the Bolsheviks, among others). The elections had been held; the SR’s had won the majority of the seats, and Lenin had responded by saying that formal parliamentarism was a betrayal of the revolution. The leaders of the largest nonsocialist party had been arrested; martial law (to be enforced by Podvoisky) had been introduced, and a demonstration in support of the Constituent Assembly had been dispersed by gunfire. Late in the afternoon, the delegates were allowed to open the proceedings:48

  Constituent Assembly member Lordkipanidze (SR) states from his seat: “Comrades, it is 4 p.m., and we propose that the oldest member of the Constituent Assembly open the session. The oldest member of the SR faction is Sergei Petrovich Shvetsov … (loud noise on the left, applause in the center and on the right, booing on the left … nothing can be heard; loud noise and booing on the left; applause in the center). The oldest member of the Constituent Assembly, S. P. Shvetsov, mounts the platform.

  SHVETSOV (rings the bell). I declare the meeting of the Constituent Assembly open. (Noise on the left. Voices: Down with the usurper! Prolonged noise and booing on the left; applause on the right.) I declare an intermission. (Sverdlov, the Bolshevik faction representative and chairman of the Central Executive Committee, mounts the platform.)

  SVERDLOV. The Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies has directed me to open the meeting of the Constituent Assembly. (Voices on the right and in the center: Your hands are covered with blood! We’ve had enough blood! Tumultuous applause on the left.) The Central Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies … (Voice on the right: It was rigged!) hopes that the Constituent Assembly will fully recognize all the decrees and resolutions of the Council of People’s Commissars. The October Revolution has kindled the fire of the socialist revolution not only in Russia, but in all countries … (laughter on the right and noise)…. We have no doubt that the sparks from our fire will spread all over the world … (noise) … and that the day is near when the working classes of all countries will rise up against their exploiters as the Russian working class rose up in October, followed by the Russian peasantry … (tumultuous applause on the left).49

  This episode would enter the Soviet canon as the moment when the Bolsheviks made their final break with the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. According to Lunacharsky, all great revolutionaries were characterized by “[their] calm and absolute serenity at times when nerves should be overstrained and it seems impossible not to lose one’s composure.” No one could compare, however, to the “endlessly self-confident” Sverdlov, whose calm and serenity were “monumental and, at the same time, extraordinarily natural.” On that occasion, the “tension had reached its highest point” when “Sverdlov suddenly appeared out of nowhere. In his usual unhurried, measured gait, he approached the platform and, as if not noticing the venerable SR elder, pushed him aside, rang the bell, and, in an icily calm voice that showed no sign of tension, declared the first meeting of the Constituent Assembly now open.” According to Sverdlov’s assistant, Elizaveta Drabkina, a sixteen-year-old Bolshevik who was sitting in the balcony booing the appeasers, “he walked up the stairs with steady, calm steps, as if there were no thousand-strong rabid mob raging behind his back, ready to tear him apart.” And according to Sverdlov’s own account, as reported by another young assistant,

  I came up behind the old man and snatched the bell from his trembling hand. Ringing the bell sharply, I called for silence and order in my lowest bass voice. Shvetsov was taken aback. He froze, with his hand suspended in midair and his mouth open in astonishment. His whole feeble body was like a question mark. Finally, he crawled down from the stage. Immediately, silence and order were restored. Many of those present were so dumbfounded that they were unable to speak. And I was able to read out the Declaration of the Rights of the Working and Exploited People that had been proposed by our Bolshevik faction.50

  The Declaration proclaimed the Constituent Assembly illegitimate. In the exchange that followed, the main Bolshevik speech was delivered by Bukharin, who said that no revolutionary change was possible for as long as the government included fainthearted appeasers, who were “the faithful lackeys and guard dogs of our oppressors and the exploiters of the working masses.” The time was fulfilled, the real day had come, and this generation would certainly not pass away until all those things had happened:

  We are, indeed, facing a truly great moment. The watershed that divides this assembly into two irreconcilable—let’s not kid ourselves and paste over the obvious with too many words—two irreconcilable camps—this watershed is about who is for socialism and who is against socialism. Citizen Chernov [the head of the SRs] has said that we need to manifest a will for socialism. But what kind of socialism does Citizen Chernov have in mind? The kind of socialism that will arrive in two hundred years, the kind that our grandchildren will be building—that kind? We, on the other hand, are talking about a living, active, creative socialism, the kind of socialism we want not only to talk about, but to implement … (applause on the left)….

  We are saying, comrades, right now, when the revolutionary fire is about to set the whole world aflame—we are declaring, from this podium, a war to the death against the bourgeois parliamentary republic … (loud applause on the left, turning into an ovation).… We Communists, we the Workers’ Party, are striving to create, starting in Russia, a great Soviet workers’ republic. We are proclaiming the slogan put forth by Marx half a century ago: let the ruling classes and their toadies tremble before the Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing but their chains to lose, and a whole world to gain. Proletarians of all countries, unite! (Ovation on the left. Voices: Long live Soviet power!)51

  Having declared civil war, the Bolsheviks left the hall. At 4:40 a.m., the remaining deputies were driven out of the building. When they came back the next day, the door was locked.52

  Nikolai Bukharin

  Trotsky claims that, after the takeover, Lenin once asked him: “If the White Guards kill you and me, do you think Sverdlov and Bukharin will be able to manage?” At the meeting of the Constituent Assembly, with Lenin among the spectators and Trotsky in Brest-Litovsk, they seemed to manage quite well. Bukharin was one of the most eloquent prophets of the coming conflagration; Sverdlov was, in Lunacharsky’s account, a perfect “underground Bolshevik”: “he had a lot of inner fire, of course, but outwardly, that man was made entirely of ice.” Since November 1917, Sverdlov had been both the secretary of the Central Committee of the Party and the chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets.53

  Two days after the Constituent Assembly was evicted, Sverdlov and Novgorodtseva moved into Tauride Palace. They shared a suite with Varlam Avanesov (Suren Martirosian), a former member of the Armenian Dashnak Party and now Sverdlov’s second in command at the Central Executive Committee, and Vladimir Volodarsky (Moisei Goldstein), a former member of the Jewish Bund and now commissar of print, propaganda, and agitation. They lived as a commune, the way they had in exile. “All the residents of the apartment,” wrote Novgorodtseva, “would get up at eight, gather around the table for breakfast, and leave by nine. The regime was very strict: no one could be late for breakfast, and no one was allowed to eat separately from the others. Breakfast did not last long: we would exchange a few jokes and run off, leaving any long conversations until later.” Volodarsky would get back around midnight, Sverdlov and Avanesov, at 1:00 or 2:00 a.m., often accompanied by other people. Novgorodtseva, as the only woman, poured the tea. “Sitting ar
ound the table, we would discuss the events of the day, recount any amusing incidents, and exchange plans for the next day.” The guests would usually stay for the night.54

  While the house of failed parliamentarism was being downgraded and partially domesticated, the “temple of the Bolshevik spirit” was being transformed into a proper House of Revolution. In the words of Smolny’s commandant, “though not right away and not without difficulty, we finally managed to rid Smolny of outsiders: all those schooldames, housemistresses, boarding school girls, servants, and others.” Sverdlov’s Central Executive Committee, Lenin’s Council of Peoples’ Commissars, and the Bolsheviks’ Party Headquarters had all acquired their own rooms, secretaries, guards, and passes. There was a cafeteria (with mostly millet porridge on the menu), a basement jail, a commandant who answered directly to Podvoisky (now the commissar for military affairs), and about five hundred Latvian riflemen, who were thought to combine military discipline with a “proletarian spirit.” (Latvia, along with the Caucasus and the Jewish Pale of Settlement, was one of the most radicalized parts of the Russian Empire; Latvian military units were a mainstay of Bolshevik power.)55

  The transformation was never completed, however. In March 1918, as the German troops were approaching Petrograd, the new government moved its headquarters to Moscow (leaving behind Volodarsky, who was twenty-seven, single, and, according to Novgorodtseva, disconsolate). Most top offices and officials were housed in the Kremlin; those who did not fit were put up in several downtown hotels, renamed “Houses of Soviets” (the National became the First House of Soviets, the Metropol, the Second House of Soviets, and so on). Once again, “people whose presence was deemed unnecessary” had to be evicted (mostly monks and nuns, in the case of the Kremlin), a cafeteria set up, rooms assigned, icons and royal statues taken down, and Latvian riflemen armed and quartered. Once again, Sverdlov took care of all these things by appointing officials who were capable of appointing other officials. “He seemed to have learned absolutely everything about the tens of thousands of people who made up our party,” wrote Lunacharsky. “He kept in his memory a kind of biographical dictionary of Communists.” In the words of Elizaveta Drabkina, who worked for him in the Kremlin, “for each more or less important Party official, he could say something like: ‘This one is a good organizer; in 1905, he worked in Tula and after that, in Moscow; he spent time in the Orel central prison and was in exile in Yakutia. That one is not a great organizer but is an excellent public speaker.’”

  Almost every more or less important party official owed his or her job to Sverdlov or one of his appointees—from Trotsky, the commissar of foreign affairs; to Bukharin, the chief editorial writer; to the sixteen-year-old Drabkina, who typed up the questionnaires he put together. Boris Ivanov, the “barely literate and politically underdeveloped baker” whom Sverdlov had tutored in Siberian exile, was made the head of the Main Directorate of the Flour Industry. Ivanov tried to refuse, saying that he was a baker, not a miller, and certainly not a manager, but Sverdlov allegedly responded: “You’re a baker, and I’m a pharmacist, and an inexperienced one, at that. And here I am, sent by the party to do a job I never dreamed of.” According to another memoirist, Sverdlov “viewed every matter, big and small, through the prism of particular people,” and viewed particular people as both fallible and perfectible. “‘The sun also has spots,’ said Sverdlov [in March 1919]. ‘People—even the best of them, the Bolsheviks—are made up of the old material, having grown up under the conditions of the old filth. Only the next generations will be free of the birthmarks of capitalism. What is important is to be able to pull a person up by playing on his strengths.’”56

  Three years earlier, in a letter to Kira Egon-Besser from Siberia, he had written that, under capitalism, there could be no ideal individuals. “But already today you can see in some people certain traits that will outlive this life of antagonisms. The future harmonious person, as a type, can be discerned in these traits. The study of the history of human development leads to the certainty in the coming kingdom of such a person.” Now that he was in charge of building that kingdom, he was following his own advice. All Bolsheviks assumed that present-day nonharmonious people could contribute to the destruction of the old economic “base,” and that the new economic base would ensure the creation of future harmonious people. They also assumed, unlike the doubters and appeasers, that this could be done in their lifetimes. Their socialism, as Bukharin had explained, was not the kind that their grandchildren would still be building. According to Drabkina, Sverdlov’s favorite stanza by his favorite poet, Heinrich Heine, was

  A different song, a better song,

  will get the subject straighter:

  let’s make heaven on earth, my friends,

  instead of waiting till later.57

  Meanwhile, they were settling into their new apartments and setting up house in familiar ways: sharing hallways, kitchens, and bathrooms; leaving doors unlocked and children unattended; and talking late into the night over tea that women poured. Osinsky left his wife and son and moved in with Anna Shaternikova, the recipient of his “Blacksmith” letter. The Sverdlovs brought their son, Andrei, and daughter, Vera, back from Nizhny Novgorod and moved to a larger apartment in the Kremlin. Their most frequent guest was Sverdlov’s closest friend and Siberian housemate Filipp (Georges) Goloshchekin, the “regular Don Quixote.” Most of the other visitors were also former coconspirators and fellow prisoners, too. When they got together, they would reenact their days of innocence by singing revolutionary songs and wrestling on the carpet.58

  The only exception were various family members. Sverdlov’s father visited regularly, accompanied by his two sons from a second marriage and once, by Yakov’s eldest daughter, who lived with her mother in Ekaterinburg. Sverdlov’s sisters had both become doctors. Sofia was married to a former entrepreneur, Leonid Averbakh, and had two children, Leopold and Ida. Sarra had briefly worked with Novgorodtseva in the Central Committee secretariat. Sverdlov’s brother Veniamin had emigrated to America and become a banker but had recently returned at his brother’s invitation to become the commissar of transportation—and the husband of Yakov’s former lover, Vera Dilevskaia. The family, in Novgorodtseva’s words, was “large, merry, and close-knit.” Only Sverdlov’s older brother, Zinovy, had left the fold for good. As the godson of Maxim Gorky, he had converted to Christianity; adopted Gorky’s last name (Peshkov); studied at the Moscow Art Theater school; worked as a laborer in the United States, Canada, and New Zealand; interpreted for Gorky during his tour of the United States in 1906 (including the conversations he had with Mark Twain and John Dewey); lived with him on Capri (where he met Lenin, Bunin, and Lunacharsky, among others); joined the French Foreign Legion; lost his right arm during the fighting in France; returned to Russia in 1917 as a member of the French military mission; and left again after the Bolshevik Revolution, having failed in his efforts to keep Russia in the war. Zinovy and the rest of the Sverdlovs did not recognize each other’s existence.59

  The most important Sverdlovs of all were the children. The parents might have to sacrifice themselves to socialism; their grandchildren would be born too late to take part in the toil of creation. It was the children, “reared under the new, free social conditions,” who would walk into the kingdom of freedom and “discard the entire lumber of the state” (as Lenin, quoting Engels, had written in State and Revolution). According to Novgorodtseva, when eight-year-old Andrei heard about the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, he asked:

  “Daddy, wasn’t Liebknecht a revolutionary and a Bolshevik?”

  “Yes,” answered Yakov Mikhailovich, “a real revolutionary.”

  “Was he killed by the bourgeoisie?”

  “Yes, of course by the bourgeoisie.”

  “But Daddy, you are also a revolutionary. Does that mean they might kill you, too?”

  Yakov Mikhailovich looked the boy in the eye, gently ruffled his hair, and said very seriously and very calmly:

/>   “Of course they might, son. But you shouldn’t be afraid of that. When I die, I will leave you an inheritance that is better than anything else in the world. I will leave you my name and my unblemished honor as a revolutionary.”60

  ■ ■ ■

  To be a revolutionary meant being both a herald and agent of the coming transfiguration. Voronsky, having been transferred from the Western Front to the Romanian Front before becoming a top Bolshevik propagandist in Odessa, prophesied the imminent consummation of the promise two weeks before the event. “The new and final wave of the revolution is coming. We are on the brink of a new revolutionary era, when, for the first time, the social element will pour into the revolution like a huge wave.” The aquatic imagery, tempered by repeated references to “the revolution,” accommodated both Christian and Marxist formulas (some of them identical). “The Russian Proletarian Revolution,” he wrote when the hour finally struck, “will triumph as a world revolution no matter what trials await her because, for capitalist society, ‘the time and all the prophecies are fulfilled.’” The apocalypse was the ultimate mixed metaphor: