The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  One reason was the unquestioned centrality of the workplace in the teachings of the Party; the other was the fact that, in the mid-1930s, no one seemed to know what a good Communist home—or even a good Communist—looked like. No one talked about Bolshevik baptisms or weddings anymore, and no one knew whether curtains and tablecloths represented “a good, cultured appearance” or the “perennial and loathsome forms of life.” Bolshevik theory seemed to assume that heroic tall buildings (the base) would produce heroic apartment residents (the superstructure). The Bolshevik family was subjected to much less pastoral guidance and communal surveillance than most of its Christian counterparts (particularly the Puritans, whom the Bolsheviks tried to imitate in the matter of efficiency, “love of responsibility,” and “sense of time”). The only Party, Komsomol, “mass-cultural,” and “mass-political” work conducted in the House of Government was conducted by—and for—the staff members who worked there. The only self-organizing done by the residents as residents was done by the housewives concerned with the state of the courtyards or the work of the kindergarten. The women’s volunteer movement was probably a good thing (especially after the movement’s first nationwide congress in May 1936, at which Sofia Butenko, the wife of the director of the Kuznetsk Steel Plant and a part-time resident in the House of Government, Apt. 141, delivered one of the central speeches), but could Arosev be sure that it did not belong to the hen-and-rooster category? And could Sofia Butenko be sure? Her own efforts to make the Kuznetsk Engineers’ Club “cozy” and to encourage young workers to wear suits focused on her husband’s steel mill, not either of the houses in which she lived.19

  Meanwhile, the House of Government (where she lived whenever she was in Moscow on one of her dressmaking expeditions) was filling up with desks, chests, busts, swords, carpets, curtains, portraits, bearskins, lampshades, pillows, tablecloths, forget-me-nots, and the Treasures of World Literature. Chests were swelling up with toys, sheets, pajamas, and ironed handkerchiefs. Residents were swelling up with suits, skirts, scarves, shawls, and black silk dresses. Apartments were swelling up with children, parents, siblings, uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces, nephews, in-laws, children from previous marriages, children of starving or exiled relatives, former spouses, and poor relations. No one listed, counted, or cataloged these people and things; no one checked their histories and associations. The House of Government leaseholders were selected, transferred, and removed according to their place within the government hierarchy; the House of Government staff members were subjected to a “thorough filtration” that included both a month-long background check and month-long initial probation period. The people who lived alongside the Government leaseholders in their apartments and who—as a majority of the House population, made the greatest claims on the House personnel’s labor—remained invisible to Party scrutiny and absent from most discussions on the sharpening of class struggle.

  In the meantime, Osip Piatnitsky and Pavel Alliluev were sharing their apartments with their wives’ fathers, both former priests. Serafim Bogachev and his wife, Lydia, were relying on Serafim’s mother, an illiterate, devoutly Orthodox woman, to help around the house. The Central Committee Women’s Department head’s sister, Maria Shaburova, was also illiterate (but so helpful around the house that the Shaburovs decided not to hire a maid). In Vasily Mikhailov’s apartment, the main helper was his eldest daughter’s godmother, an Orthodox Old Believer who begged Vasily not to take charge of whatever was going to replace the Cathedral of Christ the Savior; the mother-in-law of the head of the Soviet gold industry, Aleksandr Serebrovsky, was so distraught by the demolition of the cathedral that the whole family had to move to the Fifth House of Soviets, from which the hole in the ground could not be seen. Arkady Rozengolts’s mother-in-law, a Russian gentry woman, had his children baptized; A. V. Ozersky’s father-in-law, a former Pale of Settlement shopkeeper, recited Hebrew prayers. Aron Gaister’s mother, who came for a visit from Poland, wore wigs and kept kosher; Solomon Ronin’s father, a former rabbi, had his grandson circumcised; and Gronsky’s brother-in-law, the Siberian poet Pavel Vasiliev, was arrested for “hooliganism and anti-Semitism.” The Smilgas took in the wife of their arrested friend, Aleksandr Ioselevich; Osinsky adopted the son of his arrested brother-in-law, Vladimir Smirnov; and both Agnessa Argiropulo and Sofia Butenko adopted the daughters of their starving sisters.

  Most of the House residents who came from rural areas had relatives who starved during the famine; most of the Jewish residents had relatives abroad; and most of the maids were refugees from collectivization. Inside the apartments’ inner sanctum, the class-alien wives (Arosev’s, Mikhailov’s, Zbarsky’s, Gronsky’s, Kraval’s, Alliluev’s, and Rozengolts’s, among others) were “making progress on the front of bourgeois domesticity”; the nonworking “wives of industrial managers and engineers,” presided over by Sofia Butenko, seemed to be doing the same thing in their husbands’ domains; and the fully employed, Party-minded House wives had “suddenly remembered that they were beautiful women.” The most prominent Soviet wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina (Molotova), was head of the Soviet perfume and cosmetics industry.20

  20

  THE THOUGHT OF DEATH

  The swamp was back. The “juice of the old life” from Arosev’s “Ruined House” had seeped into the house of socialism. But there was no reason for panic—because the Bolsheviks never panicked and because the new steel foundations ensured the essential soundness of life inside the building. As Voronsky wrote in 1934 (while sitting in his study in Apt. 357), it is private property “that makes ‘material things’ suspect and the spirit, sick”:

  It is obvious that, with the disappearance of such property, the body-spirit dualism must lose its absolute character.

  The “transformation” of the flesh and the spirit and a more organic—earthly and not supernatural—connection between them will result not in the resurrection of the dead, as Gogol hoped, but in a fully developed Communist society. Man will see in things not a temptation and not a dangerous snare that breeds greed and self-interest and deadens the human soul, but [Gogol’s] “lovely sensuality” and “our beautiful earth”—not an oppressor, but a friend, which will help him develop his best capabilities ad infinitum.

  Things will once again become the source of joy that they are in Homer’s The Odyssey, but they will be richer, more varied, and not only a source of pleasure but also a means to the resounding victory of man over the elemental forces of nature and over himself.1

  Was this hubris? Was it true, as Adoratsky’s “prayerful” mother wrote to her son, that “people had rejected God, taken over God’s dignity, and become lost in arrogance and corruption”? Voronsky’s answer was consistent with the doctrine of historical materialism. The Communist transformation was not a rejection of God insofar as “God” stood for Eternal Law. In fact, it was Gogol’s modern followers who, in their talk of changing the world by way of moral self-improvement, had rejected Providence in favor of rootless individualism:

  Those who fight for the social transformation of life cannot be, and have never been, indifferent to the human soul. Every revolutionary, and certainly every Marxist revolutionary, every Bolshevik, goes, in the course of his struggle, through a hard school of inner reforging, sometimes agonizing and always very intense. He has his own “spiritual work” to do, but he cultivates in himself traits that are very different from—indeed, the opposite of, those of a Christian ascetic. In any case, it can never be said about a Marxist revolutionary that he is indifferent to his inner enlightenment. What makes him different from Gogol’s followers is not an indifference to spiritual work, but his conception of that work, a conception that rests on the conviction that man transforms the outside world and himself not arbitrarily, but in obedience to certain laws that guide that transformation.2

  Voronsky’s answer, in other words, was consistent with what he had learned in the seminary and what both Gogol and Adoratsky’s mother believed to be true. Human salvation depended on the m
arriage of predestination and free will—or, in Voronsky’s terms, of “historical inevitability” and conscious human action, both social and spiritual. The difference between Bolshevik and Christian spiritual work was not apparent (the emphasis on violence was neither exceptional by apocalyptic standards nor central to the 1934 Bolshevik self-portrait), and the final goal—the aligning of one’s thoughts and desires with eternal truth—was the same. The tools employed in such work included the study of sacred texts, the production of accurate autobiographical statements, full participation in the life of the “collective,” regular purge confessions, and routine self-scrutiny. The latter, known as “psychology,” included injunctions to “work on the self” and perhaps to keep a diary, but no specific instructions or recommended exercises comparable to monastic or Puritan self-monitoring techniques. Arosev described his diary as his “thought laboratory,” “an imperfect sketch of the human soul,” “an attempt to live on after death,” and a “frightening report to oneself and nobody.” His private spiritual work was a series of improvisations. As he wrote on November 12, 1935, “I was looking at Lenin’s portrait, thinking: human life is primarily about psychology. Man is all about psychology. Psychology is our life. But, up until now, psychology has not been able to stand on firm scientific legs, i.e., our understanding of the essence of life is still quite weak. And so, consequently, is our understanding of death.”3

  Death—as self-sacrificial martyrdom or “traumatic nervosis”—had always been central to Bolshevism. After the foundations of the eternal house had been laid, it became a problem. As the Old Bolsheviks entered their fifties, they required better health care and longer stays in hospitals and sanatoria. (In the summer of 1934, the veteran of the Decossakization campaign and high-ranking trade and education official, Iosif Khodorovsky, from Apt. 365, was appointed head of the Kremlin Health and Sanitation Department with a mandate to dramatically expand its budget and range of services. In 1936, the House of Government outpatient clinic, a branch of the Kremlin Department, had about twenty-five employees, including three physicians, three pediatricians, one neurologist, one halftime ophthalmologist, and the famously cheerful otolaryngologist, David Yakovlevich Kuperman, who addressed everyone as “my dear.”) The longer they convalesced, the more they thought about their own mortality and about the central problem of all millenarian movements—that of succession (the transition from sect to church and the legitimacy of infant baptism, or automatic conversion). But the challenge was much greater. Death from torture, wounds, labor, and tears had a clear meaning repeatedly explicated in word and image. But what did it mean to die peacefully in the eternal house?4

  Insofar as Arosev’s diary was his “thought laboratory,” his “thought of thoughts” was “the thought of death.” “It dictates my diary entries. It writes my stories and novels. It rules my imagination. I want to penetrate the mystery of nonbeing. My consciousness is more durable than my body. It endeavors to lift the body up to its own level. But instead of doing this great mental work, I am caught up in the ‘vermicelli strands’ of petty and unnecessary chores.” One way to break free was to live each day as if it would last a lifetime. “If one day equals life, then only those who die on that day are mortal, and everyone else is immortal. That means that deaths are accidents, and most people are immortal.” Another was to concentrate on overcoming the fear of death. “Fear turns man into beast; fearlessness, into God. My mother, who was shot by the Whites on September 18, 1918, ten versts from the town of Spassk, Kazan Province … was terrified of death. Her motto had always been: death is a small word, but knowing how to die is the greatest deed.” She did know, or had learned, when the time came. But the times had changed. Immortality was both closer and farther away.5

  In Yuri Trifonov’s The Disappearance (which remained incomplete at the time of his death in 1981), “Nikolay Grigorievich” is based on his father, Valentin, and “Liza,” on his mother (and his father’s second wife), Evgenia Lurye. “Grandma” is based on Yuri’s own grandmother—his father’s first wife and his mother’s mother.

  Before going to bed, Nikolai Grigorievich stood at the window in his study—it was a moment of quiet, the guests had left, Liza was in the bathroom, Grandma was asleep in her room behind the curtain—and after turning out the light, leaving only the reading lamp by the couch, he looked out over the courtyard, at the thousands of windows, still filled with evening bustle, lit up by orange, yellow, or red lampshades—green ones appeared only rarely—and in one window out of a thousand was a bluish light, and he thought, confusingly, about several things at once. His thoughts formed layers, were made of glass, each one showing through the other: he thought about all the houses he had lived in, beginning with Temernik, Saratov, Yekaterinburg, then in Osypki, in St. Petersburg on the Fourteenth Line, in Moscow in the Metropole, in sleeping compartments, in Helsingfors on Albertsgatan, in Dairen, and God knows where, but nowhere had he been at home, everything had been ephemeral, rushing along somewhere, an eternal sleeping compartment. That feeling had only arisen here, with Liza and the children, of life running out, it had to happen sometime, it was for the sake of that, for the sake of that, after all, that revolutions were made, but suddenly it occurred to him, with immediate and devastating force, that this pyramid of coziness, glowing in the night, this Tower of Babel made of lampshades, was also temporary, was also flying, like dust in the wind—deputy people’s commissars, central board heads, public prosecutors, army commanders, former political prisoners, presidium members, directors, and prize winners, turning out the lights in their rooms and enjoying the darkness, flying off somewhere into an even greater darkness. That’s what occurred to Nikolai Grigorievich for a second just before bedtime, as he stood at the window.6

  ■ ■ ■

  In August 1936, the journal Literaturnyi kritik (Literary critic) printed Andrei Platonov’s short story, “Immortality.” A special editorial introduction (probably written by Platonov’s main supporter on the board, Elena Usievich) explained the unusual decision to publish a work of fiction by arguing that the author had overcome “the grave creative errors” of “Doubting Makar” and “For Future Use,” produced new stories of “great artistic value,” and was being treated unfairly by the literary journals, which refused to publish his work out of “a bureaucratic fear of consequences” masquerading as Bolshevik vigilance. The story’s main character, Emmanuel Semenovich Levin, is a stationmaster at a junction called the Red Line. He hardly ever sleeps or eats, and does not talk much. His wife and daughter live far away, and his soul, scarred by anti-Semitism, had “anticipated its distant death” when he was still a little boy. “He had pushed aside the hands of his wife and friends so he could leave for the station at midnight whenever he felt there was any grief or worry down there. The train cars contained cargo: the flesh, soul, and labor of millions of people living beyond the horizon. He could feel them more strongly than the loyalty of friends or the love of a woman. Love must be the first service and aid in his worry about all the unknown but dear people living beyond the faraway terminals of the tracks running from the Red Line.”7

  He does not spare himself and wants “to live out his life as quickly as possible,” but he is different from a Christian ascetic and from his own former self because he has heard Stalin’s 1935 speech about the “cadres deciding everything,” understood the importance of a complete human being at the gate of the new world, and seen the “hen-and-rooster problems” his workers were suffering from for what they were: “not a dangerous snare,” but a “lovely sensuality” and “our beautiful earth.” “It had become clear to him long ago that, in essence, transport was a simple, straightforward thing. So why did it demand, sometimes, not ordinary, regular work, but anguished effort? The dead or hostile human being—that was the difficulty! That was why you needed to warm another person with your breath constantly and without ceasing and to hold him close, so that he would not die, and so that he would feel his importance and would give back, if onl
y out of shame and gratitude, the warmth of help and comfort he had received in the shape of honest work and honest living.”8

  One day, an employee named Polutorny tells Levin that he needs a “suitable, worthy rooster” for his wife’s special hens. “Levin looked quietly at Polutorny’s face: the things a person could live for—even hens and roosters could feed his soul and even in a backyard chicken coop could his heart find consolation! ‘I understand,’ said Levin quietly. ‘I know a chicken breeder in Izium. He’s a friend of mine…. I’ll give you a note for him, and you can go see him on your day off.’” There is also Polutorny’s wife, who wants to study French; a young clerk and his wife who need a babysitter; a tired worker who needs help with his sleeping schedule; and various other “small accidents and minor injuries” that need attention. “Levin understood that little glitches were major catastrophes that only by chance died in infancy.” He is needed everywhere, by everyone, all the time.9

  Love for others demands self-sacrifice. Levin does not preach asceticism: he practices it quietly because someone must. (He has a maid who worries about his bodily comfort, but she understands his mission and shares his wisdom.) His job is to ensure the salvation of others. “At night, after a short rest, Levin went back to the station. There was nothing dangerous happening, but Levin felt bored at home. He believed that for a transitory, temporary person there was no point in living for himself. The real, future people may already have been born, but he did not count himself among them. He needed to be away from himself day and night in order to understand others…. In order to hear all voices, one has to become almost mute oneself.”10