The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  The campaign resumed at the end of the summer and did not let up until most of the surviving peasants and pastoralists had been collectivized. In February 1931, Goloshchekin announced a new phase of the transition from semifeudal to socialist relations: “In our discussions of Kazakhstan, we often wrote: ‘given the special conditions of Kazakhstan.’ In other words, the achievement of the objectives set by the Party only partially concerned us. But now? Now the situation is different. Now Party decisions concern Kazakhstan absolutely, fully, and completely, and not only partially. Do we still have peculiarities and backwardness? Yes, we do, but they are no longer the ones that prevail and dominate.”19

  Some local officials were slow to respond. “In this procurement season,” wrote Goloshchekin in the fall, “we face a new phenomenon: the fear of excesses.” A special telegram from the Kazakhstan Party Committee ordered provincial Party officials to rehabilitate all those previously reprimanded for dizziness. “The provincial Party committees must be able to guarantee the total fulfillment of the plan without having to fear the consequences.” The most obvious consequence was famine. According to a report by the Secret-Political Department of the OGPU, “based on obviously incomplete data, between December, 1931 and March 10, 1932, there were 1,219 officially registered cases of death from starvation and 4,304 cases of swelling due to starvation.”20

  The agency responsible for collecting this information—as well as for arresting and deporting kulaks, suppressing rebellions, and assisting collectivizers with force of arms—was the OGPU Plenipotentiary Office in Kazakhstan. The formal head of the office was V. A. Karutsky, but the man doing most of the work was his first deputy, Sergei Mironov (Korol), who had arrived in August 1931 in the company of his mistress Agnessa Argiropulo (after their elopement from Rostov and shopping spree in Moscow). According to Agnessa,

  V. A. Karutsky (Courtesy of A. G. Teplyakov)

  Karutsky—paunchy, swollen—was a big drinker. His wife had been married to a White officer and had a son by him. People began to throw this in Karutsky’s face. So he said to his wife: “I think it would be better if the boy lived with your mother.” They sent him away, but Karutsky’s wife missed him terribly and not long after we arrived she killed herself.

  Karutsky had a dacha outside of Alma-Ata where he used to throw bachelor parties. Soon after we arrived, he invited us over. There I saw some pornographic pictures done by a very good French artist, but I don’t remember who. I still remember one of them. It was of a church in Bulgaria. Some Turks had forced their way in and were raping the nuns.

  Karutsky loved women. He had an assistant, Abrashka, who used to procure them for him. He would pick them out, butter them up, and then hand them over. This same Abrashka started dropping in on me every morning as soon as Mironov left for work. And each time he would bring me something different: grapes, melons, pheasants—all sorts of things.21

  Afraid to leave Agnessa in Alma-Ata by herself, Mironov took her with him on his inspection trip around Kazakhstan. As she recalled,

  We traveled in a Pullman car that was built in the days of Nicholas II. The salon was upholstered in green velvet, the bedroom in red. There were two large sofas. The conductors, who doubled as cooks, fed us magnificently. Besides me, there was only one other woman—a typist.

  It was late fall, but in northern Kazakhstan it was already winter with fierce winds, freezing temperatures, and snowstorms. The car was well heated, but it was impossible to go out anywhere. Being from the south, I was always cold. So they found me a coat that was lined with fur as thick as your hand. I could wrap myself up in it and go out wherever I wanted—even in a snowstorm or the freezing cold—and still be warm.

  Everything was fine, except that for some reason, Mirosha was becoming gloomier and more withdrawn with each passing day, and even I could not always shake him out of it.

  One day we arrived at a way station completely buried in snow.

  “This,” we were told, “is the village of Karaganda. It is still under construction.”

  Our car was uncoupled, and some of the staff went to see what kind of place Karaganda was. I wanted to go with them, but Mirosha wouldn’t let me. They were gone a long time, and Mirosha and I went into the bedroom. Mirosha lay down on the couch, was silent for a while, and then fell asleep. I got bored and went to look for the others again. They were all squeezed into one compartment. The ones who had gone to the village had come back and were talking about it.

  “This Karaganda” they were saying, “is just a word. It’s only some temporary huts built by exiled kulaks. The store has nothing but empty shelves. The saleswoman told us, ‘I have nothing to do because there’s nothing to sell. We’ve forgotten what bread even looks like. But you say you don’t need any bread? What can I offer you then? I think there may be a tiny bottle of liqueur somewhere. Would you like to buy that?’” They bought it and got into a conversation with her, and she told them:

  “Some exiled kulaks were sent here in special trains, but they’re all dying off because there’s nothing to eat. Do you see that hut over there? The mother and father died, leaving three small children behind. The youngest, a two-year-old, died soon after. The older boy took a knife and started cutting pieces off and eating them and giving some to his sister until there was nothing left.”

  When Mironov woke up, Agnessa told him about what she had heard, “thinking to shock him.” He said he knew all about it and had himself seen a hut filled with corpses. “He was very upset, I could tell. But he was already trying not to think about such things and to brush them aside. He always believed everything the Party did was right, he was so loyal.”22

  A few weeks or possibly days earlier, on October 7, 1931, Mironov had written the following memo: “According to the information at our disposal, owing to a lack of housing, inadequate health care, and insufficient food provision, large numbers of the special settlers distributed among the hamlets of the Chilikskii District New-Hemp-Trust State Farm No. 1 are suffering from contagious diseases, namely typhus, dysentery, etc. Those sick with typhus have not been isolated and continue to live in the general barracks. As a result, there has been some flight and high mortality among the special settlers.”23

  The northernmost point of Mironov’s and Agnessa’s inspection trip was Petropavlovsk. It was a real city, and Agnessa was happy for the chance to socialize:

  As soon as we arrived, the head of the Petropavlovsk OGPU came to see Mirosha. Mirosha was supposed to inspect the work of these officials, but he didn’t act the part of the dreaded inspector-general—just the opposite.

  “We’ll start working tomorrow,” he said in a friendly way, “but why don’t you and your wife come over for dinner today? We’re having roast suckling pig.”

  They did come. His wife, Anya, was pretty, but really fat. And her dress! Why on earth would you wear something like that if you are overweight? A pleated skirt always makes you look even fatter! I remember her trying to make excuses: “The reason I’ve gained so much weight is because we were in Central Asia, where it’s really hot in the summer, so I drank water all the time.”

  The table in the salon was set unimaginatively, but sumptuously. Our cook came in carrying a huge platter with the suckling pig, cut into pieces and covered in gravy. As he was passing by and probably trying to avoid Anya’s extravagant hairdo, he slightly tilted the platter—and some of the gravy splashed out onto her dress! She jumped up screaming, “This is simply outrageous!” and then began cursing.

  The cook froze, and his face turned white as a sheet. What would happen to him now?!

  I tried to calm her down and told her to sprinkle salt on the stain, but the dinner was ruined. Mirosha turned to her and said:

  “Surely you’re not going to let a dress keep you from sampling this suckling pig?”

  Her husband frowned at her, as if to say—“that’s enough!” but she didn’t calm down for the rest of the dinner.

  The next day we were invited to their h
ouse. Now that was a feast! All kinds of flunkies and servants and various types of toadies and bootlickers serving every kind of fresh fruit imaginable—even oranges. And I’m not even talking about all the different kinds of ice cream and grapes!24

  On January 11, possibly on the return leg of the same trip, Mironov wrote a report on the situation in the Pavlodar District:

  Recently, according to the data collected by our Pavlodar district network, 30 secret grain pits have been discovered. Animal theft and the mass slaughter of animals have increased.

  Grain procurement is being conducted in an atmosphere of sheer coercion. The following instructions have been issued by the procurement plenipotentiaries to the Party cells and local soviets: “during procurement, confiscate all grain and use all possible measures except beatings,” as a result of which there have been reports of flight by kolkhoz members.

  The District Party Committee’s plenipotentiary in Settlement No. 1, Matveenko, conducted full-scale searches of kulak families deported from their home districts and confiscated all personal-consumption grain, as a result of which 40 cases of mortality, mostly among children, have been reported. Others feed themselves by consuming cats, dogs, and other carrion.25

  Such numbered settlements had been built for the newly “sedentarized’ nomads. In a long “Short Memo” written four days after the Pavlodar one, Mironov described the “unplanned, slow, and criminally wasteful” way in which the campaign was being implemented. Most settlements, according to him, had no water; some were too far from their pastures; some were organized “according to the clan principle”; some had been built on sand and were sinking; and some consisted of buildings that “had begun to collapse after the rains.” The officials responsible for this state of affairs were “great-power chauvinists” who believed that Kazakhs were not ready for settled life, and Kazakh nationalists, who agreed with the great-power chauvinists. Both revealed their hostile intentions by blaming the Party for what they called “hunger and misery.” By spring, the “difficulties with food provision” had, according to Mironov’s report of August 4, “acquired extremely acute forms.” In the Atbassar District, “as a result of starvation, numerous cases of swelling and death have been reported. Between April 1 and July 25, there were 111 registered deaths, 43 of them in July. During this period, there were five reports of cannibalism. In this context, there have been reports of the spread of provocative rumors.”26

  In October 1932, a prominent Kazakh journalist and fiction writer, Gabit Musrepov, traveled to the Turgai District. He was accompanied by a territorial Party Committee official, a coachman, and an armed guard (“or else they might eat you,” said the local executive committee chairman, himself a deportee). In the steppe, they lost their way in a blizzard, but then came upon rows of dead bodies stacked up like firewood. “Thanks to them, we found the road: the corpses were lined up along both sides.” According to a later version of Musrepov’s original account,

  They dug themselves out of the snowdrifts and set off down this road of the dead. They kept passing villages that were completely empty. The coachman, who was from the area, called out the names of these settlements—known only by number. There was not a soul in sight. Finally, they arrived in a yurt town that appeared strange to Kazakh eyes. Since the beginning of collectivization, a great many of these had sprung up in the steppe. For some reason, the yurts were laid out in rows, and each one had a number as if it were a city house on a city street. The white felt yurts were spacious and new. The coachman explained that they had recently been confiscated from the local kulaks. Two or three months ago, he added, there were a lot of people here. Now the place was deathly still. The absolute silence was broken only by the sound of the wind-driven snow: a dead city of white yurts in the white snow.

  They walked into one yurt, and then another. All the household items were there, but there were no people.

  In one yurt, the mats and carpets were frozen, and snow was coming in through an opening at the top. In the middle of the floor lay a large pile with a small hole at the bottom.

  Suddenly, they heard a shrill, thin sound that made their flesh crawl—like the squealing of a dog or the shrieking of a cat, followed by a low growl.

  From a tiny hole in the pile, some sort of small creature darted out and rushed toward the men. It was covered in blood. Its long hair had frozen into bloody icicles that stuck out at all angles. Its legs were skinny and black, like a crow’s. Its eyes were wild, and its face covered with clotted blood and streaks of fresh blood. Its teeth were bared, and its mouth dripped with red foam.

  All four men recoiled and fled in fear. When they turned to look back, the creature was no longer there.27

  Goloshchekin was bombarded with letters. Stalin and Molotov wanted to know what was being done to stem the flow of Kazakh refugees to China; the Party boss of West Siberia, Robert Eikhe, complained about the invasion of starving Kazakhs and asked, sarcastically, whether it was the kulaks who had uprooted “thousands of poor and middle-income households”; Gabit Musrepov accused the Party Committee of “being afraid of Bolshevik self-criticism when it comes to the catastrophic reduction in livestock population and famine”; Mironov and his colleagues reported regularly on the many “cases of mortality” and how they were being used for hostile propaganda; and an unknown number of people wrote to beg for food and mercy.28

  In August 1932, the chairman of the territorial Council of People’s Commissars and second-most-important official in Kazakhstan, Uraz Isaev, wrote a letter to Stalin in which he accused Goloshchekin of blaming his own “sins” on the kulaks and low-level officials; believing his own myth “that every single Kazakh had decided to join the kolkhozes”; engaging in “ritual curses and incantations” against the kulaks instead of correcting his own mistakes; and trying to solve every problem by transferring the same—and sometimes “totally corrupt”—Party activists from one place to another.29

  Goloshchekin defended himself by arguing that, “slanderous claims” and real excesses notwithstanding, the fact remained that, in accordance with Comrade Stalin’s prediction, the poor and middle Kazakhs had “voluntarily, in powerful waves, turned toward socialism.” The new campaign of violence unleashed by Moscow in the fall of 1932 seemed to vindicate his approach. On November 11, 1932, Goloshchekin and Isaev ordered mass arrests, deportations, and a goods blockade in all kolkhozes accused of “artificially slowing down grain collection.” (“The task,” wrote Stalin in a telegram praising the order, “is, first and foremost, to hit the communists at the district and below-district level, who are wholly infected by petit bourgeois mentality and have taken up the kulak cause of sabotaging the grain procurement campaign. It stands to reason that, in such conditions, the territorial Council of People’s Commissars and Party Committee would have no choice but to engage in repression.”) In October and November 1932, when top-level emergency commissions were being sent to all the important grain-producing areas, Goloshchekin remained his own emergency commission. In early January, speaking at a joint plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission, he said: “The enormous successes achieved by the implementation of the Five-Year Plan in Kazakhstan … are the best argument against the opportunists and nationalists and their counterrevolutionary slander, which exaggerates certain negative phenomena that are inevitable given the very complicated processes that are taking place in Kazakhstan.”30

  A few days after the plenum, Goloshchekin was dismissed from his post and sent to Moscow as head of the State Arbitrage Court. He, his second wife, Elizaveta Arsenievna Vinogradova, her mother, and her son from a previous marriage moved into the House of Government, Apt. 228. According to Voronsky’s daughter Galina, who saw a great deal of them, Elizaveta Arsenievna was “broad-faced, very lively, and, despite her plainness, extremely charming.” She was also relatively young (twenty years younger than Goloshchekin) and a strict disciplinarian: when her son started getting bad grades in school, she forced him to work at a factory
and live in a workers’ dorm for a year before allowing him to come back home. According to Galina,

  She was just as strict with her husband. At one time F. I. Goloshchekin had been a first district party secretary. For some sins, real or imagined, Stalin had dismissed him from that position. Filipp Isaevich was very depressed and kept moping about, talking of suicide all the time.

  “I had completely had it with his ‘I’m going to shoot myself’ talk,” Elizaveta Arsenievna once told us, “so the next time he made one of those speeches, I walked up to his desk, pulled out the drawer where he keeps his gun, and said: ‘Go ahead then, shoot yourself!’”

  “Stop it, stop it,” Filipp Isaevich cried, throwing up his hands.

  “Fine, you don’t want to shoot yourself. So don’t let me hear any more of this suicide talk. I’m sick of it.”

  And the subject never came up again.31