The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  In the evenings, Fedor Ivanovich taught an optional photography class. “Everything was almost the same as when, not so long ago, my father and I used to lock ourselves in the bathroom to develop and print photographs.” Once he got sick and was taken to the town hospital, where his life story provoked a great deal of curiosity. Among those who came to see him were two “self-assured, insolent” young men who subjected him to “something like an interrogation,” but his roommates defended him, saying that he was not responsible for his parents. No one at the orphanage had treated him any differently from the other children, so he was “caught completely by surprise.” Later, he discovered that “the unpleasant episode in the hospital was not typical of ordinary people’s perception of the events of 1937.” After three years in the orphanage, he moved to Leningrad to live with his aunt, a Party official. His suitcase contained family photographs, some shirts and underwear, and the five-volume collected works of Pushkin that his mother had given him on the day she was arrested. After graduating from high school, he was admitted to a military college and eventually became a naval officer.15

  ■ ■ ■

  Valia, Rem, and Svetlana Osinsky were sent to an orphanage in the town of Shuya, Ivanovo Province. According to Svetlana, Valia did not change at all. “He found everything interesting, lived a fun-filled, joyous life, and was ready to share his joy with everyone. His future looked bright to him, and he was sure life would not let him down.” He loved his orphanage, his school, his teachers (especially the chemistry, geography, and history ones), and his new friends (especially Misha Kristson, who knew the whole of Eugene Onegin by heart). He kept up with his Moscow friends, Sasha Kogan and Motia Epstein, who sent him parcels with books and “all sorts of yummy things.” He enjoyed acting (his stutter disappeared on stage), singing (especially “Wide Is the Sea,” a prerevolutionary ballad revived in 1937 by Leonid Utesov), and sleeping under the stars (“wrapped in a coat with grass for a mattress”). He served with distinction as his ninth-grade elected representative; admired Boris Shchukin in the role of Lenin in Lenin in October and Lenin in 1918; loved “The Song about Stalin,” which he, as a member of his school choir, sang on the third anniversary of the Stalin Constitution; enjoyed a play “about how a bunch of spies and wreckers slander an honest Party member”; rejoiced at being found fit for military service (having read Goethe while waiting for his medical exam); and trained hard in order to pass his “Ready for Labor and Defense” test. Getting ready for labor and defense—and working on oneself as preparation for the general future—involved ascetic self-restraint. “Rem and I,” he wrote to his mother, “do not smoke and do not intend to. First, it’s bad for your health; second, it’s a waste of money; and, third, it would make things harder during a time of war or something else. As for drinking—we don’t drink, either. Recently I tried some beer in the theater—I was thirsty, and there was nothing else—and thought it tasted terrible. So no need to worry on that score.”16

  Svetlana and Valia Osinsky in the orphanage (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

  But mostly, he read. After a year and a half of searching for their parents, Valia, Rem, and Svetlana found their mother in a “family members’ camp” in Mordovia. In his first letter from the orphanage, Valia wrote:

  Mom, in Shuya there is a library—actually, not one, but four. I use all of them, and check out books for Svetlana and Rem, as well as for myself. I’ve read all three novels by Goncharov, a lot of L. Tolstoy, A. K. Tolstoy, “Kozma Prutkov,” a lot of Saltykov-Shchedrin, Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done and tons more. Of the Europeans, I’ve read a lot of Heine—the poems in German and the prose in Russian, and Goethe. I particularly liked Faust and read Part I three times. I’ve read a little Balzac—Le père Goriot and Gobseck, Ibsen—a lot of plays, Hoffmann, and many others whom I can’t recall at the moment.17

  Everything on Valia’s list came from his parents’ own list, with the usual exception of socioeconomic books. Heine was still the sentimental favorite:

  Recently, I checked out the fifth issue of October that you wrote to me about. The Heine biography is very good. And I liked it even more because Heine is now my favorite poet. Remember, Dad once gave me a book of his poems as a present? I didn’t read them for a long time, but now that I’ve read most of them, I’m not sure which I like better—the lyrical or the satirical ones. His long poem Atta Troll, in which lyricism and satire are intertwined, is a marvelous work. I also like Heine as a human being. Goncharov, for example, wrote brilliantly, but I don’t like him because he was so narrow-minded as a person. With Heine it’s completely different. I’ve read at least three biographies, but none of them so far has been entirely good or complete. I wish the October biographer had written a more complete one.18

  Valia Osinsky (right) and his friend, Motia Epstein (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

  The Geist of Soviet happy childhood involved a marriage of lyricism and completeness. “Man’s best strivings,” as well as the best men who excelled at striving, were to be tenderly loved and methodically appropriated. In the Shuya orphanage, Valia’s, Svetlana’s, and Rem’s motto was: “Life goes on, the most important thing is to study!” All three were excellent students, but the most important studying was done at home—or, in their case, in the orphanage. As Valia wrote to his mother, “I’ve become fairly well-versed in literature—at least from the historical point of view. But there’s a lot I don’t know yet. For example, I’ve barely read any of the French classics. Le père Goriot, Gobseck, and Eugénie Grandet by Balzac, “A Simple Heart” by Flaubert, and nothing at all by Stendhal. There’s still plenty of reading left to do. I’ve just started on ancient literature—the Greeks. I found Homer a bit boring, but loved Aeschylus, Sophocles, and especially Aristophanes.”19

  Several months later, and now in the tenth grade, he was farther along but still working on filling in the gaps:

  There’s still plenty of work to do. Recently I read Voltaire’s Candide and was very impressed. Too bad I can’t get my hands on anything else by Voltaire. I also quite like Anatole France and have made my way through his The Gods Are Athirst, Penguin Island, The Revolt of the Angels, At the Sign of the Reine Pédauque, The Opinions of Jerome Coignard, and some stories. On my bookshelf I still have Lucian, Shelley, and A History of Western Literature. I read very few contemporary writers: there’s no time. I am reading a good novel by Kaverin, The Two Captains, which all the critics rightly praise for its resemblance to Dickens.

  He never seemed to have enough time to read contemporary Soviet writers because they did not measure up to the Pamirs and because one could not measure anything without conquering the Pamirs first: “I am slowly mastering Don Quixote, which is not as difficult as I expected. Sancho Panza is wonderful. I am also reading Romain Rolland’s Jean-Cristophe, one installment at a time, whenever I can get them. It seems to me that Romain Rolland is not inferior to Dickens or any other writer of that calibre. After Leo Tolstoy, he is my favorite novelist. I have also read Sophocles and find that I like him.”

  “Completeness” presupposed hierarchy. Only a fully ranked world could be complete. Literary rankings were based on a combination of depth and beauty. At sixteen, Valia had no doubt about which summit was the highest:

  I fell in love with Faust for a variety of reasons. First, I like the main characters—Faust and Mephistopheles. Their thoughts are very intelligent and profound. Gretchen is a bit silly, but very touching. Faust is good because it is written in simple, clear, but elegant language. Shakespeare uses a lot of metaphors, similes, and elaborate phrases, so it is not always easy to get at the meaning. That’s why reading him can be exhausting, in my view. But Goethe has none of that. The play has some very beautiful verses, especially the songs. On the whole, the verse in Faust is wooden—written, as Heine said, in the meter of a German puppet theater comedy. But, at the beginning (in the first section), the Archangels’ Song, the Chorus of Spirits, and Gretchen’s songs are very beautiful. In the second part
, too, although it’s harder to understand. But it has even more of these beautiful passages.20

  Because of his perfect grades, he could enroll in any university without taking the entrance exams. He took a long time deciding between biology and philology and ended up choosing classics. His mother wanted him to stay in Moscow, but he decided to go to Leningrad University to study with the legendary Olga Mikhailovna Freidenberg. He spent several nights at the railway station before asking his class representative, Elena Monchadskaia, if she would help him get a place in the dormitory. She took him in, and he spent several days living in her apartment. Her father, the zoologist Aleksandr Samoilovich Monchadsky, whose half-brother had been arrested in 1937, talked to the dean of philology and leading Soviet Assyriologist, Aleksandr Pavlovich Riftin, and Valia was allowed to live in the dorm.21

  According to Monchadskaia, “He was a brilliant student. He got perfect grades. He stood out from us because of his knowledge of languages (we knew he had been born in Berlin). But he also studied harder.” Olga Freidenberg tried to help him with money and started a collection, “but he was proud in such things and would not accept any help.” As he wrote to his mother during his first semester at the university, “I sometimes go to the movies and afterward feel that, if it weren’t for such occasional outings, things might get pretty bad. I tend to work without a break and without realizing how tired I am or noticing that I am not being as efficient. But I won’t drive myself into exhaustion. I recently saw Valery Chkalov, a very good movie, and Vasilisa the Beautiful—which was also not bad.” As a member of the Student Scholarly Society, he also worked on his own research projects. “I gave my paper on Racine and Euripides to our department chair, Olga Mikhailovna Freidenberg, and she read it and, contrary to my expectations, said that it was very good. And I had just about decided to burn it. Yet I know that I could have written something better, more substantial. But still, it’s good news. We are going to have one of our Society seminars, and Freidenberg herself is going to talk about my paper. I am sure she’ll have criticisms, but when they’re fair, it doesn’t bother me.” He had several new friends and reported in detail about their interests and virtues. They talked about history and literature and went to the movies and theater together. According to Monchadskaia, “Valia was an active Komsomol member. Our Marxism instructor, I think his name was Safronov, had a lot of respect for him. During our first class, he asked if he was related to that Osinsky, and Valia told him he was. I remember in seminars they used to have long conversations, talking like equals. And Valia used to gesticulate a lot.”22

  Valia Osinsky (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

  ■ ■ ■

  Valia’s sister, Svetlana, who was two years younger, describes herself as less good-natured, less sociable, and less open to the world. Her first several months in the orphanage were very difficult, but the teachers “showed a great deal of tact,” and eventually she understood that there was life—indeed, a more authentic life—outside the House of Government. “I understood,” she writes in her memoirs, “that different people had different values, that I was not the moral lawgiver, and that from then on I was equal to everyone else whom fate had brought to that orphanage.”23

  Her memories of orphanage life, like those of her original home, were shaped by the sacred calendar, which centered on the celebration of the New Year.

  Children from the Shuya orphanage (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

  Children from the orphanage carrying water in 1941 (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

  Children from the orphanage marching. Svetlana Osinskaia is in front. (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

  For New Year’s they used to set up a tree in the assembly hall, and we would stage a masked ball and concert, and sing and dance. Once we performed the children’s opera, The Magic Swan Geese. I sang in the choir, and Valia acted the silent role of the Wood Sprite. The costumes were borrowed from the theater in town…. But in our own theater club, which we organized and led without the help of any of the teachers, we put on a play from prerevolutionary life, in which I played an old laundress, and then we even acted out Timur and His Crew, in which I played Zhenia…. On New Year’s Eve, the teachers from the school used to come sometimes and pass out presents.

  We also celebrated November 7 and May 1. Dressed in our sports costumes—short bloomers and light blue T-shirts (they were called vests then) with white collars and white bands on the sleeves—we would perform a trick that was very popular in those days called the pyramid. We older girls would also prepare folk dances of different ethnic groups of the Soviet Union. Our choir would sing both revolutionary and new songs—either military ones or children’s ones such as “The Heroic Pilots Are Flying Away,” “The Red Flag Is Flying Overhead,” “Our Horses, Horses of Steel,” “Our Big Brothers Are Marching in Columns,” and many others. On Lenin Memorial Day we would create a commemorative bonfire by placing some lightbulbs in a circle on the assembly hall floor and then covering them with a red cloth and some red narrow strips of red fabric that seemed to flicker like flames. We would turn off the light and sit on the floor around the bonfire singing and reciting poetry.24

  She also remembered trips to the Godless Movie Theater inside an old church and dancing to the accordion at the summer camp, among many other things, but her fondest memories were those of her teachers.

  We had a wonderful director, Pavel Ivanovich Zimin. I think it was probably thanks to him that we were always treated the same way as all the other children. Many years later he told me that he had had to report on us and on our behavior, but we never felt any special attention and, of course, knew nothing about it. No one ever reproached us about anything to do with our parents. Only once either a new Pioneer leader or a young teacher started asking me whether I realized who my parents were and whether it might not be better for me to forget them. I listened to him in amazement. Someone interrupted our conversation, and I never heard any more speeches like that again.25

  Pavel Ivanovich Zimin (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

  What the carpentry shop was to Volodia Lande, the sewing shop was to Svetlana:

  The noise inside the shop was easily tamed by our sewing instructor, Natalia Trofimovna, who, though not noisy herself, was firm and decisive in her own quiet way. Short and thin, she had an attractive face with small, sharp features, gray eyes, small hands, and small feet. She always wore the same carefully ironed, light gray satin smock, under which a silk cream-colored blouse peeked out. She always had a measuring tape around her neck and a row of pins and needles stuck in the lapel of her smock. She would cut the thread with a precise movement of her small teeth, although she warned us not to do this, pointing to a chipped spot on her upper tooth. On my first day Natalia Trofimovna gave me an assignment: to gather a sleeve into a cuff—a five-minute job at most. She showed me how it was done. I worked for at least an hour. When it was finished, she looked at it and, in order to encourage me, showed it to the class as an example of good work. The other girls maintained an ironic silence. Alas, it was probably the only exemplary piece I ever made.

  I started coming to the sewing shop every day, on schedule, although I did try to play hooky sometimes. Secretly, I became very attached to Natalia Trofimovna and felt that she, too, liked me and felt sorry for me. I watched her agile movements and listened intently to what she had to say (trying not to be too obvious about it). She was forty, an old woman as far as I was concerned back then. She lived with her son and often talked about him.26

  The person who helped Svetlana the most during her first difficult days in the orphanage was her “class mentor,” Tatiana Nikolaevna Guskova (known to the children as “Tian-Nikolavna”). “Pretty, nervous, thin, quicktempered, blunt and quite strict, she was wholly devoted to the children and to the orphanage.” When she saw that Svetlana did not know how to wash the floor, Tatiana Nikolaevna brought the rag, got down on the floor, and did it with her. But the real test—for both of them—came later, after the orphanage had, f
or most purposes, become home: “Once, one of my aunts decided, for some reason, to take me home to live with her family in Moscow. In the orphanage everyone was trying to talk me out of it. I wrote to my mother. I remember sitting in a small classroom and suddenly hearing quick footsteps. The door flew open, and in ran a beaming Tatiana Nikolaevna, holding a telegram from my mother in her hand (how did Mother manage to send a telegram from the camp?): ‘Do not agree no matter what.’ How happy Tatiana Nikolaevna was!”27

  Tatiana Nikolaevna Guskova (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

  Svetlana’s and Valia’s mother, the Old Bolshevik and former senior editor at the Children’s Literature Publishing House, Ekaterina Mikhailovna Smirnova, wrote often. Once Pavel Ivanovich, who read all the letters received at the orphanage, took Svetlana into an empty bedroom, sat her down on the bed, sat down beside her, put his arm around her, and started, “unhurriedly and sympathetically,” asking questions about her mother. “Her letters—about books and poetry, and full of advice—not the everyday kind but about life in general—had made a strong impression on him.” When love of friends and lovers began to replace love of parents and teachers in Svetlana’s life (and letters), her mother responded by quoting from a poem by A. K. Tolstoy: “My love, wide as the sea / Cannot be kept within the shores of life”: