The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  One of Khalatov’s employees at OGIZ was K. T. Sverdlova (Novgorodtseva), who headed the department of children’s literature and school textbooks. She and her family did not move from the Kremlin to the House of Government until 1937, but in 1932, her son Andrei married Nina Podvoiskaia and joined the Podvoisky-Didrikil patriarchs in Apt. 280, in Entryway 14. The apartment residents included the senior Podvoiskys, three (but later just one) of their daughters, and, on and off, their son Lev with his wife, Milena (whose father, the head of Trade Union International, Solomon Lozovsky, was living in Apt. 16 with his new wife, young daughter, and in-laws). The Didrikil sister who was married to the Chekist Mikhail Kedrov lived in Apt. 409. The Sverdlovs, including Nina Podvoiskaia, would eventually move into Apt. 319. Andrei Sverdlov sided with the Trostkyists as a high school student in 1927, studied foreign languages in Argentina in 1928–29, conspired with Bukharin and other rightists in 1930 (proclaiming, according to an eyewitness account and his own later confession, that “Koba [Stalin] must be bumped off”), studied briefly at Moscow University and the Moscow Tractor Institute, and graduated from the Military Academy of Mechanized Forces in 1935, at the age of twenty-four.14

  Podvoisky family

  Yakov Sverdlov’s (and Voronsky’s) close friend, Filipp Goloshchekin, moved in permanently in 1933, after he was dismissed as Party boss of Kazakhstan and appointed head of the State Arbitrage Court. He lived in Apt. 228 with his second wife, her mother, and her son from a previous marriage. Sverdlov’s and Goloshchekin’s proletarian protégé, the “baker,” Boris Ivanov, moved into Apt. 372 on the fifth floor (Entryway 19). Before that, he had been serving as chairman of the Crimean Trade Union of Food Industry Workers and was still relying on the Society of Old Bolsheviks for basic assistance a year after the family’s clothes were stolen: “I have a family of four dependents including a nonworking wife and three children between the ages of 3 and 11 of which two children go to school and the absence of warm clothes for the children makes their school-going impossible during the period of winter besides which my wife and I are unclothed too in the absence of winter coats but these funds are being asked for the children only.”15

  In May 1930, Ivanov was appointed deputy chairman of the Main Administration of the Canned Food Industry and transferred from Crimea to Moscow. Because the approval process at the Party’s Central Committee took several months “due to Wrecking in the abovementioned organization and the now occurring personnel purge,” he asked for a grant of two hundred rubles, citing the fact that his wife suffered “from nervous fits.” Ivanov’s wife, Elena Zlatkina, came from a large family of Yiddish-speaking tailors-turned-revolutionaries. One of her brothers, Ilya Zlatkin, distinguished himself as a Red Army commander during the Civil War and later served as head of political departments in various armies. In spring 1931, Ilya left for his new posting in the Soviet legation in Urumqi, China, and the Ivanov family moved into their three-room apartment in the House of Government. “Since during the move several more related expenses took place (horse-cart movers and so on) along with the necessity to purchase several household items namely a table and some chairs I request to render financial assistance in the amount of 150 rubles if not possible as a grant then payable within three months.” Ivanov’s request was granted, as were most of the requests he submitted over the next few years (several a year, mostly for free tickets to Black Sea resorts and northern Caucasus spas). After being officially diagnosed with “neurasthenia” in May 1931, Elena Zlatkina stopped working. The Ivanovs (Boris, forty-four; Elena, thirty-four; two sons, ages eleven and ten; and a daughter, age eight) decided to rent out one of their three rooms.16

  Boris Ivanov

  E. Ia. Ivanova (Zlatkina)

  Despite their reduced circumstances, the Ivanovs, like most residents of the House of Government, had a maid (“domestic employee”). Her name was Niura, and she was sixteen or seventeen at the time of the move. One day, while walking with the children in the courtyard, she met Vladimir Orekhov from Apt. 384, who was in his early twenties. Soon afterward, they got married, and Niura moved into his apartment. Vladimir was the son of Vasily Orekhov, the former shepherd and public prosecutor who had succumbed to “traumatic nevrosis” as a result of Lenin’s death in 1924. By 1931, he had turned forty-seven, retired, and received “two rows of teeth to the total amount of 26 teeth,” but continued to suffer from poor health and spent much of his time at Black Sea resorts.17

  Orekhov and the Ivanovs were not the only Old Bolsheviks having difficulty recovering from the Civil War and the great disappointment. The director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, Vladimir Adoratsky, continued his program of balneological treatment. Several months before moving into the House of Government (Apt. 93) at the age of fifty-three, he wrote to his wife from Gurzuf, on the Black Sea, that “the food here continues to be of the highest caliber. The vegetarian soups (borscht) are of excellent quality, and the roasts with fried potatoes are always delicious and so abundant that Varia cannot eat it all.” (Varia, Adoratsky’s daughter and a translator at his institute, was twenty-six at the time. She also suffered from poor health and often accompanied her father on his trips.) Several months after moving into the House, Adoratsky and Varia went to a spa in Kislovodsk. There were no oxygen treatments, but the mountain air was so good “you could get it even without all those special gadgets.” In Moscow, he had access to a special “dietetic cafeteria,” where he ate “vegetables, fruit, and meat, but no bread,” and a clinic for regular “ultraviolet” treatments.18

  Adoratsky’s colleague at the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute and the first director of the Health-Care Department of the Resort Administration in Crimea, Olympiada Mitskevich, retired within a year of moving into the House (Apt. 140), at the age of fifty. Her preferred place of residence, she wrote to the Society of Old Bolsheviks, was a sanatorium; her first trip after the move was to the Borzhomi Mineral Spa, in Georgia. The former “Christian Socialist,” organizer of mass executions in the Don Area, and curfew violator at the Second House of Soviets, Karl Lander, retired four years before moving into the House (Apt. 307), “following a severe nervous illness and a series of severe emotional shocks.” As a “personal pensioner” since the age of forty-four, he devoted himself to scholarly work on “the history of the Party, Leninism (theory and practice), history of the revolutionary movement, and historical questions in general.” Another long-term invalid, the theoretician of War Communism and chief agrarian economist, Lev Kritsman, stopped teaching for health reasons in 1929, when he was thirty-nine years old. In 1931, when he and his wife Sarra moved into Apt. 186, in Entryway 9, he was made deputy head of Gosplan, but, in 1933, he retired from “operational work” and became a full-time scholar, editing Russian translations of Marx for the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, contributing to the first volume of the History of the Civil War, and working on a book titled The First World Imperialist War and the Disintegration of Capitalism in Russia.19

  Kritsman’s closest ally on the agrarian front and his successor at Gosplan, Aron Gaister, moved into Apt. 167 with his wife, Rakhil (an economist at the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry); their two daughters; and their maid, Natalia Ovchinnikova. A third daughter, named after Kuibyshev, was born in 1936. Gaister’s fellow delegates to the Planned Economy Conference in Amsterdam and fellow Kritsman protégés, Ivan Kraval and Solomon Ronin, moved in at the same time (into Apts. 190 and 55, respectively).20

  Kritsman, as he wrote in one of his letters to Stalin, had been “an opponent of all oppositions and deviations within our Party since the middle of 1918.” The recently repentant deviationists were also made welcome. Karl Radek resumed his role as a propagandist and diplomatic negotiator (visiting his mother during a trip to Poland in 1933) and moved into Apt. 20 with his wife, daughter, a poodle named Devil, and Larisa Reisner’s portrait. The first book he published after the move was about engineers accused of wrecking (“they could not struggle against us face to face, they could only do it b
y hiding in our institutions and attacking us from behind, like vipers”).21

  Radek’s fellow oppositionist (and prosecutor at Filipp Mironov’s trial), Ivar Smilga, was readmitted to the Party, appointed deputy chairman of the State Planning Agency (as head of planning coordination), and given a six-room apartment (Apt. 230) in the House of Government, where he lived with his wife; two daughters; the daughters’ nanny; Nina Delibash, the wife of his exiled friend Aleksandr Ioselevich; and an Estonian woman, who, according to Smilga’s daughter Tatiana, had nowhere else to live.22

  Aron Gaister (Courtesy of Inna Gaister)

  Rakhil Gaister with daughter Inna (Courtesy of Inna Gaister)

  Another repentant exile, Aleksandr Voronsky, was put in charge of the Russian and Foreign Classics Section of the newly created State Fiction Publishers (within Khalatov’s OGIZ monopoly). He lived in Apt. 357 with his wife, Sima Solomonovna, and their daughter, Galina. According to Galina, “after his return from Lipetsk, Father kept to himself and refused not only to speak publicly on literary matters, but even to attend literary conferences and seminars.” After being readmitted to the Party, he chose to join a “primary cell” at the print shop, not the publishing house. His friend Goloshchekin suggested that he attempt to improve his position by publishing (or ghostwriting) an attack on Trotsky’s autobiography, but he declined. He continued to work on various versions of his memoirs, a biography of the revolutionary terrorist, Zheliabov, and a book about Gogol.23

  Aleksandr Voronsky with his mother and daughter

  Sima Solomonovna Voronskaia

  Voronsky’s friends from the days of his revolutionary youth in Tambov, Feoktista Yakovlevna Miagkova and her daughter Tania, moved into one of the first completed apartments (next to the Shock Worker Movie Theater) in 1930, after Tania was released from Kazakhstan and Tania’s husband, Mikhail Poloz, was transferred from Kharkov to Moscow as deputy chairman of the Central Executive Committee’s Budget Commission. After the House was finished, they moved to a larger and quieter apartment (Apt. 199, in Entryway 10). The family also included their daughter Rada, who was six at the time; their maid; and Tania’s sister Lelia and her son Volia (Vladimir). Tania got a job as an economist at a ball bearing factory.24

  Some of the most resolute crusaders against “factionalism” lived next door. Boris Volin, who had led the “beat the opposition” raid in November 1927, moved into Apt. 276 with his wife, Dina Davydovna (a former gynecologist and now editor at the Music Publishing House); their daughter Victoria, born in 1920; and their maid, Katia, who had been with the family since Victoria’s birth. Volin had been as tough on the Right Opposition as he had been on the Left. As head of the Press Department of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, he had written several confidential letters unmasking his colleague, Deputy Commissar Maksim Litvinov, as “one of the worst Right opportunists in our Party” (“Litvinov hates the OGPU. He can’t talk about it without extreme, savage loathing.”). Within two years, Litvinov (Apt. 14) would become commissar of foreign affairs; and Volin, chairman of the Central Censorship Office (Glavlit).25

  Grigory Moroz with his mother and sons

  Another leader of the raid against the Left Oppositionists, the former Chekist Grigory Moroz (who warned Smilga that things would get worse and then, at the Fifteenth Party Congress, promised to “snip off the heads of the arrogant oppositionist noblemen”) had since fallen into right deviationism, recanted, become a trade union official in charge of trade, and moved into Apt. 39, in Entryway 2, with his wife, Fanni Lvovna Kreindel, who was a pharmacist, and their three sons, Samuil (eleven), Vladimir (nine), and Aleksandr (three). According to Samuil, his father was “short, hollow-chested, and stooped,” with a moustache that “at first used to cover the whole space between his nose and upper lip, and later just the little furrow between his mouth and nose.” His eyes “were always half closed—from exhaustion, anger, or, very rarely, when he smiled.” He was able to maintain “a remarkable balance between reason and will, and hence a perfect conformity of word and deed…. He was not known for unquestioning obedience, but when a certain name was associated with an idea, he had his faith—a faith in the infallibility of Lenin and Dzerzhinsky and the correctness of the Party line as defined by Stalin.”26

  ■ ■ ■

  Upon moving in, residents had to sign detailed inspection checklists. Podvoisky’s consisted of fifty-four items, including ceilings, walls, wallpaper, tile floors (in the kitchen, bathroom, and toilet), parquet floors (in the rest of the apartment), closets, windows, hinges, lampshades, doors (French and regular), locks (two kinds) doorknobs (three kinds), nickel-plated doorstops, an electric doorbell, enamel bathtub with overflow drain and nickel-plated plug, nickel-plated shower, wall-mounted porcelain sink, water heater, cold and hot water faucets, a porcelain toilet, raisable oak toilet seat, mounted toilet water tank with porcelain pull chain, gas stove with four burners and two vents, a samovar vent, wall-mounted cast-iron enamel kitchen sink with hot and cold water faucets and chain plug, an icebox, a garbage chute with flap doors, and an extra cargo elevator with a metal door and call button (and garbage pail that a special attendant emptied out twice a day). Apartment regulations urged residents not to hang objects on electric plugs and switches; not to place paper and rugs over heaters; not to hit water pipes with heavy objects; not to clog sinks with matches, cigarette butts, and other small items; and not to throw bones, rags, and boxes into the toilet. Furniture—heavy, rectilinear oak pieces designed by Iofan—could be leased from the carpentry shop located in the basement. All the residents requested some furniture, supplementing it with pieces of their own they did not want to part with. Arosev brought a Venetian armchair inlaid with mother-of-pearl; Volin—a desk; Khalatov—a desk, couch, armchairs, and weapons collection; Podvoisky—a tall bookcase; Kerzhentsev—most of his furniture and a large German radio set; and the Ivanovs—a chandelier and a wardrobe.27

  The first residents moved into apartments next to the movie theater and Ditch (but some, like Tania Miagkova and her family, would later move to more prestigious parts of the house). In the spring and summer of 1931, children played in the furniture warehouse, on the wooden walkways placed over the mud, among the piles of earth and bricks in the courtyards, on the volleyball court by the laundry, and around the Church of St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker (known as tserkovka or tserkvushka: “the little church”).28

  The church’s most recent tenants—the State Historical Preservation Workshop and the Institute of the Peoples of the East—took a long time to move out. The only available alternatives were other churches, for which there was intense competition despite the many problems involved in converting them to secular uses. After much acrimony (and several conflicting claims to the Church of St. Nicholas in the Armenian Alley, Trinity Church in Nikitniki, and the nearby Church of the Resurrection in Kadashi), the Historical Preservation Workshop was assigned to the Assumption Church on Herzen Street, and the Institute of the Peoples of the East, to the Church of St. Martin the Confessor on Big Communist Street (in the Taganka District). In April 1932, permission to tear down “the little church” was officially withdrawn; in July 1932, most of the premises were forcibly taken over by the House of Government’s largest tenant, the New Theater; in March 1934, both the church and the Averky Kirillov residence were formally, though inconclusively, transferred to the jurisdiction of the House of Government.29

  By this time, the area around the House had changed considerably. The Swamp’s shops and stalls were gone, as were most of the tenements. The Maria Women’s College was now School No. 19; the Einem Candy Factory became State Candy Factory No. 1, and, in 1922, the Red October; the Gustav List Metal Works became Plant No. 5, Hydrofilter, and, later, the Red Torch; and the Kharitonenko mansion was first turned into a guesthouse of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and then, in 1929, taken over by the British embassy. The most dramatic change was the disappearance of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which was blown up on
December 5, 1931, to make way for the Palace of Soviets. According to Mikhail Korshunov from Apt. 445, who was seven at the time, “salvos of rock, marble, and brick shot straight up and spread out over a large area. The ice on the river must have cracked: in any case, a loud, lingering boom sounded over the river—and in the courtyard wells. The beacons along the fence flashed on and off, and, after straining to find its voice, the siren began screaming.” Korshunov’s neighbor from Apt. 424, Elina Kisis, who was six at the time, remembered how the river “became covered with dust and smoke,” and how her grandmother “stood in the corner of the kitchen, praying and crossing herself.” Four construction foremen and their families living in Apt. 4 (which they had received as a prize from the Construction Committee), heard the sound of the explosion and ran out onto the balcony facing the river. According to the daughter of one of them, Zinaida Tuchina, “the grown-ups were very upset, and some even cried.”30

  It took several months to remove the rubble (referred to in official documents as “the pile”). According to Korshunov, “the workers brought to remove the pile worked in three shifts, with no days off. The site was lit up at night, and the shadows cast by the ruins seemed to move—as if the cathedral were still alive.” On April 14, 1932, Adoratsky wrote to his daughter, who was staying at a Crimean resort, that the Cathedral of Christ the Savior “has disappeared for good: the brick-and-mortar Easter bread [kulich] has been completely liquidated.” The only part of the neighborhood that remained untouched was the western corner of the Swamp between the candy factory and the Arrowhead. In the words of Inna Gaister from Apt. 167, “the conditions there were terrible: two-story buildings densely packed with large families and crawling with bedbugs.”31