The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  I need to get away from here. This is not where I belong right now. Our lives have been interrupted and are moving in a new direction. I need to make some decisions, but, most important, I need to be honest with myself and have the courage to face the hostile winds.7

  In the absence of Lena and Grisha, her only confessor and confidant was the forest. “It’s hard to tell which are more beautiful: the tall, slender, austerely thoughtful pines or the birch trees, as joyous and festive as a circle of dancing girls. The gloomy pine forests are closer to me in spirit, though.” On September 3, she came to her favorite spot, “where the pine trees part, creating a tiny gap for a narrow trail to pass through” and cried “sweet and bitter tears”:

  Fall is coming. Two or three more weeks, and I will part with you, my dear forest; I will leave, I must leave for the place where the great battle is being waged…. I feel very sad at the thought of leaving my happiness here … in order to look for a different happiness somewhere else. But I will find it, I know I will!

  The proud pines seem to be telling me: “You should live your life so as to earn the right to hold your head high, proudly and independently, the way we do.”

  “But fate breaks such people,” rustle the birches fearfully. “Storms break the proud ones, tear them out by their roots…. Be humble, bow down….”

  “True, but those who withstand the storm will be even stronger and prouder,” I can hear in the roar of the mighty pines, “We sing our song to the folly of the brave!”8

  A month later, she made a “sudden and resolute” decision to leave for Moscow. Sergei was away, preparing the expedition’s evacuation to the Urals. The passenger trains were no longer running, but a young sergeant from a military transport train agreed to let her join them and held out his hand to help her climb in. It took the convoy three weeks to reach Moscow. She and the soldiers became “good friends on the very first day.” They were “nice, lovely boys.”9

  Her mother, grandmother, aunt, and two little sisters had left for the Urals. She found a note from her mother urging her to do the same. “The empty apartment felt oppressive. I thought that my favorite books might help distract me and chase away my melancholy, but the dead silence weighed upon me…. I ran my finger across the cupboard: a line was clearly visible in the layer of dust. I wrote: “Nina—Lena—Grisha!”—then suddenly felt a chill and goosebumps—from the silence and those words in the dust. I quickly erased the inscription and went outside.”10

  Two weeks later she received a letter from Sergei. He agreed with her mother and the birches. “I have always told you,” he wrote, “that you are still very young and that you need the advice of older and more experienced friends. I am becoming more and more convinced of this. I hate doing it, but I feel it’s my duty to remind you of our last conversation in the forest. I told you then, as a friend and brother, just how dangerous life is for you right now. My dear Ninusha, I am earnestly asking you: be prudent!!! In these times, we must keep our eyes open! At this moment, carelessness can be fatal. Keep yourself safe from harm!” He begged her to show some concern for her friends and relatives at last and hop on any train headed for Gorky and then travel on to the Urals.

  This was his response to my farewell note.

  Yes, it had been a wonderful summer, filled with love, tender caresses, forest magic, “eternal oaths,” and other memories—“too many for him to remember them all.” He was not there when I made my “insane” decision.” I left a letter for him—“don’t be sad, forgive me, and farewell,” put on my backpack and walked down the forest path toward the railway station. I must go where my country needs me, leaving everything behind: the forest smells, the whisper of the pines, the birches’ merry round dances, the wildflower wreaths….

  Today I learned that Grisha is already at the front—he went as a volunteer. Oh how I wish I could stand shoulder to shoulder with him….

  Meanwhile, in the sky over Moscow, my dear beloved Moscow, Messerschmitts roar and drop their firebombs on the dreams of my youth, burning everything that, along with my mother’s milk, has fed and nurtured me since I was a tiny baby.

  So there you have it, my dear Sergei. Do not expect an answer from me. Different times call for different tunes.…

  Lena’s not in Moscow either, she’s gone off somewhere.11

  She walked all over Moscow, observing the destruction and paying no attention to the air-raid sirens. “The days are filled with anxious expectation. Hitler is gathering strength, preparing to pounce on Moscow. I have to make my decision, and the sooner I do, the better. I cannot remain an outside observer. Of course, it is tempting to live like the detached Josephus Flavius from The Jewish War, but the future would never forgive me! While I am sitting in my cozy room, people are struggling, suffering, dying.” On November 6, she listened to the radio broadcast of Stalin’s speech. “We all froze in front of our radios, listening to the leader, while the guns thundered outside. It was so strange and surreal. Stalin’s voice sounded calm, steady, never pausing for a moment.” The next day, she went to see the parade and “liked the tanks best.” Within a week, her decision had been made.

  November 13.

  … On November 16 I am leaving to join a partisan detachment. So, my life is entering the same path as my father’s before me.

  The Lenin District Komsomol Committee sent me to the Central Committee: “There you’ll find what you’re looking for.” In the Central Committee they talked to us for a long time. Several people were rejected, and some left after realizing the seriousness and extreme danger of the mission. By the end, only three of us were left. “It’s a scary, frightening thing,” the Central Committee official kept telling us. But I was afraid of only one thing: “What if, in the course of testing and training, they discover that I am nearsighted? They’ll kick me out.” They said: “You’ll have to jump with a parachute.” But that’s the easiest and least important part. We’ll have to go alone, or, if we’re lucky, in pairs. Now that is really hard…. In the woods, in the snow, in the dark of night, behind enemy lines…. Well, never mind, it’s not like I’m looking for a safe place! So, November 16, at 12 o’clock, in front of the Coliseum Movie Theater!

  November 14.

  Of course I’m not as hard as a rock, or even made of stone. That’s why it’s so hard for me now. I’m all alone here. Do you think I’m not haunted by sneaky little thoughts or that I’m not sorry to leave my cozy shelter behind and step into the unknown? Oh no, that is not the case at all. I feel very lonely and, these past few days especially, I have needed my friends….

  As I walk through the empty rooms, images from the past appear and vanish all around me. It’s here that I spent my childhood and youth, here that my mind was formed. Lovingly and sadly, I go through my books, letters, and notes, reread passages from my diaries, look at random entries on torn scraps of paper.

  Goodbye books, diaries, and all the dear trifles that have been part of my life since childhood: the inkwell made of Ural stone, the stool and little table in the old Russian style, Khudoga’s paintings, and the pile of photographs—of father, mother, Lelia and me as children, and of the Volga and Moscow.

  I am saying goodbye to this diary, too. For how many years has it been my loyal companion and trusted confidant, the witness of my failures and triumphs, never forsaking me even at the most difficult times. I have been truthful and sincere with it…. A day may come when, having lived through the storm, I return to these faded, yellowed pages. Or perhaps … But no, I want to live! It may seem like a paradox, but it’s true: the reason I am going to the front is that I love life so much and want so badly to live, work, and create … to live, to keep living!

  MY WILL AND TESTAMENT

  If I don’t come back, give all my personal papers to Lena. I have only one thought: perhaps by doing this, I will save my father?

  Lena! To you and to Grisha, my only friends, I leave all my personal possessions: my friends’ letters and my diary. Lena, dear, sweet Lena, why di
d you leave, I wanted so much to see you.

  Nina12

  On November 16, Nina joined Special Unit No. 9903, devoted to sabotage behind enemy lines and commanded by Major Artur Sprogis. From the meeting place in front of the Coliseum (later Sovremennik) Theater, she and the other volunteers were taken by truck to an abandoned kindergarten building in Zhavoronki, west of Moscow, where they were taught to set fire to buildings, mine roads, blow up bridges, and cut communication lines. Many of the students were young women (about 18 percent of the total). According to one of them, they were told that only one in a hundred would survive. (Among the early casualties was Zoia Kosmodemyanskaia, one of the most widely celebrated Soviet martyr-heroes.) The training lasted several days. On December 8, Nina wrote to her mother that she had just returned from one mission and was about to go on another; that she was warmly dressed and surrounded by young people; and that she had gotten strep throat from sleeping in the snow but was now fine.13

  She was killed less than two weeks later, on December 19. The official notice, sent on January 20, 1942, stated that she had died “in battle for her socialist Motherland, true to her military oath and having demonstrated heroism and courage.” The message took more than a year and a half to reach her mother (who continued to write regularly to Aleksandr Serafimovich, who continued to help her and her husband, who was still in a camp). Valentin Litovsky, who had played Pushkin in The Youth of a Poet, went missing in action at about the same time. Grisha (Grigory Abramovich Grinblat) was last heard from a month later. Vova Osepian (Gevorkian), who had written to his mother’s camp asking for a visit, was killed in 1943 (at the age of seventeen or eighteen, about three years after writing that letter).14

  Nina Kosterina in uniform

  Valia Osinsky joined the people’s militia in the summer of 1941, soon after presenting a paper on Euripides at a Classics Department colloquium. In a letter to his sister, Svetlana, he wrote that he had a feeling that he would come back alive. “Our studies—yours, Rem’s, and mine—are probably over for now. But remember that after the war you will go back to school, graduate from college, and become a true, good, worthwhile human being. It will be difficult for a while—maybe a year or two, and for some time after the war. But then, after Hitler has been beaten and everything has been rebuilt, life will be so wonderful that ‘there’ll be no need to die,’ as Chapaev used to say.” Svetlana received the letter in her orphanage: “I remember standing in that large classroom, leaning against the round, slightly warm, tall black metal stove. The younger kids were at their desks, and I was there instead of their teacher. I read the letter, written in a terrible, tiny hand and folded into a triangle, in the dim light of the bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling.” Valia disappeared soon after mailing it. Svetlana stayed in the orphanage for another year, until the fall of 1942. Her “dowry” was a warm red flannel dress, which she had made with the help of Natalia Trofimovna. “She looked at me with sadness and warmth, as if wishing to say something. But she did not say anything. She kissed me and gently pushed me away: go. I left.”15

  Anatoly Granovsky, who was a year younger than Nina, survived his missions behind enemy lines and was, in the spring of 1944, transferred back to agent provocateur work under Andrei Sverdlov. His younger brother, Valentin, volunteered for the army (“to wash away the stain on our name,” as he told Anatoly) and died of multiple wounds on December 1, 1942. Volodia Ivanov spent the war in the Far East and participated in the August 1945 campaign against Japan. On March 13, 1946, he wrote to his parents from the city of Bei’an, in Manchuria. “About ten days ago I received a letter from you, but I could not respond right away because I was on a trip around Manchuria—its cities and villages (carrying out a special government assignment). We covered 2,000 kilometers and accomplished a large and very important task. What kind of task it was, I can’t tell you in a letter, for obvious reasons.” Shortly afterward, when his division was crossing the border from Mongolia on its way home, he was accidentally killed by a Soviet border guard.16

  Lyova Fedotov remained in the House of Government for at least a month after the beginning of the war. “Amazing things have started happening in our plants and factories,” he wrote on June 26. “People have begun to overfulfill their tasks by several hundred percent and to achieve the kinds of heroic successes that could only be dreamed about before. I was reading about it in the newspaper and could not help marveling at how high the spirit of the Soviet people could soar.” He thought of the war as the last battle of the army of light against the beast, with a possible Gog-and-Magog epilogue at the very end.17

  Volodia Ivanov’s last photograph

  Consequently, in this war we can expect every possible departure from the laws of war because it will be the most monstrous confrontation the world has ever known, for it is an encounter of two opposites. It is possible that, after our victory over fascism, about which I have no doubt, we will have to clash with our last enemies, the capitalists of America and England, before the final triumph of communism on Earth….

  But when the last den of reaction has been destroyed, I can only imagine what life on Earth will be like! God, how I would like to live to that time! Communism is a magnificent word! How beautiful it sounds next to Lenin’s name. When you put the hangman Hitler next to the image of Ilich … My God! Can one really compare? They are two absolute opposites: Lenin’s luminous mind and that pathetic, vicious little reptile who resembles …—but can Hitler really resemble anything? The most wretched creature on the face of the earth would look like an angel next to that reject of the human race.

  How I wish Lenin could be resurrected! Oh, if only he were alive now! How I would love for those Fascist beasts, in their war against us, to feel on their own skin the luminous genius of our Ilich! Then they would truly find out what the Russian people are capable of!18

  Lyova Fedotov had almost certainly never read the Book of Revelation, but he had devoted his life to the study of the Pamirs (in the Hermitage and the Conservatory, as well as among the treasures of world literature), absorbed the vocabulary and eschatology of Bolshevism, and kept reading the newspapers, “marveling at how high the spirit of the Soviet people could soar.” He defined the Soviet people as “the Russians and other nations that make up the Soviet family,” but the other nations, including his own large Jewish family, were but further evidence of what the Russian people were capable of. Lyova’s world, like the one he read about in the newspapers, was a heavenly St. Petersburg. Its earthly incarnation was Peter’s creation; its future reign was Lenin’s bequest. Lenin, who had been absent from Lyova’s Leningrad, had been resurrected for one final battle. Stalin’s job was that of the Archangel Michael: mentioned in passing as “the leader” in the war against Satan, he was secondary to the Russian people and the luminous prophet of their triumph.19

  Sometime in the late summer or early fall, the theater in which Lyova’s mother worked was evacuated to Zelenodolsk, in Tatarstan. While there, Lyova, according to his mother, “did not draw, did not come near the piano, and did not keep his diary.” In the winter of 1942–43, he joined the army. His mother tried to tell the recruitment board that his vision and hearing were bad, but it did not help. On June 14, 1943, he sent her a postcard: “Dear Mom: Your son, the frontline soldier, is sending you his warmest greetings. I receive frontline rations. We live outdoors. I don’t worry about myself, so please don’t worry about me, either. Tell everyone who writes to you that I am in a combat unit, on the frontline, and that I am very happy and proud about it. The most important thing is for you to be calm and take care of yourself. See you soon on victory day. Lyova.” He was killed eleven days later, on June 25, 1943, “having demonstrated heroism and courage,” and was buried in the village of Ozerskoe, Tula Province. Roza Lazarevna received the official notification on November 20, 1943. Forty-five years later, she told a documentary filmmaker: “I had some very difficult moments. I wanted to throw myself out the window. I even came up to the window, but then
I thought: ‘I have been a Party member since 1917, a Bolshevik. What right do I have to do this?’ And I walked away.”20

  32

  THE RETURN

  About 500 House of Government residents (approximately one per apartment) went off to war; 113 of them (23 percent) did not come back. Those who did not leave on their own were evacuated in the late summer and fall of 1941. On October 16, when the German troops came within sixty miles of Moscow and most government agencies were evacuated to Kuibyshev, some of the House accounting records were burned. Within a week or two, most House employees had been let go, apartments sealed, remaining residents evicted, and the building as a whole placed under “conservation regime.” According to the official 1942 report, “as a result of the detonation of aerial bombs in the immediate vicinity of the building in the last quarter of 1941, 90 percent of all glass in the windows and stairways has been completely destroyed or partially damaged. Because the damage occurred in the winter, almost the entire heating, plumbing, and sewage systems have been rendered inoperable. There has also been substantial damage to the stucco and even some shifting of partition walls.”1

  In November 1941, an NKVD unit consisting of forty to fifty men arrived at the House in order to carry out a “special assignment” involving apartment searches. They were quartered in Entryways 12 and 17; the remaining members of the House administration, newly rehired guards (three to four per entryway), and an unknown number of repair workers moved into first- to third-floor apartments in other entryways. An investigation conducted in the summer of 1942 found that the NKVD unit and seventeen members of the House administration, including the House commandant and several of his deputies and senior guards, had stolen a wide variety of items (with a particular preference for watches, razors, revolvers, hunting rifles, leather coats, gramophone records, and sewing machines) from at least sixty-eight different apartments. At the same time, 453,638.45 rubles’ worth of furniture was evacuated from residents’ apartments and the basement warehouse (which was converted into a bomb shelter) “without any records being kept.” Items taken from the apartments “on a massive scale and for unknown destinations” included, among other things, 32 mirrors, 126 curtains, 10 radios, 43 desks, 22 dinner tables, 64 coffee/telephone/card tables, 483 chairs, 151 stools, 23 couches, 79 wardrobes, 65 bookcases, 29 silk lampshades, 33 china cabinets, 67 coat racks (including 42 oak), 84 draperies (including 41 tapestry), 28 carpet runners, 129 beds (85 nickel-plated, 38 iron, and 6 oak), 43 armchairs (including 20 children’s), 381 mattresses (305 hair, 37 cotton, and 39 bast), 3 pianos, 3 concert pianos, 17 teapots, 10 pendulum clocks, 103 enamel spittoons, 1 billiard table, 1 drum, 1 “Street Urchin” figurine, 1 “Mother and Child” sculpture, and 1 polar bear skin.2