In 1930, the year of the Bazar-Kurgan uprising, he published a fictionalized memoir about the adventures of five unemployed workers in America. Frank is a dark, hot-tempered, Italian anarchist; Red is a red-haired Irish union organizer; “Negro Willie” dreams of getting rich and moving to Africa; “Punch, the American” has big fists, but no principles or convictions; and Fred, the narrator, is a Russian revolutionary. They wander around the country doing odd jobs and often going hungry. A mining executive wants to employ them as scabs, but they refuse. An insurance company official offers them money for burning down uninsured houses, but only Frank, Punch, and Willy agree. Fred and Red get hired as sailors, discover that the ship they are on is transporting weapons to the anti-Bolshevik forces in Murmansk, organize a mutiny, and are sentenced to ten years in Trenton Prison. According to Aleksandr Isbakh’s review, the book was “interesting, but artistically weak.” In 1931, Fedotov was admitted to the literary seminar at the Institute of Red Professors in Moscow. On March 12, he, Roza, and their eight-year-old son Lyova moved from the First House of Soviets to the House of Government, Apt. 262.63
Fedor, Roza, and their son, Lyova
According to Isbakh, who was in the same seminar, “learning did not come very easily for him. At first he was too hard on the classics, inveighing against Gogol’s reactionary views, deflating Turgenev, and making sarcastic remarks about Hugo…. At Party meetings and during seminars on the international situation, Fedor liked to talk about America. On this subject, of course, he knew a lot more than the rest of us—and not just about America: he had crossed two oceans and knew Mongolia well.”64
He did publish two books. One was an illustrated children’s book about two Mongol orphans, a boy and a girl, who stop fearing “the lamas, rich people, and Chinese and Japanese generals,” join the young pioneers, and start singing the song of the Soviet drummer-boy with new lyrics:
Puntsuk the Mongol hunter,
Puntsuk the Mongol hunter,
Puntsuk the Mongol hunter
Got himself a gun.
Did a little jumping,
Did a little shouting,
Made the greedy lamas
Turn and run.
Both plan on going to Moscow to study. The boy will learn how to build “not yurts, but houses, factories, and railroads”; the girl will become a schoolteacher.65
The second, more grown-up book was set in the Bazar-Kurgan District during wholesale collectivization. The main character is a Kyrgyz cotton-procurement plenipotentiary named Galim Isakeev, and the central scene (soon to become common in long journey narratives) is a meeting of poor peasants who begin by denying that there are any kulaks in their village, but then, as new truths, skillfully conveyed by Isakeev, enter their heads through the ears and come out on top, draw up a list of forty-two households to be liquidated as a class. Surrounding the decisive battle is a traditional hero’s quest narrative, as Isakeev, with the help of some children and young women, searches for the hidden cotton, which is being guarded by a giant bandit, a rich trader, and a two-faced innkeeper.66
In January 1933, at the height of the famine, the Party’s Central Committee created political departments in rural machine-tractor stations. Their responsibilities included plan-fulfillment, political supervision, and secret-police work. They were to be independent from local Party and state control. The chairmen were to be experienced Party functionaries selected by the Central Committee (seventeen thousand in all), and their deputies would be OGPU officers appointed by provincial plenipotentiaries and confirmed by OGPU head, G. Yagoda. In March 1933, Fedotov was summoned to the Central Committee but, according to Isbakh, was not selected because his big book had not been finished yet. He protested and received an appointment as head of the political department of the Altai State Farm. He got there by mid-April.67
Fedotov’s first brief letter to Isbakh was followed by a long silence. “I couldn’t write earlier,” he explained in his next letter, “because there was no time for letter writing. Can you imagine a situation in which all the state farm officials (with a few exceptions) have turned out to be wreckers? They had an organization of up to fifty members and needed to be rooted out.” He mentioned the hard work and the “incredible tension,” but he did not complain (“there is no difficulty a Bolshevik cannot overcome”). He described the steppe and the harvest; promised to write an article about his experiences; and asked for a printing press and a women’s organizer. His department was headquartered in the houses of the deported peasants.68
You ask what my life is like. It’s a wonderful life: I’m absorbed in my work, enjoy it immensely, and do it easily (despite the great difficulties) and with the kind of desire that I did not, to be honest, feel in Moscow. The only thing that sometimes ruins my mood is that I don’t have any time to read or do literary work. I keep up with my diary, but the book—the book, my dear Sasha, is exactly where it was when I left off. And that pains me. I sometimes feel the absence of a literary environment and of you, Sasha, our songwriter-poet (“off to the political department, you rush at full speed”), and I miss my son.69
Fedor Fedotov with his son, Lyova
On September 4, 1933, Fedotov’s OGPU deputy sent the following telegram to Moscow:
On August 29, at around 5 or 6 p.m., Fedotov, the director of the garage (political officer Kliushkin), and company commander, Kirillov, left to go hunting in the area of meadows that is located 10 to 12 kilometers northwest of the farm headquarters. The meadows are dotted with lakes, marshes, brush, grass, and so on.
Upon arrival, Fedotov left the others and went on ahead. In the meadows, on one of the lake shores, Fedotov had an epileptic seizure, fell into the shallow water, and, apparently, drowned. At said time and place, he was alone and of sound mind.
The next day (August 30th), around 6 or 7 p.m., I personally discovered Fedotov’s body and pulled it out of the water, but did not find any signs of violence. The medical specialists who performed the autopsy did not detect any signs of physical violence, either.70
13
THE IDEOLOGICAL SUBSTANCE
The canonical Soviet histories of the First Five-Year Plan consisted, like Marxism in Lenin’s definition, of three components: industrialization, which stood for the construction of the economic foundations of socialism; collectivization, which stood for the destruction of the force that “engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a massive scale”; and the cultural revolution, which represented the conversion of all nominal Soviets to genuine Marxism-Leninism. As a proletarian judge in Platonov’s “For Future Use” says of a former fool named Pashka (little Paul), “Capitalism gave birth to fools as well as to the poor. We can handle the poor just fine, but what are we to do with the fools? And this, Comrades, is where we come to the Cultural Revolution. So therefore I propose that this comrade, entitled Pashka, must be thrown into the cauldron of the Cultural Revolution so we can burn away the skin of ignorance, get at the very bones of slavery, crawl into the skull of psychology, and fill every nook and cranny with our ideological substance.”1
The goal of the cultural revolution was to fill every nook and cranny with the Bolshevik ideological substance. The most visible part of the campaign was the remaking of the arts and sciences. When in the summer of 1931, Ilya Zbarsky was admitted to Moscow University (his father’s Order of the Red Banner of Labor for preserving Lenin’s body was officially equated with proletarian origin), he wanted to enroll in the department of organic chemistry, but was told there was no such specialization:
“Perhaps physical chemistry then?”
“We do not have that specialization either.”
“So what specializations do you have?”
“‘Engineer specializing in the production of sulphuric acid,’ ‘engineer specializing in the production of aniline dyes,’ ‘engineer specializing in the production of plastic materials,’ ‘engineer …’”
“I’m sorry, but I was actually thinking of stu
dying chemistry.”
“We need specialists, who are essential for socialist industry, not desk-bound scholars.”
Zbarsky wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps, but he was not sure which engineering specialization would be appropriate.
I walked over to the Biology Department, but it turned out that there was no such thing. Instead there were botany and zoology departments. When I said I wanted to study biochemistry, I was told that there was no such specialization, but that there was hunting science (formerly “zoology of the vertebrates”), fishing science (formerly “ichthyology”), physiology of labor (formerly “physiology of animals”), and so on, including “physicochemical biology.” They probably could not think of a way to rename it. It sounded like the only department in which science had survived, and I applied and was accepted.2
Ilya Zbarsky’s job after graduation was exempt from Marxist exegesis. (He liked to call himself a “paraschite,” but his official title was “Lenin Mausoleum employee.”) In other arts and sciences, young proletarian true believers of mostly nonproletarian origin were trying to oust their former teachers while fighting among themselves over Party patronage and definitions of orthodoxy. Urbanists, disurbanists, constructivists, RAPPists, AKhRRists, and sulphuric acid engineers were planning a new world in the ruins of the old. The only criterion of success was endorsement by the Party. The most conclusive revolutions took place in agrarian economics (because Stalin intervened directly) and literature (because it meant so much to the Bolsheviks and because Stalin intervened directly).3
The Party’s turn toward the policy of forced collectivization had formalized the triumph of Kritsman’s Agrarian Marxists (who were studying the spread of capitalist class relations in the countryside) over Chayanov’s “neopopulists” (who had insisted on the traditional nonmarket specificity of peasant agriculture). Chayanov had lost his institute, renounced his views, and abandoned the study of peasant households in favor of the study of large state farms. On the last day of the First All-Union Conference of Agrarian Marxists in December 1929, Stalin was expected to congratulate the delegates and set the goals for future work. (“Given the complete contamination of virtually all agricultural experts with Chayanovism,” wrote Aron Gaister in a private letter to Kritsman, “the struggle against it by means of daily agitation and Marxist propaganda is a huge and important task.”) Instead, Stalin used the occasion to proclaim the policy of the liquidation of the kulaks as a class, rendering Kritsman’s and Gaister’s work on social differentiation meaningless and possibly harmful.4
Ilya Zbarsky as a student(Courtesy of I. B. Zbarsky)
On June 21, 1930, Chayanov was arrested for membership in a Peasant Labor Party, allegedly led by his colleague, Professor N. D. Kondtratiev. The party was an OGPU fiction, but, as is often the case in thought-crime inquisitions, the fiction had been of Chayanov’s own making. According to his 1920 novella, My Brother Alexei’s Journey into the Country of Peasant Utopia, peasant representatives were going to enter the government around 1930, become the majority party in 1932, and embark on the wholesale destruction of the cities in 1934. Now, in real-life 1930, the ten-year-old fantasy had become a plausible reaction to the wholesale destruction of the peasantry. On September 2, 1930, Stalin wrote to Molotov: “Might the accused gentlemen be prepared to admit their mistakes and publicly drag themselves and their politics through the mud, while at the same time admitting the strength of the Soviet state and the correctness of our collectivization strategy? That would be nice.” In the end, the alleged members of the Peasant Labor Party were not asked to do this (unlike the alleged members of the Industrial Party, who were, and did). “Wait before turning the Kondratiev ‘case’ over to the courts,” wrote Stalin to Molotov on September 30. “It is not entirely risk free.” On January 26, 1932, the OGPU Collegium sentenced Chayanov to five years in a labor camp.5
At the time of Chayanov’s arrest, Kritsman was being publicly criticized for having incurred Stalin’s criticism. On July 12, 1930, he wrote to Stalin asking whether his (Stalin’s) speech at the Conference of Agrarian Marxists should be interpreted as criticism of his (Kritsman’s) work. In January 1931, Stalin told Kritsman that he disapproved of the press campaign being waged against him. In April 1931, he pointed out certain faults in Kritsman’s speech at the international agrarian conference in Rome. In his response, Kritsman wrote that his words had been misrepresented, and that he had followed Stalin’s instructions to the letter not only because he considered them “compulsory in general,” but because they corresponded with his own “understanding of these things.” The cultural revolution on the agrarian front ended with the victory of Kritsman’s “understanding” to the extent that it corresponded with Comrade Stalin’s instructions.6
In literature, the monopoly of Leopold Averbakh’s Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) survived until April 1932. The role of Chayanov had been played first by Voronsky, and then, after his fall, by his shadow. “Voronskyism” stood for neopopulism, “blini nationalism,” and “abstract humanism.” One of the latter-day representatives of Voronskyism was Andrei Platonov, who seemed to oppose his holy fools to those who “only thought of the big picture, and not of the private Makar.” As Averbakh wrote in his review of “Doubting Makar,”
It is well-known that both Marx and Lenin often compared the building of socialism to childbirth, i.e., to a painful, difficult, and excruciating process. We are “giving birth” to a new society. We need to muster all our strength, strain all our muscles, concentrate totally on our goal. But then some people come along with a sermon about easing up! They want to evoke our pity! And they come to us with their propaganda of humanism! As if, in this world, there were something more genuinely human than the class hatred of the proletariat; as if it were possible to demonstrate one’s love for the “Makars” other than by building new houses, in which the heart of the socialist human being will beat!7
Platonov’s story was ambiguous, concluded Averbakh, but “our time does not tolerate ambiguity.” The Party was “making it impossible to oppose ‘private Makars’ to ‘the big picture.’”8
Of the many proletarian groups contesting RAPP’s monopoly on Marxism in literature, the most serious was the circle of Serafimovich’s protégés, which included Isbakh, Parfenov, and Ilyenkov. On the day of the publication of the Politburo decree of April 22, 1932, which put an end to the search for orthodoxy (and Averbakh’s rule) by abolishing all proletarian writers’ groups in favor of an all-encompassing writer’s union, they gathered in Serafimovich’s apartment in the House of Government. “What has happened, has happened,” said Serafimovich, according to Isbakh. “It’s as if we had finally recovered from a terrible fever. But now let’s think ahead, about how we will work from now on. So, young men, what are your plans? What can you say in your defense?”9
The cultural revolution in literature ended with the victory of private Makar to the degree that he fit into the big picture. Helping the writers with their plans and occasionally calling on them to say something in their defense was the greatly expanded central censorship office (the Main Directorate for Literary and Publishing Affairs, or Glavlit) under its new head, Boris Volin (himself a former RAPP activist). Upon taking over, Volin announced “a decisive turn toward extreme class vigilance,” and, two years later, on April 9, 1933, promised the creation of an “integral censorship” and the use of “repression” against errant censors.10
Another institution that had been designed to discipline literary production was the Association of State Book and Magazine Publishers (OGIZ). On August 5, 1931, the head of OGIZ, Artemy Khalatov, was scheduled to report to the Politburo. The editor of Izvestia, Ivan Gronsky (who lived in Entryway 1, on the other side of the State New Theater from Khalatov’s Entryway 12), described the proceedings in his memoirs:
On the agenda was the work of OGIZ. The presenter was Khalatov. He entered the room and stood, not where he was supposed to, but at the other end of the table,
closer to Stalin. Just as Khalatov was about to begin, Stalin suddenly asked:
“Why are you wearing a hat?”
Khalatov looked lost.
“But you know I always wear this hat.”
“It shows a lack of respect for the Politburo! Take off your hat!”
“But, Iosif Vissarionovich, why?”
I had never seen Stalin in such a state. Usually he was polite and spoke softly, but now he was absolutely furious. Khalatov still did not remove his ill-fated hat. Stalin jumped up and ran out of the room. We all began to reason with Khalatov in semi-facetious terms: “Artem, don’t be silly …” Khalatov relented, and began his report. Stalin came back, sat down, and raised his hand. Molotov, as usual, said: “Comrade Stalin has the floor.”
The General Secretary’s brief intervention can be summarized as follows: “The political situation in the country has changed, but we have not drawn the appropriate conclusions. It seems to me that OGIZ should be split up. I propose taking five publishing houses out of OGIZ.”
The proposal was accepted. Khalatov left the meeting as a nobody.11
In fact, only two publishing houses were taken out of OGIZ (the State Science and Technology Publishers and the Party Press), and Khalatov was not formally dismissed until April 1932. Bureaucratic politics seem to have been at least as important as Khalatov’s hat. One of the initiators of the removal of the Party Press from OGIZ was Aleksei Stetsky, the head of the Central Committee’s Cultural-Propaganda Department and a close friend of Gronsky. (Soon after moving into the House of Government, Stetsky and Gronsky had switched apartments: Stetsky moved into Apt. 144, Gronsky’s original assignment, and Gronsky, who had a larger family, moved into Apt. 18, in Entryway 1, under Radek, who often wrote for Gronsky’s Izvestia and sometimes walked home with him.) Khalatov became Head of Personnel at the People’s Commissariat of Transportation and, three years later, chairman of the All-Union Society of Inventors. He continued to live in the House of Government and to wear his hat.12
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