The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  Bolshevism was a men’s movement. Before the Revolution, women were junior partners in the struggle and the embodiment of a time when “any grief is easy to bear.” After the Revolution, they served as a symbol of both the dream’s vulnerability and the old world’s tenacity. In the House of Government, they stood for the preservation and renewal of sectarian intimacy.

  Most high officials who left their old comrade women for new ones did it during the time of the great disappointment: a midlife crisis for both the Revolution and the revolutionaries. In the 1930s, even those who did not conceal their new liaisons seemed reluctant to abandon the women who had given them the best years of their lives (and had shared with them the best years of the Revolution). Koltsov got together with Maria Osten without breaking up with Elizaveta Ratmanova; his brother Boris Efimov openly shared his time between his two wives and their children; Ivan Kraval moved his third wife in without parting from his second (who continued to live in their House of Government apartment along with her sister and her sister’s husband and son, as well as Kraval’s daughter from his first marriage). Kuibyshev’s first, second, and fourth wives (P. A. Stiazhkina, E. S. Kogan, and O. A. Lezhava) lived in separate apartments in the House of Government, apparently on good terms with each other. His death in 1935 produced two widows with claims to benefits: O. A. Lezhava and A. N. Klushina. The Gorky Park inspector, Mikhail Tuchin, left his wife, Tatiana Chizhikova, for another woman, but continued to live in their House of Government apartment.18

  What all genuinely close relationships had in common—whether among comrade friends, comrade men and women, or various family members—was the construction of socialism. This was not true of the former construction worker, Mikhail Tuchin, who was often drunk, belligerent toward his family, and, apparently, indifferent toward socialism, but it was true of many, perhaps most, nomenklatura households. Watching Soviet factories grow gave Osinsky as much “personal pleasure” as watching his own children grow; studying Marxist dialectics was “no less important than the building of 518 factories”; and one of the greatest personal pleasures in his relationship with Anna Shaternikova was the thought of her devoting herself full time to the study of Marxist dialectics. Feliks Kon reassured his distraught lover by referring to their common Party membership, and Serafimovich exiled himself to the steppe in order to read Engels and Lenin and write to Nadia about Bolshevik collectivism as the key to an exclusive reciprocal relationship (and a rival who might be an agent provocateur). On January 22, 1935, Arosev wrote a testament to his children, in which he asked them to be resolute in pursuing their dreams. “Don’t be afraid of criticism and don’t resent it. Trust the collective and test yourself through the collective. But, of course, you will be living in an age when the collective will be playing a much greater role than it does in our day.” In the same year, Podvoisky wrote to his children urging them never to forget how much their mother had done for them. “Remember it in order to nurture, develop, and strengthen your sense of duty toward not only each other and your loved ones, but also toward those who are far away, toward the entire working class.”19 Izrail Veitser had two true loves: Natalia Sats and, as the primary loyalty on which everything else depended, the Party. Natalia Sats reciprocated—on both counts:

  More than anything else in the world, Veitser treasured and safeguarded the confidence of the Party. Each time he was about to leave on one of his foreign trips, he would hand me the keys to our safe deposit box, and we would always have the same conversation.

  “I leave everything to you.”

  “But what do you have to leave??”

  He looks at me with reproach and surprise.

  “My Party card and my medals.”

  Abroad, he had what they called a “blank check”: all his expenses were government expenses. How dear this trust was to him, and how cheap his blank check was for the state!

  For me, he was the ideal Bolshevik-Leninist.20

  Serafimovich’s friend, Sonia Gavrilova, “almost cried from joy” when, on July 2, 1936, she received her new Party card (as part of the Party card verification and exchange campaign of 1935–36). Another friend, Mirra Gotfrid, wrote to him in a private letter: “Are there any fortresses the Bolsheviks cannot overcome? No, none and never will be. That is true happiness…. A person who is honest and who truly loves his motherland and the Party of Lenin-Stalin cannot die.” Efim Shchadenko wrote to his “darling, sweet little Maria” to congratulate her on the “Great holiday of the October Socialist Revolution” and to his old friend, Arkady, to tell him what was going on in his life: “As far as work is concerned, I have nothing to write: in our wonderful country, all is well: everything keeps growing, maturing, and developing in the direction required by the Party and the people. Obviously you have been reading our newspapers and rejoicing in our successes and achievements as much as we have. So that’s about it then.” And as Khrushchev remembered many years later (a propos of his close friendship with Beria in the 1930s), “In those days, I looked at things as an idealist: if a person had a Party card and was a true communist, he was like a brother, and even more than a brother, to me. I believed that we were all connected by the invisible threads of a common struggle for ideas—the ideas of the building of socialism, something lofty and sacred. To speak the language of religious believers, every participant in our movement was, for me, a kind of apostle, who, for the sake of our idea, was prepared for any sacrifice.”21

  Sofia Butenko, the wife of the director of the Kuznetsk Steel Plant, Konstantin Butenko, and one of the leaders of the nationwide women’s volunteer movement, was thirty-three years old when Sergo Ordzhonikidze, her husband’s boss and the patron of the women’s volunteer movement, died on February 18, 1937. She still remembered how she felt sixty-one years later: “When they took away my husband … I sobbed and cried. But the way I cried when Ordzhonikidze died, I never … my eyes were all swollen…. I couldn’t even open them. The secretary of our city Party committee even told me: ‘This has to stop.’ And he put me in his car and said, ‘Let me take you out for a bit of fresh air.’ You can’t imagine how I sobbed. I just couldn’t stop.”22

  At the All-Union Congress of Wives of Managers and Engineers Working in Heavy Industry, May 1936. Sofia Butenko is on the right.

  When Agnessa Argiropulo was told by Sergei Mironov that he would have her shot if she turned out to be a hidden enemy, but would then shoot himself, she “accepted the compromise.” He loved her as much as the cause; for as long as the two did not clash, life could go on.23

  ■ ■ ■

  Agnessa Argiropulo was not a hidden enemy, but Tania Miagkova was—or may have been. Agnessa was never a Communist; Tania was, and felt strongly about it. Agnessa’s role in the building of socialism was to make her husband happy; Tania thought of socialism as a cause she shared with her family and her country. Agnessa’s question about a possible conflict between two kinds of love was a playful test of her husband’s devotion; Tania’s commitment to both her family and socialism was tested continuously. Her mother and husband followed the Party line; she followed her heart and her Bolshevik conscience. When she was leaving Kazakhstan, her fellow exiles were not sure if she had found inner reconciliation or chosen one over the other.

  After her return to Moscow in 1931, she continued to see her friends from the former opposition and, according to her OGPU investigator, appeared to believe that total collectivization threatened the country’s productive forces and that the Party suffered from insufficient rank-and-file activism. In January 1933, two years after the family moved into the House of Government and two months after her thirty-fifth birthday, she was arrested, tried as part of the “counterrevolutionary Trotskyite group of I. N. Smirnov, V. A. Ter-Vaganian, E. A. Preobrazhensky, and others,” and sentenced to three years in the Verkhneuralsk “political isolator,” fifty kilometers from Magnitogorsk.24

  According to a former inmate, “the Verkhneuralsk political isolator was a huge building standing all by itself
on the bank of the Ural, three kilometers from Verkhneuralsk. During the day, it made a strong impression because of its enormous bulk; at night, because it was lit up with blindingly bright electric lights amid the silent steppe darkness. They started building it during World War I as a military penitentiary, but never finished, so it was the Bolsheviks who completed it to house their own political opponents. The building was subdivided into separate blocks, with long corridors interrupted by a succession of iron doors. The corridors were wide, so prisoners from opposite sides could not hear each other tapping. There were different kinds of cells: for four, three, or two people…. The worst were the solitary cells in the east wing: they had a complex system of passageways; the cells were small; the windows were high, just under the ceiling; and the whole wing was isolated from all the others.”25

  Judging from her letters home, Tania had several cellmates and a window with a beautiful view: “the faraway horizons, black and green ploughed fields, and mountains off in the distance.” She liked to stand by the window at dusk: “In the evening air, I can sometimes hear the rattling of horse carts from somewhere far away, or a song (probably from a kolkhoz shepherds’ encampment): a slow, sad Russian song. The horses graze nearby, and sometimes the herd approaches. Far, far away on the left, I can see the edge of the setting sun and the bright, rapidly changing colors of the clouds over the pale-blue mist of the mountains. Every evening, some kind of night bird monotonously repeats its call.”26

  After several weeks of uncertainty, dejection, and waiting for parcels from home, she transformed her corner of the cell into an “illusion of home” (complete with dictionaries, sugar tongs, family photographs, an apron, calendar, inkwell, teapot, medicine kit, Swiss Army knife, tiny mirror, cushion for the stool, small tablecloth for the bedside table, carpet for the wall next to the bed, and a reproduction of La Gioconda) and settled into the traditional political-prisoner routine of study, exercise, reading, drawing, and writing letters home:

  We now walk from 8 to 9 and 12 to 1. I begin by tackling Das Kapital. I usually manage 5–7 pages in 2–3 hours (including note-taking, of course). I read and am horrified that I understand everything. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not being coy, but I’ve been told (and it does seem to be true) that if the first chapters come easily, it means you’re skimming the surface and not truly comprehending what you’re reading. Besides, I’ve had very few thoughts of my own about the text so far and, to be honest, even those have not been terribly profound. Well, the first step is always the hardest! Intelligent thoughts are bound to come sooner or later! After Das Kapital, lunch, and the walk—it’s math’s turn. I’m almost done with trigonometry…. I’ve been working on it with long breaks in between, but am now determined to push through. After the second lunch (or dinner, officially), I lie down to rest, though every so often some newspapers arrive, and I glance through them in bed. Then comes English—followed by a second reading of The Elements of Machines, journals, serious newspaper reading, and sleep. The next day, I start all over again.27

  The rigidity and intensity of the schedule did not vary much, but the program of study did. In addition to Das Kapital, English, and trigonometry, Tania worked on her specialty of industrial economics (“with an emphasis on machine-building and technology”), as well as algebra, French, German, physics, statistics, accounting, draftsmanship, economic geography, analytical geometry (a particular favorite), the history of Greece, and the history of the French Revolution (using Mathiez, Kropotkin, and a collection of Robespierre’s letters).28 Her plan to study art history proved unrealistic because of the lack of material:

  As for Das Kapital [she wrote to her husband on January 12, 1934], it did turn out (“just as I, poor me, knew it would!”) that I missed some very important things. I now have a new method: I take copious notes and then write out all my questions, confusions, and “revelations” (when they occur) in the margins. After that, I hand my notebook over to a very intelligent person who really knows Das Kapital well. This person then writes out his own comments, explanations, and confusions concerning my “revelations,” accompanied by exclamation marks (lots of them!). I receive a great deal of benefit and pleasure from this (he, probably, less so), and I strongly hope that by the end of my third year here, I will begin to understand some of it.29

  Before bedtime, she usually read fiction: Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Flaubert, Goethe, Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, and various Soviet writers. (She especially liked Bagritsky’s poems and Aleksei Tolstoy’s Peter I.) Sometimes she and her cellmates read aloud to each other: she mentions Blok, Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk, and Pushkin’s Boris Godunov. Of special significance to her were Voronsky’s The Seminary (a memoir of his student days) and Zheliabov (a biography of one of the leaders of the People’s Will executed in 1881 for the assassination of Alexander II). When Tania was still a little girl with a “critical frame of mind,” and Voronsky was her mother’s apprentice as an underground socialist, she used to dismiss his stories as fiction. Now she read them “with enormous pleasure” but remained critical: The Seminary was good, but not as good as In Search of the Water of Life, and Zheliabov, while “very exciting,” showed signs “of having been written hastily.”30

  Zheliabov was about the birth of Bolshevik morality, as Voronsky understood it. Whereas Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov believed that, in a world without God, “everything was permitted,” Voronsky’s Zheliabov understood that, in true Christianity, everything was permitted, but only outside the army of light. Zheliabov the terrorist did what Jesus had taught and what his Bolshevik successors would finally accomplish. “Like the mythological hero,” writes Voronsky in the book’s conclusion, “Zheliabov sowed the dragon’s teeth. From them sprouted a forest of thick-necked warriors clad in armor—the invincible proletarians.” Voronsky was not mixing archetypes: his Jesus, like Zheliabov’s, came from the Book of Revelation and belonged in the same category as Cadmus, Jason, and countless other dragon-slayers. It is not clear whether Voronsky remembered that the warriors who sprouted from the dragon’s teeth ended up killing each other. Nor is it known which part of his argument Tania found unconvincing. She could not write to him directly because she was only allowed to correspond with her husband, mother, and daughter (at their House of Government address).31

  The main difference between Tania’s “political isolation” in the Soviet Union and Voronsky’s (and Zheliabov’s) “prison and exile” in tsarist Russia was that Tania had been jailed by a state she considered her own. “How do I feel?” she wrote in her first letter home. “I can’t say I feel good. I find myself in an extremely difficult situation because my position (I immediately announced my unconditional support for the Party’s general line) provoked a certain reaction on the part of my cellmates. I asked the administration to transfer me to a cell with comrades who, like me, support the Party line, but the matter has not been resolved yet, and I don’t know if it will be resolved favorably.” It was. About two weeks later, she was transferred to a different cell, where she was able to “feel calm” among like-minded comrades. Still, one had to be vigilant. As she wrote to her husband, the deputy chairman of the Central Executive Committee’s Budget Commission, Mikhail (Mikhas) Poloz, “you don’t have to worry: even in these conditions, just as in any other, I am able to isolate myself politically from my surroundings. You know me; you know that the fact that I am here is the result of a misunderstanding. It will be cleared up, I think. In the meantime, I have to wait patiently and use my time here for studying.”32

  The main difference between Tania’s and Voronsky’s prison study programs, besides her professional interest in economics and mathematics, was her “serious and detailed,” “pencil-in-hand” reading of newspapers: especially Pravda and For Industrialization, but also Izvestia, the Literary Gazette, and the Pioneer Pravda. She read official speeches (including her husband’s), took down plan fulfillment numbers, worried about the harvest, rejoiced in “Litvinov’s victory” (the recognition of the Sovie
t Union by the United States), and was “very much taken by the romance of Arctic exploration.” The main themes of her letters reflected the recently introduced main themes of Soviet public life: the love of life, the richness of everyday experience, the joy of being a witness to history. The newspapers and the letters from home conveyed and communicated the “powerful feeling of pure, physical joy” that reigned throughout the country. Tania was particularly touched by the autobiography of the head of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Dam construction project, A. V. Vinter, published in the almanac Year Sixteen. Its title was “My Happy Life,” and its concluding sentence was: “My life has been happier than what a human being is probably entitled to.”33

  Tania could not say that about herself, but her “love of life and curiosity about life” were “as strong as ever,” and her perception of happiness seemed all the more intense for being postponed. “I cannot say that I am not sad at all, but the main reason for this sadness is that I have to sit on the sidelines while such a wonderful life passes me by,” she wrote to her mother soon after reading about the USSR-1 high-altitude balloon, the Moscow–Kara Kum–Moscow auto rally, and the First Nuclear Conference in Leningrad. “But I am preparing myself for it much better now, studying a lot, and waiting…. I don’t know how long I’ll have to wait, but the day will come…. The balloon, the Kara Kum rally, and the nucleus of the atom have provoked in me the same thoughts and feelings they have provoked in you. You probably know it from my letter to Mikhas. It is so good to be a citizen of the USSR, even if you are temporarily confined to an isolator…. I am also very happy that the children have taken so much interest in the balloon. I hope they, too, will develop a strong sense of pride in the achievements of the Soviet state. I know you will be able to instill it in them.” Her mother, Feoktista Yakovlevna, did her best. According to Tania’s daughter, Rada, her grandmother “lived on newspapers and the latest news on the radio” and raised both her and her cousin Volia as fervently patriotic Soviets. (The cooking was done by the maid.)34