The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  “Why a wave?” asked the editor, suddenly surprised.

  “How else would the masses end up on the island? It is a desert island, after all!”

  “Who said it was a desert island? You’re getting me confused. Okay, so there’s an island, or, even better, a peninsula. It’s safer that way. And that’s where a series of amusing, original, and interesting adventures will take place. There’ll be some trade union work going on, but not enough. The female activist will expose certain deficiences—in the area of dues collection, for example. She’ll be supported by the broad masses. And then there’ll be the repentant chairman. At the end you could have a general meeting. That would be quite effective artistically. I guess that’s about it.”

  “But—what about Robinson?” stammered Moldavantsev.

  “Oh yeah …, thanks for reminding me. I’m not wild about Robinson. Just drop him. He’s a silly, whiny, totally unnecessary character.9

  The era of socialist realism was separated from the era of the great disapppointment by the epoch of great construction sites. It was different from the great disappointment because the most labor-intensive part of the construction work had been completed. The foundations had been laid, the first layer of scaffolding had been taken down, and the shape and beauty of the house of socialism could be seen by all those who had eyes. Or, as Kirov put it at the Seventeenth Party Congress (using another key Bolshevik metaphor), “the army has won several decisive battles against the enemy and taken some key positions; the war is not over, far from over, but there is something like a brief breathing space, if I may say so, and the whole great victorious warrior host is singing its powerful victory song.” At the Seventeenth Party Congress and at the writers’ congress that followed, the delegates’ main job was to compose, rehearse, and start performing that victory song. Back at work and at home, they had to keep waging the war. Everyone who had ears had heard Stalin’s words first uttered in 1928 and invoked repeatedly and emphatically through the mid-1930s:

  The more we advance, the greater will be the resistance of the capitalist elements and the sharper the class struggle, while the Soviet Government, whose strength will steadily increase, will pursue a policy of isolating these elements, a policy of demoralising the enemies of the working class, a policy, lastly, of crushing the resistance of the exploiters, thereby creating a basis for the further advance of the working class and the main mass of the peasantry.

  It must not be imagined that the socialist forms will develop, squeezing out the enemies of the working class, while our enemies retreat in silence and make way for our advance, that then we shall again advance and they will again retreat until “unexpectedly” all the social groups without exception, both kulaks and poor peasants, both workers and capitalists, find themselves “suddenly” and “imperceptibly,” without struggle or commotion, in the lap of a socialist society. Such fairy-tales do not and cannot happen in general, and in the conditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat in particular.

  It never has been and never will be the case that a dying class surrenders its positions voluntarily without attempting to organise resistance. It never has been and never will be the case that the working class could advance towards socialism in a class society without struggle or commotion. On the contrary, the advance towards socialism cannot but cause the exploiting elements to resist the advance, and the resistance of the exploiters cannot but lead to the inevitable sharpening of the class struggle.10

  Some enemies bleated like goats, dripped slime over the living room floor, and had gaping nostrils, dangling earlobes, and scurvy-stricken mouths torn by silent screams. Others, like Tania Miagkova, looked unremarkable but were found guilty of duplicity and might not be sincere in their recantations. Yet others, including Smilga, Radek, and Voronsky, continued to live in the House of Government but seemed to be singing out of tune and might yet be found guilty of duplicity. And then there were all those who resisted the advance by refusing to retreat: the petty devils in dusty chancelleries, the hens with their hen-and-rooster problems, the Sancho Panzas on trade union committees, the authors and editors of the absurd pseudo-Soviet Robinson Crusoe, and possibly Robinson Crusoe himself, if it turned out that he had, in fact, spent several years on a desert island without a trade union committee. Class enemies were being engendered daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a massive scale. Eventual victory over them was both assured and difficult: like all millenarian prophecies, the guarantee of the coming of Communism made predestination dependent on free will. As Arosev wrote in his diary on September 28, 1934, less than a month after the writers’ congress, “Moscow is being transformed heroically. There are new tall buildings and wide squares. Will all this remain socialist? Yes, it definitely will, but it will have to be defended!”11

  ■ ■ ■

  The home front was the least well defined and therefore the most dangerous. The House of Government, designed as a “transitional type” building dominated by straight lines, right angles, and wide windows, was swelling up with fat. Various commissions and inspections complained repeatedly about the bloated staff, inflated costs, growing debts, and opaque accounting practices. The first casualties were the Kalinin Club and the State New Theater. The club was stripped of its property and employees and converted to a much more modest “cultural center” for the members of the Central Executive Committee’s trade union organization; the tennis court was rented out to the All-Russian Artists’ Cooperative (Vsekokhudozhnik). The theater never fully recovered after the banning of The Champion of the World. Most of the season-ticket holders asked for their money back; the old productions did not work on the new stage; the remaining new productions were widely seen as failures; the administrative director, S. I. Amoglobeli, left for the Maly Theater; and the House of Government administration never agreed to lower the rent (which, at 160,000 rubles, was 2,000 percent higher than what the theater used to pay for its previous venue). The theater made some money by going on tours, selling the Champion’s costumes, and firing thirty employees, but the situation remained bleak. Meanwhile, the introduction of socialist realism had put into question Fedor Kaverin’s choice of material and the legitimacy of his “nonliteral realism.” The new administrative director, G. G. Aleksandrov, announced that the theater’s task was to fulfill Party directives, that Party directives reflected the demands of the proletariat, and that the proletarian demanded “the kind of art that measures up to the times we are living in.” The art that measured up consisted of the classics (most prominently represented in 1934 by “Ostrovsky, Gogol, and Griboedov among the Russians and Shakespeare, Schiller, Goldoni, and others among the foreigners”) and all the “first-rate” Soviet plays that measured up to the classics. The fact that none—except for Gorky’s—did was not an excuse for not staging them. On the “artistic personality” front, the State New Theater was to continue to produce “striking, theatrical, rhythmic shows based on the creativity of the actors and the use of stage convention,” while combating “inventiveness for the sake of inventiveness” and “elements of eclecticism.”12

  Kaverin responded by saying that nonliteral realism was perfectly compatible with the socialist kind and that “the Art Theater’s anti-theater” would not be allowed onto his stage. The theater briefly considered producing Mikhail Levidov’s A House on Prechistenka (in which, according to Aleksandrov, class enemies provoked “not feelings of compassion, as in Bulgakov’s The Days of the Turbins, but those of hatred”), but it was Karl Gutzkow’s 1847 romantic tragedy, Uriel Acosta, that was going to prove that the State New Theater was capable of combining artistic integrity with financial solvency, striking theatricality with high moral seriousness, and the greatest possible generalizability with enormous inner richness. The plan almost worked: Uriel Acosta premiered in the spring of 1934 and was playing to full houses and getting enthusiastic reviews when, on November 3, 1934, the Central Executive Committee ordered the theater’s eviction from the House of Government. According to Kaverin’
s diary, he reached Stalin’s secretary, A. N. Poskrebyshev by phone several days later. Kaverin’s student, B. G. Golubovsky, offers an account of what happened:

  Kaverin did the impossible: he reached Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s secretary, and said that he was speaking on behalf of the theater’s collective that had been created by the revolution and had always faithfully served the Party’s cause, and that they were all indignant, shocked, and confused by such a devastating decision. Poskrebyshev asked Kaverin to wait on the line and then disappeared for about fifteen minutes. When he returned, he told Fedor Nikolaevich not to hang up and to wait by the phone no matter how long it took. Kaverin and the actors, who had all managed to squeeze into his office, waited. Occasionally someone would replace him for several minutes, holding the receiver until he came rushing back. Finally, Poskrebyshev came on the line: “The order must be carried out. It is a matter of state importance. I am to convey Comrade Stalin’s assurance that you will soon receive a building at least as good as the previous one. That is all.” And the line went dead.13

  They did get a magnificent new building (which had formerly belonged to the newly disbanded Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiles), but soon lost it, too, along with their “State New” name. Kaverin’s hopes for another breakthrough and another new building became focused on Faust, The Merchant of Venice, and a “peak” that was not usually mentioned as part of the Pamirs: The Communist Manifesto. (According to Golubovsky, Kaverin always believed that the real reason for his theater’s expulsion from the House of Government was the rumored existence of an underground passage that began under the stage and ended in the Kremlin.) After the theater’s departure, the building was given over to The First Children’s Movie Theater. In February 1935, the head of the Central Executive Committee’s Housekeeping Department, N. I. Pakhomov (Apt. 204), complained to Enukidze that the theater had not yet removed some of its property stored in the “former church.” But the following October, when the head of the Theater Directorate finally asked to have it back, Pakhomov wrote that “none of the property belonging to the theater remains in the House.”14

  The “New Theater” sign above the facade has been replaced by one saying “First Children’s Movie Theater.”

  At that point, Pakhomov’s Housekeeping Department had other things to worry about. The eviction of the club and the theater, along with several other budget-cutting measures, had resulted in a reduction of House of Government personnel from 831 in October 1934 to 612 in October 1935, but a special Central Executive Committee inspection found the gains to be insufficient or illusory. The cost of maintaining the House of Government exceeded the Moscow norm by 670 percent (6.47 rubles as compared with 0.84 rubles per square meter per month). The main reason, according to the inspection report, was the still unacceptably large staff (one employee for every four residents, including fifty-seven administrators and forty-three plumbers and electricians). Another reason was the profligate spending: most of the savings were revealed to have been “not savings but the difference between actual expenses and those anticipated by inflated plan estimates.” The cafeteria, with eighty-six employees, and the laundry, with ninety-four, were used by the House staff and Housekeeping Department employees, but almost never by the House residents. The quality of service was poor (“low-quality lunches” and “torn linen with rust stains”); the cafeteria, in particular, was a serious financial liability. Also troubling was the large number of cars in the courtyards and the survival of the old Swamp in the form of various affiliated “wooden residential houses that have fallen into disrepair.”15

  One obvious remedy was to increase the supervision, financial discipline, and labor productivity. Another was to improve the quality of personnel. According to a November 4, 1935, joint report by the House commandant, Party committee secretary, and trade union committee chair, the introduction of additional screening for job applicants and repeated purges among current employees had reduced the danger of enemy infiltration. Guards were being recruited “exclusively from the ranks of the Red Army, Red Navy, and border troops, with the goal of maximizing the number of Party members”; their political knowledge and combat readiness were being tested on a regular basis and with “100 percent involvement.” The staff Party organization consisted of sixty-four individuals: forty-five members and nineteen candidate members. In addition to attending regular meetings, all Party members engaged in specialized study: some outside the House (at evening schools for workers, district schools for Soviet work, courses on Marxism-Leninism, the Communist Higher School of Propagandists, and the Communist Higher School for Party Organizers), and the rest, in the locally run reading groups devoted to Party candidate training, general education, and the study of Leninism and Party history. Attendance was kept by group leaders and Party organizers; all reading notes were checked before class; truants were summoned to Party bureau meetings; and stronger students were assigned to weaker ones as tutors. Komsomol activities (for forty-three members) were organized the same way. Non-Party members were reached by means of lunch-break newspaper readings, regular rallies, lectures on Party and government decisions, monthly in-house newspapers, and political education classes. Thirty activists from among the nonworking wives of staff members were involved in running a children’s club, located on the administrative floor. There was a kindergarten for thirty-five children of staff members with its own summer camp, a library with 320 books, and various clubs (including theater, music, sewing, and foreign languages). Over the course of 1935, the trade union committee issued 205 discounted passes to rest homes and organized an unspecified number of picnics and collective trips to theaters and museums. The residents’ maids were to be included in as many of these activities as possible. Twenty-four of them were organized into an activists’ group.16

  It is not known how many of these claims were exaggerated or inaccurate: the Central Executive Committee inspection report did not address staff matters beyond recommending the firing of “no less than 25 percent of service personnel” and the tearing down of “wooden residential houses that have fallen into disrepair.” The report did not specify which houses the inspectors had in mind, but it is likely that some of them were dorms for House staff members. There were three altogether: one, the “Wooden Barrack No. 17,” in the village of Nizhnie Kotly (absorbed into southern Moscow in 1932), and two others right next to the House of Government—the exemplary one reserved for the guards, with its own refrigerator; and, as described in the administrative report, “the dorm at Bersenev Embankment, No. 20, for janitors, porters, and unskilled laborers, with a fluid population of mostly temporary workers, such as janitors, whose numbers grow to 30 in the winter and fall to 16 in the summer. Despite such impermanence, the management has been able to maintain good order and cleanliness. A radio has been installed. The dorm has been painted with oil paint and has a good, cultured appearance. There is a stove for cooking and boiling water.”17

  ■ ■ ■

  The swamp was still there: in the wooden shacks next to the House, the forgotten warehouse inside the former Church of Nicholas the Miracle Worker, the abandoned backstage area (and perhaps an underground passage) inside the former theater, the soon-to-be-evicted Artists’ Cooperative inside the former club, the storage rooms filled with unused “copper pipes” in the basement, and the overcrowded administrative offices on the first floor of Entryway 1.18

  But the most opaque, remote, and vulnerable parts of the House were the residents’ apartments. The House of Government was “transitional” by design: some entryways were more prestigious than others; some apartments were more spacious than others; and some nomenklatura members belonged in some apartments and not in others. Some people who moved into the apartments proved unworthy and had to move out. But what about those who remained? How many of them were unworthy, and how could one tell? Arosev, who kept trying to reassure himself that the new socialist buildings would be defended from hen-and-rooster problems, seemed unable to defend his o
wn two apartments. Comrade Stalin was silent, and no one else seemed to know what to do.

  One of the central tenets of Marxism as a millenarian doctrine was that the key to salvation lay in the sphere of production. One of the central features of Bolshevism as a life-structuring web of institutions was that Soviets were made in school and at work, not at home. The Party committees that supervised every aspect of Soviet life were territorially based (from the district to the republic), but the primary Party cells were in schools and in workplaces. Members of the Party and various auxiliary institutions (from the Octobrists, Pioneers, and Komsomols to the Young Naturalists and Voroshilov Sharpshooters) were inducted, examined, rewarded, and mobilized in school and at work, but not at home. Home life did come up at purge meetings and in connection with admissions and promotions, but only insofar as the person in question admitted certain shortcomings in his or her autobiographical statements or if a neighbor, friend, or relative volunteered a written denunciation. In theory and iconography, family life was an integral part of socialist construction; in practice—including the practice of such self-reflexive Communists as Aron Solts and Nikolai Podvoisky—the family remained autonomous and largely hidden from view. The communal experiments of the 1920s had never altered the Party’s institutional setup, had affected the lives of few families, and had mostly run out of steam by the time the House of Government was built. When Arosev and Lydia Bogacheva suspected their maids of spying on them, they fired them and found new ones without having to explain their actions to anyone. And when inspection committees arrived in the House of Government, they headed for the basement, the cafeteria, and the administrative offices on the first floor, without ever venturing upstairs. Dorm activists might organize room inspections, and schoolteachers might send children’s delegations to the homes of failing students, but the idea of a Party committee visiting Arosev’s apartment in an effort to help him combat hens and roosters was alien to 1930s Bolshevism.