■ ■ ■
Most of the men rarely spent time at home. As Khrushchev put it, “in those days, we were all engrossed in our work; we worked with tremendous passion and excitement, depriving ourselves of virtually everything.” And, as Natalia Sats described her third husband, People’s Commissar of Internal Trade Izrail Veitser, “He did not like to be seen in public and paid no attention to his personal appearance. His fanaticism about his work was the stuff of legends. He considered it perfectly natural to leave for work at 9 a.m. and not come back until 4 a.m. the following morning.” After their marriage in 1935, Veitser’s deputy and House of Government neighbor, Lev (Lazar) Khinchuk, sent them a line from Eugene Onegin: “They came together: waves and stone, poems and prose, flames and ice.” Sats was not so sure: “‘If he is prose,’ I thought to myself, ‘then that prose is worth all the poetry in the world.’ … They used to say ‘Soviet trade is our personal, Bolshevik cause.’ For Veitser, it truly was personal. He was the poet of Soviet trade.”25
Veitser had two explanations for his “fantasy and fanaticism.” One was his love for the Party (according to Sats, he was “an ideal Bolshevik-Leninist”). The other was his Pale-of-Settlement childhood. “Most of all I feared the Sabbath. My mother, Hannah, used to put the three of us—my brother Iosif, my brother Naum, and me—all together in one tub and scrub us all with the same sponge. Mother was always in a hurry; we would be wriggling around; soap would get into our eyes; and shrieks and slaps on the head would follow. We were little boys and always getting dirty—we used to run barefoot through the puddles—and there was only one tub. Once, I remember saying: ‘God, if you exist, make the Sabbath go away.’”26
Izrail Veitser
“We knew no rest,” wrote Khrushchev. “On our days off (when there still were days off—later they disappeared), we would usually hold meetings, conferences, and rallies.” When asked about Stalin, Artem Sergeev, who grew up in Stalin’s household, said: “What was his most characteristic trait? He seemed to work all the time…. He worked constantly, always and everywhere.” Most top nomenklatura members had schedules similar to Veitser’s. Mikhail Poloz and Mark Belenky worked until 2:00 a.m.; Aron Gaister, until 5:00 or 6:00 a.m. Ivan Gronsky describes his schedule as follows:
I usually got up at 8 a.m., did my exercises, took a cold shower, and ate breakfast. I had to be at the Kremlin by 9. On most days, various state and Party commissions would begin working at that time. Every ten days, at 11 a.m., there would be a meeting of the Politburo, which I was required to attend. Those meetings usually lasted until 7 p.m., with one 15–20 minute break. On other days, the Council of People’s Commissars and the Council of Labor and Defense would hold their meetings, in which I also participated. I usually arrived at Izvestia after 7 p.m. The newspaper came out in the morning…. I normally did not get home before 3 a.m.27
Those who worked at home tended to have a similar schedule. Osinsky and the literary critic Elena Usievich usually worked for most of the night and never ate with their children. No one was allowed to disturb them while they were in their studies writing. According to Osinsky’s daughter, Svetlana, “‘Father is working and cannot be disturbed’ was the most important thing we children knew about him.” Koltsov, according to his colleague and friend, N. Beliaev (Naum Beilin), “did not write, but dictated his works. His secretary, Nina Pavlovna Prokofieva, or simply Ninochka, used to report to work at 11:00 a.m. “At that time, Koltsov, still groggy after three or four hours of sleep, and having quickly gulped down a cup of strong coffee and taken an aspirin for his headache, would begin dictating another chapter.”28 As she tells it, “In the mornings, I used to go to his home, first on Bolshaia Dmitrovka and then to the House of Government on the Bersenev Embankment, where he lived in a four-room apartment on the eighth floor and where he had a large study with a balcony. He always walked about when dictating; he couldn’t dictate sitting down.” Her job required both speed and patience.
I would arrive, take off my coat in the hall, and then enter the study. He would greet me warmly, but I would know by the look on his face—concentrated, serious, remote—that he was ready to start dictating. I would set out both regular and carbon paper, insert two sheets into the typewriter, and sit quietly at the desk with my back to the window. The light would fall on the typewriter, leaving me in the shadow. Mikhail Efimovich, wearing slippers and an old jacket or a dark-blue knitted vest over a light-blue shirt, would pace up and down the room, stopping occasionally in front of the balcony, where he would reach up and grab the top of the door frame and stare pensively into the distance—or, as it seemed to me at the time, at the clock that used to hang in the gateway arch of the house. Then he would sit down next to the desk, cup his chin in his hand, and examine a pack of Kazbek cigarettes. Or he might rest his cheek on his hand and look off into space until I began to think he had completely forgotten about me, my typewriter, and the essay.
But then he would suddenly jump up and begin slowly dictating the first sentence, as if he were trying it out. Sometimes he would have the title ready, but more often it came only after the last word had been dictated.29
Mikhail Koltsov dictating
Outside the home, Koltsov wore suits. He had always worn suits. A Pravda journalist remembered his first appearance in the editorial offices, soon after the Civil War. “There were tunics, blouses, uniforms, folk shirts, Tolstoy-shirts, field jackets, leather jackets, and trench coats—and then, suddenly, amidst all that uniformity of diversity, I spotted a real suit.” By 1935, almost everyone had switched to a real suit. Even Veitser, who was famous for always wearing the same overcoat (which also served as a blanket when he slept in his office), got himself a new black suit. Osinsky wore light suits; Rozengolts wore hats (to go with his suits); Rozen golts’s friend Arosev wore bowties and tuxedoes (and used expensive English soaps and colognes, which he brought back in bulk from his foreign trips). The head of the Trade Union International (Profintern), Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky, wore suits made by his father-in-law, the famous tailor Abram Solomonovich Shamberg (who was living in his apartment, Apt. 16). Lozovsky’s daughter by a previous marriage, Milena (named after Marx and Lenin and married to Podvoisky’s son, Lev), believed that her father “would be easy to imagine on a Parisian boulevard,” but that it was his friend, the deputy head of the Supreme Court, Petr Krasikov, who looked like the “real boulevardier.” Krasikov’s adopted daughter, Lydia Shatunovskaia, thought he looked like “a Russian nobleman.” Adoratsky bought his suit in a Parisian shop, the day he saw Aronson’s bust of Lenin.30
Vladimir Adoratsky
The ones primarily responsible for the elegance of both the suits and interior decorations were the wives. Some did not work because they were invalids (as in the case of the wives of the “proletarians” Boris Ivanov and Vasily Orekhov); some because they were committed housewives (as in the case of the wives of Mark Belenky and Ivan Gronsky); and some because they were both invalids and committed housewives (as in the case of Nadezhda Mikhailova and Maria Peterson). But most of the women had professional jobs (as editors, accountants, statisticians, economists, pharmacists, doctors, and engineers), worked regular daytime hours, and rarely saw their husbands or spent much time with their children during the week. Some of them continued to favor the severe style of sectarian asceticism (gray or black suit, white blouse, and hair pulled into a tight bun at the back of the head), but most had discovered “elegance.” According to Inna Gaister, around 1934–35 her mother, Rakhil Izrailevna Kaplan, “suddenly remembered that she was a beautiful woman.” She had graduated from the Plekhanov Institute in 1932 and was working in the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry. “At some point she began having dresses made for her, and I remember feeling very indignant: ‘look at her, she is having two dresses made, no three!’” (Rakhil was thirty-two at the time, and Inna ten.) According to Irina Muklevich (born 1923), “after around 1935, things began to change quite a bit. You could already see it: all those beaut
iful wives.” Irina’s thirty-five-year-old mother, a Party member and section head at the State Planning Directorate, suddenly took to wearing evening dresses. The forty-year-old Nadezhda Smilga-Poluian, also a Party member and one of the editors of the Short Soviet Encyclopedia, alternated suits with black silk dresses, which she accented with a cameo brooch bought for her in Italy by her husband. Elena Usievich, the literary critic and former Chekist, developed a passion for hats. Most of the women cut their hair short and wore perfume. (Nadezhda Smilga-Poluian preferred Quelques Fleurs.) The cosmetic equivalent of curtains (as the symbol of philistine vulgarity) was lipstick. A manicure was acceptable, but lipstick was not.31
The women who did not work tended to cultivate domestic femininity. The night Lydia Gronskaia’s sister Elena met her husband, the poet Pavel Vasiliev, the two sisters were “perched on the couch” in the Gronsky’s dining room “engaged in the usual female tasks: sewing and embroidering.” Nadezhda Mikhailova embroidered cushions and, according to her daughter, “was a good singer and an excellent pianist, and loved to dance. Toward the end, she put on quite a bit of weight, but she still danced beautifully, and loved doing it.” She did not have many outfits, but those she did have were “in good taste,” including “a very beautiful cameo brooch.” Lydia Khatskevich liked to have her female friends over for tea. Maria (Mirra) Ozerskaia preferred to shop (a taste she had developed in London, where her husband was a Soviet trade representative). Maria Peterson spent much of her time presiding over her large household. According to one of her daughters, “Mother had a real talent for running the house and for making it cozy and efficient. She had good taste and a sense of beauty, which she imparted to our home. This beauty could be felt in the things she made herself and in the way she furnished the rooms. She passed on her talent for drawing and needlework to us. She was in charge of various maids, nannies, and even some visiting German governesses at one time. She knew how to give orders and take command…. Mother was very pretty in her youth: small and fragile with long thick dark hair down to her knees. That hair caused Mother so much trouble and was such a burden that, in the mid-1920s, she cut off her thick braid and got one of those short perms that were the fashion then…. By the time I came along, Mother had put on weight, but she was still light on her feet and always wore high heels.”32
Evgenia Allilueva (Zemlianitsyna), according to her daughter (and Stalin’s niece) Kira, “wasn’t particularly political and wasn’t too crazy about the whole high society thing. It was all these Bolshevik women, and Mom wasn’t one of them. Mom was more feminine, more flirtatious.” She loved music and dancing, opera and ballet. “At that time, it was fashionable to wear your hair cut short and permed into waves. Mom had her hair cut, too. But she saved her braid, which she kept in a special box and would ‘wear’ on special occasions.” According to Kira, most House of Government women had their clothes made to order—“not only dresses and suits, but even overcoats and fur coats. There weren’t any Soviet fashion magazines. So it was only if someone brought them from abroad. Mom would borrow and look through them and then work some magic with the help of her dressmaker, Evdokia Semenovna. She would bring a French fashion magazine, point out a dress or a suit, and ask Evdokia Semenovna: ‘Could you make this?’ To which Evdokia Semenovna would always reply: ‘Evgenia Aleksandrovna, it won’t be easy, but I’ll try.’ And then she’d do it.”33
Evgenia Allilueva(Courtesy of Kira Allilueva)
In 1936, there was a special event in the Kremlin on the occasion of the adoption of the new constitution, and Evgenia decided to wear a new dress. As Kira tells it,
Almost overnight, Evdokia Semenovna had to create something extraordinary: a dark dress with a white lace insert in the bodice. That insert was a masterpiece of needlework. It had tiny ruffles—very intricate and beautiful! There was only one problem: Evdokia Semenovna wasn’t able to finish in time. She was still putting in a few last-minute stitches, even after Mom already had the dress on.
That day the radio in our apartment was turned up full blast. It was a historic moment; you couldn’t miss it. It was being broadcast live. Stalin had already started speaking, and Mom was still home, getting dressed. A car with a driver was waiting for her downstairs. Dad, of course, was already in the Kremlin, waiting nervously.
Mom entered the hall in the middle of Stalin’s speech and, crouching down low (as low as she could), she made her way to her seat. When the official session ended, many of the guests walked over to St. George’s Hall, where a lavish banquet was laid out.
People were lining up to talk to Stalin, and to offer their congratulations. When Mom’s turn came, he says to her: “So, Zhenia, why were you late?!” Mom was amazed: “How did you spot me?”—“I’m farsighted,” he said with a chuckle. “I can see for miles. You were crouching down as you were walking. Who else would do something like that? Only Zhenya!”34
Several months later, a large Soviet delegation went to Paris to participate in the International Art and Technology Exposition. Evgenia’s husband, Pavel Alliluev, was appointed the delegation’s commissar (Party supervisor):
When Mom found out about it, she ran over to talk to Stalin. “Iosif, I’ve never asked you for anything. I’m dying to go to Paris! I’ve heard so much about it, and I took French in school …” He looked at her, and then at Ezhov, who happened to be in his office at the time, and said, smiling under his moustache: “What do you think, should we let her go?” …
She spent twelve days in Paris. According to her, she never slept more than four hours a night. She wanted to see everything. She loved the city. She was amazed at the way the cars yielded to pedestrians because that was the custom in France.
Pavel Alliluev and Evgenia Allilueva at the Paris Exposition (Courtesy of Kira Allilueva)
She seems to have felt at home in Paris. She went to the Opera, a Josephine Baker show (she had seen her in Berlin once before), and the Louvre. She was absolutely captivated by the famous Venus of Milo. “I went around to take a look at ‘Venus’ from the back, and she was breathing!” …
She and Dad went to a restaurant and tried the famous onion soup and some oysters. She explained to us later that you were supposed to eat them with a slice of lemon, and that they even squeak.35
At the exposition, the Soviet pavilion, designed by Iofan, and the German pavilion, designed by Albert Speer, both received gold medals. The two structures faced each other across a boulevard in the Trocadero. The facade of the German pavilion was a tower crowned with an eagle. The facade of the Soviet pavilion was a tower crowned with Vera Mukhina’s Worker and Kolkhoz Woman. According to Elina Kisis from Apt. 424, an early model of the Kolkhoz Woman had appeared in the House of Government courtyard around 1934 or 1935. “The model was slightly larger than life size and made of plaster or clay. In any case, it was gray, and Mukhina had it installed in the fountain in front of Entryway 21, where I lived. When the workers were removing the boards, a piece of the ‘Kolkhoz Woman’ broke off.” The Paris version was brought back to the Soviet Union and installed, along with the Worker, at the main entrance to the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition. Evgenia Allilueva came back with “presents for everyone.” including “an elegant little pipe” for Stalin.36
Soviet and German pavilions at the Paris Expo, 1937
Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris Expo
The most renowned connoisseurs of beautiful things were the wives of provincial Party officials and industrial managers. Before moving to the House of Government, the Granovskys lived in a “splendidly decorated” house in Berezniki with “all the finest chinaware, silver, linen and everything needed to make a princely home.” Sofia Butenko, the wife of the director of the Kuznetsk Steel Plant, Konstantin Butenko, was one of the leaders of a nationwide women’s volunteer movement (which urged the wives of top industrial managers to see to the cleanliness, beauty, and “cultured domesticity” in the lives of their husbands’ workers). On her regular trips to Moscow, she would visit an exclusiv
e dressmaker’s atelier, look at samples, and usually order several suits and dresses (paying about 140 rubles for a three and a half–meter length of the best dress material and about 350 rubles for the labor, or about twice the average RSFSR monthly salary per dress).37
Another source of beauty—employed in a variety of ways—was the theater. When Natalia Sats’s daughter, Roksana, was in the second grade at Exemplary School No. 25, she once hit a girl named Dashenka (but only after Dashenka had pushed her off her gym stool and then bragged that no one dared touch her because of her powerful grandfather who was driven around everywhere in a chauffeured limousine). Roksana was publicly reprimanded by the principal and sent home. The next morning before school, she complained to her mother.
The House of Government Page 68
