A few years later she got her reward: “Please congratulate me on my new Party card. I received it today at 1 p.m. My heart was overcome with incredible joy, like I’d never felt before. When the district committee secretary handed me my new card and said, ‘Take it, Comrade Gavrilova, you have worked hard for it,’ and firmly shook my hand, I almost cried with joy, but somehow managed to keep my composure.”46
Another one of Serafimovich’s frequent correspondents was his elderly relative, Anna Mikhailovna Popova (Serafimovich’s real name was “Popov”). On January 18, 1932, she wrote that her grandson, Serafim, had moved away and not been in touch with her since. “I live in very difficult conditions. I have no money or bread. I wish he would send me something, anything at all. Other people feed me sometimes, I have nothing left to sell.” She asked for some dried bread cubes and a little money. “I don’t know what to do. I have nothing left but debts. I wait for death to bring salvation. Please forgive a poor wretch and invalid for bothering you. I pray for you all every day and thank you for your help and kindness, my dear ones! I never thought I’d live to such a state…. My friend has asked me to move out, what else can she do? She is in need herself, we are now eating cakes made of grass.”
On March 3, 1933, she heard of the renaming of Ust-Medveditskaia and sent her best wishes—from the new town of Serafimovich to: Aleksandr Serafimovich Serafimovich, No. 2 Serafimovich Street, Apartment No. 82. “Dear Aleksandr Serafimovich: Congratulations on your 70th jubilee and the cross you received and the renaming of our town in your honor as a fighter for the people’s freedom, such merit as yours will live on for many generations.” She had still not heard from her grandson, Serafim. “I am now all on my own. Please take pity on me and send some dried bread cubes. I’ve been waiting for them all this time and am sending you my very best regards and wishes for good health…. For food, I have oak bark mixed with chaff. For over a month I’ve had no bread, and no death either. You’re the only person, who, I hope, will not abandon me.”
Her last letter was sent twelve days later. “Dear Aleksandr Serafimovich: I am dying, I beg you please send 70 rubles for my burial, I owe Agafia Aleksandrovna 11 rubles that need to be returned. She fed me the best she could, I was a burden to her but she never abandoned me, if you cannot send this money tell Serafim to send this money right away to Agafia Aleksandrovna Kozmina. This is my last request of you. You treated me like a true relative, you and your whole family. Anna Mikhailovna Popova March 15, 1933, town of Serafimovich.”47
Several months later, Serafimovich arrived in “his own” (as he put it) town to witness the final scene from his own Iron Flood. He described it in a letter to one of his proletarian-writer protégés, V. P. Ilyenkov:
It was, you might say, a triumphal entry on a white horse: the bridge on the other side of the Don (the meadow, forest, devilish sun)—the flags, the glistening brass, and the thunderous, unimaginable roar. The band roared; the kids, eyes popping and red cheeks puffed out, roared into their long trumpets; it was utter madness; the drums—of the 900 young pioneers, both local and those brought in from Stalingrad (where they have a summer camp)—roared; and the district Party committee, district executive committee, trade unions, cooperative officials, fishermen, grape growers, cobblers, goldsmiths, outhouse cleaners, old men, women, and infants (drowning out everyone else) all roared. Then I puffed up like a rooster and began roaring, too. I made speeches at them, and they made speeches at me, and then they bent my head down, placed a young-pioneer scarf around my neck, and presented me with some ears of grain, as a symbol of the harvest.48
Sometimes collectivization arrived in the flesh, close enough for some House of Government residents to see. Tatiana Belenkaia, the daughter of one of the architects of collectivization, Mark Belenky, was five years old in the winter of 1933. Every day around noon, her nanny, Aniuta, would put her on a sled, and the two of them would cross the river to a government take-out cafeteria on Granovsky Street. “Once,” writes Tatiana, “I heard Father tell Aniuta (and made a note to myself): ‘Don’t throw away a single crumb. Take any leftover food to the bridge.’ There, under the Big Stone Bridge, is where the beggars stood: grown-ups and children, who looked like little skeletons, with their hands stretched out.” Elina Kisis from Apt. 424 was three years older. Her school was on Yakimanka, south of the Ditch. “Grandma would wrap up some sandwiches for me, but I never got to eat them because every morning I used to run into some boys by the Small Stone Bridge, and they would open my bag, pull out my breakfast, and eat it right on the spot. They often used to fight over a piece of bread.”49
Bridges, large and small, were traditional shelters for outcasts and breeding grounds for swamp creatures. Sometimes, however, the “documentary proof of the planless creation of the world” made it as far as the gate. According to Kisis, “during the first years of the existence of the House of Government, security was very strict, but skinny children from the nearby houses would slide through the bars of the metal gates and fences, hide beneath the columns, and beg for food. This continued until ration cards were abolished” (in January 1935).50
There were also those who did not need to hide, those who were not seen as documentary proof of anything: the various guards, painters, gardeners, carpenters, janitors, laundresses, floor polishers, and cafeteria servers, most of them former peasants. And then there were the domestics. Every apartment had a maid, and most maids were refugees from the countryside. Belenkaia’s nanny Aniuta was one, and so was Kisis’s Dunia. Dunia went on to marry one of the House guards, but most nannies never married. Some residents knew about the families of their “home workers” (Nadezhda Smilga-Poluian sent food packages to the starving relatives of her children’s nanny). Others did not. The House of Government was and was not an island. One of the consequences of collectivization was that almost every child raised in the House of Government was raised by one of its casualties.51
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Another casualty of collectivization was its fictional representation. Serafimovich never finished his novel, The Kolkhoz Fields, and what he did write about the transformation of Ust-Medveditskaia was entirely within the industrial framework of the creation/construction myth. “You cannot imagine how unrecognizable the Ust-Medveditskaia landscape will be,” he wrote to his brother in August 1933. “In Kalach-on-the-Don, a 35-meter-high dam is going to be built. In Ust-Medveditskaia, the water will rise by 25–28 meters and flood the lower part of the town of Serafimovich, as well as Berezki, the meadow, the forests, the sands, Novo-Aleksandrovka, and perhaps Podolkhovskie, too. The land will remain on the horizon. It will all become a large bay. I can’t help feeling sorry for the forests, the meadow, and the lakes I know so well, but it is better this way, it will be magnificent.” As for the surviving settlement, “it is going to be a garden city, a city of schools, study, and rest.”52
But what about “the kolkhoz fields”? And who would be left on them after the flood? “Who,” asked Mikhail Koltsov in a 1931 Pravda essay, “will tell us about the march of one hundred thousand people from the south to the north of the Central Black-Earth Region during the cold winter of 1930–1931?”
It was with astonished incredulity that the people—individual households—entered the unheard-of world of common labor and economy. Everything terrified them. Everything seemed—and was—amazing, stupefying, topsy-turvy, contrary to everything they knew about the way the world worked. But this old way, which had been protected for a thousand years by their oppressors—this powerful, gray-haired way covered with the moss of centuries—turned out to be foolish and feeble-minded compared to the young and vigorously intelligent Bolshevik way.
Every individual owner who has been drawn into the collective by the masses or has joined it himself must experience a moment when the new truths, imposed from the outside, enter the head through the ears, clash with the old truths, and come out on top. The kolkhoz propaganda becomes the individual’s personal conviction. It is this decisive battle in
side the peasant’s head that marks the true, actual—not just on paper—registration of a new kolkhoz member.53
One of the earliest attempts to give shape to this story was Andrei Platonov’s “For Future Use: A Poor Peasant’s Chronicle” (1931). While traveling through the Central Black-Earth Region in March 1930, “a certain soulful poor peasant”—innocent, like Makar, of “both selfishness and self-respect”—comes across a large assortment of melancholy enemies: left deviationists, who “take their own individual mood for universal enthusiasm”; right opportunists, who want to postpone the building of socialism “until the distant time of a lofty universal consensus”; and unmasked wreckers, who are “marched to the district center and left there for eternity.” Arrayed against them are conscious kolkhozniks, who “have no need for any urging coercion,” and honest activists, who “have the courage of gloomily telling the kolkhozniks that what awaits them in the near future is the grief of unruliness, incompetence, unreliability, and want.” One particularly “indomitable” collectivizer watches his family “become extinct” from hunger and tells the people “in the words of the Gospel because he did not know the Marxist words yet”: “these are my wives and fathers and children and mothers: I don’t have anyone but the indigent masses.” After many trials, he finally realizes that spirit alone is not enough for those who are looking for the city that is to come: “what we need is a live person—but the same as Lenin. As soon as I finish the sowing, I’ll go looking for Stalin. I feel my source in him.”54
The story seemed right, but it was not. Once again, Platonov had reached for a myth but written a picaresque folk tale; imagined a Divine Comedy but produced Menippean satire; celebrated the indigent masses by representing lone eccentrics. Igor Sats (Lunacharsky’s brother-in-law, Natalia Sats’s uncle, and Elena Usievich’s friend and colleague) wrote in his reader’s report for Red Virgin Soil that the novella was very well written and full of “hatred for all things that damage the socialist construction,” but that it could not be published in its current form because the author “did not understand the true meaning of the reconstruction as a mass movement.” Fadeev, the new editor of Red Virgin Soil, published it anyway—perhaps because there were no other manuscripts about collectivization. Stalin read it, called it “a story by an agent of our enemies,” and ordered Fadeev to apologize in print. Fadeev apologized, called it “an attack by an agent of the class enemy,” and wrote that, “in order to falsify the true picture of kolkhoz construction and struggle,” Platonov “turns all the kolkhoz builders into idiots and holy fools. On Platonov’s instructions, these idiots and holy fools do everything they can to embarrass themselves in front of the peasantry, so as to benefit the kulaks, while Platonov, pretending to be an idiot and holy fool himself, sneers at the reader by rhapsodizing over their actions. Saintly simplicity, indeed!”55
Platonov wrote to Pravda and Literaturnaia gazeta, renouncing all his “previous creative work” as non-Party and “therefore in poor taste,” and to Maksim Gorky, assuring him that he was not a class enemy. “No matter how much I suffer as a result of my mistakes, such as ‘For Future Use,’ I cannot become a class enemy, and it is impossible to reduce me to that condition because the working class is my motherland, and my future is connected to the proletariat.” His other response might be hidden in the text of “For Future Use”: “The rich peasants, after becoming the bureaucratic leaders of the village, taught the people to think and talk in such an officially tongue-tied way, that many a poor peasant’s phrase, though expressing a sincere emotion, sounded almost ironic. A listener might suppose that the village was inhabited by sneering subkulaks, while in fact these were poor peasants, tomorrow’s builders of a great new history, expressing their thoughts in an alien, ambiguous, kulak-bureaucratic language.”56
The task was to demonstrate the true meaning of the reconstruction as a mass movement while having the masses speak their own language; to show how the new truths, imposed from the outside, enter the head through the ears, clash with the old truths, and come out on top. It was fulfilled almost a year after Platonov’s fiasco, by Mikhail Sholokhov’s Virgin Soil Upturned. One of the novel’s central characters, Makar Nagulnov, is Platonovian in more than first name. During the Civil War he “hacks at the vermin” until he begins having epileptic fits; during collectivization he “hunkers down and drags everyone into the kolkhoz, closer and closer to the world revolution”; and in a rare moment of quiet reflection, he confesses that he does not need a wife because he is “all sharpened up for the world revolution: it’s her, my sweetheart, I’m waiting for.” But Makar Nagulnov—unlike Platonov’s Makars—eventually figures out the true meaning of the reconstruction as a mass movement. The plot is propelled by the confrontation between Bolshevik collectivizers (who have their own maturing to do) and kulak and White Guardist wreckers (whose opposition has psychological, as well as political, motivation), but the novel’s true center is the “decisive battle inside the peasant’s head.” Virgin Soil Upturned is centered on the conversion episode from the canonical construction plot—without the construction. In the kolkhoz fields, the work of creation was mostly invisible.57
No other novel about collectivization would enter the Soviet canon. (F. Panferov’s Bruski was warmly acclaimed on arrival but irreparably damaged—Serafimovich’s defense notwithstanding—by Gorky’s 1934 attack on its literary quality.) One reason may have been the long shadow cast by Sholokhov. (Serafimovich, the first and most forceful champion and publisher of The Quiet Don, seemed unable, in the drafts of his The Kolkhoz Fields, to escape the influence of Virgin Soil Upturned.) But the main reason was the much longer shadow cast by the cranes, chimneys, and masts of the great construction sites. The true meaning of the reconstruction as a mass movement was the building of the eternal house, not the decisive battle inside the peasant’s head. The real reason for Serafimovich’s barrenness was not the success of Virgin Soil Upturned, but the irresistible image of the purifying flood washing up against the brand new city of Serafimovich.58
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The greatest exceptions to the reign of urbanism were “the backward national republics undergoing the transition from semifeudal to socialist relations, bypassing capitalism.” In central Asia and Kazakhstan, the greatest effort was directed at “feudal, patriarchal, and clan relations,” and Koltsov’s appeal for more descriptions of how the gray-haired way turned out to be foolish compared to the vigorously intelligent Bolshevik way applied all the more. Some necessary plot twists related to backwardness included a starker contrast between the two ways (separated as they were by most of human history) and the centrality of young women and children as positive characters (given the association of backwardness with immaturity). One of the pioneers of what would become the “long journey” literature was the proletarian writer and member of Serafimovich’s circle, Fedor Kallistratovich Fedotov.59
Fedotov was born in 1887 in a peasant family. He joined a socialist circle as a young man, spent time in prison for distributing leaflets, and, around 1914, emigrated to America. In New York he met his future wife, Roza Lazarevna Markus (who had arrived from Nikolaev by way of a Paris millinery shop). According to an interview she gave many years later, the only time he ever kissed her was in 1917, when he heard the news of the Russian Revolution. According to a personnel form he filled out in 1931, he stayed in the United States for about five years. “Worker (a miner), but employed as a turner and stevedore. In 1914 joined the Bolshevik section in New York. In 1915–16 president of the dockworkers’ union. One of the organizers of the Communist Party of the United States. Arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison. Spent one year in Trenton Prison before escaping to the Soviet Union.” In the 1920s and early 1930s, he served as secretary of the Semirech’e Provincial Party Committee (based in Alma-Ata), member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Turkestan (based in Tashkent), and head of the organizational department of the Osh District Party Committee in the Kyrgyz Autonomous Repu
blic.60
Fedor Fedotov and Roza Markus
During collectivization, Fedotov was in the Bazar-Kurgan District in the Fergana Valley. He kept a diary, which may or may not have been edited by his biographer.
The situation is as follows. Here in the Bazar-Kurgan District, where we have been conducting wholesale collectivization, there is an emergency situation.
On March 7th, at 10 a.m., we received the news: In Bazar-Kurgan, armed kulaks had incited a peasant rebellion.
I jumped on my horse and rode to Kokand-Kishlak, from where I called the Andijan OGPU and requested help. Then I mobilized the local militia, which sent fifteen men to Bazar-Kurgan.
Our Machine-Tractor station was in danger. When I got back with the militia men, I discovered that in Bazar-Kurgan, the kulaks who were demanding the release of all arrested kulaks, had organized an uprising by the local population. In the melee, three people—a militia man and two local activists—were killed, and one, the secretary of the district committee, injured. At the same time, a crowd of peasants led by the kulaks and religious leaders were demanding the dissolution of the kolkhozes.61
Help arrived; the siege was lifted; and wholesale collectivization continued in accordance with Party policy. But Fedotov’s real ambition was to become a fiction writer. His first attempt had been a play written in 1916 for the dockworkers’ union in Erie, Pennsylvania. “I am yet to write my big book,” he wrote fifteen years later in his diary, “a book that will be about life and still be a piece of life: full of passion, risk, and adventures.”62
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