The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?

  For after all these things do the Gentiles seek: for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.

  But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

  Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.26

  In Alma Ata, after about three weeks of searching, she found a job as an economist in the provincial Department of Internal Trade. Finding a room proved much more difficult. After several days in a hotel, she moved in with an old classmate from the Sverdlov Communist University who was also a fellow exile: “He is a very good person and in complete agreement with me when it comes to politics: firmly and unconditionally for the Party line and absolutely committed to his work, no matter how much time or effort it takes.” About three weeks later, he found her another temporary room with a roommate. The room was cluttered with old books, suitcases, fur coats, and empty bottles, but she embarked on a major “reform program” and was happy with the early results. “What is remarkable is that I find things interesting and, despite the difficult circumstances, eagerly confront life in all its manifestations.” She continued to read newspapers, worry about the situation in Mongolia, and enjoy walks in the Park of Culture and Rest. “Spring in Alma Ata is absolutely wonderful! The rains have ended, but it still hasn’t gotten hot. The blackthorn and cherry trees are already in bloom, and the apple trees are just about to bloom. The air smells as sweet as the air in Crimea in the spring. We’re surrounded by snow-covered mountains and trees. Even as I was running around wildly looking for a job, I was able to enjoy the coming of spring. I saw the movie We Are from Kronstadt. It’s extraordinary. It held me in suspense the whole time. It is excellent and very profound. Now I dream of seeing Chapaev!”27

  The biggest question was whether Rada (who was turning twelve in June) would join her at the end of the school year or two months later, after pioneer camp, and whether Tania would be able to find a permanent room for the two of them. The prospects were not very good, but, as she wrote to her mother, “I steadfastly credo quia absurdum [believe because it is impossible].” Meanwhile, she was developing “a taste for life outside.” “Did I write to you that I have some perfume now? One bottle of ‘Glorious Lilac’ and one of ‘Jasmine.’ I love the ‘Glorious Lilac,’ even though it’s half the price, but I’m not sure about the ‘Jasmine.’ I have to confess that it was not me who bought them. Do send me the crepe de Chine, Mommy dear, with Rada or by mail, although I think I’ll be able to get some clothes here. The comrade I’m living with right now enjoys making dresses and is very good at it. So my Ukrainian shirt is bound to be turned into a dress at some point.”28

  Finally, everything was ready. According to Rada, “in June 1936, they bought me a ticket to Alma Ata, found some people to accompany me, packed my things, and sent a telegram with my itinerary. When they received no reply, they sent an urgent telegram with a prepaid response. The response came back immediately: ‘The addressee no longer resides at this address.’” They heard from Tania about a month later. Rada remembered waking up at night when her grandmother and aunt turned on the light so they could see the map of the Soviet Union hanging over her bed. They were trying to find Nagaeva Bay.29

  Tania had been arrested on June 14 and sentenced to five years in a labor camp. She had been sent by train to Vladivostok and from there, by boat, to Magadan, in Nagaeva Bay. Her first telegram arrived sometime in July:

  My dear ones: My journey is over. I am told that it has never taken place under better weather conditions. I have now sailed on the Pacific Ocean. I spent the whole time on deck—as if I were on a nice tourist excursion, with no hint of seasickness. There were some magic moments—for example, the moonlit night on a barge in Vladivostok Bay (when we were being taken to our ship). Whatever may have happened before and after that night, I will never forget it. Nagaeva Bay is large. It is surrounded by fog-covered mountains. Everything is fine. I can see the city, too. I kiss you, my darlings. Don’t worry about me, everything will be all right. Love, Tania.30

  The first letter was sent on July 18, 1936:

  I have been here for several days, not sure how many: I seem to have lost my ability to count the days. Everything is still temporary and unsettled. We will be living in the club building of the so-called Women’s Detachment until we are moved to the barracks (which are not bad and do not have “alien elements”). I don’t have work yet. The food is not any worse than what I’ve been getting over the last three years, but very monotonous: there are no vegetables at all here. If you are going to send something, send garlic, onions, and, if available, some kind of vitamins, but don’t send a lot until I can start sending money (which I hope to be able to do soon). There’s no scurvy here, the health care is good, and the air is wonderful. In the Women’s Detachment area, we can move around freely. I have not been outside yet, but it is probably a matter of time and work. Right now I am catching up on my sleep after Alma Ata and the trip over here. I always sleep badly when I travel. The trip was good and interesting; I wish it had not ended so soon. To be honest with you, I still haven’t recovered from the shock, and the atmosphere around here is not conducive to concentrated reflection…. But you know I am indestructible, and quite soon I’ll be in good shape again.31

  The second letter, mailed on July 29, was about the continuing uncertainty. She was hoping to get a job as a planning specialist at an auto repair plant. It seemed likely that she would stay in Magadan, the “capital” of Kolyma. This was a very good thing because Magadan had better connection to Moscow and more reliable mail service.

  I don’t know much about life and work in Kolyma yet. In any case, it is not an ordinary camp. In many ways, it is better, freer than most—if only it weren’t so far away…. Mommy dear, from the tone of my letter, so different from my usual letters, you can probably tell that I am still not quite “back to normal.” I won’t lie to you: in spite of the fact that this camp is much freer than most, I am not overjoyed at being here and not exactly moved to repeat my favorite lines:

  I’ll greet the coming days as cups

  Filled to the brim with milk and honey.

  To be honest, I am not so sure about the milk and honey. But I’ll wait and let my natural optimism take over again. It’s bound to somehow, isn’t it, and I’ll be afloat again.32

  The lines are from “Thyl Ulenspiegel,” by Eduard Bagritsky. The poem, about one of the most popular heroes of Soviet happy childhood, ends with the epitaph: “Here lies, in peace, the jolly wanderer, who never learned to cry.”

  In Kolyma, Tania was reunited with Mirra Varshavskaia, her roommate from her exile in Chelkar in 1929. They had been together at the Verkhneuralsk Political Isolator, too, but they had not been on speaking terms there because Mirra had remained in opposition while Tania had embraced the Party line. In Kolyma, those differences had lost their significance.33

  ■ ■ ■

  In the House of Government, disagreements over orthodoxy had lost their significance several years earlier, when open opposition became impossible. Anyone already in prison was guilty irrespective of his or her particular beliefs, past or present. Anyone still in the House of Government was suspect because no one could be trusted. Former oppositionists were guilty by virtue of having been oppositionists. The arrest of Smilga and the other former participants in the 1927 demonstration was followed by the arrest of those who had suppressed that demonstration. Grigory Moroz, who had promised to “snip off the heads” of the Leftists before being unmasked as a Rightist, was arrested on July 3, 1937, at his dacha in Serebrianyi Bor. According to his son, Samuil, who was seventeen at the time, he told his family that it was a misunderstanding and that he would be released once the facts had been established. Two months later, his wife, Fann
i Lvovna Kreindel, was arrested, and his two younger sons, the fourteen-year-old Vladimir and eight-year-old Aleksandr, sent to an orphanage. Samuil was moved from Apt. 39 to Apt. 402, where he was joined by the nineteen-year-old Kolia Demchenko, the son of the people’s commissar of state farms and former Party secretary of Kiev and Kharkov provinces, Nikolai Nesterovich Demchenko (who had been arrested on July 23). Kolia’s eleven-year-old brother, Feliks, had been sent to an orphanage. Kolia and his wife, Tatiana, were still celebrating their honeymoon, provoking “desperate envy” on the part of Samuil. On January 28, 1938, both Samuil and Kolia were arrested.34

  Ten days earlier, Boris Shumiatsky, who had helped Moroz disperse Smilga’s demonstration (and had, since 1930, presided over the Soviet film industry), had been arrested in his House of Government apartment along with his wife, Leah Isaevna. Among his belongings listed by the arresting officers were an eight-cylinder 1936 Ford, a Schröder piano, a General Electric refrigerator, a Latin-script Royal typewriter, a Cyrillic-script Mercedes typewriter, 1,040 books, and portraits of Marx and Lenin. Yakov Agranov, who had presided over the interrogations of both the Left and Right Oppositionists, had been executed ten days earlier.35

  Grigory Moroz with his son Samuil

  The “extraction” campaign had begun to accelerate during the Central Committee plenum of June 1937. On June 17, Sergei Mironov had written to Ezhov asking for the right to issue death sentences “by means of a simplified procedure” and had proposed the creation of special troikas. On June 22, Ezhov had endorsed Mironov’s proposal in a memo to Stalin. On June 23, he had opened the plenum with a report on the total infestation of Soviet institutions with terrorists and spies. Three days later, while the plenum was still in session, the NKVD arrested Deputy People’s Commissar of Agriculture Aron Gaister. According to his secretary, he was summoned to the office of his boss, People’s Commissar Mikhail Chernov, and was never seen again. (Chernov lived in Apt. 190, not far from the Gaister’s Apt. 167.) Gaister’s wife, Rakhil Kaplan, was at work in the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry when her husband’s secretary called to say that their apartment was being searched. Later that night, two NKVD agents drove over to the Gaisters’ dacha in Nikolina Gora to conduct another search. Rakhil accompanied them. Inna Gaister, who was eleven at the time, woke up when two men in military uniforms walked into her bedroom and started breaking the lock on her desk. Several days later, the Gaisters’ dacha and House of Government apartment were sealed. Rakhil was told to move to a four-room apartment on the fourth floor of Entryway 4, which had to be shared with the wife and three children of the recently arrested member of the Committee of Soviet Control, Viktor Karpov. The Gaisters’ children—Inna, seven-year-old Natalia (“Natalka”), and one-year-old Valeria (“Valiushka”)—went to their grandmother’s dacha. On August 30, they moved back to Moscow in time for the beginning of the school year. They were accompanied by their nanny, Natasha. Inna turned twelve that day.

  That night they came for my mother. I woke up right away. Natasha and Valiusha woke up, too. Natalka was still asleep. Mother kept walking through the rooms with me following behind her in my nightshirt. And Natasha followed after me with Valiushka in her arms. We just kept walking like that in single file around the apartment. At some point, Mother needed to go to the bathroom. In the Karpov apartment, the door to the bathroom had a glass window, with a curtain covering it. When Mother went into the bathroom, the NKVD officer told her to open the curtain and stood watching her. When she came out, we resumed our single-file motion.

  I was sobbing the whole time. Mother kept saying: “Don’t worry, sweetie, we’re not guilty of anything. Daddy and I are not guilty of anything. I’ll be back soon.” At about 5 a.m. they took her away. I remember hearing some kind of noises on the stairs the whole time. My mother must not have been the only one to be picked up that night.36

  Inna’s friend, Svetlana Khalatova, returned to Moscow at about the same time. Her father, the former director of the State Publishing House and most recently chairman of the All-Union Society of Inventors, Artemy Khalatov, had been arrested on the same day as Aron Gaister. His wife (Svetlana’s mother) was arrested shortly afterward. Svetlana had been in the Artek Young Pioneer Camp in Crimea. When she came back to Moscow, her grandmother told her that her parents had gone to Leningrad, but when they arrived at the House of Government, Inna Gaister, who was playing hopscotch outside, ran up to Svetlana and said: “The same thing happened to you as to us!” Svetlana and her grandmother were transferred to a three-room apartment that they had to share with the younger brother and two children of the head of the Mobilization Department of the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry, Ivan Pavlunovsky, who had been arrested one day after Khalatov and Gaister, and the family of Gaister’s former boss, Mikhail Chernov, who had been arrested on November 7. The Khalatovs and the Pavlunovskys had been neighbors in Entryway 12. Before being assigned to the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry, Pavlunovsky had served as the OGPU plenipotentiary in Siberia and the Caucasus. In Siberia, he had claimed to uncover a counterrevolutionary military organization consisting of White officers, SRs, and kulaks. Pavlunovsky’s success had served as a model for Sergei Mironov’s discovery of the White-SR-kulak alliance within the “Russian All-Military Union.” Mironov’s success had served as a model for Ezhov’s USSR-wide campaign unveiled on June 23, four days before Pavlunovsky’s arrest.37

  Rakhil Kaplan’s arrest photographs (Courtesy of Inna Gaister)

  Inna, Valeria (Valiushka), and Natalia (Natalka) Gaister after their parents’ arrest (photograph they had made to send to their mother in the camp) (Courtesy of Inna Gaister)

  ■ ■ ■

  The day Gaister and Khalatov were arrested, Arosev returned to Moscow from Leningrad. He had been feeling increasingly isolated and mistrusted. “The time we live in is extraordinarily frightening,” he wrote in his diary on August 13, 1936. “Nobody trusts anybody, and even the very principle of a need for trust has been shaken. They are trying to replace trust with cunning. Everyone is afraid of everyone, everyone wears a frown. No one talks about what matters.” Arosev’s response—the same as Bukharin’s—was to prove himself to history by appealing to chosen individuals. He wrote to Stalin: “I feel depressed because of the coldness and even mistrust that I sense around me. If I have done something wrong, there are two ways of dealing with me: either teach me, lift me up, give me more responsibility and more exciting, useful work, or cast me aside and let me look for new paths in a distant world” (by “distant world” he meant his life in art and, in particular, his “historical-psychological” chronicle of the Revolution). He wrote to Voroshilov: “From you, and only from you, I have always seen deep understanding and, most important, intelligent human kindness. It is not only my personal impression, but the feeling shared by everyone who has been in contact with you, directly or indirectly. That is why the affection that I, and the whole nation, have for you is suffused with a profound personal emotion.” He kept trying to talk to Molotov, whose biography he was writing. He kept calling Ezhov, who, according to an entry in his diary, received him on at least one occasion (May 8, 1935):38

  He seemed utterly exhausted: disheveled, pale, a feverish gleam in his eyes, swollen veins in his thin hands. It’s obvious that his work is more than he can take. His khaki tunic was unbuttoned. His secretary kept calling him “Kolia.” She’s a plump, cheerful, aging woman with a teasing manner.

  Ezhov looked at me sharply. I told him about VOKS’s “orphanhood.” He understood right away. Also understood about American Institute and immediately set things in motion. About wife’s trip abroad: agreed right away. Promised to help with apartment, too.39

  Arosev knew that the general mistrust was justified. The last part of his tetralogy (Winter) was going to be about “the falling off of the de facto alien elements more interested in the process of the revolution than in its results. Trotskyites, Zinovievites. etc.” On August 22, 1936, he wrote in his diary
:

  The 19th, 20th, 21st, and today: can’t stop thinking about the case of Kamenev, Zinoviev, and the others. The Russian revolutionary movement has always contained demons as well as pure idealists. Degaev was a demon, Nechaev was a demon, Malinovsky was a demon, Bogrov was a demon. Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Trotsky are demons. They are morally sick. They have a hole in place of moral fiber.

  Politics is not the same as ethics, but each politician has and must have moral principles. “Demons” do not have them; they have only politics.

  Sent a letter to Kaganovich the other day: about trust and about help with my application to go abroad.40

  In his letter to Kaganovich, he wrote that he and his wife needed to spend a month-and-a-half abroad for health reasons. “I have written all this with the utmost sincerity and leave it up to your judgment,” he concluded. “If you find it possible and expedient to help, please do. With sincere respect, yours, faithfully.” Kaganovich (who had been left in charge while Stalin was on vacation) was busy determining the degree of Bukharin’s insincerity. He had no way of knowing whether Arosev was also a demon. The permission was not granted.41

  On November 6, Arosev’s courier arrived at the People’s Commissariat of External Affairs to pick up passes to the Revolution Day parade but was told there were none left. Arosev wrote to Litvinov and Ezhov reminding them that he had been one of the leaders of the October insurrection in Moscow and asking them to investigate the reason for the snub. (He watched the parade from his House of Government balcony.) On December, 19, Pravda published a short notice about Arosev’s recently printed memoir, October, 1917 (written in 1920). Titled “Advertising for the Enemy,” it asked why Arosev had chosen to end his account with a mention of Tomsky. “Why such touching ‘concern’ for a man who fought against the Party in the ranks of its most vicious enemies?” In a response published in Pravda ten days later (possibly thanks to Molotov, whom he had asked to intercede in his behalf), he admitted that the mention of Tomsky had been a mistake but defended the rest of the memoir as sincere and accurate.42