The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  Aleksandr Arosev and his wife, Gertrude Freund, in Berlin

  Not much had changed when, in 1935, he crossed into Poland from the other direction on his way from the Soviet Union to Paris:

  19 June.

  Travel impressions. Moscow-Negoreloe. Dining car.

  Walked in, sat down, and for at least half an hour, no one has paid any attention to me. The two tables by the entrance are occupied: one, by a waiter, counting money and looking despondently at the abacus sitting in front of him; the other, by a man in civilian clothes, stretching his arms and looking bored. He could pass the time by reading or writing, but, like all Russians, he is lazy and does not appreciate the value of fast-flowing time. He appears to be some kind of supervisor or commissar.

  Two young Englishmen walked in just now. The waiter came up to them, but couldn’t understand anything. So a second came up, but he couldn’t understand them, either. Then the idle supervisor himself came up. All three suspended their melancholy faces over the Englishmen, and all three failed to understand a single word. Then, with a slow, grudging motion, the supervisor summoned a fourth, whom he recommended as a German speaker. The waiter asked [also in Russian]:

  “Roll, tea?”

  At last hearing a Russian word they recognized, the two Englishmen cried in unison:

  “Tea!”30

  The Soviet cultural celebrities engaged in establishing cultural ties were, as far as Arosev was concerned, not much better than dining-car waiters. According to his diary, at a 1932 Kremlin reception for foreign diplomats, Boris Pilniak had “loitered next to the food tables” while Leonid Leonov had “acted like a shopkeeper made a bit reckless by the sound of an accordion on a Sunday.” At a VOKS reception on October 17, 1934, the invited Soviet writers had “distinguished themselves by their bad manners and complete cluelessness about what to do or say.” In June 1935, at the Congress for the Defense of Culture in Paris, the Soviet delegates had “made the French blush.” In July 1935, some Soviet dancers touring England had shown themselves to be “enthusiasts and narcissists at the same time.” And in December 1935, in Paris, four visiting Soviet poets (Kirsanov, Lugovskoi, Selvinsky, and that “jug-eared, snub-nosed ‘genius,’” Bezymensky) had arrived “with faces frozen with self-importance.” On the day of their departure, the physiologist A. D. Speransky, who happened to be in town on an official visit, had gotten drunk and “at the railway station, babbled incoherently and kept looking for women.”31

  ■ ■ ■

  Arosev did not like his job. But the reason he did not like his job was that the cause of the Revolution was being represented “by complete idiots and ignoramuses,” not because he ever doubted the cause itself. He did not want to do “the work of a maître d’hôtel” because he believed that he himself was at the top of his creative powers. “I want,” he wrote to Stalin on July 21, 1936, “to work more intensely and with greater responsibility for socialism, which is being built under your direction.” He would prefer an assignment in the People’s Commissariat of People’s Enlightenment or a full-time job as a writer, working on his “historical-psychological” tetralogy about the Russian Revolution (Spring, covering 1905–13, Summer, on the immediate prerevolutionary years, Fall, from the October Revolution to Lenin’s death, and Winter, about “our Party’s work on the economic building of socialism under your direction and the falling off of the de facto alien elements more interested in the process of the revolution than in its results.”) Ultimately—no matter who waited on tables or who shuttled back and forth as a maître d’hôtel—crossing into the USSR stood for “entering the country that is the source of all the strongest human impressions, emotions, and ideas.” The best people in the West understood that too, idiots and ignoramuses notwithstanding. “Many very honest, loyal, and heroic human beings are drawn toward us.”32

  Lev Kritsman (Courtesy of Irina Shcherbakova)

  One such human being was Lev Kritsman’s childhood friend Senia, who had emigrated to America around 1913, settled in Los Angeles, gotten a job as a cobbler in a shoe shop, and become Sam Izeckman (also known as Itzikman or Eisman). He and his wife, Betia, had never liked America. It was bad enough to be a “deaf mute” immigrant, he wrote in his letters to Kritsman, but the worst part was the “atmosphere of greed and wealth” that permeated everything. People in America worked day and night and talked of nothing but material things: “here even a hungry person thinks less about getting food than buying a house of his own.” Los Angeles (he wrote in Yiddish-inflected Russian) “is a lousy boring little town a European could even die here from boredom.” There was nothing to describe and an awful lot to regret, even before he heard about the Russian Revolution. “I absolutely do not like America and do not want to write anything about it.”33

  In 1930, Kritsman visited the United States as part of a delegation of Soviet agrarian economists and met with Senia. Shortly afterward, Senia (who by then had started mixing up his Roman and Cyrillic alphabets) wrote to describe the effect the meeting had had on him. “I am seriously considering moving back to Russia and so I ask you to please let me know (1) what I have to submit in order to enter the U.S.S.R. in terms of paperwork and (2) whether it is possible to stay there upon arrival? Without securing a visa in advance? And also if possible write what things are like in our line of work and do they need people of my caliber there? I know you are very busy but I hope you won’t refuse.” Three months later, he was still trying to get a visa. “Now that you’re back home you must be busy like bee, but in the name of our good old days I ask you to steal your precious moments and write to me…. How do you feel when it comes to health? Busy day and night I imagine but Lyonia what supreme joy it is to be working in such conditions for better future and toward such wonderful goal I wish that future the best possible success. Yours forever Senia.” In April 1936, he was still hoping to move, working for the cause, and had much improved writing skills in Russian. “My son sends his comradely greetings. He lives permanently in San Francisco. He has joined the ranks and is working actively for the establishment of a Soviet government here in America. I subscribe to and read all of this year’s enormous achievements and am very interested to know what is being done in the field of mechanical shoe repair if you write let me know what progress has been made in that particular area of industrial production. Betty sends her best to Shura. I hope to receive your reply. Yours, Senya.”34

  Senia never made it to the Soviet Union, but many people did, and some of them stayed. The largest political émigré community was German: in 1936, there were about 4,600 German-speaking refugees living in the Soviet Union, most of them in Moscow. The top Soviet expert on German politics was Karl Radek, who was responsible for the official manifestos announcing a new pro-Versailles policy, secret negotiations suggesting a continued Soviet willingness to cooperate, and the public and private statements aimed at Communists and fellow-travelers. During the first Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, he made two speeches: a formal one—in which he called on foreign writers to face the choice between obedience to Party discipline and “dismissal from the struggle for which their soul yearns”—and an improvised one at Gorky’s dacha, in the presence of Molotov, Bukharin, and a select group of foreign visitors. One of those visitors was the German writer Gustav Regler, who described the occasion in his memoirs (which he wrote when he was no longer a Communist):

  Radek spoke first in Russian. Since he spoke several languages fluently I suspected that his words were intended more for his own Government than for ourselves. I asked Koltsov to interpret, which he did.

  It was a Dostoevsky speech, an act of ecstatic confession and self-flagellation. “We must look more deeply into our hearts and scatter the eggshells of our self-deception!” he cried. “We must seek our own private peace of mind.” …

  He spread his shirt wider apart. There was now no stopping him. I found him terrifying, with his gleaming eyes and the little, ugly fringe of beard on his chin that served only to emphasize the thi
nness of his lips. He was certainly drunk, but this had loosened his tongue without impairing his wits. “He’s talking too much!” Koltsov whispered to me, and glanced anxiously towards the Government people. I noted Molotov’s tense mouth and Gorky’s wrinkled forehead. “He is in a mood to throw everything overboard,” said Koltsov, and craned his neck to see whom Radek was now facing. But what was there for Radek to throw overboard? All sound in the room had died down.

  “We are still far from the objective,” said Radek in his high-pitched voice. “We thought the child had come of age, and we have invited the whole world to admire it. But it is self-knowledge, not admiration, that we need.” …

  With his shirt hanging over his belt he paced up and down amid the cigarette-smoke and the clinking glasses, but always keeping at a certain distance from Molotov, and suddenly he directed his attack at the Germans. He upbraided them, talking of his bitter disappointment at their swift betrayal of the Revolution, the way the workers had adapted themselves to Hitler, and the ease with which the literary calling had been gleichgeschaltet, brought into line. It must be said that not many had fallen upon fruitful ground!

  He was now speaking in German, but not out of courtesy. His purpose was to insult and offend….

  Then, beneath the basilisk gaze of Molotov, he returned to selfaccusation, and in the end his discourse became a mere mumbling, the firework display petered out amid the hubbub of talk and the general indifference which finally he seemed to share. He picked up glasses as he passed, perhaps finding comedy in his own pathos….

  Finally, he faded away through the tobacco-smoke and vanished like a ghost into some other part of the house, and I heard Koltsov breathe a sigh of relief.

  “The party is over,” he said in an exhausted voice.35

  Karl Radek

  Koltsov was more cautious, more polished, more influential, and more directly responsible for relations with writers. Koltsov’s House of Government apartment served as the headquarters of German cultural life in Moscow, and his common-law wife, Maria Osten, served as its principal coordinator. She worked in the Soviet Union’s main German-language newspaper, Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung; founded and managed the international German literary journal, Das Wort (financed by Koltsov’s Magazine-and-Newspaper Alliance and edited—after Osten’s unsuccessful courtship of Heinrich and Thomas Mann—by Berthold Brecht, Willi Bredel, and Lion Feuchtwanger); and arranged Soviet tours for German cultural celebrities, including Brecht and Feuchtwanger. According to Bredel (who also lived in Moscow), “Maria Osten had a poor reputation among virtually all the German writers in Moscow. It was her own fault. In spite of her relatively modest literary abilities, she, as Koltsov’s friend, played an undeservedly major role in German literature, corresponded with Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Bert Brecht, and, still as Koltsov’s friend and confidante, exercised all kinds of power and presented herself as a grande dame, so to speak. It seemed that she aspired to be the hostess of a literary salon.”36

  Maria Osten

  The daughter of a Westphalian landowner, Maria Gresshöner (Osten) had become a visible presence in Berlin’s bohemian café life in 1926, when, as an eighteen-year-old, she got a job at the radical Malik Press, became the mistress of the co-owner, Wieland Herzfelde (who was married at the time), and joined the Communist Party. In 1929, she followed the Leningrad film director Evgeny Cherviakov to the Soviet Union, but, after discovering he was also married, returned to Berlin. In the same year, she wrote her first short story and started publishing sketches about rural day-laborers in the Rote Post Communist newspaper (under the rubric of “rural agitation”). In 1930, her photograph appeared on the cover of the Malik-produced translation of Ilya Ehrenburg’s The Love of Jeanne Ney. In 1932, she met Koltsov and followed him to Moscow. In the fall of 1933, Koltsov and Maria spent some time in Paris in the company of Boris Efimov, the writers Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, and Koltsov’s official wife, Elizaveta Rat-manova. From Paris they traveled to Saar to report on the preparations for the referendum on whether the territory should rejoin Germany. In December, in the town of Oberlinxweiler, they met Hubert L’Hoste, the ten-year-old son of a local Communist.37 Hubert describes the occasion in Maria’s book, Hubert in Wonderland:

  The time flew by very quickly. We were all terribly sorry when Mikhail said that he could not stay for the night because he had to return to Saarbrücken.

  But the most wonderful memory that I have of that evening were his words that kept ringing in my ears:

  “Why don’t we take him with us?”

  Mikhail put me on his lap and patted my head.

  “But only on one condition,” he said, having thought for a minute.

  “What condition?”

  Terribly disappointed (“were they making fun of me?”), I climbed down off his lap. Now he was sure to say: “We will take you with us only if you’ve read Marx’s Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital. In my mind, I was blaming my father for not bringing me these books, even though I had asked him to many times. In response, he would always say that I should wait a little before reading them.

  Mikhail put me back on his lap.

  “Our condition,” he said, “is that you will write one page each day about what you have seen.”

  “I will, I will, of course I will!” I said, clapping my hands, and everyone laughed.

  “And, perhaps, we’ll even use what you write in a book we’ll put together for the young pioneers of the entire world.”38

  Hubert’s father approved of the plan. On the way to Moscow, Hubert and Maria stopped over in Paris, where Gustav Regler showed Hubert around. On the Paris–Vienna train, Hubert read the Belgian novelist Charles de Coster’s The Legend of the Glorious Adventures of Thyl Ulenspiegel in the Land of Flanders and Elsewhere (because it was one of the most popular children’s books in the Soviet Union and because the story of a wandering trickster’s rebirth as a revolutionary hero seemed to presage Hubert’s own life’s journey). In Moscow, Hubert received a hero’s welcome, made a radio address, met Marshal Budennyi, and saw Lenin in his mausoleum. In Maria’s version of Hubert’s account, Lenin made a strong impression on him: “He is wearing a khaki jacket, and his hands are resting on a red cloth, which covers him up to his chest. I do not want to leave. Lenin seems to be asleep. His little beard casts a shadow over his cheeks and enlivens his face.”39

  Hubert liked everything in the Soviet Union, especially Gorky Park and Natalia Sats’s children’s theater. Even his own new home was special. It had “not one courtyard, but several. A survey of the whole huge territory revealed that there were three of them. Small fences indicated where the hedges, now mostly covered in deep snow, were hidden. Only the soft green tops of the fir trees could be seen above the huge snowdrifts. The pathways leading to the numerous entryways were completely free of snow. In the middle courtyard was a grocery store, whose shop windows faced the street. It was a cooperative building for workers.” In fact, it was the House of Government, but Hubert’s—and Maria’s—job was to describe the typical, not the particular (what is becoming, not what is).40

  Hubert L’Hoste with Natalia Sats

  Hubert was enrolled in Moscow’s Karl Liebknecht German school (which Arosev’s daughters also attended). In the summer, he and his classmates went to the Ernst Thälmann pioneer camp, where he learned “to submit to discipline and live within a collective.” When he came back in August, he saw Gustav Regler, who was in town for the Writer’s Congress, and returned the favor by showing him around Moscow. Hubert was proud to be able to show him things that “did not exist in the entire world or were inaccessible to us in the capitalist countries.” Regler particularly liked Gorky Park. On his first visit there, he never made it to the Children’s Technical Station, where children built their own radios, turbines, and trolleybuses, because he could not stop doing the parachute jump. Another guest of the Writers’ Congress was Thomas Mann’s son Klaus, who wrote in his diary that the “all-powerful Maria” had shown h
im a department store, the Metro, and some specialty stores.41 Mann’s traveling companion, Marianne Schwarzenbach, liked both Koltsov and Maria:

  Mikhail Koltsov and Maria Osten in Moscow

  He has such wit and such a lively mind, and has grown so much in his position, that one is tempted to assume that he can do anything. Besides, he is warmhearted and friendly, and Maria loves him with a solicitous sweetness out of keeping with her usual aggressive manner. In his presence, she seems smaller and a bit quieter than usual. Actually, she is an extraordinary girl, with a very feminine, not entirely self-conscious, intelligence, extremely frank and open, a bit devious, and affectionate in an impetuous, feline, never-to-be-trusted sort of way. In short, it would be dangerous and painful to be in love with her, for it would be impossible to fully possess her or pin her down.42

  In January 1935, the Saar plebiscite was won by the pro-German party. Hubert’s parents emigrated to France, and he stayed on in the Soviet Union indefinitely. In spring 1936, Maria started an affair with the German Communist singer, Ernst Busch. A year later, she and Koltsov separated but remained close friends and collaborators.43

  ■ ■ ■

  Germany was by far the most important country in the world. But Germany (as Radek kept saying) had betrayed the Revolution. The country that had recently fallen in love with the Revolution, and was ardently loved in return, was Republican Spain. Germany had always been present in the House of Government apartments in the shape of books, tutors, gadgets, and governesses. Most of what the House residents came to learn about Spain came from Koltsov’s dispatches from the Civil War, reissued in 1938 as The Spanish Diary.