The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  At the Sixteenth Party Congress, in June–July 1930, the Rightists were asked to repent properly. As Postyshev said, in the very first speech of the discussion session, “prove, through your actions, the sincerity of your admission of mistakes, the sincerity of your declaration. Prove that it was not a maneuver similar to what the Trotskyites do. The Party has asked a very tough question, and comrades Rykov, Tomsky, and Bukharin must give the Congress an unambiguous answer (applause).” “The Trotskyites” had become shorthand for persistent apostates. Bukharin claimed to be sick and stayed at his dacha in Crimea. Rykov admitted his own mistakes but refused to renounce Bukharin. “I am responsible for what I have done, for the mistakes I have made, and I am not going to use Bukharin as a scapegoat. You cannot ask that of me. I, not Bukharin, should be punished for the mistakes I have made.” Several hours before Bukharin and Anna Larina spent their “thrilling, romantic Crimean evening” together, Bukharin received a postcard from Rykov. The last paragraph, according to Larina, said: “Come back healthy. At the congress, we talked about you with dignity. Know that I love you the way even a woman passionately in love with you never could. Yours, Aleksei.”67

  Tomsky made a full confession, stating that his main errors had been, first, to assume that the reconstruction of “the whole life of the country” was a matter of mere “technical and industrial reconstruction,” and, second, to forget that “any more or less long-term opposition against the Party line and its leadership inevitably leads, and will lead, to an opposition against the Party as such.” The audience did not seem convinced. Tomsky persevered:

  The Party has the right to ask us: how sincere are our admissions of mistakes? Isn’t this a maneuver? (Artiukhina: “That’s right!”) Isn’t there a danger of a relapse? Some people even say: We don’t believe words, words are meaningless, ephemeral, hot air, didn’t Lenin once say, “do not take their word for it,” and so on? But if we interpret Lenin as crudely as some comrades have been doing here at the congress, then we must stop talking altogether. What is the point of talking? (laughter) …

  At a certain point, I, along with Zinoviev, told Trotsky: “Bow your head before the Party.” Later, I said the same to Zinoviev, who was with Trotsky, “Bow your head before the Party, Grigory.” I have made my share of mistakes, I am not ashamed of that, and I am in no way ashamed of bowing my head before the Party. I think that, in my speech, I have admitted my mistakes with all the necessary sincerity and frankness. But it seems to me, comrades, that it is rather difficult to be in the role of a permanent penitent. Some comrades seem to be saying: repent, repent without end, do nothing but repent (laughter).68

  Tomsky’s difficulty was resolved by the Leningrad Party Secretary (and new Politburo member) Sergei Kirov, who said that true repentance consisted in acknowledging that any disagreement with the Party leadership was tantamount to enemy sabotage. “What we needed to hear from comrades Rykov and Tomsky is not just the admission of their mistakes and the renunciation of their platform, but the admission that it was, as I said, a kulak program, which, in the final analysis, would have led to the death of socialist construction.” But could one admit something like that and be forgiven? And what about the Left, whose sin had consisted in struggling against the Right when the Right was still the center?69

  Most of the original Leftists were already in exile when they learned of the victory of their long-held views. Trotsky admitted that Stalin’s policies were “undoubtedly, an attempt to approach our position,” but argued that “in politics, what matters is not only what is being done, but also who does it and how.” Stalin may have had something similar in mind when he sent Trotsky to Alma-Ata (and later to Turkey), Radek to Tobolsk, Smilga to Narym, and Vladimir Smirnov, a veteran oppositionist and Osinsky’s brother-in-law, to the northern Urals. At the Ninth Party Congress in 1920, Osinsky and Smirnov had still been leading the “Democratic Centralist” opposition against centralization, “bureaucratization,” and the employment of bourgeois experts; Osinsky later rejoined the general line (if not without his usual irritable reservations), but Smirnov remained an irreconcilable proletarian purist and was punished accordingly. On January 1, 1928, Osinsky wrote a letter to Stalin:

  Dear Comrade Stalin:

  Yesterday I learned that V. M. Smirnov was being exiled for three years to a place in the Urals (apparently, to the Cherdyn district), and today I ran into Sapronov, who told me that he was being sent to the Arkhangelsk Province for the same period of time. It seems they are required to leave as early as Tuesday, but Smirnov just had half his teeth removed, in the expectation of having them replaced with false ones, so now he will be going to the northern Urals without his teeth.

  When Lenin kicked Martov out of the country, he made sure he had everything he needed and even worried whether he had his fur coat and galoshes with him. And that was because Martov had once been a revolutionary. Our former Party comrades, who are now being sent into exile, have committed a grave political error, but they have never stopped being revolutionaries—this cannot be denied. Not only will they be able to return to the Party some day (despite the silly nonsense they have been spouting about a new party and about the old party having outlived its usefulness), but, if hard times come, they will be able to serve it as well as they did in October.

  The question arises, therefore: is it really necessary to send them to the North—adopting, in effect, a policy of their spiritual and physical annihilation? I do not think so. I do not understand why they cannot either be 1) sent abroad, as Lenin did in the case of Martov, or 2) settled in the interior, in places with a warmer climate, where Smirnov, for example, would be able to write a good book about credit.

  This policy of exile produces nothing but unnecessary resentment among people who cannot yet be considered lost and for whom the Party has sometimes been more of a stepmother, than a mother. It lends credence to the mutterings that the present regime is similar to the old police state, and that “those who made the revolution are now all in prison and exile, while power rests in the hands of different people.” Such mutterings are very bad for us, so why give them extra ammunition? All the more so because our attitude toward our political opponents from the camp we call “socialist” has so far been characterized by an effort to weaken the influence of their activity, not punish them for that activity.

  I do not know whether these measures are being taken with your knowledge and consent, and so I thought it was important to inform you and offer my view. I am writing on my own initiative, without their knowledge.

  With comradely greetings, Osinsky.

  The letter was returned to Osinsky, with an accompanying note from Stalin.

  Comrade Osinsky,

  If you stop to think, you will probably understand that you have no right, moral or otherwise, to censure the Party or take upon yourself the role of an arbiter between the Party and the opposition. I am returning your letter, as offensive to the Party. As for your concern about Smirnov and other oppositionists, you have no reason to doubt that the Party will do everything possible and necessary in that regard. J. Stalin, 3 January 1928.

  The following day, Osinsky responded.

  Comrade Stalin. I do not need any time to think about whether I can be the arbiter between the Party and the opposition, or anyone else. Your interpretation of my point of view and my general position is fundamentally wrong.

  I did not realize that the decision about the exile had been taken by a Party agency and honestly assumed otherwise. I did not find it among the Politburo protocols. Perhaps it was classified. My letter to you was entirely personal. I wrote it (as I am writing this one) on my portable typewriter, and I personally delivered it to the Central Committee. I would have dropped it at your home address, but, when I tried to do that in 1924, I was told to go to your secretariat, even though the matter was top secret. I wrote “personal” on this letter, on the assumption that your personal letters were not read by your secretaries.

  My general position i
s that I consider it within my rights to have independent opinions on some issues, and occasionally to express those opinions (sometimes—in the most sensitive cases—only personally, to you or to you and Rykov, as I did during the congress, as you will recall).

  In recent days, I have been taught two lessons in this regard. In connection with the grain procurement, Rykov told me that I ought to have lead poured down my throat, and now you have returned my letter. Well, if that, too, is unacceptable, I will have to bear it in mind.

  Wouldn’t it be much simpler to let me go abroad to work on my book for a year and be relieved of my bothersome presence entirely?

  With comradely greetings, Osinsky.70

  Osinsky may have been within his rights to have independent opinions “on some issues,” but he was not within his rights to have independent opinions on matters of Party policy. As he had written in 1917, there was no greater pleasure or duty for a Bolshevik than to dissolve his personality in the “sacred fury” of the proletariat’s collective will. That will—then and now—was embodied in the Party, and the will of the Party—despite the silly nonsense the oppositionists were spouting—was embodied in the decisions taken by its leaders. Ultimately, only the Party’s leaders could tell where “some issues” ended and Party policy began. Ultimately, according to Osinsky’s own logic, he had no right to have independent opinons about anything—any more than he had the right, moral or otherwise, to make distinctions between Stalin the person and Stalin the general secretary of the Party’s Central Committee. Such distinctions, common among cornered oppositionists and their sympathizers, were obviously offensive to the Party (and any other sectarian or priestly institution). If Osinsky had stopped to think, he would have understood that a letter about how to deal with oppositionists could not possibly be personal. He would have understood that no letter to Stalin could possibly be personal. As Bukharin’s disgraced ally, Tomsky, would later say in his confession to the Sixteenth Party Congress,

  We have seen how, in conditions of fierce class struggle, in a large Party intimately connected to the broad masses, the particular can sometimes become the general, and the personal can become the political. We have seen how ostensibly private conversations of politicians become political facts, so that if two people, one of whom is a member of the top leadership and the other one is, too, get together and talk about political matters, even in the course of a private conversation, then those are no longer private conversations. When people standing at the helm of power in the greatest country in a difficult, politically charged moment have private conversations, these private conversations—no matter how many times you say that they are private—become political, not private…. When we fight, we do not fight the way liberals do. They are the ones who separate the personal from the political. Among us, it does not work that way: if your politics are lousy, then you are a lousy, good-for-nothing person, and if your politics are wonderful, then you are a wonderful person.71

  Smirnov was duly sent into exile. Osinsky and his wife, Ekaterina Smirnova, adopted their four-year-old nephew, Rem (Revolution-Engels-Marx). At the time, the Osinskys’ oldest son, Vadim, known as “Dima,” was fifteen and best friends with Sverdlov’s son, Andrei. Both were friendly with Anna Larina. Two and a half years later, when Bukharin returned to Moscow after the Sixteeth Party Congress, he went to visit some of his former allies. Among those present were Andrei Sverdlov and Dima Osinsky. According to another young man who was there: “Still under the impression of what Bukharin had been saying about Stalin, Andrei Sverdlov proclaimed: ‘Koba [Stalin] must be bumped off.’”72

  Smilga was exiled at the same time as Smirnov. Smilga’s older daughter, Tatiana, who was eight at the time, remembered a lot of people at the station, her own warm scarf and woolen tights, her father’s massive fur coat and hat, Radek’s words “Farewell, Bear,” and her father’s prickly moustache (he had never kissed her before). Smilga was taken to Narym, but was soon—thanks to Ordzhonikidze—transferred to the less remote Minusinsk, not far from where Lenin had once been exiled. The following summer, Nadezhda and the two girls joined him there. Tatiana remembered intense heat, bouts of dysentery, and frequent dust storms (“when dust whirls around in towers and columns”). Twice she had to run to the local planning office where her father worked: once, to bring him home because he wore glasses and could not see in the dust; and then again, when her mother started crying and could not stop. “He came to see Mother, and they talked about something for a long time. Maybe they reached the conclusion that they should try to do something, rather than just dying quietly like that.” Soon afterward, Nadezhda took the sick girls back to Moscow. Nadezhda’s brother Dmitry Poluian, a high official at the People’s Commissariat of Transportation (and the presiding judge at the trial of Filipp Mironov in 1919), provided a separate train compartment. The following summer, Smilga came down with acute appendicitis and was brought back to the Kremlin hospital for an operation. On July 13, 1929, Pravda published a statement by Smilga, Radek, and Preobrazhensky (the original champion of the “tribute on the peasantry”), in which they announced the abandonment of their opposition and their “full solidarity with the general Party line,” most particularly the policy of industrialization, the creation of collective farms, and the struggle against the kulak, the bureaucracy, Social-Democracy, and the Right (“which, objectively, reflects the unhappiness of the country’s capitalist elements and petty bourgeoisie with the policy of the socialist offensive conducted by the Party”).73

  Ivar Smilga in Minusinsk

  Nadezhda Smilga-Poluian with the children

  Voronsky was arrested on January 10, 1929. After a month-long investigation (conducted by Agranov, whom Voronsky had met at various literary events), he was sentenced to five years in a “political isolation unit,” but Rykov and Ordzhonikidze interfered, and he was sent into exile in Lipetsk instead. He lived there with his mother and was occasionally visited by his wife, daughter, and former literary protégés, including Babel and Pilniak. In one of his letters home, he complained of loneliness and asked for a dog; a friend lent him a “furry, pale-yellow husky with black eyes.” He enjoyed skating, but fell down awkwardly once and damaged his kidney. He continued to work on his memoirs: the first part had been published in Novyi mir; the second part was banned. His wife, Sima Solomonovna, managed to find out that the ban “concerned Novyi mir as a central and widely circulating publication,” and wrote to Molotov asking for a small-print separate edition. Molotov requested the opinion of the head of Agitprop (and one of Voronsky’s most influential “proletarian” opponents), Platon Kerzhentsev. Kerzhentsev wrote that much of the book had been published before “without raising any objections” and that “the Agitation, Propaganda, and Press Department considers it possible to allow a separate printing of Voronsky’s book with the run not to exceed five thousand copies, under the supervision of the chairman of the editorial board of Federatsia Press, Comrade Kanatchikov.”

  Kanatchikov, the former Gustav List worker and the only former proletarian among Voronsky’s “proletarian” critics, had since gotten caught up in the Zinoviev opposition, spent a year and a half in exile as a TASS correspondent in Prague, proclaimed his loyalty to Stalin after the Fifteenth Party Congress, been reinstated as a top literary administrator, and published, to great acclaim, the first part of his own autobiography. Kanatchikov did not only comply with Kerzhentsev’s request—he became the main champion of Voronsky’s new work, sponsoring the second printing of In Search of the Water of Life and publishing the short stories and fictionalized memoirs about seminary life that Voronsky wrote in exile. Another former “proletarian” critic of Voronsky, G. Lelevich (Labori Gilelevich Kalmanson), who had also been arrested for opposition activities, wrote to Voronsky—from one place of exile to another—proposing a coauthored Marxist history of Russian literature. Voronsky agreed to write the chapters about Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Tiutchev, Tolstoy, Uspensky, Chekhov, Andreev, and “a few of our contemporari
es.” In the fall of 1929, he returned to Moscow for medical consultations, signed a letter renouncing his opposition views, and was pardoned on the spot.74

  There were many reasons to renounce opposition views—loneliness, boredom, dust storms, small children, ill health—but one of the most important was the desire to rejoin the Party. For lifelong Bolsheviks, there was no truth or meaning outside the Party, and, for most of those expelled, there could be no other party, despite the silly nonsense the handful of remaining apostates continued to spout. The Party was the ontological foundation of the true believer’s universe, the vessel of sacrality on the eve of the end, the only point of support in a world where everything outside the building of socialism was a “fetish” (as Bukharin, following Lenin, put it in 1925). In 1929 and 1930, most Bolsheviks, orthodox and nonorthodox, believed that socialism was finally being built and that the end was near. Trotsky, who shared that belief but could not rejoin the ranks, claimed that “in politics, what matters is not only what is being done, but also who does it and how.” Sometimes, however, what matters in politics is not only who and how, but also what. And sometimes, politics do not matter at all. As Tomsky would tell his confessors at the Sixteenth Party Congress, Bolshevik politics were different from liberal politics in that they left no room for the personal.75