The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  Ostap Bender wins the argument. The wandering Jew is supposed to stop wandering on the eve of the millennium; the millennium is scheduled to begin at the great construction site in the desert; and the train they are on is leaving the world of eternal return behind. Or is it? A short time later Ostap crosses the Romanian border with some contraband. His plan is to go to Rio de Janeiro and stroll under the palm trees in his white pants. The border guards catch him and beat him up, but they do not kill him. The Wandering Jew is on the loose again. “Hold the applause! As the Count of Monte Cristo, I am a failure. I’ll have to go into apartment management instead.”96

  Ostap may be difficult to destroy (he had been killed and resurrected before), but he is a homeless stranger in search of a mirage. Olesha’s Ivan Babichev, the god of the bed and brother of the chief tower-builder, Andrei Babichev, is much more dangerous because he sits at the very source of eternal return. “Keep your hands off our pillows!” he says to his brother on behalf of humanity. “Our fledgling heads, covered with soft reddish down, lay on these pillows; our kisses fell on them in a night of love, we died on them—and people we killed died on them, too. Don’t touch our pillows! Don’t call us! Don’t lure us, don’t tempt us! What can you offer in place of our ability to love, hate, hope, cry, regret and forgive?”97

  Ivan is “a magician,” however—and possibly a fraud. His own pillow is homeless, and the bed he ends up in is the bedbug-ridden realm of the snoring Anechka. But there is one test of the legitimacy of doubt that every Russian reader knows to be unimpeachable. What if the child who is to live in the New City and for whom “untold sacrifices” have been made dies before the work is done?

  Platonov’s Nastia, “the fact of socialism,” catches a cold during the “ordeal of the kulaks,” dies, and is buried in the foundation pit of the eternal house. But The Foundation Pit—closest to The Bronze Horseman in its degree of ambivalence—was not published at the time. Much more striking is the death of the little girl in Leonov’s The Sot’, which was praised as a flawed but timely account of socialist construction at the Sixteenth Party Congress. “The engineers felt a strange, guilty sorrow because the corpse was that of a little girl, and, judging from her size, she could not have been more than eleven. Her bare knees were covered with mud. In its senselessness, the accident resembled murder.” Uvadyev, the chief of contruction, imagines that “he has recognized in the dead girl the one who had been so closely bound up with his own fate. Driven by a strange need, he asked her name and was told it was Polia.”98

  In the end, however, it always turns out that the sacrifice has not been in vain and that Dostoevsky’s absurd scenes and hysterical crying fits are but a passing sickness. Doubt is natural, and the suffering terrible, but the work of creation cannot be tainted by the loss of innocence. (Even in The Bronze Horseman, the death of Evgeny does not seem to doom “Peter’s creation.” And, of course, the most popular of all Soviet construction novels is Aleksei Tolstoy’s Peter I, which depicts the prologue to the First Five-Year Plan as a joyfully violent event.) In The Sot’, Uvadyev reaches a conclusion “that would not make sense to anyone else and was possible only on such a terrible night: she was the sister of the one for whom he had suffered and caused others to suffer so much.” In the novel’s final paragraph, he sits down on a bench above the river:

  Having scraped off some of the icy crust, Uvadyev perched on the edge of the wooden plank and continued sitting there with his hands resting on his knees until the lights at the construction site began to glow. Half an hour later, the wet snow had partially covered the man sitting on the bench. His shoulders and knees were white; the snow on his hands was melting, but still he did not move, although it had already grown dark. Staring out into the March gloom with a barbed, dispassionate gaze, he could probably make out the cities that were to rise from those inconceivable expanses and feel the fragrant breeze that would blow through them and tousle the locks of a little girl whose face he knew so well.99

  Even in The Foundation Pit, the work goes on. Voshchev, victim of “a vain mind’s troubled longing” and the collector of “petty and unfortunate scraps of nature,” finds, thanks to Nastia, true knowledge, hope, and his place as the head of the purged peasants. And of course “Nastia” comes from “Anastasia,” which means “resurrection.” The engineer Prushevsky sees past his own approaching death, and perhaps that of Nastia, too. “Prushevsky looked quietly into all of nature’s misty old age and saw at its end some peaceful white buildings that shone with more light than there was in the air around them. Prushevsky did not know a name for this completed construction, nor did he know its purpose, although it was clear that these distant buildings had been arranged not only for use but also for joy. With the surprise of a man accustomed to sadness, Prushevsky observed the precise tenderness and the chilled, comprised strength of the remote monuments.”100

  10

  THE NEW TENANTS

  In spring 1931, the chief builders of the new world began moving into their own, as yet incomplete, eternal house. Apartments were distributed among members of the Party’s Central Committee, the Central Executive Committees of the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation, the Executive Committee of the Comintern, the People’s Commissariats of the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation, the Central Control Commission and Worker-Peasant Inspectorate, the Supreme Council of the Economy, the State Planning Agency, the Trade Union Council, the Trade Union International, the Unified Main Political Administration (OGPU, the new name for secret police), the Moscow City Soviet and Party Committee, the Lenin Institute, the Society of Old Bolsheviks, the editorial board of Izvestia, the families of late heroes and high officials, assorted fiction writers, and “the House of Government’s administrative and maintenance personnel.” The apartments varied in size and status: the largest and most prestigious faced the river and had views of the Kremlin and the Cathedral of Christ the Savior (Entryways 1 and 12). Most leaseholders (eligible individuals in whose name the apartments were registered) held positions that entitled them to extra “living space.” After 1930, each government agency kept a list of such positions. Not everyone who qualified for extra living space could receive an apartment in the House of Government. Each position within the Party and state hierarchy entitled its holder and an indeterminate number of his or her relatives to a wide range of goods and services. Any move within the hierarchy was accompanied by numerous other moves, including those within the House of Government.1

  Arkady Rozengolts, the leader of the Bolshevik insurrection in Moscow and now people’s commissar of foreign trade, who used to move through the walls like a ghost (and was described by his niece Elena as “gloomy and morose”), moved into a large apartment on the eleventh floor with a long balcony overlooking the river (Apt. 237, in Entryway 12). His first wife and their two children stayed behind in the Fifth House of Soviets on Granovsky Street. His House of Government family included his new wife; their two daughters, born in 1932 and 1934; his wife’s mother and brother; one of his brothers; his sister Eva (the painter who had recently separated from her husband, the Pravda journalist Boris Levin); Eva’s daughter, Elena, born in 1928; and the maid, “Duniasha.”2

  Rozengolts, his second wife, and one of their daughters

  Eva Levina-Rozengolts with her daughter, Elena

  Eva’s Higher Art and Technology Studios classmate, Maria Denisova, and her “proletarian” husband, Efim Shchadenko (now a member of the Central Control Commission), received two separate apartments: a very large one on the sixth floor of Entryway 1 (Apt. 10) with a view of the river, and a smaller one at the opposite end of the complex, in Entryway 25 (Apt. 505, probably meant to serve as her studio). According to their neighbors, however, Maria tended to live in the first one, and Efim, in the second. In her December 1928 letter to Mayakovsky, she wrote that she had returned to her husband because he threatened to shoot himself. In May 1930, less than a month after Mayakovsky’s suicide and about a year before they moved into the H
ouse, she was diagnosed as a “psychopath with schizophrenic and cyclical traits.”3

  Maria Denisova working on a bust of Efim Shchadenko

  Rozengolts’s deputy during the Moscow insurrection, now head of the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries, and still a writer, Aleksandr Arosev, was also given two apartments: a four-room one on the tenth floor for his three daughters, a nanny, and a governess (Apt. 104, in Entryway 5), and a one-room one on the same floor (Apt. 103), for his new wife and their newborn son Dmitry. At the time of the move, he was planning “a large work based partly on personal recollections and partly on written sources about how, in the course of revolutionary work, first illegal and later legal and state-directed, the threads of human connections, sympathies, friendship, and love come together and then get torn apart; how individuals enter the revolutionary movement and sometimes move away from it, and how all of this is, in the final analysis, only a ripple on the surface of the epic class struggle, which has produced such a ‘Great Rebellion’ in our country.” The projected novel was to consist of “pictures of that rebellion that would resemble pictures of a river flowing partially underground and partially on the surface, just like now.”4

  Aleksandr Arosev

  Arosev’s old comrade and now top Comintern official in charge of finances and foreign agents, the famously “taciturn” Osip Piatnitsky, moved into a five-room apartment (Apt. 400) with his wife Yulia, their two sons (ten and six in 1931), and Yulia’s father, the former priest, with his new wife and daughter. Another famously taciturn veteran of the Moscow uprising, and now the chairman of the Main Committee on Foreign Concessions at the Council of People’s Commissars, Valentin Trifonov, moved into a four-room apartment (Apt. 137, in Entryway 7) with his wife Evgenia (an economist in the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture); their two children, Yuri (1925) and Tatiana (1927); Evgenia’s mother (and Valentin’s former revolutionary comrade and wife) Tatiana Slovatinskaia; a Chuvash boy nicknamed Undik, whom Slovatinskaia adopted during the Volga famine in 1921, when he was four years old; and a maid.5

  The Trifonovs’ friend and author of the proposition that the family was “a small Communist cell,” Aron Solts, moved into Apt. 393 with his sister, Esfir; a young boy they had recently taken in, Evgeny; and their niece, Anna, who was separated from her husband, Isaak Zelensky. (Their marriage had been arranged by Aron and Esfir, who met him in Siberian exile in 1912.) In 1931, Zelensky was transferred from Uzbekistan, where he was serving as head of the Central Asian Bureau, to Moscow to become chairman of the Central Union of Consumer Cooperatives. He moved into Apt. 54 with his new wife, their daughter, and his and Anna’s two children, Elena and Andrei (named after one of Solts’s Party pseudonyms).6

  Solts’s coauthor, Supreme Court colleague, and fellow expert on the family, Yakov Brandenburgsky, moved into Apt. 25 with his wife, Anna, whom he met in their native town of Balta, north of Odessa, and their daughter Elsa, born in 1913. In July 1929, Brandenburgsky was relieved of his duties as legal theorist and sent to Saratov to supervise collectivization (as deputy chairman of the Lower Volga Province Executive Committee and member of the Provincial Party bureau). In March 1931, he was fired for “dizziness from success” and transferred to the Commissariat of Labor as an expert on labor legislation. In 1934, after several months in the Kremlin hospital, he was appointed to the USSR Supreme Court.7

  Yakov and Anna Brandenburgsky

  Dizziness and domesticity were at the center of the literary work of Aleksandr Serafimovich, who moved into Apt. 82 with his wife (and former maid) Fekla Rodionovna, his son by a previous marriage, and the son’s wife and daughter (named after Lenin’s newspaper, Iskra [Spark]). After finishing The Iron Flood, Serafimovich embarked on a novel set in a large apartment building (“House No. 93”). According to the outline of one chapter draft, “The family is falling apart: (1) Sergei and Olga Yakovlevna; (2) Pania and Sakharov; (3) Petr Ivanovich Puchkov—pulling himself together, crying; (4) sitting around, talking about the people they know: mostly men changing wives, sometimes women changing husbands.” In 1930, Serafimovich’s former wife died in a mental institution. In 1931, he abandoned the “House” idea in favor of a novel about collectivization. In January 1933, the day before his seventieth birthday, he received a telephone call from People’s Commissar of the Army and Navy Kliment Voroshilov, who told him that members of the government had decided to name the city of Novocherkassk after him. Serafimovich, according to his own account, proposed his hometown of Ust-Medveditskaia instead. Voroshilov objected that Ust-Medveditskaia was not a city, but then called back to say that the problem had been resolved: Ust-Medveditskaia would first be reclassified as a city, and then renamed. All Saints Street (which formed the eastern boundary of the House of Government and connected the Big Stone Bridge to the Small Stone Bridge) also received a new name at that time. The House of Government’s official address became “2, Serafimovich Street.”8

  Serafimovich with his granddaughter, Iskra

  Serafimovich’s key ally in the struggle for proletarian literature against “Voronskyism,” Platon Kerzhentsev, moved into a five-room apartment on the tenth floor (Apt. 206, in Entryway 10) with his second wife, Maria; their daughter, Natalia (born in 1925); and maid, Agafia. Kerzhentsev met Maria in Sweden when he was Soviet ambassador and she was Aleksandra Kollontai’s secretary. After that, he became chief theoretician of the Bolshevik “sense of time,” while serving as ambassador to Italy (where Natalia was born), president of the editorial board of the State Publishing House, deputy head of the Central Statistics Directory (under Osinsky), director of the Institute of Literature, Arts, and Language at the Communist Academy, and deputy head of Agitprop (in which capacity he first helped defeat Voronsky and then allowed his memoirs to be published). Shortly before his move to the House of Government, he was appointed chief administrator of the Council of People’s Commissars.9

  Kerzhentsev with daughter Natalia

  Kerzhentsev suffered from a heart condition, and around 1935 (after he became head of the Radio Committee), the family moved down to the third floor to Apt. 197. Their next-door neighbors in 198 (a five-room apartment) were the Old Bolshevik and Kerzhentsev’s predecessor as head of the Radio Committee, Feliks Kon, who was seventy years old at the time, and his wife Khristiana (Kristina, or Khasia) Grinberg, who was seventy-seven. (“Khristiana” was the name she received when she formally converted to Orthodox Christianity in order to get married officially when they were in exile in Siberia). Kon’s new assignment was to head the Museum Section of the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment.10

  Kon and Grinberg’s daughter, Elena Usievich (born in Siberia in 1893), lived in the same entryway, but on the first floor in Apt. 194. Elena and her daughter, Iskra-Marina (b. 1926), shared the apartment with the Old Bolshevik Mark Abramovich Braginsky and his wife (three rooms for Elena, Iskra-Marina, their nanny and maid, and two for the Braginskys and their maid). As Iskra-Marina put it many years later, “It never occurred to either my mother or my grandparents that it might be better for us to live with them rather than some old people we weren’t even related to.” (The Braginskys’ children had an apartment in a different entryway.) Elena and her first husband, Grigory Usievich, returned to Russia from Swiss exile in Lenin’s “sealed car” in April 1917. After Grigory’s death in the Civil War at the age of twenty-seven, Elena worked in the Cheka, the Economic Council (under Yuri Larin), and the Crimean Theater Repertory Censorship Committee, before graduating from the Institute of Red Professors in 1932. Her second husband, a Far Eastern Bolshevik and later second secretary of the Crimean Party Committee, Aleksandr Takser (Iskra-Marina’s father), died in 1931, soon after they moved into the House. Elena’s first child (Grigory’s son) died in 1934 in his grandparents’ apartment at the age of seventeen. By then, Elena was already a well-known literary critic and prominent fighter against the Association of Proletarian Writers and was serving as deputy director of the Institute of Literature and t
he Arts at the Communist Academy (under Kerzhentsev’s successor, Lunacharsky).11

  Elena Usievich

  Elena Usievich’s closest friend and Institute colleague was Lunacharsky’s secretary and brother-in-law, Igor Sats. Igor’s niece and director of the Central Children’s Theater, Natalia Sats, moved into the House of Government (Apt. 159) in 1935, when she married Commissar of Internal Trade Izrail Veitser. Natalia’s patron, admirer, and onetime dance partner, Mikhail Koltsov, lived close by, in a large four-room apartment on the eighth floor (Apt. 143). Still formally married to his second wife, Elizaveta Ratmanova, he had been living since 1932 with the German writer and journalist Maria Gresshöner (who changed her name to “Osten” and broke with her “bourgeois” family soon after her arrival in Moscow, when she was twenty-four years old).12

  Artemy Khalatov

  Khalatov’s wife, Tatiana

  One of Koltsov’s closest collaborators and head of the Association of State Book and Magazine Publishers (OGIZ), Artemy Khalatov, moved into a large, six-room apartment on the seventh floor of Entryway 12 (four floors below Rozengolts). His family consisted of his mother (head of collections at the Lenin Library), wife (a graphic artist), cousin (an actress at the Moscow Art Theater), daughter Svetlana (born in 1926, after Svetlana Stalina and Svetlana Bukharina but before Svetlana Molotova), and their maid, Shura. Khalatov (thirty-five at the time of the move) was famous among the Bolsheviks for his long curly hair, full beard, and Astrakhan hat, which he rarely took off. Before being put in charge of nationalizing and centralizing the publishing industry, he supervised rationing in War Communism Moscow, chaired the Commission for the Improvement of Scholars’ Living Conditions, founded the State Puppet Theater, and, as head of People’s Nutrition (“Down with kitchen slavery! Long live communal food consumption!”), inspired Yuri Olesha’s Envy. According to Khalatov’s daughter, Svetlana, Koltsov used to amuse her by riding her tricycle up and down the hall, shouting, “Time for tea!”13