The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  All millenarian sects committed to poverty and fraternity are men’s movements. Bolshevism was aggressively and unabashedly masculine. Its hero was a blacksmith, énorme et gourd, and its most iconic war poster was Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. Its main enemy was the swamp and everything “resembling jelly.” Women produced children; women and children formed families; and families “engendered capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a massive scale.” The only women who did not threaten the rule of the iron scepter were mothers of prophets or Amazons. Larisa Reisner was the Bolshevik Marianne in the flesh.

  “Legends have enveloped her memory in a special aura, and it is difficult to think of her outside these semifictitious tales,” wrote Vadim Andreev. “Stories have been told about how she was on the Aurora on the memorable night of October 25 and how she ordered the bombardment of the Winter Palace, or how she dressed up as a peasant woman, crossed the enemy lines, and started an uprising in the Kolchak Army.” Most of these stories were not true, but she did seem to embody something Mayakovsky tried to create with words: the poetry of the Revolution. She was a living protest against the Great Disappointment, the divine bluebird of eternal revolution.52 According to Voronsky,

  Lazar Lissitzky, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge

  During the decisive days of the revolution’s bloody harvest, her noble, determined, feminine face, like that of a legendary Amazon with its halo of chestnut hair, and her nimble, self-confident figure could be seen in armored cars, on our Red warships, and among the rank-and-file soldiers.…

  Larisa Reisner hated everyday philistinism, wherever it might be found. She did not know how to accumulate or settle down, did not like sinking into a quiet and dull everyday routine. In life’s prose, she—an artist and fighter for the revolution—could always find the lofty, the gripping, the substantive, and the great.53

  And according to Radek, who was not loved by anyone but the Woman of the Russian Revolution, “She knew that the petit bourgeois element was a swamp that could swallow up the grandest of buildings, and she could see the strange flowers blooming in that swamp. But, at the same time, she could see the path of struggle against the dangers that threatened the republic of labor: the dams that the proletariat and the Communist Party needed to erect in order to protect themselves.”54

  Karl Radek and Larisa Reisner got together in 1923, when she returned from Afghanistan and asked him to take her with him to witness the revolution in Germany. He obliged; she wrote about “the barricades of Hamburg”; and they became lovers. Larisa separated from her husband; Karl continued to live part-time with his wife, Rosa, and their four-year-old daughter, Sonia. The German revolution failed, Karl fell from grace, and three years later, at the age of thirty, Larisa died of typhoid fever in the Kremlin hospital. “This beautiful young woman has flashed across the revolutionary sky like a burning meteor, blinding many in her path,” wrote Trotsky.55

  Her coffin was carried by Isaak Babel, Boris Pilnyak, Vsevolod Ivanov, and Boris Volin (Boris Efimov’s brother-in-law), “among others.” Varlam Shalamov, who felt “purified and elevated” by his love for her, was there, too. As he wrote later, “Karl Radek was being supported on both sides as he followed the coffin,” he wrote. “His face was dirty and had a greenish tinge, while a never-ending stream of tears blazed a trail down his cheeks lined with red sideburns.” Boris Pasternak addressed the deceased directly (“Wander on, heroine, into the depths of legend), and one of Larisa’s oldest friends wrote to the grieving father: “Many, many years ago, when I often used to visit, you once said that you lived and worked to serve a special religion—a Religion without God. All religions in the world, my dear M. A., serve as a refuge from sorrow. That, after all, is their ultimate purpose.”56

  The second-most-famous Bolshevik romance was between Bukharin and Anna Larina, the adopted daughter of the Old Bolshevik and radical anti-NEP economist, Yuri Larin (Mikhail Lurye). Bukharin was as commonly admired as Radek was despised (the two were close friends for a while). According to Ilya Ehrenburg, everyone loved “Bukharchik” for his “contagious laughter” and “sense of fun” when he was a gymnasium student, and, according to Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, “everyone adored him” when he visited her father’s dacha when she was a little girl. “He used to fill the whole house with animals, which he loved. There would be hedgehogs chasing each other across the balcony, garter snakes sunning themselves in jars, a tame fox racing through the park, and a crippled hawk glaring from a cage…. He used to play with the children and tease my nurse, whom he taught how to ride a bicycle and shoot an air rifle. Everyone always had a good time when he was around.” Anna Larina claims to have singled him out among her father’s friends because of his “irrepressible love of life, his mischievousness, his passionate love of nature, and his enthusiasm for painting.”57 They met the day Anna saw The Blue Bird for the first time:

  I spent the whole day under the impression of the show, and when I went to sleep, dreamed of Bread and Milk and the Land of Memory, which was calm and serene and not at all scary. I could hear Ilya Sats’s beautiful melody: “Here we come, to find the Blue Bird’s home.” And just as the Cat appeared, someone tweaked me on the nose. I was frightened—for on stage the Cat had been very big, as tall as a man, and I screamed: “Go away, Cat!” In my sleep, I could hear Mother saying: “Nikolai Ivanovich, why wake the child?” But I did wake up, and the Cat’s face slowly dissolved into Bukharin’s features. At that moment, I caught my own “Blue Bird”—not a fairy-tale one, but a flesh-and-blood one—one that I would pay a heavy price for.58

  Bukharin had married his first cousin and fellow sectarian, Nadezhda Lukina, when they were both very young. She had a serious back problem and spent long periods of time in bed. “During such periods,” wrote Lenin’s wife, Krupskaia, “Nikolai Ivanovich would run the household, put sugar instead of salt into the soup, and talk animatedly to Ilich.” In the early 1920s, he got together with Esfir Gurvich, who at the time was working at Pravda, studying at the Institute of Red Professors, and living in Gorki with Lenin’s sister Maria (her boss at Pravda). In 1924, their daughter Svetlana was born; in 1927, Stalin asked Bukharin and Nadezhda to move into the Kremlin; in 1929, Esfir left Bukharin. Soon afterward, he found himself in a compartment of the Moscow-Leningrad train with a young woman named Alexandra (Sasha) Travina. They started an affair, and a year and a half later she told him she was a secret police agent. Seven years after that, he wrote to Stalin “directly and openly about … what one doesn’t normally talk about”:59

  In my life, I have been with only four women. N. was ill. We separated de facto back in 1920. When I got together with Esfir, she (N) almost lost her mind. Ilich sent her abroad. To give N. time to recover, I temporarily separated from E. and then, fearing for N’s health, kept my relationship with E. secret. Then our daughter was born, and the situation became unbearable. Sometimes I couldn’t sleep for weeks on end. Objectively, I tormented E. by putting her in such a false situation. In the winter of 1929, she left me (perhaps partly because of my political problems at the time). I was in a terrible state because I loved her. She started another family. Then I got together (quite quickly and suddenly) with A. V. Travina, knowing that she was also close to some GPU circles. It didn’t bother me at all since there was no reason for concern. We lived very well together, but soon the old problems returned, greatly magnified. That was when N. tried to poison herself, and Sasha began suffering from nervous paralysis. I rushed madly back and forth between the two sick ones, and, at one point, even thought about renouncing any kind of private life altogether. I had been living openly with Sasha. I went everywhere with her, including vacations, and everyone considered her to be my wife. But once again my soul was being devoured by all these growing torments, and there was a break-up. What made all of this even harder was that these women were kind, intelligent, and extraordinarily attached to me.… Meanwhile, Niusia [Anna] Larina had been in love with me
for a long time (you were wrong about the “ten wives”—I was never with more than one woman at a time). And so what happened is that there was another horrible scene at Sasha’s, and I didn’t go “home” to sleep. I went to the Larins instead and stayed there. I am not going to go into all the details, but eventually Aniuta and I started living together. N. put up a partition in our apartment and calmed down. For the first time, a new life began for me in this regard.60

  In the summer of 1930, when Anna was sixteen, she and her father had stayed at a government sanatorium in Mukhalatka, in Crimea. Bukharin was at his dacha in Gurzuf, down the coast. His “Right Opposition” to forced collectivization had been defeated and forced to apologize; the Sixteenth Party Congress was proceeding without him; he was forty-two years old. One day she came to visit. She was wearing a light blue calico dress with white daisies around the hem; her black braids (she reports in her memoirs) hung down, almost touching the daisies. They went down to the beach, and, having found a shady spot under a cliff, he started reading from Knut Hamsun’s Victoria: “What is love? A wind whispering among the roses—no, a yellow phosphorescence in the blood. A danse macabre in which even the oldest and frailest hearts are obliged to join. It is like the marguerite which opens wide as night draws on, and like the anemone which closes at a breath and dies at a touch.” He may or may not have read four more paragraphs of similes before getting to the last one: “Love was God’s first word, the first thought that sailed across his mind. He said, Let there be light, and there was love. And every thing that he had made was very good, and nothing thereof did he wish unmade again. And love was creation’s source, creation’s ruler; but all love’s ways are strewn with blossoms and blood, blossoms and blood.”61

  Victoria had been required reading for the gymnasium students of Bukharin’s generation. It was—perhaps appropriately—a modernist fairy tale about the doomed love of an Underground Man. Bukharin read two more passages: one about a woman who cut off her hair after her sick husband lost his, and the other about a man who threw acid in his face after his wife became “crippled and hideous.” In the novel, both tales are the main character’s fantasies about how his love might have ended, had it not been doomed. When he finished reading, Bukharin asked Anna if she could ever love a leper. She was about to respond (in the affirmative, she writes in her memoirs) when he stopped her and, still reenacting Victoria, said he feared an answer. A few days later she came to visit again. Bukharin had just received a letter from his fellow-“Rightist” Aleksei Rykov, who wrote that he had conducted himself with dignity at the Sixteenth Party Congress and that he loved Bukharin “the way even a woman passionately in love with you never could” (he, too, had read Victoria). This time, there was no ride back to Mukhalatka; Anna stayed overnight and “experienced a thrilling, romantic Crimean evening.”62

  Nikolai Bukharin

  Anna Larina

  A long and checkered courtship followed. Bukharin continued to “rush madly back and forth between the two sick ones”; Anna had an affair with Zhenia Sokolnikov, the son of Bukharin’s childhood friend; both, according to Anna, suffered greatly from jealousy and uncertainty. Anna’s father, Yuri Larin, seemed much more worried about Bukharin. “You should consider very carefully how serious your feelings for him are,” he said once. “Nikolai Ivanovich loves you very much; he is a delicate, emotional person, and, if your feelings are not serious, you must step aside, or this will end badly for him.” She asked if he meant suicide. “Not necessarily suicide,” he said, “but he certainly does not need any more suffering.” In January 1932, as he lay dying, Larin told Anna that it would be “more interesting to live ten years with Nikolai Ivanovich than a lifetime with someone else.”

  These words of my father’s became a sort of benediction. Then he gestured for me to bend down even closer because his voice was growing weaker and weaker, and barely managed to wheeze out:

  “It is not enough to love Soviet power just because you live fairly comfortably as a result of its victory! You must be prepared to give your life for it, to shed your blood, if necessary!” … With great difficulty, he slightly raised his right fist, which quickly fell back down on his knee. “Swear that you will be willing to do this!”

  And I did.63

  Two years later, “after another horrible scene at Sasha’s,” Bukharin ran into Anna not far from where she was living in the Second House of Soviets. It was her twentieth birthday. She invited him over. Two years after that, their son Yuri was born. By then they were sharing a Kremlin apartment with Bukharin’s father and Nadezhda Lukina-Bukharina (as she continued to sign her name). According to Anna, Nadezhda gave their family “all the warmth of her heart, and loved [their] son in a way that was deeply touching.”64

  The challenge of combining personal love with love for Soviet power—as prescribed by Solts and implied in Yuri Larin’s blessing—was of immediate personal importance to Bukharin’s former friend, cellmate, and fellow Left Communist, Valerian Osinsky. As Osinsky wrote to his own Victoria, Anna Shaternikova, in February 1917, love “over there” would “reveal without shame all of its profound tenderness and its charity without embellishment, without the tinkling bells of magnanimity and philanthropy.” Life under Communism, he explained, quoting Victoria, would be “the kind of ‘good time when any grief is easy to bear.’” Osinsky and Shaternikova had read Victoria aloud to each other in Yalta, where they had met a few months earlier. Several years later, he wrote to her that he had decided to reread a few passages—“to take a quick look, that’s all, because I was sure I wouldn’t like it this time.… I read 5–10 pages from the middle, went back to the beginning, read some more, then a little more, and by four in the morning had read it all.… What I find moving about Victoria (the ending) is not the sense of pity it evokes, but the enormous power of feeling. In its own way, it is comparable to revolutionary enthusiasm. It belongs to the same category. It has the same power, clarity, and purity. There is no doubt that Victoria is a novel of genius.”65

  Osinsky, like Bukharin, had married a comrade-in arms when he was a young man. In 1912, his wife, Ekaterina Smirnova, gave birth to a son, Vadim. In late 1916, he met Anna Shaternikova in a Yalta sanatorium. She was a volunteer nurse, a true believer, a would-be Party theoretician, and, as far as Osinsky was concerned, “young, tall, intelligent, and beautiful.” They walked in the park and read Victoria by the sea. He left for the front and, on the eve of the February Revolution, wrote her the letter about “insatiable utopia.” She joined the Party; he spent most of 1917 in Moscow with Bukharin and his wife’s brother, Vladimir Smirnov, agitating for a military uprising. A few days before the October Revolution, he left for Kharkov—officially because he was frustrated by the old guard’s foot-dragging and possibly because he wanted to be with Anna, who was there at the time. Soon afterward he left for Petrograd, where he was put in charge of the empire’s economy (as director of the Central Bank and the first chairman of the Supreme Economic Council). In March 1918, as the chief ideologue of the defeated Left Communism, he resigned this position, and, after a stint in the provinces, became head of the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture and the chief advocate of “massive state coercion” against peasants (in the form of forced labor and a variety of “repressive measures”). Love was on the verge of revealing without shame all of its profound tenderness and charity, and in September 1920 he told his wife that he was in love with another woman. As he wrote to Anna, “Ekaterina Mikhailovna, whom I told what needed to be told and who knows how to deal with it correctly, is digesting it with great effort and pain. It is very, very understandable for a person who has known and loved somebody for a very, very long time. She has asked me to leave her in peace and not talk to her about the situation until things have settled…. Don’t worry, it will all get sorted out, because Ekaterina Mikhailovna is a good and intelligent person, but this is a delicate and tricky matter. It is not pleasant to be writing this, but one has to, of necessity.”66

  Val
erian Osinsky and his wife, Ekaterina

  (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

  Soon Ekaterina and their son Vadim (“Dima”) left for Finland, where she found a job as a cryptographer at the Soviet embassy, and Anna moved into the Osinskys’ Kremlin apartment. She was not happy there because, as she put it later, “everything smelled of another woman.” He was not happy either; one day, Anna came home to find a note that he had left for Finland to rejoin his family. He was appointed ambassador to Sweden; he and Ekaterina had another son, who died as an infant, and then, in 1923, another, whom they named after his father but called “Valia.” Two years later, they had a daughter, Svetlana. (Bukharin and Esfir Gurvich had started a trend: Stalin and Molotov would name their daughters “Svetlana,” too.)67

  In 1925, the Osinskys returned to Moscow and moved back into the Kremlin. At first they lived next to the Sverdlovs (Svetlana remembered Klavdia Novgorodtseva-Sverdlova as “taciturn, cold, dry, and colorless”), but then moved to a nine-room, two-story apartment (from which they could see Bukharin’s pet squirrel and fox running around in their cages). At the beginning of 1926, Osinsky was made director of the Central Bureau of Statistics, but he still considered himself, above all, a scholar. “The most important thing we children knew about him was ‘Father is working and cannot be disturbed,’” writes his daughter Svetlana. “Since he demanded absolute silence, his rooms in our second Kremlin apartment were separate from ours, across the stairway. His bed was covered with a white camelhair blanket. At the dacha his rooms were on the second floor—again, so that no one would disturb him. He was very irritable. Everyone was a little afraid of him.”