While the older people played cards, the younger ones danced. In 1935, Agnessa Argiropulo was thirty-two, and her husband, Sergei Mironov, forty-one. His boss, the “regular Siegfried” Vsevolod Apollonovich Balitsky, and the representative of the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry in the Ukrainian SSR, Daniil Ivanovich Petrovsky, were in their early forties. Once, around that time, they were all staying in the Ukrainian Central Committee rest home in Khosta, outside of Sochi. They danced on many occasions, but November 7 was special:
The manager said to us, “I’ve ordered some cars for you. You can go to the mountains for a picnic, and we’ll have everything ready for you when you get back.”
We climbed into the open cars, already loaded with baskets of wine and other delicacies. We drove to the market in Adler, then for a swim—and then up into the mountains for a walk. We had a wonderful time and came back crowned with garlands of cypress.
The banquet tables had already been set. There was a vase of flowers at each place setting and a bouquet of flowers under each fork and knife.
Sergei Mironov and Agnessa Argiropulo at a resort (Courtesy of Rose Glickman)
We rested a bit, then changed for dinner. I wore a white dress with a large white bow with blue polka dots in front and white shoes. (Nobody wore sandals back then.)
Postyshev, Chubar, Balitsky, Petrovsky, and Uborevich were all there that evening, and Mikoyan came later from Zenzinovka, where Stalin was staying.
Balitsky was master of ceremonies. As I said before, he was slender, lively, fun, and very amusing. Pretending to be angry, he shouted: “What’s going on here? Why are the ladies sitting together and not with the men? Up! Everybody up!”
He grabbed one lady by the hand, and then a man, and sat them down next to each other; then the next pair…. When he got to me, I acted coy. “I don’t want to sit next to just anyone. I first want to know who you are going to put me with.”
He paused, hesitated for a moment, then raised his eyebrows and said softly, “You’ll sit next to me.”
And he ran off to seat the others. He got everyone seated, including me, but still did not sit down himself. His wife was looking at me across the table, her eyes narrowed contemptuously. Suddenly everyone burst out laughing because Mirosha had brought a chair and squeezed in between me and Balitsky.
Balitsky said, “This will not do.”
He whispered to two of the waiters, and they picked up the chair with Mirosha in it and carried him back to the lady who’d been chosen for him. Everyone laughed until tears ran down their faces.
Finally, Balitsky sat down and began talking to me and serving me with food and drink, but not for long: as master of ceremonies he had to make toasts and keep things moving…. Meanwhile, I tried to ignore his wife’s dirty looks.
After dinner the dancing began. I think I must have danced with them all! My first partner was Balitsky, and others danced, too—but when Daniil Petrovsky and I began doing the tango, a circle formed around us, and they all stepped back to watch. We really laid it on—he would dip me, and I would lean backwards over his arm, then he’d pull me up, and we’d walk sideways, cheek to cheek, with our arms outstretched. These days no one knows how to dance a real tango. But Daniil did, and we understood each other without words. Postyshev was sitting in his chair, dying with laughter, and his wife was laughing, too. When we were done, they all applauded until their hands hurt.13
■ ■ ■
Besides the one-day rest homes (frequented mostly in the winter) and several-week sanatoria (frequented—following Stalin’s lead—mostly in the fall), there were permanent country houses (dachas) outside of Moscow, where some women and most of the children and old people lived all summer long (and, in the case of the better heated and insulated dachas, during winter vacations, as well). The men usually came on their days off and whenever else they could. Most dachas belonged to the state and were distributed according to rank, although, starting in the early 1930s, the top officials started buying their own “cooperative” (de facto private) country houses. The largest concentration of Central Executive Committee state dachas was in Serebrianyi Bor, on the western edge of the city. The Podvoiskys, Trifonovs, Sverdlovs, Khalatovs, Mikhailovs, Volins, Larins, Morozes, and Zbarskys, among many others, lived in close proximity to each other (usually several families per dacha), swam in the Moskva River, gathered mushrooms, rode bicycles, played tennis and volleyball, and grew fruit, vegetables, and flowers. On August 6, 1937, Yuri Trifonov, who was not quite twelve at the time, wrote a lyrical entry in his diary: “The sun and the trees. The smell of pine. All the greenery. A light breeze coming through the open window and stirring the pages of my diary…. The phlox and dahlias under my window perfuming the air. Bushes and trees and other greenery all around. Greenery, greenery, everywhere…. And the sun turning it all emerald green.”14
Trifonovs in Serebrianyi Bor
Mikhailovs in Serebrianyi Bor
The most desirable dachas were farther west, along the high bank of the Moskva River, upstream from the city. Some were rest homes with rooms permanently reserved for particular families. The aviator Yakov Smushkevich (commander of Madrid’s air defenses during the Spanish Civil War and, since 1937, deputy commander of the Soviet Air Force, from Apt. 96 in the House of Government) used to spend summers with his family in one such communal dacha in Barvikha. According to his daughter, Rosa,
He was a lifelong, passionate fisherman. He used to sit by the pond with his fishing rod. But the famous Maly Theater actor, Ostuzhev, would pace back and forth behind him memorizing his and other people’s roles in a loud voice. (He was hard of hearing, you know.) Ostuzhev adored my father. He loved being near him. So my father would come home with an empty bucket, grumbling jokingly: “Ostuzhev chased all the fish away …” I remember a lot of people in Barvikha—Ezhov’s wife, a red-haired Jewish woman, who used to call very loudly: “Ko-o-olia!” The Berias lived there, too. Beria himself didn’t come very often, but his very nice wife, Nina, did, and their son, Sergei—a wonderful young man, and Beria’s sister—a good, kind woman. They used to play with me. Among the guests in the nearby sanatorium were [the famous theater actors] Vasily Ivanovich Kachalov, Ruben Simonov (young and very handsome), Varvara Osipovna Massalitinova, Prov Mikhailovich Sadovsky, and Ekaterina Pavlovna Korchagina-Aleksandrovskaia. They loved spending time with my father. They were affectionate with me and gave me their photographs.15
In another former manor house, the Old Bolsheviks Feliks Kon, Petr Krasikov, Gleb Krzhizhanovsky, Nadezhda Krupskaia, the German Communist Clara Zetkin, and the former head of the Department of Female Workers in the Party’s Central Committee, Klavdia Nikolaeva, all ate in the same “Gothic” dining-room, walked in the woods, and—especially Krasikov and Krzhizhanovsky—hunted for mushrooms.16
But most dachas were separate houses custom built for individual families on large plots of land within “dacha settlements.” According to Osinsky’s daughter, Svetlana,
During the construction of our dacha in Barvikha (state-provided, of course), my father had a tall fence built around the huge lot so that nothing and no one could disturb him. Inside, a tennis court, volleyball court and croquet lawn were set up. A long, long stairway was built from the high bank down to the river. One whole area was planted with strawberries, fruit trees, and berry bushes. There was also a small wooded grove where mushrooms grew, a ravine, lots of hiding places, and, away from the main building, the so-called “gazebo,” which was actually a small wooden cottage where my father used to work. And what a main building it was! Wooden, with two stories and ten rooms, a deck, glassed-in veranda, running water, septic tank, and bathroom. And a grand piano in the dining room.
Most dachas had tall wooden fences, usually painted green. The Osinskys also had a guard dog, “a ferocious Caucasian shepherd named Choba”:
Everyone except my brother Valia and [the maid] Nastia was scared to death of her. My father had her put on a chain, and she used to run ba
ck and forth along a wire by the gate, greeting all our visitors with a low, fierce growl. Choba hated my father—and with good reason. For training purposes, in order to get her accustomed to loud noises and I don’t know what else, he used to fire his pistol into the fence behind her wire. I remember how Valia once brought Choba on a leash to the tennis court. When she saw my father behind the high wire fence, she started barking madly, standing on her hind legs and throwing herself at the fence, while he stood on the other side in his white slacks and tennis shoes, with his racket practically poking her in the nose. Later they took the dog back to the kennel.17
Valerian Osinsky at his dacha next to the corn he planted (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)
The Gaisters’ dacha was a bit further upstream, in Nikolina Gora. Aron Gaister did some of the work himself: planting apple, pear, and cherry trees; starting a vegetable garden; and building a special shed for the white Leghorn chickens he brought back from one of his trips. As his daughter, Inna, remembers it,
The lot was right above the river, on the high side. The dacha was a large, two-story building with six rooms. There were three large rooms downstairs, three upstairs, and a huge veranda. My mother’s brother Veniamin, not without secret envy, liked to refer to it as our “villa.”
The rooms were always full of people. Some of my father’s and mother’s numerous relatives, especially my cousins Elochka, Nina, Igor, and Vitia, used to stay there regularly. My parents’ friends usually came from Moscow on their days off. The poet Bezymensky, who was a close friend of my father, came a lot. Next door were the dachas of the parents of Irina and Andrei Vorobiev and the large Broido clan. I hung out with the kids from the dachas closest to ours: Vera Tolmachevskaia, Natasha Kerzhentseva, the Broido girls. To make it easier for Grandma to get down to the river, my father built a stairway with at least a hundred steps; it was called “the Gaister stairway” for many years after that. It was built as a serpentine because the bank was very steep. Some dachas had wooden piers for swimming. By our pier, the river was deep, and I only swam there when my father was around. Most of the girls liked to gather by the Kerzhentsevs’ pier, where it was shallow and great for swimming.18
Aron Gaister (Courtesy of Inna Gaister)
Platon Kerzhentsev’s dacha was built according to his own design. It had a veranda with sliding glass walls and retractable partitions inside. Next door was a dacha that Elena Usievich used to rent for the summer; she had been offered one in the writers’ settlement in Peredelkino, but, according to her daughter Iskra-Marina, preferred not to have to worry about her own “cooperative” property. She usually came on her days off in her father Feliks Kon’s car; Iskra-Marina spent most of her days with Inna Gaister and Natasha Kerzhentseva. The Rozengolts’ dacha in nearby Gorki-10 was designed by his sister, the painter Eva Levina-Rozengolts. Downstairs was a large hall, a study with its own veranda, Eva’s studio, a dining-room with a long table for up to fifty people and an adjacent veranda, a kitchen, and, next to it, the servants’ quarters (including a room mostly used as a waiting area by the chauffeurs); upstairs there were two bedrooms, a living room, a bathroom, a toilet, and a billiard room, separated from the living room by a covered walkway. According to the US ambassador, Joseph E. Davies, who visited on February 10, 1937, “the winding approach from the road to the dacha was attractive. The house was large and comfortable and commanded a beautiful view of the snow-covered landscape on all sides. It was well and attractively furnished after the rather heavy modern German type.” Efim Shchadenko and Maria Denisova had a six-room, two-story dacha in Kraskovo 4, to the east of Moscow. One of the largest dachas (Bakovka-111, 241.2 cubic feet, not far from the Osinskys) belonged to Shchadenko’s former Red Cavalry commander, Semen Budennyi. In December 1937, it included some large apple, pear, plum, and cherry orchards, 40 gooseberry and 207 raspberry bushes, and, among many other things, a workhorse named Maruska, a black cow named Willow, a red cow named War, and a pig with no name weighing 550 pounds.19
For Arosev, nothing seemed to come easily. (He was not admitted to the Society of Old Bolsheviks until the summer of 1933 because of concerns regarding his overly detailed description of his youthful enthusiasm for SR terrorism.) In 1934, he picked out a spot for a dacha in the writers’ settlement in Peredelkino, went there a few times to oversee the construction, and talked at length to the engineer in charge, but, in 1935, was removed from the list by A. S. Shcherbakov, Gronsky’s successor as the Central Committee overseer of the Writers’ Union. He then chose a place in Troitse-Lykovo just west of Serebrianyi Bor, but was told not to bother because it was a restricted area close to Kaganovich’s dacha. He applied anyway, was turned down, applied again, this time directly to Stanislav Redens (head of the Moscow Province NKVD), and finally, on May 28, 1935, received a permit. While waiting for construction to begin, he rented various cottages (also in restricted areas), traveled unannounced to one-day rest-homes, and often visited his friend Molotov (“Viacha”), whose dacha was in Sosny, next to Nikolina Gora. On July 12, 1936, he was visiting with his daughters, Olga and Elena. Two of Molotov’s and Arosev’s friends from their Kazan days, German Tikhomirnov (now an official in Molotov’s secretariat) and Nikolai Maltsev (now head of the Central Archival Directory), were also there. As Arosev wrote in his diary, “Viacha was, as usual, playful and in a great mood. We went for a swim. He wanted to push me into the water in my clothes. I was the only one who didn’t want to swim, but I had no choice. At least he let me get undressed first.”20
Aleksandr Arosev and one of his daughters at Molotov’s dacha
Meanwhile, Olga, who was ten at the time, was playing around a bend in the river, next to Molotov’s wife, Polina Semenovna Zhemchuzhina:
Floating on round, glossy green leaves next to the bank of the Moskva River were water lilies of such snow-white purity they seemed to glow a pale pink. I swam over and picked a whole bunch of these lilies. Polina Semenovna wove them into a wreath and placed it on my head. She admired me for a moment and, after saying that with these flowers and stems I was the very image of Undine herself, told me to swim over to the men’s bathing area to show myself to my father and the other guests. What I saw there shocked me.
Polina Semenovna Zhemchuzhina; her daughter, Svetlana Molotova; and Aleksandr Arosev at the Molotovs’ dacha
Molotov had always been an extremely quiet and reserved man. Newspapers often printed his photographs: old-fashioned pince-nez and a pug-nosed face, seemingly good-natured, but generally unremarkable and rather closed and expressionless. My father, despite his excitability at home, also came across in public as a man of European cultivation and reserve. But here, in the bathing area, they were fighting, dunking and grabbing on to each other’s legs and shoulders, tearing off any remaining clothes, and raising a fountain of splashes every time they climbed out onto the bank and crashed into the water again. They were acting wild and ferocious, like little boys, I thought, reproachfully, at the time. And I was right. For a few moments on that peaceful summer day at the dacha, on the grassy bank and in the water, they were transformed from statesmen into regular, spontaneous people. Could it be that they—these former swimmers, brawlers, and athletes—had suddenly recollected their Volga childhood?21
According to Arosev’s diary, they spent the rest of the day inside. “We watched a movie and talked about literature—about Gorky and Dostoevsky. Viacheslav loves literature and really understands it. He had some scathing things to say about Chukovsky and quoted Lenin well and very appropriately, to the effect that socialism as an ideology enters the working class from the outside and may be poisoned by bourgeois influences.”22
17
THE NEXT OF KIN
Socializing—particularly of the ferocious and wild variety—was limited to dachas, rest homes, and sanatoria. In Moscow, Arosev, Molotov, Maltsev, and Tikhomirnov rarely visited each other, even though all except Molotov were neighbors in the House of Government. For nomenklatura men, Moscow life was about work, and House of
Government apartments were for sleeping or work. With the exception of those professionally involved in “guiding the work of the Soviet and foreign intelligentsia” and a few irrepressibly gregarious men such as Radek and Kuibyshev, most people rarely received guests outside the four annual feast days (birthdays and the three Soviet holidays), and some never received them at all. Nomenklatura men had no friends, in the sense of surrogate siblings with a claim to unconditional loyalty, and no neighbors, in the sense of next-door residents with rumors or household items to exchange. They had special comrades and more or less close relatives.
All Bolsheviks belonged to the same family and referred to each other as “comrades,” but not all Bolsheviks were welcome in each other’s apartments. As Solts wrote in the 1920s, “it is, of course, very difficult to preserve those close, intimate relations that we used to have when there were just a handful of us. The common fate and common persecutions of the comrades who worked in the tsarist underground drew us closer together and united us more than our current conditions do. There are many more of us now, and it is very difficult to have the same feelings of closeness toward each communist.” This had been true in the days of the tsarist underground, as well (Arosev had been closer to Molotov, Maltsev, and Tikhomirnov than to other Kazan Social-Democrats, not to mention those he did not know personally), but it was particularly true now, when the economic foundations of socialism had been laid and the sect had become a church. Or rather, a fraternal, faith-based group radically opposed to a corrupt world had become a bureaucratic, hierarchical, world-accepting institution with weak horizontal bonds and porous boundaries. The post-1934 Soviet Union was no longer a heathen empire ruled by a millenarian sect: it was an ideocratic (theocratic, hierocratic) state composed of nominal believers and run by a priestly hierarchy. All Soviets were assumed to be more or less observant Communists (adherents of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam were analogous to “pagans” in Christian states: awaiting remedial conversion but posing no existential danger to ideocratic monopoly). The Bolshevik priestly elite consisted of two layers: the rank-and-file Party members recruited from the general population on the basis of scriptural competence and personal virtue and retained as potential nomenklatura members; and, above them, active nomenklatura members recruited from rank-and-file Party population and assigned to positions of responsibility in the administrative, judicial, military, and economic spheres. The nomenklatura members were divided into those who tended toward professional specialization (especially in industrial management) and those who remained interchangeable universal supervisors, from the Party’s “general secretary” at the center to republican, provincial, and district secretaries throughout the Soviet Union.
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