Moscow, 1937

by Karl Schlogel

  We must remember that following the Revolution we dealt blows to the right and the left. We were victorious, but even so there were still enemies of very different colours who might unite to ward off the threat of fascist aggression. It is thanks to 1937 that we had no fifth column. For even among the Bolsheviks there were and are those who remain loyal and devoted as long as all is well and the Party and the country are not under threat. But as soon as something happens they start to waver and run over to the enemy . . . In my opinion, the course Stalin followed was absolutely right. Maybe one head too many rolled – but in exchange that means there will be no wavering either during or after the war.70

  The idea of a final solution to the social question – ‘Let’s put an end to the remnants of hostile classes once and for all’ – the resolve to eliminate all the uncertainties and insecurities by instigating mass arrests and executions, together with the growing threat of war in Europe, created a hurricane of violence from whose self-destructive consequences Soviet society would never recover. Paradoxically, it was the murderous Great Patriotic War, with its 27 million dead, that enabled the country to rise up and rediscover its strength once again.

  34

  Lonely White Sail …: Dreamtime, Children’s Worlds

  Aleksandr Deineka’s painting Pilots of the Future of 1937 depicts three boys sitting on the promenade in Sevastopol'. They are gazing out onto the blue sea and following the flight of a white seaplane. Deineka’s painting is not only a portrait of one of his dream landscapes, the sun-drenched Crimea, it is not simply the painter’s act of homage to the beauty of the human body; it is also an evocation of a moment of childhood happiness, ethereal and complete. 1937 was the year of the aviators, and the wish to be a pilot stood at the top of the list for boys and girls growing up at that time.1 Furthermore, by a strange coincidence, 1937 had been designated the Year of the Child.

  The whole world seemed to revolve around children. A special publishing house for children’s literature had been set up in 1936 on the initiative of Maxim Gorky. Children’s books achieved record sales, children’s theatres were established.2 Even toys and dolls, which had long been criticized as the expression of bourgeois education, were now back in favour. There were now special shops named ‘The World of the Child’, selling everything associated with children. In 1937, little model towns for children made their appearance in culture and leisure parks everywhere.3 In cities such as Leningrad, the opportunity provided by the celebrations of the Revolution was seized to refurbish the old town houses of the nobility and transform them into palaces for young pioneers, with everything that went with them: observatories, laboratories, and courses in handicrafts and languages. The authors of children’s books, among them Kornei Chukovskii, Samuil Marshak, Valentin Kataev, Arkadii Gaidar and Lev Kassil', joined the ranks of the most popular Soviet writers. Some of their books have become classics, and not only in the Soviet Union. These famous children’s authors were also active writing screenplays for children’s films. Fairy-tale films had long been frowned on, but during this period a whole series of them were produced – classics such as the film version of Pushkin’s Ruslan and Liudmila (1939) or Vasilisa the Beautiful and The Frog Queen (1937). In 1937 a number of adventure films also reached the screen – the adventures of Masha and her dog Pushka in the film Adventures in the Air (1937), Adventures of Petrushka and What an Absent-Minded Guy after Samuil Marshak (1937 and 1938) – and finally Kornei Chukovskii’s Dr Aibolit, a classic of children’s literature that has captivated several generations of children and that came to the screen in 1939. There were also other successful films: The Children of Captain Grant (1936) and Treasure Island (1938). Lonely White Sail was premiered in 1937, having been previously performed as a play in the Central Children’s Theatre. Based on Valentin Kataev’s book, it was one of the most successful films of the day. It depicts the 1905 Revolution in Odessa, as seen through the eyes of Gavrik and Petia. It is a story of revolution viewed as an adventure story. In it Odessa features as a gigantic adventure playground, with a crowd of fantastic people and a thrilling plot. These films were no mere propaganda films for children but narratives concerned with adventures, solidarity, helping the weak, friendship, a good relationship with parents and teachers, and such simple things as decency and respectable behaviour. Millions of children had these books read to them before they went to school; they taught them the basic values of living together in a civilized way.4

  In many respects, 1937 was a year like any other for children and adolescents. It was a normal school year in which they had to study and pass examinations, and in which holidays to celebrate the Revolution and other occasions were a welcome break from the school routine. ‘I am happy and content; school is such fun that I can barely wait to leave home.’5 Nowhere did the hunger for education, for books, seem greater than in this country, where the Revolution had thrown everything out of joint and the yearning for a return to an orderly normality was overpowering. This daily normality consisted of difficulties with teachers, dance evenings trying out the first foxtrot steps, a year like any other with long summer holidays, and perhaps even a trip to a pioneer camp on the Black Sea. Children and young people would visit the Tretiakov Gallery or go to Sokol'niki Park for the May Day celebrations. Much thought was spent on how to get hold of a pair of artificial silk stockings, tears would be shed over the death of a kitten, and there would be heartbreak over the end of first love. The great events of 1937 did appear on the horizon of the world of children and young people. You can find a review of the premiere of Turandot next to a news item on the end of the show trial, as was the case with the diary of the schoolgirl Nina Kosterina: ‘Brief report on the month of January: twelve days vacation soon passed. I did not go to the convalescent home. I go skating almost every day and I go to the theatre very often. In January I saw Woe from Wit and Turandot. The second trial against the Trotskyists has now begun. Terrible things are coming to light. Presumably they will all be shot.’6

  An alert schoolgirl like Nina Kosterina, the daughter of a man who was a member of the Socialist Revolutionaries, recorded in her diary all the great events of the day, though originally they appear somewhat at the margins: the constitution, the Pushkin celebrations and Ordzhonikidze’s death. When war came in 1941, she at once joined up, and fell in her first action. In 1937 there were even moments of happiness. She notes in her diary as the year drew to its end: ‘In my mind I rerun the story of our love. I did not really begin to live until the spring of 1937. Since then my most beautiful experiences, feelings and thoughts have been associated with you. You are a part of my life. To tear you out of my life is impossible and would hurt terribly …’7 The Terror ‘occurs’, initially, but increasingly thrusts itself into the foreground in a dramatic sequence of catastrophes until it destroys this girl’s life and that of her family. Nina Kosterina’s diary – like the diaries of many others – testifies to the way in which the ideal world of childhood of hundreds of thousands of children was destroyed. The diary entries read like thunderbolts. They express terror, bewilderment, fear and despair – and often culminate in thoughts of suicide. Instead of talk about people whose names were known from newspaper reports, we suddenly start to hear about uncles, teachers, a father’s colleagues at work, and finally about a child’s own father. News of the arrest of relatives begins to percolate from other towns. Nina Kosterina kept a record of all the terrible waiting in queues at the counters of the NKVD in Kuznetskii most, and about the fact that letters had ceased to reach the people to whom they were addressed.

  Figure 34.1 Aleksandr Deineka, Pilots of the Future (1938)

  ‘1937 was the year of the aviators, and the wish to be a pilot stood at the top of the list for boys and girls growing up at that time.’

  ‘Something strange and incomprehensible has happened’, she wrote on 25 March 1937. ‘Uncle Misha, Papa’s brother, has been arrested. And also his wife, Aunt Anya. Irma, our little cousin, has to be sent to a children’s hom
e. Uncle Misha is said to have been involved in a counter-revolutionary conspiracy. How can something like that be possible? Uncle Misha has belonged to the Party since the first days of the Revolution – can he now be an enemy of the people?’8 A month later, she noted in her diary, on 16 April 1937: ‘My birthday has passed without notice. Only Tonya gave me a little red handbag. Everyone else forgot about it. And something else terrible and also incomprehensible has happened. Stella’s father has been arrested. He is said to have been an enemy of the people.’9

  Bad news followed thick and fast. Thus, on 22 May 1937, she heard:

  Something terrible has happened at home. Uncle Misha, who had disappeared, has reappeared. In reality he had come to Moscow to seek help for his brother who was under arrest in Baku. He went to the NKVD in search of justice and was immediately arrested. Uncle Misha now looks utterly distraught. He has the most ghastly things to report about what happened in Baku. As he talks, he keeps looking around him even though he had spoken quite quietly. At the NKVD he was asked about everything. When they let him go, the NKVD advised him simply to forget his brother. In the evening we cheered up a little; after all, Uncle Misha is still at liberty.10

  But in the end it affected the children too. They became orphans, alone in the world. There were not always relatives at hand, and if there were, they were not always willing to take on the children of ‘enemies of the people’ or ‘spies’ who had been arrested. Quite often, it was the grandmothers and nurses who assumed the burden of looking after fatherless and helpless children and bringing them up.11 A new generation of orphans was added to the 4 million who had been produced by the war, the Revolution, the Civil War and the general chaos, and who had been left homeless to roam the country, often in hordes. Since the law of 1932, they could no longer count on forbearance. Even twelve-year-olds could be condemned to death. The mass graves of Butovo contain the bodies of young people who have been executed. Gone were the times when there was at least a verbal assurance that young people could be ‘reforged’ by work and led back to an everyday normality. Gone were the rhetoric and the experiments in teaching reform that had fascinated so many foreign visitors and had misled so many of them. The new line called for children and young people to be taken seriously as ‘little adults’. ‘The Soviet child, even when very little, is immensely curious about everything that goes on around him … Moreover, the Soviet child is not content with the role of passive observer; he joins in the lives and the struggles of the grown-ups.’12 As a ‘little adult’, the child was drawn into the campaign to achieve a heightened vigilance; children should learn to recognize ‘double-dealers’ and to unmask them. They should use their childlike curiosity to unmask saboteurs and conspiracies. Sergei Eisenstein’s banned film of 1937, Bezhin Meadow, had such a vigilant child hero – Stepok – who was based on a real-life child, Pavlik Morozov. The education of a child who unmasks and denounces his own father, and is murdered in consequence, is a significant motif in the world of childhood in 1937.13 But the regime did not even trust children who were supposed by officialdom to be responsible for their own fathers. As the offspring of enemies of the people and anti-Soviet elements, they scarcely had any prospects of a university place, a normal job, or even financial support.14

  The stream of arrests and executions in 1937 produced a stream of orphans, and one of the places that scooped them up was the Danilovka, a children’s reception centre (detpriemnik) that had been set up in the former Danilov Monastery in the south-east of Moscow, one of the oldest monastic foundations, dating back to the thirteenth century. As early as the twenties, the great representatives of Russian culture who had been buried there – Nikolai Gogol among them – had been moved elsewhere. The Pokrovskii Cathedral had long since been converted into a gaol, its altarpiece replaced by a portrait of Yezhov. In 1931 alone, over 5,000 children passed through the monastery. In 1935 it had around 1,000 inmates; every cell that had once housed a monk now contained an overcrowded pandemonium. The Danilovka was the preferred destination for the children of prominent enemies of the people: Nikolai Bukharin’s son, Aleksei Rykov and Georgii Piatakov’s daughters, the son of NKVD boss Genrikh Iagoda, the children of People’s Commissars and of the military top brass.15 There they languished until they were sent on to special camps for the children of enemies of the people far out in the countryside, to Dnepropetrovsk, Odessa or Kazakhstan. ‘The socially dangerous children of condemned men are to be divided up according to age, the degree of risk they pose and their potential for rehabilitation, and incarcerated in the camps of correctional institutions of the NKVD or else to be accommodated in the special children’s homes of the People’s Commissariats for education’ – so ran Directive No. 00586, of 15 August 1937.16 The year 1937 saw the birth of a generation without a father. There were thousands and thousands of children who had lost their fathers or who had never seen them. It is not difficult to make the connection between the loss of the fathers and the establishment of a cult of Stalin as an ideal father figure.

  35

  Yezhov at the Bolshoi Theatre: Celebrating Twenty Years of the Cheka

  In the same year, 1937, the NKVD and its predecessor organization celebrated their twentieth anniversary. A celebration in the Bolshoi Theatre on 20 December was intended to commemorate the founding by an edict of Lenin’s of the ‘Extraordinary All-Russian Commission for the Combating of Counter-Revolution, Speculation and Espionage – abbreviated as VCheka or Cheka – on 20 December 1917. After 1922 it was reorganized under its chairman Felix Dzerzhinsky as the ‘Joint State Political Directorate’ (OGPU), and in 1934 the different institutions concerned with police and intelligence were brought together in the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD). It was only logical for the celebrations to be held in the Bolshoi Theatre.1

  At the heart of Moscow: power made visible

  The Bolshoi Theatre was the most festive and prestigious public space in the capital – if we except the meeting room in the Great Kremlin Palace, which was reserved for congresses of the Soviets and the Communist Party. Ever since the old Imperial Theatre was transformed into the Great State Academic Theatre in 1917, it was in regular use as the principal venue for political events of central importance, an authentic stage on which to display the politics of Soviet power. It was in the Bolshoi that the plan for the electrification of Russia – GOELRO – was announced. At the end of 1922 it was the stage for the constitution of the USSR. Anniversaries of the October Revolution were celebrated there in the glorious surroundings of the old Imperial Theatre, most recently on 6 November 1937, when the film Lenin in October, which had been commissioned for the jubilee, was given its premiere in the Bolshoi Theatre.2 This not only pointed to the lack of large public spaces in Moscow – the construction of the great Palace of the Soviets had been repeatedly postponed and in 1937 had only just begun. But, in addition, the use of the most prestigious public space of the old Moscow was also part of a political programme. This is well illustrated by a painting of the period. Members of the working class, all dressed up, are seated by the light of the gilt chandeliers in front of the velvet curtains in the very auditorium that had belonged to the former ruling class.3 In addition, the Bolshoi Theatre had become one of the few places where the regime’s leaders appeared in a public auditorium where there might be something of an encounter between the leaders and ‘society’, however abstract and however protected the leadership remained. And, to a limited extent, the same may be said of the other Moscow theatres, such as the Vakhtangov Theatre, Stanislavskii’s Moscow Art Theatre and the Maly Theatre.

  In the evening in the Bolshoi in Natalka-Poltavka. A guest performance by the Kiev Opera. Sat in the director’s box right next to the stage; the box was crammed full. Before the start of Act II, Stalin, Molotov and Ordzhonikidze appeared in the government box opposite. After the performance all the singers assembled on stage and applauded Stalin; the entire audience joined in the ovation. Stalin waved to the singers and clapped likewise.4


  Theatre visits – especially in the capital – were a privilege of which the leaders and their entourages hastened to take advantage. They frequently turned up in the government boxes reserved for them; their applause or their leaving the performance midway signalled their approval or disapproval. Bursts of applause for the leadership were a not infrequent occurrence at performances. To put in an appearance in the Bolshoi Theatre meant that you belonged to the very highest echelons of power; but to disappear from there was synonymous with a fall from favour and death. The degree to which the Bolshoi Theatre represented the pinnacle of social prestige and power became especially obvious in the jubilee year of 1937, particularly in November and December. Opera performances in the classical style, such as A Life for the Tsar, and new works, such as Quiet Flows the Don or Battleship Potemkin, alternated with state occasions. A wave of meetings and events passed through the capital. On 1 December the assassination of Kirov three years earlier was commemorated at meetings and ceremonies in the factories. On 5 and 6 December the entire city became a single giant meeting place, making use of its parks, squares, cultural houses, university lecture halls, workers’ clubs, metro station ticket halls and theatre lobbies to bring people together: the candidates for the elections to the Supreme Soviet presented themselves to the voters, accompanied by massed dances, brass bands, ski races and acrobatic performances which lasted until well into the night. The newspapers talked about hundreds of thousands of individuals gathered together to take part in these popular events for ordinary people. And all the while the arrests just went on.5 Stalin too presented himself in the Bolshoi Theatre on 11 December as a prospective deputy for the Stalin constituency. The ballot on 12 December was to be a demonstration of the ‘unity of the Party and the non-Party’. The polling booths were opened at 6 a.m., and voting became a collective, solemn, thoroughly rehearsed ceremony. Over 90 million people took part in the elections nationwide, 96.5 per cent of the electorate.6 And, on 16 December, over a million people arrived in Red Square to celebrate the newly elected deputies. The entire city was in motion, and it advanced on the centre in marching columns, amid the chiming of the bells in the Spasskii Tower, slogans and songs blaring from the loudspeakers.7 Around 90 per cent of the electorate had voted in favour of the ‘Communist and Non-Party Block’.8