Well, aren’t your hands bare, for god’s sake? And your nose and the rest of your face? That’s not a problem, is it? Not too scary? Almost all parts of the body could easily be left naked for most of the year. You don’t catch a cold because your hands are wet, do you? But the minute you get your feet wet, you go straight to bed. That’s your punishment for wrapping them up all the time, for hiding them from the sun….
We can—and must—discard all the ballast that separates our body from the sun: coats, jackets, vests, shirts, women’s fashions, socks, and boots. Nine times out of ten, people wear them not because they need them, but because they want to show off or outdo others. Of course, in our climate we must protect ourselves from the elements for part of the year. But I am talking about an alliance with the sun, and when the sun is willing to enter into an alliance with us, we must not miss our chance.”
Yuri the skeptic objects by saying that he cannot imagine the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Aleksei Ivanovich Rykov, showing up at an official reception in only his underwear. But the protagonist is ready for this objection. “It is very easy to imagine a perfectly natural setting in which a high-ranking official might appear in public in only his underwear…. The very fact of such an appearance would inspire the masses to debate the problem of developing and reinforcing the strength of the working people.” Eventually, the masses would understand that “the sun is the best proletarian doctor.” Yuri, for one, is persuaded.39
Podvoisky practiced what he preached—both in the matter of discarding the ballast and in making his family the primary cell of a larger transformation. In 1923, they received a dacha in Serebrianyi Bor (Silver Forest) on the Moskva River, next door to the Trifonovs. Yuri Trifonov describes the experiment in his novel The Old Man. The Burmins resemble the Podvoiskys, and Sanya—the author as a boy:
Burmin, his wife, his wife’s sisters and their husbands were devotees of “the naked body” and of the “down with modesty” society, and often used to walk around near their dacha in the garden—and sometimes even in the public vegetable plots where many people would assemble in the evenings—in an indecent state: that is, in the nude. The other residents were outraged—the professor wanted to write to the Moscow Council—but Sanya’s mother just laughed and said it was an illustration of the tale of the emperor’s new clothes. She once quarreled with his father, who forbade Sanya to go the vegetable plots while those “buffoons” were larking about. Father really had it in for Burmin because of that “down with modesty” business. Yet the others just laughed. Burmin was gaunt, tall, and bespectacled and reminded one more of Don Quixote than of Apollo; the Burmin women were no raving beauties, either. True enough, they were marvelously sunburned.
Sanya’s father knows Burmin from their Civil War days. “Father thought Burmin was stupid (Sanya used to hear him say: ‘That fool Semyon’), and adopted a skeptical attitude to his feats of military prowess and even to his decoration.” As for discarding the ballast, some of the children talk others into imitating the grown-ups, and it all ends in a terrible scandal. “But was it really stupidity as his father said? Was he truly stupid, that land surveyor’s son with the goatee, who was swept up onto the crest of a wave of monstrous force? Now, more than three decades later, what had seemed axiomatic then, Burmin’s stupidity, seemed doubtful.” (Valentin Trifonov and Nikolai Podvoisky had served together; Podvoisky’s father was actually a priest, not a surveyor.)40
Valentin Trifonov was free of prejudices in a different way. After the Civil War, he moved back in with his common-law wife, Tatiana Slovatinskaia, and her daughter from a previous marriage, Evgenia Lurye. Several years later, he left the mother for the daughter, and, in 1925, their son Yuri was born. At the time, Tatiana was fifty-six, Valentin, thirty-seven, and Evgenia, twenty-one. They continued to live together as one family. Tatiana worked as head of the visitors’ office of the Party’s Central Committee and director of the Politburo archive; Valentin was chairman of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court; Evgenia postponed her studies at the Agricultural Academy to take care of the children (they had a daughter two years later). According to Yuri, Tatiana was a rigid, unsentimental true believer. “She is not a human being,” says one of his characters, “she is some kind of an iron closet.” Valentin seemed less orthodox but almost as impenetrable. “By temperament he was silent, reserved, even a little gloomy; he did not like to ‘stick out,’ so to speak.”41
Valentin Trifonov, Evgenia Lurye, Tatiana Slovatinskaia, and little Yuri
The Trifonovs’ closest friend was Aron Solts, “the conscience of the Party,” the cousin of Evgenia’s father, and the mentor of both Tatiana and Valentin in matters of doctrine and Party ethics. Yuri remembered him as “a small man with a large, gray bumpy head. He had big lips and big, bulging eyes that looked at you shrewdly and sternly. I thought of him as very smart, very cross, and very sick: he always breathed heavily, with a loud wheeze. Also, I thought of him as an exceptional chess player. I always lost to him.” Solts never married and lived with his sister Esfir. In the early 1930s, they were joined by their niece, Anna, who had been left by her husband, the Party boss of Uzbekistan, Isaak Zelensky. At about the same time, they adopted a boy from an orphanage who, according to Anna’s daughter and Yuri Trifonov, was rude to the old people and talked of them with contempt.42
Tatiana Slovatinskaia, Anna Zelenskaia, Isaak Zelensky, Aron Solts, and the Zelensky children, Elena and Andrei
It is not known what Solts thought of Valentin Trifonov’s new living arrangement or his own expanding household. At the height of his power in the mid-1920s (when Koltsov’s friends would restrain his playful imagination by threatening him with “a reprimand by Solts”), he believed that the greatest danger for Communist families lay in unequal marriages with class enemies. He considered such marriages to be in poor taste.
This poor taste consists in the fact that such things should be considered in the same way in which the old society considered a marriage between a count and a housemaid. The public would be scandalized: How dare he, he has abandoned our traditions, it is improper, he should be ashamed of himself! Such was the attitude in those days. Today, we are the ruling class, and we should have the same attitude. Intimacy with a member of the enemy camp when we are the ruling class—such a thing should meet with such public condemnation that a person would think thirty times before making such a decision. Of course, every feeling is individual, and it is not always appropriate to interfere in a person’s private life, but we can condemn such things the way the old society did when any of its members refused to obey its demands. We call this “prejudice,” but when it comes to self-preservation, it is not prejudice at all. One should think long and hard before taking a wife from an alien class.43
Solts’s warning came too late for Arosev. In 1916, he became engaged to the sixteen-year-old daughter of a Kazan prosecutor and a housemaid. The father died early, and the daughter was educated at an institute for noble maidens. When Arosev was drafted into the army, she married another man, with whom she had a son. In 1918, Arosev returned to Kazan as a hero (he had just presided over the closure of all non-Bolshevik newspapers in Moscow) and took her away from her husband, apparently against her will. Her son soon died, but they had three daughters, born between 1919 and 1925. Her name was Olga Goppen; she spoke French, wrote poetry, liked to dress up, did not know how to cook, and prided herself on being “frivolous.” Her mother, the former housemaid, treated her son-in-law with ironic forebearance and had all three girls secretly baptized. Soon after the birth of their third daughter, when Arosev was working at the Soviet embassy in Stockholm, Olga left him for his junior colleague and followed her new husband to Sakhalin, where he became regional Party secretary (having also left a wife and three children behind). Arosev refused to let Olga have any of the girls and raised all three with the help of a Swedish nanny, who accompanied them around Europe. In 1932, while serving as ambassador to Czechoslovakia, Arosev married
his eldest daughter’s dance teacher, Gertrude Freund. He was forty-two; she was twenty-two. Because she was a Czechoslovak citizen, he was not allowed to continue as ambassador and returned to Moscow to head the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries. The girls hated their stepmother “ferociously,” as one of them put it. “She was the German version of a ‘well-organized’ European woman—cold, restrained, and very stingy.” His comrades condemned him for once again marrying a member of the alien class.44
Alexander Arosev
Olga Goppen
One of Arosev’s comrades from the time of the Moscow uprising was Osip Piatnitsky. His first wife and fellow revolutionary, Nina Marshak, left him for Aleksei Rykov, and in 1920, at the age of thirty-nine, he married the twenty-one-year-old daughter of a priest (and widow of a general), Yulia Sokolova. She had partially redeemed her origins by serving as a Bolshevik spy in a White Army counterintelligence unit in Cheliabinsk. According to one fictionalized history of the Civil War, when her identity was discovered, she had hidden in a barrel of pickles and stayed there until the Red troops found her the next morning. Yulia and Osip met when she was convalescing in a Moscow hospital. Their first son, Igor, was born in 1921; the second, Vladimir, in 1925. Vladimir describes his father as taciturn and ascetic, and his mother, as “very emotional” with an “exposed conscience.” Shortly before his birth, she left the Party because she considered herself unworthy.45
Osip Piatnitsky
Yulia Sokolova
Boris Zbarsky only partly heeded Solts’s warning. His first wife, Fani, was from his hometown of Kamenets-Podolsky in Ukraine. They got married in Geneva, where they were students together, and moved to the northern Urals in 1915, when their son, Ilya, was two years old. In January 1916, they were joined by Boris Pasternak and his friend, Evgeny Lundberg. Zbarsky knew Pasternak’s father and gave Boris a job as a clerk in one of his factories. Fani had nothing to do and felt bored and lonely. According to her son, Ilya, “My father usually came home late. I used to spend whole days with my nanny or by myself while my mother sought consolation in the company of E. Lundberg and B. Pasternak. The latter played the piano, improvised, and wrote and recited poetry. My mother and Boris Pasternak must have had an affair, which later became one of the reasons for my parents’ separation.”
When the Zbarskys divorced in 1921, Ilya stayed with his father. Around 1927, Boris Zbarsky went to Berlin on business, met a college friend of Lydia Pasternak (Boris’s younger sister), and eventually brought her to Moscow, first as his assistant and then, his wife. Her name was Evgenia Perelman. She was the daughter of a lawyer, granddaughter of a rabbi, and not a Communist herself. According to Ilya, she “turned out to be a mean, hysterical, miserly woman” who “constantly demonstrated her dislike of all things Russian and talked about her émigré past.” She was also self-consciously and emphatically Jewish—something Ilya was not used to and found distasteful. Many people in his father’s world, and the high Party elite in general, came from Jewish families, but they tended to assume that internationalism meant having no motherland and possibly no parents at all. Nationalism was the last resort of the enemy classes; “nationality” was a remnant of the past tolerated in “laborers lost in the forests” but not in “progressive people free of prejudices.” The Russianness of Russian internationalism was taken for granted and noticed only when it was violated. Ilya Zbarsky’s stepmother fired his peasant nanny “and hired as a servant an unpleasant Jewish woman who did not feed me and who brought into the house an alien and unpleasant atmosphere…. The food was unfamiliar and did not taste good, and I had to listen to my stepmother’s mocking comments. Finally, I moved into my mother’s communal apartment in the Arbat, which she shared with twenty other people.” Ilya went on to become his father’s assistant at the Lenin Mausoleum. Boris and Evgenia had two sons; the first, Feliks-Lev, was named after the chemist Lev Karpov and the Cheka head Feliks Dzerzhinsky.46
Vladimir Vorobiev and Boris Zbarsky with his son, Ilya
(Courtesy of I. B. Zbarsky)
■ ■ ■
In the top ranks of the Bolshevik leadership, such violations of Solts’s injunction were rare. Most elite Communists socialized, one way or another, with other elite Communists—either because of shared loyalties or because there were few other people in their offices, houses, clubs, dachas, and resorts. In the 1920s, the most talked-about Party union was between two of the most celebrated Party propagandists: Karl Radek and Larisa Reisner. Radek’s biographer described the couple as Quasimodo and Esmeralda. One of Karl’s high school classmates described him as “short, skinny, and physically underdeveloped; from his earliest youth, he always had a pair of glasses perched upon his nose. Yet in spite of his general ugliness, he was very arrogant and self-confident.… His ugly nose, his gaping mouth, and the teeth sticking out [from below] his upper lip marked him clearly. He was forever carrying a book or a newspaper. He was constantly reading—at home, on the street, during recess in the school—always reading, day and night, even during classes.”47
He later abandoned Germanophilic Jewish enlightenment for Polish nationalism and then Bolshevism (although he continued to wear sideburns in honor of Mickiewicz). He was expelled from the Social Democratic Party of Poland-Lithuania, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and, after the failure of the German revolution in 1923, from the Executive Committee of the Comintern and the Central Committee of the Party. He was known for his wit, sarcasm, slovenly bohemianism, self-deprecating buffoonery, ferocious personal attacks on ideological opponents, and eloquent defense of various causes in three different languages. Rosa Luxemburg had refused to sit at the same table with him, and Angelica Balabanoff “despised him personally and considered him a vulgar politician.”
He was—and is—a strange mixture of amorality, cynicism, and spontaneous appreciation for ideas, books, music, human beings. Just as there are people who have no perception of colors, so Radek had no perception of moral values. In politics, he would change his viewpoint overnight, appropriate for himself the most contradictory slogans. This quality, with his quick mind, his sardonic humor, his versatility and his vast reading, was probably the key to his journalistic success….
Because of his insensibility, he had no resentment about the way he was treated by other people. I have seen him attempt to go with people who refused to sit at the same table with him, or even put their signatures next to his on a document, or to shake hands with him. He would be delighted if he could merely divert these people with one of his innumerable anecdotes. Though a Jew himself, his anecdotes were almost exclusively those which dealt with Jews and which put them in a ridiculous or degrading light.48
He became a prominent Left Communist alongside Bukharin and Osinsky, a loyal Leninist after May 1918, and, after Lenin’s stroke in March 1923, the chief promoter of “Leon Trotsky, the Organizer of Victory” (as he titled his programmatic article about Lenin’s succession). According to a much-repeated anecdote, when Voroshilov accused Radek of being Leon’s—or the lion’s—tail, Radek responded that it was better to be Leon’s tail than Stalin’s ass. (A decade later his Pravda article, “The Architect of the Socialist Society,” would become one of the cornerstones of the Stalin cult.) He was widely regarded to be the author of most anti-Soviet jokes. In the words of the journalist Louis Fischer, “he was a witty imp and an ugly Puck. He had dense, curly disheveled black hair which looked as if he never combed it with anything but a towel; laughing, nearsighted eyes behind very thick glasses; prominent moist lips; sideburns that met under his chin; no moustache, and sickly sallow skin.”49
Karl Radek
Larisa Reisner
Larisa Reisner was universally, almost ritualistically, acclaimed as the most beautiful woman of the Russian Revolution (or, in Nadezhda Mandelstam’s words, “the Woman of the Russian Revolution”). Koltsov called her a “magnificent, rare, choice human specimen”; Mikhail Roshal, the secretary of the Helsingfors Bolshevik Committee in 191
7, compared her to La Gioconda; the author of The Week, Yuri Libedinsky, wrote that she reminded him of “either a Greek Goddess or a Germanic Valkyrie”; and Trotsky called her “the Pallas Athena of the revolution.” Vadim Andreev, the son of her literary mentor Leonid Andreev, claimed that “when she walked down the street, she carried her beauty like a torch, so that the coarsest objects seemed to acquire softness and tenderness at her approach.… Not a single man could walk by without noticing her, and every third one—a statistic I can vouch for, would stand rooted to the spot and look back until we had disappeared in the crowd.”50
A law professor’s daughter, poet, journalist, and, after 1919, commissar of the naval general staff, Reisner seems to have been the only person in Russia who appeared convincing as both a decadent writer and leather-clad Bolshevik, a “heavenly wagtail” and a “slayer and avenger.” She had poems dedicated to her by Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Gumilev (with whom she had an affair while he was married to Akhmatova). Pasternak named his heroine in Doctor Zhivago after her, and Vsevolod Vishnevsky used her as the prototype for the “female commissar sent by the Party” in his canonical play, An Optimistic Tragedy. In 1918, she married Trotsky’s deputy for naval affairs, Fedor Raskolnikov, who called her his “warrior goddess, Diana.” She accompanied him to the Volga Fleet, the Baltic Fleet, and finally to Afghanistan, where he was sent as ambassador after the Kronstadt debacle. Sverdlov’s assistant Elizaveta Drabkina saw her on the Volga in 1918: “In front, on a black stallion, rode a woman in a soldier’s tunic and a wide, light-blue and navy checkered skirt. Sitting gracefully in her saddle, she galloped bravely across the ploughed field. Clods of black earth flew from under the horse’s hooves. It was Larisa Reisner, Chief of Army Scouts. The rider’s enchanting face glowed from the wind. She had light gray eyes, chestnut hair pulled back from her temples and coiled into a bun at the back of her head, and a high, clear brow intersected by a single tiny, stern crease.”51
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