The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  Andrei Sverdlov (seated in the middle of the front row) with friends. Next to him (front row, right) is Dima Osinsky.

  But there was a lot about Andrei Sverdlov she did not know. She probably had not heard about the execution of his other cousin, Leopold Averbakh; his uncle, Veniamin Sverdlov; or his childhood friend, Dima (Vadim) Osinsky. Nor was she likely to know that Andrei had another uncle, Zinovy Peshkov, who was an officer in the French Foreign Legion, or that his daughter, Andrei’s cousin Elizaveta, had returned to Moscow from Italy in 1937 and had recently been arrested. Anna did find out later that Andrei had also interrogated her aunt, the wife of the former deputy chairman of Gosplan, V. P. Miliutin (from Apt. 163), and that he had been “rude to her, threatened to beat her, and waved his whip in front of her face.” Dima Osinsky’s sister, Svetlana, considered Andrei “a traitor and vile creature” and claimed that when their mutual friend, Khanna Ganetskaia (Hanna Hanecka, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of the founder of the Polish Social Democratic Party, Jakub Hanecki, from Apt. 10), “entered the investigator’s office, saw Andrei, and rushed toward him with a cry of joy, assuming that now everything would be cleared up, he pushed her away, screaming ‘you bitch!’” According to Elizaveta Drabkina, whom Andrei had known since early childhood and referred to as “Aunt Liza,” he had come to her prison cell sometime after her arrest and said: “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? You used to be Yakov Sverdlov’s secretary, and now you are an enemy of the people!” According to Ruf Valbe, Ariadna Efron (the daughter of the poet Maria Tsvetaeva), who had also known Andrei before her arrest, was shaken by his “cynical and vile” behavior when he was interrogating her. And according to Roi Medvedev, the Petrovsky family archive contains documents showing Andrei’s participation in the repeated beatings of Grigory Petrovsky’s son, Petr Petrovsky.21

  30

  THE PERSISTENCE OF HAPPINESS

  Volodia Moroz was a lone rebel. (His brother, Samuil, who also ended up in a camp, “argued furiously” with other inmates in defense of the Party.) Volodia Shakhurin was preparing to become a Reichsführer. Anatoly Granovsky owed loyalty to none but those who could exact it from him. Andrei Sverdlov loved either power for its own sake or Soviet power in its struggle against its enemies (most of whom happened to be his former friends).

  Most of Andrei Sverdlov’s former friends considered him a traitor but did not question the cause he was serving. They did not feel that they had to choose between their loyalty to the Party and their loyalty to their friends, family, and themselves. No matter how great the catastrophe, they continued to live in a luminous, premillennial world—a world that made sense even if their own exclusion from it did not. The Great Terror spelled the end of most Old Bolshevik families and homes; it did not bring about the end of faith.

  Ten days after being sentenced to eight years in a labor camp, Anna Larina wrote a poem dedicated to the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution (a poem that, according to her memoirs, offered a fair reflection of her frame of mind at the time):

  This prison may bring me to tears,

  And make me feel lonely and sad,

  But this day I mark with my dear,

  Beloved Soviet land.

  …

  Today I am certain it’s near—

  The day I’ll reenter the ranks

  And proudly march on Red Square

  Along with my Komsomol friends!1

  Natalia Rykova wrote to Stalin on June 10, 1940, a year after being sentenced to eight years in a labor camp:2

  I was accused of conducting anti-Soviet agitation, but not only did I not conduct it, I could not possibly have conducted it because both before and after the arrest I was faithful to the Soviet state and the Party. I am a person for whom life means work for the benefit of the Soviet people. I was brought up in a Soviet school, in the Pioneer and Komsomol organizations, and in a Soviet university. I am only twenty-two years old, but I have never been able to conceive of any other life than study or work for the benefit of my country, in my own field or in any place the Komsomol chooses to send me, to work first in its ranks and then in the ranks of the Party. This is how I have always thought, and this is how I think now….

  I know how odious my last name is, and I understand that I cannot be trusted now the way I was trusted before Rykov’s unmasking, and yet I would like to ask you to consider my case because I am not guilty of anything and because I am able and willing to give all of myself for our country’s great cause. I was and I remain a Komsomol member, for whom life is worth living only if it means working for the Soviet country.3

  The Soviet country as one big family continued to exist for most former residents of the House of Government. It took four meetings and a speech by the Party secretary to persuade the Komsomol organization of the Moscow Aviation Institute to expel Nikolai Demchenko (the son of the people’s commissar of state farms and Samuil Moroz’s best friend). In the case of Leonid Postyshev, four times proved not enough. Only the commissar and Komsomol secretary of his regiment at the Air Force Academy voted for expulsion; everyone else, according to Postyshev, voted against the motion. After the fourth meeting, the commissar called him in and demanded that he surrender his membership card. He did, but said that from now on he considered himself a Party member.4

  When Inna Gaister and Zaria Khatskevich (the daughter of the recently arrested secretary of the Council of Nationalities of the Central Executive Committee, formerly of Apt. 96) applied to join the Komsomol, they were both asked about their fathers, and both said that the arrests had been a “tragic mistake.” Both were admitted unanimously (Gaister in Moscow and Khatskevich in Mogilev, after several months in an orphanage). Isaak Zelensky’s children, Elena and Andrei, were expelled from the Komsomol but appealed to the Central Committee and were reinstated.5

  Natalia Rykova a year and a half before her father’s arrest

  Gaister, Khatskevich, the Zelenskys, and most of their friends believed that enemies were, in fact, everywhere and that only their own parents, and perhaps those of their closest friends, were innocent. But even those whose parents they believed to be guilty were not guilty themselves—because Comrade Stalin had said that “sons do not answer for their fathers” and because in their world—the world of happy childhood and the “treasures of world literature”—one did not betray one’s friends. There were bad people, tragic mistakes, moments of utter loneliness, enemies posing as commissars, and double-dealers posing as friends, but the Soviet world as a whole was just, transparent, and naturally compatible with private love and friendship. Most of the children who were expelled from the House of Government remained children of the Revolution. Yuri Trifonov’s inspirational discussions in the literary club of the Moscow House of Pioneers, led by the editor in chief of the journal Pioneer, Comrade Ivanter, took place after the arrests of his parents. Inna Gaister’s parents were arrested in the summer of 1937. Two weeks after the beginning of the school year, she and her cousin Igor (whose father, Semen Gaister, had also been arrested) went to see their “class mentor,” Inna Fedorovna Grekova, in order to report what had happened: “She looked at us strangely and said: ‘So what? What difference does it make? Go and do your work.’ And that was that. A little surprised, we went back to our classroom, wondering why she had ignored our declaration. As if nothing had happened.”6

  Inna’s other teacher, Anna Zinovievna Klintsova, made the point of looking after Vova Piatnitsky, who needed to re-register at the school after his return from Karelia, and his older brother, Igor, who was one of the stars of the school math club, over which she presided. When, in the fall of 1940, school fees were introduced, Anna Zinovievna paid Inna’s tuition and arranged some private lessons for her. And when Inna’s grandmother received a telegram with the address of the camp where Inna’s mother was being held, she called the school principal, Valentin Nikolaevich, who went and found Inna and escorted her to his office. “When I hung up, I must have looked completely dazed. Valentin Nikolaevich only
asked, ‘Will you return to class or go home?’ I went back to class.”7

  During the Bukharin trial, Inna Gaister’s father was mentioned as one of the organizers of the murder of Valerian Kuibyshev (after whom he had named her sister, Valia), but no one in her class held it against her. When the time came to elect a leader for the “Pioneer detachment,” they elected Inna. When she said that she could not accept because her father was an enemy of the people, one of her classmates counted all such children in the classroom and produced a list with twenty-five names on it (about three-quarters of the total). The rest of the students felt that he had betrayed their trust and questioned their loyalty, and stopped talking to him. Later, when he did “another dishonorable thing,” they decided to teach him a lesson. They caught him on the embankment in front of the British Embassy. The boys formed a semicircle in front of the balustrade, and the girls kept hitting him until one of the policemen posted at the embassy chased them away.8

  Inna loved her friends and teachers, believed that School No. 19 was unique, and felt vindicated in having refused, as a grade-school student, to transfer to the Moscow Exemplary, where “children were being forced to publicly renounce and disown their parents.” The students of the Moscow Exemplary, for their part, seem to have felt that it was their school that was uniquely nurturing (as well as academically distinguished). Svetlana Osinskaia, who was the same age as Inna Gaister (twelve in 1937), remembered telling her class mentor, Kapitolina Georgievna, about her parents’ arrest. “She fell back against the wall and said: ‘Yours, too?’” Svetlana spent only four years at the school, but she remembered enjoying her time there and admiring Kapitolina Georgievna (“we loved her, even though we were afraid of her”); her choir teacher, Viktor Ivanovich Pototsky (who “wore a velvet jacket with a bow and was not simply a music teacher, but a true artist”); and her physical education teacher, a former imperial army officer, Tikhon Nikolaevich Krasovsky, who was pointedly “attentive and affectionate” toward her after her parents’ arrest. Svetlana’s brothers, Valia and Rem Smirnov, who were two years older and had spent more time at the Moscow Exemplary, “praised their teachers very highly”; Zaria Khatskevich, who was in the same class as Rem (and believed he was in love with her), did not remember any hostility following her parents’ arrest; and Elena Kuchmina, who was a year younger than Svetlana, wrote in a 1991 letter that she had preserved “the most wonderful memories” of the Moscow Exemplary. “I am still amazed at our teachers’ nobility of spirit: the school was overflowing with the children of ‘enemies of the people,’ but we were invariably treated with kindness and forbearance.”9

  Moscow Exemplary School, fifth grade. Svetlana Osinskaia is seated in the front row, third from left. (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

  Tatiana Smilga, who was five years older and also a Moscow Exemplary student, did not remember any hostility from strangers or betrayal by relatives or friends, but her main “comfort and joy” in those days was her first love, Pushkin. Her nanny made her and her younger sister new dresses for the Pushkin jubilee and someone got her a ticket to a series of lectures on Pushkin at Moscow University—“by Bondi, Brodsky, Grossman—all the best Pushkin scholars.” Tatiana’s schoolmate, Lydia Libedinskaia (who was two years younger), did remember one Komsomol meeting at which a friend of hers, John Kuriatov, was expelled, but pointed out that the meeting had been presided over by an outsider rather than someone from the school, that John (named for John Reed, the author of Ten Days That Shook the World) had refused to renounce his father or surrender his Komsomol card, and that John’s friends (including Libedinskaia) had stood by him. One of them, Valentin Litovsky, had run after a little boy who called John an “enemy,” caught him, grabbed him by the collar, and said, desperately drawing out his words so as not to stutter: “You creep, how da-a-a-re you? Wha-a-t do you understa-a-and? If his father re-e-eally is an enemy of the people, it is a tra-a-a-agedy, a terrible tra-a-agedy, like sickness or death, you u-u-u-understand? And he-e-e-re you are, atta-a-a-acking him. He is no-o-ot guilty of a-a-a-nything!”10

  Valentin was the son of the prominent censor, theater critic, Mikhail Bulgakov’s nemesis, and Uriel Acosta’s champion, Osaf (“Uriel”) Litovsky. He had recently returned to school from the set of The Youth of a Poet, in which he played the young Pushkin. Lydia Libedinskaia fell in love with him because she was already in love with Pushkin. As she wrote in her memoirs (about herself and her generation), “Might we be fated to relive the days of his lycée fraternity? Might there be a new Pushkin among us? We dedicated our poems, essays, and hopes to Pushkin. We dreamed of Pushkin. We dreamed of a pilgrimage to his Mikhailovskoe estate: to Pskov by train and then on foot, only on foot! In the meantime we walked around Moscow, looking for the buildings that were associated with his life there.” Soviet happy childhood was a golden age built on all the previous golden ages, and the most golden of them all was Pushkin’s “lycée fraternity.” When the boys and girls from the House of Government talked about their beloved country, they meant the center of the world revolution, but they also meant Russia, and the Russia they loved had been created by an eternally young poet, the highest of the Pamirs. In 1937, on the one hundredth anniversary of his death, he stood for both. “We spoke of Pushkin as if he were alive. We kept asking each other if Pushkin would like our Metro, our new bridges that spanned the Moskva, the neon lights on Gorky Street.”

  After toasting the New Year of 1937, Libedinskaia and her friends went to the Pushkin Monument on Tverskoi Boulevard, in the center of Moscow. That night is one of the central episodes in her memoirs:

  The light, transparent snowflakes fluttered down and gathered in the folds of his bronze coat and in his curly hair. The ice-covered tree branches shone in the dark.

  We read his poems to him—one after another, on and on: Eugene Onegin, “The Forest Sheds Its Purple Attire,” “Reminiscences in Tsarskoe Selo,” “To the Sea,” “Tsar Saltan.” …

  Suddenly, in the frosty silence of that New Year’s Eve, a boy’s voice, trembling with excitement, rang out:

  While freedom kindles us, my friend,

  While honor calls us and we hear it,

  Come, to our country let us tend

  The noble promptings of the spirit.

  It sounded like a vow. That is how, in solemn silence, warriors take their oaths. Happy are those who had such moments in their youth….

  The snow kept falling, melting on our flushed faces and silvering our hair. Our hearts were overflowing with love for Pushkin, poetry, Moscow, and our country. We yearned for great deeds and vowed silently to accomplish them. My generation! The children of the 1920s, the men and women of a happy and tragic age! You grew up as equal participants in the building of the Soviet Union, you were proud of your fathers, who had carried out an unheard-of revolution, you dreamed of becoming their worthy successors.11

  On October 7, 1939, the remnants of the Trifonov family had been expelled from the House of Government. Five weeks later, Yuri, who had just turned fourteen, wrote a poem that seemed to transform his new apartment into Pushkin’s Mikhailovskoe and his future life into that of a historian:

  Faithful Lyova, are you there?

  Oleg, still the jesting man?

  Carefree Misha, do you care

  That I won’t be back again?

  Time is counting out the hours,

  Days file by but never end,

  Our past life’s no longer ours,

  Long forgotten your old friend.

  Long forgotten my apartment

  And my lyre’s timid chord.

  Only I, by fate discarded,

  Will remember every word!12

  Yuri Trifonov

  ■ ■ ■

  Volodia Lande from Apt. 153 was nine years old in December 1937, when several NKVD agents came to arrest his mother, an editor from the Party Publishing House, Maria Yusim. (His father, the head of the Planning Department of the Soviet State Bank, Efim Lande, had been arrested six months earlier.)<
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  My mother woke me up right before it was time to leave the house. While I, still too sleepy to understand what was happening, was getting dressed, she was nervously packing her things and mine into suitcases. Along with clothes, she put in some family photographs and a few books. In honor of the 100th anniversary of Pushkin’s death in 1937, a five-volume edition of his works had been published. My mother packed those small volumes into my suitcase. Right before leaving the apartment, probably with the permission of the NKVD men, she put some money in the pocket of my overcoat. On the surface, my mother appeared calm, but when they led us out into the dark street, she started sobbing, threw her arms around me, and held me tight. The NKVD men literally dragged my sobbing mother away from me, started forcing her into a car, then put me in a different car, and drove us away, in opposite directions.13

  After a short stay at the Danilovsky Children’s Reception Center in the former Danilovsky Monastery, Volodia was taken to an orphanage in the town of Nizhny Lomov, in Penza Province. The local schoolteacher, Antonina Aleksandrovna, welcomed him, introduced him to his new classmates, told him about her own arrested relative, and invited him to her house for a dinner of fried potatoes. “I suppose that for me both the school and Antonina Aleksandrovna’s house,” he wrote in his memoirs, “were tiny parts of that small world I’d left behind.”14

  His orphanage (also a former monastery) turned out to be yet another part of the same world. When he walked into the 1938 New Year’s Eve party soon after he arrived, he saw “a tall New Year’s tree, shiny new vinyl tablecloths, a whole stockade of lemon soda bottles, a smiling cook, and girls on cafeteria duty handing out steaming rice porridge with raisins and hot chocolate.” Soon, what had first appeared as an imitation of home became home. Volodia liked his new friends (who quickly accepted the new arrivals from Moscow), the church cemetery where they told scary stories, the river Lomovka “with an eddy by the opposite, high bank,” the campfires, the orphanage director, with his “big mustache and teasing half-smile,” and especially his carpentry teacher, the unflappable Fedor Ivanovich, who “patiently and unobtrusively taught the kids his trade. He would begin by teaching us how to use carpentry tools and how to plane a plank. Lean and agile, Fedor Ivanovich would lift each plank to eye-level and, with a quick stroke of a pencil, mark the places that needed more work. Having learned how to plane, we would begin working on a stool. Having finished his first stool, a newcomer would become a full-fledged member of the carpentry shop and could aspire to other, more complicated tasks. I often remember my first, painstakingly manufactured, unprepossessing, wobbly-legged stool.”