The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  One much-discussed problem was that the Party was too closed. A band of book-reading converts and dragon-slaying warriors had turned into a rigid hierarchy of state officials. Some concessions had been made to specialization, professionalization, and uniform regulations; some Party comrades had moved into exclusive apartment houses, dachas, and rest homes; and some had prostituted themselves to the gods of “bubbles all over your body.” The “proletarian vanguard” had moved away from the proletariat and succumbed to “bureaucratism” and “degeneration.” As Se-rafimovich, the author of The Iron Flood, wrote to a friend from the Trotsky Sanatorium in Kislovodsk in 1926, “the sanatorium is so beautifully appointed that I am afraid I might turn into a bourgeois myself (what? you say I already am one?!). In order to resist such a transformation, I have been spitting into all the corners and onto the floor, blowing my nose, and lying in bed with my shoes on and hair uncombed. It seems to be helping.”12

  The other much-discussed problem was that the Party was too open. The New Economic Policy engendered capitalism “continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a massive scale.” Or, as Chepurny noticed soon after he ordered the extermination of the “residual scum” of the half-bougeoisie, “the bourgeois are gone, but the wind continues to blow.” Peasants were acting like peasants; traders were acting like traders; and some workers and even Bolsheviks were acting like peasants and traders, too—spontaneously and on a massive scale.13

  The Houses of Soviets were being besieged by ragpickers, knife-grinders, “painted women and young ladies with ringlets,” and street urchins guilty of “begging bordering on extortion, outrageous conduct (up to the baring of hidden parts of the body),” and assaults “involving the breaking of windows.” Some of the contagion seeped into the Houses. Staff members were routinely exposed as drunks, prostitutes, speculators, counterrevolutionaries, and former exploiters. According to a 1920 report, the Second House of Soviets, which had been liberated “in the grievous torments of revolutionary struggle,” had since become “a den of iniquity and greed.” One employee was fired for saying that “Jews should be given a gold medal for revolutionary activity and then exiled to Palestine.” Another had “uncovered drunkenness” on the part of three House administrators: “I am telling the truth and always will. Blood is being shed at the front, while here, in a Soviet house, bottles clink and people get drunk. I found wines from the Caucasus, some ashberry vodka, 3 bottles of champagne, a bottle of cognac, and another bottle of some really spicy stuff that tastes like pepper vodka and makes your mouth burn.”14

  Contagion was not only metaphorical. According to one of many such reports, “on the stairs and in the cafeteria, kitchen, and other areas there is a great deal of dirt; there are cigarette butts and paper everywhere. The employees see all this dirt and trash and pay absolutely no attention to it.” The worst offenders, and an independent source of contagion in their own right, were the residents themselves. They chopped firewood and used primus stoves in their rooms, clogged the sinks and toilets with garbage, lay on their beds with their boots on, carried food and hot water up and down the stairs, hung up their wet clothes in the halls, brought in unauthorized guests, claimed to be someone they were not, and often behaved “in a rude and downright outrageous manner.” On January 20, 1925, the director of the Third House of Soviets (which served as a dormitory for congress delegates and visiting officials) wrote a report about “one of those intolerable events that have been occurring on a daily basis for some time now.” A “mentally disturbed” citizen had attempted to throw himself out of a third-floor window.

  Although a house employee arrested his downward fall, the glass in the big framed window was nevertheless broken. For a long time afterward, Citizen Volkov roamed the halls, cursing, whistling, and shouting, as a result of which, the war invalid, blind Citizen Tsibis, lost all patience and attempted to walk down the stairs, and fell and cracked his head. The comrades who live on that floor started a noisy fight, as a result of which, three of them simultaneously experienced severe seizures. Watching them thrash about and hearing their screams, blind Tsibis also suffered a severe seizure. The House doctor was summoned, and he ascertained that the House was in an intolerable condition. At present, the dormitory is populated by epileptics, brawlers, and the mentally ill, and it is hard to believe that the Third House of Soviets serves as a refuge for such comrades because it was originally intended for normal comrades. In its present state, it resembles a lunatic asylum and, if there are still any sane people left, their likeliest fate is to follow the example of blind Tsibis and end up crazy, too.15

  One of the main reasons for both the distress and contagion was kinship and procreation. Lovers and relatives kept moving in and out, and children kept being born and growing bigger. Problems of space, services, and supplies were compounded by “problems of Communist everyday life.” One report complained that there were “some unscrupulous comrades ‘from the upper crust,’ who live outside of the Second House of Soviets, but keep special rooms there for their ‘second wives’ or for their so-called retired wives.” Another report, by the director of the Second House of Soviets, Comrade Rosfeldt, alleged that, on November 7, 1921, a non-Party woman without identification had attempted to enter the building with the intention of visiting Comrade Lander (who had just left his job as the Special Cheka Plenipotentiary in the North Caucasus and Don Region to become head of Moscow Agitprop, three years before his retirement for health reasons):

  When I stated that Comrade Lander, who resides in Room 408, must provide me with a note that he can vouch for her, she called Room 408, and Comrade Lander suggested that I let her in without further ado, to which I suggested that Comrade Lander make sure that his acquaintances carry their identification with them, to which he responded that she was his wife, however, considering the fact that Comrade Lander is registered with us as a single person and that I had seen various ladies leaving his room early in the morning, during the day, and late at night, a fact that can be confirmed by several of my staff members, and that on November 6, at about 11 p.m., after the pass bureau had closed, he had attempted to bring in two young ladies but had been prevented from doing so by Comrade Klaar—based on these and other considerations, I asked Comrade Lander, what wife, you must have at least half a dozen of them, and promised him an explanation at a later date. When, around 2 p.m. he showed up in my office and demanded an explanation, I promised to give him one after the end of my work day, but he was very unhappy and kept saying words to the effect that you are not my father, priest, or protector, and what do you want from me, to which I responded that what I want is for the Second House of Soviets not to be turned into a brothel, to which he said that you are being insolent, and so I told him that if in your opinion I am being insolent, then in my opinion you are ten times more insolent, and asked him to leave the office, after which he went away.

  Rosfeldt concluded his letter by saying: “Perhaps my view of such things is too moral, but I was brought up in a country where the working class looked at family life from a different, more moral, point of view.”16

  ■ ■ ■

  Was there such a thing as a Communist moral point of view? According to Bukharin, there was not, because traditional morality was “fetishism,” or “the submission of human behavior to an authority that comes from some unknown place and demands obedience for some unknown reason.” What the building of socialism required was a conscious submission of human behavior to the needs of the building of socialism. Or, in Lenin’s formulation, Communist morality was a system of ethics that rejected all “extra-human and extra-class concepts” in favor of the realization that all proletarian behavior should be “entirely subordinated to the interests of the proletariat’s class struggle.”17

  The main Party expert on Party ethics was Aron Solts, otherwise known as “the Party’s conscience.” The central principle, he wrote, was simple enough: “At the foundations of our ethics are the requirements of our goal. Correct, ethical, a
nd good is whatever helps us reach our goal, smash our class enemies, and learn to organize our economic life according to socialist principles. Incorrect, unethical, and inadmissible is whatever harms this. This is the point of view we must adopt when we try to determine whether a certain action by a Party member is ethical or not.” The determination of whether a certain action by a Party member had helped or harmed the achievement of the Party’s goal was the Party’s job. “We, the government of the majority, can say openly and frankly: yes, we hold in prisons those who interfere with the establishment of our order, and we do not stop before other such actions, because we do not believe in the existence of abstractly unethical actions. Our objective is to institute a better life; this objective must be pursued, and all resistance to it must be crushed. This, in our view, is ethical.”18

  Aron Solts

  The Party was justified in pursuing its goal by any means necessary; individual Party members were to measure their behavior according to the requirements of the goal and the official Party strategies of its pursuit. The main principle of Communist morality was “usefulness to the Party” or “Party discipline”—that is, the submission of human behavior to an authority that comes from a known place and demands obedience for a known reason (which, in the case of Party members, was freely and voluntarily accepted). Obedience to the Party came before “one’s own household, family, etc.,” but obedience by itself was not enough. “Can there be free discipline in the absence of sufficiently good comradely relations? No, this would be barracks discipline.” On the one hand, “only by looking at each other as comrades who have come together to reach a common practical goal can we have the kind of discipline that would help us overcome all kinds of difficulties.” On the other, “the necessary comradely relations—love and friendship toward our comrades—are reinforced by the realization that they are my helpers and that it is only thanks to them that I have been able to preserve what is dear to me, what makes me a member of the Party in the first place.”19

  A mutually reinforcing unity of faith, obedience, and love for fellow believers is the central principle of all sectarian communities. According to Jesus of Nazareth, the two most important commandments were: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Loving God meant submitting to the inevitable; loving God with all your heart meant submitting absolutely and without qualification. Particular forms of submission were outlined in the scripture and revised by God’s special representatives (“you have heard …, but I tell you”). As for “loving your neighbor,” Jesus was not referring to those who were rich, those who had “already received their comfort,” or anyone else who deserved to be thrown into the fiery furnace. He was referring to those who had followed him in abandoning their brothers and sisters and father and mother and children and fields, and those who were prepared to follow his followers at least part of the way. There could be no sufficiently good comradely relations in the absence of free discipline any more than there could be free discipline in the absence of sufficiently good comradely relations.

  By the time the Christians finally became a ruling party, they had stopped being millenarian and arrived at a series of compromises between the sect they would have liked to remain and the society they had grown to be. The Bolsheviks took over a large heathen empire while still believing that “this generation will not pass away until all these things have happened.” But before they could determine what to do with the millions of non-neighbors who had suddenly become would-be neighbors, they had to determine what to do with the thousands of certified neighbors they were expected to love as much as themselves. As Solts put it, “It is, of course, very difficult to preserve those close, intimate relations that we used to have when there were just a handful of us. The common fate and common persecutions of the comrades working in the tsarist underground drew us closer together and united us more than our current conditions do. There are many more of us now, and it is very difficult to have the same feelings of closeness toward every communist.”20

  But the biggest problem, as always, was not that there was not enough love for countless remote neighbors, but that there was too much love for a few close ones. Sects, by definition, transcend the bonds of kinship, friendship, and sexual love by dissolving them in the common devotion to a particular path of salvation (and, when available, to the prophets who represent it). The sects’ greatest enemy, along with Babylon, is marriage—because of its centrality to all nonsectarian life and its traditional claim to primary loyalty. But marriage is not just a powerful source of alternative devotion; the reason it is central to all nonsectarian life is because it regulates reproduction, and reproduction is, by definition, at odds with sectarian life, which is based on a voluntary union of conscious (adult) converts. Sects are about brotherhood (and, as an afterthought, sisterhood), not about parents and children. This is why most end-of-the-world scenarios promise “all these things” within one generation; most radical Protestants object to infant baptism; and all millenarian sects, in their militant phase, attempt to reform marriage or abolish it altogether (by decreeing celibacy or promiscuity). Jesus’s claim that his family was not his real family and his demand that his disciples hate their erstwhile fathers, mothers, wives, children, brothers, and sisters were as central to his ministry as they were impossible for his later followers to imitate (monastics being the rule-proving exception).

  During the time of floods, massacres, and wanderings through the desert, the Bolsheviks assumed that marriage and the family would wither away along with private property, inequality, and the state. After the temporary postponement of Communism under NEP, it became clear that the Lander-Rosfeldt argument would have to be resolved, however provisionally, and that childbirth and childrearing would have to be supervised and regulated until the state could take them over completely. This meant that marriage as an institution had to be defined and, until further notice, consolidated. The former proved impossible; the latter, very difficult.

  The main Bolshevik expert on the marriage problem was Yakov Brandenburgsky, an Old Bolshevik from the Pale of Settlement who had severed relations with his family as a gymnasium student radical, attended the Odessa (New Russia) University before being expelled for revolutionary activity, joined the Party in 1903, graduated from the Sorbonne law faculty in 1911, and served as a roving plenipotentiary in charge of food requisitioning during the Civil War. By 1925, he had become a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Justice, first dean of the Department of Soviet Law at Moscow University, and chairman of the new family law commission.21

  In bourgeois jurisprudence, wrote Brandenburgsky, what made matrimony different from cohabitation (concubinage) was its permanence. In the Soviet Union, because of the freedom of divorce, this distinction did not apply. The view that marriage was a cohabitation between two individuals who considered themselves husband and wife was, according to Brandenburgsky, circular and legally meaningless. Attempts to define marriage in terms of its goals (most commonly, child rearing) were not satisfactory, owing to the large number of exceptions. The argument that marriage was a legal contract could not be accepted because “some elements, conditions, and, especially, consequences of marriage depend on nature and not on the will of the parties.” In the final analysis, definitions did not matter. “A legal definition will be found easily and effortlessly when the new forms of everyday life have established themselves.” Or rather, the new forms of everyday life would obviate the need for a definition because there would be no marriage. In the meantime, cohabitation and reproduction would have to be regulated, whatever the terminology. “The family, which, in bourgeois countries, is based on marriage and creates certain rights and obligations for the spouses, parents, and children, will, of course, disappear and will be replaced by a state system of socialized child-rearing and social welfare. But until that happens, for as long as the individual family still exists, we impose certain mutual obligations, such as alimony, on family me
mbers.”22

  Yakov Brandenburgsky

  The early Soviet drive to destroy the family had been, in principle, appropriate, but “on the other hand, the population is justified in wishing that it not be destroyed so precipitously because this does not correspond to the current conditions of life.” Under current conditions, there was no alternative to recognizing “de facto marriages” and “protecting the weak.” Soviet legislation was based on realism, not moral “fetishism.” In the case of family law, this meant—perhaps paradoxically—that it was based on biological kinship. “Abroad, in bourgeois countries, kinship is a relationship based on the legitimacy of marriage, so that, if I have a child out of wedlock, there is no family relationship—no kinship—between me and that child. We, on the other hand, have built our law on a different principle, according to which the relations between parents and their children are based on blood ties, on actual birth origins.”23

  The family was real and, for the time being, both useful and inescapable. But what was a new Bolshevik family? What did it mean for a Communist to be a good husband, wife, parent, or child? According to Solts, “the family of a Communist must be a prototype of a small Communist cell” or, to be more precise, “it must be a collectivity of comrades in which one lives in the family the same way as outside the family, and in which the members of the family must, in all their work and life, represent a unit of assistance to the Party.” This was the Calvinist (Puritan) model of the family as a congregation in miniature or, insofar as the secular commonwealth managed to be separate-but-godly, a state in miniature. But what was the specific contribution of the family if one was to live inside it the same way as outside? In Brandenburgsky’s formulation, the point was “for the relations between the spouses to be completely free of all prejudices, survivals, and preposterous conventions of bourgeois ‘virtue,’ for the woman to be fully emancipated from the power of the man, and for the wife to become economically independent from her husband.”24