However much emphasis was placed on the new and the proletarian, it remained true that, for the most part, the principal routes to the major tourist attractions followed the lines laid down before the Revolution and, like them, were based on the existing infrastructure of health resorts and spas. The process began with the refurbishment of the passenger boats of the pre-revolutionary river companies and bringing them back into service, and ended with the transfer of the Black Sea coast villas, holiday homes and palaces to Soviet organizations: trade unions, the Central Executive Committee of the Council of the People’s Commissariats, and the various People’s Commissariats and institutes. The expropriation of the Russian Riviera and the takeover of the landscape of white palaces, promenades, parks and palm groves was a procedure fraught with consequences. The dream landscape of the ancien régime was incorporated into the new world, and hitherto inaccessible worlds were opened up to the people. In the 1936 film A Girl Hurries to a Rendezvous (dir. Mikhail Verner), the resort town of Yessentuki is clearly presented as a tourist centre.5 The new elite even adopted the lifestyle of the old ruling class: the white cotton suit, the Panama hat, and the effortless casualness beneath the southern skies. Nevertheless, a new style inevitably came into being. An entire bureaucratic apparatus was required for people to obtain places in the sun that were always in short supply. The mid-1930s witnessed a boom in the construction of model convalescent homes, sanatoria and assembly rooms, all built to the standards of the latest developments in European and American health resort culture – kurortologiya. Among them were the Barvikha sanatorium outside Moscow and the Matsesta sanatorium on the Black Sea. In these sanatoria everything was ‘modern’ – from the architecture, which was bathed in sun and light, with glassed-in verandas and balconies, to the interior design, with its guarantee of tranquillity and relaxation and its provision of the very latest medical and balneological innovations.6 The organized group tourist was at an advantage compared with the individual tourist, who had more or less died out. The increased ‘density’ already observable in the communal apartments in the capital was now repeated in the health and seaside resorts. People no longer took their holidays on their own but found themselves cheek by jowl with other, for the most part strange people. Despite privileged access to the supply of food, even the dream places by the sea were not free from queues for the canteen, cafeterias and kiosks. Even so, the ‘journey to the south’ – whether to the Volga, the Caucasus or the Black Sea coast – was an unprecedented, almost unattainable privilege and luxury.
Figure 21.2 The Crimean coast, as illustrated in an article on the activities in the Artek pioneer camp in a special issue of USSR in Construction
‘The dream landscape of the ancien régime was incorporated into the new world, and hitherto unattainable worlds were opened up to the people.’
But even distant journeys did not mean you could escape realities. Yevgeni Cherviakov’s The Prisoners (1936) featured the White Sea Canal as part of the route: tourism and forced labour went hand in hand.7 Another location symbolizing the escape from the pressures of everyday life and of politics was drawn into the vortex of events in 1937. This was the summerhouse, the dacha.8 During the Moscow show trials, the dacha, the place of retreat into a private realm for recreation and relaxation, was portrayed repeatedly as a location where conspiracies originated. The dacha was where intimate conversations and consultations took place, texts and letters were exchanged, and plots were hatched. Radek had allegedly visited Bukharin in the latter’s dacha in order to persuade him to intervene on his behalf.9 A secret meeting between Zinoviev and Tomskii was said to have taken place in Zinoviev’s dacha.10 Even Ordzhonikidze was supposed to have tolerated counter-revolutionary discussions in his dacha.11 At any rate, in the Moscow show trials the summerhouses of prominent figures close to Moscow featured as significant locations for conspiratorial activities. Even being close to dachas belonging to prominent figures could have catastrophic consequences: renting a dacha in the Moscow suburb of Kuntsevo to a diplomat; the denunciation by means of which an informer might gain possession of a much prized dacha; the mere proximity to the dachas of prominent figures – all these things could and did affect the degree of punishment.12 A particularly striking illustration is afforded by the fate of a plot of land belonging to the state property of Kommunarka lying adjacent to Iagoda’s dacha. This plot became the place of execution for Iagoda’s own followers after the exposure of an alleged conspiracy in Dmitlag in 1937. The dacha, actually a symbol of retreat into the private sphere, a place of recreation and relaxation, became instead a place of conspiracy and executions.13
22
The National Bolshevik Nikolai Ustrialov: His Return Home and Death
In 1935, Nikolai Ustrialov, one of the most prominent representatives of the Russians in exile, returned home to Russia. Two years later, on 6 June 1937, he was arrested in Moscow, and on 14 September 1937, under Articles 1a, 8, 10 and 11, he was condemned to death by firing squad by the Military Division of the Supreme Court of the USSR. The court accused him of treason, terrorism, propaganda and agitation to bring about the fall of Soviet power, and of having organized preparations for activities detrimental to Soviet power. As usual, the sentence was carried out immediately.1 Ustrialov had lived abroad for more than a decade, and while he was there he had urged other émigrés to recognize the new Soviet Russia. However, as a returnee he fell prey to the very power he had invited others to serve. His motives were not, or not primarily, homesickness, but his profound conviction that, as can be seen from all his writings in exile, the rebirth of Russia after a period of revolutionary confusion would be the work of ‘red state power’. This was the point at which his great Russian patriotism coincided with Stalin’s slogan of ‘Socialism in One Country’.2
The day after his arrest, Ustrialov asked for the diary that he had kept since his return to Russia to be sent to him in gaol. He hoped that the diary would help to demonstrate his loyalty to the Soviet Union. The exercise book with unlined pages, in which he had written in ink on both sides of the paper, survived in the dossier of his trial. Together with the underlinings, which presumably come from the hand of the interrogating officer, it provides us with an insight into Ustrialov’s own process of re-education. It is evident that the more determined he was, and the more strenuous the efforts he made, the more he confirmed the suspicions of the authorities and their secret police about a man so willing to submit to them and to deny his own individual nature.
Ustrialov was ‘flesh of the flesh of the Russian intelligentsia’. Born in St Petersburg in 1890, he grew up in Kaluga and completed his law studies at Moscow University in 1913. He had spent part of his time as a student abroad – in Paris at the Sorbonne and also in Marburg, where he had attended the lectures of Hermann Cohen. In 1916 he became a privatdozent and was in contact with the Moscow Society of Religion and Philosophy, where he also gave talks. In the same year, he joined the party of Russian liberalism, the ‘Constitutional Democratic Party’ (the Cadets), and made a name for himself as a distinctive political journalist with his contributions to leading magazines, such as Russkaia mysl'. This in itself is a pointer to the breadth of his intellectual interests and the themes of his future writings. In later years he would write about Schopenhauer’s ethics (1927), Italian fascism (1928), Plato’s political ideas (1929) and German National Socialism (1933). Following the February Revolution he led the Kaluga branch of the Cadet party; a little later he joined the law faculty of Perm University. The ‘second phase of his life’ began with a move to Omsk, where he chaired the Central Committee of the Cadets in the Siberian Republic as well as the information section of the government headed by Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak. Admittedly, he was already persuaded of the hopelessness of the cause of the White counter-revolution. ‘If we are doomed, it means that we deserve our fate’, he noted as early as spring 1919.3 Following the defeat of the Kolchak army, he emigrated in 1920, going via Irkutsk, Chita and Manchuria to Harbin, whic
h, with its 40,000 Russian refugees, its institutes, libraries, newspapers, theatres and the local university, had become a major cultural centre of the Russian diaspora. Here began, as he remarks, ‘the third phase’ of his life.4 In 1925 he entered the service of the China Far Eastern Railway (KVZhD), a Sino-Soviet frontier joint venture, and became very active in both teaching and writing. He made a name for himself in the world of Russian culture and politics with the volume Change of Landmarks (Smena vekh), which was written together with other prominent intellectuals and appeared in Prague in mid-1921. In this volume, Ustrialov and his co-authors expressed the view that the ‘die was now cast’ and that the rebirth of Russia would be achieved under the aegis of Bolshevism and would assume Bolshevik forms. If the émigrés wished to remain true to Russia, they would have to begin their ‘pilgrimage to Canossa’ [a proverbial expression for doing penance, dating back to 1077, when the Emperor Henry IV had done penance before Pope Gregory VII – Trans.]. Significantly, Ustryalov’s own contribution to the volume Smena vekh was called ‘Patriotica’. This volume triggered vehement controversies in the diaspora but also in Russia itself. It had struck a nerve. The Civil War was over, and the intelligentsia, which had been awaiting its outcome while standing on the sidelines or else had been openly hostile, was now forced into a U-turn. Ustrialov was among those who took the slogan ‘To Canossa’ quite literally. As early as 1925 he had visited the Soviet Union and published a book about it.5 He now set about organizing his return to Russia, and for this he made careful preparations, as we can see from his correspondence and from the fact that he sent his archive together with his diaries to the United States for safekeeping. His intention was to resume his teaching activities in Russia and, above all, to work as a propagandist for the construction of the Soviet Union. On 12 May 1935, he and his family took the train from Harbin to Moscow, where he arrived on 2 June.6
Returning home from exile: establishing contact with the new Russia
From the very first day of his arrival, Ustrialov was overwhelmed by his impressions of his old and new home. He took precise notes, even indicating the exact time of day of individual diary entries. He wanted to revisit the places and people he had known before and give an account of his impressions of the new Russia. As he himself noted, his return to Russia turned into a journey through a ‘genuine time machine’ (6 June 1937). His impressions overwhelmed him, and he was barely able to put them in some kind of order. ‘Back home. Somehow unable to get a grip on things. Literally a dream, a tidal wave of impressions, élan vital’ (30 May 1935). Conversations in the train, revisiting the places of his childhood, released a ‘chaos of emotions’. He sought out the places familiar from his childhood and youth, but he also had to try and find work. In this way he travelled through different periods: the past, the period of his childhood and the present, which stood for the new Russia. Sometimes, the different phases overlapped. During the next two years he travelled extensively – to Voronezh, Kaluga, Moscow, Leningrad, and the resorts in the Caucasus and on the Black Sea. In Kaluga he visited his grandmother’s house – ‘resurrected childhood, the living past’ (6 June 1935). He felt intoxicated by the aromas, wandered along by the river with the children, tended the neglected graves in the cemetery, and encountered peasants who still belonged to the world of the old Russian village. He felt confused by the stark contrasts and dreamed of becoming a writer who could understand and describe them. He felt horrified by the dilapidated state of the house, the fraying rugs familiar to him from his childhood, the patterned floor of the study, and the weeds in the garden of the family house. He was dismayed: ‘The past … Once upon a time … A vanished world … But can’t it be rebuilt?’ And, in fact, he meets a young lad who has been billeted in the room that used ‘to belong to Mama’ and tells him that order would be restored. ‘Yes, yes, there is new life stirring in the ruins’ (10 July 1935; in German in the original). He went on excursions to Sergiev Posad and Novyi Ierusalim, whose monastery had become a sanatorium for tuberculosis sufferers and whose cathedral had been turned into a museum (25–6 May 1937). He kept wondering whether he had not succumbed to nostalgia and a backward-looking gaze.
Ustrialov failed to reintegrate himself into the Soviet world of work as smoothly as he had imagined. He kept presenting himself to the People’s Commissariat for Transport and Communications, where he was supposed to give lectures on economic geography. In February 1937 he was informed that, because of the general situation and the need for enhanced vigilance, he would not be able to begin his lectures in the approaching spring term. Many of the articles he wrote – on Peter the Great or Pushkin – were rejected or else mutilated by the many corrections or omissions. He suffered from his enforced idleness.
Chiefly, however, his diaries focus on the new Russia. Not only because he was interested in the changes in Russia, but also because he was in search of clues, of proofs, that confirmed his vision of a Great Russia revived by Bolshevism.7 A strong element of wish fulfilment runs throughout his writing. He did not want to see only ruins and destruction, but ‘images of a feverish and youthful creative effort’ (19 June 1935). He even believed that, as a returnee, he had a sharper view of things than the natives and could make proper comparisons, while they frequently could not see the wood for the trees (24 June 1935). He concluded that the history unfolding before his very eyes ‘was worthy of the verses of a Shakespeare, the music of a Wagner and the paintbrush of a David’. ‘Here, however, was history in the raw, au naturel … history – that is the present. Crossroads. Indeed, something massive, fate-like, heavy with destiny’ (16 February 1937; in German in the original).
Figure 22.1 Nikolai Ustrialov (1890–1939)
‘In this way he travelled through different periods: the past, the period of his childhood and the present, which stood for the new Russia.’
Everywhere he discerned the signs of a new age, a new beginning. A visit to the Moscow ball-bearing factory moved him to raptures: ‘Firstrate machines. Outstanding people. It is a joy to see the country growing in every direction. When you see such powerful modern machines you understand the beauty of technology – just as Spengler understood it when he praised the beauty of ocean liners, etc.’ (11 June 1935). He was fascinated by the ‘roar of the birds of steel in the sky’, by the new human beings he had seen in the parade of sportsmen (19 July 1935). He liked the new manners and the fact that ‘citizens’ had now become ‘comrades’. The social lineaments of the city had changed.
A new social stratum! A new class! You can literally feel its emergence and its progress. The face of the towns has changed dramatically. There’s a new type of face, what used to be the ‘faces of the suburbs’. Yes, it’s the era of worker peasants, the proletarian revolution. The bourgeois intellectuals and the aristocratic gentry no longer define the face of the city. Even the face of the new intelligentsia is different; it too is proletarian, the face of the masses. Rarely, very rarely do you see an older type of person in the street: literally, a species on its way to extinction. That is the social effect of the Revolution: ‘the suburbs’ have moved into the city and ‘the city’ has emigrated, it’s gone abroad or into the next world. But it would be a sin to dispute the historical logic. Russia now has authentic cities for the first time, cities that have overcome their inertia. In time, the population too will become ‘urban’. We now find ourselves at the beginning of this potent and highly interesting process. (9 July 1935)
Amid this demographic and social transformation, he saw himself as a fossil. ‘All around everything has changed; everywhere you can see new, unknown faces – the familiar ones that have survived the storm look old, and they are old’ (16 July 1935).
He followed the political upheavals with close interest. He listened to the direct broadcasts of the passing of Stalin’s Constitution and took note of the speakers and the applause. He observed – not without satisfaction – the fall of the left oppositionists who had attacked him in the past. He had known some of them personall
y – he had studied with Piatakov at Moscow University. ‘Complicated feelings’ was his response to radio announcements about the Trotskyite trial. ‘Although these people’s death has been dictated by the logic of history, I felt genuine pleasure at the news about Radek and Sokolnikov’ (30–1 January 1937) [they had been sentenced only to gaol terms, not to death]. He was spellbound by Stalin’s address over the radio.
This organizing, hypnotizing name – his name is a slogan; it stands for a personality, a destiny dictated by logic, history and social development. The successful revolution – the Great Revolution! A nation like ours, a nation of many peoples, peoples who are accustomed to think concretely, needs clear, conscious, concrete leadership. And it is a stroke of fortune that we have received it, yes we need a talisman, we need Stalin, STALIN [underlined in the text and with a photograph of Stalin in profile glued onto the page], to set the pistons, steam valves and springs in motion, this system constructed of human beings, designed to preserve our state and transform it and to fight for socialism, to consolidate it and disseminate it. (The night of 6–7 December 1936)
Moscow, 1937 Page 48