The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  ■ ■ ■

  Mironov and Agnessa remained in Kazakhstan until September. Once, Agnessa wrote to her sister Lena in Rostov, asking if she would like her to send some stockings, dresses, and silk. Lena asked for food instead.

  Later Lena told me: “I was giving everything to Boria (her son), everything I could get with my ration coupons, and wasting away myself. The streets and doorways were full of corpses, and I kept thinking—I’ll be one of them soon…. Then suddenly a car stopped in front of the house, and a soldier unloaded some sacks. He rang the doorbell and said, with a shy smile: ‘This is for you … from your sister, I think.’

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. I opened one of the sacks—millet! I poured out a bit for him, of course, then quickly ran inside to make some porridge. I tossed some millet into a pot, added some water, and started cooking it, but then couldn’t wait till it was done and began gobbling it down raw.”32

  Soon afterward, Agnessa went to Rostov with a large food parcel herself. What struck her most was the behavior of Lena’s son, Boria, “who was just a little boy then. Somber, joyless, silent—all he did was eat. He ate his way through everything I had brought.” When Agnessa got back to Alma-Ata, she heard that one of Mironov’s employees—“pretty, with a delicate porcelain face, black shoulder-length hair, and bangs”—had been flirting with Mironov at an office picnic.

  I was immediately on my guard!

  “Did they go off alone? So, what did they do?”

  “She offered him a pastry from her basket.”

  I wasn’t too happy about that either. It was right before the holidays, and we were planning a party.

  I always watched my figure. If I let myself go and started eating everything I wanted, I’d get fat in no time! But I didn’t and was always half starved because I was so careful about my diet. Everyone was amazed at how slender I was. I decided to have a dress made for the party and designed it myself. Just imagine—black silk (black is very slimming) with multicolored sparkles, close fitting around the waist and hips, and diagonal pleats…. Here, let me draw it for you. I’ve never seen anything like it since. It had these pleats flowing down from the top, and then, at the bottom, just below the knees, it widened out into a flounce skirt—as light and airy as a spring fog at dusk. And here, on the side, there was a large buckle, which shimmered with color, just like the sparkles on the fabric.

  We had several servants: Maria Nikolaevna, who cooked for us and went everywhere with us just like a member of the family (I couldn’t possibly have managed without her); Irina, who used to bring us our meals and whatever we were entitled to from the special stores and cafeterias; a housemaid, who cleaned and served at table; and a laundress, who did the washing and ironing and helped the others when there wasn’t any laundry to do. And then my mother came to live with us as well.

  Agnessa Argiropulo, 1932 (Courtesy of Rose Glickman)

  They all loved to dress me. They’d pull here and tug there and fasten me up—and then just stand and marvel. On the evening of the party even my mother, who was more restrained than the servants, couldn’t help saying:

  “You’ll outshine them all tonight!”

  And that’s exactly what I intended to do. To outshine them all! To outshine and sweep away like a grain of dust any who dared to rival me.

  And so I appeared among the guests in that dress, and all eyes turned to me, while she, that employee with the black bangs and little porcelain face, in her plain white blouse and skirt, stood arm-in-arm with a girlfriend…. How could she think she could compete with me? She ceased to exist the moment I walked into the room. Mirosha was able to see with his own eyes the kind of woman I was, and the kind she was.33

  In September 1933, Mironov was transferred to Ukraine as the OGPU’s plenipotentiary in Dnepropetrovsk Province. (Ekaterinoslav had been renamed in 1926 in honor of Grigory Petrovsky.) It was an important promotion. They moved into a large house and sent for both of Lena’s boys, Boria and Lyova. (Agnessa’s brother’s daughter, Aga, was already living with them.) “I remember an old two-story mansion,” wrote Lyova. “On the second floor there were dozens of rooms for family and guests, a viewing room for movies, a billiard room, and a toilet and bathroom in each wing. My uncle’s chauffeur and his family lived on the first floor, where there was also a huge study that opened out onto a glassed-in terrace. I had been brought to Dnepropetrovsk and enrolled in the kindergarten. As soon as I began to boast that Mironov was my uncle, everyone—the teachers, my playmates’ parents, and even my playmates—started fawning all over me and trying to curry favor. Everyone knew I was special: after all, I was the nephew of a very powerful man, Mironov himself!”34

  Mironov’s job remained the same: enforcing collectivization, “repressing” its enemies, and dealing with its consequences. In March, before they arrived, the Dnepropetrovsk OGPU office had reported the death from starvation of 1,700 people and the swelling from hunger of 16,000. Over the next two years, the province lost about 16 percent of its rural population.35

  When not working, Mironov played cards and billiards with his friends or spent time with Agnessa:

  Mirosha had two lives. One was with me. That’s the one I knew and that’s the one I’m telling you about—because I knew nothing about his other life, his working life. He made it very clear that he was determined to keep it separate.

  When he came home, he would cast off his official cares like a suit of armor and not want to think about anything except having fun together. Though he was eight years older, I never felt the difference in age between us. We were friends and used to fool around and play our game of love without ever growing tired of it.

  Sometimes we went on long hikes together. We really loved those walks. Or we might go to the theater or take a trip and “live it up” somewhere like Tbilisi, Leningrad, or Odessa.36

  Every fall, they went to the Black Sea resorts (in Sochi, Gagra, or Khosta), and in the summer, to Berdiansk on the Sea of Azov, where the OGPU (renamed the NKVD in 1934) had its own sanatorium.

  Three times a day a policeman would bring us food from a special sanatorium. For dessert after lunch we sometimes got a whole bucket of ice cream.

  Once, the woman who worked for us there asked, “Is it okay if I take the leftovers home? I have three children …”

  “Of course!” my mother exclaimed.

  Two days later the same woman asked, “Is it okay if I bring my children to play with yours?”

  Sergei Mironov and Agnessa Argiropulo (Courtesy of Rose Glickman)

  She brought them—a little boy and two girls. We were shocked at how thin her children were. The little boy, Vasia, had ribs that stuck out like a skeleton’s. He looked like a picture of death next to our Boria, who had grown quite chubby. Someone had photographed them side by side. I said, “Remember that old advertisement for rice flour? Showing someone very skinny before he began eating rice flour and very fat afterward? This photo is exactly like that ad—with Vasia before the flour, and Boria after it.”

  Then, this woman, our servant, could see that we felt sorry for them, and she brought her fourteen-year-old niece from Kharkov to live with us, too. When she arrived, she was so weak the wind could have blown her over.

  We were now up to nine (including Boria and Lyova). The sanatorium started providing lunches for all of us. They didn’t dare refuse. We were a tiny island in a sea of hunger.37

  ■ ■ ■

  The House of Government was and was not an island. Among the residents who helped shape collectivization and determine its course were the head of the Kolkhoz Center and one of the most radical advocates of antipeasant violence, Grigory Kaminsky (Apt. 225); the head of the Grain Trust and Kaminsky’s close collaborator and personal friend, Mark Belenky (Apt. 338); the head of the Center of Consumer Cooperatives (and the former husband of Solts’s niece), Isaak Zelensky (Apt. 54); and the head of the Grain and Fodder Department at the People’s Commissariat of Internal Trade (and Natalia Sats’s husband), Israel
Veitser (Apt. 159).38

  Some residents—including Postyshev, Terekhov, Demchenko, Goloshchekin, and Zelensky (in his dual capacity as head of the Central Asian Bureau and Party boss of Uzbekistan)—enforced collectivization as high-ranking regional officials; some—including Ronin, Shumiatsky, and Brandenburgsky—assisted the enforcers as special emissaries; and some—including Gaister, Kritsman, Kraval (and Osinsky, who was still living in the Kremlin)—drew up plans and collected procurement statistics (while also serving as occasional special emissaries). Some top OGPU/NKVD officers, including Matvei Berman and his brother-in-law, Boris Bak, presided over arrests, deportations, executions, surveillance, and forced labor. (Sergei Mironov did not become eligible for a House of Government apartment until 1936, when his old comrade, M. P. Frinovsky, was appointed deputy head of the NKVD.) Some top industrial managers, including Granovsky, employed the forced labor supplied by the NKVD.

  The Central Executive Committee’s Housekeeping Department, to which the House of Government belonged, ran several farms that provided the House cafeteria and various nearby resorts with food. On November 13, 1932, the director of the Maryino State Farm and Resort wrote to the head of the CEC Housekeeping Department, N. I. Pakhomov:

  Dear Nikolai Ivanych!

  During my absence, several more people were picked up, so now there have been eighteen arrested, of whom twelve were released. Just now, they brought a warrant for the arrest of our agronomist-zootechnician, Zelenin, and our veterinarian, Zhiltsov, but then relented and allowed them to remain under their own recognizance. Our best workers keep leaving—for fear of being arrested themselves. The same phenomenon can be observed among our technicians. The local OGPU organs are on a rampage looking for hidden theft and wrecking—but what can a laundress or a mute cowherd possibly wreck? Therefore, Nikolai Ivanych, I ask you to inform Mikhail Ivanovich and Avel Sofronovich that measures must be taken to set up an inquiry into the correctness of the arrests and further threats. We need to create a normal working environment. With these abnormal and incorrect arrests, we may find ourselves in the kind of situation and the kind of conditions where we have no one left here to do the work.39

  Most Soviet institutions adopted one or more kolkhozes as the recipients of moral, intellectual, physical, and, if possible, financial assistance. The House of Government Party cell had become the official sponsor of the “Lenin’s Path” collective farm north of Moscow. On December 7, 1933, during a respite on the collectivization front, it received a reprimand from the Party Committee of Moscow’s Lenin District (where the House was located) for an “unacceptably formal approach” to its responsibilities. “Having been sent by the cell, the Communists Ivanchuk and Tarasov committed a gross distortion of Party policy and violations of revolutionary legality at the sponsored kolkhoz by engaging in coercion and by initiating and carrying out criminal acts of abuse against a group of adolescents (intimidation, beatings, etc.).” Most members of the House of Government Party cell were House employees; the leaseholders and their family members tended to register at work and travel to their own adopted kolkhozes.40

  Some House residents encountered collectivization indirectly. Nikolai Maltsev (Apt. 116), Molotov’s and Arosev’s childhood friend and a member of the Central Control Commission, was asked to respond to a letter sent to Stalin by a peasant named Nikulin. “The heads of the benighted and undeveloped collective farmers and proletarians,” wrote Nikulin, echoing Doubting Makar, “are being laid down like bricks in the foundation of socialism, but it’s the careerists, curly-haired intellectuals, and worker aristocracy who will get to live under socialism.” Maltsev replied: “Your letter addressed to Comrade Stalin is not a good letter at all. In it, you are thinking in a non-Party way.” The Zbarskys’ encounter was more substantial. “In the 1930s,” wrote Ilya Zbarsky, “a collective farmer named Nikitin attempted to shoot at Lenin’s body, was apprehended, but managed to kill himself. In a letter found in his pocket, he wrote that he was avenging the terrible conditions of life in the Russian village. The mausoleum guard was increased; the sarcophagus was provided with bullet-proof glass; and a metal detector was installed.”41

  Some House residents had friends and relatives in the countryside. Olga Avgustovna Kedrova–Didrikil (Apt. 409), Andrei Sverdlov’s aunt by marriage and the wife, mother, and aunt of three prominent secret police officials (Mikhail Kedrov, Igor Kedrov, and Artur Artuzov), interceded, at the request of a friend, in behalf of two dekulakized peasants. A subsequent investigation established that the two peasants, Efim and Konstantin Prokhorov, had been dekulakized correctly (for owning four houses, two horses, two cows, six sheep, a threshing machine, and thirteen beehives); that both had been sentenced to one year in prison, but that one of them, Efim, “had, on account of poor health, been released from prison and, while at large, been conducting anti-Soviet propaganda in the following cunning way: after dekulakization, he had begun walking door to door in rags not only in his own village but also in neighboring villages asking for testimonies that would support the return of his property and vouch for the fact that he had never hired labor.” The investigation concluded that “in this matter, Comrade Kedrova does not have a clear sense of the class struggle in the countryside and the Party line, which circumstance we find it absolutely necessary to convey to the Party bureau of the Society of Old Bolsheviks.”42

  Kedrova’s brother-in-law, Nikolai Podvoisky, kept up a vast correspondence with former comrades-in-arms, who wrote asking for character references, various favors, and help getting out of prison. Podvoisky’s former “personal orderly, the cavalryman Kolbasov, Stefan Matveevich,” had been fired from his position as chairman of his village soviet and secretary of the Party cell for what he claimed was embezzlement perpetrated by his subordinates. According to a letter from Kolbasov’s brother, “while carrying out, from 1929 until the present, the Party’s hard-line policy on the liquidation of the kulaks as a class, all the kulaks and subkulaks, having become openly hostile toward him and, in connection with his arrest, keep concocting false accusations.” Another old comrade wrote from the Vishera camp (in Granovsky’s Berezniki or in nearby Vizhaikha). “I was so distressed by the wholesale collectivization campaign of February–March, 1930, before the Party directives were issued, that I kept grumbling and complaining—probably not in the best manner, but for the best of reasons.” A third letter writer, the Civil War veteran Tit Aleksandrovich Kolpakov, understood that good intentions were no excuse for weakness but confessed to feeling “like a pencil without lead.” He asked for Podvoisky’s help in obtaining release from prison and saving his family from starvation:

  From September 3 to October 26, 1932 I worked in the Kuban Grain Council as head of a department in charge of 10,000 hectares, but I was unable to overcome the difficulties that stood in our way, gave in to weakness, and quit my supervisory position….

  I fully realize my mistake and sincerely repent for giving in to weakness on the labor front—something I never did on the bloody battlefronts. Dear Nikolai Ilich! On behalf of my children and their sick mother, on behalf of my Red-Partisan soul, I am not just asking, I am begging you….

  How is the health of your family? Your boy must be quite big by now. How is the health of your better half, your spouse, Nina Avgustovna?43

  Efim Shchadenko was at the center of his own large patronage network. One of his correspondents, a Civil War hero and now collectivization official in Kalach-on-the-Don, A. Travianov, wrote about the difficulties and rewards of rural activism:

  You’d die of laughter if you knew how we live next to them and them next to us we taught them many political and economic words for example they now know bourgeoisie exploitation speculation contractation wholesale collectivization and so on and so forth etcetera. I apologize for not writing for a long time because I was mobilized by the district committee for all the grain procurement campaigns, my throat is sore from making speeches and ordering up whatever is needed and necessary, like let’s do the
five-year plan in four years if we fulfill all the plans drawn up by our Soviet government then things will get good for you peasants and workers in all things and we won’t want for anything we just need to endure a little bit longer and gather our strength to improve the sowing and improve animal breeding and so on more faith in socialist construction—be selfless firm well-organized united friendly loving united all together workers peasants day laborers poor and middle on the economic front. And now dear Comrade to the most important thing the campaigns are going not too badly and not too well so far nothing to brag about and nothing to complain about the fulfillment is getting close to 100% the kolkhozes exceeding and the individual peasants still having some difficulties.

  In other news, according to Travianov, the harvest had been bad in fourteen rural soviets on the left bank of the Don, and twenty people had been arrested for conspiring against the Soviet state. “And they all confessed and testified against each other and for this thing they got ten years each from the GPU collegium but in my own opinion I would bite off their noses and ears with my own teeth.”44

  The writer A. S. Serafimovich went home to Ust-Medveditskaia every summer—to see his friends and relatives, ride in his motorboat, and do research for his novel about collectivization. Throughout the rest of the year, he stayed in touch by writing letters. One of his regular correspondents was his wife’s friend, Sonia Gavrilova, who spent parts of 1931, 1932, and 1933 on grain-procuring missions. On the whole, she wrote on December 3, 1931, the situation was “nightmarish”:

  All this squeezing out of grain, hay, flax, and other crops is taking place under difficult circumstances. They whine and whimper that there’s nothing left, but when you grab them by the throat, they deliver both grain and hay, and whatever else they’re required to. My nerves are always on edge. You have to be on guard or else they might bash you on the head, but I’ve gotten used to it by now, and I can walk from one village to another at night. I’m still alive, but who knows what will happen next. And yet, in spite of all the hurdles and difficulties, we have emerged as victors, met our grain and hay targets 100%, and managed to kolkhozify this whole petty, private-property peasant mass.45