The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  The original sectarians had to adjust socially and emotionally, as well as politically. Friendship without comradeship was still inconceivable, but the fact that most comrades were now strangers made it obvious that some comrades were also friends (in the sense of having close, intimate relations rooted in a shared sacred past). As the Old Bolshevik Fridrikh Lengnik (Fridrihs Lengniks, in Latvian), from Apt. 200, wrote in his Society of Old Bolsheviks questionnaire, “I have no requests. I would like to have the warmth of comradely relationships that we used to have, but I realize that, in a Party of a million members, that is impossible.” To emphasize the point, he attached a “list of personal friends,” specifying the number of people involved and the origin of the relationship:

  1. The Lepeshinskys

  2: exile and emigration

  2. N. K. Krupskaia

  1: ditto

  3. M. I. Ulianova

  1: Cental Control Commission

  4. The Krzhizhanovskys

  2: exile and illegal work

  5. A. S. Shapovalov

  1: exile and emigration

  6. N. N. Panin

  1: exile

  7. G. I. Okulova

  1: Sverdlovsk

  8. E. I. Okulova

  1: exile and emigration

  9. P. A. Krasikov

  1: emigration

  10. Fotieva

  1: emigration

  11. M. N. Liadov

  1: emigration

  12. M. M. Essen

  1: ditto

  13. I. I. Radchenko

  1: illegal work

  14. Lezhava

  1: Dep. Comm. of Agr.

  15. Shotman

  16. Enukidze

  17. Stasova

  18. Rubinshtein1

  The warmth of comradely relations was not what it used to be even for the original sectarians (one of Lengnik’s jobs as deputy head of the Society of Old Bolsheviks was to settle conflicts among members), but some of them, especially those in their sixties like Lengnik and his personal friends, did get together regularly on Bolshevik feast days in order to reminisce and sing revolutionary songs. Most of their favorite recollections were about courtships, friendships, and homemade dumplings in Siberian exile, when spring was on its way.2

  But the most common strategy for dealing with the affective consequences of sectarian dissolution was to revert back to the family. The most frequent, and often the only, guests at special holiday dinners were family members. Some House of Government residents favored the husband’s side, some favored the wife’s, and some embraced both, but virtually every apartment served as the center of an extended kinship-based patronage network. Charity began at home: in addition to the leaseholder’s wife, children, and servants, most apartments contained some combination of parents, siblings, and poor relations. Compared to the House leaseholders, most relations were poor: helping them move to Moscow and get jobs, apartments, and places in colleges and children’s camps was an important part of life for most adult House residents. Even the famously misanthropic Osinsky helped his brother with promotions and, according to his daughter, Svetlana, got his sister a job as an actress at the Vakhtangov Theater, “even though she was, of course, totally talentless.”3

  Some families—the Sverdlovs, Gaisters, Kuibyshevs, Arosevs, Podvoiskys, Lozovskys, Zelenskys, and Alliluevs, among many others—received more than one apartment within the House. Some, including the ever-expanding Sverdlov-Kedrov-Podvoisky-Lozovsky-Krzhizhanovsky-Yagoda-Artuzov clan, extended their reach and welfare through in-House and out-of-House marriages. Arosev’s comrades and neighbors Maltsev and Tikhomirnov both married cousins of his second wife (before he married for the third time and received two House of Government apartments). The collectivizer of the Middle-Volga peasants, Boris Bak, moved into the House in March 1935, when he was made deputy head of the Moscow Province NKVD (under Redens); his sister, also a secret police official, was married to Boris Berman, the brother of the head of the Gulag, Matvei Berman, and a high-ranking secret police official in his own right. Boris’s brother Solomon did not live in the House because he was, at that time, head of the Karaganda Province NKVD in Kazakhstan.4

  ■ ■ ■

  Comrades and relatives who lived or traveled outside of Moscow stayed in touch by writing letters. Most adult House residents—like most literate Soviets—were active participants in the thick web of correspondence that defined and held together social circles, family networks, patronage rankings, and, ultimately, the “Soviet people” (all the more so because foreign correspondence slowed to a trickle after the house of socialism was built). At work, high officials governed the state by means of letters and telegrams (while Aleksei Rykov governed all private and official letters and telegrams as the people’s commissar of post and telegraph); at home, they maintained personal ties by writing letters, telegrams, and postcards—to old comrades, clients requesting favors (many of them old comrades), vacationing household members, and an assortment of relatives, mobile and stationary.

  If old family connections did not provide “feelings of closeness,” new (or old) loves could. A separate category of personal correspondence consisted of letters to more or less secret lovers: letters that, because of their assumption of utmost privacy, intimacy, immediacy, and emotional authenticity, were similar to diaries and prison confessions (two other popular Bolshevik genres). Osinsky continued his relationship with Anna Shaternikova, writing regularly about his health, children, life at work, and life’s work: mostly Hegel and mathematics, but also Gogol, Heine, and the Soviet automobile industry. After the first few years, he stopped writing about the freedom of relationships. He and Anna had a special address in Moscow to which they sent their letters. He kept offering her money: for sanatorium stays and—his fondest wish—for her to be able to go to university and take up the formal study of Marxism-Leninism. She kept refusing, but seems to have accepted some help, possibly to allow her to take care of her son, Vsemir, who was not expected to live long.5

  Around 1937, the Old Bolshevik Feliks Kon, who was seventy-three at the time, started an affair with Maria (“Mara”) Filippovna Komarova, an employee of the All-Union Radio Committee (which he had headed until 1933, when Kerzhentsev took over). (It is possible their liaison started earlier, but the surviving correspondence begins in 1937.) They met regularly, although it appears that he was not always up to the physical challenge. She suffered from jealousy and suspected him of being unfaithful. His best defense was his reputation as a Party veteran. “I am sorry, my dear Mara, but there is one question I cannot help asking you: is it possible to love someone and not trust him, not to trust in him? You are a Bolshevik. You will understand the full horror of this question. All my life, I have considered myself, and have been considered by others, an honest man. But you have cast doubt on this…. It is killing me.” His loyalty as a Bolshevik and faithfulness as a lover were one and the same thing.6 That still left the question of what should be done in a situation both found painful, as well as rewarding:

  You are young. You have decades left to live. And me?! I do believe that it would be natural for you to become involved with somebody else and start living in a way that is different from the way you live now, from one meeting to the next. Would it be painful for me? Very much so, but … And there is one more thing, besides old women’s gossip. There is Khr. G. [Khristina Grigorievna Grinberg].… One way or another, I have lived with her for 45 years. How could I leave her now? … How could I even think of leaving Khr. G., an 80-year-old invalid, who has given me the best years of her life? She would not be jealous, but it would cause her great pain. You keep bringing up the A. Karenina analogy. It simply doesn’t apply.7

  Feliks Kon

  Things would eventually change because the Revolution had won, but change took time—probably more than they had. Anna Karenina’s—and Khristina Grigorievna Grinberg’s—pain had not yet become unimaginable. As he wrote to Komarova, “The modern family has many, many deficiencies. But these ar
e growing pains. The old forms of marriage involving buying and selling (‘you’ve got the goods, we’ve got the merchant’), business contracts between the parties, the wife’s adulteries and the husband’s open debauchery both before and after the wedding (‘boys will be boys’), as well as the peculiar division of labor, with the husband earning a living while his wife runs the household, are rotted through and through, but the miasma of decay is still poisoning today’s spouses.”8

  What mattered, in the meantime, was that Feliks and Maria had each other. “I keep remembering,” he wrote in a letter devoted mostly to Khristina Grigorievna’s illness, “how I kissed my little girl for the first time…. It was so wonderful, and it brought us so close together for the rest of our lives!”9 That closeness, like all true closeness between a man and a woman, was spiritual, as well as physical:

  As you can see, my dear girl, we are thinking about the same things, and that is the best part of our relationship. Because, no matter what I do, I am spiritually connected to you. In everything I write, there is a little part of you, and in every one of your feelings, there is more than a little of mine. In spite of everything, our lives have become inextricably linked. As I write this, I think of all the things that have tied us so closely together. There you are, my darling Mara! Please always remember how much you mean to me, and how I wish you were free of all this … anxiety, so that you could live, for as long as possible, a full personal, spiritual, and public life.10

  Aleksandr Serafimovich’s soulmate was Nadezhda Petriaevskaia (Nadia). In 1931, when they began to correspond, he was sixty-eight and she was twenty. As he wrote on August 20, 1932, from his native Ust-Medveditskaia (a few months before it became Serafimovich),

  Nadia, it is amazing to what extent we complement each other. My mind is slow and heavy; it moves laboriously, like a millstone, always lagging behind. Your mind is exceptionally quick; it sparkles as it apprehends everything it touches. What saves me is my ability to reach a certain depth, to synthesize. You are brilliant at analyzing, subtly and exhaustively. (I am writing to you from the steppe: on my right is a glittering wall of rain; on my left is the mountain called the Pyramid, on top of which is a tower made of criss-crossing beams, a survey marker, the beginnings of a railroad, and the graves of some Whites killed in 1919 with secret flowers on them.) It looks like I’ll be whipped by the rain. I’m hiding here, reading [Engels’s] Anti-Dühring. At home people are always getting in the way. That is your doing. You have gotten under my skin. I have just finished Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism.11

  Aleksandr Serafimovich

  The flip side of long-distance spiritual intimacy is loneliness at home. “Write to me, my dear Nadia: I am alone. There is no one I want to share my thoughts or anything else with. When I come, I’ll bring a whole pile of work plans I want to discuss with you.” He needed her in order to do his writing: “your fresh eye can see things that escape me, and your mind is fresh, sharp, searching, and active.”12 He measured time by counting her letters; he measured distance by how far away she was. She was a student of science at Leningrad University; in the summer of 1932, she was doing field work in Goloshchekin’s Kazakhstan:

  Your letter has just arrived, about your trip to some deserted place with a nice description of your journey and of the student Kerbalai. And I know it’s silly, but I can’t get rid of a deep-seated suspicion that Kerbalai is an agent provocateur. I have no idea where it came from. My first gut reaction was: “Does she have a gun?” I can’t sleep. I go to bed with the chickens and fall into a mute, all-enveloping blackness. And then two or three hours later, I wake up and can’t go back to sleep again. The whole house is asleep, while I, full of anguish, climb out the window, so as not to disturb anyone, and wander around the garden. I am losing weight. I know this isn’t helping anyone, but there is nothing I can do.13

  Reading her letters from Kazakhstan, he discovered that she was a talented writer. They shared a bond, a faith, and, as it turned out, a gift. The best analogy for their relationship could be found in the life of one of the Soviet Union’s most popular writers.

  Have you read Jack London’s biography? A glorious writer, really close to my heart. Sasha [Serafimovich’s secretary and daughter-in-law] and I have been reading him. And what about his second wife, Charmian? She is like you: an excellent swimmer, diver, horse rider, shooter, and mountain climber. They did everything together. They crossed the ocean in a little sailboat from San Francisco to Hawaii in twenty-five days. He called her his “Mate Woman.” When she got sick, he said: “If she dies, I’ll kill myself.” But, with all these similarities, there is one crucial difference between you two: she did not have your mental sharpness and intensity, even though she and London worked together, and she wrote a book of her own. Most important, she did not have the feeling of collectivism that you are suffused with. That is understandable: you find yourselves in totally different social circumstances—profoundly bourgeois ones in her case, the revolution and socialist construction, in yours.14

  There was another difference: he and Nadia were not married. (Serafimovich’s wife, Fekla Rodionovna, was a peasant woman famous for her pies, with no apparent interest in science or literature.) Nadia was his “Mate Woman,” but in a way that appeared incomplete or temporarily split. In one of his letters, Aleksandr Serafimovich Serafimovich (or simply Aleksandr) writes to the public Nadezhda about the private Nadia. In social circumstances totally different from those of the Londons, the “Mate” has become a comrade. Or rather, “Nadezhda” is a comrade, whereas “Nadia” is a “Comrade Woman” who is all the more beautiful as a woman for being a true collectivist comrade:

  Ask her [Nadezhda] to look me in the eye with her own deep eyes filled with the resolute preparedness for struggle and readiness to forge her will…. Tell her (confidentially, so she won’t laugh) that I won’t use bleach to treat myself anymore (at least not foolishly), that I am working on my publication, that I have finished one important task, about which more when we meet, and I wait for her letters here at my rest home. And tell her how my heart fluttered when she mentioned in one of her letters that “life without a collective is impossible.” She is made of healthy, firm substance, no matter which way the wind blows outside. And tell her, do tell her, that I am not idealizing her, that romanticism is a lie, that I keep adding up all the debit and credit entries, and that the total, fixing me with its cold eyes, is slowly telling me: “You will never, ever, meet another Nadia like this.”—“Oh, shut up; I don’t need you to tell me.” No, don’t tell her that—I can see the tiniest snake of a smile wrinkling the corner of her mouth. Just tell her that I firmly grasp her hand in mine, and that I am—Aleksandr.15

  The former Chekist and Right Oppositionist (and, in the 1930s, head of the Union of State Trade and Consumer Employees), Grigory Moroz, liked to tease his wife by playing Aleksandr Vertinsky’s “A Song about My Wife” (“to be able to forgive my regular infatuations, one has to know a thing or two about life”). She suffered from jealousy and confided her fears to her son, Samuil.16

  Roza Smushkevich was eleven years old in 1937 when her father, the Air Force commander Yakov Smushkevich, returned from Spain (where he became known as “General Duglas”). Fifty-three years later she talked about her father in an interview for a documentary:

  Yakov Smushkevich

  One day I was walking home from school through the little park that was across from the house…. Suddenly, a woman came up to me and asked: “Are you Roza?” Surprised, I answered, “Yes, I am.” Then she said, “Let’s sit down on a bench and talk.” That surprised me even more. We sat down, and she pulled out a large box of chocolates…. There used to be some chocolates called “Deer” in those days. She opened the box and offered me some. I took one piece. She said that her name was Aunt Tamara and that she used to be my father’s interpreter in Spain. And that she was madly in love with him, and he with her, and let’s live together, and some other things along those lines…. I completely
lost control, threw her chocolate in her face, and started yelling something. When I got home, I flung my briefcase into the corner. My father was home. He asked: “What’s the matter?” And I screamed: “Leave me alone! Go back to your Aunt Tamara!” My father walked out of the room, and I could hear my mother say: “See, I’ve been trying to keep it hidden from Roza, but now she knows, too.” Without a word, my father walked over to the telephone, dialed a number, and said: “Please leave me and my family alone.” Then he took me on his lap and said: “My dear, sweet girl, there is no one who means more to me than your mother and you.” … Of course, I hated her. But then … the years passed … and I started feeling sorry for her. I heard that she loved him very, very much. I believe she even had a son by him, but I think he died.”17