There was no cause for disappointment or need for resignation. There were no cracks in the foundation of socialism and no obstacles large enough to block the future. One could not live in that era and not see the shape and beauty of the house of socialism. It was a time of both fulfillment and expectation, dignity and enthusiasm, discipline and merriment, proletarian infancy and Old Bolshevik wisdom. It was a “synthetic” era that, like Goethe’s Faust, combined the Sturm und Drang with the “essentially rational” classical antiquity, the Renaissance, and the Empire style. It was an epoch of heroic domesticity in the House of Government. It was an age without old age, and possibly without death.
■ ■ ■
For some residents of the House of Government, the announcement of the coming of eternity came too late. Karl Lander and Lev Kritsman were too ill to work outside the home, while many others, including Vladimir Adoratsky and Olympiada Mitskevich, continued to require regular treatments at various Black Sea and North Caucasus resorts. Vasily Orekhov never recovered from his wounds and persistent melancholy. In April 1934, he went to Foros, in Crimea, for the last time. On December 10, 1934, at the age of fifty, he died in the Kremlin Hospital. Two days later, his body was cremated. The Society of Old Bolsheviks paid for a niche in the columbarium, an urn, and a plaque that identified the deceased as a “member of the VKP(b) since 1913” and “member of the Society of Old Bolsheviks.”2
But the vast majority of the original revolutionaries were ready for a new beginning. Rejuvenated by a powerful feeling of pure, physical joy, they moved in, made themselves comfortable, and settled for a long stay.
In 1935, the House of Government had 2,655 registered tenants living in 507 apartments. Seven hundred residents were leaseholders assigned to particular apartments; the rest were servants and dependents, including 588 children. There were more leaseholders than apartments because some apartments (such as the Ivanovs’, the Tuchins’, and the Usievichs’) contained more than one family. Altogether, there were 24 one-room apartments, 27 two-room apartments, 127 three-room apartments, 179 four-room apartments, 120 five-room apartments, 25 six-room apartments, and one seven-room apartment. (The four remaining ones were taken up by the kindergarten, which, despite repeated requests, never received a building of its own.) Residential areas accounted for 42,205 square meters of space within the House; the movie theater, store, club, and theater took up 11,608 square meters; the rest belonged to the Central Executive Committee Secretariat (2,665 sq m); House administrative offices (500 sq m); and the Committee for the Settlement of Toiling Jews on the Land (365 sq m).3
All leaseholders were divided into “nomenklatura members” (high officials entitled to certain goods and services appropriate to their place in the Party/state hierarchy); “personal pensioners” (retired nomenklatura members still entitled to certain goods and services); and “nonnomenklatura members” (House personnel, prize-winning builders, Central Executive Committee administrators, demoted nomenklatura members, and relatives of nomenklatura members with apartments of their own, such as Arosev’s second wife and Stalin’s in-laws). Those who lost the right to reside in the House of Government as a result of demotion or dismissal were to be evicted; those promoted to higher positions had the right to move to larger apartments. Both tasks were difficult to accomplish because of resistance on the part of the losers. Such resistance could be effective because the classification of officials was not directly related to the classification of apartments and because all classifications were subject to exceptions based on formal exemptions and personal patronage.4
Attempts to overcome such resistance had to be based on even stronger personal patronage. The Persian poet and revolutionary, Abulkasim Lakhuti (Abulqosim Lohuti), who emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1921 and served as a high Soviet official in Tajikistan, received a one-room apartment with a large balcony in 1931, when he became a correspondent of both Pravda and Izvestia. The following year, at the age of forty-four, he married Tsetsilia Bentsionovna Bakaleishchik, a twenty-year-old student of Oriental languages from Kiev. By 1934, they had two children, and he had a new job as a “responsible secretary” of the Writers’ Union. In August 1934, he represented Tajik literature at the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers. Soon after the congress, the Central Committee Secretary, Lazar Kaganovich, ordered the Housekeeping Department to move the family to a bigger apartment.
The move was delayed because of the existence of more urgent claims (one large apartment was being prepared for the hero of the Reichstag Fire Trial, Georgi Dimitrov, who had recently arrived from Germany) and because of “great resistance on the part of those being evicted.” On October 22, 1934, Lakhuti wrote to Molotov that “the unbearable noise of the streetcars outside the apartment and the commotion and crying of an infant inside” made productive literary work impossible. “For many months now, I have been deprived of the most basic rest and sleep at night that I need after doing volunteer work outside the house. As a result, my health and nervous system are deteriorating. My children are weak and often sick. My work, which the Party seems to consider useful, suffers accordingly. I am unable to receive the collective farmers, students, and young writers from Central Asia, who, on their visits to Moscow, wish to meet with me.” Any further postponement of the move threatened “to turn a toiler for the Party and literature into a uselss invalid.” This would be a tragedy for everyone involved, he concluded. “One can patiently wait to be rescued when a leaky ship is just beginning to go down. One can wait when the ship is halfway under water. But when the waves begin to cover the deck, every second’s delay may be lethal.” It took another year and Stalin’s personal intercession for the family to move to a larger apartment (Apt. 110). Several months later, Lakhuti sent Stalin a traditional ruba’i:
Stalin, you are greater than greatness,
You know the hearts of men and the soul of beauty.
My soul is singing, and my heart is proclaiming
That Lenin’s path and Sign were given to me by you.5
Abulkasim Lakhuti and his wife, Tsetsilia Banu
The poem was translated by Lakhuti’s wife, who, under the pen name Banu (“Lady” in Farsi), had become a professional translator of Persian poetry—her husband’s and that of the “brilliant craftsmen of the word” that he listed in his writers’ congress speech. Three years and one child later, the family moved to an even better apartment.
The government portion of the house accounted for about 60 percent, or, if one includes personal pensioners, 70 percent of all apartments. Most nomenklatura leaseholders had been sect members since before the real day (new arrivals, such as Lakhuti and Dimitrov, and newly promoted young officials, such as Khrushchev, were a small minority). They were almost all men: in keeping with the original sectarian practice, female members were rarely promoted to positions of power outside the Women’s Section (most female leaseholders—about 10 percent of the total in 1935—were personal pensioners, not active state and Party officials). The original distinction between “workers” (including peasants and artisans) and “students” (intelligentsia members and Jews of all backgrounds) remained crucially important and readily obvious in speech, gestures, writing proficiency, home furnishings, and family celebrations, among other things. Former workers were a minority among leaseholders. They might feel more comfortable around the House guards and gardeners than around the former students (Orekhov’s son had married Ivanov’s maid); rarely rose very high within the nomenklatura hierarchy; and tended to be overrepresented among the sick, the needy, and the prematurely retired. Their hard-won privilege required constant protection and reinforcement.6
One such former worker (peasant, machinist, and railroad engineer, among other things) was Pavel Gerasimovich Murzin, who was given a job as an inspector in the People’s Commissariat of Transportation, but spent most of his time treating his angina, gout, rheumatism, inflammation of the gall bladder, and, as he wrote in an official request, “malignantgastritis of the stomach,” �
��calitis of the intestines,” and “miasthenia of the heart.” In 1930, at the age of forty-three, he “received the consent of a professor of Kremlin consultation at the Kremlin Hospital of the Council of People’s Commissars” that he be allowed to perform only “work not at all resulting in fatigue and nervous stress.” His wife, Maria Stepanovna, aged forty-five, was, according to Murzin, “totally unfit for work because she shared all of the privations of the prerevolutionary period, as well as during the revolution.” Both required frequent stays at resorts and sanatoria and various forms of material assistance from the Society of Old Bolsheviks. The Society showed a great deal of understanding, but the symptoms persisted—“exclusively because of the apartment,” which was small, full of children, and offered “neither peace nor quiet.” Murzin’s repeated requests for better accommodations met with “foolishness and slander” on the part of various officials, who thought they could do whatever they liked “while Old Bolshevik workers languish in basements.” The situation was made worse by bad news from Murzin’s native village Stary Buian, in Samara Province, where his sister Polia and her husband Markel had been forced to harness themselves to the plow but were being paid “not a penny” by the kolkhoz. After another of Murzin’s in-laws was killed “by the kulaks,” Polia’s and Markel’s daughter, Nina, came to live with the Murzins, adding considerably to their difficulties.7
In 1931, Murzin received a small apartment (Apt. 130) in the House of Government. Later that year, he wrote to the Society of Old Bolsheviks:
I have received an insult as a result of a brazen act of hooliganism on October 27 at 4 p.m. on the front platform of streetcar No. 10 between theater square where I got in and the house of government. First while mounting the car a certain citizen acted rudely toward a woman with child “where the hell are you going can’t you see its crowded” and sat down both of them in the front engine area as soon as the streetcar started to move this citizen crossed his legs and leaned against my side so I stated to him citizen I am not a wall and it’s hard for me to hold you up, to which he turned around and responded with rude contemptuousness toward me it’s okay you can handle it fatface I thought that the fellow was drunk and without saying anything I asked him to let me pass and walked inside the car no sooner had I entered the car than he in the presence of the driver, two militiamen, and one man of his ilk who was with him, in a similar act of rudeness stated in a loud voice “see I have liquidated him as a class from the engine platform” and both of them giggled gleefully. Then I proceeded to ask the militiamen to find out the identity of this citizen according to his ID and showed the militiamen and the citizen who had twice insulted me my society of old bolsheviks document.
The citizen and his companion refused to comply. Murzin and the two militiamen rode with them to the end of the line, enlisted the help of a third militiaman, and eventually discovered that the hooligans were plenipotentiaries of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Unit, Citizen Pashkin and Citizen Kochkin. Murzin “got into the streetcar with difficulty because of chest pains and went back home completely chilled to the bone.”8
Even those former workers who had risen high in the Party hierarchy tended to preserve a sense of separateness and perhaps the memory of an incomplete apprenticeship. Efim Shchadenko’s struggle against the tastes and friends of his wife, the sculptor Maria Denisova, reflected the Party’s fight against the opposition. It was not quite right to suppose (he wrote to an old friend, probably with Mayakovsky’s circle in mind), “that the point of the argument consists of the fact that the workers … can’t stand the intelligentsia in general and the Jewish intelligentsia in particular.” The point (he wrote to another friend), was that “the intelligentsia monopolists of theoretical knowledge can’t help noticing that the workers are beginning to master that knowledge, combining it with huge practical experience, which not every intelligentsia member may have.” The war had been won, but unity and equality remained precarious. The former print-shop stitcher Vasily Mikhailov was still only second in command to former “students” on both the Dnieper Hydroelectric Dam and the Palace of Soviets construction sites. The former metal worker Ivan Gronsky found himself directly under Stalin but continued—like his predecessor Semen Kanatchikov—to play the role of proletarian watchdog over unreliable intellectuals. Even Pavel Postyshev, the former calico printer who had joined Stalin’s inner sanctum and was a quick learner and capable writer, kept a low profile around his former social superiors (including the ones he formally supervised). According to the chronicler of an informal meeting of Politburo members with about fifty Soviet writers in Gorky’s house on October 26, 1932, “Postyshev is amazingly modest. He does not seem to have uttered a single word the whole evening and just tried to stay in the background.” As Postyshev had written to his intelligentsia patron in 1913, when he was twenty-six years old, “the evil, inescapable fate of the proletarian will never leave me in peace.” Most of the proletarians with successful careers (including Shchadenko, Mikhailov, Gronsky, and Postyshev) were married to women with more formal education.9
The majority of government officials residing in the House of Government were former “students” (provincial intellectuals “of various ranks” who had joined socialist sects while still in school). By far the largest single group among them were Jews, who constituted 23 percent of all leaseholders and about 33 percent of the nomenklatura ones (counting “personal pensioners”). If one includes family members, the proportion was even higher: Jewish women were more strongly overrepresented among socialist sectarians than Jewish men (partly filling in for the absence of “workers” among female sectarians), and many non-Jewish officials, including Arosev, Bukharin, Ivanov, Rykov, and Voronsky, were married to Jewish women. During the second wave of informal marriages, in the 1920s, female Party members of proletarian background became available but remained unrepresented at the top: most second and third marriages by high Soviet officials were to upper-class and Jewish women. The Jews who lived in the House came from a variety of social backgrounds, but almost none—including those from families of small artisans—fit the “worker” category. Of the many millenarian rebellions that comprised the eventual “October Revolution,” the Jewish one had been the most massive and radical. Of the many residents of the House of Government, the Jewish ones were the most millenarian and cosmopolitan. The modernization of late imperial Russia had destroyed the traditional Jewish monopoly on a broad range of service-sector occupations in the empire’s western borderlands. The Jewish revolution against the tsarist state had been inseparable from the Jewish revolution against traditional Jewish life. A minority of Jewish rebels chose Zionism; most of those who chose cosmopolitanism did so with an intensity and consistency unparalleled among socialists with traditional national homelands. Polish, Latvian, and Georgian residents of the House of Government seemed to assume that proletarian internationalism was compatible with their native tongues, songs, and foods. The Jewish ones equated socialism with “pure orphanhood” and made the point of not speaking Yiddish at home or passing on anything they thought of as Jewish to their children. Their children were going to live under socialism. In the meantime, they continued to list themselves as “Jews by nationality” in various forms and seemed to recognize each other as belonging to the same tribe and the same revolution.10
Some of the other groups of residents who thought of themselves as sharing a common pre-Bolshevik origins were Latvians, Poles, priests’ sons, and natives of the same regions of the Russian Empire, but such distinctions seemed minor compared with those based on position within the nomenklatura, duration of Party membership, and shared experiences in prison, exile, and the Civil War. What mattered most to the residents of the House of Government was whatever distinguished them from all the nonresidents of the House of Government.
■ ■ ■
Inside the House of Government, what mattered most to the residents was the size and shape of their apartments. Apartment geography reflected family hierarchy. T
he symbolic center—and largest room—of most apartments was “father’s study.” The walls of most studies were covered with floor-to-ceiling dark oak bookcases with “barrister” glass doors that could be lifted by a little knob and pushed back. Most bookcases were built to order by House carpenters, with niches carved out for a desk and couch. The most frequently mentioned books were the gold-lettered, multivolume editions of the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedia, Alfred Brehm’s Lives of Animals, and the Treasures of World Literature series from Academia Publishers. (Nomenklatura residents periodically received Academia catalogs in which they could mark the books they wanted to be delivered free of charge.) Arosev also collected rare books of different types; Volin collected first editions of Pushkin and Lermontov; and the secretary of the Council of Nationalities of the Central Executive Committee (and a permanent representative of Belorussia in Moscow), A. I. Khatskevich, liked to collect the complete works of classical authors.11
Abulkasim Lakhuti’s study. The photographs are of Taras Shevchenko and Maxim Gorky.
The rest of the office furniture could be ordered from the House factory (such pieces remained government property, as indicated by the metal tags with numbers) or brought in by residents. Arosev was attached to his Venetian armchair with mother-of-pearl inlay; Volin, to his enormous desk; and Osinsky, to his enormous couch. Mikhailov brought his father-in-law’s dark-green armchair, and Khalatov his stepfather’s armchairs, couch, and enormous desk. The former trade representative in Great Britain, A. V. Ozersky, ordered all his furniture from London. According to his son, V. A. Ozersky, “there was a Mr. Trivers, who came to Moscow with my father. Father showed him the apartment. He made all the measurements and suggested a design. Father was given the required sum, and the furniture was shipped over.”12
The House of Government Page 66
