by Amor Towles
Though he didn’t mind seeing that so many of the old landmarks had disappeared, he was greatly relieved to find that the inn at the edge of town was still there. Ducking his head as he came through the front door and taking his rucksack from his shoulder, he was greeted by the innkeeper—a middle-aged woman who appeared from the back wiping her hands on her apron. She asked if he was looking for a room. He confirmed that he was, but said he’d like to have something to eat first. So she gestured with her head toward the doorway that led to the tavern.
Ducking his head again, he went inside. Given the hour, there were but a few citizens seated here and there at the old wooden tables, eating a simple stew of cabbage and potatoes, or drinking a glass of vodka. Offering a friendly nod to those who bothered to look up from their meals, the man headed to the little room with the old Russian stove at the back of the tavern. And there in the corner, at a table for two, her hair tinged with gray, the willowy woman waited.
*In fact, it was into the suite directly below the Count’s that Yakov Sverdlov, the first chairman of the All-Russian Executive Committee, had locked the constitutional drafting committee—vowing he would not turn the key again until they had completed their work. Thus did the typewriters clack through the night, until that historic document had been crafted which guaranteed for all Russians freedom of conscience (Article 13), freedom of expression (Article 14), freedom of assembly (Article 15), and freedom to have any of these rights revoked should they be “utlitized to the detriment of the socialist revolution” (Article 23)!
*Among readers of European fiction, the character names in Russian novels are notorious for their difficulty. Not content to rely on given and family names, we Russians like to make use of honorifics, patronymics, and an array of diminutives—such that a single character in one of our novels may be referred to in four different ways in as many pages. To make matters worse, it seems that our greatest authors, due to some deep-rooted sense of tradition or a complete lack of imagination, constrained themselves to the use of thirty given names. You cannot pick up a work of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Turgenev without bumping into an Anna, an Andrey, or an Alexander. Thus it must be with some trepidation that our Western reader meets any new character in a Russian novel—knowing that in the remote chance this character plays an important role in future chapters, he must now stop and commit the name to memory.
As such, I think it only fair to inform you now that while Prince Nikolai Petrov has agreed to meet the Count on Saturday night for a drink, he will not be keeping the appointment.
For when the quartet finishes their engagement at midnight, young Prince Nikolai will button his overcoat, tighten his scarf, and walk to his family’s residence on Pushkin Square. Needless to say, when he arrives at 12:30, there are no footmen to greet him. With his violin in hand, he mounts the staircase headed toward the room on the fourth floor that has been left to his use.
Though the house seems empty, on the second floor Nikolai comes upon two of the house’s newer residents smoking cigarettes. Nikolai recognizes one of them as the middle-aged woman who now lives in the nursery. The other is the bus operator with a family of four who lives in his mother’s boudoir. When the Prince wishes them a goodnight with the unassuming smile of the house, neither says a word. But when he reaches the fourth floor he understands their reticence and can hardly blame them. For standing in the hallway are three men from the Cheka waiting to search his room.
Upon seeing them, Prince Nikolai does not make a scene or voice some idle protest. After all, it is the third time they have searched his room in six months, and he even recognizes one of the fellows. So, familiar with the procedure and weary from a long day, he offers them the same unassuming smile, lets them inside, and sits at the little table by the window as they go about their business.
The Prince has nothing to hide. Just sixteen years old when the Hermitage fell, he has never read a tract or harbored a grudge. If you asked him to play the imperial anthem, he wouldn’t remember how. He even sees some sense in his grand old house being divvied up. His mother and sisters in Paris, his grandparents dead, the family servants scattered to the winds, what was he going to do with thirty rooms? All he really needed was a bed, a washbasin, and a chance to work.
But at two in the morning, the Prince is awakened with a shove by the officer in charge. In his hands is a textbook—a Latin grammar from Nikolai’s days at the Imperial Lyceum.
“Is it yours?”
There is no point in lying.
“Yes,” he says. “I attended the academy when I was a boy.”
The officer opens the book; and there on the front plate looking regal and wise is a picture of Tsar Nicholas II—the possession of which is a crime. The Prince has to laugh, for he had taken such pains to remove all portraits, crests, and royal insignia from his room.
The captain slices the page out of the grammar with the blade of a knife. He marks the back with the time and place and has the Prince undersign it.
The Prince is taken to the Lubyanka, where he is held for several days and questioned once again regarding his loyalties. On the fifth day, all things considered, Fate spares him. For he is not ushered to the courtyard and put against the wall; nor is he shipped off to Siberia. He is merely given a Minus Six: the administrative sentence that allows him to roam Russia at will, as long as he never sets foot in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, Kharkov, Yekaterinburg, and Tibilisi—that is, the country’s six largest cities.
About fifty miles from Moscow in Tuchkovo, the young Prince resumes his life; and for the most part, he does so without resentment, indignation, or nostalgia. In his new hometown, the grass still grows, the fruit trees blossom, and young women come of age. In addition, by virtue of his remoteness, he is spared the knowledge that one year after his sentence, a trio of Cheka will be waiting for his old instructor when he comes home to the small apartment where he lives with his aging wife. When they haul him before a troika, what seals his fate and sends him to the camps is evidence that on multiple occasions he had hired Former Person Nikolai Petrov to play in his quartet despite a clear prohibition against doing so.
But having said that you needn’t bother to remember the name of Prince Petrov, I should note that despite the brief appearance of the round-faced fellow with a receding hairline a chapter hence, he is someone you should commit to memory, for years later he will have great bearing on the outcome of this tale.
*Why, especially the street sweepers!
Those unsung few who rise at dawn and trod the empty avenues gathering up the refuse of the era. Not simply the matchbooks, candy wrappers, and ticket stubs, mind you; but the newspapers, journals, and pamphlets; the catechisms and hymnals, histories and memoirs; the contracts, deeds, and titles; the treaties and constitutions and all Ten Commandments.
Sweep on, street sweepers! Sweep until the cobblestones of Russia glitter like gold!
*Established in 1923, the OGPU replaced the Cheka as Russia’s cental organ of the secret police. In 1934, the OGPU would be replaced by the NKVD, which in turn would be replaced by the MGB in 1943 and the KGB in 1954. On the surface, this may seem confusing. But the good news is that unlike political parties, artistic movements, or schools of fashion—which go through such sweeping reinventions—the methodologies and intentions of the secret police never change. So you should feel no need to distinguish one acronym from the next.
*In those early years of the Soviet Union, how did the Bolsheviks countenance the idea of gilded chairs and Louis Quatorze dressers in the mansions of starlets? For that matter, how did they stomach them in their own apartments? Simple. Nailed to the bottom of every piece of fine furniture was a small copper plate embossed with a number. This number served to identify the piece as part of the vast inventory of the People. Thus, a good Bolshevik could sleep soundly in the knowledge that the mahogany bed he was lying on was not his; and desp
ite the fact that his apartment was furnished with priceless antiques, he had fewer possessions than a pauper!
*Yes, this little gray fellow behind his little gray desk was charged not only with recording the information the waitresses gathered, but with ensuring their willing participation by reminding them of their duty to their country, by suggesting how easy it would be for them to lose their positions, and, when necessary, by making some other more ominous innuendo. But let us not condemn the fellow too quickly.
For he has never been to the Shalyapin Bar. Nor has he dined at the Boyarsky. He has been allotted a vicarious life—a life in which all experiences are at arm’s length, all sensations secondhand. No bleat of the trumpet, no clink of the glass, no sight of a young woman’s knee for him. Like a scientist’s assistant, his lot was simply to record the data and then relay a summary to his superiors without embellishment or elaboration.
To be fair, he was no slouch in this endeavor and was even known throughout his department as something of a prodigy. For no one in all of Moscow could write a report to such drab perfection. With limited instruction, he had perfected the art of withholding his insights, forgoing his witticisms, curbing the use of metaphors, similes, and analogies—in essence, exercising every muscle of poetic restraint. In fact, if the reporters whom he was dutifully transcribing had only seen his handiwork, they would have taken off their hats, bowed their heads, and acknowledged that here was a master of objectivity.
*While many of the young loyalists (like Nina) who joined the udarniks in the countryside would have their faith in the Party tested by what they witnessed, most of Russia, and for that matter the world, would be spared the spectacle of this man-made disaster. For just as peasants from the countryside were forbidden to enter the cities, journalists from the cities were forbidden to enter the countryside; delivery of personal mail was suspended; and the windows of passenger trains were blackened. In fact, so successful was the campaign to contain awareness of the crisis, when word leaked out that millions were starving in Ukraine, Walter Duranty, the lead correspondent for The New York Times in Russia (and one of the ringleaders in the Shalyapin Bar), would report that these rumors of famine were grossly exaggerated and had probably originated with anti-Soviet propagandists. Thus, the world would shrug. And even as the crime unfolded, Duranty would win the Pulitzer Prize.
*True, there was still one more purge to see to, but this one was to be directed at high Party officials and members of the secret police. In fact, Genrikh Yagoda, the dreaded head of the NKVD, was about to get his. Accused of treason, conspiracy, and diamond smuggling, Yagoda would be tried publicly in the Palace of Unions—right across the square from the Metropol Hotel—found guilty, and summarily shot. So, this too would be regarded by many as a harbinger of brighter days. . . .
*Stripped of their names and family ties, of their professions and possessions, herded together in hunger and hardship, the residents of the Gulag—the zeks—became indistinguishable from one another. That, of course, was part of the point. Not content with the toll exacted by means of incarceration and forced labor in inhospitable climes, the supreme authorities sought to efface the Enemies of the People.
But an unanticipated consequence of this strategy was the creation of a new polis. Having been stripped of their identities, henceforth the zeks—though millions in number—would move in perfect unison, sharing in their privations as well as their will to persist. Henceforth, they would know each other whenever and wherever they met. They would make room for each other under their roofs and at their tables, addressing each other as brother and sister and friend; but never, ever, under any circumstance, as comrade.
*What sort of topsy-turvy circumstances could lead to a boom for builders and a bust for architects? Simple:
In January, the mayor of Moscow had called a convention of the city’s architects to discuss the needs of the capital given the rapid growth in its population. Over the course of three days, an excited consensus had quickly formed across the various committees that the time had come for bold new steps. Taking advantage of the latest materials and technologies, they proposed that the city erect towers forty stories high with elevators that shot from the lobby to the roof, and apartments that could be configured to suit every individual need, each with a modern kitchen and private bath and plate-glass windows emitting natural light!
At the closing ceremony of the convention, the mayor—a bald and brutish sort, whom we will have reason to revisit later—thanked the attendees for their artistry, their ingenuity, and their dedication to the Party. “It is satisfying to discover that we are all in agreement,” he concluded. “In order to house our fellow comrades as quickly and economically as possible, we must, indeed, pursue bold new steps. So, let us not get bogged down with elaborate designs or bow to aesthetic vanities. Let us apply ourselves instead to a universal ideal that is fitting for our times.”
Thus was born the golden age of the prefabricated, cement-walled, five-story apartment building—and the four-hundred-square-foot living spaces with ready access to communal bathrooms boasting four-foot tubs (after all, who has time to lie down in a bath when your neighbors are knocking at the door).
So ingenious was the design of these new apartment buildings, so intuitive their architecture, they could be built from a single page of specifications—regardless of which way the page was oriented! Within six months, thousands of them had sprung up on the outskirts of Moscow, like mushrooms after a rain. And so systematic was their realization, you could mistakenly enter any apartment on your block and feel immediately at home.
*The making of candles; the sealing of letters; the sculpting of maquettes; the polishing of parquet; the removal of hair; the shaping of moustaches!
*The studious reader will recall that upon Stalin’s death there were eight men of eminence at the pinnacle of the Party. Where were the other two at the time of this dinner? Lazar Kaganovich, a fine old Stalinist in the iron-fisted mold, had been sent on an administrative mission to Ukraine. Within a few years, he would be presiding over a potassium factory a thousand miles from Moscow. But at least he fared better than Lavrentiy Beria. The former head of the secret police, who many Western observers thought well positioned to inherit the throne when Stalin died, instead was decorated by the Party with a pistol shot to the head. And then there were six.
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