The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  Twenty minutes later, someone called on the phone and asked for Mironov. Another twenty minutes later, the same person called again. Two hours later, the doorbell rang. A man wearing white felt boots introduced himself as an employee of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, apologized for the intrusion, and asked where Mironov was. After he left, Kolesnikov said that he knew everyone who worked at the commissariat and that this man was not one of them. When the telephone rang again, it was the Mironovs’ maid asking Agnessa to come back home. When she did, she found several NKVD agents ready to start a search. The man in the white felt boots accused Agnessa of lying about her husband’s whereabouts, demanded her address book, and started calling Mironov’s relatives. Finally, at 2 a.m., someone called to say that Mironov had been found and taken into custody.

  Three weeks later, Agnessa was told to come to the NKVD reception office. From there, she was taken to the main building, where an investigator by the name of Meshik gave her a note from Mironov. The note said: “My darling wife and friend. Only now have I understood the depth of my love for you. I had never realized that it was this strong. Everything will turn out all right, please don’t worry. They’ll sort things out soon and I’ll come back home to you. I kiss you tenderly. Mirosha.”61

  The question that preoccupied Agnessa for the rest of her life was what Mironov had been doing in snowbound Moscow, on a dark and very cold January night, between 5:00 p.m., when he left the Kolesnikovs’ apartment, and 2:00 a.m., when he arrived in his office at the commissariat:

  I learned from the Kolesnikovs’ driver that from their place Mirosha had gone home, and not to the Commissariat. Before reaching the gate, he asked the chauffeur to stop. He got out, thanked the chauffeur, and disappeared from sight.

  I thought a lot about what must have happened. The letter that Meshik gave me to read provided some possible clues.

  He must have gone home first to get the revolver that he kept under his pillow. He knew, despite all my assurances, that this strange call could mean only one thing—arrest. He had resolved a long time ago not to give himself up. But as soon as he entered the courtyard, his experienced eyes must have spotted the secret agents in the entryway, so he walked out into the still bustling streets of a Moscow winter’s evening. He didn’t go to see anyone. If he had, I would have been told. What was he hoping to do? Travel to some unknown destination? Run away? Escape? But could he really escape? Wouldn’t they find him sooner or later? And what about me? And Agulia?

  Should he kill himself some other way, without his Mauser? Throw himself down the stairwell of a tall building or under a bus, or a trolleybus, or a street car?

  There were many ways to end one’s life. And for him, that would have been easier than what lay ahead. He didn’t believe that they would let him go. The list of executed friends and acquaintances that passed before his eyes was too long, all the executed bosses, underlings … Balitskii, who, they said, screamed terribly when he was being led out to be shot; Bliukher, who was shot by Ezhov; Uborevich, who was executed immediately after he was sentenced …

  Should he kill himself? If he did, they would say: aha, you shot yourself, or threw yourself down a stairwell, or under a bus—that means you are guilty, you are an enemy, you know you did something wrong. When Gamarnik killed himself, they denounced him as an “enemy of the people” and arrested his family. The same would happen to Agulia and me if he killed himself.

  And so, trying to save his family, he was prepared to submit to physical and moral torture, and that’s what he’d meant by that sentence, “Only now have I understood the depth of my love for you.”

  What must he have suffered that night before he gave himself up?

  I have thought and thought about that sentence he wrote about his love for me. Did he sacrifice himself for my sake? I don’t mean to say that he didn’t love me. He loved me as much as it was possible for him to love another human being—passionately, fiercely. Of course he loved me! But was that the real reason he did not commit suicide? I don’t think it was the only one. He must have convinced himself that it was the reason, the only reason. But, in fact, he simply loved life too much and couldn’t bring himself to just end it, to do away with himself—so healthy, so full of life and strength—to do away with himself, to take his own life….

  And maybe it also helped that, when I was trying to talk him out of killing himself, I said that even if he was arrested, he could still hope to prove his innocence and have justice prevail. He’d been so lucky all his life, after all. Was he hoping to win this last game, too? The chances were slim, but still, there was a chance.62

  It is not known what Mironov did or thought during those nine hours in snowbound Moscow, or how he understood innocence and justice. He spent a year in prison before being sentenced to death. His sentence was signed by Stalin as part of a list of 346 “active members of a counterrevolutionary, Rightist-Trotskyite, conspiratorial, and espionage organization,” submitted by Beria on the previous day. Also on the list were Redens and Shapiro; Ezhov and his brother, Ivan; Frinovsky, his wife, and his older son; Mironov’s West Siberian troika colleague, Robert Eikhe; Mironov’s deputy in Novosibirsk and later in Mongolia, Mikhail Golubchik; Boris Berman’s brother-in-law and the onetime people’s commissar of internal affairs of Bashkiria, Solomon Bak; and the NKVD official who directed the executions of about three thousand Trotskyites at the “old brick factory” in Vorkuta in the spring of 1934, Efim Kashketin-Skomorovsky. Included on the same list as the administrators of the great purge were Kerzhentsev’s deputy at the Committee for the Arts and director of the Moscow Art Theater, Yakov Boiarsky-Shimshelevich; Bukharin’s first wife (an immobile invalid), Nadezhda Lukina-Bukharina; the former Central Committee stenographer and Anna Larina-Bukharina’s cellmate, Valentina Ostroumova; the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold; the writer Isaak Babel; and the chief chronicler of the February Revolution, October Revolution, and socialist construction, Mikhail Koltsov.63

  Car at the gate of Courtyard No. 1

  PART VI

  THE AFTERLIFE

  29

  THE END OF CHILDHOOD

  When Maksim Vasilievich Zaitsev, chairman of the Information Section of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, and his wife, Vera Vladimirovna Vedeniapina, member of the Presidium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, from Apt. 468, were arrested in the spring of 1938, their twelve-year-old son, Igor Zaitsev, wrote a poem titled “Alone”:

  Nothing made sense to me.

  I wandered, and brooded, and cried,

  I thought of a Yalta pony

  That took me around for a ride.

  I called out for Mom and Dad

  I broke into a sweat

  I bit my lip till it bled,

  I lit up a cigarette.

  I have to go looking for food,

  No one will help me now.

  Will I grow up to be good?

  Can I be good somehow?1

  Vladimir (Vova) Osepian, from Apt. 60, was also twelve when his parents (deputy head of the Red Army’s Political Department, Gaik Aleksandrovich Osepian, and personnel officer in the Political Department at the Commissariat of Transportation, Elizaveta Fadeevna Gevorkian) were arrested. Three years later, in June 1940, he wrote a letter to the commander of the camp where his mother was serving her eight-year sentence as a family member of a traitor to the motherland. His father had been executed (“sentenced to ten years with no right to correspondence”) on September 10, 1937. He had moved in with his mother’s father and changed his last name:

  Igor Zaitsev

  Vova Gevorkian (Osepian) with his parents

  Petition

  It has been three years since I last saw my mother. I have been living with almost complete strangers. It is very hard for me to live without my dear Mommy. I miss her very much. I ask you, I beg you to allow me a visit with my Mommy. She is very sick and I am afraid I may never see her again. I count on your kindness and hope that you will not refuse.
My mother, Elizaveta Fadeevna Gevorkian, receives our letters at the following address: Novo-Sibirsk Province, Tomsk Railroad, Station Yaya, P.O. Box No. 247/13.

  Anxiously awaiting your reply at the

  address Marx Street 20, Apartment 12,

  Vova Gevorkian

  Greetings, Vova Gevorkian

  The resolution across the page read: “Hand to Prisoner Gevorkian. Write a petition requesting a visit.”2

  ■ ■ ■

  Volodia Moroz, the fifteen-year-old son of the former head of the Cheka Investigations Department, Grigory Moroz, gave up trying to be good. After his parents’ arrest, he and his eight-year-old brother, Aleksandr, were sent to Orphanage No. 4 in the village of Annenkovo in Kuznetsk District, Kuibyshev Province. On December 7, 1937, he wrote in his diary:

  Again I feel so miserable and alone. But what can I do? Absolutely nothing. The same thought keeps going through my head, over and over again: “What am I guilty of?”

  Why did they send me here, into this undeserved exile? …

  I thought of writing a letter to Stalin, but then changed my mind: he won’t believe me anyway and won’t understand, even though he’s considered a genius.

  I’ll keep it as a last resort. My only consolations are nature, cigarettes, and books.

  The nature here is really extraordinary. A person from the capital would be amazed by it, while rejecting it as a “pastoral delight.”

  The vast meadows, covered with crystal snow, the small peasant huts, clean and cozy on the inside and unprepossessing on the outside, the river, the forest, and finally, looming over them all, the white stone building of Orphanage No. 4, in which I have the honor to reside—all this is beautiful but at the same time unpleasant as a reminder of my undeserved exile.

  Most of the teachers in the local school were “uncultured and ignorant.” Life at school and in the country at large was being poisoned by “sycophancy, lies, slander, infighting, and other squabbles.”

  But why? Is it because the people are base? No, it’s because a few scoundrels holding all the power in their hands are base.

  If a person who had fallen into a deep sleep twelve years ago were to wake up now, he would be amazed by the changes that had taken place.

  He wouldn’t find the old leaders. Instead, he would see a government of callow fools, who had done nothing for the victory of the revolution, or aged scoundrels, who had sold out their comrades for the sake of their personal well-being. He wouldn’t see the “former” legendary Red Army commanders, the builders and organizers of the revolution, the talented writers, journalists, engineers, artists, theater directors, diplomats, statesmen, etc. Everything is new: the people, the human relations, the contradictions, the country as a whole. Everything has taken on a new appearance. But have things changed for the better? On the surface, yes. In essence, no. Toadies are respected; slanderers are apparently excoriated but in fact feared; and scoundrels are in fashion.

  Thousands of people are unhappy. Thousands of people are badly, dreadfully embittered. This bitterness will burst forth and wash away all this filth. Happiness will triumph!

  Volodia’s style and imagery were influenced by contemporary political rhetoric, but his main inspiration, both stylistic and programmatic, came from the books he had read in the House of Government (and continued to read in the orphanage school). Amid the crystal snow of distant exile, the aesthetic of Soviet happy childhood reasserted itself along familiar golden age lines. When Volodia heard from his brother that three more women from the House had “followed their husbands,” he wrote:

  Insatiable beasts, have you not had enough sacrifices? Go on destroying, robbing, and killing, but remember that the day of reckoning will come. Remember Lermontov:

  The court and justice may condone your crime

  But God’s tribunal stands beyond all time.

  The dread Judge waits, and on his lips, behold

  No smile responds to clink of bribing gold.

  According to Volodia’s diary, the reign of terror had begun the day Kirov was murdered and had now destroyed the state that Lenin had built:

  The whole top layer of the Party and government have been arrested. Meanwhile, their old friends from prerevolutionary prisons and exiles are trying to save themselves by screaming: “Death to the enemy of the people,” “Death to the spies,” etc. And they call this justice!

  It is amazing. A handful of well-fed, fat people are brazenly ruling over a population, 90 percent of whom are unhappy people. Molchalinism and Khlestakovism are flourishing. The facade of general progress is concealing the decline in morality in our country. I feel like crying out:

  How much longer will the Russians

  Be their masters’ mute possessions?

  Men and women,

  Just like cattle,

  How much longer will be sold?3

  Molchalin is the toady from Aleksandr Griboedov’s Woe from Wit (1825); Khlestakov is the braggart from Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General (1836); the poem is by the Decembrist Kondraty Ryleev, who was hanged for attempted regicide in 1826.

  On January 20, 1938, Volodia wrote a letter to his seventeen-year-old brother Samuil (Mulia), who was sharing Apt. 402 in the House of Government with his friend Nikolai Demchenko while working at the nearby Institute of Local History and Museum Studies (inside the “Little Church”):4

  Dear Mulia: When are you finally going to write?!

  I beg you: write and write again! But don’t write anything important in your letter. Remember—absolutely nothing. It’s obvious that they are not giving me your letters. Mulia, as soon as you get this letter, send me some cigarettes. I have nothing to smoke. I have no money. I am completely miserable. Soon I will write such a letter to the NKVD that they will put me away in a safe place. Let them, I’ll be glad of it!!! They want me to become stupid, they want to make sure I won’t be able to fight against evil, which is to say, against them, but that trick is not going to work. The gentlemen from the NKVD have miscalculated. I’ll be fighting, screaming, and sounding the bell! I’ll be talking about their cruelty and direct violence everywhere! I am not afraid of them now! Down with fear!

  Long live the struggle!

  Mulia, write to me, and then write again and again. I am waiting for your letter and parcel.

  Love,

  Vova5

  Samuil never received the letter because he was arrested on the day it was mailed. On February 18, having heard about Samuil’s arrest from a House of Government friend, Volodia wrote to Stalin, describing his parents’ unexplained arrest and his own undeserved exile:

  Imagine my position in the orphanage. I have turned into a kind of misanthrope: I avoid people, see hidden enemies everywhere, have lost all faith in humanity. Why am I lonely? Only because the general intellectual level of the children in the orphanage and at the local school is so much lower than mine. This is not a boast. And the school? The school is so pathetic, and the teachers, with two exceptions, are so mediocre that I do not even feel like attending. I wish to receive as much knowledge as possible, and here I’m not even receiving the bare minimum. How can I be satisfied in such conditions? You may think that I am too effete and sentimental, but that is not at all the case. All I demand is happiness—genuine, lasting happiness. Lenin said: “In the Land of the Soviets, there should be no destitute children; let all young citizens be happy.” But am I happy? No, I am not. So who is happy? You must have heard of the “gilded youth” from the tsarist period. Sad as it sounds, such “gilded youth” exist today, too. They are mostly children of important, esteemed people. These children do not respect anything: they drink, lead dissolute lives, and are rude to others. Most of them are terrible students, although they are given every opportunity to study. They are the ones who are happy! It seems strange, but it’s true. Comrade Stalin, I am sinking farther and farther, falling with dizzying speed into a dark abyss from which there is no escape. Please save me, help me, and don’t let me perish!

&
nbsp; I believe that is everything. I hope you will answer soon and help me.

  I await your response with great anticipation. Vl. Moroz.6

  Two months later he was arrested. At first he denied his guilt, but when the interrogator showed him his letters, he admitted that the arrest of his parents and especially the arrest of his brother had provoked in him the feeling of “hatred toward the Soviet state and the leaders of the Communist Party and Soviet government.” He was found guilty of counterrevolutionary activity, but, as a minor, he could not be formally charged according to article 58–10, part 1, of the criminal code. After a special review by the attorney general’s office, he was sentenced to three years in a labor camp.7

  Volodia Moroz shortly before his parents’ arrest

  A year later, on September 9, 1939, Volodia’s mother, Fanni Lvovna Kreindel, who was being held in the Temnikovsky Camp for Family Members of Traitors to the Motherland, wrote to the new commissar of internal affairs, Lavrenty Beria, that her sons “could not have committed any crimes independently” and that they had probably been arrested as “family members,” in clear violation of Comrade Stalin’s statement that sons should not answer for the crimes of their fathers. “I have been working honestly from an early age and even in the camp I have been, since January 1938, working in my professional capacity, as a pharmacist. I am enduring my imprisonment as a family member courageously, but the fact that my children are suffering at such an early age is depriving me of all strength, and only the hope of your legal intervention and review of my children’s case gives me the strength to endure this suffering, too.”8

  Kreindel’s petition was reviewed by an official of the NKVD’s Special Commission, Captain of State Security Chugunikhin, who found that Samuil had been convicted independently as a member of an anti-Soviet organization and that Volodia had revealed himself to be “viciously hostile toward the leaders of the Communist Party and Soviet government.” On March 25, 1940, Chugunikhin formally rejected Kreindel’s appeal. Neither one of them knew that almost a year earlier, on April 28, 1939, Volodia had died in prison of “tuberculosis of the lungs and intestines.”9