The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  A virgin fearing and anticipating “the inevitable” represented the loss of revolutionary innocence. A self-confident woman to whom the inevitable has already happened was NEP incarnate. One of the main reasons for Derevtsov’s emasculation was a certain Comrade Sheptunovskaia (“Whisperer”), who had “small, mousy eyes,” collected things out of “spontaneous greed,” communicated by “chirping” or “rattling,” had burrowed her way into the Party, become a Women’s Department activist, and secretly married Derevtsov, who “followed her around like a trained animal.” Not all predators were equal, it seems. The greatest danger was not that Petr the Chekist might turn out to be a vampire—it was that Masha, with her “bright red lips and firm breasts,” might turn out to be a witch. The greatest danger was not the haunted House of Soviets—it was the small room containing an emasculated commissar who “does not seek anything.” In the 1920s, nothing seemed more frightening and more inevitable.89

  In Arosev’s Recent Days (1926), a Chekist of proletarian origin, Andronnikov, remembers how, as an exile on the White Sea, he used to take German and math lessons from a young Socialist Revolutionary by the name of Palina (“Scorched”). As they sat by the hot stove, one of her eyes would look directly at him, the other, “somewhere into the corner.” One night, Andronnikov tosses his book down and embraces her, but she “threw back her head, her eyes sparkling with a devilish mischievousness, and, still facing his burning gaze and flushed lips, stuck out her tongue.” Suddenly, a fellow exile runs into the cabin crying that there is a wolf outside. They rush out, but “the wolf, of course, runs away.” And so, of course, does Palina. Several years later, during the Civil War, they meet at a Red Army headquarters on the Volga. Palina is in the kitchen mixing batter for blini, “looking like a young witch stirring her brew.” Andronnikov recognizes her, realizes that she is “the enemy,” and shoots her in the back. “She fell backward into the gaping black jaws of the Russian stove…. She flopped into those jaws on top of the soft blini, hot as blood, which splattered under her.”

  The she-devil had gone back to where she came from, but was the spell broken? Was there more to milk and honey than the hot, soft, splattering blini? Back in NEP Moscow, in his room “under a glass dome,” Andronnikov suffers from doubts, headaches, “the murky stream flowing in the narrow ditch of half-gossip,” and terrible nightmares in which Palina’s crossed eyes seem to beckon him on. “And just a few steps away, all around the Second House of Soviets, huge, multicolored Moscow is teeming with noises and people.” Tsarist generals, speculators, spies, and prostitutes go about their business, and, in the middle of Theater Square, an old Jew plays his violin.90

  Andronnikov lives alone in his room, but of course most people in the Second House of Soviets did not. The most widely debated NEP-era book about the NEP era was Yuri Libedinsky’s The Birth of a Hero. An Old Bolshevik and Party judge, Stepan Shorokhov, lives in one of the Houses of Soviets with his two sons and his late wife’s younger sister, Liuba (short for Liubov, or “love”). One day he sees her naked, loses his peace of mind, and, after a short and inconclusive inner struggle, marries her. His older son, a teenager named Boris, calls him an “appeaser” and her, “a bitch.” Boris is right: Liuba reveals herself to be a mindless philistine and sexual predator, and Stepan grows listless and irritable from sleeplessness and remorse. He moves out of her bed, but she pursues him with reproaches and caresses until he flees to Turkestan on a Party assignment. His coworker is a soulless bureaucrat by the name of Eidkunen (“Eydtkuhnen” was the East Prussian town closest to the Russian imperial border); the case he is investigating involves a Communist who shot his “class-alien” wife.

  Meanwhile, Boris realizes that all the evil in the world comes from the fact that grown-ups are always busy dealing with “that shameful, important, and not really comprehensible thing that leads to the birth of children.” The father of one of his friends leaves his wife for a typist; the father of another beats his wife because he suspects that his son is not his own; and the father of a sweet girl named Berta kills Berta’s stepfather and drives her mother to insanity. Worst of all, Boris notices that his moustache is beginning to grow, and that some girls in his class seem to enjoy being touched. In an attempt to break the cycle, he proposes the creation of Children’s Cities, or Houses of Soviets the way they were meant to be—truly fraternal. He imagines “grandiose games by thousands of children without any nannies, under the supervision of some intelligent people, and completely free from the grown-ups, from all those Moms and Dads.”

  While Stepan is away, Liuba moves in with a fellow philistine and gives birth to Stepan’s son. Suddenly free, as if awakened from a nightmare, he realizes that the two dangers—Eidkunen’s dry bureaucratism and Liuba’s lush domesticity, are two faces of the same evil. He returns to confront Liuba:

  Liuba was pacing up and down the room, cradling the baby in her arms and singing the eternal mother’s lullaby, and there was an instinctive, protective, predatory power in her supple movements and the husky, almost moist tones of her cooing, low voice…. Next to her, Stepan suddenly felt brand new, as if he were the one who had just been born and still had his whole life ahead of him. And in the emptiness and desolation of that large room, he could see the barely visible signs of Liuba’s domestic little world: the colorful embroidery on the window sill, the new meatgrinder glistening in the corner, and her cozy, worn little slippers under the bed. And he saw all these things, which used to be so dear to him, as a reappearance of the old enemy, the spontaneously regenerating perennial and loathsome forms of life.

  Liuba tells Shorokhov that she will not give up the baby, but Stepan says that all he wants is to make sure the child is not corrupted by her influence. At the end of the novel, they stand “on either side of the cradle, intense in their hostility toward each other and ready for new struggles.”91

  The hero of the title has been born. Or rather, two heroes have been born. Or rather, two protagonists have been born, a father and a son. Revolutions do not devour their children; revolutions, like all millenarian experiments, are devoured by the children of the revolutionaries. Stepan feels truly free for the first time when he realizes that he is past the age of unreason; to use Osinsky’s formula, “revolutionary enthusiasm” can finally prevail over “the enormous power of feeling.” But what was Boris to do? Revolutions, Boris’s nascent moustache seems to suggest, begin as a tragedy and end at home.

  For Platonov, this was the greatest tragedy. Platonov’s Communism is an eternal Children’s City for orphans of all ages, but Platonov’s Communists do not know how to build it and what to protect it from:

  Prokofy wanted to say that wives were also working people and that there was no ban on their living in Chevengur, so why not let the proletariat go take by the hand and bring back wives from other settlements, but then he remembered that Chepurny wanted women who were thin and exhausted, so they would not distract people from mutual communism, and he said to Yakov Titych:

  “You’ll set up families here and give birth to all kinds of petty bourgeoisie.”

  “What’s there to be afraid of, if it’s petty?” asked Yakov Titych with some surprise. “Petty means weak.”92

  Petty meant weak, and weak meant strong. Nothing was more dangerous than women, even the exhausted kind, and nothing was more justified than worrying about the cozy, worn little slippers under the bed. In an article defending Arosev from accusations of faintheartedness, Voronsky writes that “Terenty’s hamletizing may be harmful for some people, but it prevents self-satisfaction and, for the Party as a whole, represents ‘the water of life’ and ‘the God of a living person.’” It proves that the faith is still strong—because “it is not Hamlet’s spirit, it is the spirit of Faust: that irrepressible, indestructible, active element of the human soul that is not satisfied with what has been achieved, but seeks new untrodden paths, so the heart is rejuvenated and the mind always remains engaged.” This was not an easy argument to make. Goethe’s F
aust is saved in the end; Arosev’s Derevtsov loses his faith and commits suicide, while his comrade, Terenty, dies of typhus (and is, of course, forgotten). As Platonov’s Prokofy puts it, earnestly and hopefully, “Everyone is dead, now the future can begin.”93

  The future was best described by Mayakovsky. In his 1929 play, The Bedbug, the young Communist, Ivan Prisypkin, leaves his loyal, proletarian girlfriend, Zoia Berezkina, for a rich hairdresser’s daughter. Zoia shoots herself. Ivan celebrates his wedding in a hair salon, amidst bottles and mirrors. (“On the left side of the stage is a grand piano, its jaws wide open, on the right, a stove, its pipes snaking around the room.”) The party ends in a fight, which leads to a fire. Everyone dies, but one body is missing. Fifty years later, Ivan’s frozen corpse turns up in a flooded cellar in the “former Tambov.” The director of the Institute of Human Resurrections and his assistant, Zoia Berezkina, who, as it turns out, has survived her suicide attempt, bring Ivan back to life. He reveals his foreignness to his Communist surroundings by demanding beer and pulp fiction (both long extinct) and is placed in a special cage at the zoo. The bedbug, defrosted along with him, is placed next to him. As the zoo’s director explains, “there are two of them, of different sizes, but identical in essence. They are the famous ‘bedbugus normalis’ and ‘philistinius vulgaris.’ Both live in the musty mattresses of time. ‘Bedbugus normalis’ gets fat drinking the blood of one person and falls under the bed. ‘Philistinius vulgaris’ gets fat drinking the blood of mankind and falls on top of the bed. That’s the only difference!”

  Lenin’s metaphor would soon be realized: the Russian land would be purged of bugs. In a poem from the same period, Mayakovsky writes about hearing, through the noise of “domestic mooing,” “the rumble of the approaching battle.” The Revolution’s last act was about to begin. The “hearth’s family smoke” would soon be extinguished. Maria Denisova, his stolen Gioconda, had sent him a note thanking him for protecting women from the “domestic moods of their Party husbands.”

  But there was another possible interpretation. Ivan, his bedbug, and the world of sour-smelling “soups and diapers” they represented might be indestructible, after all. Having survived the fire, the flood, and the freeze, they would reenter the world of the future. On April 14, 1930, four months after receiving Maria’s letter, Mayakovsky shot himself. His suicide note ends with a poem, which begins with a pun.

  “The case has been revolved,”

  as they say.

  The boat of love

  has crashed on domesticity.”94

  8

  THE PARTY LINE

  Different millenarian sects have different ways of bringing about the inevitable, from praying and fasting to self-mutilation and mass murder, but they all have one thing in common: the inevitable never comes. The world does not end; the blue bird does not return; love does not reveal itself in all of its profound tenderness and charity; and death and mourning and crying and pain do not disappear. As of this writing, all millenarian prophecies have failed.

  There are various ways of dealing with the great disappointment. One is to point to failures in the implementation. Hiram Edson founded Seventh-day Adventism on the assumption that the millennium had to be postponed because of the continued practice of Sunday worship. For the Bolsheviks, the most popular early explanation of the apparent nonfulfillment of the prophecy was the failure of the world outside Russia to carry out its share of the world revolution. As Arosev wrote in 1924, “the young, northern country flashed its red fire, through the wilderness of its forests, at European life, and then fell silent, expecting an answer from the west.” The fact that the answer was slow in coming had to do with tactical miscalculations, not the original prediction, and large numbers of Old Bolsheviks spent much of the 1920s abroad ushering in the world revolution. The most durable success came in Mongolia, where Boris Shumiatsky helped create a nominally independent Soviet state. (The son of a Jewish bookbinder exiled to Siberia, Shumiatsky was a lifelong revolutionary and top Bolshevik official in Siberia and the Far East. Having supervised the Mongolian Revolution of 1921–22, he became ambassador to Persia, and, in 1925, rector of the Communist University of the Toilers of the East. In 1930, he was made head of the Soviet film industry.)1

  Other commonly cited reasons for the postponement of the end were the recalcitrance of evil (which, according to Kritsman, was both foreseen and excessive); the peculiarity of the Russian situation (especially the size of the predictably unwieldy peasantry); and the tendency of the proletariat to prostitute itself to foreign gods, especially those of soups and diapers. In theory, the Bolsheviks subscribed to the strong version of the circular mythological conception of fate, in which every freely chosen departure from the oracular prophecy is a part of that prophecy; in practice, they followed the Hebrew god’s practice of blaming the nonfulfillment of the promise on the chosen people’s lack of proletarian consciousness. The fact that immaturity was part of the original design was no excuse for immaturity.

  The next, more radical step in dealing with the great disappointment is to adjust the prophecy itself. Augustine turned the millennium into a metaphor; Miller moved the end of the world from 1843 to 1844; Stalin and Bukharin proclaimed that socialism could first be built in one country. A particularly productive subset of this strategy is to proclaim that the prophecy has been fulfilled and that the remainder of human history is a mopping-up epilogue. Among the disappointed Millerites and their descendants, the Seventh-Day Adventists believed that Jesus had been briefly detained in a special antechamber, while the Jehovah’s Witnesses argued that he had returned as prophesied but remained invisible so as to allow the faithful to make their final preparations. Christianity as a whole is based on a similar claim: the failure of the founder’s prophecy about the imminent coming of the last days became the main confirmation of the truth of that prophecy. Jesus’s arrest and execution before any of “those things” could happen became both an act of fulfillment and a sacrifice needed for the future fulfillment. NEP-era Bolsheviks were in a similar position: there was much weeping, of course, but the fact that the revolution had begun was the best indication that it would end.

  In the meantime, they had to learn how to wait. All millenarians who do not burn in the fire of their own making adjust themselves to a life of permanent expectation in a world that has not been fully redeemed. Special texts, rituals, and institutions are created in an attempt to mediate between the original prophecy and the fact that it has not been fulfilled and that nobody lives in accordance with its precepts. The millennium is postponed indefinitely, claimed to have been realized in the current unity of the faithful (as in Augustine’s new orthodoxy in Christianity), and either transformed into an individual mystical experience or transferred to another world altogether. Promises become allegories, and disciples who have abandoned their old families start new ones. Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are all examples of successfully routinized, bureaucratized millenarianisms—and so, to all appearances, was the Stalin-Bukharin Party line of the 1920s. As the new regime settled down to wait, its most immediate tasks were to suppress the enemy, convert the heathen, and discipline the faithful.

  Money changers had to be allowed into the temples and “bourgeois specialists” had to be used as their own gravediggers, but the policy of “ruthless class exclusivity” (as Kritsman put it) remained the main guarantee of final liberation. It was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a former rich man or his children to enter a high-status Soviet institution (not counting all the special exceptions for the “flower” of the world revolution). As a matter of self-conscious, self-fulfilling prophecy, class aliens were continually being unmasked as active enemies. As Koltsov wrote in a 1927 essay,

  The Cheka has become the GPU, but the only things that have changed are the outward conditions and methods of work.

  In the old days, the chairman of a provincial Cheka, a worker, would
sit down on the remnants of a chair and, fully armed with his sense of class righteousness, jot down an order in pencil on a scrap of paper: “Milnichenko—to be shot—as a vermin of the international bourgeoisie. Also the seven men in the cell with him.” Now, the GPU works in collaboration with the courts, worker-peasant inspection, and control commissions, under the supervision of the Procuracy. The methods and rules of the struggle have become more complex, but the dangers and number of enemies have not diminished.

  One thing that had not changed, according to Koltsov, was the pride that the revolutionary state took in its commitment to violence. The Soviet secret police possessed the same advantage as its predecessor, the Jacobin Committee of Public Safety: it was not secret. The agents of the ancien regime had snooped around in dark alleys and hidden their victims in dungeons. The Jacobins had nothing to hide. “On the Place de Grève, the glittering blade of the guillotine worked day and night, and all could see the fate that awaited the enemies of the people. The Jacobin police did not conceal its work. It carried out its activities openly and in public view. Armed with the righteousness of an ascending class, it relied on a vast number of supporters, voluntary helpers, and collaborators.”