The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  During his first stay in prison, and with nothing but the prison library at his disposal, Kanatchikov read “Turgenev, Uspensky, Dostoevsky, Spielhagen (Between the Hammer and the Anvil), Shchedrin, and others.” Shchedrin was his particular favorite. “I laughed so hard that the guard repeatedly opened the transom and stared at my face, evidently wondering if I’d lost my mind.” By the time he was arrested again, he had more experience, a higher consciousness, and much better comrades. Faina Rykova (the sister of the student revolutionary, Aleksei Rykov), brought him a year’s worth of books. “The selection had not been made very systematically, but that really didn’t matter; I wanted to know everything there was that could aid the cause of the revolution, whether directly or indirectly…. I recall that my collection included Lippert’s History of Primitive Culture, Kliuchevsky’s lectures on Russian history, Timiriazev’s Popular Exposition of Darwin’s Theory, Zheleznov’s Political Economy, and V. Ilyin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia. At that time, I still didn’t know that Ilyin was the pseudonym of Lenin.”47

  Voronsky began by reading Marx, Kropotkin, Balzac, Flaubert, and Dostoevsky, but when he was put in a “semi-dungeon” with “damp corners crawling with woodlice,” he relaxed his schedule. “Morning and evening—calisthenics and a brisk towel rubdown; three hours of German; and the remaining hours I reserved for Homer, Dickens, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Leskov, indolent and sluggish daydreaming, and unhurried reflections and recollections.”48

  Yakov Sverdlov seems to have been incapable of anything indolent or unhurried. He walked fast, talked loudly, followed the “Mueller system” of calisthenics, slept no more than five hours a night, and kept his personal “consumption statistics” (ten cigarettes, one prison lunch, one bottle of milk, one pound of white bread, and three cups of tea a day, four to six pounds of sugar a month …). In the Ekaterinburg prison, when he was not doing some combination of the above or playing leapfrog, he was reading Lenin, Marx, Kautsky, Plekhanov, and Mehring, as well as Werner Sombart on capitalism, Paul Louis on socialism, Sidney and Beatrice Webb on trade unionism, Charles Gide on cooperation, and Victor S. Clark on the Australian labor movement. He read German books in the original, worked hard on his French and mathematics, and picked up a teach-yourself-English textbook. His constant rereading of Das Kapital, What Is to Be Done?, and the Marx–Engels correspondence allowed him to profit from reading journal articles about women’s history (the author “is correct to relate the rise of individualism to the capitalist mode of production, which has led to the economic independence of women”), sports (“in different historical periods, sports have always served the interests of the ruling classes”), and a great variety of poetry, from proletarian autodidacts to Shelley, Verhaeren, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Poe, Kipling, and his particular favorite, Heinrich Heine. “Literature and the arts interest me very much,” he wrote in a letter. “They help me understand the development of mankind, which has already been explained theoretically.” According to Sverdlov’s common-law wife and Bolshevik party comrade, Klavdia Novgorodtseva, his motto was: “I put books to the test of life, and life to the test of books.”49

  In March 1911, when Sverdlov was in the St. Petersburg House of Pretrial Detention and Novgorodtseva was about to have their first child, his reading turned to “various approaches to the sexual question and, in particular, the question of reproduction.” She was thirty-four; he was twenty-five and had a seven-year-old daughter by another comrade (although he does not seem to have stayed in close touch with them). Among the “questions” he was considering were:

  The special selection of partners for the production of offspring in Plato’s ideal state; More’s Utopia, where, before marriage, the two sides appeared before each other with nothing on; the most recent theories, principally by the so-called men of science, at the head of which one would have to put Auguste Forel [the author of the recently published The Sexual Question], who recommends a preliminary medical examination of the whole organism in order to determine whether reproduction is desirable. I am also reminded of various descriptions of the act of birth in different cultural epochs, contained in both histories of culture and works of literature. Everything leads me to believe that the “pangs of birth” are directly related to the condition of the mother’s organism: the more normal the organism, the less acute the pain, less frequent the accidents, etc. I am also thinking of various political programs that rely on scientific data to demand the termination of work for a certain period of time before birth, etc. Thinking of all these things and weighing them relative to each other, I am inclined to reach a favorable conclusion, although of course I am not a specialist and there is so much I still don’t know.

  Yakov Sverdlov

  Klavdia Novgorodtseva

  He kept putting his reproductive life to the test of books until, on April 4, their son was born. Novgorodtseva named him Andrei, after Sverdlov’s party nickname. When she wrote to Yakov that her body was much changed, he reassured her that it would not last and said that when he had written to her about literary depictions of childbirth, he had—“of course”—been thinking of Natasha Rostova from War and Peace.50

  ■ ■ ■

  If prison was a university, then exile was the ultimate test—a test of one’s character and convictions by life when reduced to its essentials. There were two kinds of exile. One was voluntary flight to the west, known as “emigration” and mostly remembered as a time of homelessness, secret conferences, frequent moves, fractious votes, work in libraries, meetings with leaders, and loneliness in a variety of strange and mostly uninteresting cities and countries—or not remembered at all as a time spent away from both the beauty and the beast. The other kind was exile proper—an “administrative” banishment to Siberia or Russia’s European north that combined martyrdom and fulfillment, confinement and freedom to a much more concentrated degree than prison—because it was both banishment to an inferno and a full-fledged, self-administered community of true believers complete with courtship, marriage, and childbirth. In most retrospective accounts and some contemporary ones, exile was an epic, mythic experience—the most important one in the lives of revolutionaries short of the revolution itself.51

  Osip Piatnitsky

  After months of travel in a convoy, accompanied by more or less drunk and more or less indulgent soldiers, the exile would be delivered to the end of the world (usually a village in the tundra) and met by a local “political,” who would ask him whether he was a “Bek” (a Bolshevik), a “Mek” (Menshevik), or something else entirely. Depending on the answer, the new arrival would be taken to a particular cabin, given tea, asked about life outside, and inducted into the local community, which, depending on its size, might or might not be divided along sectarian lines. The most important line was the one separating the “politicals” from everyone else. As Kanatchikov put it, “We jealously guarded the high calling of the revolutionary and strictly punished anyone who sullied and abased it…. We had to expend a great deal of energy in order to draw a sharp and distinct line between ourselves—political people who were struggling for an idea and suffering for our convictions—and the ordinary criminal offenders.”52

  Most of the larger communities were run as communes—with mutual aid accounts, communal dining rooms, conflict resolution committees, libraries, choirs, and regularly scheduled meetings and debates. Government stipends (higher for “students” than for workers) were supplemented with money sent by comrades and relatives, as well as with earnings from teaching, publishing, and occasional work in the area. (Sverdlov wrote about local life for a Tomsk newspaper; Novgorodtseva worked as a meteorologist; Voronsky bound books; and Piatnitsky felled trees.) Many of the exiles taught, treated, or studied the locals, but they could find no place for them in the coming revolution. Piatnitsky, a ladies’ tailor from a Lithuanian shtetl (described in one police report as “below average height, thin, with a narrow chest),” marveled at how “dreadfully inept” the Siberian peasants were at being peasants
. He wondered why, after they had listened to Marxist explanations with apparent interest, they would go straight to the local policeman “to ask if what the political exiles were saying was true.” There were exceptions, however. Sergei Mitskevich married a local sixteen-year-old girl named Olympiada, who decided to “be useful to the people” by becoming a nurse; Boris Ivanov, a baker from St. Petersburg, came close to developing a “genuinely deep attachment” to his landlord’s daughter Matrena; and Aleksandr Voronsky’s literary double, “Valentin,” preached so eloquently to his landlady, an Old Believer widow of about thirty-two, “broad-shouldered and stout,” that once, after sitting and listening to one of his monologues she “got up, walked over to the double bed with a mountain of down pillows and a gloriously puffy eiderdown, slowly turned back the quilt, then turned to Valentin and said, calmly and meekly: ‘I understand now. Come here and let me comfort you.’ Having said this, she began, just as slowly and meekly, and with deep sighs, to unbutton her bodice.”53

  But mostly, they courted each other, married each other (unofficially), and lectured each other. Some exiles also exchanged lessons, but usually the students were the teachers and the workers their students. Valentin Trifonov, the orphaned Don Cossack who had worked in a railroad depot before becoming a Bolshevik, claimed to have learned everything, including “simply culture,” from his fellow exile, Aron Solts. Boris Ivanov, the “barely literate and politically underdeveloped” baker (as he described himself), had Sverdlov tutor him in Russian, algebra, geometry, and political economy, as well as “basic literacy and political development.” The exiles hiked, talked, celebrated revolutionary holidays, waited for new arrivals, and read (many publishers provided exiles with free copies). “Despite the administrative constraints, we lived fairly freely,” wrote Voronsky about his time on the White Sea coast. “We were surrounded on all sides by snow, ice, the sea, the river, cliffs, and the rather primitive, but solid and healthy life of the native Pomors. We received free newspapers, journals, and books. Our days were uneventful but not dreary, at least during the first year of exile. We often got together, argued, and regularly received illegal literature. The police bothered us, but not very persistently…. The superintendent and the guards were a little scared of us.”54

  The exiles’ worst enemy was melancholy and depression. “How could you not be melancholy and depressed,” wrote Piatnitsky, “if all around you there was snow for eight months of the year, and it hurt your eyes to look at it, and you could only walk on a road because otherwise you were in danger of falling through the snow, which was almost five feet deep?” And how could you not be melancholy and depressed, wrote Boris Ivanov, “when, for several months in a row, the sun hides behind the horizon, and the pale, sullen, overcast day appears for half an hour to an hour, and then it’s night again, for months on end”?55

  Some would refuse to get out of bed; others would start drinking; yet others would suffer from doubt or stop reading and writing altogether. Local peasants would come uninvited, and, according to Sverdlov, “sit silently for half an hour before getting up to say, ‘Well, I’ve got to get going, good bye.’” Visiting nomads would stop by “to marvel at how quickly the pen moved across the page and how much got written, and stand there looking over your shoulder until you couldn’t write anymore.” Postyshev could not always keep his promise to write to Belokonskaia. “How many times I have sat down at a moment of overwhelming sadness in order to share my loneliness with you, but was never able to finish a single letter. My dear, much respected Lubov Matveevna, if only you knew how much I suffered, you would forgive my silence.”56

  Even the company of fellow exiles could become unbearable. In the spring of 1914, Sverdlov was transferred to a tiny village beyond the Arctic Circle, along with one other political, “a Georgian named Dzhugashvili.” “He’s a good fellow,” wrote Sverdlov to a friend, “but too much of an individualist in everyday life. I, on the other hand, require some minimal degree of order, so it bothers me sometimes.” “The saddest thing of all,” he wrote a month later, “is that, in the conditions of exile or prison, a person is fully exposed and reveals himself in the smallest details. The worst part is that all you see are the ‘small details of life.’ There is no room for bigger traits to manifest themselves. My comrade and I are in different houses now, and we don’t see much of each other.” Having been allowed to move to a different village, he wrote to Novgorodtseva: “You know, my dear, how horrible the conditions in Kureika were. The comrade I was with turned out to be such a person, socially, that we didn’t talk or see each other. It was terrible. And it was all the more terrible because, for a variety of reasons, I didn’t—couldn’t, really—study. I reached the point of total intellectual torpor, a kind of anabiosis of the brain.” (Three days later, Dzhugashvili wrote to Tatiana Slovatinskaia, in whose apartment in Petrograd he had lived before his arrest: “Dearest, my misery grows by the hour. I am in desperate straits. On top of everything, I have come down with something and have a suspicious cough. I need milk, but … I don’t have any money. My dear, if you can scrape some money together, send it immediately, by telegraph. I can’t bear it any longer.”)57

  Moving in with a close friend helped Sverdlov, but did not bring full relief. The friend, Filipp Goloshchekin, born “Shaia Itskov” but known as “Georges,” “contributed quite a bit” to Sverdlov’s reawakening. “He is a lively person. He raises countless questions, which he tries to resolve through dialog…. But don’t start thinking that it’s so great for the two of us, that we have a vibrant comradely atmosphere here. After all, we are only two.” And still worse: “Georges has become a certified neurotic and is on his way to becoming a misanthrope. He has a good opinion of people in general, of abstract people, but he is terribly quarrelsome with particular human beings he comes into contact with. The result is that he is on the outs with everyone—except for me, of course, because I know what a good fellow he is, what a kind soul he has.” Finally, they parted—“not because of a quarrel, nothing of the kind,” but because “a separate apartment is better, after all.” They had been going to bed at different times and studying at different times, “and, moreover, I can’t write intimate letters when there’s someone else around who is awake.”58

  Sverdlov wrote many intimate letters, especially when there was no one else around. “You know, my little one,” he wrote to Novgorodtseva from Kureika, after he and Dzhugashvili had stopped talking to each other, “I really do love you so—so very, very much. Are you asleep and cannot hear? Sleep then, sleep, my darling, I won’t disturb you. Oh my, oh my!” A year after the birth of Andrei, he still had not seen his son and wife (he called her his “wife” in his letters, although some Bolsheviks were wary of the term).

  I feel so strongly that my existence is inseparable from yours, and talk to you in my soul so often that it seems strange somehow that we haven’t seen each other for so long. Oh how I want to be near you, to see you and our little one. But I’ll confess that my greatest desire is to be with you; you are in my thoughts much more, you and you and you again, and then our little one. Don’t misunderstand me. Yes, I do want your caress, sometimes I want it so much it hurts, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I want to lay my head in your lap and gaze endlessly at your dear, beloved, beautiful face, peer into your eyes, turn into a tiny babe and feel the touch of your hand on my hair. Yes, there is inexpressible joy in this, but even stronger, much much greater is my desire to share with you all my feelings, my thoughts, and in sharing them to gain new strength, to ensure that you are carried along by my mood, that we become one person within that mood…. I want to caress you, take care of you, fill your life with new energy and joy…. I want to give you so, so much. But what can I do?59

  Meanwhile, Sverdlov’s pupil, Boris Ivanov, was writing to a “dear, distant friend” Bliuma Faktorovich. “I am writing to you in the dusk. You are standing before me in my cabin the way you did back then at the New Year’s Eve party in our worker
s’ club. Your thick brown hair is like a crown, and your dark, fiery eyes are sparkling in the glow of the lights.” The letter ends with a poem that transforms his loneliness and longing into their common—and tragic—devotion to the cause.

  We’ll welcome the New Year with a kiss

  This night of joy is not for you and me.

  We’ll kiss like brothers, as we struggle for the people

  Who suffer from oppression and from want.

  Please don’t be jealous of the feasting all around,

  Let’s drink our cup of tears to the bottom.60

  Thousands of miles away, Voronsky was drinking from the same cup.

  During those long, dull nights, I used to read until my head spun, then stoke the stove, and turn down the lamp. The birch logs would hiss, crackle drily, and pop, like roasting nuts, while ugly, furry shadows wandered around the room. The coals covered in gray ashes reminded me of things lost and extinguished. Life in the capitals and big cities seemed far away and gone forever…. Enchanting female images would come alive and disappear, those past passions turned into ghostly, elusive shadows. In a rush I would finish stoking up the stove, close the stove doors and shutters with a bang, get dressed, cast a last worried, melancholy look around the dark room, and set off to see Vadim, Jan, or Valentin. The dark heavenly depths used to crush me with their frightening immensity.61