The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  It must have been difficult to make sense of my confused, inarticulate mumblings, but Mom understood perfectly. She stood up, called the theater to let them know she would be late for rehearsal, and began to get dressed. It was never a simple process, but this time she dressed as if she were on her way to a diplomatic reception instead of an elementary school. And when she threw her leopard fur coat into the arms of the school cleaning lady, who suddenly appeared out of nowhere, and walked down the school corridor in her silver lacquered pumps and her bright red dress with the wide sleeves lined with white silk, the effect was truly spectacular. The long break was just beginning, and kids were streaming out of the classrooms. At the sight of Mom, however, even the wildest boys, who were already racing headlong toward the cafeteria, suddenly stopped, changed course, and ran after her, staring in amazement.

  The principal was in the gym, presiding over a young pioneer induction ceremony. My mom’s sudden appearance with her large entourage in tow put an abrupt end to the proceedings. The pioneer leader forgot why she was holding a red scarf and stepped aside, letting Mom pass. The forgotten inductee craned his neck in utter bewilderment, made a 180-degree turn, and ducked back into the column of not-yet-pioneers. Mom marched straight up to the principal.

  “Where is this other girl?” she demanded.

  Dashenka was in the gym, too.

  “I want you to tell me exactly what happened yesterday,” Mom ordered.

  Dashenka began, slowly: “She was sitting … I came up … I said …”

  Natalia Sats with the Children’s Theater conductor and composer, Leonid Polovinkin (Courtesy of Roksana Sats)

  Not daring to repeat what she had said before, Dashenka hung her head and was silent. Mom finished her story for her.

  “So is that what happened? Or did I get something wrong?” she asked at the end.

  “No,” mumbled Dashenka, completely embarrassed.

  “Roksana, come here,” ordered Mom.

  I walked to the middle of the gym and stood between the column of young pioneers and the rapidly growing crowd of onlookers. Mom’s words rang out in the total silence:

  “Even the greatest accomplishments of those closest to us do not justify arrogance. You did the right thing yesterday. Never allow anyone to humiliate you.”

  She nodded to me, said goodbye to the principal, and walked out. Almost the whole school followed after her. They stood and watched as she put on her fur coat, got into her car, and shut the door. And then, when she rolled down the window and waved mischievously to the kids, they all waved back and shouted:

  “Goodbye!”38

  Another group known for its well-dressed women and well-furnished apartments were the high-ranking military officers (especially aviators) and NKVD (secret police) officials. When they were living in Dnepropetrovsk, Sergei Mironov and Agnessa Argiropulo used to throw lavish parties for Mironov’s colleagues and their wives. Once, one of the wives, Nadia Reznik, began flirting with Mironov. As Agnessa tells the story,

  Nadia, I have to admit, also knew how to rise to the occasion. She was blonde, and the cornflower blue dress she was wearing really suited her. That was too much for me. Blue was my color. It complemented my chestnut brown hair perfectly. A clerk at the hard-currency store helped me exchange my coffee-colored, crepe georgette fabric for—no, not a cornflower blue—but a very pale shade of blue that looked even better on me.

  My Dnepropetrovsk seamstress was a magician. The design she came up with was a masterpiece. It had two soft folds from the waist that streamed out when you walked, like Nike’s, the Greek goddess of victory.

  The table was elegantly set, with flowers at each place setting. At the table I reigned supreme, but after the meal I suddenly noticed that Mirosha and Nadia had moved to a couch in another room and appeared to be engrossed in lively conversation. I walked by once, twice, the folds in my skirt flowing like the wind, or a pale blue breeze, almost as if I were flying like Nike. But Mirosha didn’t seem to notice.39

  Agnessa asked her maid to call Nadia on the phone and tell her that she was wanted at home on an urgent matter. Nadia left in a hurry. When she called a few minutes later and asked what the point of the joke was, Agnessa replied that “one should know how to behave in someone else’s house” and hung up the phone. When she told Mironov what she had done, he “burst out laughing in delight.”40

  Managing the home front was relatively easy. Agnessa’s biggest challenges were the vacations at large sea resorts in the Caucasus.

  Before leaving for the sanatorium I would go to Kiev to buy fabric at the foreign-currency store and then have outfits made in Kiev or by my seamstress magician in Dnepropetrovsk.

  Mironov kept telling me to dress more modestly, saying that my extravagant outfits embarrassed him, but I continued to have glamorous gowns made as well as modest ones—and it’s a good thing I did.

  When we arrived at the Ukrainian Central Committee sanatorium in Khosta that fall, all the young women were competing with each other to be the best dressed. I said to Mirosha: “See? It’s a good thing I didn’t listen to you!”41

  One of Mironov’s oldest colleagues (they had served in the Caucasus together) was the commander of the Border Security Forces, the former seminarian, Mikhail Frinovsky.

  We used to run into them at the sanatoriums in the Caucasus. Frinovsky had an arrogant, fat face. His wife Nina was terribly vulgar—plain, pug-nosed, and wore way too much gaudy makeup. Mirosha and I used to make fun of her. Mirosha once told me, howling with laughter:

  “I was sitting across from her at the restaurant. It was hot, and she was sweating, and suddenly I saw two black streaks run down from her eyes and mix with the rouge on her cheeks, then roll down her chin and drip slowly onto her plate.”

  Mikhail Frinovsky (Courtesy of A. G. Teplyakov)

  But when we arrived in Sochi in the fall of 1936, Mirosha said to me: “Take a look at Nina! She used to dress like a prostitute, but now she’s really something!”

  I saw her and couldn’t believe my eyes. She was like a different person! It turned out that she had just gotten back from Paris, where they had given her a “make-over”: found her style, taught her how to do her hair, and picked out the right makeup and clothes for her. I remember she was wearing a blue gingham dress and a blue ribbon in her hair that were so flattering you could hardly tell it was the same person. She knew it, too, and was very proud.

  That fall Yagoda was dismissed (it was the beginning of his downfall), and Ezhov was appointed Commissar of Internal Affairs. As soon as the news reached us, Nina really came into her own. She didn’t try to hide her hopes from me: “This is excellent,” she said, “Ezhov is a big friend of ours.”

  They had spent some holidays together somewhere, and the two families had become friends.

  And sure enough, some time later I read in the paper that Frinovsky had been appointed Deputy People’s Commissar.

  You should have seen the reaction at the sanatorium! All the toadies came running up to Nina and started fawning all over her.

  She left the next day. I remember walking her over to the car. She was wearing a black hat, an elegant, close-fitting black suit, and white gloves. As she was saying her goodbyes, she singled me and Mirosha out, hugged me, and gave me a meaningful look….

  Our hopes came true. Mirosha received an order to wind up his affairs in Dnepropetrovsk and go to Novosibirsk as head of the NKVD Directorate for all of West Siberia.42

  15

  THE DAYS OFF

  When the House of Government was being built, most Soviet institutions were on the so-called uninterrupted production schedule. The seven-day week had been abolished. The year now consisted of 360 working days organized into seventy-two five-day weeks and five common holidays. All workers and employees were divided into five groups, each with its own work schedule. In keeping with the First Five-Year Plan ethos of ceaseless work by autonomous individuals organized into random but seamlessly cohesive production “co
llectives,” factories and construction sites never shut down, and members of the same family might have different days off. The demand for individualized spaces coincided with the drive for individualized schedules. The chief promoter of both was Bukharin’s future father-in-law, Yuri Larin, who liked to imagine the future producer as “a snail carrying its shell.” Rational collectivism was about extreme individualism.1

  The House of Government had been built as a structure “of transitional type” combining extended communal services with a concession to family longevity. On December 1, 1931, soon after most House residents moved into their apartments and a whole year before the First Five-Year Plan was pronounced to have been fulfilled “ahead of schedule,” the uninterrupted five-day calendar was replaced by a uniform six-day week, with universal days off falling on the 6th, 12th, 18th, 24th, and 30th of each month. All Soviets, including those forming affective and reproductive units within more or less insulated separate spaces, were to synchronize their lives.2

  For top nomenklatura officials and their families, however, weekday schedules remained uncoordinated. A continued attachment to the ethic of ceaseless work in an age of proliferating “parks of culture and rest” meant that those who never slept had to sleep while others worked. In the House of Government, maids, nannies, grandmothers, and female poor relations would get up early, make breakfast for the children (hot cereal, sandwiches, or both), see the young ones off to school (help them across the streetcar tracks on Serafimovich Street or hand them over to their fathers’ chauffeurs), and then do things around the house. Some did their own cooking; most relied on prepared meals from the House cafeteria and other exclusive food distribution points, supplemented (usually at dinner) with homemade dishes made from ingredients picked up at various distribution points or purchased at the House grocery store. Working mothers might eat breakfast with their children or a bit later. Nonworking mothers (a minority in the House) might get up before their husbands and engage in a variety of activities (volunteer work, dressmaking, shopping, sewing, conversing with visiting friends or live-in relatives) or get up and have breakfast with their husbands in either the kitchen or the dining room. Most men did not linger over breakfast and might or might not have time to read through Pravda (everyone did eventually—at work if not at home); their chauffeurs might come up or wait outside. Soon after the men’s departure, the schoolchildren would come home and have lunch (usually by themselves, served by the nannies). Tutors normally came in the late afternoon. Some working mothers might have dinner with their children and other live-in relatives; others would come home late and eat by themselves, usually quickly and with little ceremony. The men might or might not have dinner at home. Most would come home when all the other apartment residents were asleep. The only permanent presence in the home—the fixed axis of the weekday schedule and the only person vitally connected to every other member of the household—was the nanny or maid (assisted, and occasionally replaced, by the grandmother or another resident female relative).3

  The sixth day of the six-day week was the “day off.” It was not called “Sunday,” but it was a common holiday officially dedicated to rest and unofficially serving as the chronological pivot of family life. After the first layer of scaffolding was taken down from the house of socialism, the Sabbath was gradually returning (even for Veitser, who was now happily married). Once every six days, the maids and nannies would step into the shadows and cede the space and schedule to their “masters.”

  Most families woke up to the sound of the radio. Each apartment had a radio cable connected to a round black loudspeaker (or “dish”) mounted on the wall, usually in the kitchen or dining room. Radios were always on, but on holiday mornings they were turned up and actively listened to. “Day-off” programming usually included children’s shows, music shows (Soviet songs and classical music), and, later in the day, live broadcasts of concerts, operas, and theater performances. The man responsible for both the programming and the nationwide cable and relay network was the expert on rational time-keeping and work ethic, Platon Kerzhentsev, who served as head of the All-Union Radiofication and Broadcasting Committee between 1933 and 1936. Like many other men in the House, Kerzhentsev also owned a German valve radio set, which he kept in his study.4

  All the men read newspapers (which meant a lot of articles written by Koltsov, among others). Some recuperated from their work week by working on themselves. Osinsky studied Hegel and mathematics; Arosev wrote fiction and kept a diary. Almost everyone read for pleasure. The most popular books remained the same as in prison and exile, with the exception of both the Russian radical tradition (Chernyshevsky, Kravchinsky, Gorky) and fin-de-siècle Belgian and Scandinavian modernism, which did not seem to fit the age of Augustinian fulfillment and gradually dropped out of the high culture canon. Still compulsory were “the Pamirs” of European literature (Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe); the Russian classics (with Pushkin and Tolstoy at the top); and the nineteenth-century European standards (especially romantic and early realist works, headed by Dickens and Balzac). Another large category included the adventure stories the House of Government men had enjoyed as boys. It consisted of two overlapping sets of texts: early-nineteenth-century historical novels reimagined as literature for adolescents (Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Alexandre Dumas) and books of imperial exploration, whose popularity had coincided with their Old Bolshevik youth (Thomas Mayne Reid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jules Verne, Louis Henri Boussenard, Jack London, and O. Henry). Of contemporary writers, the most popular was Romain Rolland, who was seen as a reincarnation of heroic realism (and perhaps of his—and his readers’—great heroes, Beethoven and Tolstoy). Soviet literature was read by few people who were not directly involved in producing or supervising it. The great exceptions were children’s books (including Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How Steel Was Tempered, which was popular among adolescents) and, of the adult novels produced in the 1930s, Aleksei Tolstoy’s Peter I (a construction/creation story in the form of a realist historical epic).

  Other popular forms of home entertainment for men were photography and chess. Cameras (along with gramophones and clothes) were among the most important items brought home from foreign trips, and many men spent hours developing photographs. (Ivan Kraval created a fully enclosed photo lab inside his dining room.) Chess complemented reading as a form of relaxation that combined high-culture credentials with entertainment. Kerzhentsev clipped match reports from newspapers, classified the matches in various ways, and then analyzed and replayed them himself. The added value of chess was social. Some men had permanent partners. (Yakov Brandenburgsky played with N. V. Krylenko, the people’s commissar of justice and head of the Soviet Chess Federation; Romuald Muklevich played with Iosif Unshlikht [Józef Unszlicht], the chairman of the Civil Aviation Directorate and a fellow Pole.) Most fathers played regularly with their sons. Kerzhentsev’s son (from a previous marriage) had died young, so he played with his daughter, Natalia, who was not particularly interested. The Komsomol Central Committee secretary, Serafim Bogachev, played with his young wife, Lydia. “Sima really loved chess,” she remembered, “and in the evenings, when we had some free time, we would often sit down and play. He would say: ‘Stop doing your math; let’s play chess instead.’”5

  Many parents, particularly fathers, devoted their days off to their children: playing with them, reading to them, and taking them to the theater, the movies (usually the Shock Worker and, in the late 1930s, the First Children’s Movie Theater, located in the New Theater auditorium), the Tretyakov Art Gallery (a short walk away on the other side of the Ditch), the Museum of Fine Arts (a short walk away on the other side of the river), and Gorky Park (a slightly longer walk, first along the Ditch and then along the river). Gorky Park was a particularly popular destination. In 1935, Koltsov’s new wife, Maria Osten, published a book on behalf of a ten-year-old German boy she and Koltsov had adopted in the Saar and brought to their House of Government apartment. The book was called Hubert in
Wonderland, and one of the greatest wonders Hubert had seen in the USSR was Gorky Park, which he visited in the winter of 1934, soon after his arrival: “I went to the Park of Culture and Rest. Even in winter, there were plenty of fun things to do. The squares, avenues, and paths were turned into mirror-smooth skating rinks. There were rinks for beginners and for regular and figure skaters and special areas for games and rides. In the evenings, they were all lit up, with Red Army bands playing. At the far end of the Park was a ski area that stretched all the way to the Lenin Hills. I spent many wonderful hours in the winter in the Park of Culture and Rest, skating, skiing, and sledding.” His next visit was in the spring:

  Everywhere you look, someone is painting or building something, or a banner is being put up. The circus is open, and the Swing Boats are ready. Posters announcing the new season have been displayed in front of the theater and the cinema. There is a Ferris wheel, a parachute jumping tower, a roller-skating rink…. I don’t know where to go or where to begin.

  I run around, as if in a maze: to the house of mirrors, reading room, restaurant, children’s village, and boat rental…. An orchestra is playing in one of the pavilions. A little farther on, someone is playing an accordion. In one place couples are dancing a foxtrot. In another, they are learning folk dances. I look at the people around me, and each one seems to be headed toward a specific goal. Only I run back and forth, confused. That is because it is all so new to me.

  I spent many fun days at the Park of Culture and Rest. I was seldom alone there. I met new friends and often went with my classmates. We used to swim, take out rowboats, exercise, ride on the Zero Gravity, roller-skate, and go to the theater, cinema, or circus. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to parachute because we were still too small, but we used to stand for hours watching others do it.6

  Hubert in Wonderland was a political work published by Koltsov as a special issue of his illustrated weekly, Ogonyok. If Soviet children wanted to be like the Reichstag-trial hero, Georgi Dimitrov, wrote Georgi Dimitrov in his introduction to the book, they must read about Hubert’s travels. “To be like Dimitrov,” wrote Dimitrov, “means to be a consistent proletarian fighter,” and to be a consistent proletarian fighter meant knowing the difference “between the joyful and truthful world of socialism and the mean, lying, and bloodthirsty world of fascism.” Most of Hubert’s (and Dimitrov’s) neighbors in the House of Government did know the difference, did want to be like Dimitrov, and, whether or not they thought much about such things, did enjoy going to Gorky Park. Boris Volin’s daughter, Viktoria, who was fourteen in 1935, remembered going there to watch movies, dress up for “carnivals,” eat ice cream, skate, and walk. “We used to walk and walk and walk. We’d kiss and we’d walk. We did all kinds of things.” In 1935, the official things to do included twenty amusement rides that were open from noon to 11:00 p.m. In addition to those mentioned by Hubert, there were different kinds of carousels, a bumper-car rink, an “upside-down room,” and a “Magic Chamber.” The “Music and Song” part of the entertainment included daily symphony concerts, no fewer than ten other orchestras and bands playing on any given day, mass chorus singing on two different stages, and a music center consisting of a “room for musical games,” a “gramophone-record listening room,” and “a room for individual music lovers” with free tutoring sessions. Theater options included an open-air (“green”) theater for 20,000 spectators, an indoor theater for 1,270 spectators, a music theater for 1,500 spectators, a small drama theater, a circus (two shows daily), and a children’s theater.7