She was in a terrible state. I saw her the first day she was back. She was sitting in her old room unable to recognize her two grown sons, apathetic to everyone. Her eyes were cloudy, and she was staring out the window, indifferent to the news we were trying to tell her about my father’s death, about Grandmother’s death and the down-fall of our sworn enemy, Beria. Her only reaction was to shake her head listlessly.34
She recovered eventually, “stopped raving and only occasionally talked to herself at night.” She was back to the way she had always been (as Svetlana saw it in 1963): “a martyr in the name of goodness, a true saint, a genuine Christian.”35
Once again she tries to help everyone else in sight. The day her pension arrives, myriad old ladies appear on her doorstep and she hands out money to them all, knowing perfectly well that none of them will ever be able to pay her back. People she’s never seen in her life keep showing up at her apartment to ask for help. One wants a permit to stay in Moscow. Another is looking for a job. An old schoolteacher has trouble at home and nowhere to live. Aunt Anna does what she can for all of them. She goes to the Moscow City Soviet. She spends hours waiting to see someone at the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. She peppers the Central Committee with appeals, never for herself, of course, but for someone in trouble, some ailing old woman who doesn’t have a pension and has nothing to live on.
She’s a familiar figure everywhere she goes. Everybody respects her and is kind to her, everybody except her two young, good-looking daughters-in-law, who are only out for themselves. Her home life is terrible—no one consults her or pays her any attention. Sometimes they go to the cinema and pay her to baby-sit. When they have friends in for the evening, she is an unwanted guest, a dishevelled, white-haired old woman who is sloppily dressed and keeps butting in at the wrong moment. Instead of a purse, she’ll pick up an old muff or sack and go out for a walk. She’ll have a long talk with the militiaman on the street, ask the dustman how he’s been lately and go for a boat ride on the river. If this were before the Revolution people would treat her like a holy woman and bow down before her on the street.
Neither Anna nor Svetlana knew that Anna’s late husband had been officially recognized as the country’s number one executioner. Unlike number two, Sergei Mironov, he had since been rehabilitated. “She’s convinced Redens is still alive, although she’s had official word of his posthumous rehabilitation. She thinks he has a new wife and family somewhere in the far North like Kolyma or Magadan (‘After so many years, why not?’ she’ll ask) and that he just doesn’t want to come home. From time to time she’ll insist after one of her dreams or hallucinations that she’s seen her husband and had a talk with him. She lives in a world of her own, where memories and visions and shadows of bygone years blur into those of the present.”36
Svetlana Stalina finished her book of memoirs, Twenty Letters to a Friend, in August 1963. A year later, she added the footnote: “Anna Redens [Allilueva] died in August 1964, in a section of the Kremlin hospital located outside of Moscow. After prison she had a great fear of locked doors, but despite her protests she was locked up one night in a hospital ward. The next morning she was found dead.”37
Anna Allilueva
Osinsky’s widow, Ekaterina Mikhailovna Smirnova, had died six months earlier. According to her daughter, Svetlana, no one would have recognized in her “the brilliant woman from many years ago or even the intelligent and sad one of more recent years.”
Fate was not kind to her in her last years. Her rehabilitation in 1955 provided her with relative comfort, an apartment in Moscow, and a chance to rent a dacha, something she had always dreamed of. But the people she loved were all in their graves, and unknown ones at that. She did have a daughter, but she was unloving, uncaring, and irritable.
When my mother became an invalid, she moved from one rented apartment to another, with her friends’ help, until the Academy of Sciences gave her, as an Academician’s widow, a room in a communal apartment. She started living with constantly changing maids, who stole from her to the best of their ability or conscience. In 1961 the Academy authorities decided, for some reason, that she was mentally ill and offered her a separate one-bedroom apartment. I moved in, too, with my daughter and against my wishes. She would live for another three years and have two more strokes. Nobody wanted to stay with her permanently, but she could no longer live by herself.
Thus began our three years of torment, which are not worth describing because they are so easy to imagine. I will only say a few words about my mother. Until the very end, she would sit completely straight in a simple, ten-rouble lawn chair made of canvas stretched over aluminum tubes, which I would push around the apartment. With unsteady, indistinct movements of her now completely smooth, “boyish hand” (as my father used to say), she would direct her food toward her mouth, spilling some along the way and greedily devouring the rest. Her main occupation was reading, but only books she had read before. Sometimes, when looking at my mother from behind, I would notice her back begin to quiver and shake. She would suddenly burst into violent sobs while reading something that brought back memories or, more often, when listening to music. (When the sweet strains of Lakmé’s aria “Where will the young Indian girl, a Pariah, go?,” poured forth from the radio, Mother, no matter how hard she tried, could not hold back the sobs, which would then turn into almost a howl.)38
E. M. Smirnova (left) (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)
Sometime during the war, Svetlana had been contacted by Anna Shaternikova, who told her about her twenty-year relationship with her father. They became friends. Anna lived in a communal apartment with her husband, whom she did not love, and son Vsemir, who died soon after the war. She was paid a special Old Bolshevik pension and worked part-time in the district Party committee and as a volunteer in various official campaigns. She was very proud of having joined the Party before the October Revolution. After Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, she was contacted by a man who had spent time in the same prison cell with Osinsky. She did not tell Svetlana about it because Svetlana was not a Party member (but did tell Svetlana’s nephew, Ilya, who was). Toward the end of her life she spent some time in a psychiatric institution. She once told Svetlana that she had three wishes: not to die alone, to have someone say something at her funeral, and to have her grave taken care of. She died alone in a hospital, sometime in the late 1970s, when she was in her mid-eighties. Svetlana never found out where she was buried. But she did receive the package of her father’s letters, which Anna had preserved for forty years, in a variety of hiding places.39
Anna Shaternikova (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)
Bolshevism, like Christianity, Islam, and most other millenarianisms, started out as a men’s movement. Women represented a very small proportion of both the original sect members and House of Government leaseholders. Men could be married to both women and the Revolution. Women had to choose. The great majority of those who moved into the House of Government did so as family members of male Bolsheviks. Many of them were Bolshevik true believers and trained professionals, but they did not qualify for the House of Government in their own right. Those who did tended to be like Stasova: single, childless, politically irrelevant, and recognized for their past service (in auxiliary capacities).
Bolshevism, unlike Christianity, Islam, and a few other millenarianisms, was a one-generation phenomenon. When the leading Bolsheviks were homeless young men, women embodied the “insatiable utopia.” When they settled down and formed families, women represented either “the pettiness of existence” or—occasionally and often secretly—the last hope for the luminous faith. When they went to their deaths, women were not present, except possibly as the subject of their last farewell. After their husbands’ disappearances, most Bolshevik wives were not accused of any crime but were sent to special camps as “family members.” When they came back—old, sick, broken, and unwanted—there was no luminous faith left and no home to return to. They had nothing to say to their children, and their chi
ldren had nothing to say to them.
Revolutions repeat themselves: first as tragedy and then as family tragedy. They begin as rebellions against the eternal return and end at home, amidst women and children. If they attempt to survive by executing their high priests for betrayal, they end a little later, amidst broken families and old love letters. When it turns out that immortality is impossible, some of the men get punished for it, and acquire a degree of immortality as a consequence (often with the help of their women and children). The women are left to be forgotten and to bear some of the blame—first in general, as carriers of the hen-and-rooster problems, and then at home, for outliving their husbands and their faith.
Valerian Osinsky had once loved his wife, Ekaterina Smirnova; his lover, Anna Shaternikova; his three children, Dima, Valia, and Svetlana (especially the boys), and the insatiable utopia, which promised profound tenderness without shame and charity without embellishment. Dima was executed along with him; Valia went missing in action; and the utopia evaporated a decade or two later, without anyone quite noticing. Ekaterina and Anna died alone. Svetlana deposited her father’s letters in the Academy of Sciences archive and published a book of memoirs—as a tribute to her father, brothers, and teachers and a mea culpa to her mother.
Eva Levina-Rozengolts, 1974 (Courtesy of E. B. Levina)
Arkady Rozengolts’s sister, Eva Levina-Rozengolts, was arrested in August 1949, as part of the campaign against relatives of executed enemies of the people. She was sentenced to ten years in exile (as a “socially dangerous element”) and spent five years in Siberia as a lumberyard worker, cleaning woman, medical orderly, nurse, and painter on a river barge, and two years in Karaganda, as artist-decorator at the Kazakh Drama Theater. In 1956, she was allowed to return to Moscow.
By the time of her death in 1975, at the age of seventy-seven, she had produced eight graphic cycles: Trees, Swamps, People, Sky, Portraits, Frescoes, Plastic Compositions, and Landscapes. Her human figures seem to emerge from the netherworld of silent despair into a crowded purgatory of ageless, sexless, anonymous souls. Some are imploring or praying; most seem resigned to whatever judgment awaits them.40
Eva Levina-Rozengolts, People, Rembrandt series, ink on paper, 1958 (Courtesy of E. B. Levina)
Eva Levina-Rozengolts, People, Rembrandt series, ink on paper, 1960 (Courtesy of E. B. Levina)
Eva Levina-Rozengolts, People, Plastic Compositions, pastel on paper, 1972–74 (Courtesy of E. B. Levina)
Eva Levina-Rozengolts, Frescoes, pastel on paper, 1968 (Courtesy of E. B. Levina)
33
THE END
The best of the House of Government children were killed in the war. Or rather, the children who were killed in the war became the best because they had fulfilled their oath to Pushkin and followed him into the temple of eternal youth.
The children who were not killed in the war came back to Moscow and stopped being children, with varying degrees of success. The children of former students fared better than the children of former workers, and both fared better than the children of the workers who had served and guarded them. Most of the children of government officials, including “family members of the traitors to the motherland,” graduated from prestigious colleges and (re)joined the postwar Soviet cultural and professional elite (known to both members and nonmembers as the “intelligentsia”). They got married, raised children, bought refrigerators, moved into new apartments (if they did not stay in the House of Government), had more or less successful careers, and never lost their sense of chosenness. They were heartened and briefly rejuvenated by Khrushchev’s “thaw” and disillusioned and perhaps amused by Brezhnev’s “stagnation.” They venerated the memory of their fathers but no longer shared their faith. They thought of Roza Lazarevna Markus and her neighbors in the Home of Party Veterans as shadows of forgotten ancestors. Some of them became dissidents; some emigrated to Israel, the United States, or Germany; most welcomed Gorbachev’s perestroika. By the time the Soviet state collapsed, no one seemed to take the original prophecy seriously anymore.
The Palace of Soviets was never built. During the war, the metal piles from its foundation were used to make antitank barriers. In 1960, the foundation pit was converted into an outdoor swimming pool. In the 1990s, the pool was drained and the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, rebuilt. The square in front of the House of Government officially reverted to its former name, Swamp Square.
The Russian Revolution ended where it began—in the swamp on the eve of the End. As the Soviet world began to crumble, at first in a few places and then everywhere at once—amidst earthquakes, nuclear explosions, falling stars, and nation rising against nation—people became increasingly talkative, contemplative, and quick-tempered. As Celsus wrote about a similar time two thousand years earlier, “there were many, who, although of no name, with the greatest facility and on the slightest occasion, whether within or without temples, assumed the motions and gestures of inspired persons.” They promised a variety of things (mostly disastrous), and “to those promises were added strange and quite unintelligible words,” some of them so dark as to have no meaning at all. Some came from afar: Mormons, Christian evangelicals, Sathya Sai Baba, Baba Vanga, and, with particular success, Aum Shinrikyo (which had its own radio and TV shows and filled stadiums for initiation ceremonies). Some were homegrown: Vissarion’s Church of the Last Testament, Maria Devi Christ’s White Brotherhood, and Blessed John’s Mother-of-God Center preached the coming apocalypse; Anatoly Kashpirovsky and Allan Chumak healed and “energized” millions of TV viewers; Pavel Globa and Mikhail Levin transformed astrology into a science and an industry; Sergei Mavrodi built a financial pyramid that offered profits to millions of investors, and Anatoly Fomenko discovered that most recorded history was a hoax.1
The last days of the twentieth century were different from the last days of the nineteenth century in that they ended the way most last days do. The fervor subsided, the prophets vanished, the revolution never came, and life in the Swamp resumed its usual course.
One of the most magnificent monuments of that era is Leonid Leonov’s novel The Pyramid, which reimagines the building of socialism (and Leonov’s own previous work) as Satan’s deadly joke. Conceived in 1940, after one of his plays was banned and his family “had spent a week sleeping with their clothes on, waiting for a nocturnal knock on the door,” it was still unfinished in 1994, when the first edition came out. In the meantime, the author of The Sot’ and The Road to Ocean had been acclaimed and forgotten as the exemplar of socialist realism, elected to the Supreme Soviet and Academy of Sciences, named Hero of Socialist Labor and Distinguished Artist of the Russian Republic, awarded Lenin, Stalin, and state prizes, and presumed dead by most readers. In 1989, he had asked the Bulgarian clairvoyant, Vanga (whom he had consulted on several previous occasions), about his new novel, and she told him to publish it in three years. He published it five years later and died soon afterward, at the age of ninety-five. “Not counting on being able to complete his last book in the time remaining,” he wrote in the foreword, “the author has accepted his friends’ advice to publish it in its present condition. The urgency of the decision is dictated by the imminence of the most terrible cataclysm—religious, ethnic, and social—we have ever lived through, the last one for all Earthlings. The ever-growing horror of the events of the waning century lead one to interpret it as the preface to humanity’s epilogue.”2
The Pyramid was written as an epitaph to a false apocalypse on the eve of a true one. The action takes place in the fall of 1940 and at various points in the future, to which the narrator, known as “Leonid Leonov,” is taken by a succession of guides, not all of them reliable. In 1935, Gorky had written to Leonov about The Road to Ocean: “Dostoevsky’s gloomy and spiteful shadow hangs over the entire plotline.” In 1971, Leonov had written to a friend about his new novel: “Dostoevsky and I stand on opposite sides of the mountain range. I can see with my own eyes the things he was afraid of.” In the 1990s, after the ex
periment has been pronounced a failure, Leonov—and one of the novel’s central characters, Father Matvei—agree with Dostoevsky about the meaning of the catastrophe: “Was it not Russia’s historic mission to crash to the ground from the height of a thousand-year greatness before the eyes of the world, so as to warn the coming generations against repeated attempts to contrive a heaven on earth?”3
Mikhail Gorbachev visiting Leonid Leonov on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday (Courtesy of N. A. Makarov)
In Leonov’s creation novel, The Sot’, Communism had been a vision of distant buildings glimpsed by the chief of construction. In The Road to Ocean, it had been a glorious city that travelers from the present could explore and write books about. In The Pyramid, it is—for a while—still hidden behind the gate of a top-secret construction site. Father Matvei’s son, Vadim, has been brought there by the mysterious “Comrade Virgil.” “While talking to him, Vadim never took his eyes off the unfolding panorama of construction, whose awesome grandeur could only be compared to one of the visions of the apocalyptic cycle. A dwarfed imagination strained in vain for a commensurate episode. It was difficult for the eye to grasp the true dimensions or even the approximate shape of the stone bulk that could only be guessed at by the rising agitation within the soul, while the bewildered mind foresaw the scale of the catastrophe occasioned by the tiniest engineering miscalculation.”4
The House of Government Page 126