The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  The Kremlin and the Houses of Soviets were teeming with the fathers, mothers, children, brothers, and sisters of “the flower of the Russian Revolution.” The conscience of the Party, Aron Solts, a wealthy merchant’s son, lived with his sister and, later on, his niece and her children. Lenin, also of “bourgeois” origin, lived with his wife and sister. So did Arkady Rozengolts, who came from a family of wealthy Rostov merchants. The Krzhizhanovskys, both from the gentry, had taken in and were raising Milena Lozovskaia because she was their niece. (Milena’s father, Solomon Lozovsky, was the son of a melamed.) The Larins had adopted Anna for the same reason. Larin’s own father had been a railroad engineer, his mother, the sister of the famous publishers, the Granat brothers (who financed Larin’s revolutionary activities). Sergei Mironov and Agnessa Argiropulo would also adopt a niece and have Agnessa’s mother, sister, and sister’s sons come live with them for long periods of time. (Mironov had fond memories of his own grandmother Khaia, who had owned a dairy store on Kiev’s central street, Kreshchatik.) Osinsky, of gentry background, who would later adopt his nephew, considered his son Valia “his best creation.” Bukharin’s father, a retired teacher of mathematics, lived in his son’s Kremlin apartment. In The Economics of the Transition Period, Bukharin had singled out nine groups of people to be subjected to “concentrated violence”: teachers were number five on the list (under “the technical intelligentsia and the intelligentsia in general”). Voronsky’s and Podvoisky’s fathers had both been priests (number nine on the list), and Podvoisky was surrounded by his wife’s many sisters, clothed or not. (Their father had been an estate manager.) Lev Kritsman, who had written with approval that “belonging to the class of exploiters could guarantee a place in a concentration camp, prison or, at best, a shack left behind by proletarians who had moved to better houses,” was the son of a dentist.79

  Such relations and cohabitations were taken for granted and assumed to be theoretically unproblematic. There were, however, occasional exceptions. Kritsman’s wife, Sarra Soskina, came from one of the wealthiest Jewish merchant clans in the Russian Empire (number one on Bukharin’s list: “parasitic strata: bourgeois entrepreneurs not directly involved in production”). Unlike many others, the Soskins had not lost all of their wealth after the Revolution because an important part of their grain-exporting business was based in Manchuria, along the Eastern Chinese Railroad. (One of the brothers, Semen, had supplied the Imperial Army during the Russo-Japanese War.) In the 1920s, the Harbin-based “S. Soskin & Co., Limited” sold grain throughout the Far East, including the Soviet Union. Sarra’s father, Lazar, was a minor member of the family, with no great fortune of his own, but he had been able to help Kritsman’s father establish a dental practice outside Elisavetgrad and, in the early 1920s, to offer his daughter financial help.

  In 1924, his wife came down with spinal tuberculosis, and he wrote to Sarra asking if “as the mother of Communists, she could be treated in a Soviet sanatorium at a discount.” Sarra responded with indignation, and on April 8, 1926, Lazar wrote to her from Harbin, in imperfect Russian: “Sarra, let us talk heart to heart. For our relationship is not what a father-daughter relationship should be, and it is not my fault…. The fact that I supposed that you had the right to have your relatives, in the person of your mother, treated at a discount, is only natural, given my philistine mentality. And I wouldn’t boast so much that you never ever accept privileges, because that is no great act of heroism if privileges are a matter of mercy, not merit.”

  Lev Kritsman (Courtesy of Irina of Shcherbakova)

  Sarra Soskina (Courtesy of Irina of Shcherbakova)

  The Kritsmans were, of course, receiving privileges of every kind—from housing, food, and health care to Black Sea resorts and theater tickets—and their relatives were, indeed, eligible for special treatment, but the fact that Sarra’s mother lived abroad and was married to a “bourgeois entrepreneur not directly involved in production” could very well make her stay at a CEC sanatorium impossible. It is not known whether Sarra made inquiries. She does not seem to have tried very hard to explain the workings of the system to her father, who was not amused, “There is no need to be so ironic in your letter about how it’s not your fault that not everything in life complies with your father’s wishes. Mother’s illness came as a terrible blow to me, and the fear of losing her is too great. For better or worse, she and I have lived our lives together, and now, in our old age, we need each other too much. There is no one in the world closer to us, because you children have gone your own way, you have your own higher interests, and have no time for us.”

  There was nothing uniquely Soviet about Lazar Soskin’s predicament, but of course the young Kritsmans did believe that “the parasitic strata” belonged “in a concentration camp, prison or, at best, a shack,” and that any feelings that might interefere with revolutionary enthusiasm were to be extinguished (“If it is needed, it exists, if it is not needed, it will be destroyed”). Lazar addressed the matter directly—relying on both Dostoevsky and the traditional diaspora Jewish genre of parental lament:

  It seems that it is too much trouble for both of you to maintain family relations by writing an occasional short letter. Well, I am not asking for that, either. In your view, it is all a philistine prejudice not worthy of you, so please feel free to act toward us in accordance with your views and convictions about life in general and family relations in particular. After all, Lev Natanovich doesn’t seem troubled and, since you arrived back in Russia, hasn’t once deigned to add even a few words as an attachment to your letters. Who are we, really, to seek to be in touch with such a pillar of the great movement as our Lev Natanovich. He has more important things to do, and of course we are not complaining…. Far be it from us…. Well, enough of this, or God knows where this will lead me. But I dare say that I am no less a communist in the profound sense of the word than you are, except that I don’t have communist conceit. So don’t worry, Sarra. Mother is not going anywhere, and we don’t need any help from you.

  “Communist conceit” was a term coined by Lenin to refer to members of the Communist Party “who have not been purged yet and who imagine that they can resolve all problems by issuing Communist decrees.” But the point was not Lenin; the point was King Lear.

  But, daughter dear, let’s not fight. I am writing this letter in a hospital, waiting for an operation, which is scheduled for tomorrow. They say it’s quite serious, something to do with my bladder. It’s been five days since they started preparing me, but the operation itself is tomorrow. Mother can’t come to visit because she is not allowed to go out yet. Thank you for ending your letter by saying that you kiss us both…. Mother has not yet learned how to write lying down, so I allowed myself to write you one more letter. Well, take care of yourself, I kiss you many many times, my darling little girl. Forgive me if I was too harsh in this letter.

  Take care, yours, L. Soskin80

  Four days later, Sarra’s brother Grisha, a Red Army officer, received the following telegram: “Father died yesterday after prostate operation. Tell Sarra. Mother.” Grisha, who was living in a small apartment in Kiev at the time, decided to bring his mother to live with him. “The only thing that has me a bit worried,” he wrote to Sarra on April 12, 1926, “is the terrible dampness of our apartment (the walls leak). I think dampness is dangerous for Mother’s health, but I hope to get her a place in a sanatorium as my dependent.” Grisha did arrange for his mother to move in with him. But later, in 1929, when he was expecting a transfer in advance of an imminent war with Poland, he wrote again to Sarra to ask if their mother could come live with her. Sarra responded that it was not possible.81

  Sarra’s own son, Yuri, died of scarlet fever in 1920 at the age of nine (Bukharin had arranged a special car to take him to the hospital, but it was too late). Kritsman’s classic, The Heroic Period of the Great Russian Revolution, opens with a picture of Yuri in a sailor suit and the following dedication:

  Title page of Lev Kritsman’s
The Heroic Period of the Great Russian Revolution

  To the memory of little Yurochka,

  my only child,

  To the memory of countless children,

  Who fell victim to the intervention

  of world capitalism,

  And to all those who have not perished

  and have now become

  the cheerful young pioneers of the wonderful country

  of the happy children of the future.82

  ■ ■ ■

  In Party discussions and private conversations, the connection between the remnants of the family and the postponement of the prophecy was drawn repeatedly but inconclusively, and often defensively. In Bolshevik fiction, it was at the center of the plot. Bolshevik fiction, unlike Party discussions and private conversation, dealt in “types” and reached for the myth. It strove to express the universal in the particular and to understand the present by appealing to the eternal. It put the Revolution to the test of love and marriage.

  Arosev’s story “The White Stairway,” about the old doorman in the former imperial palace haunted by the Bronze Horseman, was published in 1923 by Voronsky’s Krug (Circle) Press. Another story included in that collection, “A Ruined House,” is about a young woman named Masha, who lives in a small provincial town but traces her lineage “to a worker’s family from the Obukhov Works in St. Petersburg.” Masha is nineteen years old, “slender, not very tall, with bright red lips and firm breasts.” She is married to a phlegmatic Latvian by the name of Karl but feels a powerful attraction to the Chekist Petr, who wears black leather and talks in short “imperious” sentences.

  Masha works in the local army unit’s secret police department but feels unfulfilled and wants to move to Moscow; Karl “does not seek anything” and is “perfectly happy to have served two years without a break as commissar in various army regiments.” They live “in a small hotel in a tiny, filthy room suffused with the smell of mice and rotten food.” One day, when Karl is away, Petr stops by and tells Masha to come out with him. They walk through the dark, snowbound town until they reach the ruins of a large mansion.

  It used to contain human life—petty, stupid life, not amusing but meaningless and cruel, like a rock. Even love here used to be stiff and puffed up, like a paper rose.

  There was “she,” a medalist from some local school, wrapping her shawl around her shoulders and trying to stay warm by the fireplace or fingering the keys of a piano and summoning the hopeless sounds of a maudlin romance.

  And there was “he,” sitting beside her, smoking cigarettes, stroking her hands, or reciting poetry. It wasn’t clear what he wanted: her, her dowry locked away in iron-bound coffers, both at once, or neither—or whether he was simply going through the motions inherited from the inertia of successive generations.

  The walls of that house had witnessed many unnecessary tears—and soaked them all up. Its corners had absorbed the warmth of human blood. The doors in all the rooms had learned to imitate human sighs. The sofas, like loyal, sleeping dogs, had been able to tell the difference between strangers and masters and used to squeak in different ways under their soft human behinds. The mirrors had had their favorites, whom they reflected in true portrait style. Porcelain cats, clay cats, painted cats, and live cats had served as household gods and were used by the owners to perfect their Christian love of their neighbor.

  Masha and Petr feel the warmth of this vanished life and submit to “blind instinct, as old as the earth.” On the way back, Masha tells Petr that she does not even know his last name. He says that it is better that way. She asks what he means. He says: “An apple can only be eaten once.” She asks whether they are going to see each other again. He says yes, once she has rid herself of the “old yeast” and they have built a new life in which there are neither husbands nor wives. She asks whether it will be death, not life. He says it will be “better than life”—a Shrovetide festival.83

  The Communist literature of the 1920s came out of “The Ruined House.” The proletarian Adam and Eve had joined the secret police and tasted their apple. What followed was both a new beginning and the Fall; the acquisition of knowledge and, for that very reason, an expulsion from paradise; the promise of a Shrovetide festival and, in the meantime, the curse of having to earn their food by the sweat of their brow, give birth to children with painful labor, and return to the ground from which they had been taken, for dust they were, and to dust they would return. NEP literature retained the memory and the hope of the last days, but it was, more than anything else, a literature of the great disappointment, of unquenchable weeping, of the realization that the sun had not stopped at its zenith and that the serpent (the blind instinct as old as the earth) had not been forced to crawl on its belly, after all.

  At the center of NEP laments was the ruined house, at the center of the house was the hearth, and next to the hearth were “she,” “he,” their reflections, and the inertia of successive generations. In 1921, Comrade Rosfeldt had offered to resign from his post as director of the Second House of Soviets because he could no longer preside over a brothel. Milk and honey, mixed together, had reproduced a “bubbling, rumbling, rotting, and gurgling” swamp. The New City had turned out to be the old one. “What can be done?” asked Lenin as early as 1919. “We must fight against this scum over and over again, and, if this scum crawls back in, clean it out over and over again, chase it out and watch over it.”84

  There were two main ways of representing the profaned Houses of Soviets. One was the ruined mansion with its sighing doors, squeaking sofas, and shimmering mirrors; the other, Karl and Masha’s room, suffused with the smell of mice and rotten food. One was the old imperial palace transformed into a House of Soviets; the other, a gray wooden box with blooming geraniums in the windows. One was a stage for gothic horror; the other, a swamp of deadly domesticity. One was descended from the myth about a town sacrificing its young brides to a dragon; the other, from the story of Samson in Delilah’s arms and Odysseus on Calypso’s island. One was about rape; the other, about castration.85

  In Arosev’s The Notes of Terenty the Forgotten (1922), the Old Bolshevik Derevtsov, a former carpenter, comes to see his comrade Terenty, who works in a former governor’s mansion:

  Derevtsov was sitting in a large, oaken armchair with lion-paw feet. His pale face stood out against the back of the chair, like the portrait of a knight. The deep, sunken eyes, ringed by dark circles, glowed on that immobile face. Derevtsov stared at the round dark-green tile stove, standing in the corner like a forgotten, moldy servant left behind by his previous owners, a silent witness…. It seemed as if someone had smeared blood over the transparent blue sky: the sunset was nearing extinction. Its dark-purple reflections flickered on the white windowsill and the white door. This produced a slight drowsiness and a desire to listen to medieval tales about mysterious castles and parks with old ponds. It was as if there were traces of former life nestled behind every square inch of silk wallpaper.

  Like most Bolsheviks, Derevtsov is suffering from postclimactic melancholy. Unlike most, he also writes poetry. “He’s like a saint or small child; his eyes are light blue, like a monk’s.” Late one evening, Terenty is sitting alone in the palace, writing an appeal to the peasants about grain requisitioning. “Suddenly, my eye fell on the armchair in which Derevtsov had been sitting. What the devil! How absurd! I thought I saw Derevtsov’s pale face shining whitely against the back of the chair. Shuddering, I threw down my pen and leapt up. How ridiculous. It was only the bright, white door throwing its reflection on the back of the chair.” In the middle of the night, the telephone rings. The Chekist, Kleiner (who wears leather, conducts mass executions, and believes that what is necessary does not corrupt), informs Terenty that Derevtsov shot himself earlier that evening. He left a suicide note that said: “I’m tired, and, in any case, it’s all in vain.”86

  Infants, saints, monks, and poets are commonly used as surrogates, but the sacrificial lamb par excellence, especially in gothic ta
les, is a maiden. In Arosev’s Nikita Shornev (1926), a young woman named Sonia, a peasant (Shornev), and a student (Ozerovsky) all meet in the Moscow Soviet building during the October uprising. At one point, Shornev embraces Sonia, but an exploding shell interrupts their kiss. Several years later, she comes to see the two men in their separate rooms in one of the Houses of Soviets. The student Ozerovsky is now a coldly articulate Chekist executioner. The peasant Shornev is a high Party official. He tries to kiss Sonia, but she pushes him away.

  “But Sonia,” he said, “back then, it was the struggle that got in the way.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said, also using the intimate form of the pronoun. “It is still the struggle getting in the way.”

  “How?”

  “Because it doesn’t provide an answer about how we—you and I—are supposed to live.”

  Unable to decide between the Chekist’s “lies that contain truth” and the true believer’s “truth that contains lies,” Sonia leaves Moscow on a Party assignment. Some time later, during a May 1 rally on Red Square, in front of the Chapel of the Virgin Mary of Iveron, Ozerovsky tells Shornev that Sonia has committed suicide by throwing herself out of a window. “Because Ozerovsky’s words seemed impossible to him, their meeting also seemed impossible. And for that reason, everything—the crowd and the May 1 celebration—suddenly became impossible. It was all a dream.”87

  NEP was a gothic nightmare, and Masha’s suspicion that Petr was a messenger of death, not life, might prove accurate, after all. In Gladkov’s Cement, an idealistic young woman who suffers from “leftist infantilism” and has recurrent dreams about Babylon is raped in her House of Soviets room by a “strong and imperious” Party official. “On one of those sultry, sleepless nights, something she had long expected as inevitable had happened.” She cries uncontrollably, spends time in a sanatorium, and is “purged” from the Party. A purge was a symbolic death with the possibility of resurrection. In V. Kirshon and A. Uspenskii’s Korenkovshchina, the violated heroine kills herself for good; in Malashkin’s Moon from the Right Side, she attempts suicide, recovers, “leads a maidenly life” in the woods, and rejoins the struggle.88