The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  Gustav List Metal Works

  Twice a month, on Saturday paydays, most of Kanatchikov’s housemates “indulged in wild carousing. Some, as soon as they had collected their pay, would go directly from the factory to beer halls, taverns, or to some grassy spot, whereas others—the somewhat more dandified types—first went back to the apartment to change their clothes.” On the following Mondays, the “sufferers … with swollen red faces and glazed eyes” would treat their hangovers with shots of alcohol-based varnish kept in a special tin can. “After lunch half the shop would be drunk. Some would loaf on other people’s workbenches; others would sit it out in the lavatory. Those whose morning-after drinking had gone too far went to sleep in the drying room or in the shop shed.”15

  East of the Gustav List Metal Works was the “Renaissance” mansion of the sugar millionaire, Kharitonenko, with Gothic interiors by Fedor Schechtel and a large gallery of Russian art. Between Gustav List and the Ditch was the Swamp proper: a large square filled with long sheds, filled with small shops, filled with all kinds of things, mostly edible. In late summer and early fall, the space between the sheds became Moscow’s largest farmers’ market. Every night, the dealers would gather in Afanasyev’s tea room to agree on prices. At about two in the morning, they would come out to greet the arriving peasants, and, according to one newspaper report, each would “walk unhurriedly along the line of carts, glancing indifferently at the mountains of berries. Having made a choice, he would name a price and, if the peasant began to object, would shrug and walk away, lighting up a cigarette.” In the ensuing haggling, “various numbers, promises, oaths, and jokes would be jumbled together, passed on, and spread around the square.” At sunrise, the peasants would leave, the selling of berries to the public would begin, and, “as if by magic, everything would come alive and turn bright and cheerful…. There was so much of everything that one could not help wondering about the size and appetite of Moscow’s belly, which, day after day, devoured these gifts of the Swamp quite casually—a mere tasty morsel or idle amusement.”16

  Swamp Square, view from the Kremlin

  Swamp market

  Later in the day, the berries would be replaced by mushrooms, vegetables, and, on holidays, promenaders and tavern regulars. The inhabitants of “the hovels where naked children crawled amidst soiled rags and which smelled of untreated leather, sauerkraut, the outhouse, and dank mold” would, in Nikolai Bukharin’s words, “spill out onto the streets or suffocate in the fumes of taverns and bars with red and blue signs that read ‘Beer-hall with Garden’ or, in fancy script, ‘The “Meeting of Friends” Inn.’ Waiters, in jackets that were white in name only, would scurry around through the smoke while in the background, a ‘music machine’ played, glasses clinked, an accordion wailed, and a voice sang mournful, heart-rending songs. And this motley, mixed-up world was full of moaning, brawling, drinking, screaming, hugging, fighting, kissing, and crying.”17

  ■ ■ ■

  The state, through a variety of offices and officials, did its best to regulate and sanitize the life of the Swamp and the rest of the city. It inspected the goods sold at the markets and the products manufactured at the Einem, Smirnov, and List factories; repaired the streets, sidewalks, and embankments (the Bersenev and Sophia ones were among the best maintained in the city); fished the bodies of drunks and suicides out of the Ditch; counted every door, window, and tenant for taxation and surveillance purposes; supplied running water, gas, and electricity, along with detailed sign-up and use regulations; installed Gustav List fire hydrants every one hundred meters and put out fires (increasingly using telephones rather than fire towers for signaling the alarm); created a sewage system and, in 1914, made its use compulsory for property owners (who were to collect reports of any “foul odor emanating from water closets and pissoirs”); drained water out of flooded areas and transported solid trash to special dumps; carved, stored, and sorted meat at municipal slaughterhouses; issued numbered badges for cab drivers and enforced parking and traffic regulations; administered the growing streetcar network, powered by electricity that was generated on the site of the former Wine and Salt Yard (using Baku oil brought by rail and water to a special tank by the Simonov Monastery and pumped to the Swamp through an underground pipeline); delivered letters, parcels, and telegrams; replaced kerosene street lamps with gas burners and, in front of Christ the Savior Cathedral and along tram lines, with electric lighting; obligated landlords to cart off their dirty snow beyond the city limits and hire janitors and night guards (who doubled as police agents); planted trees and kept up city parks complete with gazebos, pavilions, and concert stages; built, funded, and staffed most of the schools; paid for about one half of the city’s hospital beds; supervised and censored performances and publications; ran foundling homes, almshouses, workhouses, and poor relief offices; and required that all duly classified imperial subjects be registered at their place of residence and that all births, deaths, and marriages be recorded by the appropriate religious authorities. (In order to be allowed to marry his cousin, Rachmaninoff had to procure a written certificate confirming that he had been to confession, find a priest who was willing to risk the displeasure of the Holy Synod, and receive special permission from the tsar.)18

  The modern state, more or less by definition, does too much or not enough; its many services are both intrusions and entitlements. Early-twentieth-century Russia was not a modern state because its services could not keep up with its industrializing efforts (Moscow was one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, with new immigrants, mostly peasant men like Kanatchikov, making up about 70 percent of the population) and because most bureaucratic rules were seen as optional or negotiable by both citizens and bureaucrats (Sergei Rachmaninoff took care of his incest problem by obtaining his confession certificate without ever going to confession, celebrating his wedding in the barracks chapel of the Sixth Grenadier Regiment, and receiving a note from the tsar that said: “whatever God has bound together, may no man tear asunder”). But mostly, late imperial Russia was not a modern state because it never quite recognized that its services were fulfillments of inalienable rights or that its subjects were responsible citizens (that is, individuals actively complicit in their own nationalization). It never tried to claim, with any degree of conviction, that Russians had a part in building up their state, a stake in its continued growth, and a self-generated desire, however ambivalent, to keep asking for more institutional intrusions.19

  Instead, the imperial state continued to create more unacknowledged rights while disciplining as many potential usurpers as possible. On the eve of World War I, Moscow was the most policed city in Europe (with about 278 residents per policeman compared with 325 in Berlin, 336 in Paris, and 442 in Vienna). The Yakimanka Police Station, which included the Swamp, kept records of all resident foreigners, Jews, students, cabmen, workers, and unemployed, among others, as well as “commercial, inn-keeping, factory, and artisanal establishments.” In addition to routine reporting and recording, police agents were to describe the “mood” of particular groups of people (especially those likely to “have a bad effect on their coworkers”); encourage residents to put out flags on public holidays; and “keep a close watch” on all “persons placed under open or secret police surveillance.” Under “characteristic traits” in the police registration books, some of these persons were described as “quick-tempered”; others, as “talkative”; and still others—the majority—as “contemplative.” The harder the police worked, the more quick-tempered, talkative, and contemplative their wards became.20

  In September 1905, the Gustav List workers were among the first in Moscow to go on strike and to demand civil liberties and “personal inviolability” along with improved working conditions. After a rally on the Sophia Embankment, approximately three hundred of them walked over to the Einem Chocolate Factory and forced it to shut down. In November 1905, the Einem mechanical shop was turned into a weapons stockpile as workers made knives and daggers in the expe
ctation of a “St. Bartholomew’s Night” (which, according to an early Soviet oral historian, they understood as “a general slaughter”). There was sporadic shooting and barricade building in December 1905; more strikes in 1906 and 1913; a disastrous flood in April 1908 that made most of the basements uninhabitable; and massive anti-German riots in 1915 that involved a pogrom at the Einem factory and the destruction of six of its candy stores in the city. The Swamp and the rest of Russia were becoming quick-tempered, talkative, and contemplative to the exclusion of all other dispositions. The state’s expectations and classifications (the “peasant” Kanatchikov, the “nobleman” Rachmaninoff) had little to do with what most people actually did or imagined; church truths (from the divinity of autocracy to the efficacy of confession) were routinely questioned and ridiculed; the new institutions that organized economic life (including the large foreign-owned factories such as List and Einem) had trouble attaching themselves to any existing representation of virtuous living; the new system of railway lines with its center in northern Moscow (along with the new industrial and commercial districts gravitating toward it) clashed with the old street diagram radiating from the Kremlin; and high literature (increasingly remote from the mass-produced kind) had mostly forsaken its job of providing meaningful connections between “once upon a time” and “happily ever after.” Russia was not the only casualty of industrialization’s encounter with the fin-de-siècle, but the ancien regime’s rigidity made its plight seem universal and revelatory. The empire was crawling with prophets, soothsayers, and itinerant preachers. Everyone seemed to believe that the world was sick and would not last much longer.21

  In addition to the orthodox Orthodox, who tended to read more devotional literature, go on more pilgrimages, and report more miraculous healings and apparitions than they had half a century earlier, there were the newly literate proletarian writers, who wrote about the “chains of suffering” and the coming deliverance; the Ioannites, who venerated Father John of Kronstadt as the herald of the coming apocalypse; the Brethren, who preached personal redemption through temperance, sobriety, and charismatic spiritualism; the Tolstoyans, who foresaw a universal moral transformation through vegetarianism and nonviolence; the Dukhobors, who resisted the growing demands for conscription and civil registration by emigrating to Canada with the help of the Tolstoyans (and their brethren, the Quakers); the Baptists, who proselytized vigorously and successfully in behalf of the priesthood of all believers; the Socialist Revolutionaries, who believed in the Russian peasant as both the instrument and principal beneficiary of universal emancipation; the Social Democrats (divided into the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and a variety of short-lived subsects, including the God-builders), who believed in the redemptive mission of the urban working class; the Anarchists, who expected free individuals to create a world without coercion; the Decadents, who had “the sense, both oppressive and exalting, of being the last of a series”; and the Symbolists, who approached “every object and phenomenon,” including their own lives, “from the point of view of its ultimate state, or in the light of the future world” (as Vladimir Solovyov put it).22

  In and around the Swamp, everyone was a Symbolist. Nikolai Bukharin’s favorite book, as a ten-year-old, was the Book of Revelation—“its solemn and obscure mood, cosmic cataclysms, the archangels’ trumpets, the resurrection of the dead, the Beast, the last days, the Whore of Babylon, the magic vials.” After reading Solovyov’s “The Tale of the Antichrist,” he felt “shivers run down his spine” and rushed off to find his mother to ask if she was a harlot. Aleksandr Voronsky, a Tambov priest’s son who lived in an attic above a Trans-Moskva holy bread bakery and taught Marxism to leather workers in a basement next to the church gate, “kept repeating” the verses he had memorized as an adolescent—about the divine gift of an “undivided heart” and the kind of “inspiring hatred” that engenders “the powerful, ferocious, and monstrous hymns of vengeance and retribution”: “They will plunder your wealth and loot your merchandise; they will break down your walls and demolish your fine houses and throw your stones, timber and rubble into the sea. I will put an end to your noisy songs, and the music of your harps will be heard no more.”23

  Nikolai Fedorov, who worked as a librarian in the Rumiantsev Museum, proposed a practical plan to resurrect the dead and institute the reign of “complete and perfect kinship”; Semen Kanatchikov, who went to the Rumiantsev Museum “to look at pictures,” discovered that soon “everything would become the common property of the toilers”; Alexander Scriabin (Rachmaninoff’s classmate at the Moscow Conservatory) set out to write a work of art to end all life as well as all art; and Rachmaninoff himself based his First Symphony (composed and performed when he was a teacher at the Maria Women’s College) on “Dies irae,” a thirteenth-century Latin hymn about the Last Judgment. César Cui probably did not know how right he was when he began his review of the first performance with the words: “If there were a conservatory in Hell, and if one of its gifted students received the assignment to write a programmatic symphony on ‘the seven plagues of Egypt’ …”24

  The conservatory (a short walk from the Sophia Embankment across the Big Stone Bridge and past the Rumiantsev Museum) was not the only doomed institution in Moscow, and the symphony about the coming plagues was not Rachmaninoff’s only endeavor. While he was working on the First Symphony about the last days (op. 13) and the Six Choruses for his Maria College students (op. 15), he also wrote a song (op. 14, no. 11) that soon became “a symbol of social awakening” and a popular anthem of hope and redemption. The lyrics, originally written around 1829, were by Fedor Tyutchev, one of the Symbolists’ favorite poets.25

  The fields are still white with snow,

  But the streams are astir with the clamor of spring.

  They flow and awaken the somnolent shores

  They flow and sparkle and proclaim …

  They proclaim to the four corners of the world:

  “Spring is on its way, spring is on its way!

  We are the young spring’s messengers,

  She has sent us on ahead!

  Spring is on its way, spring is on its way,

  And, crowding merrily behind her,

  Is the red-cheeked, bright dancing circle

  Of the quiet, warm days of May.”

  On May 12, 1904, the police intercepted a letter from a certain “Y” in Nizhnii Novgorod to S. P. Mironycheva, a resident of the “Dormitory for Female Students” on the Sophia Embankment. Referring as much to Rachmaninoff’s song as to Nikolai Dobroliubov’s 1860 essay, “When Will the Real Day Finally Come?,” the author urges his correspondent not to give in to despair: “Let this be a momentary concession to a time of uncertainty, oppression, and doubt. Surely, even now, the coming renewal is capable of lifting up the best people of our time toward energy and faith. The real day is coming, after all. It is coming—noisy and tempestuous, sweeping away everything weak, feeble, and old…. The dawn, which sheds its fantastic, enchanting, and transparent light over everything and everyone, is near.”26

  Spring flooding in the Swamp (1908)

  It is not clear whether the police agent who read the letter knew that “Y” was Yakov Sverdlov, a nineteen-year-old gymnasium dropout, pharmacist’s apprentice, and “professional revolutionary.”

  Spring flooding in the Swamp

  2

  THE PREACHERS

  Most prophets of the Real Day were either Christians or socialists. The majority of Christians continued to think of “the Second Coming” as a metaphor for endless postponement, but a growing minority, including a few decadent intellectuals and the rapidly multiplying Evangelical Protestants, expected the Last Judgment in their lifetimes. This belief was shared by those who associated Babylon with capitalism and looked forward to a violent revolution followed by a reign of social justice.

  The two groups had a great deal in common. Some people believed that revolutionary socialism was a form of Christianity; others believed that Christianity was
a form of revolutionary socialism. Sergei Bulgakov and Nikolai Berdyaev proposed to incorporate political apocalypticism into Christianity; Anatoly Lunacharsky and Maxim Gorky considered Marxism a religion of earthly salvation; Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich referred to Baptists and Flagellants as natural “transmission points” of Bolshevik propaganda; and the Bolshevik propagandist (and priest’s son) Aleksandr Voronsky claimed to have met a revolutionary terrorist who was using the Gospels as a guide to “the violent overthrow of the tsarist regime.”1

  But normally they saw each other as opposites. Christians tended to think of socialists as atheists or Antichrists, and socialists tended to agree (while considering Christians backward or hypocritical). In standard socialist autobiographies, the loss of “religious” faith was a prerequisite for spiritual awakening. One crucial difference was that most preachers of a Christian apocalypse were workers and peasants, while most theorists of workers’ and peasants’ revolutions were students and “eternal students.” The students were usually the children of clerks, clergymen, teachers, doctors, Jews, and other “proletarians of mental labor”: professional intellectuals as metaphorical Jews (chosen, learned, and alienated) and Jews as honorary intellectuals irrespective of what they did for a living. They all grew up as perennial prodigies, as heirs to a lost sacred mission, as strangers among people they called “the people.” They were, for the most part, hereditary members of the intelligentsia.