The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  Most girls and some of the boys took piano classes; a few attended music schools, but most studied with teachers at home. For children under seven, there were several “playground groups” and a “children’s facility” on the top floor of Entryway 7. The facility consisted of a nursery for fifteen to twenty children under the age of two and a boarding kindergarten for fifty to ninety children between the ages of two and seven, with a staff of about twenty-five employees, including a doctor, nurse, two “teaching nurses,” a German teacher, music teacher, eight regular teachers, and a “seamstress/tailor.” In addition to toys, meals, sheets, diapers, towels, and chamber pots, the kindergarten provided a large assortment of children’s clothing, including socks, trunks, mittens, slippers, dresses, garters, galoshes, “day shirts,” nightshirts, undershirts, camisoles, sailor suits, felt boots, winter coats, and masquerade costumes. On days when there was no rain or snow, the children, wrapped in wool blankets, would take their afternoon naps on the roof above Entryway 7. Every summer, the kindergarten was moved to a camp (“colony”) outside of Moscow. All the children received character references that described their “work habits” and status within the group (“she is liked by the collective”).6

  School-age children took chess, tennis, and music classes in the Kalinin Club above the theater. After the club’s closure in 1934, two ground-floor apartments in Entryway 3 were converted into a club for children between the ages of eight and seventeen. It had a billiards room, a small stage with a piano, several classrooms, and a photo lab. The classes included photography, choir, drawing, knitting, sewing, “rhythmic dance,” theater, and “navy.” Most were very crowded; those that grew too large were divided into different age groups. The most popular ones were theater (with regular productions and intense competition for the lead parts) and navy, in which boys and girls were given sailor collars to wear and were taught how to row, march, sing sea chanteys, use flags for signaling, and identify different types of ships. Adolescents staged frequent dance parties, and several boys knew how to play the tango and foxtrot on the piano.7

  Other places where the House children liked to congregate were the shooting gallery in the basement and the “Little Church” vacant lot, also known as the “stinkhole” (voniuchka). But the most important playgrounds and focal points of the House’s collective life were the three courtyards. Or rather, the focal points of the House’s collective life were the children, and the children were mostly in the courtyards. The House of Government was designed as a transitional building that retained old-fashioned family apartments within a growing network of innovative collective services. In practice, and possibly as a sign of things to come, the historical axis (from the individual to the collective) coincided with the generational one (from the old to the young). The adults ignored the collective services almost entirely (especially after the closure of the club)—indeed, they rarely visited each other’s apartments and almost never engaged in traditional neighborly practices such as exchanging gossip and borrowing small household items. The maids, who presided over family economies, tended to be protective of their realms and did not cooperate with each other. The availability of food items and repair services within the building made last-resort appeals to neighbors unnecessary, as well as undesirable. The dominant form of socializing consisted of exchanging greetings on stairs, in elevators, and on paths connecting entryways to outside gates.

  Children by the gate of Courtyard No. 1

  Members of the children’s club in Entryway 3

  Tamara Matiukhina (daughter of the award-winning construction foreman, G. A. Matiukhin, from Apt. 4, where the Tuchins also lived) and Tolia Ronin (Solomon Ronin’s son, from Apt. 55), in the club’s production of La farce de Maître Pathelin

  Courtyard at the House of Government

  To the extent that the House of Government was a common home and not a random collection of individual family cells, it was the children who made it so. And to the extent that the House of Government, like the rest of the Soviet Union, was a children’s world, it was the three courtyards, and not the surrounding apartments, that served as its structural and social pivots. Seen from above and below, the House of Government ensemble consisted of three unequal rectangular spaces bounded by thick protective walls. The boundary was broken in several places (the courtyards were connected to each other and to the street), but, for children under fifteen or so, they represented different worlds. Infantile collectivism was limited by age, gender, and courtyard, with the latter almost as important as the first two. Outside the neutral territory of the club and the Little Church (which also served as a soccer field, volleyball court, and skating rink), most preadolescents played with “their own kind,” or “kids from their courtyard” (that is, from all the entryways that led out into that courtyard). Some games were gender specific: hopscotch, “good luck rocks,” and various jump-rope and small-ball games for girls and soccer and “war” for boys; others were common to both boys and girls, but usually played separately: tag, hide-and-seek, lapta (a traditional Russian bat-and-ball game), “twelve sticks” (a version of hide-and-seek with a home base the “it” player had to protect while searching), and shtander (a version of dodgeball). One of the most popular games was “Cossacks and Robbers,” in which the object of the robbers was to overrun the Cossacks’ headquarters, while the object of the Cossacks was to find out the robbers’ password by torturing their captives, more or less symbolically. Perhaps for the latter reason, it was normally played by boys and girls together.

  Floor plan of the basement

  School-age children (seven and older) were usually allowed to walk to school and around the neighborhood by themselves. The most popular destinations included the House movie theaters (the Shock Worker and, after 1934, the First Children’s, with jazz bands playing in both) and Gorky Park, especially in the winter, when many of the alleys were turned into a labyrinthine skating rink, and loudspeakers played dance music. Also popular was skiing along the Ditch and down the snowbound steps leading from the embankment to the river. Groups of girls often walked along the embankment, holding hands and talking.

  All children were defined by their courtyard origin and, as they grew older, their class in school. The primary units were groups of two-to-four close friends, who spent most of their out-of-school time together. Some individuals might migrate, but core members tended to stay together throughout their school years and beyond. They would join the same classes in the club, team up in courtyard games and on city exploration trips, sit together in school (unless broken up deliberately by the teachers), and spend much of the remaining time in each other’s apartments (with a preference for those with absent or welcoming grown-ups and high-status books and toys)—talking, drawing, developing photographs, listening to the gramophone, reenacting popular books or movies, and doing homework. Teenage girls often went to the theater and opera to watch celebrity performers. The most famous were the Bolshoi tenors Sergei Lemeshev and Ivan Kozlovsky, who had large and well-organized groups of female followers. As fourteen-and fifteen-year-olds, Elena Kraval and her girlfriends would try to catch a glimpse of Lemeshev as he was leaving the theater after his death in the duel in the second act of Eugene Onegin.8

  Skiing on the embankment (from Hubert in Wonderland)

  Age, gender, and courtyard identity could be reinforced or complicated by school alliances. Most groups of friends were informally affiliated with one or two same-age groups of the opposite sex, usually from the same courtyard and school class. Common activities included shtander, skating, Cossacks and Robbers, volleyball at the Little Church, theater productions in the club, and, in later adolescence, dancing and joint trips to movies, art museums, Gorky Park, and beyond. Toward the end of high school, two to four such groups could merge into one kompaniia and eventually split into couples, but that did not usually happen until college, when new kompanii were formed. Until marriage, duos or trios of “best friends” remained the primary cell of social organization.
New college friends might quickly supplant high school ones, lose out to them in the end, or coexist with them as two related clusters or as one merged threesome or foursome.

  Children living in various dorms and tenements in the old Swamp were collectively known as “Tatars.” Girls from these “bedbug hotels” (as Inna Gaister called them) could be incorporated into House of Government social networks via school friendships, but rarely became full-fledged members—because of their visible awe at the wealth they observed, their status as recipients of hand-me-down clothes, and their unwillingness to invite House children to their homes (single rooms in barracks or communal apartments). When such visits did take place, girls from the House tended to express shock at the squalor they found and no wish to see it again. Boys were usually kept apart by the strongly felt need to protect territorial integrity and to prevent dating across the House-Swamp boundary. House boys on their way home from school risked being ambushed and beaten up.9

  Valia and Svetlana Osinsky (center and right) at the dacha

  Dacha life temporarily rearranged some of the children’s social networks without undermining them. Most House of Government families had their dachas along the high (Kremlin) bank of the Moskva, from Serebrianyi Bor in the east (where Yuri and Tania Trifonov lived next to the Podvoiskys, Sverdlovs, Khalatovs, and Morozes, among others) to Nikolina Gora in the west (where House and school friends Inna Gaister, Natasha Kerzhentseva, and Marina Usievich would reunite for the summer). Dacha life was at the sacred center of the House of Government version of the Soviet happy childhood. Like so much else, it was modeled—more or less consciously—on the pastoral descriptions of noble estate life from a previous golden age.10 The Osinsky children—Dima, Svetlana, and Valia—spent their summers in Barvikha, about halfway between Serebrianyi Bor and Nikolina Gora. The future family chronicler was Svetlana:

  The long, happy days of summer. Sometimes you might go outside early, while everyone was still asleep, and the air was chilly, but with the promise of a glorious day ahead. The house was surrounded by sweet-smelling flowers. I might stand by the small bench near the entrance to the woods pondering where to go—down the steep stairway to the river or past the arbor to the far end of our lot where you could play in the sand above the ravine. The thought of the long day ahead that I would invariably spend playing with my brothers and their friends would fill me with a sense of joy….

  We often went to visit our friends in what we called the “Plywood Settlement” near the Razdory train station. We’d form a large group and gather pine cones and play war, tossing them and sometimes painfully hitting the mark (I was actually scared of that game) or play twelve sticks or hide-and-seek. Or the three of us would play by ourselves, not really needing anyone else. We rode our bikes or played in the sand at the edge of the huge ravine on the other side of the fence, building not castles, but entire cities. On Sundays we used to walk in the forest with our mother, who loved gathering huge bouquets of flowers, and never thought she had enough. We would climb tall pine trees and play Indian. Valia used to carve boats and all kinds of small figures out of pine bark. But he liked reading best of all, and most of the time he could be found curled up in some cozy corner devouring his book.11

  Svetlana Osinskaia at the dacha (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

  ■ ■ ■

  In her memoirs, Svetlana described herself as spoiled and endlessly indulged—in part deliberately (“it was evident that my parents loved Valia more and could not help showing it, so my mother, realizing that I knew and sensing the injustice, tried to make up for it by giving me everything I wanted”) and in part because such was the life of the Party elite as it appeared to her in hindsight. She liked sweets and expensive toys, was driven from Barvikha to school in her father’s limo, took exotic foreign paints to her drawing class, and “believed, from an early age, that all people moved around in cars and that public transport existed for fun.” Inna Gaister remembered demanding expensive presents and making the point of wearing her watch to school; Anatoly Granovsky (the son of Mikhail Granovsky, the director of the Berezniki Chemical Works) described his friends as “the heirs of the universe” who exuded the “conviction of personal power as though they had been suckled to it”; and Irina Muklevich remembered sitting at her school desk and looking at her father’s portrait on the wall (while her best friend, Svetlana Tukhachevskaia, was looking at her father’s). According to Irina, she and Svetlana took care to climb out of their fathers’ limos a block or two away from school, but both knew that everyone knew: the portraits were there to prove it, and they did not seem to mind. (Their school, the Moscow Exemplary, was a fifteen-minute walk from the House.) Some House children were not shy about displaying their wealth: Roza Smushkevich, Sonia Radek, and Lelia Kobulova (the daughter of the secret police official, B. Z. Kobulov, who moved into Apt. 8 in Entryway 1 after being transferred to Moscow from Georgia in September 1938) were famous for their dresses and fur coats. According to the award-winning construction foreman’s daughter, Zinaida Tuchina, Rosa was also famous for her mother’s hospitality, which included “both kinds of caviar sandwiches [red and black], all sorts of piroshki and sweet pastry, and apples or some kind of fruit.”12

  In a tacked-on comment at the bottom of a 1935 diary entry, a teacher from School No. 19 on the Sophia Embankment, Vera Shtrom, mentioned that some of the children from the House of Government suffered from “a sense of belonging to the elite and, considering how utterly and unremittingly busy their parents are at work, from total parental neglect.” At a District Party Committee plenum on February 11, 1940, the head of the committee’s education department described the problem as “a great evil”: “The parents spoil their children, free them from all chores at home, and cultivate great selfishness and a great sense of entitlement among their children. Some parents worship their children. For example, in School No. 19, one high official put a car and other luxuries at the disposal of his child. Obviously, the picture that emerges is not a pretty one.” At the same plenum, the director of the First Children’s Movie Theater (the heir to the State New Theater) said that one of his employees had been found guilty of trading tickets for leather gloves, and that some of the children involved “had elements of criminality.”13

  Samuil Moroz, the son of the former Chekist, Grigory Moroz, got into trouble for selling his father’s books and robbing their neighbors’ apartments. Anatoly Ivanov, the son of Boris Ivanov, “the Baker,” was a “hooligan” often detained by the police. Vladimir Rabichev, the son of the director of the Lenin Museum, remembered being “neglected” and “difficult,” learning how to steal, fighting often, and not doing any homework until the eighth grade. And Aron Solts’s adopted son, Zhenia, preferred the company of the “Tatars” to that of the House children and, according to the daughter of Solts’s niece who lived in the same apartment, treated his father “as nothing but a sick old man and a source of income.”14

  Zhenia dropped out of school and soon vanished. But he had always been an outsider. Most House of Government children were not spoiled and difficult, or not spoiled and difficult for very long. Samuil Moroz discovered the joys of reading and mathematics; Anatoly Ivanov went on to Moscow’s most prestigious engineering college (the Bauman Institute); and Vladimir Rabichev started doing his homework, graduated with distinction (with a “red diploma”), and would have become a historian if his father had not persuaded him to become a military journalist. All three were saved by other children: Moroz’s friends spent most of their time talking “about literature, history, and the country’s future,” and Rabichev’s friends demonstrated to him “that studying math and solving geometry problems could be interesting.” (He had always known that history and literature were interesting.) The teacher from School No. 19, Vera Shtrom, made it clear in her diary that most of the children from the House of Government were “talented and interesting,” and that it was “a pleasure working with them.”15

  Most of the children from the House of Go
vernment were happy dwellers in the land of happy childhood. They admired their fathers, respected their seniors, loved their country, and looked forward to improving themselves for the sake of socialism and to building socialism as a means of self-improvement. They were children of the Revolution because they were their fathers’ children, because they were born after the Revolution, and because they were proud of their paternity and determined to carry on what was at once their father’s “profession,” their country’s mission, and history’s secret purpose. (Most of the women assigned to the House of Government because of their own, as opposed to their husbands’, revolutionary service, were childless. Most female Old Bolsheviks had to choose between family and revolution. Most House families were as patrilineal and patriarchal as the Soviet state of which they were a part.)

  But, above all, they were children of the Revolution because they were children of the great construction. Born in the 1920s, they came of age along with socialist realism and Soviet Augustianism. While waiting to grow as big as the age—and waiting for Soviet literature to come of age at the same time—they read Don Quixote, Faust, Robinson Crusoe, and other “treasures of world literature” that combined lyricism and monumentalism, realism and romanticism, and the greatest possible generalizability with enormous inner richness. Growing up amidst this “international constellation of human types,” they measured themselves against them and thought of them as their heroic predecessors and eternal contemporaries. What Faust, the character, had been to the bourgeois age, they, the first truly self-aware generation in history, would be to the age of socialism. And socialism—as well as, by extension, socialist realism—was about “the flourishing of the individual, the enrichment of his inner world, the growth of his self-awareness.”