The House of Government
Page 27
No one except the leader had a permanent position (or street address). Bolshevik officials kept being transferred from one job to the next on the assumption that, as Sverdlov put it, a pharmacist, even “an inexperienced one,” could run a state. Vasily Orekhov, the former shepherd who was exiled from Moscow in 1908 for “overturning a bowl of cabbage soup onto Kudelkin’s head and boiling his whole head,” served as a brigade commander in the Don Area, where he “received seven wounds, three of them severe,” and then as a member of the Moscow revolutionary tribunal before becoming a deputy provincial prosecutor. Roman Terekhov, the Donbass miner who began his armed struggle by trying to kill a mechanic in his shop, organized underground Bolshevik cells in White-held territory, served as an “agitator” in the Red Army, and held various Party positions in his native Yuzovka before becoming director of the Ukrainian Central Control Commission. The calico printer, Pavel Postyshev, remained in Siberia after the February Revolution, became one of the top Bolshevik commanders in the Far East, and served as a Party official in Kiev before becoming secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee. The “politically underdeveloped” baker, Boris Ivanov, was sent by his mentor Sverdlov to nationalize the flour industry, then worked as an agitator in the Astrakhan fisheries, before returning to Moscow to spend the rest of the 1920s as an official in the food workers’ union. Sverdlov’s friend and chief regicide, Filipp Goloshchekin, worked as director of the Iron Ore Trust, chairman of the Kostroma and Samara Provincial Executives, and, after 1924, secretary of the Kazakh Party Committee. Ivanov’s fellow worker, Semen Kanatchikov (they had worked together as propagandists in the Petersburg Women’s Mutual Aid Club in 1908, several years after Kanatchikov’s apprenticeship at Gustav List in the Swamp), spent the Civil War in various Party posts in Siberia, the Urals, and Kazan before being assigned to the “culture front.” He helped to found the Sverdlov Communist University in Moscow and served as rector of the Zinoviev Communist University in Petrograd, head of the Press Department of the Party’s Central Committee, a TASS correspondent in Prague, and, after 1928, a member of the editorial boards of several journals and publishing houses.6
Kanatchikov’s main competitor on the literature front was the former seminarian Aleksandr Voronsky, who was transferred from Odessa to Ivanovo, where he worked as secretary of the Party Committee and editor in chief of the Worker’s Path newspaper; then to Kharkov, where he ran the Political Department of the Donetsk Railroad; and, in February 1921, to Moscow, where Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia, put him in charge of the Publishing Department of the Main Committee for Political Enlightenment. Within weeks, he would become the head of the Modern Literature Department at the State Publishing House; editor in chief of the official literary journal, Red Virgin Soil (Krasnaia nov’); and the main judge, champion, and ideologue of new Soviet literature.7
One of Voronsky’s literary protégés was Arosev, the conqueror of Moscow and a “memoirist of intra-Party emotional states” who thought of himself as a writer even as he continued to serve as deputy commander of the Moscow Military District, commissar of the Tenth Army, chairman of the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal of Ukraine, deputy director of the Lenin Institute in Moscow, secretary at the Soviet embassies in Latvia, France, and Sweden, and then as ambassador to Lithuania and Czechoslovakia. Arosev’s former commander Arkady Rozengolts, who had once seemed to “move from one room to another through the walls,” now seemed to move—with equal ease—through positions of political commissar of transportation (during which time he sent Voronsky to Kharkov), member of the Collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Finance, head of the Main Directorate of the Air Force, Soviet ambassador to Great Britain, and people’s commissar of foreign trade. Another participant in the Moscow uprising, Osip Piatnitsky, served as head of the Trade Union of Railroad Workers before becoming a member of the Comintern Executive Committee and one of the chief administrators of the international Communist movement. One of the leaders of the assault on the Winter Palace, the former seminarian Nikolai Podvoisky, had been named head of the Office of Supreme Military Inspection and was set on becoming the Revolution’s “iron hand throughout the world,” but Lenin disapproved of his subsequent performance as the people’s commissar for military affairs of Ukraine, and had him transferred to the Supreme Council on Physical Culture and Sports International.8
Filipp Mironov’s prosecutor, Ivar Smilga, served as head of the Main Fuel Directorate, deputy head of the Supreme Council of National Economy (VSNKh), deputy head of the State Planning Committee (Gosplan), and rector of the Plekhanov Institute of National Economy. Smilga’s associate during the Filipp Mironov affair, Valentin Trifonov, worked as his deputy and then as head of the Oil Syndicate at the Fuel Directorate before becoming chairman of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. In 1925, he was replaced by Vasily Ulrikh and sent abroad: first to China as deputy military attaché and then to Finland as head of the trade mission. One of Trifonov’s successors in the Don area was Karl Lander, the son of Latvian day laborers who had lived with several Christian evangelical sects before converting to Bolshevism. As the special Cheka (secret police) plenipotentiary in the North Caucasus and Don region, Lander directed the executions of thousands of Cossacks in the fall of 1920. After the war, he served as head of the Agitprop Department of the Moscow Party Committee, Soviet representative at the foreign famine relief missions in 1922–23, and member of the Collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Trade.9
Osinsky, the main ideologue of “War Communism” and the first chairman of both the State Bank and the VSNKh, went on to serve as chairman of the Tula Executive Committee, deputy people’s commissar of agriculture, deputy director of VSNKh, member of the presidium of Gosplan and the Communist Academy, ambassador to Sweden, and head of the Central Directorate of Statistics. Osinsky’s deputy in the Directorate of Statistics (and his predecessor as ambassador to Sweden) was Platon Kerzhentsev, who had converted him to Bolshevism twenty-five years earlier by defeating him in a debate about the Decembrists at Moscow Gymsnasium No. 7. Kerzhentsev had also run the Russian Telegraphic Agency, the section of the Scientific Organization of Labor at the Worker-Peasant Inspection, and the Soviet embassy in Italy. After two years at the Directorate of Statistics, he became deputy head of the Central Committee Agitprop and director of the Institute of Literature, Arts, and Language. Closest to the top of the pyramid—or so it seemed—was Osinsky’s and Kerzhentsev’s younger comrade from the early days of the Moscow Bolsheviks, Nikolai Bukharin. As he wrote in his official autobiography in 1925, “at present I am working as a member of the Central Committee and Politburo, member of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, as well as a writer, lecturer, party agitator, propagandist, etc.”10
■ ■ ■
Most of those working in Moscow moved into the Kremlin or into one of several mansions and hotels designated as “Houses of Soviets” and administered by the Central Executive Committee’s special Housekeeping Department. The old residents were expelled and their property confiscated, or, as Arosev put it, “all the old trash was shaken out.” Lenin ordered the removal of all the icons and royal statues in the Kremlin. According to the Kremlin commandant, Malkov, “Vladimir Ilich could not stand the monuments to the tsars, grand dukes, and all those celebrated tsarist generals. He said on more than one occasion that the people, having been victorious, should tear down any such filth that reminded them of autocracy, and leave, by way of exception, only genuine works of art such as the monument to Peter in Petrograd.” The “ruler of half the world” would remain on his steed (if not always on his pedestal) even after Petrograd became Leningrad; Moscow’s most conspicuous horseman, General Skobelev, was replaced by the Liberty Obelisk. The building from which the ghostly Rozengolts ordered Arosev to go out and take over the city never fully recovered from the visit by the “man in the black-leather shell.” The headquarters of the Revolution had moved down the street to where Lenin now lived and worked
. Or, as Arosev put it, “for ‘both now and ever, and unto the ages of ages,’ the Kremlin has stopped being the crown on the head of ‘all Russias’ and turned into a stone engagement ring used to wed ‘all the earth’s nations in the name of peace, labor, and truth.’”11
Among the few old residents allowed to stay in the Kremlin were several palace doormen, retained in their previous capacity, but told not to wear liveries. According to Malkov and Novgorodtseva (who was now calling herself “Sverdlova”), the old men began by disapproving of the new masters but soon understood that their informality concealed real power and “became warmly and sincerely attached” to them. In 1918, Arosev wrote a short story about “an old servant of the old dead masters,” left behind in an old empty palace. One day, soon after the Revolution, the old man revolts against the bronze statues of tsars and generals standing in niches along the palace’s white stairway. The largest of all is a life-size Peter “wearing jackboots and wielding a sword,” whom the old man accuses of having “stuck us all in a Petersburg swamp.” Then, frightened by his own bravery, “the old man started and staggered back, grabbing onto the bannister and spitting over his left shoulder, before running as fast as he could down to the doorman’s chamber, feeling a cold chill behind him all the way, as if he were being chased by a dead man.”12
Malkov was not afraid of statues. Within a year of the introduction of the New Economic Policy, his Kremlin household had evolved into a vast real estate empire that included the Kremlin and eighteen Houses of Soviets with approximately 5,600 permanent residents and 1,200 dormitory beds. In 1922 alone, the Central Executive Committee (CEC) Housing Authority granted living space to 28,843 individuals—2,441 of them as permanent residents. The hierarchy of the buildings corresponded to the hierarchy of the officials. The Kremlin was reserved for the top Party leaders and their families. The First House of Soviets (formerly the National Hotel) housed the members of the Central Committee of the Party, Central Executive Committee, Central Control Commission, and governing boards (“collegia”) of the People’s Commissariats. The Second House of Soviets (the Metropol Hotel) was used for those who did not make it into the First House, as well as for the Central Committee and Central Executive Committee department heads and other “responsible officials” affiliated with the CEC. The Third House of Soviets (the former Orthodox Seminary on the corner of Sadovaia-Karetnaia and Bozhedomsky Alley) served as a dormitory for congress delegates and visiting high officials; the Fourth House (the Peterhof Hotel, on the corner of Vozdvizhenka and Mokhovaia) housed the CEC offices and staff members; and the Fifth House (Count Sheremetev’s apartment building on Granovsky Street), which was added to the list later than the others, served as a respectable alternative to the first two. The remaining Houses of Soviets, which were less comfortable and farther away from the Kremlin, housed the lower officials and CEC staff and their families. Individual commissariats and other Soviet institutions had their own real estate, including residential housing.13
Over the course of the 1920s, the number of Houses of Soviets kept fluctuating (twenty nine in early 1924, then back down to eighteen the next year) as the need for housing clashed with a lack of funding. The greatest challenge for the Housekeeping Department was to keep up with the various transfers, promotions, and demotions by evicting some residents, installing others, and shifting the rest among rooms, floors, and houses. Rules connecting space to rank were undercut by countless complaints and demands citing special needs and patronage precedence. As the head of the housing authority wrote in the summer of 1921, “I was forced to make exceptions following requests and instructions from higher authorities, whom I was duty-bound to obey.” Most of the claimants were higher authorities, and most of them objected to the strict ranking on personal or doctrinal grounds. The head of the Cheka Investigations Department, Grigory Moroz, who wanted to move to a lower floor in the First House of Soviets because he had TB, a small infant, a recalcitrant nanny, and a twenty-four-hour workday, enclosed a list of neighbors who did not have comparable qualifications (his request was approved). The head of the Archival Authority, David Riazanov, wrote that a certain comrade was “of proletarian origin, and consequently entitled to a room” (request denied). The residents of the Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Houses signed a petition arguing that they could not be taken off the budget just because they were service personnel, and thus proletarians (request approved but later ignored).14
In addition to being officials with secretaries and other employees, the residents were human, and consequently, mammals, who ate, drank, slept, procreated, grew hair, produced waste, got sick, and needed heating and lighting, among other things. All this required a vast and intricate infrastructure and a growing staff of service personnel (around two thousand in 1922–23). The Housekeeping Department’s priorities were centralization, symmetry, transparency, cleanliness, accountability, and surveillance. All things and people were to be catalogued and, if possible, correlated. Doormen’s chambers were to be free of “trash, cigarette butts, and spittle”; doormen were to accompany duly identified guests to their rooms; residents were to have passes corresponding to their status and location; and clerical staff were, in the interests of saving time, to drink tea at their desks. No one was to sleep with his boots on or eat on windowsills; everyone was to report all violations.15
Before 1921, all services and household items were free; after the introduction of private trade under NEP it was up to the management to set the prices. In January 1923, the head of the Housing Authority decreed that a regular male haircut should cost 3 rubles; a flat top, 3.75; a beard trim, 2.25; a head shave, 3.75; a beard shave, 3.75; a female haircut, 3.75; and a perm, 6. In August, after a currency reform, these prices rose sharply, but not all at the same rate (with head shaving emerging as the most expensive operation by a considerable margin). The same was true of the cost of firewood, laundry, and cafeteria meals. The drive for consistency (apartment rent was to vary according to house, floor, size, view, facilities, and so on) was partially thwarted by the demands of patronage and privilege (special conditions for those with greater responsibilities and their associates). The list of officials entitled to free use of Central Executive Comittee cars consisted of those who could transfer that right to others, those who could not transfer that right to others, and those who were not officials, but had certain unspecified rights. Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Allilueva, was on the list “by order of Comrade Stalin”; Sverdlov’s widow, K. T. Sverdlova, was on the list “by order of Comrade Enukidze.” Stalin and other top Party leaders rarely interfered, as various services were increasingly offered to them as “initiatives from below.” Enukidze, as CEC secretary and one of Sverdlov’s official successors, distributed favors from above as well as from below. Large and variously defined groups of officials and their dependents received special discounts.16
First House of Soviets (the National Hotel)
Second House of Soviets (the Metropol Hotel)
The extraordinary thing about the living conditions of high Soviet officials in the 1920s was how extraordinary they were by Soviet standards. As the head of the Housing Authority Food Supply Department wrote in 1920, the work of an organization “that serves the needs of the Kremlin, which is the political center of the country, as well as the needs of the Houses of Soviets, which contain the high officials who constitute the flower of not only the Russian, but also the world, revolution, must be considered of paramount importance, with all the consequences that that entails.” There was no need for a special decree: the needs of the flower of the world revolution were considered paramount by all of the agencies charged with meeting them.17
All sects are, in theory and by definition, equal and fraternal. All are, in fact, hierarchical. Some consist of a teacher and several male disciples; some consist of a teacher and a commune including women and children (which may or may not belong to the teacher); and some grow large enough to contain ranked officials. The Kremlin and the most important Houses of So
viets had their own cafeterias as well as a bakery and kvass factory. During the famine of 1921–23, eleven special agents were sent to procure meat in the North Caucasus, Penza, and Saratov; grain and flour in Ukraine; vegetables in the Moscow and Vladimir Provinces; and rice in Turkestan. “In order to improve the quality of the food in the cafeterias, a special dietary office was created. A nutritional scientist with experience working abroad was invited to head it. In the cafeterias themselves, almost the entire staff was composed of individuals with special training in popular nutrition and the culinary arts.” The dependents of CEC members received a special cafeteria discount irrespective of their place of residence; the dependents of CEC staff received the discount only if they lived in the Houses of Soviets. As few staff members as possible were to be assigned to the top five Houses of Soviets.18
The inhabitants of the top five Houses of Soviets had their own laundry services and a telephone station. They had their own club with sports, music, dance, and drama classes. They had their own “Kremlin” hospital, with outpatient clinics in the First, Third, and Fifth Houses and doctors available for home visits. They had their own school, day-care centers, kindergartens, and summer camps for about 850 children (with K. T. Sverdlova in charge). They had special passes “valid for free travel on all the railways and waterways of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic”—and, after 1922, of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (Those who did not have such passes received free tickets to particular destinations, as Sverdlova did in September 1924 for a trip to Crimea with Andrei, Vera, and an unspecified fourth party, probably a nanny).19
They had special seats reserved for them in all the Moscow theaters, the circus, and State Movie Theater No. 1. In 1924, ad hoc demands for free admission were replaced by a formal obligation by the theaters to provide comfortable boxes to officials of certain ranks (more or less corresponding to residency in the Kremlin and the First, Second, and Fifth Houses of Soviets). Eligible officials could be accompanied by one adult or two children. Access to the CEC boxes was to be “regulated in such a way that only comrades with CEC tickets could enter them, while individuals with regular tickets could not.” Enukidze, who wrote the decree, was famous for his love of opera and his appreciation of female beauty. In 1926, the women in the CEC Secretariat traded in their dark smocks for English suits with “elegant” shoes and blouses. According to one employee of the Statistics Department, the women decided to have two skirts made for each suit: one for everyday use and one for special occasions. They worked long hours, and often went to the theater straight from the office.20