The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  In early 1942, some of the evacuees started returning, and the House began to fill up again. By fall 1942, the repair work had been largely completed and most apartments made habitable. By 1945, the theater had been reopened as part of the Council of Ministers Housekeeping Department Club. By 1946, the House had 970 official leaseholders (270 more than before the war) and 3,500 residents (almost a thousand more than before the war). The proportion of communal apartments had increased dramatically. Hundreds of residents who had moved in illegally or “lost the right to reside in the House” were evicted, often after a long series of petitions and court decisions; new Housekeeping Department officials were moved in as part of the “apartment consolidation” program; and many returning old residents complained about strangers living in their apartments. People and things migrated continuously—in, out, up, and down; during 1942, 50 percent of all registered House furniture was transferred between apartments. Mikhail Koltsov’s widow was evicted; Lyova Fedotov’s mother moved in with two other Old Bolsheviks; and Stalin’s daughter moved in, and later moved from a three-bedroom to a five-bedroom apartment. Dachas, suits, special passes, and, increasingly, cars and garages were to be awarded, returned, and reassigned. The House of Government was back, but it was busier, noisier, messier, less exclusive, and less directly connected to the government than it had been before the mass arrests and wartime evacuation.

  Many top postwar officials (including Khrushchev, Molotov, Malenkov, Shcherbakov and Marshals Konev, Rokossovsky, and Zhukov) preferred the French baroque Fifth House of Soviets on Granovsky Street (formerly Count Sheremetev’s rental apartments) and, after the construction boom of the late 1940s and early 1950s, the “Stalin empire style” buildings along the renovated embankments and the newly laid-out Leninsky and Kutuzovsky Avenues (especially No. 26, Kutuzovsky Ave., where Brezhnev, Suslov, Andropov, and Shchelokov lived). At the same time, twenty-four special housing cooperatives were built for elite actors, artists, writers, doctors, dancers, singers, scholars, musicians, and foreign ministry officials. The Soviet elite was regenerating, reproducing, and spreading around Moscow and beyond.3

  Fifth House of Soviets

  Kutuzovsky Avenue. No. 26 is the first building on the left.

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  Meanwhile, many of the wives of the original House of Government residents began to return from the camps. “I hadn’t seen Mother in five years,” wrote Inna Gaister (who had since entered Moscow University’s Physics Department). “She was in terrible shape. It was painful for me to look at her. She had declined so much physically and looked glassy-eyed and listless.”4

  Maya Peterson had not seen her mother in seven years. “I remembered Mother as plump, well-dressed, and always smiling. Now I was looking at a small, skinny, wrinkled woman with long dark braids.” Maya had spent two years in an orphanage before moving in with her half-brother, Igor. In July 1941, Igor had joined the volunteer militia (“He wanted very much to wash off the shameful stain of being a son of an enemy of the people”), become a candidate Party member, and been killed on December 16, 1941, three days before Nina Kosterina. Maya had walked two hundred miles with a refugee column to Kovrov; spent a hungry and homeless year in evacuation in the Urals; returned to Moscow in the spring of 1943; graduated from high school with a gold medal (“schoolwork and friends were my whole life; never in my life had I laughed so much”); been accepted into Moscow University’s Classics Department; and started writing poetry.5 Maya was one of three sisters:

  Rakhil Kaplan (Courtesy of Inna Gaister)

  When Mother was arrested and disappeared from our lives for a while, Ira was seventeen, I was eleven, and Marina was two. We had been growing up and maturing as individuals without her. When we met again seven years later, we had been through a lot and gotten used to being independent. It was not always easy for Mother and us to understand each other…. We never really managed to get used to each other again.

  Ira, with whom Mother had lived before her second arrest, fought with her all the time. When Mother and I lived together in exile, we also had terrible fights. She lived out her final years with Marina, and also badly…. Mother suffered terribly because of this and felt lonely and hurt.6

  Svetlana Osinskaia went to see her mother, Ekaterina Mikhailovna Smirnova, in her camp outside Solikamsk, just north of Berezniki, in 1944. She stayed with her mother’s friend Esfir, who had recently been released.

  When Mother came to see me for the first time, we embraced and stood silently for a minute. Esfir was crying. But even then I could already sense something false in myself, and perhaps in Mother, as well. We had not seen each other for seven years. I felt so remote from her; everything that interested me was in Moscow, where I was studying at the university: my friendship that seemed extraordinary, my love that was desperate and hopeless but so intense, the exciting research I was doing in the seminar on ancient history, my presentation on the tyranny of Peisistratos—which I was telling Mother and Esfir about, when I saw the puzzled look on their faces, and Mother then cautiously asked: “Does anyone else find this interesting?” I could tell that all these things that engrossed me so utterly were not interesting to them and that my raptures were incomprehensible to them and could not really be understood because they were connected to events and emotions that I did not—I knew right away—did not want to share, since they did not seem to care! I had my young, distant, selfish world, not all happy, but still full. They, as camp inmates, must have thought of the things I lived for and worshipped as completely crazy. The tyranny of Peisistratos …7

  In 1945, Ekaterina Mikhailovna’s camp term ended. She was fifty-six years old. She wanted to stay as a free employee in the camp hospital, but the settlement was closed down, and she had to leave. Former prisoners were not allowed to live in Moscow, but she had nowhere else to go. “She could only live in Moscow illegally. But where? In the apartment of my father’s brother Pavel, where I was living? It was impossible, and nobody wanted her there. With friends? But how long would they tolerate her? And how would she make a living?” Since she was not allowed to register in Moscow, she could not get a job. More important, according to Svetlana, “The eight years she spent there [in prison and camp] had broken her. She came back a completely different person, and only very rarely could one see a pale reflection of her former brilliance. Those who expected her to return to her former life were disappointed: there was no life left in her, only the wish to survive somehow. ‘If we are alive, we must go on living,’ she used to say, and there was bitterness and hopelessness in those words…. Very soon it became obvious that nobody wanted her and that she should leave as soon as possible.” She found a job as a bookkeeper at a dairy factory outside Uglich, and in early 1947 Svetlana visited her there. “It was a cold winter. She had a tiny room in a long barrack with blind windows. You could hear everything through the walls. Outside, in the dark hall, people were constantly walking back and forth, cursing, or having drunken fights.”8

  In late 1948 and 1949, as the Soviet Union returned to a state of siege, some of the recently freed “family members of the traitors to the motherland,” including Maria Peterson, were rearrested and sent back into exile. Arrested and exiled along with them were some of the traitors’ newly grown children. Maya Peterson (twenty-two years old), Inna Gaister (twenty-three), and Tania Miagkova’s daughter, Rada Poloz (twenty-four) were arrested on the same day (April, 23, 1949) and found themselves in the same prison cell. Inna Gaister had defended her thesis that day. The State Security agent who came to arrest her had waited for her to finish before escorting her to the Lubyanka. Rada Poloz had spent the war as a nurse on a hospital train and was, at the time of her arrest, a student at the Bauman Institute of Technology. Maya Peterson remembered feeling “great relief” at not having to prepare for her Latin, Greek, and ancient drama exams or write her thesis on Aristophanes. They were all sentenced to five years in exile as “socially dangerous elements.” None was charged with a crime. Maya was sent
to Siberia; Inna and Rada, to Kazakhstan.9

  Inna Gaister’s arrest photographs (Courtesy of Inna Gaister)

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  Anatoly Granovsky’s specialty of seducing the daughters of the enemies of the people was not as urgently needed anymore. He remembered being summoned once in December 1944 to Andrei Sverdlov’s office. “He sat with the rigid immobility of a corpse and only his bright, staring eyes seemed alive as I stood stiffly to attention before him…. It would not have been in character for him to have asked me to sit down, and he did not do so while this interview lasted.” Granovsky’s new assignment was to become a priest and serve as a secret informer within the Russian Orthodox Church. Unhappy at the idea, tired of working as an informer, bored by his current female “subject” (whom he described as a “hungry, despised, and hated mistress”), and desperate to get away from the “sadistic” Sverdlov, he asked for a transfer back to Pavel Sudoplatov’s Fourth Section (which directed terror and sabotage activities behind enemy lines), citing his desire to do the “man’s work” he had been trained for.10 The next day he was called in to see Sverdlov again:

  He received me with an exaggerated pantomime of courtesy, bowing to me slightly and waving me to a chair. I remained standing, however.

  “So?” he said. “The great Captain Granovsky does not consider that the Second Section is the place for him? He does not think he is doing a man’s work? What is his definition of a man’s work, I wonder? …

  I remained silent.

  “Please forgive Commissar Sudoplatov, Comrade Granovsky, because he has been unable to grant your request. I am afraid there is no other way for you except to continue obeying orders, my orders.” And his manner changed from bantering sarcasm to tight-lipped anger. “You may go now, and if I hear any more of this nonsense, I will see that you are properly punished.”11

  According to his memoirs, Granovsky left that same night for Minsk and then Kiev, seeking the protection of his former Fourth Section commanders. In Kiev, one of his mentors from the sabotage school took him to see the commissar of state security of Ukraine, Sergei Savchenko, who sent him to the recently reoccupied town of Uzhgorod, in West Ukraine, as part of a team charged with recruiting “sleeper agents” among the departing refugees. The principal method was hostage-taking and blackmail, and the success rate, according to Granovsky, was very high. “In the Trans-Carpathian Ukraine already occupied by Soviet troops there was plenty of material among the Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, Romanians, Slovaks, Jews, Ruthenians, Ukrainians and Austrians who lived there to serve the purpose admirably.” Granovsky did well and was retained by the Ukrainian NKVD. His subsequent missions included marrying Uzhgorod’s wealthiest woman for the purpose of accompanying her to the West (aborted, in April 1945, owing to the chronic alcoholism of the “subject”); traveling to Berlin in May 1945 in order to recover the secret files taken by the Nazis from the Kiev NKVD offices; and running a spy ring in newly liberated Prague in the winter and early spring of 1946. In late April, he was placed as a secret agent on a Soviet ship that was to travel around Europe.

  Anatoly Granovsky, 1944

  On September 21, 1946, he offered his services as a defector to the US military attaché in Stockholm. The intelligence officer who flew over from the Allied Command in Berlin to interrogate him found his story unconvincing, and he was handed over to the Swedish authorities. Around mid-October, he was visited in Långholmen Prison by the Soviet ambassador and consul general, who urged him to return home. When he refused, they asked him if he had a message for his mother and twelve-year-old brother, Vladimir. He responded:

  “Tell them that I cannot take part in mass murders and mass enslavement of millions of people in order to secure a few years of existence for my beloved mother and brother in Soviet paradise. If you kill my brother you will kill him, but it is better for him to die as a child than to suffer the torture of life under communism. However, I am sure you will tell them whatever your masters order you to tell them.”

  “You pretend to be unconcerned, but do you fully realize what it means for them that you should desert the service of your motherland?”

  “I realize perfectly.”

  “And you can so easily send your mother to Siberia?”

  “There is nothing I can do to help now.”12

  On October 30, 1946, the Soviet Ministry of External Affairs sent a note to the Swedish Embassy in Moscow demanding Granovsky’s extradition. According to the Swedish-Russian report of 2000 on the fate of the “savior of Hungarian Jews,” Raoul Wallenberg, arrested in Budapest in January 1945, Soviet officials may have suggested an exchange of Wallenberg for Granovsky. On November 8, the king of Sweden decreed that Granovsky not be released to the Soviet Union, “nor to any country where, presumably, he does not enjoy safety against being returned to his national country.” Later that day, he was released from custody. On November 15, the Swedish Ministry of External Affairs informed the Soviet Embassy that Granovsky would be extradited to a country other than the USSR. The Soviet ambassador, I. S. Chernyshev, made several attempts to persuade the Swedish government to reconsider (one of which was described by the prime minister, Tage Erlander, as “so naked and abrupt that one is completely taken aback”), to no avail. Granovsky left Sweden and seems to have spent several years in Brazil before arriving in the United States. Wallenberg was, by most accounts, executed in July 1947. The fate of Granovsky’s mother and brother is unknown.13

  Andrei Sverdlov was arrested in October 1951 as part of the purge of Jewish secret police officials. According to his letter to the chairman of the Council of Ministers, G. Malenkov, he spent nineteen months under investigation, “being groundlessly accused of the most monstrous and preposterous crimes.” He was released on May 18, 1953, two and a half months after Stalin’s death, but was not readmitted to the secret police. He graduated from the Academy of Social Sciences at the Party’s Central Committee, became a Party historian, got a job at the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, and collaborated with his mother on her memoir about his father and with his father’s employee, Pavel Malkov, on his Memoirs of a Kremlin Commandant.

  In the 1960s, he and his former fellow interrogator in the Anna Larina-Bukharina case, Yakov Naumovich Matusov, collaborated, under the names of Andrei Yakovlevich Yakovlev and Yakov Naumovich Naumov, on three spy thrillers for adolescents: A Thin Thread, Two-Faced Janus, and A Fight with a Werewolf. In all three, the villain, “embittered against the Soviet system” because of his class or ethnic origins or because of his father’s fall from grace, forms an anti-Soviet secret society in the late 1930s, betrays his country to the Nazis during the war, and spies for the Americans in the 1960s. The secret societies, known as “Avenging Our Fathers,” are replicas of the ones Anatoly Granovsky, on Sverdlov’s orders, used to press his classmates into joining. In A Thin Thread, the future spy “socialized with school kids and tried to tempt some of them into joining the ‘society’ he planned to create. Not with good intentions, you understand. The girls he tried to corrupt, to seduce.” The Soviet counterintelligence agents do catch him in the end, but not before one of them is fired for extracting false confessions from innocent people. The reader is given an example of his interrogation technique: “The longer you persist in denial, the worse for you. And what do you expect? If you start talking of your own free will and tell everything, it means that you have laid down your arms and stopped fighting against the Soviet state. That will be taken into account. I’ll be the first to ask for leniency for you. But if you continue your denials, there will be no mercy. You will start talking, in any case. Sooner or later, you will. And the sooner it happens, the better for you.”14

  Andrei Sverdlov (right) with his uncle, German Mikhailovich Sverdlov (Yakov Sverdlov’s half-brother), from Apt. 169

  It is not known whether the authors meant this to be a mockery or a confession. Andrei Sverdlov died in 1969, the same year the following notice appeared in the underground publication Chronicle of Current Events:
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  There are at least seven individuals living in Moscow, whom Andrei Sverdlov personally interrogated, using torture and abuse. He participated in the investigation of the case of Elizaveta Drabkina, who had been Yakov Sverdlov’s secretary in 1918–19 and who, at his request, had taken his children Andrei and Vera out of his apartment several hours before his death. Andrei Sverdlov knew very well that Drabkina had not committed the crimes she was accused of committing, but still demanded her “confession” and “repentance.” …