The House of Government
Page 101
Dima Osinsky (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)
Dima Osinsky (left) and Andrei Sverdlov (right) with friends (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)
Osinsky’s favorite pastime, when Dima’s friends came over, was to conduct them in the singing of “In Chains” and “Martyred by Hard Servitude.” One of Dima’s closest friends and most frequent guests was Yakov Sverdlov’s son, Andrei. Dima and Andrei had grown up as next-door neighbors in the Kremlin and studied together at the Academy. In March 1935, when Dima was twenty-three and Andrei was twenty-four, both had been arrested as part of the “Kremlin affair” investigation (after one of the suspects, D. S. Azbel, had testified that, following a 1930 meeting between Bukharin and some of his youthful supporters, Andrei had said, in Dima’s and Azbel’s presence: “Koba must be bumped off”). Osinsky had written to Stalin vouching for Dima; Bukharin had called Stalin pleading on behalf of Andrei (for his father’s sake). Both had been promptly released.76
On February 2, three weeks before the February–March plenum, Osinsky had mailed his last letter to Anna Mikhailovna Shaternikova (“A.M.”). Their relationship had been deteriorating along with his position within the Party leadership (which had begun to slide after Dima’s arrest in March 1935). The reason, in both cases, was the apparent loss of the original wholeness, the persistent search for the guilty party, and the growing inability to trust words and feelings:
You’re a strange person, A.M, above all, in the sense that we cannot have a single conversation. And the strangest thing is that you don’t understand that this is, in fact, the main reason why things have not worked out between us….
All our conversations invariably turn to how I am guilty before you for one reason or another. But this whole approach is beside the point. Human closeness is based—and can only be based—on mutual affection, on the fact that it (human closeness) brings joy and satisfaction, that people, together, do something positive for each other. This is precisely what has not been working.
Why has it not been working? Probably because both you and I have been badly damaged by adversity. For myself, I can say that, when it comes to personal relations with people, I have become a recluse. I live by myself, slave away at higher mathematics and think mostly about getting through it as quickly as possible (the end is in sight—only a month to a month and a half left), then getting through Hegel, and finally starting to write books again. You, too, have been damaged, by your relationship with me, among other things. But you don’t seem to realize that that is not the only reason, and that much else has contributed to the damage. As a result, you have been taking out all of your bitterness on me and keep presenting me with demands for a reckoning.77
Human closeness—between lovers, as well as among Party comrades—was not a matter of moral accounting. Human closeness was a prerequisite for “insatiable utopia,” which still—twenty years after he had first written to Anna—stood for “tenderness without shame” and “charity without embellishment.” The problem was that twenty years earlier, it had seemed to come naturally, and now it was a matter of duty and, increasingly, guilt and innocence:
I consider mutual help among friends not a duty, but a natural thing. There is really nothing to discuss here, it is perfectly obvious. There is no such thing, nor can there be, as psychological duty, or duty in the realm of emotion, otherwise there is nothing left but boredom and frustration. In fact, the main difference between the old and the new type of marriage is that the former was a constraining duty, whereas the latter is a free union (obviously, accompanied by material obligations associated with the birth of children). But when the latter reverts to the former, it becomes clear that things are not working, and the situation is truly bad.78
The answer was to withdraw. In his personal life, he had become a recluse. In his Party work, he had managed to relinquish most of his administrative duties. “My continued employment in a position for which I feel an irresistible, profound, and ever growing revulsion,” he wrote to Molotov on May 15, 1935, in regard to his job as head of the Main Directory of Statistics, “may have bad consequences not only for me personally, but also for the institutions in which I work.” Molotov gave in, and Osinsky was transferred to the much less demanding and, for him, much more congenial directorship of the Institute of the History of Science and Technology of the Academy of Sciences.79
He could not hide, however, and he did not seem to want to. The “luminous faith” he had described in his 1917 letter to Anna was still there, and the reason he was studying Hegel and higher mathematics was to grasp the inner dialectic of the “insatiable utopia.” He still thought of Soviet construction projects as his own children and tried to raise his children as conscious participants in the great work of construction. In the Central Committee, he voiced and defended his views about agriculture, the car industry, and other subjects that inspired and captivated him. And if Anna wanted to know why he had not broken off their relationship if he thought things were not working (or why he had not really become a recluse), he would give two answers:
First, I kept thinking that things would work out in the end, when things got easier for you; second, because you are a good person, the kind one does not meet often in this world, and so one tries, in spite of oneself, to prolong the relationship in some form.
It is really quite simple. I am not a bad person either; the problem is that I have a very difficult personality. It hasn’t always been difficult—on the contrary, it used to be cheerful, sociable, and lively. But because of the circumstances, it has become difficult and unpleasant—I know it myself. But do bear in mind: your personality is just as bad. You probably weren’t born this way either, but have, in fact, become this way. This is something you would do well to remember. And yet, in spite of this, you are—I am saying this truthfully and sincerely—a decent, interesting person.
And since it is generally natural to want to maintain a relationship with a good, albeit difficult, person, I kept “procrastinating and muddling through,” as you, I suppose, would choose to call it. But if, as we can see now, nothing is working, then, alas, nothing can be done.80
Nothing was working because of their difficult personalities, and their personalities had become difficult because of the times. The times—for unexplained reasons—were bad, and the worst thing about them was that conversations had become impossible.
But as soon as I point that out, you immediately begin to ask: “Whose fault is it?” Why can’t you understand the obvious—that nothing shows more clearly that things are bad, that they’re not working, than that very question? Against this background, every conversation becomes a legal battle—something I prefer not to engage in. In the course of this litigation, I could also argue that it’s your fault, but I don’t want to, and I’m not going to because that’s not the point, and who needs it anyway. So should I try to argue that it’s not my fault? I don’t want to do that either because it would mean going back to the old, boring, “it’s-your-duty” routine. The only thing left is to stop talking altogether.81
The letter ended with a plea to Anna not to return the money he had given her for her Marxist-Leninist education:
First become a professor of philosophy and then you can return it. And even then, there’s no need. I have always felt that any money that leaves my hands is no longer mine; I live day to day; I have no use for any kind of savings, reserves, or accumulation: I am truly a Communist.
I suppose that is all. I wish you all the best possible.
25
THE VALLEY OF THE DEAD
The search for enemies started at the top and spread outward, from the former leaders of the world revolution to vaguely defined social and ethnic categories consisting of anonymous, interchangeable individuals. After the February–March plenum of 1937, the people’s commissars were given one month to draw up detailed plans for the “liquidation of the consequences of the destructive work of saboteurs, spies, and wreckers.” The people’s commissar of external trade (and Arose
v’s former commander, from Apt. 237), Arkady Rozengolts, needed more time to “carefully consider and study the proposals concerning measures aimed at the unmasking and prevention of espionage activities.” The people’s commissar of internal trade (and Natalia Sats’s husband, from Apt. 159), Izrail Veitser, found that the enemies of the people were responsible for shortages and lines for bread, sugar, and salt. The chairman of the Central Union of Consumer Cooperatives (and Solts’s former son-in-law, from Apt. 54), Isaak Zelensky, discovered that the cooperatives he presided over had been causing supply problems and cheating customers in grocery stores. There was no longer such a thing as a mistake, accident, or natural disaster. According to the campaign’s logic, any deviation from virtue—not only in human thought and deed, but in the world at large—was the result of deliberate sabotage by well-organized agents of evil.
It was the logic of magic; the logic of “traditional societies,” in which misfortune is attributed to spirits or witches; the logic of all witch hunts, which return to tradition by promoting healing through acts of scapegoat sacrifice. Forces of darkness are, by definition, legion, and the darker the darkness and greater the fear, the more numerous, dangerous, and ubiquitous they are. As one of the principal promoters of the American ritual-abuse panic of the 1980s, the psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder, put it, “any position of societal power or influence should be seen as a target of infiltration.” All such infiltrators are connected to each other in what another prominent ritual-abuse doctor compared to a “communist cell structure.” In seventeenth-century Bamberg, the witches who had infiltrated every street and institution had the same structure. In April 1937, when the struggle against the consequences of the destructive work of saboteurs, spies, and wreckers was just beginning to gather strength, the director of the Lenin Museum and Kerzhentsev’s deputy in the Committee for the Arts, Naum Rabichev, wrote a programmatic article about the persistence of evil. “All mixed together in one dirty, bloody pile are the counterrevolutionary dregs of the Trotskyites, Rightists, SRs, professional spies, White Guardists, and fugitive kulaks. This frenzied gang of capital’s mercenaries tries to penetrate the most important, the most sensitive parts of the state organism of the Soviet land in order to spy, harm, and soil.” Rabichev (Zaidenshner) lived in Apt. 417 with his wife (the Party secretary of the Izvestia Publishing House), his mother (whom he had forbade to teach his son German because of her Yiddish accent), his son, Vladimir (who had been “difficult” until his friends persuaded him of the value of formal education), and their maid. He had six fingers on his left hand.1
The Bamberg witches had served the she-devil and her associates. The Soviet wreckers worked for foreign intelligence services. “Their masters have given them the assignment to hide until the hour of the decisive battle,” wrote Rabichev. “Every so often, the fascist masters check on their hirelings’ whereabouts and test their ability to harm by ordering them to carry out exploratory acts of sabotage, wrecking, and murder, so that, undetected, they can continue to remain in hiding until the hour of decisive battle.” Accordingly, the main targets of the police investigations were foreigners, especially Poles, Germans, and Japanese, as well as all Soviet citizens who had spent time abroad, had ethnic links to foreign countries, or had reasons to harbor resentments against the Soviet order. By the time of the Central Committee Plenum of June 23–29, Ezhov had uncovered an enormous spy network that had been operating in several regional Party organizations and People’s Commissariats (including his own) and culminated in the “Center of Centers,” run by Rykov, Bukharin, and other former oppositionists.
By then, Rykov, who had been in prison for four months, had begun to name names. New arrests led to new confessions and more arrests. Stalin regularly read the interrogation transcripts sent to him by Ezhov and suggested new lines of investigation. Ezhov complied with Stalin’s requests and produced new suspects and new evidence. Stalin circulated some of the interrogation transcripts among the Central Committee members, including those accused of treason. On June 17, the people’s commissar of health and former head of the Kolkhoz Center, Grigory Kaminsky (Apt. 225), wrote to Stalin dismissing new testimony against him and describing the suspicious behavior of the deputy commissar of health of the Russian Federation, Valentin Kangelari (Apt. 141). Kangelari was arrested on June 17. On June 25, Stalin circled Kaminsky’s name (along with Khalatov’s and Zelensky’s) in the text of the interrogation of the deputy commissar of communications, Ivan Zhukov (who, at the February–March plenum, had called for the speedy execution of his former boss, Rykov). On the same day, Kaminsky spoke at the plenum, accusing Beria and Budenny. Later that day, Kaminsky was arrested. Khalatov and Zelensky were also arrested (but Beria and Budenny were not). By the end of the summer, most of the participants in the February–March Central Committee plenum had been jailed.2
The fate of arrested high officials was decided by Stalin and his closest associates. The NKVD prepared lists of those to be sentenced, dividing them into Category 1 (execution), Category 2 (ten years in prison), and Category 3 (five to eight years in prison). Category 3 disappeared after July 1937; Category 2 appeared infrequently. The lists were signed by a handful of Politburo members (who might move some names from one category to another, cross them out altogether, or make marginal comments or recommendations), returned to the NKVD, and then sent down to the Supreme Court’s Military Collegium, which staged five-to-ten-minute individual trials and issued formal sentences. This procedure had been pioneered in the fall of 1936, when 585 people were condemned as a single list in the wake of the Zinoviev trial, but it did not become a regular sentencing method until the opening day of the February–March plenum, when 479 people, including Aleksandr Tivel-Levit, Radek’s deputy in the Central Committee’s International Information Bureau and the official Comintern historian, were marked for execution. Altogether, in 1936–38, 43,768 individuals organized into 383 lists were sentenced in this fashion, most of them to death. Of these lists, 372 were signed by Molotov, 357 by Stalin, 188 by Kaganovich, 185 by Voroshilov, 176 by Zhdanov, 8 by Mikoyan, and 5 by Kosior. Kosior himself was executed in February 1939, when the lists had been mostly discontinued.
The chairman of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court, Vasily Ulrikh, did not live in the House of Government, but he knew many of the people he formally sentenced. His former wife’s sister, Marta (Matla) Dimanshtein, an Old Bolshevik and chief editor of Moscow’s Radio Committee, lived in Apt. 279, next door to the Podvoiskys, with her two children and maid. Her former husband, Semen Dimanshtein, had served as chairman of the Central Committee’s Nationalities Section, director of the Institute of Nationalities, and head of the Committee for the Settlement of Toiling Jews on the Land. Both couples had separated in the 1920s but remained close and saw each other regularly. Semen was arrested on February 21, 1938, included in the “List of Individuals to Be Tried by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court” (313 names, all Category 1) by the head of the NKVD’s First Special Section, Isaak Shapiro; approved for execution by Stalin and Molotov on August 20, 1938; sentenced by Ulrikh’s Collegium on August 25, 1938; and shot on the same day.3
■ ■ ■
Sergei Mironov (Korol) had taken up his new job as head of the NKVD Directorate of West Siberia in late December 1936, two months after Frinovsky’s appointment as Ezhov’s deputy. He and Agnessa were accompanied by her sister Elena, her nephew Boria (Elena’s son), and her niece Agulia (her brother’s daughter), whom they had adopted and were raising as their own. They moved into what Agnessa described as the former governor-general’s mansion. Their first visit was to West Siberian Party Secretary Robert Eikhe.
And now, picture this: Siberia, dead of winter, minus forty, and forest all around—spruces, pines, and larches. It’s the middle of nowhere, the taiga, and suddenly, in the midst of all this cold and snow, a clearing, a gate, and behind it, glittering with lights from top to bottom—a palace!
We mount the stairs, are met by the doorman, who bows
respectfully and opens the door for us, and then dive straight from the cold into tropical warmth. The “lackeys”—I beg your pardon—the “attendants” help us take off our coats, and it’s warm, as warm as summer. We are in a huge, brightly lit antechamber. Before us is a staircase covered with soft carpet; on the left and right of each stair are vases of fresh blooming lilies. I had never seen such luxury before! Even our governor’s mansion could not compare.
We walk into the hall. The walls are covered in reddish-brown silk, and then there are drapes and a table … Just like in a fairytale!