The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  Yulia Piatnitskaia, the wife of the secretary of the Comintern Executive Committee, Osip Piatnitsky (Apt. 400), started a diary shortly before his arrest and kept it until she, too, was arrested. Her diary was published by her son, Vladimir, who also wrote a book about his father. Tatiana (“Tania”) Miagkova, the wife of the chairman of the State Planning Committee of Ukraine, Mikhail Poloz (Apt. 199), regularly wrote to her family from prison, exile, and labor camps. Her letters were preserved and typed up by her daughter, Rada Poloz. Natalia Sats, the wife of the people’s commissar of internal trade, Izrail Veitser (Apt. 159), founded the world’s first children’s theater and wrote two autobiographies, one of which dealt with her time in prison, exile, and labor camps. Agnessa Argiropulo, the wife of the secret police official who proposed the use of extrajudicial troikas during the Great Terror, Sergei Mironov, told the story of their life together to a Memorial Society researcher, who published it as a book. Maria Denisova, the wife of the Red Cavalry commissar, Efim Shchadenko (Apts. 10, 505), served as the prototype for Maria in Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem A Cloud in Pants. The director of the Moscow-Kazan Railway, Ivan Kuchmin (Apt. 226), served as the prototype for Aleksei Kurilov in Leonid Leonov’s novel, The Road to Ocean. The Pravda correspondent, Mikhail Koltsov (Apt. 143), served as the prototype for Karkov in Ernest Hemingway’s novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. “Doubting Makar,” from Andrei Platonov’s short story by the same name, participated in the building of the House of Government. All Saints Street, on which the House of Government was built, was renamed in honor of Aleksandr Serafimovich, the author of The Iron Flood (Apt. 82). Yuri Trifonov, the son of the Red Army commissar and chairman of the Main Committee on Foreign Concessions, Valentin Trifonov (Apt. 137), wrote a novella, The House on the Embankment, that immortalized the House of Government. His widow, Olga Trifonova, would become the director of the House on the Embankment Museum, which continues to collect books, letters, diaries, stories, paintings, photographs, gramophones, and other remnants of the House of Government.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book took many years to write. I am grateful to the Hoover Institution for one of the quietest years of my life and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, for one of the happiest; to the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, and the University of California, Berkeley, for financial support; to Christiane Büchner, for letting me watch the making of her film and teaching me how to record interviews; to Olga Bandrimer, for transcribing those interviews and contributing her own stories; to Artem Zadikian, for being the world’s most observant and generous photographer; and to Michael Coates, Nicole Eaton, Eleonor Gilburd, Clarissa Ibarra, Jason R. Morton, Brandon Schechter, Charles Shaw, I. T. Sidorova, Victoria Smolkin, A. G. Tepliakov, and Katherine Zubovich, for help with research. I am particularly grateful to the friends and colleagues who have read the entire manuscript and offered suggestions ranging from the inspiring to the debilitating: Victoria E. Bonnell, George Breslauer, John Connelly, Brian DeLay, Victoria Frede-Montemayor, Gregory Freidin, David Hollinger, Sergei Ivanov, Joseph Kellner, Joachim Klein, Thomas Laqueur, Olga Matich, Elizabeth McGuire, Eric Naiman, Benjamin Nathans, Anne Nesbet, Joy Neumeyer, Daniel Orlovsky, Irina Paperno, Ethan Pollock, Hank Reichman, Irwin Scheiner, James Vernon, Mirjam Voerkelius, Edward W. Walker, Amir Weiner, Katherine Zubovich, and all the members of the Berkeley Russian History Reading Group (kruzhok).

  Jon Gjerde kept asking me how I would go about writing this book until I decided to go ahead and write it; Reggie Zelnik would have noticed the presence of a character who never lived in the House of Government; Brigitta van Rheinberg never wavered in her enthusiasm and helped reshape and rethink the manuscript; Chris Ferrante, Beth Gianfagna, Dimitri Karetnikov, and Terri O’Prey turned the manuscript into The House of Government; and Zoë Pagnamenta showed me what a good agent can do.

  My greatest debt is to the women who created the House on the Embankment Museum and invited me in: the late Elena Ivanovna Perepechko, Tamara Andreevna Ter-Egiazarian, and Viktoria Borisovna Volina, and my very special teachers and friends Inna Nikolaevna Lobanova, Tatiana Ivanovna Shmidt, and Olga Romanovna Trifonova. This book is for them.

  Finally, reciprocity is inversely related to intimacy. A stranger’s favor must be returned promptly; a close friend can wait twenty years for a book to get written; all happy families are happy in the same way because they lie outside the cycle of fair exchange. Which is the reason I do not have to thank Peter Slezkine and Lisa Little for their contribution to the writing of this book.

  BOOK ONE

  EN ROUTE

  PART I

  ANTICIPATION

  Moscow

  1

  THE SWAMP

  Moscow was founded on the high left bank of the river it was named after. The wide-open and frequently invaded “Trans-Moskva” fields on the right side gradually filled up with quarters of coopers, weavers, shearers, carters, soldiers, blacksmiths, interpreters, and tribute-collectors, but the floodplain just opposite the Kremlin remained a chain of swamps and marshy meadows. In 1495, Ivan III decreed that all buildings along the right bank of the river be torn down and replaced by Royal Gardens. The gardens were planted and, under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, neatly landscaped, but the mud kept creeping in. The Middle Garden was bounded on the west by the Boloto (“swamp” in Russian); on the east by the Balchug (“swamp” in Turkic); and on the south by nameless puddles and lakes. The construction of the All Saints Stone Bridge in 1693 transformed the old southern crossing into a causeway lined with shops, taverns, and warehouses (including the Royal Wool Yard and Royal Wine and Salt Yard). After the fire of 1701, the gardens were abandoned, and one part of the swamp began to be used as a market square and a place for recreational fistfighting, fireworks displays, and public executions.1

  After the spring flood of 1783, the Vodootvodnyi (or “Drainage”) Canal was built along the southern edge of the Moskva floodplain. The embankments were reinforced; the perpendicular ditches became alleys; and the former Royal Gardens were transformed into a crescent-shaped, densely populated island. The fire of 1812, which smoked Napoleon out of Moscow, destroyed most of the buildings and drove away most of the residents. The new structures—including inns, schools, factories, and merchant mansions—were largely built of stone. The Babyegorodskaia Dam at the western tip of the island made the canal navigable and floods less frequent. Next to the dam, on the Kremlin side, arose the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, consecrated in 1883 and dedicated “to the eternal memory of the unrivaled diligence, loyalty, and love of Faith and Fatherland, with which, in those difficult times, the Russian people acquitted themselves, and in commemoration of Our gratitude to the Divine Providence that saved Russia from the calamity that threatened to befall it.”2

  On the eve of World War I, the western section of the island (“the Swamp”) was dominated and partially owned by the F. T. Einem Chocolate, Candy, and Cookie Factory, famous for its Dutch cocoa, bridal baskets, colorful marzipan figures, and “Fall in Love with Me” chocolate cakes. Founded in 1867 by two German entrepreneurs who made their fortune selling syrups and jams to the Russian army, the factory had several steam engines, brand new hydraulic presses, and the title of official supplier of the Imperial Court. Its director, Oskar Heuss (the son of one of the co-founders), lived nearby in a large, two-story house with bathrooms on both floors, a greenhouse, and a big stable. On the opposite side of the courtyard were apartments for the factory’s engineers (mostly Germans), doctors’ assistants, married and unmarried employees, housekeepers, and coachmen, as well as a library, laundry, and several dormitories and cafeterias for the workers. The factory was known for its high wages, good working conditions, amateur theater, and active police-sponsored mutual aid fund. Sunday lunches included a shot of vodka or half bottle of beer; boarders under sixteen received free clothing, sang in a choir, worked in the store (for about eleven hours a
day), and had an 8:00 p.m. curfew. About half the workers had been there for more than fifteen years; the hardest work was done by day laborers, mostly women.3

  The Swamp

  View of the Swamp from the Kremlin.

  The Cathedral of Christ the Savior is on the far right.

  View of the Einem Factory from the Cathedral of Christ the Savior

  To the west of the chocolate factory were army barracks, a collection of shops, and, on the island’s “Arrowhead,” the Moscow Sailing Club. To the east was the seventeenth-century residence of the Duma clerk Averky Kirillov, which contained the Moscow Archaeological Society, and the Church of St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker, which contained the remains of Averky Kirillov. The deacons, sextons, psalm-readers, holy bread bakers, and priests (Father Orlov and Father Dmitriev) all lived in the churchyard, alongside dozens of lodgers and the wards of St. Nicholas Almshouse.4

  According to Nikolai Bukharin, who grew up a short walk away on Bolshaia Ordynka Street, the Trans-Moskva churches were usually full.

  Sailing Club

  Averky Kirillov Residence

  In the front stood the merchants’ wives, rustling their silk skirts and blouses and crossing themselves with plump, rosy fingers, while, beside them, their husbands prayed gravely and fervently. Farther back one could see household dependents and poor relations: old women in black, God-fearing gossips, matchmakers, keepers of the family hearth, aunts with nieces still hoping for bridegrooms and swooning from fat and longing, confidantes, and housemaids. The government officials and their wives stood nearby looking fashionable. And at the back, pressing together as they stood or knelt, were exhausted laborers, waiting for consolation and salvation from the all-merciful God, our Savior. But the Savior remained silent as he looked sadly down at the hunched bodies and bent backs…. Joking and laughing a little nervously, young boys and girls spat on their fingertips and tried to put each other’s candles out. As the candles sputtered, they would snicker, then stifle their laughter under the stern gaze of the grown-ups. Here and there, lovers could be seen exchanging glances. The porch was full of wall-eyed beggars in pitiful rags, with turned-up eyelids and stumps instead of hands and feet; the blind, lame, and holy fools for Christ’s sake.5

  Most of them lived close by. Next to the church, along the Drainage Canal (also known as the Ditch), and all around the chocolate factory were courtyards filled with wooden or stone buildings with assorted annexes, mezzanines, wings, porches, basements, and lofts. Inside were apartments, rooms, “small chambers,” and “corners with cots” inhabited by a motley mix of people who might or might not attend the Mass celebrated by Father Orlov and Father Dmitriev. A sixteen-year-old factory apprentice, Semen Kanatchikov, who lived in the neighborhood in the second half of the 1890s and went to Mass regularly before converting to socialism, described his building as a “huge stone house with a courtyard that looked like a large stone well. Wet linens dangled from taut clotheslines all along the upper stories. The courtyard had an acrid stench of carbolic acid. Throughout the courtyard were dirty puddles of water and discarded vegetables. In the apartments and all around the courtyard people were crowding, making noise, cursing.” Kanatchikov lived in one of those apartments with about fifteen other men from his native region, who shared the rent. “Some were bachelors, others had wives who lived in the villages and ran their households.”6

  Church of St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker

  View of Bersenev Embankment from the dam

  View of Trans-Moskva from the Ditch

  Next to the church of St. Nicholas was the Ivan Smirnov and Sons’ Vodka Factory, owned by Ivan’s grandson, Sergei Sergeevich Smirnov, and famous for its brightly labeled bottles of cheap alcohol—made, as one government commission charged, from low-quality moonshine distilled by Tula Province peasants. At the end of the block, between the Smirnov Factory and All Saints Street, was the former Wine and Salt Yard, which housed the Moscow Assembly of Justices of the Peace, the office and residence of the city’s sewage administrator, a water-supply office, several stone warehouses (including three for apples and one for eggs), and the Main Electric Tram Power Station, crowned by two chimneys and a little tower with a spire.7

  Entrance to the Wine and Salt Yard

  The power station

  House next to the power station

  The All Saints Bridge, commonly known as the Big Stone Bridge (even though it had been mostly metal since 1858), was a gathering place for pilgrims, vagrants, and beggars—except for the first week of Lent, when the surrounding area became the city’s largest mushroom market. According to newspaper reports, mushrooms—dried and pickled—predominated, but there were also “mountains of bagels and white radishes,” “lots of honey, preserves, cheap sweets, and sacks of dried fruit,” and “long rows of stalls with crockery, cheap furniture, and all sorts of plain household utensils.” One could hear “the shouting, laughter, whistling, and not-so-Lenten joking of thousands of people, many of them still hungover from the Shrovetide feast.” “People wade through muddy slush, but no one seems to notice. Pranksters stomp on puddles, in order to splash the women with dirt. There are quite a few pickpockets, who try to start stampedes.”8

  Big Stone Bridge

  Mushroom market by the Big Stone Bridge

  Across the road from the Wine and Salt Yard and next to the Birliukovskaia Hermitage, stood the Chapel of St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker, with two small wings that housed the monks’ rooms, a drapery, and a vegetable stall. Next to the chapel were several pubs, a cheap bathhouse doubling as a brothel, and several former Wool Yard buildings filled with crowded apartments and shops occupied by various tradesmen, including a dyer, hairdresser, tinsmith, cobbler, seamstress, embroiderer, dressmaker, and “phonographer.”9

  Farther along the embankment, facing the Kremlin but partially hidden from view by tall trees in the front yard, was the three-story Maria Women’s College, dedicated to “using the students’ talents not only for the education of the mind, but also for the education of the heart and character.” Most of the heart’s education took place in the music rooms on the first floor between the administration office and the dining hall. From 1894 to 1906, one of the instructors at the college was Sergei Rachmaninoff, who did not like teaching but needed the exemption from military service that came with it. According to one of his students, upon entering the classroom, Rachmaninoff, who was twenty-three at the time, “would sit down at his desk, pull out his handkerchief, wipe his face with it for a long time, rest his head on his fingers, and, usually without looking up, call on a pupil and ask her to recite her lesson.” One morning he walked out of the class because his students had not done their homework. He wrote to the principal to apologize: “I am generally a bad teacher, but today I was also unpardonably ill-tempered. If I had known that my pupils would have to pay for my behavior, I would not have allowed myself to act in such a way.” Perhaps as penance, Rachmaninoff composed his Six Choruses for Women’s or Children’s Voices, op. 15, and also played at several school performances.10

  Maria Women’s College

  Sergei Rachmaninoff in 1904

  Behind the school was the sprawling Gustav List Metal Works, which employed more than a thousand workers and produced steam engines, fire hydrants, and water pipes, among other things. Gustav List himself lived above the factory office in a large apartment with a winter garden. He had arrived from Germany in 1856, worked as a mechanic at the Voronezh Sugar Mill, started his Moscow factory in 1863, and turned it into a joint-stock company in 1897.11

  The factory’s shops, warehouses, and dormitories took up the rest of the block. Semen Kanatchikov worked in the “aristocratic” pattern workshop. “Most of the pattern-makers were urban types—they dressed neatly, wore their trousers over their boots, wore their shirts ‘fantasia’ style, tucked into their trousers, fastened their collars with a colored lace instead of a necktie, and on holidays some of them even wore bowler hats.…They used foul language only when t
hey lost their tempers and in extreme situations, or on paydays, when they got drunk, and not even all of them at that.”12

  In the foundry, where the finished patterns ended up, “dirty, dark-colored people, whose blackened, soot-covered faces revealed only the whites of their eyes, rummaged like moles in the earth and dust of the earthen floor.” To the roar of the “enormous lifting cranes and turning gears,” the “heavy fire-red stream of molten pig iron spewed forth large blazing sparks and illuminated the dark faces of the smelters standing by…. The heat near the pots and the furnaces was unbearable and the clothes of the smelters would repeatedly catch fire and have to be doused with water.”13

  When Kanatchikov first arrived at the plant, the workday was eleven and a half hours, not counting overtime night shifts during the busy fall and winter seasons, but after the St. Petersburg weavers’ strike of 1896, List introduced the ten-hour day. Most workers, both the “urban types” and the “peasants” (who “wore high boots, traditional cotton-print blouses girdled with a sash, had their hair cut ‘under a pot,’ and wore beards that were rarely touched by a barber’s hand”), lived in and around the Swamp. When they were not working, they drank Smirnov vodka; brawled at weddings; told funny stories about priests; fished in the Moskva and the Ditch; consorted with local prostitutes; courted stocking-knitters, milliners, and cooks in the Alexander Garden next to the Kremlin; read crime chronicles, serialized novels, and Christian and socialist tracts; attended church services and various conspiratorial meetings; staged bloody fistfights on the frozen river by the dam (usually with the Butikov textile workers from across the river); and visited the nearby Tretyakov Gallery of Russian Art, Imperial Museum of Russian History, and Rumiantsev Museum (of just about everything). On Sundays, museum admission was free, but the most popular “free spectacles,” according to Kanatchikov, were Moscow fires, which, “no matter how tired,” the workers “would run at breakneck speed to see.”14