The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  The Bolsheviks did not agree with Plato, because he was an “idealist.” They discarded Plato and most other idealist philosophers, but they did not worry about the writers of fiction and ended up raising their children on ideas that were the very opposite of those they wished them to have (or thought they did, some of the time). The parents lived for the future; their children lived in the past. The parents had their luminous faith; the children had their tastes and knowledge. The parents had comrades (fellow saints who shared their faith); the children had friends (pseudo-kin who shared their tastes and knowledge). The parents started out as sectarians and ended up as priestly rulers or sacred scapegoats; the children started out as romantics and ended up as professionals and intellectuals. The parents considered their sectarianism to be the realization of humanism—until their interrogators forced them to choose, and to die, one way or the other. The children never knew anything but humanism and never understood their parents’ last dilemma.

  One reason for the fragility of Russian Marxism was Marxism. The other was Russia.

  Tsarist Russia was a multinational empire, and the original Bolsheviks were a cosmopolitan sect with a strong overrepresentation of rebellious borderlands (especially Jews, Latvians, Georgians, and Poles). On the central millenarian question of what makes the chosen people chosen, they were much closer to Jesus’s proletarian option than to Moses’s tribal one. But as time went on, and in accordance with the logic of common sacrifices and shared living arrangements, the world revolution evolved into “socialism in one country” before becoming a motherland with a Russian pedigree. In early 1931, in the midst of the First Five-Year Plan, Stalin sounded like the Prophet Isaiah, Enoch Mgijima, or any other messianic leader of a scorned nation dreaming of revenge:

  To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind. And those who fall behind get beaten. But we do not want to be beaten. No, we refuse to be beaten! One feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered because of her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords. She was beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry. She was beaten by the British and French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. All beat her because of her backwardness, military backwardness, cultural backwardness, political backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness. They beat her because to do so was profitable and could be done with impunity….

  In the past we had no fatherland, nor could we have one. But now that we have overthrown capitalism and power is in our hands, in the hands of the people, we have a fatherland, and we will defend its independence. Do you want our socialist fatherland to be beaten and to lose its independence? If you do not want this you must put an end to its backwardness in the shortest possible time and develop genuine Bolshevik tempo in building up its socialist system of economy. There is no other way. That is why Lenin said on the eve of the October Revolution: “Either perish, or overtake and outstrip the advanced capitalist countries.”13

  The Soviet Union was a form of retribution for the humiliations of the Russian Empire. It was, ultimately, the same country, but that country was a multinational state without a clear ethnic owner. Stalin may have sounded like a Russian national prophet, but his Russian never sounded native. Soviet Communism never completed its journey away from Jesus’s internationalism. It became self-consciously Russo-centric in Stalin’s later years, but it never claimed to be the voice of Russian national liberation. And because the House of Government had never become the Russian national home, late Soviet Communism became homeless—and, eventually, a ghost. In most non-Russian nation-states, it was proclaimed to have been a Russian imposition; in the new Russia, it was assumed to have been a flood that, for better or worse, had destroyed much of old Russia.

  Marxism as an ideology of rootless proletarians triumphed in the Russian Empire and ended with the Soviet Union. Elsewhere, homegrown Communism—Mao’s, Tito’s, Hoxha’s, Sandino’s, Fidel’s, Ho-Chi-Minh’s, Kim Il-Sung’s, Pol Pot’s—was primarily nativist (anticolonial, Israelite). So were Peru’s Shining Path and Colombia’s FARC. The Chinese and Vietnamese Communist Parties survived the transition to capitalism because they stood, above all, for anticolonial national self-assertion. In the Soviet Union, the decision to embrace private property left the emperor with no clothes at all.

  One reason for the fragility of Russian Marxism was that the Party’s doctrine was not Russian enough. The other was that the country it took over was too Russian at heart.

  The Russian Orthodox, unlike the Russian Jews and Old Believers, had never known Reformation or Counterreformation and had never been taught how to deal with a Big Father who was always watching (and could never be bribed, flattered, or evaded); how to think of salvation as a matter of ceaseless self-improvement (as opposed to happy accident, deathbed repentance, or the sudden descent of collective grace); how to take Jesus’s message for the totalitarian demand that it was (the real crimes are thought crimes, and no one is innocent); or how to forestall censorship with self-censorship, police surveillance with mutual denunciation, and state repression with voluntary obedience.14

  Bolshevism, in other words, was Russia’s Reformation: an attempt to transform peasants into Soviets, and Soviets into self-monitoring, morally vigilant modern subjects. The means were familiar—confessions, denunciations, excommunications, and self-criticism sessions accompanied by regular tooth-brushing, ear-washing, and hair-combing—but the results were not comparable. Within the House of Government and in certain well-drained parts of the Swamp, there were plenty of people who felt permanently guilty and worked tirelessly on themselves, but, by the time the children of the Revolution had become parents themselves, there was little doubt that most Russians still drew a rigid line between themselves and authority and still thought of discipline as something imposed from the outside. The Bolshevik Reformation was not a popular movement: it was a massive missionary campaign mounted by a sect that proved strong enough to conquer an empire but not resourceful enough to either convert the barbarians or reproduce itself at home. In the meantime, the founders’ children had moved from the romance of those embarking on a new quest to the irony of those who have seen it all before. This is true of all human lifetimes (senile romanticism is almost as unappealing as infantile irony), but not all historical ages (some of which take centuries to complete). The Soviet Age did not last beyond one human lifetime.

  EPILOGUE

  THE HOUSE ON THE EMBANKMENT

  Yuri Trifonov kept the promise he had given his friends when he was fourteen years old. He became a writer and dedicated his “lyre” to not forgetting. “Should one remember?” asks the narrator in his last novel, Time and Place. “My God, it’s like asking: ‘Should one live?’ To live and to remember is one and the same thing. You can’t destroy one without destroying the other. Together they make up a verb that has no name.” Trifonov’s life as a writer was a quest for that verb—for himself and on behalf of his generation. To live on and to be remembered was one and the same thing. All houses have histories, but very few have their own historians. The House of Government had Yuri Trifonov.1

  There were different ways to remember. Leonid Leonov’s The Pyramid was a reversal of Bolshevik apocalypticism (and of Leonov’s novels from the 1930s). The Heavenly Warrior is revealed to have been the Beast, but the story of Armageddon is the same; the memory is the mirror image of the prophecy. Yuri Trifonov abandoned prophetic revelations for irony when he was twelve years old (in a story about four boys writing a story). In his last story, written four months before his death on March 28, 1981, the middle-aged narrator goes to Finland and looks back on his time there in the late 1920s, when he was two years old and his father, “torn away from the world revolution,” was head of the Soviet trade mission. All he remembers is the gray sky, some masts, and a chestnut horse. The sky and the masts are the same, and, on his last day in Helsinki, he meets a ninety-four-yea
r-old woman who still remembers his father and the chestnut horse. On the train ride home, he thinks: “The oddest thing is that everything fits into a circle. First there was the horse, and then it appeared again, completely unexpectedly. Everything else is in between.”2

  There were different things to remember. Leonid Leonov remembered the catastrophe that Dostoevsky had warned against. Yuri Trifonov remembered “that irreplaceable something that’s called life”: the gray sky, the masts, the chestnut horse, his father, the woman who remembered his father, and many other people and things, some more important than others. The memories he turned into stories consisted of two generations and their worlds: the Revolution and its children. “My father,” says one of his narrators, “went through life marked by 1917. There are people of the late 1920s and people of the mid-1930s, people of the beginning of the war and people of the end of the war. And like my father, they remain such to the end of their lives.” These moments of creation are separated from each other by “gaps, breaks, and lacunae” without which human lives and historical chronicles are unimaginable. “It is like a play: first act, second act, third act, eighteenth act. In each act the characters are slightly changed. But years, decades pass between the acts.”3

  Trifonov’s main characters are his contemporaries: the people who went through life marked by their mid-1930s childhood. Act 1 of their story is set in the House of Government, which Trifonov calls “the House on the Embankment” because what matters is the river, not the government. “The air in the courtyards was always damp and the smell of the river penetrated into the rooms.” People who grew up there can leave the house, but not the river. “They swim, carried along by the current, paddling with their hands, farther and farther, faster and faster, day after day, year after year: the shores change, the hills recede, the forests thin out and lose their leaves, the sky darkens, the cold sets in, they have to hurry, hurry—and they no longer have the strength to look back at what lies behind, motionless, like a cloud on the edge of the horizon.”4 The current outlives the building; only the embankment is left to connect time to place.

  I once lived in that building. No—that building died, disappeared, a long time ago. I lived in another building, but within those same enormous dark-gray fortress-like concrete walls. The apartment house towered over the trivial two-story buildings, private houses, belfries, old factories, and embankments with granite parapets; and the river washed it on both sides. It stood on an island and looked like a ship, unwieldy and ungainly, without masts, rudderless, and without smokestacks, a huge box, an ark, crammed full of people, ready to sail. Where to? No one knew, no one wondered about that. To people who walked down the street past its walls, glimmering with hundreds of small fortress windows, the building seemed indestructible and permanent, like a rock: in thirty years the dark gray color of the walls had not changed.5

  Seen from the outside, it looked “like an entire city or even an entire country.” Seen from the courtyards, it suggested an intricate hierarchy of entryways, stairways, residents, and apartments that the children could only guess at. The apartments “smelled of carpets and old books,” as well as the river, and contained a variety of rooms, which contained a variety of mysteries. When uncles, aunts, and cousins came over, the grown-ups would sit around the dining-room table under a “giant orange lampshade,” talking “about war, politics, the ancient Hittites, enemies of the people, Schmidt’s polar camp, Karl Radek (who had, until recently, lived in the same entryway), the writer Feuchtwanger, the fact that Málaga had fallen and that the attack had been directed by the German Naval Staff from on board the cruiser Admiral Speer.” In late December, the table would be pushed against the piano to clear a space for the New Year’s tree and the midnight world it promised to reveal. During the rest of the year, the best place for magic was “Father’s study,” which contained a weapons collection and “very beautiful encyclopedias bound in leather, with gold backs and a great number of pictures inside.”6

  House on the Embankment, childhood drawing by Yuri Trifonov

  (Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)

  But the real magic of childhood was the other children, and the real hero of their courtyard adventures was Lyova Fedotov. In The House on the Embankment, he appears as Anton Ovchinnikov:

  We used to visit Anton in his dark apartment on the first floor, where the sun never penetrated, where his watercolors, in shades of yellow and blue, hung next to the portraits of composers; where a young man with a shaved head and officer’s insignia on his collar looked out at us from a photograph in a heavy wooden frame on the piano—Anton’s father had died in Central Asia, killed by the Basmachi rebels; where the radio was always on; where in a secret drawer of his desk lay a stack of thick, fifty-five-kopeck school notebooks, every page covered with tiny handwriting; where cockroaches rustled across newspapers in the bathroom (there were cockroaches in all the bathrooms in that section of the building); where in the kitchen we ate cold potatoes sprinkled with salt in between bites of delicious, thickly-sliced black bread; where we laughed, fantasized, reminisced, dreamed, and rejoiced, and always felt happy for some reason, like fools.7

  The sunniest part of that “sunny, variegated, multifaceted world known as childhood” were the summers at the dacha—“back when people still used to wade across the Moscow River, still used to take the long, red Leyland bus from Theater Square to Serebrianyi Bor, still used to wear India-silk Tolstoy shirts, white linen pants, and canvas shoes, which they rubbed with tooth powder in the evenings so they would look freshly white and release a cloud of white dust with each step the next morning.”8 The river that the dacha stood on was the same river that washed the House on the Embankment on both sides, but it took a little while to reach it from the bus stop:

  Pine Grove, childhood drawing by Yuri Trifonov (Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)

  The road from the bus stop wound through the pines, past the long-unpainted fences blackened by rain, past the dachas hidden behind lilac bushes, sweetbriar, and elder, their small-paned verandas gleaming through the foliage. You had to walk a long time down the highway until the tarmac ended, and it became a dusty road. On the right, on a little hill, was the pine grove with the large bald spot (in the 1920s a plane had crashed there, and the grove caught fire), and on the left the long line of fences. Behind one of the fences, barely screened by young birches, stood the two-story wooden building that looked less like a dacha than a trading post somewhere in the forests of Canada or a hacienda in the Argentine savannah.9

  The inside of the house was of little interest. The next stage of the journey was the meadow that separated the house from the river:

  Father liked making kites. On Saturdays he used to come to the dacha, and we would stay up late shaving down sticks, cutting paper, gluing, and drawing scary faces on the paper. Early the next morning we would walk out the back gate into the meadow, which stretched all the way to the river, but you could not see the river, just the high opposite bank, the yellow sandy slope, the pines, the cottages, and the belfry of the Lykovo Trinity Church, sticking up from the pines at the highest point of the bank. I would run through the dewy meadow, letting out string, afraid Father might have done something wrong and the kite wouldn’t fly, and it really wouldn’t fly right away, but would trail through the grass for a while, trying to fly, failing, and sinking down, fluttering like a frightened hen, before suddenly, slowly and miraculously, soaring up behind my back, as I ran on and on as fast as I could.10

  Riverbank, with the Lykovo Trinity Belfry, childhood drawing by Yuri Trifonov (Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)

  The final destination was the river, which reappears in story after story, as both beginning and end. The earliest beginnings, and some special occasions, involve the protagonist’s parents. The protagonist could be a first-person narrator, a third-person character, or both (often as a set of doubles):

  When Mother took her vacation, usually in August, the three of them would often paddle off in the boat very early in
the morning and go somewhere far away—for the whole day. Mornings on the river were cool and quiet, with only a few solitary fishermen in crumpled hats sitting next to their rods and casting disapproving glances in their direction. The sun would rise, and it would get hot. Light pale clouds would appear in the sky; the banks would start filling up with people and the water, with boats. Father would pull up on a sandbar, and the three of them would spend a long time swimming, sunbathing, looking for pretty shells and “Devil’s toenails,” and, if there was no one around, Father would perform funny stunts on the sand, stand on his hands, and might even walk on his hands into the water.11

  Trifonovs on the river (Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)

  On regular weekday mornings, the boy would run there by himself, through the garden and down the rocky road to the highway. “After running a hundred and fifty steps or so, he turns into the thin pine forest that stretches along the bank. Here he has to tread carefully again because, under the fallen needles, there might be pinecones, pieces of glass, or treacherous pine roots lying in wait to make him stub his toe. At last he is on the river bluff, and sees the others already there, below: Alyosha in his red trunks, fat Rooster, and Chunya, dark as a little devil. He yells happily to them, waving his arms, and then, with a running start, takes a giant leap onto the sand below.”12

  It all ended abruptly, with Father’s disappearance. Parts of the pine forest were claimed by new dacha owners. The sandbar and escarpment were washed away after the construction of the Moscow-Volga Canal. “His former life crumbled and collapsed like a sandy bank: quietly and suddenly. The bank collapsed. Gone with it were the pine trees, benches, paths strewn with fine gray sand, the white dust, pinecones, cigarette butts, pine needles, the scraps of old bus tickets, condoms, hairpins, and the kopeck coins that had fallen out of the pockets of those who had once embraced here on warm evenings. Everything was swept downstream in the swirl of water.”13