On March 7, 1930, three months after his recantation, Bukharin wrote a response to Pope Pius XI’s protest against the persecution of Christianity in the Soviet Union. Bukharin did not claim that the Soviet Union valued “tolerance, freedom of conscience and other good things”: he claimed that the pope did not value them either—or rather, that the pope’s newfound liberalism was a symptom of old age. Quoting from Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologica to the effect that heretics, that is, those who disagree with church authorities, “deserve not only to be separated from the Church by excommunication, but also to be severed from the world by death,” he wrote: “Of course, the popes’ reach is not what it used to be: their former grandeur has faded, and their peacock’s tail has been plucked rather thoroughly by old Dame History. But when this shriveled vampire attempts to spread its claws, when it relies on the still powerful force of imperialist murderers, when it puts on the mask of tolerance, we must remember its executioner’s commandment: a heretic (i.e., anyone who is not a slave of the pope) should be ‘severed from the world by death’”!76
The problem for Pius XI was not who and how but what, and the problem for Christianity in general was not that it was a prophecy but that it was a false one, and thus “spiritual prostitution, the ideology of perfidious castrati and pederasts, sheer filth.” The shriveled beast was preparing for one last battle, wrapping itself in “papal robes,” and issuing calls “meant to sound like the trumpet of the apocalyptic archangel.” But the “heroic proletarian army” would not be deceived. “This counterrevolutionary cancan, this cannibalistic howling of lay and church hyenas, accompanied by the jingling of spurs, the rattling of sabers, and the fuming of censers is a ‘moral’ preparation for an attack on the USSR.” In the USSR, meanwhile, “superhuman efforts are being made to lay down, for eternity, the strongest possible, steel-and-concrete foundation for the immense and perfectly shaped house of communism.”77
There is little doubt that Bukharin did not believe in the existence of a third, lukewarm, force and that he knew which side he was on. The first thing Voronsky did when he came back from exile was to meet with Stalin and propose the creation of a new literary journal called War. (Stalin agreed: the journal appeared first as the Literary Section of the Red Army and Navy and then as The Banner [Znamya]). In January 1928, when NEP still seemed unshakeable, Osinsky had sulked behind the tall fence of his dacha; in June 1931, he was trying to determine whether, by the end of the second Five-Year Plan, “the proletariat as a class will complete its development, arrive at the realization of its tasks and interests …, master its own power, and, having become a class an und für sich, turn into its own negation.” (His answer was that it was a complicated matter and that he needed to devote himself “to the revelation, for everyone, of the dialectic method, which is hardly much less important than the building of 518 factories.”) In a private letter to his lover and fellow true believer, Anna Shaternikova, he wrote that the growth of Soviet factories gave him as much personal pleasure as the thought that his son Dima would soon become an engineer:78
I am saying that it gives me personal pleasure not because I am an individualist, but because I think that the launching of these factories is a personal pleasure for everyone, just like the pleasure of seeing our children grow up. Because, confound it, we have grown up together with all these real, existing factories—the Stalingrad Tractor Plant (100 tractors per day), the Putilov (80 tractors per day), the Kharkov Tractor Plant (will start producing 100 tractors a day very soon), the Moscow Automobile Plant (will produce 100 automobiles a day very soon, because that sly fox Likhachev requested a postponement precisely so he would be able to present spectacular statistics right away, and, of course, everyone at that plant knows how to work), the Nizhny Automobile Plant (100 cars by the summer), Kuznetsk (a thousand tons of rails a day as soon as January), Magnitogorsk (same thing by spring), Berezniki (will be producing thousands of tons of nitrogen), etc.—and it (all) happened practically overnight! There we were, waiting and waiting, and suddenly, we woke up in a totally transformed country, unimaginable without automobiles, tractors, fertilizer, well-equipped railroads, electric power stations, thousands of new houses etc., etc. They can’t help appearing because the wheels have started turning. It’s fantastic!79
A few weeks earlier, he had attended a discussion about the second Five-Year Plan at the Communist Academy. “The arguments,” he wrote to Shaternikova, “were about whether classes would still exist—because the kulaks have already been liquidated; 100% of the farms will have been collectivized; the majority of the population will be working in factories; and the rural population will be employed by agro-industrial combines.” They would find out soon enough. “Dear Annushka, socialism everywhere is much closer than we could ever imagine, and it will appear just as unexpectedly and just as soon as when it first came to Russia.”80
The words about “socialism everywhere” were written in August 1931 in Amsterdam, where Osinsky was serving as head of the Soviet delegation at the International Congress of Planned Economy. His topic was “The Premises, Nature, and Forms of Social Economic Planning,” and his main thesis (in the official English translation) was the same as in his letters to Shaternikova. “The plan is the expression and the weapon of that last struggle of human history, which the working class is waging for the destruction of classes and for the building up of socialism…. Millions [of people] draw it up, carry it out, and closely watch the course of its fulfillment. This is the basis of the success of planned economy, this is the fundamental advantage of the Soviet system of economy. This is the source of the unprecedented rate of development in the USSR.”81
The other members of the delegation were Osinsky’s colleagues from the governing boards of the State Planning Committee (Gosplan) and Supreme Council of the National Economy: the thirty-two-year-old Aron Gaister, thirty-four-year-old Ivan Kraval (Jānis Kravalis), and thirty-six-year-old Solomon Ronin. Gaister, Kritsman’s closest collaborator among the “Agrarian Marxists” and, after 1932, the deputy head of Gosplan, had been criticized in 1929 for insufficient optimism. In Amsterdam, he claimed that the Five-Year Plan had fulfilled Engels’s prediction about the efficiency of collectivized agriculture and laid the foundations for “the liquidation of the contradiction between town and village.” According to his daughter, he worshipped his boss, the head of Gosplan, Valerian Kuibyshev, and named his youngest daughter Valeria after him. Kraval, the deputy people’s commissar of labor and, after 1933, Osinsky’s deputy (and later successor) at the Central Directory of Economic Statistics, had belonged to the Right Opposition and, at about the same time, violated Solts’s “poor taste” principle by marrying the daughter of a wealthy Jewish-Latvian cattle trader. His topic was “Labor in the Planned Economy of the USSR,” and his main thesis was that labor, according to Stalin’s declaration at the Sixteenth Party Congress, had been transformed “from a shameful and heavy burden into a matter of glory, valor and heroism.” He, too, worshipped Kuibyshev. Ronin, a high-ranking Planning Agency official and a former member of the Marxist-Zionist “Poale Zion” Party, had gotten into trouble in 1921 when his father, a former rabbi, had his son Anatoly circumcised (Ronin’s wife was expelled from the Party as a consequence). In Amsterdam, he argued that the First Five-Year Plan would “make it possible to move forward at a still higher speed and to write a new and still more brilliant socialist page in the history of human society.” After the conference, he asked to be allowed to participate in the construction of the Magnitogorsk Steel Mill. Instead, he was given a choice between serving in the new Soviet consulate in San Francisco or supervising collectivization in the Azov–Black Sea territory. He chose the latter.82
■ ■ ■
One of Voronsky’s correspondents when he was still in exile in Lipetsk was Tania Miagkova, the daughter of Voronsky’s closest Tambov friend and revolutionary mentor, Feoktista Yakovlevna Miagkova—the same earnest, all-or-nothing, Brand-like, “olive-skinned Tania” who used to
dismiss his tall tales as frivolous when she was twelve years old.
Tania Miagkova
Tania had since joined the Party, graduated from the Kharkov Institute of Economics and Sverdlov Communist University in Moscow, married the head of the Ukrainian Planning Agency, Mikhail Poloz, had a daughter, Rada (in 1924), joined the opposition, and, in 1927, been expelled from the Party and exiled to Astrakhan. In Astrakhan she collected money for unemployed exiles, organized opposition meetings, and distributed leaflets accusing the Party leadership of betraying the working class and appeasing the NEP-men and kulaks. In February 1929, she was deported to Chelkar (Shalkar), in Kazakhstan, where she, along with two other exiles, Sonia Smirnova and Mirra Varshavskaia, rented a room in the house of a local railroad engineer. At thirty-one, Tania was the oldest of the three. She had lost most of her teeth and wore dentures, which she kept in a special glass at night. She was reserved and had, according to Mirra, “great inner delicacy, tact, and integrity.” She was responsible for assigning communal responsibilities and heating up the stove. As she wrote to her husband, Mikhail, on March 15, 1929,
I use thorny brush, or “chagor,” instead of logs. I usually bring two huge bundles and sit for a couple of hours in front of the stove, tossing in the thorny branches, one at a time. They crackle and burn, my hands are full of cuts and splinters, and I can think about anything I want.… After that, we make millet porridge or fry potatoes on the stove. I do all that, too (or rather, I, too, do all that), and yesterday I made a wonderful potato soup. So you see, my friend, you should not have complained about my impracticality: all you needed to do was send me into exile early in our life together. So far, I must say, these household chores don’t really feel like a burden to me. I’ve decided to master the mechanics of all this, and it’s not so bad to have to switch my attention from my books to the poker or the well for a change.
It’s pleasant to walk to the well. It’s at the very edge of the settlement (we ourselves are pretty close to the edge). The steppe is beautiful—even here, in Chelkar. And far away, on the road, you can often see camels walking off into the distance, one after another…. In the evenings, we sometimes sit on a bench in the yard, listening to the barking of dogs and the clanking of wheels whenever a train passes by.83
She did not have a job, and there was not much to do in Chelkar. The OGPU (former Cheka) provided the exiles with thirty (later fifteen) rubles a month, but Mikhail, who had been appointed the Ukrainian people’s commissar of finance, was in a position to help. She spent much of her time writing letters—mostly to Voronsky and her family. (Her mother, Feoktista Yakovlevna, had since moved to Kharkov to live with Mikhail and Rada). Her “chief obsession” was the fear that Rada, now five years old, would forget her, or that she would “miss out on” Rada’s development. She sent Rada stories (first fairy tales and then funny scenes from her own life), picture books, shirts that she sewed herself, and once she made a large appliqué for the wall over her bed. She kept asking Mikhail to send Rada out for a visit, but he never did, perhaps because “the living conditions, as well as the climate and the medical care” in Chelkar were “too difficult.” She promised not to indoctrinate her daughter: “Regarding my ‘dogmatism,’ I am, first of all, quite certain that I won’t pass it on to Rada, and, second, it can’t be done, in any case (according to my ideas about education, this is not the time to talk to a child about these things, and of course she won’t see any of my supposed ‘dogmatism’ herself).”84
Her other obsession was the Five-Year Plan. She asked for the Soviet Trade and Problems of Trade journals, subscribed to Kazakh Economics, “mastered” a two-volume publication of the Kazakh State Planning Commission on “regionalization,” started learning the Kazakh language and history (because of Kazakhstan’s “great potential and great scale”), worried about the Ukrainian harvest, and kept asking for a book about the Five-Year Plan. “I need the Five-Year Plan so much, so very much,” she wrote on May 20, 1929. “Generally all I need are the Five-Year Plan and a pair of size-37 sandals.” In early June, it finally started to rain. “I am so happy to see the rain,” she wrote, “not only for the usual reason that it is good for the Soviet state, but also because I have missed it so much.”85
Tania Miagkova (standing) in Kazakhstan
She missed Mikhail, too. “It’s been raining for five days now, sometimes a fall drizzle, sometimes a hard rain alternating with suffocating humidity. One night was beautiful: all around me were flashes of distant lightening and the dizzyingly bitter smell of wormwood. It was, of course, my turn to go get the water (for some reason, I always have to do it at night), and I wanted very much to keep walking far into the steppe, but … with you.” She wrote about her love for him, wondered if he missed her kisses, and offered to help him with his work. She wrote about the joy of dropping her letters in the mail car of the Moscow train and “watching them set out on their long journey,” and then, two months later, about “the terrible tragedy” that had befallen the Chelkar exiles: “the fast train that we have been using to send our mail now passes by at 2 a.m.” She kept asking for more letters, postcards, and photographs. “My darling, my dear Mikhailik. I am holding you very, very tight. Where are you now? Oh how I wish I could curl up on your sofa, when it’s dark outside, and it smells of acacia. And here all we have is wormwood, the bitter grass.”86
Finally he came to visit. According to Tania’s roommate, Mirra Varshavskaia, “he and Tania would walk in the steppe for many hours and come back late, with Tania looking exhausted and depressed. I thought he had come to convince her to renounce the opposition, and, to my distress, he seemed to be succeeding. I also thought that he had brought some secret arguments and information that Tania was not sharing with us. After his departure, Tania was quieter and even more reserved.” When a new collective letter of recantation was circulated among the exiles, Tania signed it. Mirra felt betrayed: “Tania’s stellar moral qualities excluded the possibility of mercenary reasons for deviating from the correct line,” so it must have been her daughter (a reason Mirra, “not knowing a mother’s heart from personal experience,” considered “not good enough to betray a common cause”). Another possibility was the fact that the Party leadership was no longer appeasing the NEP-men and kulaks, and thus no longer betraying the working class. Soon Tania left—“without urging anyone to follow her example, without proselytizing, without words.” As their landlady put it, “she left the same person as she came.” Some time later Mirra received a letter, in which Tania wrote: “Don’t let life pass you by.” She didn’t say if she meant motherhood or the Five-Year Plan.87
Tania Miagkova and her husband, Mikhail Poloz
BOOK TWO
AT HOME
PART III
THE SECOND COMING
9
THE ETERNAL HOUSE
In September 1929, the “proletarian” literary journal October published Andrei Platonov’s story “Doubting Makar.” Makar is a peasant who, like all peasants, “does not know how to think because he has an empty head over clever hands.” Makar’s village chairman, Comrade Lev Chumovoi, on the other hand, does a lot of thinking because he has “a clever head, but empty hands.” One day Makar makes iron ore out of mud, but soon forgets how he did it. Comrade Chumovoi punishes him with a large fine, and Makar sets off for Moscow “to earn himself a living under the golden heads of all the temples and leaders”:
“Just where exactly is the center around here?” Makar asked the militiaman.
The militiaman pointed downhill and informed him:
“Next to the Bolshoi Theater, in that gully down there.”
Makar descended the hill and found himself between two flower beds. On one side of the square was a wall, on the other, a building with pillars. These pillars were holding up four harnessed iron horses, but they could have been a lot thinner since the horses were not very heavy.
Makar looked around the square searching for some kind of pole with a red flag, which would indic
ate the middle of the central city and the center of the entire state, but instead of a pole there was a stone with an inscription on it. Makar propped himself against the stone in order to stand at the very center and experience a feeling of respect for himself and his state. Makar sighed happily and began to feel hungry. He walked down to the river where he saw an amazing apartment building being built.
“What are they building here?” he asked a passerby.
“An eternal house of iron, concrete, steel, and clear glass!” responded the passerby.
Makar decided to drop by in order to do a bit of work and get something to eat.
There was a guard at the door. The guard asked:
“What do you want, blockhead?”
“I’m a bit on the hollow side, so I’d like to do a little work,” declared Makar.
“How can you work here when you don’t have a single permit?” said the guard sadly.
The House of Government Page 45
