The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  The Diary’s overall plot corresponded to Soviet policy toward the Spanish Republic, which corresponded to the standard exodus and construction stories about the transformation of a motley crowd into a holy army. In one of the Diary’s early entries, a group of Aragonese peasants in a tiny movie theater recognize themselves in the film Chapaev, about the Red Army Civil War hero; in another, members of the Madrid government are watching We Are from Kronstadt, about the White Army general Yudenich’s assault on revolutionary Petrograd, when someone suddenly rushes in:

  “Bad news! Illescas has been taken! Our troops are retreating. Seseña may have been taken, too.”

  The spectator sitting next to me asks, without taking his eyes off the screen: “How many kilometers away are they?”

  “They, who? Do you mean Yudenich or Franco? And how many kilometers from where—Petrograd or Madrid?”44

  In the background, once again, is Babylon: mostly diplomats and spies posing as “representatives of arms manufacturers, correspondents of large telegraph agencies, and movie producers,” but also “bootleggers from Al Capone’s detachments, adventure-seekers from Indochina, and a disappointed Italian terrorist who is trying his hand at poetry.” “In the whole of the enormous Florida hotel, the only guest left is the writer Hemingway. He is warming up his sandwiches on an electric stove and writing a comedy.” (In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan says that “Karkov” had “more brains and more inner dignity and outer insolence and humor than any man that he had ever known.”)45

  In the foreground is a Spanish version of the Magnitogorsk melting pot. “The rough features of the Castilians and Aragonese alternate with the swarthy, feminine roundness of the Andalusians. The sturdy, heavyset Basques follow the bony, slender, fair-haired Galicians. But it is the emaciated, gloomy, destitute Estremadurans that predominate in this long, motley peasant procession.” The Spaniards, taken together, are “a colorful, full-blooded, distinctive, and spontaneous nation, and, most remarkable of all, strikingly similar to some of the peoples of the Soviet Union.” They, too, will overcome their spontaneity. Some of them already have: “Now one can say with certainty that these are brave, resolute, battle-tested detachments. When visiting units you have seen before, you cannot help being amazed by how much the men and officers have changed. One anarchist battalion is fighting courageously in Villaverde. Over the past four days, they have lost twenty dead and fifteen wounded. And this is the same battalion that caused so much trouble and had so many desertions in Aranjuez, when they tried to hijack a train in order to run away from the front!”46

  Koltsov’s job as Soviet ambassador to Spanish Petrograd was to describe and inspire the Spanish exodus. Koltsov’s charge as a post-1934 Soviet writer was to celebrate the land of red capes, black berets, roadside inns, and exotic names (“marching along the Estremadura highway, the rebels took Navalcarnero, an important transportation hub, as well as Quijorna and Brunete”). Koltsov’s young House of Government readers drew them in their albums, marked them on their wall maps, and recognized them from the translated adventure books they had been raised on. Koltsov brought Spain home by making it recognizably remote:

  We have never known this nation; it was distant and strange; we have never fought or traded with it, never taught it or learned from it.

  Only loners, eccentrics, and lovers of spicy, slightly bitter exoticism ever traveled from Russia to Spain.

  Even in the minds of educated Russians, the Spanish shelf was dusty and almost empty. All one could find there was Don Quixote and Don Juan (pronounced the French way), Seville and seguedilla, Carmen and her toreador, [Pushkin’s] “the raucous, quick Guadalquivir,” and perhaps The Mysteries of the Madrid Court.47

  It was not quantity that mattered most, however. The age of socialist realism had descended from the “Pamirs” of classical heritage. One of the peaks, as Koltsov’s narrator suddenly realizes, is still in Toledo—“the tragic Toledo of inquisitors, rakes with swords, beautiful ladies, licenciates, and Jewish martyrs at the stake, the repository of the most mysterious works of art he knew of—the hauntingly powerful, elongated and ever so slightly puffy faces on the canvases of El Greco.”48

  The other “peak” was one of the highest. Responding to Koltsov’s demand for greater firmness in dealing with some rebels holed up in the city’s Alcazar, the governor of Toledo urges magnanimity. “You are in Spain, señor,” he says, “in the country of Don Quixote.” Some French journalists, who are present at the scene, speak in the governor’s defense:

  “For Koltsov, he is simply a traitor. Whenever something goes wrong, the Bolsheviks immediately suspect wrecking and treason.”

  “And Don Quixote, according to them, is nothing but a dangerous liberal …”

  “Subject to expulsion from the ranks of conscious Marxists …”

  I retorted:

  “Don’t talk to me about Don Quixote! We are on better terms with him than you are. In the Soviet Union, there have been eleven editions of Don Quixote. And in France? You cry over Don Quixote, but you leave him all alone in his hour of need. We criticize him and help him at the same time.”

  “But when you criticize, you also have to consider his nature …”

  “What do you know about his nature? Cervantes loved his Quixote, but he made Sancho Panza governor, not him. Good old Sancho never claimed to possess his master’s high virtues. As for this bastard, he’s neither a Quixote nor a Sancho. The phone in his office still works, after all, and it has a direct line to the Alcazar!”49

  To prove his point, the narrator asks his driver, Dorado, to take him to El Toboso, where he finds a Potemkin collective farm and a “very young, very tall, and very sad” Dulcinea begging the devious local alcalde for an extra meat ration for her sick father. By the time he has inspected the last point on his itinerary, a horse stable full of mules, it has grown dark.

  It was pitch black outside. In such darkness, you didn’t need to be a daydreamer or a Quixote to mistake the howling wind for the battle cry of the enemy hosts or the slamming of a gate for a shot fired by the perfidious enemy. Small groups and gangs of homeless fascists haunted the roads of the Republican rear: during the day, they hid in caves and ravines; at night, they crept into villages seeking loot and revenge….

  The alcalde took us to an inn. Our car was already sheltered under an awning, next to a hollowed-out stone trough from which Rocinante must have once drunk. Inside the tavern, in the faint glow of an oil lamp, a hungry Dorado could be discerned, reclining next to a cold stove, a sour expression on his face. But the alcalde called the innkeeper aside and whispered something in his ear that produced a magic transformation in the cold, dismal hovel. Suddenly a bright fire was burning in the stove and an appetizing leg of lamb was browning over the coals. It appeared that in El Toboso one could get meat without a doctor’s prescription, and in amounts hazardous to your health, too.50

  At this point, no doubt remains: it is Koltsov who is the real Don Quixote, and Dorado is his Sancho Panza. The howling wind is the battle cry of the enemy hosts; the slamming of a gate is a shot fired by the perfidious enemy; and the very tall and very sad peasant girl is the beautiful Dulcinea. As Leonid Leonov put it at the Writers’ Congress, “The central hero of our time does not fit in a mirror as small as ours. And yet, we all know full well that he has entered the world.” It was not just Koltsov who was Don Quixote: it was his readers, too. They were all heroes, but their idealism had been disciplined by unblinking realism, and their enemies were real. In the kingdom of giants, there were no windmills.

  19

  THE PETTINESS OF EXISTENCE

  Most of the House of Government’s nomenklatura residents read Koltsov. As giants living in an eternal house, they could see the Pamirs, as well as the Kremlin and the Palace of Soviets foundation pit, from their apartment windows. All former “students” (and some of their former proletarian students) would have read Don Quixote, perhaps more than once. The same was true of such other “peaks�
�� as Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, the nineteenth-century romantic and realist canon, and the full complement of Russian classics, with a universal preference for Tolstoy over Dostoevsky. Few people read Soviet literature, and those who did, did not read much. As Leonov said in his Writers’ Congress speech, the heroes of the new age would eventually join the “international constellation of human types whose members include Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote, Figaro, Hamlet, Pierre Bezukhov, Oedipus, Foma Gordeev, and Raphael de Valentin.” But until that time—until the artists had adjusted and polished their mirrors so as to produce a Soviet Robinson Crusoe or Don Quixote—the heroes of the new age had no choice but to keep rereading the originals. Their favorite theaters were the Bolshoi, which staged classical operas and ballets; the Maly, which Fedor Kaverin described as “a temple of humanity that reveals to humans what is great about them”; and the Moscow Art Theater, whose pursuit of psychological realism would culminate in the 1937 production of Anna Karenina. Their favorite museums were the State Museum of Fine Arts and the Tretyakov Gallery (both within easy walking distance); their favorite composer was Beethoven; and their favorite living writer was Romain Rolland, celebrated as a twentieth-century Tolstoy (as well as Beethoven’s biographer). The art that had sustained the early Bolsheviks in the catacombs had become the official art of the state they built. When Yakov Sverdlov learned in March 1911 that his wife had given birth to a boy, he wrote to her from prison about Natasha Rostova from War and Peace. When, a year later, Voronsky found himself in a “semi-dungeon” with “damp corners crawling with wood lice,” he abandoned his usual study routine in favor of Homer, Dickens, Ibsen, Tolstoy, and Leskov. When, the night before the operation he knows will probably kill him, Commander Gavrilov from Pilniak’s Tale of the Unextinguished Moon asks his friend for a book about “simple human joys,” his friend tells him that he does not have such a book. “That’s revolutionary literature for you,” says Gavrilov, as a joke. “Oh well, I’ll reread some Tolstoy, then.” When, six years and another revolution later, Tania Miagkova heard of her husband’s arrest, she switched from Das Kapital to Anna Karenina and Resurrection, and when she found out that she would not be allowed to join him in Solovki, she went on a “poetry binge.” “I read Briusov for a while, then Bagritsky, then Mayakovsky and Blok …, and all this richness of harmony put together is a true feast. But then you pick up Pushkin, and it is clear that he towers above them all.” The socialist realism that the heroes of the new age designed and demanded was not a kitschy appropriation of all the “greatest achievements of world culture”—it was a deliberate attempt to build on the previous Augustinian—and Augustan—ages of heroic fulfillment and dignified maturity. Some degree of youthful ardor was acceptable; “chaos instead of music” was not.1

  In March 1935, when Stalin’s adopted son Artem Sergeev (Apt. 380), turned seven, Stalin gave him a copy of Robinson Crusoe, with the following inscription: “To my little friend, Tomik, with the wish that he grow up to be a conscious, steadfast, and fearless Bolshevik.” The implied comparison to the hero of Puritan industriousness was probably unintentional; the belief that one must climb the Pamirs to become a conscious, steadfast, and fearless Bolshevik was both self-conscious and common.2

  But it was also dangerous. Not every giant recognized his neighbor as such, and not every windmill was convincing as a giant. Seen from the Pamirs—of either socialism or Don Quixote—most people and things looked small. “Cervantes loved his Quixote, but he made Sancho Panza governor, not him. Good old Sancho never claimed to possess his master’s high virtues,” as Koltsov’s narrator says to the skeptical French reporters. But what did this mean? Was it irony or resignation? And was Sancho Panza a symbol of realism and loyalty or philistinism and stupidity, as Arosev suspected? “I should start writing books like Don Quixote,” he wrote in his diary on April 24, 1937, “only the other way around: a modern Sancho Panza, and next to him, Don Quixote.”3

  Heroes kept slaying monsters, but socialism had not grown much beyond its “economic foundations.” The House of Government had been built, but the Palace of Soviets was still a hole in the ground. The former Party secretary of the House of Government Construction Committee, Mikhail Tuchin, had become a Gorky Park inspector, found himself a mistress, and started drinking; the head of construction of the Palace of Soviets, Vasily Mikhailov, was a former Right Oppositionist.

  As far as Arosev was concerned, Sanchos were everywhere and, if not for Stalin and his closest associates, the building of socialism would have been sabotaged a long time ago. Kerzhentsev was not the only one “swelling up with stupidity the way one swells up with fat,” and Soviet tourists in Paris were not the only idiots and ignoramuses. According to Arosev’s diary, Molotov’s speech at the Seventeenth Party Congress in January 1934 had been delivered “from the heart and with passion,” but few delegates seemed to care. Arosev’s and Molotov’s friend from the Kazan days, Nikolai Maltsev, “sat listening with his face all screwed up, trying desperately not to yawn.” Three years later, the participants at a Party meeting at VOKS included several Old Bolsheviks who kept recycling the same happy memories, some time-serving clerks who had no idea why they were there, and a few activists “who had never taken part in revolutionary battles and therefore looked upon revolutionary strategy as a kind of magic.”4

  On April 4, 1935, Arosev and his deputy, N. Kuliabko, had gone over to see the deputy head of the Central Committee’s Department of Culture and the Propaganda of Leninism (Kultprop), Pavel Yudin. Later that day, Arosev reported in his diary:

  Having left his office, as always, in a depressed and gallows-humor mood, Kuliabko and I shared our impressions. He said, with his usual sarcasm,

  “It’s almost as if they had been trying to shove some of those heavy office inkwells up our butts. They huffed and puffed and sweated without any success until the ink spilled all over our pants…. What we told Yudin amounted to ‘wait, let us take off our pants first, it will make it easier for you.’ To which Yudin replied: ‘Don’t worry, we’ll just see if we can screw them in through your pants.’”

  Our only consolation was that Stalin was planning to give a speech and there were rumors going around that Kultprop might be closed down soon. That would be a good thing. It’s a ridiculous institution, especially if one considers the responsibility it is charged with.5

  Within five weeks, Kultprop had been closed down. For Arosev the diarist, Stalin remained the principal defense against the Sancho Panzas, the ultimate guarantor of the triumph of Communism, and the addressee of his most intimate letters and poems. But Stalin would not respond, and the question remained. Communism was going to triumph, but what about Arosev? What was he to do in the meantime? Kuliabko soon turned out to be “just one more petty devil in our dusty chancelleries,” and so did the head of the Foreign Ties Commission of the Writers’ Union, the “eunuch” Mikhail Apletin. “He loathes me, my wife, and everything that has to do with me. He’s no more than a calligraphy teacher. The tragedy for him is that uniforms and funeral masses have been abolished.”6

  The tragedy for Arosev was that he, too, loathed his wife and “the petit bourgeois atmosphere and greedy little hen’s world with its hen-and-rooster problems” that she represented. “I have never once seen my wife happy about anything. The minute I appear, she starts in on her demands: why haven’t I found a new maid yet or looked for vegetables for our son Mitia or procured a ticket for her friend or some such thing. She also has a lethal talent for nagging on and on, and always about the same thing: how bad it is to live here, how it puts her on a completely different footing with me, and so on.” Arosev had, of course, broken Solts’s injunction against marrying class aliens, especially foreign ones, but the frightening thing was that everyone else seemed to be languishing in the same stifling embrace. “I think Molotov is afraid of extending a more definite invitation because he is under the influence of his wife Polina, who is herself under the influence of my former wife Olga Viacheslavovna, and who,
moreover, is jealous of her husband’s relationship with me, as well as his relationship with my wife, and, in general, wants to have a great deal of influence over her husband.”7

  But Arosev’s greatest tragedy was that he was unhappy with his own life: his “maître d’hôtel job,” his “tragically diminishing taste for life,” and his losing battle against “the pettiness of existence.” “We are living in our new apartment, and each day brings new progress on the bourgeois domesticity front: today it’s a prettier tablecloth; tomorrow, after much effort, we’ll manage to find a worker, who will spend a lot of time doing something to improve our apartment.” Molotov, his oldest and closest friend, had called him a “petit bourgeois” when he asked for help in getting a room at the “Pines” rest home. Stalin, his savior and confessor, was not answering his letters. When he wrote in his diary that “every woman is, in some sense, Madame Bovary, and every man is, from a certain point of view, Don Quixote,” he did not mean that he and his wife were giants too large to be represented. Perhaps—his diary seems to suggest—it was not the mirror that was crooked: perhaps it was the face.8

  In 1932 Pravda published a short story by Ilf and Petrov, titled “How Robinson Was Created,” about a magazine editor who commissions a Soviet Robinson Crusoe from a writer named Moldavantsev. The writer submits a manuscript about a Soviet young man triumphing over nature on a desert island. The editor likes the story, but says that a Soviet Robinson would be unthinkable without a trade union committee consisting of a chairman, two permanent members, and a female activist to collect membership dues. The committee, in its turn, would be unthinkable without a safe deposit box, a chairman’s bell, a pitcher of water, and a tablecloth (“red or green, it doesn’t matter; I don’t want to limit your artistic imagination”), and broad masses of working people. The author objects by saying that so many people could not possibly be washed ashore by a single ocean wave: