The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  Transferred back to the Lubyanka in late 1938, Larina first found herself in the same cell with the Central Committee stenographer and, most recently, head of the Political Department of the Northern Sea Route, Valentina Ostroumova (from Apt. 436) and then with Natalia Sats, who “looked like a skinny little girl, but with gray hair” and kept saying: “Where is my Veitser? Surely my Veitser cannot really be dead?”59

  Natalia Sats had spent the summer of 1937 in the Council of People’s Commissars’ sanatorium in Barvikha, outside of Moscow, going on daily boat rides and listening to Stanislavsky read new chapters from his An Actor’s Work on Himself. On August 21, she was scheduled to meet with the recently appointed first deputy chairman of the Committee for the Arts, Naum Rabichev. Her husband had sent his limousine for her (she had her own, but Veitser’s was much better). According to her memoirs, in Rabichev’s waiting room, there was another person (“a modest, dark-haired young man”), but she was invited in first:

  I enter. He meets me at the door and nods toward the chair facing his. Comrade Rabichev is short. He is almost drowning in the large, oversized armchair. The conversation starts very formally: the chairman asks me to report on my theater’s repertoire for the season. I answer eagerly: our plans are well thought through and, I believe, interesting.

  There is a notebook in front of him. His right hand is holding a pencil. But he is not writing anything down. He is looking somewhere beyond me. In an indifferent tone of voice, he forces out another question or two.

  Suddenly, I notice his left hand. It is resting on the desk opposite his right one. It is small and has—six fingers. I am gripped by fear. No, it cannot be. But yes! One, two, three, four, five, six! Six! Can it be? My nerves must be playing tricks on me.

  The chairman has no more questions to ask. He says goodbye.

  “Enjoy the rest of your vacation.”

  In the lobby, she was approached by the dark-haired man, who had been waiting outside. He said he would like to help her clear up some misunderstanding and drove her to the Lubyanka Prison. She was sentenced to five years in a camp for family members of traitors to the motherland. Veitser was arrested two months later.60

  It had been five months since Rabichev published his article about the counterrevolutionary dregs; three weeks since his closest friend, the former head of the Military Political Academy Boris Ippo, was arrested; and a few days since his son Vladimir left for the School of Aviation in Irkutsk (instead of the History Department at Moscow University, because his father felt that he was spoiled and needed some discipline). Rabichev’s main job at the time, as both first deputy chairman of the Committee for the Arts and director of the Lenin Museum, was to prepare the celebrations of the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution and supervise the depiction of Lenin in film and on stage. Things did not go perfectly smoothly, and on January 15, 1938, the committee’s head, Platon Kerzhentsev, was fired and presumed arrested (in part because of an unauthorized appearance of Stalin as an episodic character in N. F. Pogodin’s The Man with the Gun at the Vakhtangov Theater). On January 21, Rabichev made a speech on the occasion of the thirteenth anniversary of Lenin’s death. On January 24, he shot himself in his study in the House of Government. His wife and mother-in-law were at home at the time.61

  Naum Rabichev

  Rykov’s daughter Natalia was, like Anna Larina, first exiled (in her case, to Tomsk) and then arrested. She left the House of Government on September 27, four days after the arrest of Ivan Kuchmin—the prototype for Leonid Leonov’s Aleksei Kurilov in The Road to Ocean. Kuchmin’s family (wife, sister-in-law, and two children) were exiled to Yaroslavl, where they slept in doorways until Kuchmin’s wife, Stefania Arkhipovna, got a job in the provincial education department. Kuchmin’s boss, the director of the Central Administration of Railroad Construction and former director of Berezniki Chemical Works, Mikhail Granovsky, was arrested several days later (soon after the family came back from a trip to Sochi). According to his son, Anatoly, who was fifteen at the time,

  On November 5, 1937, my father returned from his office at about 11 o’clock at night, earlier than he usually did. He had with him our pass cards for attendance at the parades on the seventh as well as an invitation to the celebrations at the Bolshoi Theater commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the Revolution. This was to be on the morrow, which would coincide with my father’s birthday.

  Tired after a hard day’s work, he took a glass of vodka and together with mother, brother Valentin and myself, drank the traditional toast to his birthday which would begin in a few minutes’ time. We saw his birthday in and all went to bed.

  At four o’clock in the morning we were all awakened by a loud knocking on the door of our apartment.62

  After the search was finished and Granovsky was taken away, the family was told to move one floor down to Apt. 416, which contained several other families of recently arrested officials. They moved the next day, amidst Revolution Day festivities. According to Anatoly, his mother, “who had always been beautiful and had always appeared young, now grew suddenly old and pathetic. She sat all day quite still on a hard chair with her hands in her lap and said nothing. There was something terrifying about her. In her silence and immobility, as though hypnotized, she yet gave the impression of something slowly happening, like the cocoon when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. Only, she had been the butterfly first.”63

  Kuchmin’s and Granovsky’s colleague, the head of the Cargo Department of the People’s Commissariat of Transportation and Lazar Kaganovich’s deputy, Semen (“Siunia”) Gaister, from Apt. 98, had been arrested two months earlier. According to his niece, Inna Gaister, “After my father’s arrest, Siunia was fired from his job and expelled from the Party. He sat at home waiting to be arrested. Later, the kids from his courtyard told me that the whole entryway had heard him screaming wildly as he was being dragged down the stairs: ‘Lazar Moiseevich! Lazar Moiseevich, don’t you know what’s happening? Lazar Moiseevich, please help me!’”64

  ■ ■ ■

  Osinsky’s wife and children spent the summer of 1937 on Lake Valdai, fishing, hiking, kayaking, and sleeping in the hayloft of a farmhouse that Osinsky’s sister, Galina, had rented. Valia was fifteen, Rem fourteen, and Svetlana twelve. Twenty-five-year-old Dima was there with his pregnant wife, Dina. Suddenly, to everyone’s surprise, Osinsky showed up, too. “It was a huge event,” wrote Svetlana:

  Valerian Osinsky and Svetlana at Lake Valdai (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

  He brought his work with him, his higher mathematics. Everyone was worried: where was he going to work? Where was he going to sleep? He slept in the hayloft with us and, during the day, surprised everyone by working very little and going for walks with us instead.

  I have a small, amateur photograph of my father and me during our trip to the island, which still had a working monastery at that time. We are sitting with our knees pulled up. I’m barefoot, with my arms around my knees, squinting from the bright sun and looking at the photographer. I’m wearing a hat with a broad brim, bought at the Valdai market. My father, as always in the summer, is dressed all in white, including his shoes. He had very sensitive skin and suffered from eczema. He is also squinting through his pince-nez, his ears protruding slightly. He has a small moustache, and his hands are clasped behind his knees. He doesn’t have his arm around me, and I’m not leaning against him: we are in our own separate worlds. I remember that moment so well! I was happy to be photographed with him, this distant and rather aloof father of mine, who had deigned to go with us to that island and had even chosen to have his picture taken not with Valia, but with me! I felt very grown up and close to him.65

  Soon after they returned to the House of Government, Dima’s wife, Dina, gave birth to a baby boy. They named him Ilya. Svetlana and the two younger boys went back to school. “My father was arrested in the middle of the night on October 14, 1937 (and Dima was taken away with him the same night). The last time I saw him was the evening before
his arrest, when he and my mother came to our room to say good night. I remember asking them to buy me some kind of special knee-high socks like the ones a girl in my school had. My father was sitting by the desk and listening absent-mindedly, with an ironic smile that did not seem to fit the occasion.”66

  The agents entered the apartment using their own key. Svetlana was asleep, but “according to Dina, in the middle of the night my mother, who was sleeping in her own room at the opposite end of the corridor from my father’s study, was awakened by a bright light flooding the hallway. She ran out, half-dressed, to see what was happening. My father was being escorted to the door. ‘Farewell!’ he cried out. ‘Sell the books, sell everything!’” Svetlana woke up after Osinsky and Dima had been taken away.

  The light was on in our room and seemed unusually bright and bare. My brothers were sitting up in their beds, mechanically watching the movements of two or three men, rummaging through our books. “Hush,” my mother said—“lie still. Your father and Dima have been arrested.”—I froze, frightened by the half-understood words, then sat up and started watching the search, too. The agents were very thorough and deliberate, flipping through and shaking out each book and then, with a look of satisfaction, smoothing out any pieces of paper they came across—notes, probably—and stacking them on the desk. These discoveries made them happy. After that they started pulling out our desk drawers and going through everything in them, and then concluded the search by lifting up each of our mattresses from both ends—the head and the foot, without asking us to get up first, in order to see if there was anything hidden underneath. My mother sat impassively, with a look of contempt on her face, and when they left, stood up, turned off the light, and walked out of the room. We lay there silent and still. Then I fell asleep.67

  Three days later, the agents came back for Svetlana’s mother. Several months later, they came back again:

  They needed to get a suit for my father and some books for him. The list of books, both Russian and foreign, was in his handwriting. They looked for what they needed, but couldn’t find everything. They used the phone in our corridor to make a call, and I could hear my father speaking on the other end! He told them where to look for the books. But they still had to ask us for help. Valia and I went into the room where, four months earlier, we had sat on the huge couch next to our father listening to him read Turgenev’s On the Eve, and where one evening I had been timidly examining Doré’s illustrations to the Divine Comedy and been caught at it by my father, but he hadn’t gotten angry (even though we were forbidden to touch his books without permission) and had said that we would read Dante at some point.68

  Valia, Rem, and Svetlana were taken to an orphanage. Dina was exiled to Kharkov. Her son, Ilya, was raised by her mother.

  ■ ■ ■

  Svetlana Osinskaia (right) with Dina and Ilya soon after her parents’ arrest (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

  Osinsky had been a recluse—or thought he had, for certain purposes—since the February–March plenum of 1937, when Postyshev, among others, had forced him to account for his silence. Postyshev had also come under attack at the plenum—for nepotism, high-handedness, and suppression of criticism, but had been given a second chance and a new job as first secretary of the Kuibyshev Provincial Party Committee. (His wife, T. S. Postolovskaia, who had been Ukraine’s chief ideologist during his tenure there, had been expelled from the Party for her part in the suppression of criticism.) In Kuibyshev, he started slowly and was soon visited by the Politburo member A. A. Andreev, who told him to step up the fight against the enemy underground. Postyshev responded by expelling 3,300 people from the Party and disbandeding thirty-five of the sixty-five district Party committees. According to his deputy, “Comrade Postyshev changed his way of doing things. He started going around yelling that there were no decent people left, and that there were lots of enemies.… For two weeks, all the district secretaries and their staffs ran around with magnifying glasses. Comrade Postyshev set the example: he summoned all the district committee representatives to his office, picked up a magnifying glass, and started examining a batch of school notebooks. Later they tore off all the covers of those notebooks because they supposedly found a fascist swastika or some such thing on them. It got to the point where they were finding fascist symbols on cookies, candy, and other items.”69

  In January 1938, Stalin decided to slow down the purge of local Party officials (while intensifying the “mass operations,” over which the newly appointed Party officials were to preside). Postyshev was accused of staging a witch hunt against honest Communists, fired from his job in Kuibyshev, and, according to the official statement, “placed at the disposal of the Central Committee.” According to Postyshev’s son Leonid, who had recently been admitted to the military aviation school in Liubertsy, outside of Moscow (thanks to Voroshilov’s intercession), Postyshev was relieved not to receive a harsher punishment, confident of an appointment to the Party Control Commission, and happy to be back in his House of Government apartment. At the hastily convened Central Committee plenum in mid-January 1938, he apologized for his mistakes but continued to assert, in line with the policy he had been sent to Kuibyshev to enforce, that most local officials were enemies. Taunted and interrupted repeatedly (“Weren’t there any honest people there?”), he pleaded sincerity, but was told that not all sincerity was worthy of trust. When he was given the floor at the end of the discussion, he said:

  I can only say one thing, comrades, and that is that I admit that the speech I made here was fully and totally incorrect and incompatible with the Party spirit. I can’t even understand myself how I could have made that speech. I ask the Central Committee plenum to forgive me. Not only have I never associated with enemies, but I have always fought against enemies. I have always fought against the enemies of the people alongside the Party with all my Bolshevik soul, and I will always fight against the enemies of the people with all my Bolshevik soul. I have made many mistakes. I did not understand them. I may not have understood them completely even now. All I can say is that I have made an incorrect speech incompatible with the Party spirit, and that I ask the Central Committee plenum to forgive me for making it.70

  He was removed from his position as candidate member of the Politburo and replaced by Khrushchev. A month later, the Control Commission found that whereas many of the Party members he had expelled as enemies of the people were actually honest Communists, many of those he had retained as honest Communists were actually enemies of the people. He was removed from the Central Committee and expelled from the Party. A day or two later, when Leonid came home for a visit, his father told him that he and his mother would soon be arrested and that he, Leonid, would also be arrested—and that it was probably a good thing because he would become stronger and wiser as a consequence. The next day, on the night of February 21, a group of NKVD agents came to arrest Postyshev. Several hours later, a different group of NKVD agents came to arrest his wife, T. S. Postolovskaia. Leonid’s two brothers were arrested soon afterward. Leonid went to see a public prosecutor, who told him that he could not help because he, too, would soon be arrested. He was, according to Leonid, shortly thereafter. Leonid himself was not arrested until 1942.71

  Pavel Postyshev and Tatiana Semenovna Postolovskaia

  ■ ■ ■

  Sergei Mironov returned from Mongolia and moved into the House of Government about two weeks after Postyshev’s arrest. One of their new neighbors was their Novosibirsk host, Robert Eikhe, who had since been appointed people’s commissar of agriculture and moved into Apt. 234. There is no evidence that they saw each other socially in the House of Government. On April 29, 1938, about three weeks after Mironov’s arrival, Eikhe and his wife, Evgenia Evseevna Rubtsova, were arrested.

  Another West Siberian top official and Eikhe’s and Mironov’s close collaborator, the director of the Kuznetsk Steel Plant, Konstantin Butenko, moved in at about the same time as Mironov. In early January 1938, he and his wife Sofia, the women’s vol
unteer movement activist, had traveled by train from Stalinsk (Novokuznetsk) to Moscow to attend the session of the Supreme Soviet. (He was thirty-six; she was thirty-three; and both were beneficiaries of worker-and-peasant promotion programs.) Sofia could still remember a certain day of that journey sixty years later:

  We were in the international car…. We had this Novokuznetsk-Moscow express train, and one car was always international…. You know, because that’s where all the officials would be. Right. So there we were in that train, traveling on and on, and then one night somewhere outside of Omsk, or maybe even before Omsk (I’m not sure, but, in any case, it used to take four and a half days because there weren’t any planes back then, or at least not the passenger kind) … so anyway, suddenly, in the middle of the night, there was a knock on the door. My husband was sleeping on the upper bunk, so that means I was below. It was a double…. I opened the door and it was the conductor. “I’m very sorry, but I have an urgent confidential telegram for your husband.” But the train was still going at full speed! I took the piece of paper, unfolded it—and then I quickly turned on the light and woke up my Kostia…. He sat with his feet hanging down and read out loud: “Omsk-Tomsk Railway. International Car” … But above that it says “Top secret.” “To Butenko, director of the Kuznetsk Steel Plant. Butenko, Konstantin Ivanovich. You have been appointed deputy commissar of heavy industry. Cable candidate replacement immediately. Kaganovich.”72

  They were put up in a three-room luxury suite in the recently completed Moscow Hotel in front of the Kremlin while their House of Government apartment (Apt. 141, formerly occupied by the arrested deputy commissar of health of the Russian Federation, Valentin Kangelari) was being cleaned and renovated. In early April, they moved in: Konstantin, Sofia, and Sofia’s niece, Tamara, who had been living with them since the famine of 1932. (Sofia’s family came from the Greek settlement of Styla, near Stalino. Her brother Ivan, a miner, had been arrested in late December, about a week after Ezhov launched the “Greek operation”; her other brother, Nikolai, a collective farmer and Tamara’s father, had been arrested in early January, around the time Konstantin received his new appointment.) The apartment had four rooms. The biggest was made into a study for Konstantin and was furnished with a large desk, a desk chair, a rocking chair, and a couple of wardrobes they had brought with them from Stalinsk. The others became Tamara’s room, a bedroom for Sofia and Konstantin, and a dining room. They had lived there for about a month and a half when Konstantin was arrested. The agents entered quietly in the middle of the night and surrounded the bed before waking him up. During the search, they took Konstantin’s Order of Lenin, but let Sofia keep her Badge of Honor. Several days later, Sofia got a job at a hat factory on Bolshaia Ordynka. She was not used to getting up early and did not have an alarm clock, so the entryway guards, who seemed to have recognized a fellow former peasant, agreed to wake her up every morning by ringing the doorbell. About a month later, Sofia and Tamara were asked to move to a communal apartment on the tenth floor, and were then evicted altogether. Tamara went back to Styla; Sofia found a room in Gorokhovsky Alley and got a job in a medical lab. The Butenkos’ House of Government apartment was taken over by the former head of the Gulag, Matvei Berman, who had recently been appointed people’s commissar of communications.73