The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  Final demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior

  After the explosion. The sign on the fence surrounding the site says: “The source of opium is now a palace.” The House of Government can be seen in the background.

  The House of Government was well protected from encroachment. As of November 1, 1932, the number of officially registered residents was 2,745 (838 men, 1,311 women, 276 children under the age of six, and 320 children ages six and older). They were shielded by 128 guards, 34 firefighters, 15 janitors (23 in the winter), 7 pest-control experts, a cedar hedge consisting of three hundred trees (though many died the first year), and an unspecified number of bloodhounds (fed on specially ordered meat and cared for by a full-time trainer). The guards manned all the gates and a desk in each entryway. They wore military-style black uniforms with green insignia and lived in ground-floor communal apartments.32

  One of the head guards, Emelian Ivchenko, was the son of a peasant in Briansk Province and a former Donbass miner. According to family tradition, one day in 1932, as a twenty-seven-year-old Central OGPU School cadet patrolling the platform of Moscow’s Leningrad Railway Station, he had spotted a young girl crying. She told him that her name was Anna; that she was seventeen years old; that she was originally from Borisoglebsk, outside of Voronezh; that she had been working in the port of Leningrad and been rewarded for her excellent work with a trip to Moscow; and that on the train from Leningrad someone had stolen her wallet with all her money and documents. He told her playfully that her only option was to marry him and be registered as an OGPU officer’s wife, but she chose instead to follow a young man in civilian clothes, who invited her to a party at his dorm and promised to find her a place to stay. (She was, according to her daughter, “a tough woman—she had been working as a stevedor, after all! So, naturally, she drank, smoked, swore, and all that.”) At the party, Anna discovered that the dorm belonged to the Central OGPU School, that the civilian young man was actually a plain-clothes agent, and that the cadet who had proposed to her was also there. After two weeks of futile attempts to get a job and be registered in a dorm, Anna agreed to marry Emelian because, as an OGPU’s officer’s wife, she could travel back home to Borisoglebsk for free; because he did not have any cash and could not help her in any other way; and because he struck her as a “very good, … very decent sort of person.” She did not think that she was in love with him (“she felt too scared and too confused”) but decided to return to him after her trip home anyway. Within a year, Emelian received an assignment to the House of Government and a three-room apartment there (Apt. 107). Anna got a job as a cashier at the post office. They went on to have five children: Vladimir (in 1935), Elsa (1937), Boris (1939), Viacheslav (1941), and Aleksandr (1943). Elsa got her name after a German woman whom Anna had met in the Kremlin maternity ward lost her baby daughter Elsa. Anna promised to name her daughter in her honor, and did.33

  The House administrative staff occupied the first two floors of Entryway 1 and consisted of twenty-one employees including the manager, commandant, staff supervisor, and head of the registration desk, as well as various accountants, secretaries, cashiers, and couriers. Immediately above them, serving as a cushion between the House and the Government, was the apartment shared by the four prize-winning construction foremen, including the former Party secretary of the House of Government Construction Committee, Mikhail Tuchin. Eight adults and nine children shared nine rooms, two bathrooms, and two kitchens, and—after years of living in overcrowded dorms like most construction workers—considered themselves lucky and got along well. Mikhail Tuchin found a job as an inspector at nearby Gorky Park; his wife Tatiana (née Chizhikova) worked as a salesclerk in the accessories department of the House of Government store.34

  Anna (front, center) and Emelian Ivchenko (on her left)

  Mikhail Tuchin

  Tatiana Tuchina with Zinaida and Vova

  Other members of the staff were divided into service personnel (thirty-three employees, including the janitors, dog trainer, and various warehouse attendants), cleaning personnel (fifteen cleaning women and seven garbage collectors), and maintenance workers (fifty-eight carpenters, electricians, blacksmiths, metal workers, house painters, elevator technicians, and floor polishers, among others), who were joined by twenty-four heating technicians, three ventilation technicians, and sixty-nine repairmen. The House dining room had 154 employees; the laundry, 107; and the café in the movie theater, 34.35

  Besides staff salaries, the highest expenses involved in the early running of the House of Government were heating (which proved much more costly than expected), elevator maintenance (forty-nine elevators and five permanent employees), water and sewage, restocking, supplies, current repairs, ventilation, and snow disposal. The House was supposed to pay for itself, and, during the first two years, it did. A substantial portion of the income came from the residents’ rent and utilities payments, but the main contributors were the institutional tenants, particularly the theater, the movie theater, the department store, and the club.36

  The House of Government club, or “The Club of the Employees of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, the Central Executive Committee of the Russian Federation, and the Councils of People’s Commissars of the USSR and the RSFSR,” was a new and expanded version of the Rykov Club, formerly located in the Second House of Soviets (the Metropol). The new patron’s name was Kalinin, and the new location was the space above the theater, or, as Adoratsky wrote to his daughter in March 1932, “the block with the uninterrupted line of glass windows facing the river. Tikhomirnov says that it is wonderful: there is a tennis court and different rooms where you can do whatever you like: play chess, music, etc.” Besides tennis and chess, the club offered classes in fencing, painting, skating, skiing, singing, sewing, boxing, theater, volleyball, basketball, photography, stenography, target shooting, radio building, and various foreign languages. It opened a library and planned to organize three orchestras (symphony, wind, and domra) and to acquire fields for soccer and bandy (“Russian hockey”) teams.37

  Laundry

  Tennis court

  ■ ■ ■

  The House of Government’s most visible tenant was the New Theater, whose massive classical entrance served as the building’s facade. Its company had been formed in 1925 by graduates of the Maly Theater School and was known, up until the move to the House of Government, as the Maly Theater Studio. It enjoyed the patronage of Avel Enukidze and the reputation, in the words of one contemporary critic, of a “mischievous, cheerful, and sunny” ensemble committed to a “highly individual style of light irony and life-affirming vitality.”38

  The theater’s artistic director, Fedor Nikolaevich Kaverin, joined the Maly Theater School in 1918, when he was twenty-one years old. “Left behind,” he wrote in his memoirs, were

  the gymnasium with its classical curriculum and unofficial student groups, one devoted to self-education and one, to Shakespeare; the three years in the Philology Department of Moscow University; the hard work in the military hospitals during the Imperialist War; the peripatetic life as a private tutor; the first ardent—and, for several years, unrequited—love; the accelerated graduation—as a junior officer—from the Alexander Military School during the February Revolution; the fever of the company, regiment, and garrison committees of the Kerensky era; the encounter with simple Russian soldiers and life and work among them; the friendship with the Bolsheviks at the front, and, finally, the return to Moscow.39

  The “journey through the bubbling, flooding Motherland” ended. Kaverin discovered his true home in the theater and his life’s hero in Gennady Neschastlivtsev, the tragic actor from A. N. Ostrovsky’s The Forest:

  Neither my mind nor my heart could keep up with the wonderful chaos that, like a flood, came pouring down from the stage and completely enveloped me: Neschastlivtsev is an actor; the person playing Neschastlivtsev is also an actor; and this Aksiusha, whom he is initiating into the acting profession, is also a well-known
actress. They are talking about the stage, about a life devoted to fame and art. That stage is right here in front of me. And then, suddenly, it is no longer a stage: the theater platform is transformed into an old garden, and the round flashlight behind the canvas sky looks like a real moon to me. But for Neschastlivtsev, on this great night of his initiation, both the garden and the moon are part of a stage setting. It is all intermingled: my swirling feelings, impressions, and thoughts raise me to dizzying heights. I want to run onto the stage, push the hesitating Aksiusha out of the way, kneel before the great madman, kiss his hand, take the oath, and, without thought or hesitation, accept initiation into the pure, knightly order of theater actors.40

  According to his friend, the playwright Aleksandr Kron, Kaverin was faithful to his oath. “He was a jolly ascetic, a cheerful saint, a normal person fully possessed…. He was never coy, unless one counts the innocent desire to surprise and confound. He loved mystification…. He was always excited about something, and not just excited, but enraptured to the point of ecstasy, of delirious infatuation.” He always smiled, “happily when he was understood and sadly and compassionately when he was not.” He walked “with his hands pressed to his sides, treading carefully on his toes and bobbing to the rhythm of his steps, as if he were always bowing.” Ruben Simonov, of the Vakhtangov Theater, claimed to have realized that he could play Don Quixote when he thought of Kaverin: “He wasn’t tall, but he always looked over the heads of the people around him.”

  He was not a smooth speaker. “When excited, he often gave his actors impossible instructions such as: ‘you should walk quickly past him with slow steps.’ But the actors did not mind. They understood him.” And he was a famously inept administrator. “Outside of work, he was soft and trusting, like a child. He had no practical sense, no shrewdness, and no toughness…. But in rehearsals, he was truly daring.” Kaverin was always onstage—or backstage. According to Kron, he walked the way he did because “he always walked as if he were backstage during a performance, trying not to make any noise, stumble over a cable, or run into a piece of scenery—as if he were saying: ‘Hush! There’s a show going on.’ He loved the magic of the theater, its ability to transform nondescript rags and cheap baubles into fabulous garments and sparkling ornaments; he was intoxicated by the rattling of wooden swords and the clinking of cups wrapped in gold paper. What he loved about theater was its theatricality.”41

  Kaverin objected to revolutionary theater (of the Mystery-Bouffe variety) and, with his friends from the Maly Theater School, used to boo during Meyerhold’s speeches because he believed that the avant-garde was destroying the magic of theater. “You cannot search with your mind, or search with only one of the senses,” he wrote in his diary in 1924, “because whatever is new for the eye (constructivism) or for the ear (jazz) will only offend the eye or the ear and never manage to get it right.” Theater “must be the nerve of its time and place.” It must “engage the audience.”42

  Fedor Kaverin, 1928

  But Kaverin’s main enemy was Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater, which epitomized “the victory of prose, the triumph of the petty over the sublime”:

  “Forget that you are in a theater!,” its walls, chairs, and hidden stage lights seem to be saying.

  “Quiet! In just a second, I’ll move discreetly out of the way, and you, from your hiding place, will be able to spy on the lives of simple and ordinary people just like you,” the noble curtain—so modest yet oh so boring—seems to be whispering.

  “Look, we’ve banished theater from the stage,” the whole production seems to be suggesting. “Don’t you appreciate how well, how intimately we know your life? At home, you have the same walls, the same chairs, and the same steam rising from the samovar and soup bowl.”

  “Can’t you hear how we’re speaking?” the actors seem to be asking. “Do we look like actors? Have you noticed the silences? You, too, remain silent more often than you speak. It’s true, this play, for some reason, was written in verse, but we destroy that verse, we break it up with our prosaic coughing, grunting, and wheezing.”43

  And what was the result? The result was that “our stages are haunted by the dignified, tasteful ghosts of actors, who pause more than they speak, … but lack the most important thing: creativity, Sturm und Drang. In the best cases, such acting can amount to solid professionalism. But in fact, it is the worst kind of formalism dressed up, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, in the garments of verisimilitude.”44

  “Real theater” was like the Maly, or the way the Maly was meant to be. “Long live Geltser’s curtain with its gaily decorated drapery and golden tassels, festive stage lights and bright strip of light peeking out from underneath the curtain, sudden sunrises and nightfalls, elevated speech and expressive gestures”! Theater was a temple, no matter how “banal and clichéd” the expression might be: “a temple of humanity, which reveals to humans what is great about them and what they do not see in the tedium of their daily routine.”45

  Kaverin’s first independent production, in 1925, was Kinoroman, based on Georg Kaiser’s 1924 Kolportage, a comedy of errors involving a large inheritance, a stolen baby, and a collection of scheming beggars, industrialists, and aristocrats. The idea, according to Kaverin, was to create “a parody of the kind of movie melodrama that continued to attract a large audience.” Scenes were staged like a montage of film shots lit up by spotlights. “Platforms on casters moved actors from one end of the stage to the other, creating the impression of a motion picture. Black velvet curtains revealed and concealed shots as needed.” During pauses, one could hear the clicking sound of the movie projector. A very large window and portraits of aristocratic ancestors with only their legs visible to the audience made the very small stage (the Sretenka Theater, with 320 seats, of which 20 were reserved for government officials) resemble a room in a large castle. The five-person orchestra “understood the humor of the concept” and brought it into “the tired old tunes they were playing.”46

  Kinoroman (1925)

  Kinoroman became a huge success and the studio’s signature production. Another popular favorite from the mid-1920s was V. V. Shkvarkin’s Harmful Elements, a comedy about gamblers and NEP-men that Kaverin staged as a vaudeville featuring dueling guitars, ringing alarm clocks, dancing curtains, jumping briefcases, swaying columns, and, most famously, a scene in prison, in which a group of gamblers, arranged around a table like the Cossacks in Repin’s painting, compose a letter to the prosecutor. Another big hit was Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, which began as “a boring comedy in verse” (with handkerchiefs falling from the ceiling to help the grieving courtiers wipe away their tears), continued in pantomime (with Helena, in typical NEP-era fashion, rejuvenating the king by means of magic surgery), and ended well, with a wedding. One of Kaverin’s teachers from the Maly Theater, N. A. Smirnova, praised the “ostentatious theatricality and exaggerated characterization of the comic figures and situations, combined with the tremendous lightness, simplicity, and sincerity in the depiction of the play’s poetic moments.”47

  Harmful Elements (1927)

  With the launching of the First Five-Year Plan and the rise of the Creation plot, tremendous lightness was no longer appropriate. Kaverin responded by producing D. Shcheglov’s The Recasting, about a steelworker who invents a machine that makes his own labor redundant. What follows, in the words of one reviewer, is “the overcoming of narrow personal and guild interests, their recasting in the interests of the whole plant and the whole state.” The new invention is adopted, the wrecker is slain, and the doubting workers are born again. “By remaking the world, the proletariat remakes itself.” By staging this play, wrote Kaverin, the theater had achieved “a genuine recasting.” The principles of “nonliteral realism” had found a proletarian content. The workers from the Hammer and Sickle Plant who saw a special preview were greatly impressed, as were the critics. “Has the theater passed the test of modernity?” asked Smena. “It most certainly has.” The Maly T
heater Studio, wrote the Voronezh Commune on June 18, 1930, “has demonstrated its ability to move on to Soviet subject matter.”48

  The work of recasting did not come easily to Kaverin. As he wrote in his diary in the fall of 1928, “I reject art for art’s sake, but sometimes I have trouble resisting its lure and have to struggle mightily in order to overcome it. I want to work with modern material, but all my dreams are about classical poetry and painting. I want to work for the new public, but I find the Theater of the Moscow Trade Union Council [MGSPS] disgusting and would be lying publicly if I were to accept what goes on there as art.”49

  The Recasting (1929)

  He was against MGSPS’s proletarian accessibility, “prescribed by the law and the authorities as a fixed ideal”; against the literal realists from the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR), who “speculate on the ‘backwardness of the masses’ in order to hide their own backwardness”; against arts administrators such as Kerzhentsev, “who introduce Cheka methods from the War Communism period into the politics of art”; and against every other attempt to “drive all discussions about art out of the art world.” He was “no reactionary,” of course: he wanted to “work in a cultured way,” and he greatly admired his censor, Nikolai Ravich, who himself admired some of the plays he was censoring. “He is a cultured, broad-minded person and he probably has more right than most to inflict the terrible pain I have to endure as I make all these changes.”50