The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  At issue is not whether it feels false or not; it is that the spectator does not agree with you. Why? Because this is the most important question for us, the central question of socialist construction, of a new attitude toward labor, toward work, toward the state, and toward your comrades: the question of overcoming, within each one of us, the survivals of petit bourgeois mentality, property-centered selfish mentality, self-interested mentality. Our task is to give a new, socialist birth to the whole immense mass of petit bourgeois, proletarian, and semiproletarian working people of our country, and even to all the remnants of the capitalist classes, and turn them into useful members of a classless socialist society. Not only every employee, every intelligentsia member, and every actor, but every Communist, too, should think of nothing else, as we all engage in the inner struggle aimed at the reeducation of human beings.64

  The Other Side of the Heart was not appropriate because the whole point of the reconstruction period was that even the remnants of the capitalist classes were capable of being reborn. The show was dropped until further notice.

  Entrance to the theater

  11

  THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS

  The Stalin revolution, launched in 1927, is also known as the great breakthrough, the revolution from above, the period of transition, the period of reconstruction, and, most commonly, the era of the First Five-Year Plan. The First Five-Year Plan was inaugurated in 1928 and completed in 1932, one year ahead of schedule. Its purpose was to bring about the fulfillment of the original prophecy by creating the Revolution’s economic preconditions. The Revolution was supposed to have taken place in an industrialized society. The First Five-Year Plan, insofar as it was a plan, consisted of industrializing the Soviet Union ten years after the Revolution and, according to Stalin, fifty to a hundred years after the “advanced countries” had reached this state. Industrialization was to be accompanied by its presumed consequences: the abolition of private property and the destruction of class enemies. Different parts of the original prophecy were to come true simultaneously, inevitably, and as the result of deliberate effort. The effort was to come from “Ukrainians and Tatars, Buriats, Cheremis, Kalmyks, peasants from Perm and Kaluga, coal miners from Yuzovka, turners from Kolomna, bearded road pavers from Riazan, Komsomols, exiled kulaks,” and everyone else involved in the building of the house of socialism. The Stalin revolution was about adding an industrial foundation to the already solid political roof. The work of industrialization was to be carried out at “great construction sites” that rivaled the second day of creation: the Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk steel mills, the Kharkov and Stalingrad tractor plants, the Nizhny and Moscow automobile plants, the Dnieper Hydroelectric Dam, the White Sea–Baltic Canal, the Turkestan–Siberia Railway, and the Berezniki chemical plant, among others.1

  One of the first construction projects to be completed was the House of Government, which served as the Moscow home for most of the top industrial managers. The House’s chief architect, Boris Iofan, lived in a large penthouse apartment on the top floor of Entryway 21 with his wife Olga and her two children by a previous marriage. Olga and Boris had met in Italy, as fellow members of the Communist Party. Olga was the daughter of Duke Fabrizio Sasso-Ruffo and Princess Natalia Meshcherskaia. Her first husband was Boris Ogarev, a cavalry officer. The Iofans’ apartment overlooked Iofan’s next—and the world’s last—public building, the Palace of Soviets.

  The head of construction of the Palace of Soviets was Vasily Mikhailov, a former stitcher at the Sytin printshop, one of the leaders of the October insurrection in Moscow, head of the Moscow Trade Union Council in the early days of the House of Government construction, fighter against flies in workers’ soup bowls, a “vacillating” Right deviationist, and, by way of punishment, deputy head of construction of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Dam (where he became one of the prototypes of the Bolshevik Moses in Fedor Gladkov’s Energy). Brought back to Moscow for a job he, according to his daughter, did not want, he shared his apartment (Apt. 52, in Entryway 3) with his wife Nadezhda Ushakova, a fellow Old Bolshevik and the daughter of a forestry professor at the Timiriazev Academy; their daughter Margarita; Vasily’s two daughters by a previous marriage; and Nadezhda’s daughter by her first husband, Johann Kuhlmann, a Soviet secret agent in Germany.2

  Vasily Mikhailov

  The man in charge of all Moscow construction was Nikita Khrushchev, who had interrupted his career as a Party official in Ukraine in order to study at the Industrial Academy, where he had received the double good fortune of prevailing over the Right Opposition and meeting Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Allilueva. Within three years of arriving in the capital, he had become head of the Moscow Party Committee (de facto, under Kaganovich, in January 1932, and officially in January 1934). His main job was to rebuild Moscow; his most important assignment was to create its idealized reflection underground. The Moscow Metro was an upside-down version of the Bronze Horseman’s (Peter the Great’s) imperial capital: functional and palatial in equal measure, it grew downward through the swamp. As Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs, the work of construction “had to be carried out in the conditions of underground Moscow—in Moscow’s soil, full of quicksand and saturated with water.” He claims to have spent 80 percent of his time underground. “I would go to work at the Party Committee and back from work through the subway shafts.” His home above ground was a five-room apartment in the House of Government (Apt. 206), where he lived with his parents; his two children from a previous marriage; his wife, Nina Petrovna Kukharchuk; and their three young children (Rada, born in Kiev in 1929, and Sergei and Elena, born in Moscow in 1935 and 1937).3

  The Metro’s most immediate sacred prototype was the Lenin Mausoleum (the “first-phase” stations tended to imitate its combination of a modest, symmetrical above-ground temple with a granite-and-marble netherworld). On December 31, 1925, Lenin’s embalmers, Boris Zbarsky and Vladimir Vorobiev, had written to the Commission for the Immortalization of Lenin’s Memory, urging the government to replace the temporary mausoleum with a permanent one. “Continued preservation of the body in the temporary mausoleum is intolerable,” they wrote. “Fungi have been detected on the padding of the walls, the flag of the Paris Commune, and even on the clothes, one hand, behind the right ear, and on the forehead. Disinfection of the entire building is impossible.” The stone version of the mausoleum was built at the same time as the other foundations of socialism—and just as quickly. Construction work began in the spring of 1929 and was completed by October 1930, in time for the thirteenth anniversary of the Revolution. The following year, the body’s chief guardian, Boris Zbarsky, moved into Apt. 26, which he shared with his son by a previous marriage, Ilya; his new wife, Evgenia; and their infant son, Lev-Feliks (born in 1931). In 1934, ten years after the initial embalming, a special government commission concluded that “the work of preserving the body of Vladimir Ilich Lenin for an extended period of time must be considered a brilliant success…. The commission finds it necessary to emphasize that the preservation of the body of V. I. Lenin is a scientific achievement without precedent in history.” At the same time, the twenty-one-year-old Ilya Zbarsky, who had recently graduated from Moscow University, was made his father’s assistant. As he wrote in his memoirs, “I was taken by the mystique of the priests’ solemn performance. The word ‘paraschite,’ in particular, fascinated me: there was something mystical and bewitching about it.” (“Paraschites,” he explained elsewhere, were members of the Egyptian caste of embalmers who “lived in special city quarters away from the rest of society” and specialized in “making cuts in the chest and abdominal cavities on the left side of the corpse.”) “At first I imagined myself a paraschite and compared our little group to Egyptian priests officiating at a sacred ritual. I even thought about writing a novel called ‘The Paraschites,’ with Vorobiev and my father, under fictitious names, as the main characters.” Soon, however, the work on Lenin’s body “became a habitual routine”:

  [We] would come to th
e Mausoleum two or three times a week, closely inspect the exposed parts of the body—the face and the hands—and moisten them with the embalming solution in order to prevent desiccation and parchmentization. At the same time, we would remove various small defects: the darkening of certain sections of the skin, small spots, the appearance of new pigments or changes of color. Sometimes it would prove necessary to correct an occasional change in shape. In such cases, we resorted to injections of a paraffin-vaseline fusion. The most alarming development, however, was the appearance of patches of mold: we had to carefully clean and disinfect those areas…. Particularly important was the preservation of natural coloring and the prevention of the appearance of the grayish-brown pigmentation caused by formalin.4

  ■ ■ ■

  The chemicals used in the preservation of Lenin’s body (as well as in curing the sick, fertilizing the soil, refining fuel, and exterminating pests, among many other things) were to be produced in the Soviet Union. One of the top construction projects of the First Five-Year Plan—mentioned by Osinsky in his letter to Shaternikova as one of his “favorite children”—was the chemical plant in Berezniki, in the northern Urals, next to Zinaida Morozova’s estate, where Boris Zbarsky invented the new method of purifying medical chloroform (while Ilya watched Boris Pasternak court his mother). Launched in 1929 and known as “the City of Light,” it was a miraculous realization of Leonid Leonov’s The Sot’, which was written at the same time. Built on the left bank of the Kama, not far from several seventeenth-century saltworks, a soda plant, and vast newly discovered potash deposits, the Berezniki Chemical Works was to produce ammonia and ammonia-based nitrogen fertilizers for the new Soviet industry. According to a special report of the Committee on Location, “the low, swampy river bank was subject to annual spring floods. This problem could be solved … by building a protective dam and filling the area with imported soil two to four meters high, as well as by installing special foundations capable of ensuring the stability of structures on swampy land and weak soil filling.”5

  The man in charge—as head of construction and then director of the chemical works—was Mikhail Aleksandrovich Granovsky. According to one of his deputies, Z. Kh. Tsukerman,

  Granovsky was a typical economic manager of the tempestuous, exceptionally tense period of the First Five-Year Plan. An enormous capacity for work, harsh temperament, native intelligence, mercilessness toward himself and others, tremendous willpower, determination, an ability to sort out every detail of the most complicated question, courage, relentless drive, intolerance toward formalism and hypocrisy, an ability to set specific tasks—these were the traits that I saw in him during our work together. He was a strong manager, a take-charge commander. Unfortunately, his positive qualities could occasionally turn into negative ones, such as rudeness and curtness. He paid no attention to time: he could work night and day, and he demanded the same of his workers…. Of course, in the difficult struggle for the fulfillment of the plan, there were cases of dictatorial excess. But, as they say, a pike lives in the lake to keep all the fish awake.6

  Site of the Berezniki Chemical Plant, 1929

  Mikhail Granovsky

  Granovsky was born in 1893 in Zvenigorodka, Ukraine, in the family of a Jewish merchant. At the age of fifteen, he became a revolutionary. From 1913 to 1917, he studied chemical engineering at the Moscow Commercial Institute. After participating in the Moscow insurrection, he served as head of the Chernigov Economic Council, the Ukrainian Wine and Spirits Commission, and the All-Union Syndicate of the Glass and Ceramics Industry. In the fall of 1929, he took command of the Berezniki project. His family—wife Zinaida and two sons, Anatoly and Valentin—joined him the following spring, when the weather was warmer and the director’s house had been built. Their five-room apartment in the House of Government (Apt. 418) was to remain vacant until their return. Anatoly was eight at the time. As he wrote (in English) in his memoirs,

  We went by rail as far as Perm in comfortable Pullman coaches, and from there by river boat to Berezniki. It was a delightful journey. From the windows of the train Valentin and I looked entranced at the scene changing before us—the glistening early morning frost on the ground, the little farms with their untidy yards mostly empty of animals; here a cow, there a goat, maybe a couple of geese. And then the little villages, huddles of log houses with thatched or boarded roofs. It took us altogether four days.

  My father was at the quayside to meet us, together with a large delegation of the district notables. The welcome was effusive as befitted the wife and children of the most important man for miles around.

  We were driven in a Ford car to our new home, the top floor of a large wooden house, and all those who had met us followed to drink a toast in vodka to our homecoming. There was much talking and laughing and our heads were patted avuncularly by a number of burly men. The house had been liberally warmed by fires that must have been burning half the day, and there was a smell of new paint and a freshness that came from the pine forests not far off.

  I was vaguely excited and it seemed like the beginning of a new era for me. I did not know that it was also, to some extent, the end of innocence.7

  After the floods, quicksand, the cold, and two major fires, Mikhail Granovsky’s greatest trial was the labor shortage. According to Tsukerman, “the man’s character was certainly difficult and often unpleasant, but in order to judge him fairly, one must have a clear sense of the enormity of the task and the conditions in which the work of construction was being carried out. These conditions were exceptionally difficult. Just to take one example, when it came to personnel, besides a certain number of people who were ready to dedicate all their abilities to the great cause, besides the genuine enthusiasts of the project, there were plenty of people who were there for a variety of other reasons.” About two hundred of them were foreigners, who came for the good pay, out of genuine enthusiasm, to escape unemployment at home, or—the majority—because their firms had sent them over to install and service equipment (the largest were Nitrogen, Babcock & Wilcox, and Cemico from the United States; Power Gas from Britain; Brown-Bovary from Switzerland; and Sulzer, Borzig, Hannomag, Zimmerman, Kerstner, Siemens-Schuckert, Ergart Semer, Leine Werke, and Krupp from Germany). They lived in a separate settlement and ate in a special restaurant. Granovsky called them “the Capitalist International.”8

  At first, the preparatory work of filling the swamp was done by local villagers, who transported the sand in horse-drawn carts. They were reinforced by genuine enthusiasts sent by the Komsomol Central Committee from Moscow and Leningrad (about two hundred in April 1930, when Granovsky’s family arrived), and, in more significant numbers, by contract laborers, mostly refugees from collectivization. Some skilled workers were transferred by the People’s Commissariat of Labor from other, less strategically important sites. According to a crew leader from Kazan, “workers were coming from all over the Soviet Union. There were all kinds: Muscovites, Leningraders, Siberians, lots of our people from Kazan, and up to a thousand diggers with their horse carts from somewhere beyond Kurgan. They built a whole city of dugouts along the banks of the Zyrianka and the Talycha. They drank water from the river and slept under their carts and wagons.” Few of them stayed for long. As Granovsky wrote on January 1, 1931, “the workers sent to the construction site as contract laborers or transfers from other enterprises tend to arrive in Berezniki without any warm clothing. With the coming of cold weather, they demand warm clothing, but such demands cannot be fully met. We have received only 350 of the 3,960 pairs of felt boots we had ordered and only 300 of the 2,500 winter jackets.” At the time Granovsky wrote this letter, the number of workers leaving Berezniki exceeded the number of new arrivals.9

  One solution was to have whole villages—or rather, newly created collective farms—assigned to the project. The construction management would sign a contract with a rural district pledging to deliver agricultural equipment and telephone lines in exchange for labor by peasant crews. Enforcement proved d
ifficult, however: according to an official report, “during a period of nine months in 1933–34, 1,263 collective farmers from the [Elovo] district were recruited to work in the construction of the Berezniki Works. Of those, 493 left the site without having worked a single day.” A more effective strategy was to use the labor of peasant deportees (“special settlers”). In 1930–31, 571,355 “dekulakized” peasants were exiled to the Urals, 4,437 of them, to the Berezniki District. Those who were assigned to construction work were settled in barracks not far from the site. On any given day, about five hundred to six hundred “special settlers” were employed in the work of filling the swamp. The question of who, if anyone, should provide food rations for nonworking family members remained a matter of debate and improvisation for a number of years.10

  Work on the Berezniki site

  Despite these measures, the labor shortage at the site remained acute. In the fall of 1929, the People’s Commissariat of Labor called the situation “catastrophic”; in late 1930, Granovsky admitted that “the supply of labor has fallen short of the plan by a considerable margin” (at least 3,500 workers). The solution proved both obvious and innovative: Berezniki and the neighboring Vishera Paper Mill in Vizhaikha became pioneers in the large-scale use of convict labor. Before 1929, the only labor camp in the Soviet Union was the Solovki Special Purpose Camp, which included the White Sea–Baltic Canal site and had a branch on the Vishera, north of Berezniki. In 1926–27, a Solovki inmate, N. A. Frenkel, proposed, and later administered, the use of prisoners on construction projects outside the camp. On June 27, 1929, the deputy head of the OGPU, G. Yagoda (Yakov Sverdlov’s second cousin, also married to his niece, Ida), and the head of the OGPU’s Special Department, G. I. Bokii, ordered that the Vishera camp be expanded from five thousand to eight thousand inmates, and that they “pay the full cost of their upkeep by being employed in work that does not involve the use of state funding.” Two weeks later, on July 11, the Council of People’s Commissars issued a decree “On the Use of Criminal Inmate Labor,” which prescribed the creation of a new network of labor camps charged with developing sparsely populated northern territories and “exploiting mineral resources by using prison labor.” The Vishera branch of the Solovki camp was transformed into a separate Vishera Special Purpose Camp and expanded to accommodate additional inmates. Industrialization was to rely on forced labor as much as it did on “genuine enthusiasts.”11