The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  On the last day of the Kamenev-Zinoviev trial, Arosev was still in the Sosny rest home on the Moskva, writing in his diary:

  In today’s papers we read that Kamenev, Zinoviev, Panaev, Mrachkovsky, Evdokimov, Ter-Vaganian, I. N. Smirnov Reingold, Goltsman, M. Lurye, N. Lurye, Dreitser, Olberg, and Perman-Yurgin have all been sentenced—to be shot.

  M. P. Tomsky shot himself the other day.

  Today Aralov told me that Comrade Piatakov had tried to poison himself, but apparently failed and was taken to the hospital.

  No one is saying anything. Everyone talks as if nothing has happened.

  “Did you go for a swim today?”

  “No, I took a shower.”

  At the other end of the table:

  “Do you play tennis?”

  “Of course.”

  Someone else:

  “Have some half-sour pickles. They’re delicious.”10

  All Arosev himself had to say was that Kamenev and Zinoviev were “demons.” Five months later, on the last day of the Radek trial, he listed the sentences, copied a long excerpt from Feuchtwanger’s Pravda article, and agreed with the author that “only the pen of a great Soviet writer could explain to the people of western Europe the crime and punishment of the accused.” Arosev’s own plan was to write a novel in the form of interrogation transcripts. Only “by means of aesthetic impressions,” he wrote, could one make sense of “the zigzags that have brought people from the revolution to its opposite.” This was true because Arosev was a fiction writer who hoped to represent the age with “the greatest possible generalizability.” It was also true because there was no other way to make sense of the zigzags. One of the accused at the trial was Nikolai Muralov, whom Arosev, at Rozengolts’s request, had appointed commissar of the Moscow Military District on November 2, 1917.11

  Another common reaction was to cleanse one’s life of all connections to the excommunicated. Some House residents—mostly women—burned books and letters, cut faces out of photographs, changed their children’s last names, and avoided contaminated neighbors and relatives. As in most struggles with the onslaught of the unclean, this was both a practical precaution and the extension of ritual silence to new sources of contagion. Some people reduced their possessions to a few things they might need in prison and waited silently for the knock on the door. The former head of the central censorship office, Boris Volin, had a suitcase with warm things stored behind his couch. His wife burned the entire family archive. In the fall of 1937, he had a heart attack and was sent to the Kremlin hospital and then to a sanatorium in Barvikha. When he came back three months later, most of his neighbors and colleagues (he was first deputy of the people’s commissar of enlightenment) had disappeared. The former head of the Bookselling Directorate, David Shvarts, would stay up at night, looking out the window. According to his son, “the window looked out onto the courtyard. Whenever a ‘black raven’ [NKVD car] would enter the courtyard, my father would start getting dressed.”12

  Attempts at self-cleansing and readiness for self-sacrifice were accompanied by vigilance toward others. Two and a half months after Kirov’s murder, when he was still chief censor, Boris Volin issued an order informing local censorship offices that the “expertly camouflaged work of the class enemy” had been detected “on the fine arts front”:

  By means of different combinations of colors, light and shadow, strokes, and contours disguised according to the method of “mysterious drawings,” the enemies are smuggling in counterrevolutionary content.

  The symbolic painting by the artist N. Mikhailov, By Kirov’s Coffin, in which a certain combination of light, shadow, and color represent the outline of a skeleton, has been qualified as a disguised counterrevolutionary act.

  The same has been detected on the tin can labels printed by Supply Technology Publishers (a human head instead of a piece of meat surrounded by beans).…

  In light of the above, I order that:

  All censors working with posters, paintings, labels, photo montages, etc. undertake the most thorough scrutiny possible of such material, not limiting themselves to superficial political meaning and overall artistic value, but considering carefully the entire artwork from all angles (contours, ornament, shadows, etc.), frequently resorting to a magnifying glass.13

  At the height of the campaign against hidden enemies, a magnifying glass was to be directed at everyone, by everyone. On July 27, 1937 (the day Piatnitsky was arrested), Aleksandr Serafimovich received a letter from his old friend, Mirra Gotfrid, asking for the telephone number of the head of the Writers’ Union, V. P. Stavsky. She needed to talk to him about the novella she was translating by the Yiddish writer David Bergelson:

  In the process of work on the translation I uncovered the petit bourgeois nature of the novella and three subsequent meetings were enough to uncover something quite serious about the author it worries me very much I must see Comrade Stavsky believe me I wouldn’t be bothering you for no reason. My observations are serious and this writer must be checked out very carefully. Write to Stavsky and ask him to receive me. You know I wouldn’t be making a fuss over nothing. All the best to you. Thank you for all the good things. Warmest regards to Fekola. Why don’t you do it this way send me Comrade Stavsky’s phone number and drop him a line asking him to listen to what I have to say and telling him that I am observant and don’t accuse people without evidence and that I would consider it a criminal act to keep silent and not report to the Writers’ Union president (who is also a member of the Control Commission now). Help me out. Mirra, 27 July, 1937.14

  Platon Kerzhentsev also felt the need to be vigilant. In early March 1938, he was at home awaiting arrest after his dismissal from the Committee for the Arts and the suicide of his deputy, Naum Rabichev. On the second day of the Anti-Soviet Rightist-Trotskyite trial, which involved three Kremlin doctors accused of murdering Soviet officials, he sent a handwritten note to Molotov, with a copy to Vyshinsky:

  In connection with the charges against D. Pletnev, I consider it necessary to remind you of the circumstances of the death of Comrade Dzerzhinsky.

  After his heart attack he was put in the room next to the meeting room. Several hours later the doctors allowed him to go back to his own apartment. When he got home and bent over his bed, he fell down dead.

  As is well known, after a heart attack the patient is absolutely forbidden to move in any way (especially walking, bending).

  Among the doctors attending to Dzerzhinsky was Pletnev.

  By allowing Dzerzhinsky to go, he killed him….

  As for Kazakov, I can share my personal experience: my second heart attack happened exactly four hours after the very first injection administered by Kazakov.

  Yours, Kerzhentsev, 8 March, 193815

  Three days later, after the accused had been given a chance to tell their stories, Feliks Kon wrote to his lover, Maria Komarova, that their next meeting would have to be postponed because of bad weather, but that he would do his best to make up for it when the time was right. “Will I be able to? Will I? But I’ll try. Okay?” His late love made him “feel alive, feel young again.”16 And so did the spectacle of the Anti-Soviet Rightist-Trotskyite Trial:

  Platon Kerzhentsev

  I miss you in earnest. Each time after I read the newspapers, I come close to losing my mind. Have entire generations struggled and have people died at the gallows, in dungeons, at the barricades, and in the Civil War just so these vermin could betray it all? Bukharin trying to kill Lenin and Stalin, Rozengolts with a prayer-amulet in his pocket ready to personally murder Stalin … Yagoda, Levin.… It’s like a villainy contest among scoundrels. And what about the attempt to poison Ezhov? You read something like this and then spend the rest of the day as if someone had spat into your soul. But still, despite all their scheming and their fascist conspiracies, we continue to advance, and now that Ezhov is in charge, things will get even better. If not for my 74 years, I would have approached Ezhov and volunteered to become his assistant. I w
ould not have wavered. I would have killed those monsters with my own hand. I have lived through many assaults, but I never suspected that such creatures existed. Brrrr!17

  For Efim Shchadenko, the struggle against wreckers was a time of revenge for years of humiliation at the hands of “neurotic degenerates” and other clouds in pants from “the intelligentsia in general and the Jewish intelligentsia in particular.” Most recently, he had lost a protracted feud with his superiors, the commander of the Frunze Military Academy, August Kork (Apt. 389), and Deputy Commissar of Defense Marshal Tukhachevsky (Apt. 221), both former tsarist officers. On August 17, 1936, Kork wrote to Tukhachevsky: “The state of health of my deputy, Comrade Shchadenko, is extremely precarious. It is my impression that, at any moment, Comrade Shchadenko may succumb to a fit of raving madness. I request that Comrade Shchadenko be relieved of his duties at the academy and transferred to the care of doctors without delay.” Tukhachevsky endorsed the request and Shchadenko was dismissed (and spent three and a half months in a hospital). In May 1937, Kork and Tukhachevsky were arrested and, within three weeks, executed. Their close colleague, Deputy People’s Commissar of Defense Yan Gamarnik (Yakov Pudikovich), committed suicide. Shchadenko was sent to Kiev to “liquidate the consequences of wrecking.”18 On July 10, he wrote to an old Civil War comrade:

  We must destroy this treacherous scum without mercy, the way we did during the Civil War, no matter what colors they use to camouflage themselves and no matter how leftist their reptile hissing may sound.

  Death without mercy to the fascist lackeys, spies of the German-Japanese imperialism—such is our response to the scheming and sabotage on the part of the enemies of the people.

  I am, as usual, merciless toward the enemy, hacking at them right and left, annihilating them along with their villainous acts.19

  On November 20, he wrote to another former comrade, reminding him of his (Shchadenko’s) “implacable struggle against the German spy Kork, the vile governor scum Tukhachevsky, Gamarnik and the whole sellout gang of the Trotskyite-Bukharinist bloc.” But his main correspondent, confidante, and fellow socialist realist was his wife, Maria. On June 18, he wrote from Kiev:

  My darling little sun, I miss you so much and worry so much when, exhausted, I finally tear myself away from my work and drag myself to my—quite literally—soldier’s bunk. There is so much work that I cannot leave Headquarters until 2 or 3 in the morning. The wrecker scum spent years fouling things up, and we only have weeks, or a month or two at the most, to not only liquidate all the consequences of sabotage, but to start moving forward. The cowardly scoundrels, undetected by the cheerful carelessness of our “defenders,” sneaked into high positions, corrupted the guards, filled the apparently watchful sentries with the poison of doubt, and hatched an unimaginably villainous plot.

  It is our great fortune that, early on, Stalin himself noticed and felt the danger of the fascist terrorist murderers getting close to him and began to take measures, not giving in to pleas for mercy for Enukidze (that most vile and well-disguised of reptiles), cast him, along with the rest of his gang, out of the Kremlin, recruited new, reliable guards, and, having appointed Comrade Ezhov, that modest and diligent worker, began to untangle the knots and threads of fascist designs for the bloody restoration of capitalism….

  I have a great deal of work, but working is easy because now I feel that I have vast creative freedom to fight with and for the masses, and, most important, that the truly great Stalin can, once again, see the same ability and selflessness that I demonstrated when he saw what I did during the Civil War.

  I embrace and kiss you very tenderly, my darling little sun. Soon, no later than early July, I’ll be in Moscow and then I’ll try to bring my dear family back here with me.20

  In November, he returned to Moscow as deputy people’s commissar of defense in charge of commanding personnel. Meanwhile, Maria herself seems to have succumbed to fits of raving madness. According to Maya Agroskina (Dementieva), who lived in Apt. 17, she once broke into someone’s apartment wearing a nightshirt and wielding a gun. According to Ruslan Gelman, who lived in Apt. 13,

  She lived in a huge apartment that had been converted from two smaller ones, with a few servants. Occasionally, she’d appear on the landing. She made a strong impression. She was a tall, stout woman with a piercing, menacing glare. Think of Surikov’s [sic] painting, Tsarevna Sofia: that’s her portrait, as if she had posed for it herself. Add to that a long black dress girded by a soldier’s leather belt, a kitchen knife stuck into it, and her hand resting on the handle…. It was truly a sight to behold! To amuse herself, she used to leave a chair out on the staircase with a vase full of fruit and a tightly packed lady’s purse with high-denomination bills sticking out. Sometimes that chair would remain there for several days.

  Ilya Repin, Tsarevna Sofia

  Once she came over to our place. The only ones home at the time were me and our maid, a very young girl, who was deathly afraid of her. When I opened the door after the bell rang, the maid ran into the bathroom and locked herself in. The fearsome Tsarina swept past me, this time without her knife, but with a retinue: a young man in semi-military uniform. His job must have been to look after her, but he did not dare contradict or restrain her. She spent a long time looking around our apartment and even measuring some things, talking complete gibberish all the while, and finally left, with a parting threat.21

  ■ ■ ■

  Maria Denisova was trying to do at home what her husband was doing at work. Both had their sanity questioned by the people they tried to expose, and both were being vindicated by the daily exposure of “monsters in human form.”

  After the arrest of her seventeen-year-old son, Igor, Yulia Piatnitskaia began to question her own sanity. “I cannot even admit to myself the kinds of thoughts I am having about him,” she wrote in her diary on February 25, 1938. “For as long as I have a bit of reason and a lot of love, I’ll continue to wait. But I foresee torments terrible for my heart in the coming days.” Her heart’s most terrible torment concerned the soul of her husband, who had been in prison for seven months. “Who is he?” she asked in her diary. “If he is a professional revolutionary—the kind he described in his book, the kind I saw in him for seventeen years, then he was struck by a terrible misfortune.” But what if he was not? What if he actually was a monster in human form?

  It is clear that Piatnitsky has never been a professional revolutionary: he has been a professional scoundrel, a spy or secret agent like Malinovsky. That is why he has always been so grim and withdrawn. In the darkness of his soul, there was nothing to do but wait until he was discovered or managed to escape punishment.

  We, his wife and children, have never been of much importance to him. Now, the question is: who did he serve? And why? He must have started because tailoring was hard and uninteresting, so he got involved in revolutionary work and, somehow, because of his cowardly nature, became a secret agent. Somebody must have discovered something: how he became a traitor or when he became a traitor, then the revolution happened and he realized how good the real struggle for socialism was, but the spies obviously would not let him work and he spent all those years working for the counterrevolution and surrounding himself with people like him. Piatnitsky’s life could have gone like this. But who is he: this one or that one? I don’t know, and it hurts. When I think of this first one, I feel so sorry for him and want to die or to fight for him. When I think of that second one, I feel tainted and disgusted, and I want to live in order to see them all caught and have no pity for them. I could spit in his face and call him a “spy.” Vova must feel the same way.22

  Their twelve-year-old son, Vova (Vladimir), wanted to be a sniper and a border guard. “What a bastard Dad is,” he said once, “to go and ruin all my dreams like that.” On February 25, 1938, he spent all day reading a book about the Red Army. When he finished, he said: “It’s too bad Dad hasn’t been shot, since he’s an enemy of the people.” Yulia was not sure it was true. �
��In the depths of my soul, in my inmost self, I clearly have no feeling of distrust for that man. He cannot possibly be an enemy of the Party he valued above all else in life. He cannot possibly be an enemy of the proletariat, whose interests he served all his life, to the best of his ability. It is still too early to talk about this without emotion. But the time will come, and you will still be certain of this, and your heart will sing because you will know that his thoughts and his heart were pure before the Party.”23

  But then, why had he been arrested? The Party did not make mistakes, and Piatnitsky’s arrest had been authorized by the Party. “I trust Piatnitsky, but I trust Ezhov’s holy work even more. ‘Even the sun can have an eclipse,’ but nothing can eclipse the Sun. The Party is the sun of our lives, and nothing can be dearer than its health, and if sacrifices are required (and if your life has been cut down by accident), find the strength to remain a human being, in spite of everything. My darling little Igor, my sacred little boy, I know you will understand everything if you do not die. You are too young to go through something like this.”24

  The only way to reconcile both sides of her heart was to think of Piatnitsky’s arrest as a necessary sacrifice. This meant that Igor’s arrest must also be a necessary sacrifice. But it was not. It was a redemptive trial: “As for my Igor, I think along with F. [Engels]: ‘Whatever is healthy can withstand a trial by fire. The unhealthy elements we will happily discard.… The day of the great decision, the day of the battle of nations is near, and the victory will be ours.’” She knew that Igor belonged among the chosen and was needed at Armageddon. It was Piatnitsky she was not sure about.25