The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  The GPU (Soviet secret police) was in an even better position. Unlike the Jacobin police, it represented the last class in history and could rely on total, unconditional support. Koltsov asked his readers to imagine what would happen if a White Guardist spy were to come to the Soviet Union and stay in the apartment of a coconspirator.

  If the White guest appears, in any way, suspicious, the alarmed Party cell of the building will take a special interest in him. He will be noticed by the Komsomol member who comes to fix the plumbing. The maid, upon returning home from a meeting of household employees where she has just heard a lecture on the external and internal enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat, will begin to examine this strange new tenant more closely. Finally, the neighbor’s daughter, a Young Pioneer, will lie awake at night feverishly trying to make sense of a conversation she had overheard in the corridor. And, suspecting a counterrevolutionary, a spy, or a White terrorist, they will all—together and separately—refuse to wait for someone to come question them, but will go to the GPU and recount what they have seen and heard in great detail, and with great feeling and certainty. They will lead the Chekists to the White Guardist; they will help capture him; and they will join in the fight if the White Guardist tries to resist.2

  To make sure this was the case, the Soviet state had to fulfill its second fundamental task: to convert the majority of the population to the official faith. It was an enormous task: the Bolsheviks had taken over the world’s largest empire. NEP represented a “retreat,” but most Bolsheviks, including Arosev, continued to hope that the present generation—or today’s young children, at the very latest—would live under Communism. Christians had not become the ruling party in the Roman Empire until more than three centuries after the death of the sect’s founder; the NEP-era Bolsheviks counted sacred time in years and clearly assumed, as had Paul, that “the world in its present form is passing away.” As Kritsman put it at the end of The Heroic Period of the Russian Revolution, NEP’s function was to prepare for “the coming world-historical battle between the proletariat and capital.” Such hope and expectation clashed with the fact that most of the Party’s subjects were not proletarians, and most proletarians were not fully “conscious.” NEP was the time of fomenting world revolution outside the Soviet Union and educating the revolution’s beneficiaries within. The second task had a much higher ratio of free will to predestination. The numbers were huge, and the time was short. The point, as the Puritan Richard Baxter said of a similar commonwealth, was to force all men “to learn the word of God and to walk orderly and quietly … till they are brought to a voluntary, personal profession” of the true faith. Fulfillment had been postponed and some “hamletizing” was natural, but the faith remained strong and the faithful remained a sect.3

  The main Bolshevik conversion strategy was to transform all stable face-to-face communities—peasant villages, factory shopfloors, school classes, kindergarten “groups,” university departments, white-collar offices, and apartment building associations—into would-be congregations of fellow believers collectively contributing to the building of Communism. This was achieved by having every one of such units (known, after the mid-1930s, as “collectives”) house a Party “cell.” There were Komsomol cells for young people, Young Pioneer “stars” (or primary units of five members, each representing a point on the Red Army star) for children between the ages of ten and fourteen, and “Octobrist detachments” for schoolchildren under the age of ten. With the Party as their guide, communities of classmates, neighbors, and colleagues were to become cohesive units with their own elected officials responsible for discipline, hygiene, literacy, “physical culture,” political education, and in-house newspaper. Koltsov knew what he was talking about: in 1927, every resident of his hypothetical apartment would have been a member of a “collective” and, as such, a regular participant in meetings, rallies, “volunteer Saturdays,” and other Party-sponsored activities. The overall structure was a combination of the Calvinist-style network of self-disciplining congregations and Catholic-style supervision by licensed ideology professionals, with the not insignificant difference that the Soviet rank and file were mostly pagan. Eventually, all Soviets would become Communists; in the meantime, some members of the “collective” needed to be told what Communism meant. No one could refuse to participate, but not everyone was assumed to be a believer. The Party was a hierarchy of licensed ideology professionals; the “collectives” were not yet full-fledged congregations of fellow believers.4

  The process of conversion consisted of three main elements. One was doctrinal training—through classroom instruction, “political education” seminars (modeled on prerevolutionary “reading circles”), public lectures, speeches at rallies, and newspaper reading, among other things. Participation in most of these activities was compulsory for “collective” members, from the neighbor’s Young Pioneer daughter to the maid registered by the building residents’ council. Study of the “classics” was rare; most people learned about Marxism-Leninism from school textbooks, popular summaries (such as Bukharin and Preobrazhensky’s The ABC of Communism or Kerzhentsev’s Leninism, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and The Bolshevik’s Handbook), and lectures similar to those delivered by Sergei Mironov to the wives of the Rostov military commanders. Most of the instruction focused on Party policy, not Communist theory.

  Another important element of the makeover was mandatory participation in collective activities. Like most comprehensive faiths, Bolshevism was a communal affair that required attendance at public rituals and disapproved of individualism; like most missionaries, the Bolshevik mass-education ideologues insisted that the initiates spend as much time together as possible; like the Calvinists, whose congregation model the Soviet “collectives” most closely resembled, the Bolsheviks demanded constant mutual surveilance and public transparency from their members.

  The third and largest part of the Bolshevik conversion effort was the “civilizing process.” Missionary work involves more than the transfer of belief and the creation of new communities. The message of salvation comes accompanied by words, gestures, stories, rituals, and routines associated with the original prophecy and its journey toward the present. All conversions involve some degree of “civilizing”; the Bolshevik kind, because of Marx’s identification of universal salvation with European urban modernity, was forcefully and self-consciously civilizational. Becoming Soviet meant becoming modern; becoming modern meant internalizing a new regimen of neatness, cleanliness, propriety, sobriety, punctuality, and rationality.5

  Podvoisky’s “alliance with the sun” was but a small part of the massive NEP-era campaign for hygiene, “physical culture,” “the culture of everyday life,” “rational nutrition,” and other measures aimed at creating clean, trim, healthy, and—as a consequence—beautiful bodies. Young people were to be “tempered” and disciplined through exercise; women, in particular, were to be liberated from the stifling confines of home life (the “gray wooden boxes”). According to the head of the Committee on People’s Nutrition, Artashes (“Artemy”) Khalatov, family kitchens were dark, filthy caves “where the female worker was forced to spend much of her time,” undermining her own health and tormenting her “hungry, tired proletarian husband” with unbalanced and unappetizing meals. The answer was to create “factory kitchens” stocked with “mechanical meat grinders, potato peelers, root cutters, bread slicers, knife cleaners, and dishwashers.” As Andrei Babichev from Yuri Olesha’s Envy wants to say to Soviet women (but does not), “We will give you back all the hours stolen from you by the kitchen; one-half of your life will be returned to you.” (Khalatov himself came from a middle-class Armenian family in Baku. He joined the Party in 1917, when he was a student at the Moscow Commercial Institute and a member of the presidium of the Trans-Moskva Military-Revolutionary Committee.)6

  What were Soviet families to do with so much leisure? The challenge, according to Podvoisky, was to institute “an organized, healthy, sober, an
d cheerful full-day regimen; games in a healthy environment involving movements that would expand your chest, fill your lungs with fresh air, stimulate your heart, make your blood flow faster and spread vital forces everywhere, fuel an appetite for healthy food—bread, fruit, and vegetables—improve your mood, and enhance the state of your whole being.” Thus invigorated, human beings would respond more readily to guidance and instruction. Three minutes of purposeful activity by specially trained organizers—and a festive “crowd of many thousands” would be transformed into “a rigid framework of two single-file formations; those left behind would run up to see what was happening and end up joining the ranks.” The goal was “political propaganda in an entertaining form: through joking, singing, dancing, and staged speeches and meetings, people would imbibe the ideas of international proletarian solidarity.”7

  Platon Kerzhentsev, the main ideologue of the Soviet self-disciplining campaign, started out as a theorist of mass theatrical performances that would “help audiences perform themselves.” By 1923, he had concluded that spontaneity required consciousness. Russian workers had to learn how to work and dream “according to a plan and a system.” They were to “organize themselves,” internalize social discipline, and develop a “love of responsibility.” The Bolshevik work ethic, like its Puritan predecessor, consisted of “regarding one’s work, no matter how petty it might be at any given moment, as important, significant work on whose success the common great cause depended.”8

  It also depended on “developing a sense of time.” Peasants and noblemen had regarded time as “an elemental force that operated according to arbitrary, incomprehensible laws.” The intelligentsia, too, “bore the same stamp of sluggish somnolence and disdain for time.” Capitalism “taught everyone to carry around a watch so you can’t help seeing it several hundred times a day.” Communism was about conquering the kingdom of necessity by submitting to it. It was “embodied harmony, where everything happens with accuracy, precision, and correctness, and where the sense of time is so deeply ingrained that there is no need to look at a watch because the proper flow of life will endow all things with a distinct temporal form.” In the meantime, according to Kerzhentsev, the task was to imitate and overtake capitalist modernity by reversing, cargo-cult-style, its causes and consequences. “All Englishmen, with the exception of a tiny handful of people, go to bed at 11 or 12. They all get up at a certain time, too—between 7 and 8 a.m. During the day, rest periods are rigidly fixed: between noon and 1 p.m., the English, irrespective of social status, have lunch; at 4:30 they all drink tea, and at 7 p.m. they all have dinner. Such scheduling norms have entered the flesh and blood of members of every class because the industrial way of life requires the creation of orderliness, with the correct alternation of periods of work and rest.”9

  Well-ordered time required well-ordered space. Soviet work and rest were to unfold amidst properly arranged objects whose aesthetic appeal was in direct proportion to their functional utility. In a 1926 article devoted to the “Worker’s Home” exhibition at the State Department Store, Koltsov listed spotless “cupboards, shower stalls, iceboxes, and wardrobes”; “blindingly bright pots, tea kettles, coffeemakers, and pans”; and “splendid enamel bathtubs, sinks, and even urinals.” But wasn’t this bourgeois philistinism? Was not an Englishman who ate his porridge at 9:00 a.m. and shaved over his enameled sink the epitome of middle-class vacuousness? Didn’t Kerzhentsev, who liked to read Dickens aloud to his daughter, remember the pompous Mr. Podsnap from Our Mutual Friend and his “notions of the Arts in their integrity”?

  Literature; large print, respectfully descriptive of getting up at eight, shaving close at a quarter past, breakfasting at nine, going to the City at ten, coming home at half-past five, and dining at seven. Painting and Sculpture; models and portraits representing Professors of getting up at eight, shaving close at a quarter past, breakfasting at nine, going to the City at ten, coming home at half-past five, and dining at seven. Music; a respectable performance (without variations) on stringed and wind instruments, sedately expressive of getting up at eight, shaving close at a quarter past, breakfasting at nine, going to the City at ten, coming home at half-past five, and dining at seven.10

  “This is not the worst of it,” wrote Koltsov. “Answering the call of nature and taking daily baths are not necessarily signs of philistinism. But what would you say after seeing the model three-room proletarian apartment on exhibit at the State Department Store? Rugs! A china cabinet!! Curtains on the windows!!! A lampshade embroidered with little flowers!” What you would say, it turns out, is that “the revolution has come into contact with the rug and the curtain, but the Soviet order is not dying—it is getting stronger, along with the worker and peasant who are getting stronger in their material well-being and their enjoyment of life.” The proletarian revolution required bourgeois civilization, and bourgeois civilization required rugs and curtains. “It would be silly and criminal to grab the proletarian by the sleeve and try to convince him to despise rugs and not to wear ties or use cologne. In our present circumstances, this would be the worst kind of bourgeois philistinism.” Koltsov himself, after all, wore suits and spent weekends at his dacha. “If laborers lost in the forests want to climb out of the pit of ignorance and superstition, we need to bring a step-ladder or stretch out a helping hand.”11

  ■ ■ ■

  There were many ways for the Soviet state to stretch out a helping hand. NEP was about creating the Revolution’s preconditions: modern industrial development and proletarian self-awareness. Industrialization was going to take some time; conversion—officially known as “enlightenment,” “agitation-propaganda,” or the need to “learn, learn, and learn,”—was NEP’s primary task in the meantime. Besides formal schooling and a variety of lectures, study groups, and literacy campaigns, the state could reach the masses by means of posters, newspapers, movies, radio broadcasts, and books. Different educational tools could be effective in different contexts, but for most Old Bolsheviks presiding over the Soviet state, none was of greater importance or personal interest than literature. Reading had been central to their own conversion and their early efforts to convert others; reading imaginative literature was of special significance because of the “enormous power of feeling” that it could generate. As Osinsky wrote to Shaternikova, it was “comparable to revolutionary enthusiasm” in its “power, clarity, and purity,” and it could fan or temper that enthusiasm, if directed accordingly. He himself could not think of a better representation of the “psychology of future times” than Verhaeren’s poem, “The Blacksmith”; Bukharin attributed his discovery of love without God to Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent; Voronsky had found the best portrait of a ruthless revolutionary in Ibsen’s Brand; Sverdlov’s favorite prophecy of future perfection came from Heine’s “Germany”; and Sverdlov’s (and Voronsky’s) friend Filipp Goloshchekin, who oversaw the massacre of the tsar’s family, had left behind an epitaph from Heine’s “Belsazar.” Fiction had structured, nuanced, and illustrated the Bolshevik experience. The new Soviet fiction was going to immortalize it.

  The task of organizing and guiding Soviet literature fell to Aleksandr Voronsky. In February 1921, the Central Committee appointed him editor in chief of the new “thick” journal, Red Virgin Soil, and, after a brief stint as a volunteer, helping to put down the Kronstadt uprising, he set to work. “He is a good, decent person, even though he doesn’t seem to know much about the arts,” said Gorky. “But, judging by his temperament, he’ll learn. He is extremely tenacious.”12

  Voronsky agreed that he owed everything in life to his love of hard work and did his best to maintain the “self-discipline, punctuality, and rigid daily schedule” that he had perfected in prison. In 1921, Russian literary life consisted mostly of writers reading their work to each other in private seminars. According to Vsevolod Ivanov,

  Voronsky would go from one seminar to another, listen to the discussions, and then ask the participants which of the young writers they cons
idered the most talented. The writer who got the largest number of votes would receive an invitation to publish in Red Virgin Soil.

  At first, Voronsky was suspicious of the writers. Their extreme sensitivity struck him as odd, and the low level of their political consciousness often exasperated him. Sometimes, having read a manuscript and discussed it with the author, he would throw up his hands in indignation and say, while blinking rapidly:

  “I am not sure he has ever heard of the October Revolution!”13

  He persevered, however, and found most of them open to direction. The talented young writers had all heard of the October Revolution, and many of them had participated on the right side, if not always at the appropriate level of political consciousness. Ivanov continues: “His manner was informal, and he preferred to talk about literature in his own home or the writers’ rather than in the editorial offices. ‘It is easier for us to understand each other this way,’ he would say. Most conversations were about the manuscripts he was planning to publish. It seems to me that those conversations took the place of an editorial board, which Red Virgin Soil did not have for a while. He gradually developed his own taste and eventually began to write decent fiction himself. It was not for nothing that Gorky had called him ‘tenacious.’”14

  In the 1920s, Voronsky lived in a two-room apartment in the First House of Soviets with his mother, Feodosia Gavrilovna, a priest’s widow; his wife, Sima Solomonovna, whom he had met in exile and whose eyes, as he put it, projected “the soft, ancient Jewish sorrow”; and their daughter, Galina, born in 1916. After a while, Feodosia Gavrilovna moved into a room of her own in the Fourth House of Soviets, but she continued to spend much of her time in her son’s apartment, cooking on the primus stove and taking care of her granddaughter. During the day, Voronsky wrote at his desk, often stopping to answer the phone or “talk with some comrade from another floor who stopped by to ask for a cigarette or a book, or just to share some impressions about a trip or a newspaper article.” In the evenings, he used to talk to writers and anyone else who showed up. “We often got together at Voronsky’s,” wrote Ivanov. “We used to bring a bottle of red wine and sit over that bottle all night, talking expansively and reverently about literature. Esenin read his poems, Pilnyak—The Naked Year, Babel—Red Cavalry, Leonov—The Badgers, Fedin—The Garden, and Zoshchenko and Nikitin—their short stories. Voronsky’s friends, the Old Bolsheviks and Red Army Commanders Frunze, Ordzhonikidze, Eideman, and Griaznov, used to come, too.” Ivanov himself read his Partisans and Armored Train 1469. Among other frequent visitors, according to Galina Voronskaia, were Arosev, Boris Pasternak, “the ugly and very witty Karl Radek, in his heavy horn-rimmed glasses,” and the close family friend, Filipp Goloshchekin, whom Voronsky affectionately called “Philip the Fair.”15