The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  He was tall and slim, wore a pince-nez with a gold rim, was always neat and clean-shaven, and preferred light suits. Their maid called him “the Master,” or “Himself.” According to Svetlana, “there was something cold and rational about him. I remember being shocked by something my mother once told me. When he was young, there were two women in love with him—both sisters of friends (and one of them my mother). As he later confessed, he chose as a wife the one who was healthier and more cheerful because that meant she would be a better mother for his children.”

  After his friend and brother-in-law, Vladimir Smirnov, was driven out of the Party (by his other friend, Bukharin), Osinsky no longer seemed to be close to anyone. According to Svetlana, “he almost never saw his brother and sisters, was for many years not on speaking terms with his mother, and did not even attend her funeral. None of this, however, prevented him from helping them in all sorts of ways.” He liked to play Beethoven and Chopin on the piano and often read aloud to his children. After Vladimir Smirnov’s arrest in 1927, he and Ekaterina adopted their four-year-old nephew, Rem (“Revolution, Engels, Marx”). As Osinsky had written earlier to Anna Shaternikova a propos of Victoria, “I have inherited my father’s flaw: sentimentality. I don’t know how to cry, but I get a catch in my throat during the emotional passages—even when I am reading silently to myself.”68

  In the meantime, Anna had married and given birth to a son, Vsemir (or “Worldwide,” for the “Worldwide Revolution”). He had a congenital disorder, which had caused him to grow quickly to a gigantic size, and he was not expected to live long. In the late 1920s, Anna and Osinsky ran into each other at an official reception. She fainted, was taken to a hospital, and somehow lost her Party card. The only way to restore it was to have the original recommenders confirm the endorsements. Her original recommender was Osinsky. They met again and resumed their relationship. He wrote to her often—about his work, his children, his reading, and his feelings; about their secret meetings and their shared faith. He called her “dear Annushka,” “darling comrade,” and his “Caryatid,” and kept assuring her that socialism—and, with it, the profound tenderness and charity of love without shame—would arrive “just as unexpectedly and just as quickly as when it first came to Russia.” Any day—and any letter—might be the last one.69

  ■ ■ ■

  But what if the power of love and the power of revolutionary enthusiasm pulled men and women in different directions? What if a Communist couple was, in fact, a cell of the Communist Party, and both the cell and the Party were torn by doubts and deviations? Could a difference of opinion destroy love? And if so, could a destroyed love create a difference of opinion?

  Those were some of the questions that Mayakovsky’s original Gioconda, Maria Denisova, and her husband, Efim Shchadenko, kept asking themselves. She was the “Maria” of the famous poem and, since 1925, a certified sculptor specializing in portraits (she did several of her husband and one of Mayakovsky). He was the son of a worker from the Don Cossack area and a high Red Army official known for his suspicion of “bourgeois specialists.” He was twelve years her senior. He, too, wrote poetry, and believed he was close to finding his own voice. She was not convinced. He attributed her doubts to class difference and her impatience. “I don’t know why you are accusing me of being a retrograde and reactionary in style and form and of backwardness,” he wrote to her. “Yes I am backward like the working class as a whole is backward and right now we are trying to master knowledge but what does reactionary have to do with it? Simply as a new class while mastering the science and the arts which used to be a powerful weapon in the hands of the enemy class as a means of our exploitation naturally we are afraid to make fools of ourselves to go wrong and to become simply an educated intelligentsia no different from the old intelligentsia.”

  What Maria needed, he argued, was not poems “that are strong in form but meaningless in content,” but a new monument by a genuinely new artist rooted in a genuinely new worldview—“that of Marx Engels Plekhanov Lenin and in part Trotsky.”

  It is not true that futurism is the new style of contemporary art which can be adopted wholesale by the proletariat no and a thousand times no because this style was taken not from the factories and plants and mines and shops, but from the street the in part rebellious hell-raising street from the cafés and restaurants and bawdy houses consequently it can’t be proletarian it can only be rebellious it can delight by tickling the nerves of neurotic degenerates and in general the lovers of cheap thrills who look for strength and meaning not in content but in form because that whole crowd is empty of ideological content and it can’t be otherwise because being determines the consciousness of the Briks and Co.

  To Shchadenko, Mayakovsky’s poem about Maria, A Cloud in Pants, was just that, a stuffed futurist blouse. “The Briks and Co.” were Mayakovsky, his new muse, Lilya Brik, and her husband, Osip. Lilya was Moscow’s most celebrated salonnière and an amateur sculptor. She, too, created portraits of both Mayakovsky and her husband. For several years, Lilya, Mayakovsky, and Osip Brik had been living together in the same apartment. A Cloud in Pants had been, ex post facto, dedicated to Lilya and published by Osip Brik. They had not stolen La Gioconda; they had stolen her portrait. But why should she care? And why should he? “My darling Marusia I can feel that I am growing day by day and there is no force that can stop my growth…. I just remembered what you wrote about how our difference of opinion had destroyed our love. It is necessary to create works that we would both like without reservation and not just like but absolutely love. I believe that in the end I’ll be able to create a work (I am very close) that will meet the aesthetic demands of your capricious (but in many ways correct) artistic demands.”70

  When, in the late 1920s, the matter came to a head, it was no longer about whether he would be able to live up to her aesthetic demands; it was about whether she could live up to his political and personal ones:

  Efim Shchadenko

  Maria Denisova

  Marusia! Our breakup is self-evident and I believe that it owes itself to the difference between our political views, our economic physical and moral interests.

  Ever since you first felt over you the political economic and moral-physical oppression of a male fighter prepared by his whole prior experience of Party military and public struggle to be a part of an organized force you began to protest with your whole rebellious nature against the confines of our common living which limited and constrained your will….

  Very often you and I could not help considering each other sworn class enemies because in this time of intensifying class struggle there can be no other kinds of contradictions in public and family life.

  As far as Shchadenko was concerned, NEP was over; the class struggle was inescapable; Bolshevism was identified with masculinity, and the new revolution might as well begin at home. He, as a man and proletarian, would no longer tolerate degeneracy. It was her turn to choose:

  It’s one or the other either there will be a radical shift in the direction of reconciliation with the existing new system and with the new relations of the submission of the bourgeois anarchic element to the communist i.e. organized element as a result of which comradely fraternal relations will establish themselves between two previously disagreeing elements of the same party, society or family or they should go their separate ways once and for all professing in their outlook two different philosophies of building social and family life.

  It is obvious that we have chosen this last option and are going our separate ways in order to never meet again on the political, social and family road, we are becoming enemies in content even though it may not be obvious in form.71

  Maria agreed. She asked Mayakovsky for money to pay for her studio materials, complained to him about “patriarchy, egoism, tyranny,” and “moral murder” at home, and thanked him for “defending women from the domestic ‘moods’ of their Party husbands.”72

  The upshot seemed clear: if all contradictions in
family life were class contradictions, and if one was to “live in the family the same way as outside the family,” then a domestic enemy-in-content was to be treated the same way as any other enemy. The ultimate conclusion was provided by Shchadenko’s fellow veteran of the First Cavalry Army, Sergei Mironov, when, around the same time, he was asked by his mistress, Agnessa Argiropulo, what he would do if she turned out to be an enemy:

  I expected to hear him say that he would give up everything in this world for me, that he would defy everyone and everything. But without hesitating for a moment, his face frozen into a mask, he replied, “I’d have you shot.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears.

  “Me? You would have me shot? Me—shot??”

  He repeated just as resolutely:

  “Yes, shot.”

  I burst into tears.

  Then he recollected himself, put his arms around me, and whispered, “I’d have you shot, and then I’d shoot myself.” He covered my face with kisses.73

  ■ ■ ■

  Sergei Mironov was born into a well-off Jewish family in Kiev. His real name was Miron Iosifovich Korol. He studied at the Kiev Commercial Institute but was drafted during World War I and later joined the Red Army. Once, in a hospital, he overheard some incriminating information in the ravings of a wounded soldier. He informed the head of the local “special department” and was recruited on the spot (“according to the classic rules of recruitment,” as he said many years later). Having distinguished himself as an intelligence and sabotage specialist during the Polish War, he was made the head of the “active unit” of the Special Department of the First Cavalry Army. In the first half of the 1920s, he served as a top Cheka-OGPU official in the North Caucasus and the Kuban Cossack area, receiving two Red Banner decorations for anti-insurgent operations in Chechnya. He and Agnessa met in Rostov around 1924, when he was thirty and she was twenty-one. Agnessa was the daughter of a Greek entrepreneur from Maikop. After the Revolution, her father had left for Greece, and her sister had married first a White officer, who was shot by the Reds, and then an engineer, who was arrested for “wrecking” and exiled. Agnessa had married the chief of staff of the North Caucasus border troops. Sometime after moving with him to Rostov, she went to a Red Army Day rally. “The speakers, our local Rostov Party types, were poorly educated and uninteresting. Suddenly an unknown figure mounted the podium, a man in black leather, an army cap, a revolver at his waist. He was saying something about world revolution and about the interventionists, who had been chased away, but were raring to attack us again, but I wasn’t listening—I was admiring his strong, handsome face. He had such beautiful brown eyes and amazing eyelashes—long and thick, like fans. His whole expression was nice—good-natured and appealing.”74

  Some time later the wives of the local military commanders were told to stop “thinking of nothing but dresses and housework, which was philistine behavior,” and to start attending weekly political literacy classes. Agnessa’s husband told her that she should not “compromise” him by playing hooky, so she went. The instructor was the speaker from the rally, who introduced himself as “Mironov.” “He wasn’t wearing his cap this time, so I was able to get a better look. He had a noble face with a high brow and arched eyebrows. His smiling eyes were unusual—the upper lids arched, the lower straight. And those amazing luxuriant eyelashes. He had dimples, a large, beautifully shaped mouth, straight white teeth, and thick wavy hair that framed his face. He was broad-shouldered and strong, with a thrusting, powerful gait. His smile was charming, and I could see that all the ladies were smitten.”75

  Agnessa applied herself to the study of Marxism-Leninism, beat the competition (with some help from her husband on her homework), and soon became Mironov’s lover. He was also married and worked outside Rostov, so they met in hotel rooms and took walks together in the parks. “That’s why I love rereading Anna Karenina,” said Agnessa later. “I recognize my relationship with Mirosha in that book. No, I’m not speaking of what Anna subsequently suffered. I recognize the beginning of their romance. Those secret meetings, those quarrels, those violent reconciliations.” He called her “Aga”; she called him “Mirosha.” Parodying Party questionnaires, he called that period their “underground apprenticeship.” It lasted six years.

  In the summer of 1931, Mironov was transferred to Kazakhstan as deputy head of the republic’s secret police (OGPU). Agnessa came to his train compartment to say goodbye. He asked her to come with him:

  I was wearing a light dress and jacket and carrying a small purse.

  “How can I go like this, with nothing?”

  That seemed like an irrefutable argument to me, but he rejected it right away:

  “Don’t worry, we can buy it all. You’ll have everything you need!” Suddenly the conductor came down the corridor saying:

  “The train is leaving in two minutes!”

  On the platform, the bell rang.

  Sergei Mironov

  (Courtesy of Rose Glickman)

  Agnessa Argiropulo

  (Courtesy of Rose Glickman)

  “I won’t let you go, Aga,” Mironov said, laughing and gripping my hand.

  “Hey,” I laughed. “You’re hurting me.”

  The bell rang twice, the train shuddered, and the railway buildings glided past the windows.

  Agnessa considered getting off at the next station but did not. At the third station, they sent a telegram to her husband and mother. Mironov did not sleep at all that night, fearing she might run away. “In Moscow we stayed at the Metropol [the Second House of Soviets]. In those days couples didn’t have to show their marriage certificate to get a room in a hotel. Marriages didn’t even have to be officially registered. On the very first day we went to a store together. I picked out whatever I liked, and he paid for it. I wanted one thing, and then another—my desires kept growing. Sometimes I felt a little embarrassed, but he noticed what I liked and bought everything, although in those days there wasn’t much to choose from.”76

  ■ ■ ■

  By marrying Agnessa, Mironov clearly violated Solts’s “poor taste” injunction, but he does not seem to have worried much about “Party ethics” (his favorite activities outside of work were cards and billiards). For those who did worry about them, marriage loomed larger than other non-Party loyalties because it involved free choice but could not be reduced to it.

  Or rather, there were three fundamental kinds of such loyalties. The first, friendship, was seen as a fully rational alliance based on shared convictions. Communists were not supposed to have non-Communist friends, and most of them did not. Solts did not have to say much on the subject because everyone seemed to agree and because compliance was taken for granted. Jesus did not have to mention friends among the loved ones to be hated, either. Committed sectarians can be trusted not to form strong, personal, nonsexual attachments to unrelated nonsectarians.

  Erotic love was, of course, different insofar as it was widely acknowledged to be based on a feeling “comparable to revolutionary enthusiasm in power, clarity, and purity.” One was free to resist and overcome that feeling if it interfered with revolutionary enthusiasm, but even Solts, who may never have experienced it himself, agreed that it was a serious challenge. Love and marriage are a problem for all sects because of their sect-destroying reproductive function (some try to limit all amorous activity to actual or symbolic sex with the leader, others fight long-term loyalties by prescribing promiscuity, and all worry a great deal about matrimony’s non-coincidence with fraternity), but they are also a problem for all sects because they combine the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom in ways that seem compelling and mysterious in equal measure. Love is the law of life, Solts seemed to be saying, but a random meeting that leads to a particular attachment is not (especially if one considers the unpredictability of reciprocity). As Lev Kritsman, the advocate and theoretician of War Communism, wrote to his wife, Sarra, back in 1915, “I have always known that private life is a house of cards—
too fragile to be reliable. I keep realizing that it is possible to know one thing and feel another. I cannot make myself accept that it is so.”77

  The third type of personal attachment, blood relationship, lay entirely in the realm of necessity: one did not choose one’s father, mother, children, brothers, and sisters. One could, of course, leave them behind, as all sects prescribe and as the underground Bolsheviks did—permanently in the case of most of the proletarian members and almost permanently in the case of many of the “students.” But the Party did not make it a formal requirement and, after the Revolution, seemed uncertain about how to proceed.

  On the one hand, “class,” the central category of Soviet life, was a heritable trait. As Kritsman wrote about War Communism, “Just as in a society built on exploitation anyone who wishes to gain ‘public’ respect tries to trace his origins to exploiters (titled feudal lords or capitalist magnates), so in this case anyone who wished to become a full-fledged member of Soviet society desperately tried to prove his undiluted proletarian or peasant origins by providing all sorts of documents and testimonies.” In the 1920s, the intensity of violence subsided, but the centrality and heritability of “class” remained unchanged. Hirings and promotions, high school and college admissions, Party and Young Communist League (Komsomol) membership, access to housing and services, tax rates, and court decisions depended on class belonging, which depended on “origins” and occupation. In cases of doubt, origins trumped occupation: a top manager “of proletarian origin” was, for most practical purposes, a “worker”; a registry office clerk “of bourgeois origin” was always a potential hidden enemy. On the other hand, class heredity was Lamarckian, not Mendelian, and one could—by working in a factory, serving in the army, or renouncing one’s parents—blunt the power of descent and hope to pass the newly acquired virtue on to one’s children. More obviously, the heredity principle did not apply to the Bolshevik leaders, who were almost exclusively of nonproletarian origin, or to their close relatives, who qualified for elite privileges without tests of loyalty.78