Even though the manuscript has been left uncorrected, it makes an immaculate impression. This is how a man writes when he is able to give the work his maximum concentration, when, as is frequently said, your entire life passes before you shortly before your death. The book contains an extremely sharp recall of details, which, however, never impede the brisk flow of the narrative; a linguistic richness that would have been unimaginable to anyone who had read only his philosophical and political and economic tractates; and, lastly, an intensity that testifies to his great devotion and even love of his subject: a world that once existed but which is about to disappear for ever, his world, the world of his childhood and youth, Moscow around 1900.
Bukharin was one of the few indigenous Muscovites among the leading Bolsheviks.41 These 350 pages are Bukharin’s attempt to discover himself, to find his way back to his origins and reconstruct how he became what he was. ‘Who are you? What are you? Who are you?’ he makes his protagonist ask.42 The fact that the novel breaks off in 1905 and proceeds no further – that too is the consequence of the events of 1937.
In this novel we make the acquaintance of Moscow around 1900. Kolia Petrov, Bukharin’s literary alter ego, may well have been born, like him, in 1888. He grows up in the milieu of the pre-revolutionary Russian intelligentsia, in the family of a schoolteacher in the Moscow district of Zamoskvorech'e, more precisely, on the Bol'shaia Ordynka. Bukharin depicts the swirling activity of a life dominated by merchants, petty bourgeois, coachmen and craft workers in a quarter full of merchants’ villas, shops, cellar apartments and rear courtyards. Bukharin is a meticulous observer. He describes the orderliness of the faithful during the church services; he surveys the entire panoply of the delicacies in which the Old Moscow was so rich. His gaze has been sharpened by his sociological expertise: in the appearance of the Moscow merchants clad in caftans and boots, he discerns the rise of the new class, and he registers the revolutionary ferment in the disturbances of the immigrant peasants in the factory districts. He understands the rhythms of the life of the quarter and describes its sounds, which are composed of the public houses, church bells, market cries and bourgeois house music. This quarter has its own seasons, with the drift ice on the Moscow River and the season when boys launch entire flotillas of paper boats on the water, the summer when the whole family with its bag and baggage leaves the city to pass the time outside Moscow, renting from a psalmist in a village, only to return in autumn for when school starts up again. Bukharin describes the happy childhood of a talented boy with many interests who could read and write when he was only four, who could quote Heinrich Heine, and who discovers his passion for beetles and butterflies.
The novel opens out into the expanse of the empire. He records his father’s transfer to Bălţi in Bessarabia, but even Kolia’s visit to an uncle who works as a doctor in a God-forsaken hole in Belorussia allows Bukharin to absorb the world beyond Moscow, the vastness of the country and the scope of the empire. The world of Bălţi is a colonial world with an enclave consisting of the Russian ruling class and landowners, with a mixed society comprising Jewish tenants, Armenian craft workers and Russian intelligentsia. Bukharin sketches the picture of a town where people stay for ever and time stands still, lost in the expanses of the steppes. News from the outside world percolates into the provinces, epidemics rage, anti-Semitism and the Black Hundreds lurk in the streets. In the Belorussian village where his Uncle George works in the hospital, Kolia learns about peasants’ cottages and smithies from the inside, and the barefooted peasants’ children become his playmates. He is fascinated by the world of ‘nobles’ nests’ in which the remnants of the world of Catherine the Great still seem to dwell. But this world also contains outposts from which the Enlightenment can function, where foreign newspapers are read and new farming methods are tried out, a world that was already criss-crossed by trains and telegraph wires and would soon be turned upside down.
Bukharin shows us the world of school through the eyes of his boy narrator – first, the primary school on Bol'shaia Ordynka, and then the first Moscow grammar school close to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. It is an entirely new world, one in which reading and learning are pursued with passion. Kolia’s way to school becomes an exploration of the topography of pre-revolutionary Moscow. He reads what his generation reads: Spanish novels, Huckleberry Finn, [Valentin Fedorovich] Korsh’s History of Literature, Solovev’s Anti-Christ, Plutarch, and later Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx and Ulianov, whose ‘mind is as sharp as a revolutionary guillotine’.43 We accompany Kolia through the Tretiakov Gallery, which had only recently been opened, and listen to the hit songs of the day. Kolia graduates from the school with distinction; as a scholar he has some of the features of a child prodigy, the kind of boy who jumps a class and has private tuition in drawing and painting. At one point, Nikolai Bukharin/ Kolia Petrov gives a list of all the shops in Moscow selling artists’ materials.44 Bukharin’s descriptions are wonderfully evocative; we come to know his school, the smell of the polished floors, the teaching staff, including a Czech Latin teacher and a French and German teacher of German origin, and his schoolfellows, who represent all the ethnic groups, classes and religions of the late tsarist empire. The novel bubbles over with Latin, French, German and Polish jokes, anecdotes and rhyming couplets.45
The schoolteacher’s family moves around quite a lot, and this provides him with the opportunity to discover Moscow as a whole. Kolia knows the city he is always exploring ‘like the back of his hand’. In this way, we learn about the artisans’ district, Medinskii pustyr', the red light district, Vladimiro-Dolgorukovskaia Street, and about the world of dosshouses where rural immigrants, rag-and-bone men and all sorts of dubious people have congregated.46 Bukharin conveys the atmosphere of the Old Moscow, the rituals of its daily life and the aftershocks from the events of world politics that are felt in the remotest alleyways, the Moscow of factories and strikes, the factories belonging to Hackethal, Bromley and Guyon, the city of the increasingly restive students who will soon have occasion to make the acquaintance of the prison cells in Gnezdnikovskii Lane, in Taganka and Butyrka. Kolia’s politicization begins when the world of circles, of forbidden literature, of pamphlets, of illegal writings printed on cigarette paper reach as far as the grammar school close to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. He leads us into the circle culture with its infantile organization fetish and its complex factional struggles, comprehensible only to the initiated. He describes the tsarist government’s attempts to steer the revolutionary workers’ movement into the channels of a state-led workers’ organization – police socialism – as well as the assassination attempts and the infiltration of the revolutionary parties by the agents provocateurs of the secret police. The text closes with Kolia’s inner collapse when, overwhelmed by his brother’s death, he longs for his own death. ‘Dream, fantasy, nightmare, reality – everything became mixed up together, caught up in the vortex of excruciating images and questions to which there were no answers, riddles that could not be decoded, problems to which there was no solution.’47 Kolia despairs and becomes delirious to the point where all the fixtures and coordinates of his world view are dissolved. Contemplating suicide, he finds himself in the middle of a circus performance. Acrobats, clowns, tightrope walkers, animal tamers, apes, an emotional public alternating between storms of applause and outbursts of booing, a Franco-Russian cabaret scene at the end of which the cabaret artists are arrested. ‘This was the first time he had seen with his own eyes how “that” was done’, was Kolia’s summing up as he witnessed the disruption of the performance and the circus troupe being led away by the police.48
Figure 36.2 Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (1888–1938)
‘Destined to be the leader of the conspiracy of conspiracies on Soviet soil, Nikolai Bukharin was one of the best-known figures of the Bolshevik Party, renowned for his talents as a theorist and described by Lenin as the “darling of the Party”’.
It is not difficult to discern in this delirium th
e outlines of what is about to confront Bukharin. The experiences and feelings of Kolia Petrov are in reality those of the imprisoned Bukharin on the eve of his forced appearance in the show trial. Numerous passages point to this.
There are the nightmares in which Kolia finds himself in Hell, tormented by devils; there is the dream in which a comet hurtles towards him from an exploding starry sky. ‘These nightmares in which apocalyptic catastrophes strangely combined and alternated with scientific ideas soon passed and Kolia was filled with utter peace of mind, which put an end to these religious phantasms for ever.’
Figure 36.3 Petr Ivanovich Maggo (1897–1941), who, in his capacity as an ‘official for special duties’, shot Bukharin
‘The day of his execution was overshadowed by other events. On 13 March the German Army had marched into Austria amid celebrations, while in Moscow, beneath the House of the Unions in which Bukharin had been condemned to death, an especially splendid new metro station, “Revolution Square”, was solemnly declared open to traffic.’
These are the images that stayed in his memory from his strolls through the Tretiakov Gallery: Il'ia Repin’s mad Ivan the Terrible, cradling his son whom he has murdered and who is lying there in his own blood; Vasilii Surikov’s Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy and the famous Boiarynia Morozova, as well as the picture What is Truth?, by Nikolai Gay, in which Pontius Pilate interrogates the martyred Christ – ‘they were all alive and as he left the gallery, it seemed to him as if they all existed in reality.’49 In the context of the preparations for the show trial, many of the episodes in the book acquire a very specific meaning.
In the description of a confession scene, Kolia wonders what he should say to the priest about God, his faith and the church, whether he should tell a lie and what would be the consequences if he were to tell the truth. He confesses all his sins, but scarcely is he outside again in the bright spring sunshine than he ridicules the confession he has just made.50 Another scene that seems quite macabre against the background of the approaching trial involves a peculiar test of courage, in which the youthful Kolia aims to prove that one can commit blasphemy with impunity. He mocks the body of Christ supposedly ingested in the ceremony of communion: ‘human flesh and human blood’ in the form of the host; he spits out the wafer in the presence of his friends and lets it fall in front of a turkey, which gobbles it up. Is the entire vocabulary of the confession and the communion merely the memory of a harmless piece of juvenilia, or does it point forward to the confession he is going to make and his ‘betrayal’? In his novel Bukharin writes about the martyrs of Russian culture, the censored, prohibited and exiled poets. How are we not to think of Bukharin’s own era when we read such sentences as the following?
Frankly speaking … the best minds, the flower of the nation, are cut off as if by a machine. Scarcely do genius and talent make themselves known than the axe descends … The facts are known to all, but what if we just add them up? Pushkin – exile, censorship, death. Lermontov – exile. Chaadayev, whom even Schelling thought one of the cleverest of men – almost sent to the madhouse by decree of the tsar. Polezhaiev – tormented in an army barracks. Do you recall the ‘Song of the Imprisoned Iroquois’? ‘I shall die. At the stake I shall leave my defenceless body’ … Tell me, is a nation that just keeps on chopping off heads still capable of life?
In Bukharin’s novel such statements point always to the tsarist regime, but it is improbable that the author languishing in the inner cells of the Lubianka could wholly repress his consciousness of his own situation.51 The young Kolia, who loses control of his own thoughts, and indeed of himself, cannot stop thinking about immortality, metempsychosis and death.52
On 13 March 1938, his appeal for mercy having been rejected, Nikolai Bukharin was shot in Lefortovo prison by Petr Ivanovich Maggo, an ‘official for special duties’, a somewhat older Chekist of Latvian origins, and an alcoholic.53 The day of his execution was overshadowed by other events. On 13 March the German Army had marched into Austria amid celebrations, while in Moscow, beneath the House of the Unions in which Bukharin had been condemned to death, an especially splendid new metro station, ‘Revolution Square’, was solemnly declared open to traffic.
37
‘For Official Use Only’: Moscow as a City on the Enemy Map
There are but few maps of Moscow dating from 1937, and certainly not one that is accurate and on a scale that would enable the reader to form even an approximate picture of the city. The most accurate and informative map of the chief locations of 1937 is a German Army map. It originates in all probability from the Military Geographical Atlas and was produced for the campaign against the Soviet Union and the occupation of the city. It can be found under the heading ‘Moscow: Transport Systems 1: 35,000. Annexe to Military Information about European Russia, Folder H: Moscow. Special Edition VII, 1941’, with a magnified picture of the city centre, ‘Special Edition VI, 1941’. Both maps bear the inscription ‘For Official Use Only’. The following sources are listed as having served as the basis for the map: the City Plan of Moscow, published by the Moscow Communal Agency of 1928, supplemented by the plan of the city of Moscow in the Great Soviet World Atlas, which appeared in 1940, and, lastly, the Plan of the City of Moscow, published by the Geodetic Institute of the City of Moscow, also in 1940. Since the map still contains a ‘Bukharin Tram Depot’, for example, it is evident that it was based on older maps from which the name of Bukharin had not yet been expunged.1
Maps are instruments of power; in wartime they become a weapon. The mapping of a city is the first step to occupying it. The gaze of the map-making aggressor is selective and particularly sharp. He is less interested in tourist attractions, museums and theatres – of the kind seen in the Moscow Baedeker of 1912, the Guide to Moscow of 1925 or the Tourist Guide of 1937. Nor does such a military map provide illustrations of views or ground plans of the kind supplied in the General Plan of the Reconstruction of Moscow of 1935. The aggressor’s map focuses on strategic points. It contains references to close on 1,000 buildings and features. They are marked with symbols for barracks, staff buildings, ammunition stores and hospitals. It designates sixteen bridges over the River Iauza and four over the Ring Canal, and indicates whether the bridges have iron arches or iron trusses and the length of their spans. The map shows the locations of the numerous Moscow airports. In the case of streets, it indicates whether they are surfaced with asphalt or concrete. The draftsmen of the military map were interested in the relevant military infrastructure – in other words, locations whose destruction would mean the paralysis of the city’s lifeblood: power stations, heating plants, refrigeration plants, bus and tram depots, large garages, fire stations, military radio stations, telegraph and telephone exchanges, gasworks, sewerage systems and oil depots. They aimed to provide information about installations that should perhaps be protected from bombardment so as to be able to turn them to the aggressor’s own use later on: such installations included aircraft factories, truck and cable works, and printing works. And, finally, the map is concerned with the machinery and institutions of power that could possibly be attacked. The map provides a topography of power, with the Kremlin and the old and new squares at the centre. It identifies most of the People’s Commissariats which controlled the Soviet economy. It notes also the various complexes of the NKVD – which the cartographer always refers to as the GPU – the People’s Commissariat, the apartment blocks, barracks, the radio station and the ‘secret division’ – all of them concentrated around the headquarters of the Lubianka and going along Dzerzhinsky Street. Butyrka prison is also marked. In addition, there are the government’s houses and the hotels that were used as the residences of the nomenklatura. Marking the major construction site of the Palace of the Soviets was evidently designed to assist orientation – a gigantic excavation in the very centre of the city. The locks of the Moscow–Volga Canal are shown on the map and may have been intended to play a particular role in the event of a war against the city; instea
d of being set on fire, as had happened in 1812, Moscow was perhaps to have been flooded in a war.
A Soviet map with such a wealth of information would be difficult, if not impossible, to find at this time. The principal institute responsible for the production of maps – the All-Union Cartography Trust of the Central Directorate of Geology, Hydrology and Geodesy – was closed down on 1 January 1937. But in any case the responsibility for mapping the country had already passed into the hands of the NKVD two years before – on 15 June 1935. The NKVD for its part set up an administrative office for state records and mapping. In addition, the individual People’s Commissariats were made responsible for topography and cartography in their own domains.2 The NKVD’s creation of a monopoly in mapping was almost an inevitability. Knowledge of maps is power, and the year 1937 has left its mark on mapping as well. Publicly available maps became increasingly schematic and uninformative. We might even say that they lost their grip on reality, assuming instead the character of a fictional cartography.3 Maps became a state secret, and losing a map was of course treated as treason. Thus after the discovery in October 1937 that a location map had disappeared from the offices of the general staff of the Red Army – an ‘absolutely secret, especially important document’ – fourteen employees of the general staff were arrested, eleven of them as ‘members of a military conspiracy’ and as ‘spies of foreign intelligence services’.4 In other contexts, too, maps played a significant role as evidence of spying activities – examples were the arrests of geologists and Alpinists.
Moscow, 1937 Page 75