The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  I am shaken to the very core by the tragic absurdity of what is going on. After thirty years in the Party, and despite my most sincere devotion to it and so much work done (I have done some good things, after all), I am about to be added (and am already being added) to the enemy list. And what enemies they are! To end my biological life is to commit a political crime. Life after political death is not life. It is a complete dead end, unless the Central Committee exonerates me. I know how difficult it is to trust someone after the stinking, bloody abyss that opened up at the trial, when humans stopped being human. But here, too, there is a limit: not all former oppositionists are double-dealers.

  I am writing to you, comrades, while I still have some emotional strength left. Do not cross the line in your distrust! And—please—do not drag out the case of the defendant Nikolai Bukharin. Right now, my life is a terrible, deadly torment; I cannot bear the fact that even passers-by are afraid of me—especially since I am not guilty.

  It is excellent that the scoundrels were shot. It cleared the air immediately. The trial will have tremendous international importance. It will drive an ash stake through the corpse of a bloodstained peacock whose arrogance has led him into the fascist secret police. In fact, we tend to underestimate its international importance, it seems to me. In general, it is good to be alive, but not in my sitation now. In 1928–9 I was criminally foolish, not realizing the consequences of my mistakes or the high price I would have to pay.

  My best to you all. Remember that there are people who have truly left their past sins behind and whose whole heart (while it still beats) and soul will always be with you, no matter what happens.12

  On August 31, he wrote a separate letter to People’s Commissar of Defense Voroshilov, asking whether he and the others truly believed that he had been insincere in what he had written about Kirov. He was addressing the Politburo, and ultimately the Party as a whole (and using the second-person plural):

  Nikolai Bukharin meeting with shock workers during a mountaneering trip to the Caucasus

  You must face the question honestly. If I was insincere, I should be arrested and destroyed immediately, for such scoundrels must not be tolerated.

  If you think I was insincere, but leave me at large, then you are cowards, unworthy of respect.

  But if you yourselves do not believe the lies told by that cynical murderer, vilest of human beings, and human carrion Kamenev, then why do you allow resolutions (like the one in Kiev), where it is stated that I “knew” about the-devil-knows-what?

  What, then, is the point of the investigation, the legality, and so on?13

  The problem was that the point of the investigation and revolutionary legality was to determine whether he was sincere. And the only way for him to prove that he was sincere was to keep saying that he was. As his friend Tomsky had put it at the Sixteenth Party Congress in 1930, the penitents had nothing but words, and words, according to some comrades, were meaningless. “Repent, repent without end, do nothing but repent.” The Central Committee notice on Tomsky’s suicide, published in Pravda on August 23, 1936, stated that he had killed himself, “having become ensnared in his relationships with the counterrevolutionary Trotskyite-Zinovievist terrorists.” Bukharin did not want to commit suicide. His strategy was to produce more words: words addressed to the Party leadership as a whole and to particular individuals who were both Party leaders and intimate friends. The second half of his letter to Voroshilov is in the intimate—second-person singular—key:

  It was good to be flying above the clouds the other day: the minus 8 degree (Celsius) temperature, the crystal clarity, the air of serene majesty.

  Perhaps what I wrote to you made no sense. Please don’t be angry with me. In this climate, it might be unpleasant for you to receive a letter from me—God knows, anything is possible.

  But, “just in case,” I assure you (as someone who has always been like a friend to me): your conscience can be completely clear; I have never let you down by betraying your trust in me; I truly am not guilty of anything, and sooner or later it will become clear, no matter how hard some people are trying to sully my name….

  Take my advice: read Romain Rolland’s plays about the French Revolution some day.

  Forgive me for such a confused letter. I have thousands of thoughts galloping like crazed horses, and no strong reins to hold them back.

  I embace you, for I am pure.

  Nikolai Bukharin

  31 August, 1936.14

  Three days later, the letter was returned.

  To Comrade Bukharin:

  I am returning your letter, in which you allowed yourself vile attacks against the Party leadership. If by writing this letter you wanted to convince me of your total innocence, you have convinced me of one thing only: that I should stay away from you irrespective of the outcome of the investigation into your case. If you do not retract in writing the foul epithets you directed at the Party leadership, I will also consider you a scoundrel.

  K. Voroshilov

  3 September, 1936

  Bukharin wrote back immediately.

  To Comrade Voroshilov:

  I have received your terrible letter.

  My letter ended with “embrace.”

  Yours ends with “scoundrel.”

  What can I possibly write after that?

  But I would like to clear up one political misunderstanding.

  My letter was a personal one (something I now deeply regret). Tormented and feeling persecuted, I simply wrote to a generous human being. I was losing my mind at the thought that someone might actually believe in my guilt.15

  Bukharin made the same mistake that Osinsky had made in January 1928, when he attempted to distinguish between Stalin the person and Stalin the Party leader. Party leadership—and Party membership, in general—was not a job one could come home from.

  Less than a week later, on September 8, Bukharin was summoned to the Central Committee building to participate in a direct confrontation with his childhood friend (and the father of his rival for the hand of Anna Larina), Grigory Sokolnikov. Sokolnikov had recently been arrested and was now claiming that the Rightists might have had secret dealings with Kamenev and Zinoviev. Kaganovich, who was present at the confrontation, wrote to Stalin (who was in Sochi): “After Sokolnikov’s departure, Bukharin shed a few tears and kept asking to be believed. I got the impression that even if they did not have a direct organizational connection to the Trotskyi-Zinoviev Bloc, they knew about Trotskyite activities in 1932–33, and possibly later…. In any case, it is necessary to keep looking for a Rightist underground organization. It definitely exists. It seems to me that the role of Rykov, Bukharin, and Tomsky is yet to be revealed.”16

  In the meantime, the prosecutor general’s office announced that there was not enough evidence to proceed with the investigation of Rykov and Bukharin. There was no mention of the Radek investigation. According to Anna Larina, Radek called Bukharin and asked for a meeting (they were dacha neighbors). Bukharin refused, but Radek came anyway, assured Bukharin of his innocence, and asked him to write to Stalin in his behalf. “Before leaving, he said again: ‘Nikolai, please believe me! Whatever happens, I am not guilty of anything!’ Karl Berngardovich spoke with great emotion. He walked up to N. I. [Bukharin], said goodbye, kissed him on the forehead, and left the room.” Several days later Bukharin wrote to Stalin:

  Radek’s wife rushed in to say that he had been arrested. I implore you, on his and my behalf, to become involved. She asked me to tell you that Radek is willing to shed all his blood to the last drop for our country.

  I am also stunned by this unexpected development and, despite all the “buts,” my excessive trust in people, and my past mistakes in this regard, my Party conscience obliges me to say that my own impressions of Radek (on the big issues, not the minor ones) are only positive. I may be mistaken. But all the inner voices of my soul tell me that it is my duty to write to you about this. What a terrible business!17

  The guarantors
of Radek’s sincerity were the admittedly unreliable inner voices of Bukharin’s soul. The only guarantor of Bukharin’s own sincerity was Stalin, who was both “the personal embodiment of the mind and will of the Party” (as Bukharin had said at the Seventeenth Party Congress) and an old friend nicknamed Koba (as Bukharin kept stressing in his letters). “Only you can cure me,” he wrote to Stalin on September 24. “I did not ask you to receive me before the end of the investigation because I thought it would be politically awkward for you. But now I am asking you with my whole being. Do not refuse me. Interrogate me, turn my skin inside out, but dot the ‘i’ in such a way that no one will ever dare kick me and poison my existence, thereby driving me to the madhouse.”18

  The Stalin/Koba distinction was based on the Lenin/Ulianov and Lenin/Ilich pairings that Bukharin had helped formulate. In Koltsov’s version, there was Ulianov, “who took care of those around him and was as nurturing as a father, as tender as a brother, and as simple and cheerful as a friend,” and then there was Lenin, “who caused unprecedented trouble to the Planet Earth and stood at the head of history’s most terrible, most devastatingly bloody struggle against oppression, ignorance, backwardness, and superstition.” Over time, “Ilich” had replaced “Ulianov” as Lenin’s human incarnation, but the two-in-one doctrine remained. Both “Lenin” and “Ilich” were public symbols used to name streets, cities, and collective farms, all of them ultimately connected to the mausoleum. According to Koltsov’s summary: “Two faces—and only one man; not a duality but a synthesis.”

  The founder of Bolshevism was a Moses equidistant from God (history) and the people. His successor was much closer to history because history was now much closer to its final fulfillment. After the victory proclaimed at the Seventeenth Party Congress, that victory’s architect (as Radek called him) became wholly indivisible. Nothing could be named after “Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili,” in any combination, and “Koba” (which had never been public) was no longer in use. Since all oppositions disappeared and all enemies became invisible, heresy was replaced by insincerity and the two-in-one leader was replaced by one Comrade Stalin. Only Bukharin kept trying to prove himself to history by appealing to an old personal connection. “Dear Koba,” he wrote on October 19:

  Forgive me once more for daring to write to you. I know how busy you are, as well as what and who you are. But, heaven knows, you are the only one I can write to, as a dear friend, whom I can appeal to, knowing that I won’t get a kick in the teeth for it. In the name of all that is holy, please do not think that I am trying to be familiar with you. I believe I understand your significance better than most people. But I am writing to you the way I used to write to Ilich, as a truly dear person, whom I see even in my dreams, the way I used to see Ilich. It may seem strange, but that’s the way it is…. If only you possessed an instrument that would allow you to see what was going on inside my poor head.19

  On December 4, 1936, Bukharin and Rykov were summoned to a Central Committee plenum devoted in part to their case (the other part concerned the approval of the new constitution, which Bukharin had helped draft). Ezhov made a speech accusing the former Rightists of involvement in terrorist activity. Bukharin maintained his innocence by countering specific claims made by imprisoned oppositionists and appealing to the Central Committee for trust and understanding. Stalin explained the difficulty. “Bukharin has no idea what is happening here. None whatsoever. He does not understand the position he is in, or why the plenum is discussing his case. He does not understand anything. He talks about sincerity and demands trust. Okay then, let’s talk about sincerity and trust.” Kamenev and Zinoviev, said Stalin, had claimed sincerity and then betrayed the Party’s trust. Other former oppositionists had claimed sincerity and then betrayed the Party’s trust. The recently arrested first deputy of the people’s commissar of heavy industry, Georgy Piatakov, had offered to prove his sincerity by personally executing the convicted terrorists, including his own wife, and then betrayed the Party’s trust.

  Nikolai Bukharin

  So you see what a hellish situation we find ourselves in. Just try believing in the sincerity of the former oppositionists after this! We cannot believe what the former oppositionists say even when they volunteer to personally execute their friends.

  … So, that’s the situation we’re in, Comrade Bukharin. (Bukharin: I will never admit to anything—not today, or tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. Noise in the hall.) I am not saying anything about you personally. You may be right—and you may not. But you cannot stand here and complain that people do not trust or have faith in your, Bukharin’s, sincerity. That is old hat. The events of the last two years have demonstrated convincingly that sincerity is a relative concept.20

  Tomsky had been right: words were meaningless. But Tomsky had drawn the wrong conclusion: suicide, according to Stalin, was “a means used by former oppositionists, the Party’s enemies, to confuse the Party, to evade its vigilance, to deceive it one last time by means of suicide and to put it in an awkward position.” Suicide was worse than meaningless: it was proof of insincerity. “I would urge you, Comrade Bukharin, to think about why Tomsky resorted to suicide and left behind a letter saying that he was ‘pure.’ You can see clearly that he was far from being pure. Indeed, if I were clean, then—as a man, a human being, and not a weakling, let alone as a Communist—I would shout at the top of my voice that I was right.”21

  Bukharin kept shouting, but words were meaningless. And so, in the end, were facts. Bukharin’s and Rykov’s attempts to point to contradictions and absurdities in the accusations were dismissed by their Central Committee comrades as irrelevant. What mattered was not whether they had done or said certain things; what mattered was that they had betrayed the Party once before and were, therefore, likely to do it again. And if they were likely to do it, they probably had. And the more loudly Bukharin shouted, the more entangled he seemed to become. What was the most important task on the eve of the last war? To make sure (as he admitted in his speech at the plenum) “that all the Party members from top to bottom become imbued with a sense of vigilance and help the appropriate services exterminate the scum that engages in acts of sabotage and so on.” Where was the scum to be found? Among the nine targets of “concentrated violence” that he had identified sixteen years ago plus those former oppositionists who had turned out to be scum. Could Kamenev and Zinoviev be trusted? No, they could not (their execution had “cleared the air”). Could Bukharin be trusted?22

  This question was obviously important to Bukharin and possibly interesting to Koba, but it was irrelevant to history and to Comrade Stalin. As Bukharin wrote in his letter to Voroshilov, “it sometimes happens in history that remarkable people and excellent politicians make fateful mistakes in ‘particular cases’: what I will become is a mathematical coefficient of your particular mistake. Sub specie historiae (from the point of view of history), this is a trifle, a mere literary detail.” The general principle was shared by all; whether Bukharin’s particular case was a mistake remained an open question. The plenum resolved “to accept Comrade Stalin’s suggestion to consider the case of Rykov and Bukharin unfinished, continue the investigation, and postpone the solution until the next Central Committee plenum.”23

  ■ ■ ■

  The Rykovs—Rykov himself; his wife, Nina Semenovna Marshak (formerly married to Piatnitsky); their twenty-year-old daughter Natalia, who taught literature at the Border Guard Academy; and their companion of many years, Glikeria Flegontovna Rodiukova, or “Lusha” (a native of Narym, where they had been in exile when Natalia was born)—were told to move from the Kremlin to the House of Government. They moved into Apt. 18, which had been vacant since Radek’s arrest (Radek and Gronsky had recently exchanged apartments: Gronsky had moved to the eleventh floor, and Radek, who did not need as much room, had moved down to the tenth, next to Kuusinen). It had been exactly ten years since Rykov formed the Commission for the Construction of the House of the Central Executive Committee and the
Council of People’s Commissars (of which he was then chairman) and appointed Boris Iofan as head architect. According to Natalia, the only people who visited them in the House of Government were Nina Semenovna’s sister and one of Rykov’s nieces. The near-complete isolation, she wrote, “broke Rykov morally.” “He became withdrawn, stopped talking, ate almost nothing, and paced silently from one corner of the room to the other. Or he lay in bed for hours, thinking just as intensely. Strange as it may seem, he smoked less than usual during those days. He seemed almost to forget about that old habit of his. He had aged a great deal, his hair had thinned and was always disheveled looking, and his face was haggard with dark bluish circles under his eyes. I don’t think he ever slept. He never talked. He just kept thinking and thinking.”24

  Aleksei Rykov and Nina Marshak

  Bukharin, Anna Larina, their son Yuri, Bukharin’s father, Ivan Gavrilovich, and Bukharin’s disabled first wife, Nadezhda Mikhailovna Lukina, all continued to live in Stalin’s old apartment in the Kremlin. (They had switched apartments at Stalin’s request after the suicide of his wife.) According to Larina,

  The furniture in our room was more than modest: two beds with a bedside table between them, a rickety couch with springs showing through the dirty upholstery, and a small table. A dark gray radio speaker was hanging on the wall. N.I. liked this room because it had a sink with a faucet and, next to it, a door leading into the toilet. So N.I. installed himself in this room and rarely left it….

  He became isolated even within the family. He did not want his father to come in and see him suffering. “Go away, Pops,” he would say in a weak voice. Once Nadezhda Mikhailovna literally crawled in to see the latest testimony and then barely made it back to her bed, with my help.