The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  The chief guardian—“responsible custodian”—of Lenin’s textual heritage was Arosev (who had transferred Lenin’s heart to the mausoleum and Lenin’s brain to the special Laboratory for the Study of V. I. Lenin’s Brain). Arosev’s main job at the Lenin Institute was to catalog Lenin’s writings and compile the “calendar” of his life, but his most creative contribution to Leniniana was his short book On Vladimir Ilich, published in 1926. The book consists of several apparently unconnected episodes. In the first, two boys are having a race. The shorter, “light-haired” one, wins, and buys three birds in a cage. The boys go to a place called the Golden Crown to set them free, but one of the birds is sick and cannot fly. The tall boy is impatient, but the light-haired one cradles the bird in his hands, gives it water to drink, and insists on taking it to the bushes on the bank of the Volga, where it will be safe. “Now the tall one ran ahead because he wanted to get rid of the bird as quickly as possible, while the light-haired one lagged behind, blowing lightly on the bird and stroking it. He did not want to part with it.”83

  In the next scene, the light-haired little boy has become a ginger-haired university student “with the kind of brightness in his face that marks children who are developed beyond their years but have not lost their physical freshness.” After he and his comrades are arrested for staging a student demonstration, one of the students asks him what he is going to do now:

  “What am I going to do?” he said, squinting toward the corner of the cell. “What can I do? My path has been set for me by my older brother.” [Lenin’s older brother had been hanged for attempted regicide when Lenin was seventeen.]

  He said this quietly, but everyone seemed to shudder. They looked at each other in silence.

  “So that was your brother?” asked someone quietly, as if Doubting Thomas had just thrust his fingers into the fresh wounds.

  The ginger-haired student continued to sit with his arms around his knees and left the question unanswered.84

  In one of the later episodes, a balding young man reads a book (Hauptmann’s The Weavers) to a circle of disciples. After the reading, he is approached by a worker named Grigoriev, who asks him many questions about meeting times and addresses. “For a moment, he looked hard at Grigoriev, as if trying to remember something deeply hidden. But Grigoriev could not look him in the eye. In the same way, Judas had not been able to look his teacher in the eyes at the last supper in Jerusalem, when the teacher said: ‘One of you will betray me.’”85

  In the next scene, a smiling, bald exile persuades a village storekeeper to take pity on a peasant who does not have enough money for an Easter present for his daughter. But when the peasant thanks him “from the bottom of his heart,” the exile suddenly stops smiling. “The more ‘kindness’ we show toward the small producer (e.g., to the peasant) in the practical part of our program,” he writes several months later, “the ‘more strictly’ must we treat these unreliable and double-faced social elements in the theoretical part of the program, without sacrificing one iota of our position. ‘If you adopt our position,’ we tell them, ‘you can count on “indulgence” of every kind, but if you don’t, well then, you’ve been warned! Under the “dictatorship,” we will say about you: “there is no point in wasting words where the use of power is required.”’”86

  In the final episodes, only one man is prepared to use power when it is required. The meaning of the light-haired boy’s Golden Crown has been revealed. Bukharin, Voronsky, and other Bolsheviks who grew up reading the Apocalypse, would have had no trouble recognizing Revelation 14: “I looked, and there before me was a white cloud, and seated on the cloud was one ‘like the son of man’ with a crown of gold on his head and a sharp sickle in his hand. Then another angel came out of the temple and called in a loud voice to him who was sitting on the cloud, ‘Take your sickle and reap, because the time to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is ripe.’ So he who was seated on the cloud swung his sickle over the earth, and the earth was harvested.”87

  Arosev worked at the Lenin Institute for slightly more than a year before moving on to other things. (His next assignment was the press bureau of the Soviet embassy in Paris, under Ambassador Krasin.) A much more prolific writer on Lenin and Leninism was Platon Kerzhentsev (who continued to contribute to the canon throughout his life). But the most resonant words were Mayakovsky’s. Several days after the Immortalization Commission announced its decision to preserve Lenin’s body, he wrote the words that would later become the Soviet Union’s motto: “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will always live.” By October, he had finished his poem about Lenin’s life, death, and resurrection. “Lenin, even now, is more alive than the living” because he is both “a slayer, an avenger” and “the most humane of humans” (“the earthiest of those who have ever walked the Earth”). Above his mausoleum, “Red Square rises like a red banner,”

  And from that banner,

  with every flutter,

  Lenin,

  alive,

  beckons:

  “Proletarians,

  prepare,

  for one last battle!

  Slaves,

  stand straight

  and stiffen your backs!88

  V. I. Lenin, by Maria Denisova

  Himself an avenger and savior, Mayakovsky first prophesied the last battle (“I’ll rip out my soul … and hand it to you—all bloodied, for a banner”) after his Gioconda was taken away from him. But of course no one took her away. She chose her own battles. After Mayakovsky left Odessa in 1914, Maria Denisova married an engineer, followed him to Switzerland, gave birth to a daughter, studied sculpture in Lausanne and Geneva, separated from her husband, left for the Civil War front, served as head of the Art Agitation Department in the First and Second Red Cavalry armies, and moved in with the famous Commissar Efim Shchadenko (who served in the Military Revolutionary Council under both Semen Budennyi and Filipp Mironov). In 1924, at the age of thirty, she enrolled at the Higher Art and Technology Studios in Moscow. For her graduation project, she submitted a marble sculpture of Lenin’s head resting in his coffin.89

  7

  THE GREAT DISAPPOINTMENT

  Lenin’s death was mostly about immortality. But it was also about sorrow and despair. “In 1924, after the death of the beloved leader of the Party, Comrade Lenin,” wrote the shepherd-turned-public-prosecutor-turned-pensioner, Vasily Orekhov, “I could not bear his death and wept for about three months, resulting in traumatic nervosis.”1

  Moses had died, the promised land had been reached, but there was no milk and honey—presumably because the people had “prostituted themselves to foreign gods.” Or, in the equally productive metaphor, the real day had come, but there was still death and mourning and crying and pain. As the founder of Seventh-Day Adventism, Hiram Edson, wrote after the “Great Disappointment” of October 22, 1844, “our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before.” And as a Xhosa peasant said after the world failed to come to an end on February 18, 1857, “I sat outside my hut and saw the sun rise, so did all the people. We watched until midday, yet the sun continued its course. We still watched until the afternoon and yet it did not return, and the people began to despair because they saw this thing was not true.”2

  Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur is one of the most eloquent Bolshevik laments over the apparent nonarrival of Communism. Comrade Chepurny and his assistant, the Chekist, Piusya, have exterminated the bourgeoisie and expelled the “half-bourgeoisie” along with most of the animals. Only twelve people are left in the town: eleven Bolsheviks and a woman, who, “being the raw material of communal joy, was kept in a special house, away from the dangerous life of the masses.” Chepurny “sat down on the ground by a wattle fence and softly, with two fingers, touched a burdock that was growing there; it too was alive—and now it was going to live under communism. Somehow dawn was a long time coming, though surely it must have been time for the new day. Chepurny went very s
till and began to feel afraid: would the sun rise in the morning, would morning ever come—now that the old world was no longer?”3

  The Bolshevik spas and sanatoria of the 1920s were mostly about croquet, caviar, chess, concerts, billiards, boats, and “bubbles all over your body.” But they were also about sickness and sorrow. At the time of Lenin’s death, Voronsky was staying at a rest home (as was his friend and patron Trotsky, who was suffering from a mysterious melancholy). Smilga and Arosev had recently returned from sanatoria in Germany; Podvoisky was on his way to one there. Orekhov would never return to active work (he was forty when he started weeping); Lander would retire for health reasons within three years, at the age of forty-four; and Kritsman would be judged too sick to teach in 1929, when he was thirty-nine. Bukharin would remain active and energetic, but, in the words of his last wife, Anna Larina, “his emotional constitution was extraordinarily delicate, I would even say, morbidly frail.” On the day Lenin died, most of the leader’s disciples cried, “but no one sobbed as much as Bukharin.” Indeed, “this trait—emotional fragility and acute sensitivity—would often send him into a state of hysteria. He wept easily.”4

  Orekhov and Bukharin were not alone. Of the 144 people who received medical treatment at the Central Executive Committee Rest Home in Tetkovo in the summer of 1928, 98 (or 68 percent) were diagnosed with emotional disorders: “Neurasthenia—18; Psycho-neurasthenia—6; Psychosis—1; Exhaustion—73.” A year earlier, in 1927, the Lenin Rest Home in Maryino (the Central Executive Committee Rest Home No. 1) had received 1,266 guests. Of these, “six people (0.47 percent) were healthy, while the other 1,260 had various complaints.” Almost one-half (598 of them) had “functional diseases of the nervous system”; 27 had “organic diseases of the nervous system”; 59 were diagnosed as “neurotics”; and 130, as “suffering from exhaustion.” Altogether, 65 percent of the guests complained of some form of emotional distress. Neither of the homes was a specialized medical institution: both were vacation resorts designed for sociability and recreation, with one or two doctors sent over from the Kremlin Health Department.5

  Rest and therapy produced the need for more rest and therapy. As Stalin’s father-in-law, S. Ya. Alliluev, wrote to the head of the CEC Housing Authority in June 1930, “I would be very grateful if you could find it possible to place me in one of the CEC rest homes for a couple of weeks. Somewhere in the middle of a thick forest, where it’s quiet. I recently returned from Matsesta [a balneological spa outside Sochi], where I was trying to cure my old man’s ailments and my heart. The sulphur baths have made me quite weak, and I need to restore my health.”6

  At the height of the collectivization campaign (and three months before his son-in-law’s “Dizzy from Success” article ordered a temporary halt to the mass violence), Alliluev may have had other reasons for wishing to be in the middle of a thick forest. Two years earlier, Olympiada Mitskevich’s reasons seem to have been perfectly straightforward. The daughter of Siberian peasants, Olympiada had joined the revolutionaries at the age of sixteen when she married a prominent Bolshevik, Sergei Mitskevich (who had joined the revolutionaries at the age of fourteen when he read Turgenev’s The Virgin Soil). By 1928, they had separated. He was working as the director of the Museum of the Revolution, and she was an employee of the Institute of Party History (and future employee of Adoratsky’s Lenin Institute). Her main occupation, however, was to work on recovering from a life of self-deprivation that had begun when she dedicated herself to the future revolution and ended when she became a professional keeper of the past. In July 1928, she wrote from Czechoslovakia to the Society of Old Bolsheviks asking for help in moving from one resort to another. “After receiving treatment at Carlsbad, which always weakens me, I need rest.… I am not asking for financial assistance from you at this point. All I need is a ticket to Nizhny Novgorod and then down to Samara, and then another one, to return by the same route.”7

  The Society of Old Bolsheviks had been created soon after the Civil War for the purpose of preserving the common memory, passing it on to future generations, and attending to the welfare of its current members (all Bolsheviks with at least eighteen years of uninterrupted Party affiliation). The Society provided them with financial assistance, access to elite housing, and preferential college admissions for their children and grandchildren. The most frequent petitioners among the members were pensioners, who had plenty of time to convalesce and reminisce, and former workers, who did not have access to comparable benefits at their place of work. Since the salaries of Party members could not exceed a certain limit (the “Party Maximum”), and since even under NEP the supply of goods and services was uneven, most elite consumption took place through a highly stratified system of exclusive benefits. The Society of Old Bolsheviks mitigated the effects of this stratification among the original converts. The most common requests—even from the neediest members—were for rest and therapy.

  On July 4, 1928, the baker-turned-trade-union-official, Boris Ivanov, reminded the Society of a request he had made in his previous letter.

  I appealed to the society of old bolsheviks through a secretary with a request to be sent to a Kislovodsk spa for free treatment which request was denied due to the reason that I hadn’t been a member for six months even though I was feeling bad and lay in bed sick for a whole month. I did get the treatment paid for by the central committee of the party so in that regard I am okay but they didn’t include the railway ticket which means I’ll have to pay my own way.

  Although I receive the Party Maximum I am in very dire straits. Besides the family of four persons who are all my dependents of whom my wife is sick, I was on top of everything burgled about ten months ago which is to say that in my absence they robbed my apartment clean and took all our winter coats and some of our fall clothes and underwear of my whole family and of course they never found neither the theives nor the things. So I had to go into debt to get clothes for my children and will myself go around in a fall overcoat for the second winter in a row due to not having the necessary resources for the purchase. In this situation it’s not so easy to add to your existing debts.8

  Ivanov did not ask for money for a new coat; he asked for free train tickets to the spa. His request was granted.

  The former shepherd, Vasily Orekhov, wrote to the Society in late 1927 asking for money. The board members received a typed version of the original letter.

  In 1924 I got a bad case of traumatic nervosis for which I received treatment in Korsikov’s sanatorium for three months. During this period I relatively rested and returned to work. Having worked until January 19, 1925, my illness came back, but in a more serious form. I lost the use of my tongue and legs. My physical condition was greatly affected by the cold. At the end of February the Moscow Committee sent me for treatment to Sevastopol, to the Institute of Physical Therapy, where I stayed for three months. At the end of the treatment my doctors suggested that I stay in the south.… In Simferopol, my apartment was broken into by some bandits, who killed my sixteen-year-old son, whose funeral cost 186 rubles. My family was so frightened by the attack that it entered into a mental condition, and my wife and daughter are still suffering from it. My wife fell very seriously ill, to whom was recommended by the Medical Commission to proceed to Evpatoria to take salt and mud baths, and, for the children, sea baths and electric treatments. I had to send my whole family to Evpatoria for two months. This treatment cost me 476 rubles.… Appealing to you with this request, I am asking you to lead me out of this vortex into which fate has thrown me.9

  The Society arranged for him to receive a special pension of 175 roubles a month. In June 1930, his pension was raised to 200 roubles, but his financial situation and medical condition remained unsatisfactory, and he continued to request, and receive, free treatments at Crimean spas and free services not available at the Kremlin Hospital. In December 1930, he asked the Society to pay for “the replacement of two rows of teeth to the total amount of 26 teeth as well as the placement of two crowns
on the two remaining teeth.” The Society approved the request.10

  Whatever the nature, symptoms, and etiology of the particular affliction, the 1920s were a time of deep malaise among those who believed that the real day would “sweep away everything weak, feeble, and old.” The proclamation of the NEP retreat from Communism was followed by the onset of Lenin’s illness, which was followed by the apparent rise of everything weak, feeble, and old. “After the death of the bourgeoisie, Chepurny had no idea, at first, how to live for happiness, and used to go off to distant meadows in order to concentrate and, there, alone in the living grass, to experience a premonition of communism.” Or, as Aron Solts put it in a speech at the Sverdlov Communist University in 1925,

  We are going through a period when the nerves of a great number of people have suffered and experienced so much that they have no strength left to do what the Party requires of them. There are some young Party members who have gone through the Civil War, fought at all the fronts, worked in the punitive organs of the GPU [formerly Cheka], etc., and have become totally emotionally exhausted, because of the colossal self-control that has been demanded of them. The ones who lacked sufficient self-control thought that, after one last effort, they would enter the Communist paradise, but when they saw that things were more serious and required a longer period of work, they experienced a certain disappointment.11