The House of Government
Page 118
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Stalin probably never read Volodia’s letter, but he would hear more about the “gilded youth.” On June 3, 1943, on the Big Stone Bridge, the fourteen-year-old Volodia Shakhurin (the son of the people’s commissar of aviation industry, Aleksei Shakhurin) shot the fifteen-year-old Nina Umanskaia (the daughter of the newly appointed Soviet ambassador to Mexico, Konstantin Umansky) and then shot himself. Nina died on the spot (on the stairs leading to the House of Government). Volodia, who lived on Granovsky Street (the former Fifth House of Soviets) died in the hospital the next day. The police investigation revealed that Volodia had been determined not to allow Nina to follow her father to Mexico; that he had borrowed the gun from Mikoyan’s fifteen-year-old son, Vano, who always carried one to school (as did his brother, the thirteen-year-old Sergo); and that he had been the leader of a secret society that included Leonid Barabanov (the fourteen-year-old son of the head of Mikoyan’s secretariat, Aleksandr Barabanov), Feliks Kirpichnikov (the fourteen-year-old son of the deputy chairman of Gosplan, Petr Kirpichnikov), Artem Khmelnitsky (the fourteen-year-old son of the director of the Exhibition of Military Trophies, Rafail Khmelnitsky), Petr Bakulev (the fifteen-year-old son of Moscow’s surgeon general, Aleksandr Bakulev), Armand Hammer (the nephew of the American “red millionaire” by the same name), Leonid Redens (the fifteen-year-old son of the late Stanislav Redens and Stalin’s sister-in-law, Anna Allilueva), and Sergo Mikoyan.
Unlike Volodia Moroz, whose Byronism had stayed within the romantic mode by evolving from scorn for surrounding mediocrity to a self-sacrificial rebellion against injustice, Volodia Shakhurin had moved toward Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin—and beyond. His dream had been to create a world government that would combine the might and the ruthlessness of the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany. He had called it the Fourth Reich and himself the Reichsführer. His bedside reading had been Nietzsche and Hitler’s Mein Kampf (available in Russian translations to high Party and state officials). The other boys claimed to have been indifferent to his intellectual quest, but they did seem to enjoy the trappings of secrecy and the esoteric reenactment of their fathers’ power and privilege. (They were all students in School No. 175, also attended by Svetlana Molotova, who was the same age, and Svetlana Stalina, who was three years older.) After a five-month investigation, the boys were sentenced to one year of exile “in various cities of Siberia, the Urals, and Central Asia.”10
Volodia Shakhurin
Nina Umanskaia
Anatoly Granovsky (b. 1922), the son of the director of the Berezniki Chemical Plant, Mikhail Granovsky, belonged to an earlier generation of “gilded youth” (which also included Stalin’s son Vasily and adopted son Artem Sergeev). According to his memoirs, he and his friends “danced, flirted with girls, went to the theater, had parties and enjoyed [themselves] tremendously” until November 6, 1937, when his father was arrested. On January 27, 1938, he asked to be arrested, too, in the hope of seeing his father. After almost six months in prison, three severe beatings, several eye-opening conversations with cellmates, and lots of Goethe, Hugo, Balzac, and Tolstoy, he wrote a letter to Beria, pledging his loyalty to the NKVD. On July 20, 1939, he was released in exchange for a formal commitment to serve as a secret agent. His job was to reestablish contact with his old friends from the House of Government and provoke the children of the enemies of the people into revealing their hostility toward the Soviet state.
His first assignments were Igor Peters, the son of the prominent Chekist and Party Control official, Yakov (Jēkabs) Peters, formerly of Apt. 181, and Aleksandr Kulkov, the son of the Party Control and Moscow Party Committee official, Mikhail Kulkov, formerly of Apt. 268. In his memoirs, he describes a sleepless night at the Botkin Hospital, where he was being treated for his prison injuries (a hernia and a damaged cheekbone): “I would have to spy on my friends. And my murdered father, or my imprisoned father, or my tortured father would be a bait to entice their indiscretion.” But did he have a choice? Did he need a choice? “It was still dark as I lay there on my back in the comfortable bed and I knew I must think this thing out. Even when one sees one is trapped one must think. Of course, it was quite logical. It was the most logical thing in the world. I belonged to two conflicting parties, one of which could hurt me while the other could not. It was quite logical that I should be asked to serve the former by betraying the latter. What reason had I to expect sentiment to sway the stronger party one way or the other? None. If I was dejected it meant I was still a child.”11
But he was no longer a child. He was seventeen years old, his father was gone, and he had his helpless mother and two little brothers to look after. And did he really have any friends?
I remembered Butyrki Prison, and the degradation in which we had lived for a year before that. Had anyone helped us then? Bruskin had helped, but Bruskin had gone, liquidated. But what about the others on our side of the fence, had any of them offered help? Roubles and kopeks apart, the help of a hand to lift a heavy cupboard, the help of a visit, of a kind word? No one had helped, only Erik Korkmasov who had posted a letter to my mother. Who were my friends, then? As I lay quietly awake in the dark, I almost smiled to myself with relief. I had no friends. I owed loyalty to none but those who could exact it from me—and to myself.12
Aleksandr Bruskin, the former director of the Cheliabinsk Tractor Plant and people’s commissar of machine tool industry (from Apt. 49), had been a friend of his father’s who had given him a job as a turner’s assistant after his father’s arrest. Erik (Jelal-Erast) Korkmasov, the son of the recently arrested former chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of Dagestan and deputy secretary of the Chamber of Nationalities, Jelal-Ed-Din Korkmasov (from Apt. 401), had been his best friend, whom he had asked to post his farewell letter to his mother before leaving for the NKVD headquarters. Otherwise, he had no friends and was, therefore, in no position to betray anyone. He had become what others called a “bad person,” that is, one who owed loyalty to none but those who could exact it from him—and to himself (as well as to his immediate family—something implied in the definition of a “bad person”).
When Igor Peters told him that he had renounced his parents, he responded, by way of provocation, that a person who was so quick to betray his parents could not be trusted not to betray his friends and lovers. Igor punched him in the face, but he did not punch back, even though he was stronger. He was going to punish Igor for betraying his parents (and for punching him in the face) by betraying Igor to the secret police. He did, but the chain had come full circle when his NKVD supervisor told him to stop reporting on Igor because Igor was now a secret agent, too. For Granovsky, the Soviet Faust—including the cult of self-reflexivity and “work on oneself”—was ultimately about the pact with the devil. He was Lyova Fedotov’s evil double: he, too, pursued limitless self-awareness and a seamless blend of experience and reminiscence; he, too, aimed to embody the age of “great planners and future geometers.” As he wrote about one of his conversations with Aleksandr Kulkov, “my mind had been fully occupied with the task of recording his conversation and taking care to reply in such a way as would not seem unnatural and would not discourage him from continuing. That is the quality of steel, I thought with pleasure. That is self-mastery and perfect self-subordination to a predetermined objective. Power over others begins with power over oneself.”13
He did well as an agent and, after the beginning of World War II, was sent to the newly created “special sabotage and reconnaissance training school.” There, his “work on the self” became an extension of the state’s work toward victory: “Memory, memory, memory, and the mastery of the disciplined mind over the emotions and over the weaknesses of the flesh. There are only two things that must occupy the mind of the true tchekist: the objective and the means to attain it. No preconceptions, no absolutes, no principles, no values besides efficiency. The tchekist is the perfect servant and guardian of the state. Train, train, train to improve, to achieve perfection, to become a
one hundred per cent efficient human machine.” He claimed to have benefited from the training and to have performed well on several assassination missions behind enemy lines. “I found that the swift, precise, lethal action that preceded the calculated death exhilarated me. I found with satisfaction that my body responded to urgency with a clean and unhesitant directness and my mind was as cool as if I had been playing a game of chess against an inferior opponent.”14
In between foreign assignments, he continued to work as a secret agent in Moscow, specializing in seducing and incriminating young women. According to his memoirs, “there was provocation after provocation, investigation after investigation and I introduced myself into the private lives of so many people and so intimately that, were it not for the fact that my memory is as trained as it is, I would by now have become utterly confused with the mass of my recollections.” In the spring of 1944, he was told to infiltrate another group of children of arrested high officials (mostly graduates of School No. 175 in their early twenties). Among the group’s members was his childhood friend, Erik Korkmasov, who had recently returned from the front because of a shoulder wound, and Romuald Muklevich’s daughter, Irina (formerly of Apt. 334).15
Anatoly Granovsky
Irina remembered running into Granovsky in the Metro one day. He was a “fine-looking officer,” “handsome and supremely self-confident.” He was very happy to see her and later that day he and Erik came over to chat. He started picking her up after college in his limo, to her girlfriends’ envy and astonishment. When he found out that Irina was living with her aunt because her room had been occupied by someone else while she was in evacuation, he took her to the courthouse, asked her to wait outside, returned with a judge who told her not to worry, drove over to her old apartment, forced the door open, made a list of the new occupant’s possessions, moved them all out, and changed the lock. Soon afterward, Erik told her that Anatoly was being sent somewhere on a special mission. Before leaving, he came over and asked her to marry him, but her aunt did not think it was a good idea, and Irina said no. She never saw Anatoly again. A little while later, Erik Korkmasov and twelve other people were arrested for planning an attempt on Stalin’s life. Erik spent five years in prison and several more in exile in Kazakhstan. Later Irina heard that Anatoly had been killed on a mission behind enemy lines. Another friend of theirs, Nadia Belenkaia (the daughter of the arrested NKVD official and, formerly, Lenin’s chief bodyguard, Abram Belenky, of Apt. 53) said once that of all of them, Anatoly’s fate had been the most tragic. According to Irina, they did not discover Anatoly’s book, published in the United States, about his work as an agent provocateur until much later, and she could not help noticing that in his chapter about the people he had betrayed, he mentioned Erik and Nadia, but not her.16
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Granovsky’s supervisor in this and several other operations was Yakov Sverdlov’s son, Andrei, whom he describes as the Mephistopheles to his Faust—a relentlessly ironic man with an “annoying, conceited air,” “the braying laugh of one who is not too sure of himself,” and an intense eagerness for “power for its own sake.” After a brief imprisonment in 1935 (for saying “Koba must be bumped off”), he had worked as a foreman and shop floor supervisor at the Stalin Automobile Factory before being arrested again in January 1938. It is not clear whether he became an agent after the first or the second arrest. (According to one of his superiors, he had been used as an in-cell agent provocateur during the case of the “Rightist-Trotskyite Bloc.”) In December 1938, after almost a year in prison, he was formally released and made a full-time investigator. Ten months later, when Anna Larina was sitting in the office of her Lubyanka interrogator, Yakov Matusov, the door opened and Andrei Sverdlov walked in. She had always believed that her conviction for belonging to a “terrorist youth organization” had something to do with Sverdlov’s (and Dima Osinsky’s) 1935 arrest, so she immediately assumed he was a fellow prisoner brought in for a confrontation:17
But when I took a closer look at Andrei, I realized that he did not look like a prisoner. He was wearing an elegant gray suit with well-ironed slacks, and his smooth, self-satisfied face projected perfect contentment.
Andrei sat down on a chair next to Matusov and studied me carefully, though not without some emotion.
“Please meet your new investigating officer,” said Matusov.
“What do you mean, ‘investigating officer’? I exclaimed, in utter bewilderment. “It’s Andrei Sverdlov!”
“Yes, Andrei Yakovlevich Sverdlov,” said Matusov proudly (as if to say, “see what kinds of investigators we have here”), “the son of Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov. He’ll be handling your case.”
Matusov’s announcement terrified me, and I felt completely lost. The hostile confrontation that I had originally expected would have been easier to deal with.
“What, you don’t like your investigator?” asked Matusov, noticing my shock and confusion.
“I don’t know him as an investigator, but there is no need to introduce us: we have known each other for a long time.”
“Was he a friend of yours?” asked Matusov, looking at me curiously.
“Let Andrei Yakovlevich answer that question.”
I would not have called Andrei my friend, but I had known him since early childhood. We used to run around the Kremlin and play together. One fall, Adka, as we called him then, snatched my hat off my head and ran away. I ran after him but couldn’t catch up. I went over to his place (Yakov Sverdlov’s family had continued to live in the Kremlin after his death). Andrei grabbed some scissors, cut off the top part of the hat (it was a knit cap), and threw it in my face. He was around thirteen, and I was around ten. Perhaps that was his first cruel act, and he was cruel by nature. Later we used to spend our summer vacations in Crimea at the same time. Andrei would come over from Foros to see me in Mukhalatka. That was before his marriage and mine. We used to go walking, hiking, and swimming in the sea together.18
Now he was twenty-eight, and she was twenty-five. He asked her why she had mentioned his name in her previous interrogations, and she said that she had assumed that his first arrest would be used against both of them. Two or three days later she was brought in for more questioning:
This time Andrei was gentler and looked at me with more warmth. When walking past me, he put an apple in my hand. But he did not forget his job as an interrogator. He sat behind the desk in the small, narrow office. We looked at each other in silence. My eyes filled with tears. It seemed to me that Andrei, too, became agitated, but maybe I saw what I wanted to see.
We had similar biographies: we were both children of professional revolutionaries. Both our fathers had managed to die in time, we were equally loyal to the Soviet state, and we both admired Bukharin. This had been the topic of a conversation I had with Andrei before my marriage. Finally, we had both suffered a catastrophe—to different degrees, but a catastrophe nonetheless.
Andrei Sverdlov’s actions could not be regarded as anything but a betrayal. It was Cain’s eyes that were looking at me. But the person responsible for the catastrophe, his and mine, was one and the same—Stalin.
Andrei’s silence was unbearable, but I also lost the ability to speak for a while. Finally I exploded:
“What are you going to interrogate me about, Andrei Yakovlevich? Bukharin is dead, so there’s no point in trying to obtain more false evidence against him, is there? As for my life, you know it as well as I do, so you don’t need to interrogate me about it. And yours, up to a certain point, was pretty clear to me, too. That’s why I defended you, saying you couldn’t have been involved in any counterrevolutionary organization.”
Hunched over his desk, Andrei was looking at me with an enigmatic expression on his face, apparently not having heard a thing I said. Suddenly he blurted out something completely unrelated to the investigation, or rather to the conversation we were having.
“What a pretty blouse you have on, Niuska!” (“Niusia” was the affection
ate nickname my parents and friends used.) I believe I felt sorry for the traitor at that moment, thinking that he was in the same trap, but had just entered it from the other end.
“So, you like my blouse” (I also kept switching from the formal to the informal ‘you’ with Andrei, depending on how I was feeling)—“and what is it that you don’t like?”19
He responded by saying that she had been slandering the show trials and denying Bukharin’s guilt. At the end of the conversation, he told her that, “by the way,” his wife, Nina Podvoiskaia, had asked him to say hello.
This “by the way, hello” provoked nothing but irritation in me. I doubt that Andrei’s wife knew anything about our dramatic encounter.
I did not remain in his debt for long, however, and responded to his one hello with several of my own. I passed on greetings from his aunt, Yakov Sverdlov’s sister Sofia Mikhailovna, whom I had seen in the Tomsk camp, and from his cousin, Sofia Mikhailovna’s daughter and Yagoda’s wife, whom I had not seen, but said hello anyway. According to camp rumor, Yagoda’s wife had been in one of the Kolyma camps before the trial, then transferred back to Moscow after the trial and shot. Finally, I said hello from Andrei’s nephew, his cousin’s son, and told him about Garik’s tragic letters from his orphanage to his grandmother’s camp: “Dear, dear Grandma, again I haven’t died!”20