The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  But what did it mean to be free of all prejudices? Had Lander gotten it right? According to the Presidium of the Party Control Commission, he had not—and neither had Rosfeldt. “In this matter, the Party can adopt neither the position of denying personal enjoyment, nor the position of priestly hypocrisy, nor the position of indifference toward unhealthy phenomena that arise in this sphere, provoking a strongly negative reaction among the toiling masses and producing socially damaging consequences.” The reasoning, as usual, was purely pragmatic. As Solts put it,

  The fact that we advocate a total freedom of feelings does not mean that one can change partners according to random and temporary moods—that would be incorrect. There is no doubt that sexual promiscuity damages the organism, saps a person’s strength, and weakens that person as a fighter and a Communist. Human capacity is limited: the more time and attention—emotional or any other kind—devoted to this aspect of life, legitimate and appropriate though it may be, the less strength remains for other functions that a Communist must perform. If a Communist seeks too much variety in the sexual sphere, then it will undoubtedly sap too much of his strength and will produce a flawed Communist.25

  The same was true of masturbation, promiscuity, drunkenness, and other expressions of free feelings that might distract Communists from the task of building Communism. To the surprise and unease of many young Party members, the message seemed to be one of “moderation,” which they associated with lukewarm appeasement and “bourgeois philistinism.”26

  Judging by repeated recitals of alarming statistics on moral laxity among Communists, the message was not being heard. As Bukharin put it, “our young people find themselves in the gap between the old norms that have already disappeared and the new ones that have not yet arisen. The result is a temporary anarchy in the rules of behavior and norms of personal relationships.” Or, as Trotsky put it, “the family is shaking, disintegrating, collapsing, reemerging, and falling apart again. Everyday life is going through the trials of harsh and painful criticism. History is felling the old forest, and the chips are flying. But are elements of the new family being prepared?” The answer seemed lukewarm, if not philistine: “In the most important spheres, the revolutionary symbols of the workers’ state are innovative, clear, and powerful: the red flag, the hammer and sickle, the red star, the worker and the peasant, “comrade,” the “Internationale.” But in the closed-off cells of family life, these new elements are almost nonexistent—or too few, at any rate.… That is why, in Communist circles, there are some signs of a desire to counter old rituals with new forms and symbols not only in the life of the state, where they are quite widespread, but in family life, too.”27

  Trotsky approved of the new revolutionary names such as Ilich and Oktiabrina, new Bolshevik baptisms involving “semi-facetious” induction-into-citizenship ceremonies, new rituals surrounding wedding registrations, and solemn “processions, speeches, marches, and fireworks” at Communist cremations. He spoke of such things “semi-facetiously,” however, and had no specific suggestions to make or official policies to propose. Both he and Bukharin considered literature incomparably more important for “sentimental education” (as Bukharin put it). The “gap” remained.28

  In a 1926 article called “My Crime,” Mikhail Koltsov describes a visit by a group of peasants who want “a godless Soviet liturgy for deceased, honest, non-Party peasants, as well as a full schedule of Red Baptisms (‘Octoberings’) and a register of revolutionary saints’ names for each day of the year for the naming of peasant infants.” The narrator’s reaction is predictable: “I tried to convince them that this was all nonsense and did not matter at all, and that what was important was not rituals but libraries, the liquidation of illiteracy, agricultural cooperatives, mutual aid committees, collective plowing, the fight against moonshine production, tractors, agronomists, newspapers, movies, and rural mail deliveries.”

  The visitors persist, however, and the narrator “commits an act of bourgeois philistinism and intellectual backwardness at the level of one village” by taking them to a stationary store and helping them buy “portraits of leaders, red lampshades, ribbons, slogans, and posters.… A cardboard poster ‘Save Time: When Your Work Is Done, Go Home’ may soon rustle above the head of a corpse. A fancy picture of airplanes and gas masks may well be displayed over the respectfully bent heads of newlyweds. A ‘No Smoking’ poster may hang before the tiny blue eyes of an unschooled newborn.… But none of this matters! I have committed a crime, but have yet to repent it.”

  Koltsov’s conclusion is serious. “If laborers lost in the forests want to climb out of the pit of ignorance and superstition, we need to bring a step-ladder or stretch out a helping hand—not simply order them to jump.” But what awaited them outside the pit? What were those honest non-Party peasants and thousands of confused “young Communists” to do once they no longer needed cardboard posters and “semi-facetious” Octoberings? Koltsov’s essay implies that he, “a progressive person free of prejudices,” did not need any of those things. But what did he need? If he, Solts, and Bukharin were in “the vanguard,” and if their own sentimental education was more or less complete, then the future of the Revolution might very well depend on what their own “family cells” looked like.29

  ■ ■ ■

  In 1918, when he was twenty years old, Koltsov married an actress fifteen years his senior. In the early 1920s, he married another woman, but remained free of prejudices. As he wrote in one of his essays, “men and women live together without long and boring matchmaking, mediation by church or state, false witnesses, divorce trials, or the hypocrisy of forced cohabitation within marriage.” He did not divorce his second wife when he moved in with another woman.30

  Koltsov was famous for his good looks. According to another Pravda journalist, Sofia Vinogradskaia, he was “graceful, elegant, and neat,” preferred suits to leather jackets and military tunics, and had a “slender, pale-ivory face shaven to an Egyptian blue, soft white forehead, perfectly chiselled lips, and an equally perfect shiny row of close-set teeth.” Or, in the words of the director of the Moscow Children’s Theater, Natalia Sats, “his wavy, dark-chestnut hair crowned a beautiful forehead, aquiline nose, and smiling, slightly capricious lips.” He was famously short (“like a tiny penknife”), vain (gathering, like a bee, “the honey of impressions, praise, recognition, approval, and smiles”), and witty. “Little Koltsov with his beautiful sad eyes was full of jokes, funny stories, and bons mots.… He loved to pretend to be someone else, wear disguises, and write acrostics.” Once, when he was in Natalia Sats’s room, he suddenly asked her to dance. “But,” she said, “if I sit down at the piano, how can I dance, and if I don’t sit down at the piano, who will play for us?” Koltsov picked up the telephone, “called his brother Boris, asked him to hold the receiver next to his gramophone and turn on the song ‘Valencia,’ and we danced for three minutes, holding on to the telephone cord.”31

  Mikhail Koltsov

  Natalia Sats

  (Courtesy of Roksana Sats)

  Koltsov was famous for driving his own car, knowing all the cafés in Moscow, and being everywhere at once. He was famous as the founder of the journals Ogonyok (The little flame), Za rulem (At the wheel), Krokodil (Crocodile), Za rubezhom (Abroad), and Zhenskii zhurnal (The women’s magazine), among other ventures. He was very famous and very powerful. In 1927, when Natalia Sats’s theater was threatened with eviction, he published an essay arguing that a children’s theater was no less useful than an orphanage. A Pravda article had the force of a government decree; the theater got its own building. (Natalia Sats was appointed head of the children’s section of the Moscow Soviet’s Theater and Music Department by Platon Kerzhentsev in 1918, when she was fifteen. Soon afterward she founded her own theater and, by the late 1920s, was already a celebrity. She married early, had a son, divorced, and married the director of the Moscow City Bank, who later became the Soviet trade representative in Warsaw and then in Berlin. She had a daughte
r, directed in various theaters in Europe and South America, collaborated with Max Reinhardt and Otto Klemperer, and, in 1935, left her second husband for the people’s commissar of internal trade, Izrail Veitser. The following year, a special Party and government decree announced the creation of a much bigger Central Children’s Theater on Sverdlov Square.)32

  Koltsov had a dacha on the Kliazma, north of Moscow, where he often spent his weekends in the company of friends. According to one of them, the editor of Za rulem, N. Beliaev (Naum Beilin), “the hospitable host would spend the whole day on the volleyball court or playing forfeits or some other children’s game, joking, telling stories, and entertaining his guests. Monday morning, everyone would go back to Moscow, and the dacha would grow silent again.” In the early 1930s, four of the regular guests—the writers Boris Levin, Ilya Ilf, and Evgeny Petrov, and the artist Konstantin Rotov—bought the dacha from Koltsov and started using it as a common summer home. (Levin’s former wife was Eva Rozengolts, the sister of the ghostly leader of the Moscow uprising, Arkady Rozengolts, now people’s commissar of foreign trade. Eva studied painting under Robert Falk at the Higher Art and Technology Studios and graduated in 1925, the same year as Mayakovsky’s La Gioconda, Maria Denisova. Her graduation painting, Old People, represented three elderly Jews, probably from her native town of Vitebsk. After the birth of their daughter, Elena, in 1928, Eva and Boris separated. Arkady remarried at about the same time, soon after his new appointment.)33

  Koltsov’s brother, Boris Efimov, was a political cartoonist. He married his first wife in 1919 when he was nineteen years old. He married his second wife in 1930, but without leaving the first one. He had sons by both women and spent the rest of his life sharing his time between the two families. The younger wife, Raisa Efimovna Fradkina, had three brothers and two sisters. One brother was a secret police interrogator, another a military intelligence agent, and a third, Boris Volin (Iosif Fradkin), had a distinguished Party career before becoming head of the press department of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and then, in 1931, of Glavlit (the central censorship office). Raisa’s older sister died during the Civil War; her younger sister, Sofia, married a secret police interrogator, Leonid Chertok, and joined the service herself. According to Efimov, she had been required to seek permission for both her employment and marriage at a special interview with the OGPU (secret police) chief, Genrikh Yagoda, and his wife Ida. Ida Yagoda was Yakov Sverdlov’s niece (the daughter of his sister Sofia). Her brother, Leopold Averbakh, a prominent proletarian literary critic, was married to the daughter of Lenin’s closest friend and biographer, Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich.34

  Yakov Sverdlov’s son Andrei married one of the daughters of the commander of the assault on the Winter Palace, Nikolai Podvoisky. They first met as children and then again, for good, at the CEC resort of Foros in Crimea in 1932, when he was twenty-two and she was sixteen. Podvoisky and his wife, the Old Bolshevik Nina Didrikil (Diedrich-Kiel), had five daughters and one son. Their son, Lev, married Milena Lozovskaia, the daughter of Solomon Lozovsky (Dridzo), the head of the Red International of Labor Unions (Profintern); they, too, met in Foros. Milena’s half-sister, Vera, Solomon Lozovsky’s daughter from a previous marriage, was the secretary of Lenin’s wife, Krupskaia. When Milena’s mother died in 1926, she was adopted by the family of Gleb Krzhizhanovsky, the Old Bolshevik in charge of the “electrification of the whole country” and the first head of Gosplan. Milena’s best friend was Elsa Brandeburgskaia (nicknamed Bryndia), the daughter of the author of the 1926 family code. One of Nina Didrikil’s sisters was married to the organizer of Red Terror in northern Russia, Mikhail Kedrov; her nephew Artur Artuzov (Frauci) was Kedrov’s protégé and collaborator in the Cheka Special Department before becoming head of Soviet foreign intelligence. The Bolsheviks were not just reproducing—they were reproducing themselves as a group.35

  By all indications, the Podvoiskys were a happy family. As Nikolai wrote in a letter to his wife, Nina, “I don’t know a wife, mother, friend, or comrade better, dearer, purer, stronger, or saintlier than you.… I stand before you as if gazing up at the warm sun, so high above.” They took the task of preparing their children for life under Communism very seriously and often talked about it—to each other and to their children. Nikolai believed in education through industrial labor (two of their daughters, including Andrei’s wife, worked as factory workers before becoming engineers); Nina put more emphasis on personal example. As she wrote in her diary on May 2, 1927, “I insist that parents (both of them) have a duty before mankind, for the sake of its progress, to teach their children and pass on to them the lessons of their own experience.” This did not have to be an act of self-sacrifice. “I have a lot of fire in my soul,” she wrote in July 1920, “and I feel guilty about not having given anything to mankind. Fire cannot be contained, it will burst forth, and I am certain that if it does not burst forth within me, it will do so through my children, who will make me immortal.” The progress of mankind and immortality through one’s children was one and the same thing—now that philistine domesticity was no more. As Nina wrote in an 1922 entry, “Now that the whirlwind of revolution has swept away the specter that was known in bourgeois society as ‘the Family,’ leaving nothing but the cloying and, sometimes, for our children and young people, nightmarish atmosphere of ‘the hearth,’ and since the emerging society has not yet grown a trunk that would be able to nurture and cherish its young leaves, we must be especially sensitive, especially loving toward the young shoots that are growing next to us.”36

  But what was a family that was not a family, and what was a home without a “hearth”? Could one pass on to one’s children the lessons of one’s own experience without reproducing philistine domesticity? And what if the new trunk turned out to be the same old tree of the knowledge of good and evil? The Podvoiskys’ answer was the same as Solts’s: the new biological family must become the primary cell of the Party family; life inside the family should be the same as life outside the family. As Nikolai wrote to his children, “if you want to love Vladimir Ilich [Lenin] deeply, diligently, and eagerly, you must be your mother’s friends, you must talk to her about Lenin.” And as Nina wrote to her daughter on her seventeenth birthday, months after she had said “yes” to Andrei Sverdlov,

  Congratulations, you are seventeen years old! Life at seventeen is like the sea in April: it changes colors in response to the spring wind, the sun, and the density of the air; it is like a young birch covered with tender leaves and adorned with little earrings; it is the most powerful and the most beckoning of springs. You are the spring, and life all around you is the spring. You are happy, and you will be even happier when you realize just how happy you are. And I think you already do, don’t you? You are the youngest and the strongest, and the whole life of your society is young and strong. My wish for you, in your seventeenth spring, is that you continue to move closer and closer, in all your interests, feelings, and thoughts, to the camp of the youngest and strongest: to Marx, Engels, Lenin, all the true Bolsheviks.37

  The task was to build socialism in one family within socialism in one country within the unfolding world revolution. The point of the pursuit was happiness, especially the happiness of the current generation of children. The most well-known take on children and the pursuit of happiness in the Soviet Union was Stanislavsky’s production—to the music of Ilya Sats, Natalia’s father—of Maurice Maeterlink’s The Blue Bird, which premiered in 1908, quickly became a classic, and survived the Revolution to become a required rite of passage for elite Soviet children (and eventually the longest-running theater production of all time: in 2008 it celebrated its hundredth anniversary). In her evocation of the play on May 8, 1923, Nina Podvoiskaia seems to have been thinking about both the Soviet state and her own children. In the play, the little boy and girl, Tyltyl and Mytyl, find the bird of happiness and release it out into the world. In the diary entry, Podvoiskaia meets a German Comintern agent at a Black Sea resort and feels proud that she has
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  held in [her] hands the magic “blue bird” that is flying over the sea to bring happiness to mankind. I want to work in the Comintern—that miracle-producing magic garden of communism, from where blue birds fly to every corner of the world, spreading the news of communist happiness. I want to caress and nurture those birds, breathe into them the strength that they need for their flight.… Oh the enchantingly beautiful sea! The sea, the “magic garden,” and, in that garden, the great magician Lenin and the fabulous “blue birds.” There are lots of them, and there will be many many more. I love them with all my heart, I have boundless love for these “blue birds” that will overturn the world.38

  Podvoisky family

  Nina Podvoiskaia’s actual job was to prepare Lenin’s manuscripts for publication at the Lenin Institute, and, on the home front, to talk about Lenin to her children. Nikolai Podvoisky’s job was to prepare Soviet bodies for future happiness. Having lost the fight to become the Revolution’s “iron hand throughout the world,” he became the head of the Supreme Council on Physical Culture, the founder and leader of Sports International, and the main champion of what he called “an alliance with the sun.” His comparison of his wife to the “warm sun” was not entirely a metaphor. “Man, like all living things,” argues his representative in a Platonic dialog he wrote in 1925, “is a piece of the sun, and this piece must be in constant contact with its whole, or it will fade away.” The solution is to eliminate “artificial barriers between us, that is, our body, and the source of life, the sun.”

  “In other words,” retorted Yuri, “just walk around in the nude. Right.”