The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  On December 31, Veitser, as usual, worked all day. Natalia waited for him in their House apartment. “He came home late—and froze in amazement. I had bought and decorated a little New Year tree and lit the candles. What happiness it is to do something for a man who can appreciate even the smallest sign of attention!”35

  ■ ■ ■

  The most public of Soviet public holidays were the May 1 International Workers’ Day and the November 7 Day of the Great October Socialist Revolution. On May 2, 1932, Adoratsky wrote to his daughter, Varia:

  On one side of the House of Government, at the top, we have Lenin’s portrait, and on the other, Stalin is gazing out over the Moscow River…. The Stone Bridge has been decorated to look like one of the steamships that will arrive in Moscow after they finish the Moscow–Volga Canal, which will be 140 kilometers long and have 9 locks and four power stations (according to the inscription on the bridge).

  The street decorations and signs carried by the parade participants suggest that the whole production has been carefully planned and they make an extremely good impression with their perfect symmetry.36

  The whole production had, indeed, been carefully planned. Preparations usually began about two months in advance. Plans were fulfilled, workers rewarded, rallies organized, streets cleaned, speeches scripted, signs painted, and parade marchers selected and instructed. According to the special “May Day” instructions issued in 1933 by the Party committee of Moscow’s Lenin District, which included the House of Government, “all drafts of all decorations of all enterprises, offices, and educational institutions, streets, large shop windows, artistic installations, posters, photo exhibits etc., as well as everything to be carried by parade participants, their performances, floats, etc. must be approved by the district’s Artistic Subcommittee.” The House of Government was to decorate itself and the Big Stone Bridge; the theme of the bridge decoration was to be “Moscow’s municipal economy.” In preparation for the November 7 celebration in 1934, the House of Government administration spent 351.76 rubles on the repair, upholstering, and mounting of the three-meter-high wooden letters in “Long Live,” and 403.49 rubles on the manufacture, upholstering, and mounting of the illuminated letters in “Worldwide October.” The total for all the decoration work, not counting materials and including the construction of scaffolding, restoration of the portraits of Comrades Stalin and Kalinin, painting of new portraits of Comrades Lenin and Kaganovich, painting of 150 slogans and their placement on balconies, mounting of a ten-meter star on the club balcony, and hoisting of two flags on top of the building and 150 flags above the club, was 10,287.25 rubles (based on a special hardship rate “given the building’s height and the particular inconvenience of having to carry out the work in a hanging position”). The overall decoration budget was 20,000 rubles; the shock worker bonus budget, 12,000 rubles.37

  Shock workers were workers who consistently overfulfilled the plan. In the House of Government, it paid to be a shock worker: the average holiday bonus was approximately equal to a month’s salary. In November 1935, the stairway cleaner Smorchkova and floor-polisher Barbosov received 80 rubles each, the painter Apollonov and laundress Kartoshkina, 100 rubles, and the “administrative-technical” employee Mokeev, 300 rubles. Mokeev’s colleague, Mosienko, received only a diploma because he was just back from a free trip to a Crimean resort; the senior guard Emelian Ivchenko, who talked the lost Leningrad port employee, Anna, into a marriage of convenience, received 200 rubles (they had just had their first child, and Anna’s mother had moved in to help). Altogether, out of the ninety-five people proposed by the various departments within the building, eighty-nine were approved by the “socialist competition committee.” The six rejected candidates were replaced by those whose “commitment to the cause has brought great benefits to our House.” (Between October 1934 and September 1935, the proportion of shock workers among House staff members had increased from 34.1 percent to 43.9 percent. About one-third of them received holiday bonuses.) The House Party Committee Secretary M. A. Znot, Trade Union Committee Chairman K. I. Zhiltsov, and House Commandant V. A. Irbe and his two deputies could only be rewarded by the Central Executive Committee Housekeeping Department on the recommendation of the House Socialist Competition Committee. The committee duly recommended that, “taking into account their extraordinary management of a complex enterprise and large staff,” they be rewarded “as our very best shock workers, who have achieved high marks in their management of the House.”38

  The festivities usually began the night before. According to Hubert’s memoir of Wonderland,

  On the eve of May 1st [1934] on the streets of Moscow, one could hear the sound of hammers late into the night. The last nails were being driven in, wires suspended, and floodlights connected. At night the red cloth of the banners looked especially beautiful, illuminated by the white light. A forest of flags filled several squares.

  When it grew dark, long, multicolored beams of light from the floodlights appeared in the sky and lit up the city for much of the night. Factories, power stations, workers’ clubs, and offices had been decorated with brightly colored electric lights. There were huge portraits of Lenin and Stalin hanging everywhere.

  May First demonstration in front of the Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square

  Festive crowds swarmed through the streets to the sound of loud music, which was being transmitted over the radio at every corner and intersection. The whole city was taking part in the joyous celebration.39

  Early the next morning, most House residents would go watch the parade. High nomenklatura members would have passes to Red Square (the higher the rank, the closer to Stalin); the rest would line up along the route or stroll around listening to the music and enjoying the festive decorations and celebrating crowds. Those who stayed behind (various guards, servants, old people, and some wives) would listen to the live radio broadcast. Adoratsky, who did have a pass, described the 1932 May Day parade in his May 2 letter to his daughter:

  This year’s parade was wonderful. It began, as usual, with Voroshilov, on a beautiful stallion, inspecting the troops (not only on Red Square but also on Resurrection Square and, I believe, the right side of Theater Square, as well). Next, he made a fifteen-minute speech and read the text of the oath, with each phrase being repeated by everyone standing in the square in a thousand vibrant voices. Then the cannons on Tainitskaia Tower fired their salutes (a lot of them—at least thirty salvoes), which sounded like thunder. After that, the marching columns appeared. First came the cadets from the Military Academy of the Red Army Command and the Central Executive Committee School, Navy pilots, various infantry units, cavalrymen on foot, and even militiamen in their gray helmets and white gloves. Then came the student battalions in civilian dress with rifles slung over their backs and partisan units, which included some graybeards. Next came the Komsomol battalions in gray tunics and Komsomol girls wearing the red scarves of the communications services. Then came the units with German shepherds (they serve, too). Next came the horse-drawn artillery, then artillery on trucks, then APCs, tanks of different kinds, and radio stations that looked like carriages with radio transmitters mounted on the roof. Above the tanks more than a hundred airplanes, including some five-engine giants, were flying in neat formations.40

  The Bolshevik public holidays marked key moments in the Bolsheviks’ private lives. The history of the Party and the biographies of faithful Party members were, in theory and in personal recollections, one and the same thing. Bolsheviks who were also close friends were Bolsheviks who had experienced key moments in Party history at the same time and in the same way. The May Day celebrations in forest clearings on the eve of the real day had been celebrations of shared faith as shared youth (“we are the young spring’s messengers, she has sent us on ahead”); the October Revolution was to be the birth of the new world and the rebirth of its messengers.

  Nikolai Podvoisky and his wife Nina Didrikil had met at a May Day celebration in 1905, when he was twenty-five
and she was twenty-three. By October 1917, when he, as the chairman of the Petrograd Military-Revolutionary Committee, was guiding “the stormy stream” toward the Winter Palace, they already had three children. On April 28, 1933, Nikolai wrote to his wife from the House of Government:

  My darling, darling, darling Ninochka, pride of my heart and our mighty fortress! I am sending you a great big hug from home (the biggest possible), kisses, and, once again, congratulations on our military parade day…. It is with great pride that I will stand on Red Square on May 1, sensing your presence, your shoulder next to mine, and our two Bolshevik hearts beating in unison. I will rejoice in the knowledge that, since May 1, 1905, you and I have always stood together and cut through the elements and through the waves aligned against the proletariat: by force of arms, when necessary; when not, with words, by example, or through study.41

  All successfully routinized new faiths graft their sacred chronology onto the natural cycle of eternal return and the personal life cycle of individual believers. The Bolsheviks had done well on the first score: the two great revolutionary holidays—November 7 and May 1—invoked traditional harvest (Thanksgiving, Pokrov, Sukkot) and spring rebirth (Easter, Passover, Nowruz) festivals, with New Year’s Eve joining them later as Postyshev’s winter equinox miracle. The second requirement—the extension of the universal chronology into the home and the transformation of family rites into state-regulated sacraments—remained unfulfilled. As Trotsky had written in 1926, “in the most important spheres, the revolutionary symbols of the workers’ state are innovative, clear, and powerful…. But in the closed-off cells of family life, these new elements are almost nonexistent—or too few, at any rate.” Ten years later, they were still too few or nonexistent: what had changed was that no one worried about them anymore. In 1926, Koltsov had written that whereas he, “a progressive person free of prejudices,” did not need home reinforcement for his revolutionary faith, the “laborers lost in the forests” might benefit from dressing up their baptisms, weddings, and funerals in new Soviet garb. But with the triumph of the First Five-Year Plan and the inauguration of Bolshevik Augustinianism, no one was lost in the forests anymore, and no one tried to connect family rites of passage to the official canon (the way Jews and Christians do). The socialist “base” had been laid; the appropriate “superstructure” would arise by itself. Marxism had left the Party with no instructions concerning the “closed-off cells of family life,” and the Party offered no guidance to the cells. Everyone was lost in the forests, but on the threshold of a new era, it did not matter.

  In the House of Government, as elsewhere, virtuous home behavior had to be improvised. No one knew what to do after the May Day military parade was over. Osinsky, for one, did nothing at all: he used to bring his children home from Red Square and then resume his usual study routine (or sneak out to see Shaternikova). Neither, at the other end of the class spectrum, did the prize-winning foreman Mikhail Tuchin and his wife, Tatiana. The biggest day of the year for them was Tatiana’s saint’s day. Relatives (but not friends or apartment neighbors) would come over, drink a lot of vodka, and eat Tatiana’s pies, vatrushki (pastries with sweet cheese), jellied meat and fish, and assorted pickles (which she made herself). Another—much smaller—holiday was Easter, complete with the traditional Easter breads (kulichi) and sweet cheese dessert (paskha). On regular days off, Tuchin read newspapers, books about Cossacks, and adventure stories, while Tatiana made pies and read Health and Female Worker magazines. It is not known whether the stairway cleaner Smorchkova, floor-polisher Barbosov, painter Apollonov, or laundress Kartoshkina celebrated any of the three great Soviet holidays.42

  The Rykovs followed the turning-Christmas-into-New Year’s model by moving Easter to May Day. Their maid, Anna Matveevna (an experienced domestic who had, as she put it, “worked in good homes,” including Zinaida Morozova’s) would use eighty egg yolks to make a large batch of kulichi: a huge one for the entire family, a large one for the father, a medium-size one for the mother, and small ones for each of the children. “It was, as they say, a sacred ritual in our home,” according to Natalia Rykova. “We were not allowed to run or to bang doors for any reason, or else the dough might fall.” The Ivanovs celebrated May 1 by combining Easter, Soroki (the traditional rural spring festival), and Passover meals: Boris did the baking, while Elena made gefilte fish. The same dishes, except for the special spring “lark” cookies, were served on Revolution Day.43

  But most House residents found “religious” trappings inappropriate and potentially polluting. They either did nothing at all or staged generic feasts without ritual references to the nature of the occasion (except for a toast or two). Kira Allilueva describes the special feasts her mother (and Stalin’s sister-in-law) Evgenia used to prepare:

  We did not make a cult of food in our household, but we did enjoy eating. Mother used to bake Novgorod meat and cabbage pies to go with the chicken soup. They were huge, almost half the size of the table. She would put the dough and the yeast in an enamel bucket and cover it with a cloth napkin. We children would watch, and when it began creeping up trying to escape, we would shout excitedly: “Mommy, the dough is rising! It’s getting out!”

  The appetizers always included herring with green onions. And my mother used to make a delicious tomato and onion salad: she would squeeze a lemon over it or add some sunflower oil and vinegar and pepper. And we always had mushrooms—ones we had gathered ourselves at our dacha in Zubalovo.

  Of the drinks, I remember light wines, Armenian brandy, vodka, liqueurs, and a sweet vodka infusion called “Zapekanka.” There was also a punch that my mother made by mixing white wine with pineapple and sour-cherry juice.

  Afterward, they would take their time drinking tea from cups and saucers. A samovar heated with pine cones would stand on a tray with a little teapot on top. For dessert my mother used to make delicious, sweet saffron pretzels. The dough would turn an incredible yellowish-green color because of the nutmeg and vanilla she added. Good cakes were sold in the stores, too, but I did not eat them because of the icing. And, besides, why would I want them if I could have my mother’s sweet pretzels?

  After the meal, they would usually dance. The rooms in our apartment were so big we did not even have to move the table. They danced to a phonograph. We had brought a lot of records from Germany with tangos, fox trots, the Boston Waltz, and the Charleston. In those days, everyone knew how to dance. It was the fashion.

  My father never danced, though, and neither did Stalin. On such occasions, Iosif Vissarionovich always urged Redens: “Stakh, dance with Zhenia. You dance so beautifully together!”44

  Stanislav (Stanislaw) Redens, the son of a Polish cobbler and the husband of Anna Allilueva (the sister of Stalin’s wife Nadezhda and Evgenia’s husband, Pavel), was a top-ranking secret police official: head of the Ukrainian OGPU/GPU in 1931–33 (during collectivization and the famine) and head of the Moscow Province NKVD since 1934. According to his son, Vladimir, he was “an outgoing, friendly person, easy to get along with. He had a pleasant appearance: soft facial features, curly hair, and a trim, athletic physique. He was charming and popular, especially with women.”45

  Stanislav Redens (Courtesy of Nikita Petrov)

  The Alliluev holiday feasts seem to have been typical of what high-nomenklatura House residents did on special occasions. Food was plentiful but simple, prepared mostly by peasant maids according to peasant recipes: beet, cabbage, and chicken soups and, as the standard festive dish, meat, mushroom, and cabbage pies. Osinsky liked kasha; Arosev and Kraval liked Siberian dumplings; and Romuald Muklevich (a Pole from Suprasl, outside of Bialystok) liked potato pancakes, fried pork, and boiled potatoes sprinkled with bacon cracklings and fried onions. The most popular salad was the traditional Russian “vinegret” (made of boiled beets, carrots, eggs, and potatoes with pickles, onions, and sauerkraut), but some cooks experimented with newer recipes. (Nadezhda Smilga-Poluian’s culinary mentor was her longtime admirer, the famous Art Thea
ter actor, Nikolai Khmelev.) Vodka was always around (Rykov prepared a special orange-peel infusion known as “Rykovka” and had a shot before lunch every day), but most people preferred Crimean and, less frequently, Georgian wines (wines tended to be sweet, and it was increasingly common to be a connoisseur). Dessert consisted of tea with cakes and chocolates and, occasionally, liqueurs. (Muklevich and his Polish friends drank coffee.) Most men and some of the women smoked a great deal—as a sign of both harried self-denial at work and bodily pleasure at the dinner table. The most popular cigarette brand was Herzegovina Flor, which Stalin favored. Ivan Kraval followed Stalin’s example of unrolling the cigarettes and using the tobacco to fill his pipe.46

  Dancing the tango and foxtrot to phonograph records brought from abroad was, indeed, the fashion. (Everyone’s favorite performers were the Russian émigrés Vertinsky and Leshchenko.) Also common were more or less formal recitals by amateur and professional musicians, but the most popular conclusion to a festive dinner was the general singing of revolutionary hymns and Russian and Ukrainian folk songs. Osinsky, like Serafimovich, liked to conduct. (The “choir” usually consisted of his eldest son, Dima, and Dima’s friends.) His favorite songs were “In Chains” and “Martyred by Hard Servitude.” Ivanov liked “Bravely, Comrades, March in Step”; Arosev liked “Twelve Bandits”; and Podvoisky (who used to be the choirmaster of the Chernigov Theological Seminary) liked traditional Ukrainian songs. The head of the Bookselling Directorate, David Shvarts, also liked Ukrainian songs. Once, when Shvarts was still living in the First House of Soviets, he and about ten of his friends and relatives went for an after-dinner walk through Manege Square. It was midnight, and they were singing Ukrainian songs. According to Shvarts’s son, Vladimir, “they were all from Ukraine, after all. All Jews, all from Ukraine. They may even have been singing in Ukrainian. And then a militiaman came up to them and said: ‘Citizens, you are disturbing the peace. You are being too loud.’ Next to them was a row of coachmen waiting for passengers (there were no taxis then). So those coachmen intervened: ‘Come on, let them sing. They are singing so well. Let them sing.’”47