The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  Konstantin Butenko

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  The Central Committee of the Young Communist League (Komsomol) was purged twice. In August 1937, thirty-five members and candidate members were arrested for trying “to corrupt young people politically and morally, especially through alcohol,” and for having become “young ‘old men’” married to “grandes dames.” One of those elected to replace them was the twenty-seven-year-old Serafim Bogachev, who moved into the House of Government with his wife, Lydia, and their newborn daughter, Natasha. Over the course of the next year, Serafim and Lydia got used to the barrenness of their new apartment, bought two new carpets, found a good nanny, and brought both their peasant mothers to help around the house. They still felt out of place, however, and rarely spent any time at home: he worked long hours in the Central Committee; she prepared for college entrance exams and went to volleyball practice. On November 19–22, 1938, Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, and several other Party leaders convened an extraordinary (seventh) plenum of the Komsomol Central Committee and announced that the work of self-cleansing mandated by the Party had not been done; honest young Communists had not been heard; and counterrevolutionary terrorists had not been unmasked. The general secretary of the Komsomol Central Committee, Aleksandr Kosarev (Apt. 209) confessed his errors but claimed that he had “never betrayed the Party and the Soviet people” and that his conscience was clear. His speech was officially characterized as “thoroughly duplicitous and anti-Party.” “Are you really such a political newborn,” asked Zhdanov, “that you didn’t know you were supposed to report to the plenum on everything having to do with the behavior of the Central Committee bureau?” “Perhaps it’s a pattern, and not just mistakes?” asked Stalin. Kosarev could not answer these questions, and neither could Bogachev. An incomplete confession was duplicitous and anti-Party; a complete confession meant unmasking oneself as a wrecker. For Bogachev, not denouncing his patron was duplicitous and anti-Party; denouncing him raised the fatal question of why he had not done it before. As the Central Committee member A. A. Andreev put it, “[Bogachev] is following the rotten non-Bolshevik former leadership of the Komsomol Central Committee in everything. In everything! He has not shown any independence. On the contrary, he has adopted all the negative aspects of Kosarev’s leadership style.”74

  Bogachev was expelled from the Komsomol Central Committee along with Kosarev. He wrote a letter to Stalin. The Central Committee of the Party told him to expect another assignment. He seemed relieved. On November 27, one week after the plenum, he and Lydia walked over to the Shock Worker to see Aleksandr Macheret’s newly released Swamp Soldiers (based on Yuri Olesha’s screenplay about the arrest, imprisonment, and eventual escape of a group of German antifascists). According to Lydia, at some point she realized that Serafim was not watching. She suggested that they go home, but he said it would not be right to walk out before the end. When they got back to their apartment, he asked her to read aloud to him. She read Jack London’s White Fang for a while, and then they went to bed.

  We were asleep. My husband was by the wall, closer to the window, and I was on the outside. I woke up because there were people staring at me. Just standing there staring in total silence. Our little girl was sick at the time, so I had had to get up during the night. But right then I was asleep. I was terrified. I couldn’t speak. I kept rubbing my eyes: “Is this a dream or am I just imagining it?” Then they said: “Who’s that sleeping with you?” And I said: “My husband.” I told them who we were. “Don’t wake him.” They told me to leave the bedroom. But first they asked: “Where are your weapons? Put all your weapons on the table!” They asked him, too, when he woke up. But he was confused and couldn’t figure out what was going on. So he said: “Ask her where the weapons are, I don’t know.” He had some kind of engraved gun, it was a gift. And there was a rifle, but it was back in Kolomna. A hunting one. He liked to hunt. The engraved one was in the trunk. I pulled it out. The trunk was right there. I gave them the gun. But I wasn’t thinking clearly. I couldn’t even talk, let alone scream. I was completely dazed. It was frightening. I was still very young. And he was twenty-seven when we got married, so he must have been twenty-eight at the time.75

  One NKVD agent who stayed behind after the search seemed friendly. “The first thing he said was: ‘Get dressed.’ I was still walking around in my nightshirt. I couldn’t take anything in. I’d catch the first two letters—but not the rest. My mother kept following me around with my robe for me to cover myself with.” A few days later, Lydia, her daughter, and her mother went back to Kolomna, where Lydia got a job as a draftswoman at a factory.76

  On November 17, 1938, two days before the Komsomol plenum, the Politburo had abolished extrajudicial “troikas” and discontinued the mass operations. A week later (two days before Bogachev’s arrest), Ezhov had been fired and replaced by Beria.77

  When Anatoly Granovsky, now sixteen, heard about Ezhov’s dismissal, he went to the NKVD headquarters to ask whether his father’s case might not be reviewed, but was turned away at the door. The next day, he went to Red Square and started pacing up and down in front of the Lenin Mausoleum. When a plainclothes NKVD agent asked him what he was doing, he said that he wanted to be arrested in order to talk to Comrade Beria. He was taken to Lubyanka Prison, beaten, and accused of planning an assassination attempt against the members of the Politburo.78

  27

  THE GOOD PEOPLE

  The House of Government was in turmoil. Residents had been taken away and replaced by new ones, who had been taken away and replaced by even newer ones. Families of arrested residents were concentrated in vacated apartments before being evicted and replaced by other families of other arrested residents. Rooms had been sealed, settled, resealed and resettled. On May 10, 1938, sixty-eight apartments (162 rooms totaling 3,051 square meters) were occupied by families of arrested residents, and 142 rooms (3,077 square meters) had been sealed by the NKVD. The House commandant, V. A. Irbe, had been arrested as an enemy of the people, and so had the head of the Central Executive Committee’s Housekeeping Department, N. I. Pakhomov. An inspection following Pakhomov’s arrest (on May 3, 1938) revealed that the department’s accounts had been systematically falsified, acts of sabotage deliberately ignored, dachas and sanatoria badly mismanaged, Pakhomov’s coconspirators rewarded with watches and automobiles, half the dairy cows in Lenin’s Gorki infected with brucellosis, workers’ barracks transformed into overcrowded hovels, and House of Government apartments filled with people no longer eligible to live there. Top housekeeping officials and rest home directors were dismissed and arrested. About half the House of Government accountants and warehouse workers were replaced. Emelian Ivchenko, the guard who talked the Leningrad port employee, Anna, into marrying him in order to get registered in Moscow, was appointed political supervisor of all House of Government guards. (At about the same time, the Ivchenkos were told that their little boy Vladimir, who had died in 1936 of pneumonia, had actually been murdered by Kremlin hospital doctors.) In the summer of 1938, not long after Pakhomov’s arrest, Ivchenko was put in charge of a large transport of prisoners headed for the labor camps in Kolyma (first by train to Vladivostok and then by boat to Magadan). He stayed on and served as commander of the armed guards in various camps, including Yagodnoe. Ivchenko and his wife had three more sons, one of whom died of meningitis. The surviving children (including the daughter, Elsa) were raised by prisoners who served as nannies and housekeepers.1

  The entire Swamp was in turmoil. According to the Party secretary of the neighboring Red October candy factory, Comrade Konstantinova, “today, when the whole country is seething with indignation, there is still some vermin left that supports the enemy.” The challenge was to annihilate them once and for all. “Our current director, Comrade Shaposhnikova, is full of energy, and she said that she would get rid of all of them, and I gave her my approval that we need to cleanse ourselves. I agreed that all this scum, which has crept into our socialist factory, must b
e driven out, and that our party organization must rally even more around our Party and our leader, Comrade Stalin.” Several months later, Comrade Shaposhnikova was unmasked as an enemy of the people, and Comrade Konstantinova was no longer Party secretary (Shaposhnikova was eventually executed; Konstantinova’s fate is unknown). The Party Committee of the Lenin Municipal District, which governed the Swamp and much of Trans-Moskva, kept up with arrests by means of mass expulsions (including of its own entire leadership) and urgent reappointments. According to the July 31, 1937, report to the district plenum, some of the most dangerous hidden enemies were “people entrusted with conducting political propaganda.” The man sent to explain to the Moscow Metro builders the need for vigilance against enemies turned out to be one himself, and at the nearby fur factory, the speaker reporting “On the Goals and Methods of the Work of Foreign Intelligence Services” was arrested while leaving the podium. The new Party secretary of Red October received no instructions concerning Shaposhnikova’s disappearance and had no idea how to answer the workers’ questions.2

  Emelian Ivchenko

  In some of the area’s schools, teachers and administrators had to devise special policies with regard to the large numbers of students whose parents had been arrested. One proposed solution was to get the children of the enemies of the people involved in volunteer work and to check periodically on their home situation. Most textbooks and teaching guides had to be checked for signs of fascist propaganda smuggled in (often by means of a secret code) by foreign agents posing as school administrators and education theorists. People’s Commissar of Enlightenment Andrei Bubnov, who had once said that the enemies should be “squashed like vile vermin,” was himself arrested on October 17, 1937, and executed nine months later. Over the course of 1937, 526 Moscow school teachers and 23 principals were “released for political reasons.” As the head of the Moscow Department of People’s Education, L. V. Dubrovina, put it in April 1937, “on what grounds, I would like to know, should we allow Rykov’s daughter, who lived with him up to the moment of his arrest, to work as a teacher? We have every reason to believe that she has not distanced herself from him. We cannot employ her just because she has graduated from the A. S. Bubnov Pedagogical Institute.” (After Bubnov’s arrest, the institute was named after Lenin.)3

  News of the public trials of spies and terrorists was reported on the radio, in the newspapers, and at rallies staged in workplaces. During the Radek trial, the first secretary of the Lenin District Party Committee, D. Z. Protopopov, mentioned the case of a sixty-year-old woman who “had a typical woman’s reaction and said with pity that maybe it was not necessary to execute them. But when they asked her if she had read the newspapers yesterday and the day before, and explained the situation to her, she said: ‘If that’s the way it is, I will execute them myself.’” According to a report by the Red October Party secretary, “the rallies in all the shops were conducted with great enthusiasm; everyone was shouting that all these reptiles should be shot. When the workers listened to the radio transmission, there were spontaneous shouts denouncing the scoundrels and demanding their execution.” One woman, who had worked at the factory for twenty years, said: “Why waste bullets on this scum? It would be better to pour acid over them and set them on fire.” (She was told that such punishments were not being used in the Soviet Union.) At a rally of the House of Government employees held at about the same time, one military training instructor said: “I would agree to take a leave of absence, go to the capitalist countries, track Trotsky down, and kill him.” (He was told that this “does not correspond to our Party’s program and that we do not accept individual terror.”)4

  In Koltsov’s absence, the coverage of the Radek trial had been a collective enterprise. By March 1938, Koltsov was back from Spain, ready to set the tone for Pravda’s reporting of the trial of Bukharin’s “Anti-Soviet Rightist-Trotskyite Bloc”:

  When the scoundrels, whom the court language describes as “defendants,” stand up and begin talking about their monstrous crimes—some with the cowering demeanor of penitent sinners, some with the cynical insolence of experienced rogues—one wishes to jump up, scream, bang one’s fist on the desk, and grab those dirty, blood-stained bastards by the throat and finish them off on the spot. But no, one has to sit and listen. Listen and understand. Listen and watch. Listen, watch, and remember this last, frightening ghost of fascism—vanquished, sent back into the darkness of the past, destroyed as it attempted in vain to defeat the Soviet people and to darken the bright sun of the Soviet land.5

  The emphasis, as usual, was on the enemies’ beastliness (“cornered rats,” “brazen predators,” “a pack of bloodhounds,” “monsters in human form”) and the demonic combination common to all scapegoats: omnipotence (the “endless chain of nightmarish bloody crimes unknown to history”) and weakness (of the “perfidious, duplicitous, whiny, and spiteful nonentity”). The wreckers lived underground and, in the tradition shaped by Bukharin and Voronsky, were best described as Dostoevsky’s shadows. Chief among them was Bukharin himself: “a tiny Jesus among sinners” and the “Valdai Virgin in a Rightist-Trotskyite brothel.”6

  In open trials, the blinking, shivering creatures of the night were brought to the surface, exposed to the light, and either extinguished forever or sent back to the netherworld, this time to its well-drained, securely sealed-off part. “Only when you leave the courthouse, dust off the nightmarish web of hideous confessions, and inhale the fresh air of loudly resonant evening Moscow,” wrote Koltsov in Pravda, “can you breathe easily and regain your sense of reality.”7

  Most news of the campaign against anti-Soviet elements was about its carefully scripted public reenactments. The campaign itself was conducted underground and was meant to remain there. Most arrests, searches, and executions took place at night. Family members were not told where their relatives had been taken and had to travel from one prison to another until their parcels were accepted. When the parcels were no longer accepted, they were to conclude that their relative had been transferred or executed. Executions were usually disguised as sentences of “ten years without the right of correspondence.” Places of execution were hidden (and, within Sergei Mironov’s jurisdiction, camouflaged with previously cut turf). The accused were not informed of the “mass operations” or the individual decisions that had led to their arrests. The interrogators were to banish the numbers of the accused from their minds, “while those who cannot must force themselves to do it anyway” (as Sergei Mironov put it). Large-scale deportations, including those of entire ethnic groups, were carried out in secret and remained largely unknown in the loudly resonant Moscow.

  As far as Moscow was concerned, the struggle against spies and terrorists was everywhere at once and nowhere in particular. Everyone was to be incessantly vigilant, but only the officially acknowledged parts of the campaign—purge meetings, exemplary expulsions, show trials—were to be noticed and perhaps commented on. Films and fiction were full of enemies; neighbors’ apartments were full of sealed rooms. As Abulkasim Lakhuti, from Apt. 176, had written in a poem, “The Gardener” (dedicated “To the Leader, Comrade, Stalin”), if young vines are to grow, old trunks must be cut down. Or, as he had written in another poem (“We Will Win”), “why can’t we all be Chekists, when every possible enemy is sowing treason everywhere?” What Lakhuti could not write or talk about was whose four-room apartment in Entryway 9 he and his family had moved into and which of his other neighbors had also been—or still had to be—cut down. As far as Moscow was concerned, enemies were being caught and punished; one’s neighbors vanished tracelessly into the netherworld. Generic spies and terrorists were everywhere; particular names, faces, bodies, stories, nations, people’s commissars, and Civil War heroes had never existed.8

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  The most common reaction to the multiplying disappearances was silence. Even the show trials were rarely commented on. The people in the government part of the House of Government did not seem to doubt the guil
t of the accused or the authenticity of their confessions: they seemed to refrain from mentioning them as a matter of ritual avoidance of the unclean. Only children and very old Old Bolsheviks might ask a question, which no one would consider answering. Even in prison reception rooms, the relatives of the arrested tried, according to Irina Muklevich, “not to talk and not to recognize each other. Hundreds of people would stand in a relatively small room, but it would be quiet and tense. They were all thinking of their own grief, like at a funeral.”9