The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  Most desks had lamps with green glass shades. Mikhailov’s also had an etching of Lenin sitting at his desk. Smilga had a marble bust of Dante on his desk and a needlepoint portrait of Lenin above it. Stalin’s father-in-law, S. Ya. Alliluev, had four portraits on the walls of his study: a silk one of Lenin; an oil one of his late daughter, Nadezhda (by S. V. Gerasimov); and two watercolor portraits by P. E. Bendel: one of Stalin and one of Dzerzhinsky. Above Arosev’s desk hung a portrait of his daughter, Olga, by V. S. Svarog. Khalatov had a portrait of his daughter, Svetlana, also by V. S. Svarog, several paintings by S. V. Gerasimov (including a portrait of Khalatov himself), and, on one of the walls, a carpet covered with a collection of sabers and daggers. Gronsky, who had defined socialist realism as “Rembrandt, Rubens, and Repin in the service of the working class and socialism,” had paintings by I. I. Brodsky, E. A. Katsman, and P. A. Radimov. The head of the Ship-Building Directorate, Romuald Muklevich (Muklewicz), had portraits of sailors by F. S. Bogorodsky and, on the floor, the skin of a polar bear that had been killed (according to Muklevich’s daughter, Irina) by members of the Chelyuskin Arctic expedition. The study of Malkov’s successor as commandant of the Kremlin, Rudolf Peterson, contained a saber with his name engraved on it, a pair of field binoculars, map case, shoulder belt, and several hunting rifles. In Yuri Trifonov’s fictional version of his father’s study, the wall was decorated with “an English carbine, a small Winchester with a polished green stock, a double-barreled Belgian hunting rifle, a saber in an antique scabbard, a plaited Cossack whip, soft and flexible, with a little tail at the tip, and a broad Chinese sword with two silk ribbons, scarlet and dark green.”13

  Boris Iofan’s study

  Boris Iofan had a large studio on the eleventh floor with large windows and a skylight. His downstairs neighbor, Elina Kisis (the daughter of a Soviet Control Committee official, who turned ten in 1935), enjoyed visiting him there. “During the day, Boris Mikhailovich liked to work in his studio, and I would often go visit him there. He grew fond of me and used to show me beautiful picture books and postcards, give me apples, and pat me on the head. There, for the first time, I saw many things that we, and others, did not have. There were some dark, shiny figures and figurines (probably bronze, but also a few white marble ones) on tall stands. There were lots of paintings and other mysterious things. In the middle of the studio, on tripods, were some huge drawing boards with pictures of a tall building that looked like a Kremlin tower with a man on top (“That’s Lenin,” he said) and a blue sky above.”14

  Iofan’s studio

  In smaller apartments, the father’s study might also serve as a dining room and the parents’ bedroom, but most nomenklatura apartments had a separate “dining room” (also known as the “living room” or simply as the “big room”), which was used for festive meals and large gatherings. At the center would be a large table surrounded by chairs and with a burnt-orange silk-fringed lampshade hanging over it. The other required piece was a piano. (Most of the girls and some of the boys had private music tutors.) The rest was a matter of conviction and improvisation. Vasily Mikhailov’s wife, Nadezhda—a professor’s daughter, Bestuzhev Women’s University graduate, and Old Bolshevik retired in 1929 at the age of forty—felt strongly about proper living room furniture. In addition to the table and piano, they had a redwood glass cabinet, “full of various charming, antique knickknacks,” with vases on top; a couch with velvet cushions embroidered by Nadezhda and her mother; two small armchairs; a special table for the telephone; a long settee; another armchair with an ottoman; fresh flowers on the windowsills; and, next to the French doors leading into the hall, a small table with an embroidered towel and a shiny samovar.15

  Yuri Trifonov, drawing of the family’s dining room (Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)

  Children usually lived in a small “children’s room,” which tended to have a desk for homework, one or more beds, and a wardrobe. Kerzhentsev’s daughter, Natalia, hung up magazine reproductions of classical paintings (different ones, depending on her changing enthusiasms); many adolescents, including Natalia, put up maps. Maids, most of whom doubled as nannies, might sleep next to small children or in their own rooms, but the great majority slept in a little nook at the entrance to the kitchen, usually behind a curtain. The rest of the rooms were occupied by grown children and other relatives and dependents.16

  The place of the mother (normally the leaseholder’s wife) was not predetermined. The Podvoiskys, who cultivated an exemplary relationship of mutual devotion and respect for each other’s Party work, had two studies: “Father’s” (which also served as a dining room) and “Mother’s” (Nina Avgustovna worked in the Lenin Department of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute). Some apartments had a “parents’ bedroom,” which might serve as the mother’s private space during the day. (The Petersons’ bedroom had a polar-bear skin on the floor, but most were sparsely furnished and decorated.) In families where fathers slept in their studies, the women might have their own room, known as “Mother’s bedroom” (small walk-through ones in the case of Ekaterina Smirnova-Osinskaia and Tania Miagkova-Poloz). Nadezhda Smilga-Poluian’s had a desk, bookcase, and vanity table with her perfumes, three-way mirror and photograph of her little daughters in their underwear. Nadezhda Mikhailova shared her bedroom with her daughter Margarita. It contained Nadezhda’s large, antique bed (“with some kind of drawings on it,” according to Margarita’s recollections), an antique chest-of-drawers with linen (and dried flowers for fragrance), a night table with a lamp and a pile of French novels, and Margarita’s corner with her bed, tiny desk, and toy chest. (Mikhailov’s two daughters by a previous marriage had a separate “children’s room,” and Nadezhda’s much older first daughter had a room of her own.)17

  The former workers who did not pursue elite fashion and did not rise to the top of the government hierarchy did not usually have studies. The Ivanovs had three rooms, one of which they rented out. The remaining two were divided between the adults and their three children, and the maid slept in the kitchen nook (before marrying Orekhov’s son and becoming a family friend). All of their furniture, except for one wardrobe and a chandelier, was government property. Vasily Shuniakov, another former Petrograd worker associated with the food industry (as a Central Control Commission member specializing in purges), kept all three of his rooms: the “parents’ room” (Shuniakov, like Ivanov, was married to a Jewish seamstress); the “children’s room” (the Shuniakovs had three children, two of whom died young); and a dining room (which also served as the bedroom of Shuniakov’s mother-in-law). The maid slept in the kitchen nook. Much of the furniture was built by Shuniakov himself, who, like most former workers, suffered from “nervous exhaustion” and spent long periods of time at home and in various sanatoria.

  The family of the prize-winning construction foreman, Mikhail Tuchin, had two connecting rooms (in a nine-room apartment that also housed the families of three other prize-winning construction foremen). The parents’ room had a bed, vanity table with three-way mirror, and desk, which was also used by the children when doing their homework (although, according to the Tuchin’s daughter, Zinaida, who was twelve in 1935, her younger brother Vova never did his). The “children’s” room contained Zinaida’s sofa bed and Vova’s tiny cot, a small wardrobe, a large china cabinet and dinner table, and a framed picture depicting a fox in the snow.18

  In the fall of 1937, the first secretary of the City of Kolomna Komsomol Committee, Serafim Bogachev, was transferred to the Komsomol Central Committee in Moscow and assigned to a recently vacated apartment (Apt. 65) in the House of Government. Serafim was newly married. He and his wife, Lydia, were both twenty-eight years old, and both were from peasant families. According to Lydia,

  [Serafim’s mother] was a very religious old woman—and couldn’t read or write. He was her only son. How she loved him! She absolutely adored him. He was a kind, good man. So considerate—and funny sometimes, too. He loved life. His dream was to live in the forest and work outd
oors as a warden. Once, while we were still courting, he asked me: “Would you be willing to live in the forest, in a little lodge?” And I said: “Yes, I would. I love nature, too.” “That’s my dream,” he said. “But perhaps when this is all over…. I can’t do it now. You can see what the situation is like in the country. The Komsomol still needs us. But afterwards I’ll go live in the forest.”

  They moved in with their three-month-old baby girl, Natasha. Serafim was often gone. (“The struggle against the enemies of the people was just getting under way, or rather, it was reaching its peak, so they were all terribly overworked. There were only three secretaries then: Kosarev, Bogachev, and Pikina.”) Lydia was preparing for her university entrance exams and had to go to a preparatory class each morning (in a special room at the Lenin Library, just across the Big Stone Bridge). She had graduated from a factory school in Kolomna, but had never been to high school. They were assigned a nanny, whom Lydia did not like. The apartment consisted of two furnished rooms.

  Everything had been arranged. In the bedroom, there were two beds and a little crib in a niche, which, I think, we bought ourselves. No, we brought it from Kolomna….

  But I didn’t see any of that until later. When I came into the apartment, he set out a chair for me. I sat down, with my baby in my arms, and then I just sat there and cried … and cried…. And when he came home, he found me in the same spot. I had not gotten up or done anything, except breastfeed the baby (she was still very small). I hadn’t even changed her diapers. It was so rare for me to cry like that….

  He walked in and looked confused. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “I can’t do it,” I said. “I don’t want to live here. Everything here depresses me.” After our old apartment, and now with the baby, I felt some kind of chill…. It all seemed gloomy somehow….

  I didn’t know any of the neighbors. One day I went to the people below or perhaps on the same floor to ask about something, and I saw (I can still remember it) a huge vase of flowers, but they weren’t real—they must have been some kind of artificial ones.

  After a while, they settled in. They brought her dowry things and an extra-large table (by using the cargo elevator in the kitchen). Lydia’s mother came up from Kolomna, fired the nanny, and hired a new, much better one. The House guards recognized them as equals. “I always felt their sympathy toward me. They would hold the baby, or help get the carriage ready. They were kind and attentive. You could tell they were simple people. And they could see that we didn’t put on airs or anything like that.” They bought two carpets, one green, the other with a picture of a falcon hunt. They put them down on the parquet floor, so the baby could crawl. But they did not put up any pictures, leaving the walls “bare and dry.” Lydia did not shop or cook, either. She was too busy studying. She was also an athlete: she played volleyball and had to go to practice.19

  Many House residents found Iofan’s straight lines and large windows too “bare and dry.” Most did something about it: brought in old beds and chests, hung up swords and photographs, or laid down carpets and bearskins. Some took great care to cover up as much of the constructivist frame as possible—by painting flower patterns on the walls or covering them with “silklike” wallpaper or hanging up thick curtains on the large windows (which were very drafty in the winter). Nadezhda Mikhailova attempted to recreate her parents’ Victorian domesticity. Stalin’s sister-in-law, Evgenia Allilueva (the wife of Nadezhda’s brother, Pavel, and the daughter and granddaughter of Novgorod priests), possessed, according to her daughter, Kira, “a remarkable talent for making everything around her cozy with the help of a few simple things—a bright tablecloth, some pictures…. Everyone in our house loved flowers. There were always some on the table in the big room. Dad preferred lilies of the valley, and Mom, forget-me-nots. On my birthday, people would bring roses or peonies—and, in the spring, a branch of mimosa. And there were some charming, delicate watercolors—of landscapes and barefooted ballerinas—hanging on the walls of the big room.”20

  Serafim Bogachev

  In 1935, no one seemed entirely sure whether this was good taste for new times or the “spontaneous regeneration of the perennial and loathsome forms of life.” Some House of Government residents insisted on leaving the walls bare and dry. Some drew the line at curtains, the great disappointment’s symbol of philistine domesticity. The head of the Directorate of the Alcoholic Beverages Industry, Abram Gilinsky, did not mind a carpet on the wall, a large china cabinet with a collection of playing cards inside (he was a tireless Preferans player), or an exhibit of miniature liqueur bottles on top of his daughter’s piano, but when his mother-in-law hung up some curtains, he ordered them removed. Ivan Kraval (who, in 1935, replaced Osinsky as head of the Central Directory of Economic Statistics) compromised by allowing narrow green curtains that framed—but did not cover—his study window.21

  In spring 1936, Adoratsky, Arosev, and Bukharin were in Europe buying documents and memorabilia for the Marx-Engels Lenin Institute (of which Adoratsky was director). Adoratsky was, as usual, accompanied by his daughter, Varvara. On April 5, he wrote to his wife from Paris: “I have bought a medallion with Marx’s portrait and hair, which used to belong to his daughter, Jenny Longuet…. I am also going to buy the armchair in which Marx died and a wooden armchair from his study, which he sat on while writing Das Kapital.” Five days later, he visited the studio of the sculptor Naum Aronson, where he admired a bust of Lenin (“his energy, will, and deep intelligence are rendered very well”), and picked up a suit made for him by a Parisian tailor (“it’s gray, well tailored, and made of Cheviot wool”). But nothing impressed him as much as the interiors of the homes he saw. In one house in Holland, in particular, everything was “exceptionally solid and comfortable. All the rooms are paneled: the dining-room, in dark oak; the study, in walnut; and the living room, in maple or birch; the bedroom is painted with white oil-based paint; and there are many walk-in closets. The kitchen is in the middle of the house, between the dining room and the bedroom. All the rooms are large and spacious, and there is lots of storage space.” Most of the Marx-Engels archive had been moved from Hitler’s Germany to Copehagen. The delegation arrived there on March 16. “We have been put up in a terrific hotel. I have never lived in a hotel like this. Everything is solid and full of all kinds of handy contraptions. For example, there’s a blue sack in the closet where you can put your dirty clothes, and they’ll wash them for you. The tub and other things are very clean, and there’s this amazing magnifying mirror in which you can see your whole face almost doubled in size—for when you’re shaving.”22

  The House of Government did not have special blue bags for dirty linen or magnifying mirrors for shaving, but it did offer laundry services (in a separate building between the House and St. Nicholas Church), and it did provide a large number of accessories, including lampshades, doorbells, and raisable oak toilet seats. For apartments that had cargo elevators, special attendants came twice a day to pick up trash (other apartments had garbage chutes, and some had both cargo elevators and garbage chutes). Mail carriers came twice a day to drop letters and newspapers through mail slots in the doors. Repair work and cleaning services, including floor polishing and window cleaning, could be requested from the House management by telephone. The hairdressing salon (located above the grocery store) offered home appointments. Dogs could be left in a special pen in the basement. There was a shooting range under Entryway 1, a kindergarten on the top floor of Entryway 7, a children’s club on the first floor of Entryway 3, and a walk-in clinic with on-duty nurses and doctors next to the laundry. And, of course, there was the large club located above the theater, which, as Adoratsky wrote in another letter, “has a tennis court and different rooms where you can do whatever you like: play chess, music, etc.” Virtually none of the residents ate in the House cafeteria (which was used by House employees and occasional conference delegates). Nor did they do much cooking: prepared food in special stackable containers could be brought up (by the maids) fro
m the cafeteria or delivered (by personal chauffeurs, sometimes accompanied by the maids) from exclusive food distribution centers (most frequently the one in the Fifth House of Soviets on Granovsky Street, a short distance away). There were three kinds of “food receipt cards”: “employee” (issued to nomenklatura members), “dependent,” and “child.” The selection and quality were widely seen as satisfactory; one list of ingredients bought by the cafeteria included a wide variety of meats (beef, pork, lamb, chicken, tongue, liver, and several kinds of sausage), fish (including smoked fish and herring), dairy products, vegetables, eggs, grains, flour, pasta, rice, potatoes, bread, beer, fruit, dried fruit, nuts, tea, coffee, jams, and spices (pepper, ginger, vanilla, cardamom, cinnamon, and cloves).23

  The material contents of the House were protected by several layers of security. According to Nadezhda Mikhailova’s elder daughter, M. N. Kulman,

  each entryway of the House of Government had its own guard, with a desk, chair, and telephone mounted on the wall. This was all near the entrance door, by the stairway. When a person entered, the guard would ask for their last name and who they were going to see and then call the resident the person had named and ask if it was okay to let them in. The guards worked around the clock, and there were always three for each entryway. They took turns working twenty-four-hour shifts and also rotated on the weekends. The guards were very strict about making sure that nonresidents did not take anything out of the building: if a person wanted to leave an apartment with a suitcase or bundle, the official resident would either have to escort that person out or call the guard to escort them. The guards knew all the residents by sight and could even distinguish them by their voices. Once, a woman tried to leave our apartment with a bundle …, but the guard would not let her pass, saying, “There are no grown-ups at home, and a child cannot be expected to know what may or may not be taken from the home.” So she had to return to our apartment and wait for my mother. When my mother finally arrived, he told her: “There’s a woman here, who was trying to leave your apartment with a bundle.”24