The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  He believed that he was being followed. According to Voronsky’s daughter, Galina Voronskaia, “once, during those months, my father ran into his old friend, A. Arosev …, who pointed to a man standing nearby. Arosev and my father were both veterans of the Bolshevik underground and were quite good at spotting spies. My father said that the man was probably watching him, but Arosev disagreed, saying that he had first noticed that he was being followed several days earlier.” He had recorded it in his diary. December 20: “Went for a walk in the morning. Followed by spies. At least one on every corner.” December 21: “In the morning went for a walk. Spies chasing at my heels. It must seem odd to them for a man to be out just for a walk.” He wrote to the Politburo about the constant feeling of being “under assault by something unjust or mistaken” and to tell them about his plan to write a novel about enemies of the people “in the form of interrogation transcripts.” He wrote to Stalin on the occasion of Ordzhonikidze’s death:

  Perhaps the reason I was so shocked by the news and moved to write to you, of all people, is that I talked to Sergo Ordzhonikidze on two occasions, both at moments of crisis, and met with the deep and, above all, warm understanding that only he was capable of—and that you, dear Iosif Vissarionovich, possess to an enormous degree.

  The feeling of loss is painful and acute. It is within me, reaching out to you. For me, for all of us, Sergo was an example and an object of awe; for you, a comrade in arms closer than a brother.

  Iosif Vissarionovich, please accept these lines as the sound of my heart, a spasm in my throat rather than words. Yours, Aleksandr Arosev.43

  Perhaps Stalin was the only one left. According to Arosev’s diary, Voroshilov, Ezhov, and Kaganovich were too busy and possibly incapable of a deep and warm understanding. Molotov was becoming increasingly aloof. The world of fraternal comradeship had turned into a Hobbesian state of nature. “I can’t remember the last time I heard anyone say anything good, or, at least, not entirely bad, about someone else. When people talk about someone else, they look as if they were chewing and gnawing at a bleeding body. During such conversations, even their mouth movements are repulsive, rodent-like.” Arosev was accused of haughtiness and asked to engage in “self-criticism.”44 On March 21, he spoke at a district meeting of Party activists and then wrote down his impressions in his diary:

  They shouted angrily, bared their teeth, asked rude questions—let themselves go and seemed happy to be beating up on an Old Bolshevik.

  I responded to every comment, not repenting at all (except to take responsibility for the fact that VOKS had employed some Trotskyites). I concluded by saying that I consider it my duty to tell the truth, whether they like it or not.

  No one clapped. Stasova and Yagoda’s deputy Prokofiev were there. There was a deathly silence as I walked off the stage. I suddenly felt a chill, as if I were among people from a different social class. I thought of Esenin’s “I am a foreigner in my own land.”45

  His daughters disliked their stepmother Gertrude (“Gera”), and she disliked him and his daughters. “My wife has locked herself in her apartment and says she wants a separation. Meanwhile, we are facing much greater tragedies than family troubles. Should we let them deprive us of the chance to at least talk to each other and perhaps make it easier to bear the sense of approaching catastrophe?”46 On April 15, he was getting ready to leave for Leningrad:

  For several days now, Gera has been refusing to talk to me, coming to my apartment for lunch as if to a restaurant. Yesterday morning I broke the silence. She expressed complete indifference, said she was now fine, feeling better, and did not care at all what I thought or did. She spoke in short sentences, and looked at me as if I were an old, discarded piece of furniture.…

  When I asked: “So, does this mean the end? Does it mean we’re free?” she responded: “What else did you think? Of course we’re free.” …

  Just as I was about to leave for the station, Gera walked in—cold and malicious, as always, without a word of greeting, her eyes like ice. The room suddenly turned arctic.

  She had come to look for the key to her apartment. After finding it, she disappeared without a word. I walked over to her apartment to say goodbye. With a smile like the ones you sometimes see on corpses, she held out her dry hand and shook mine. Then I left.47

  Aleksandr Arosev, Gertrude Freund, and their son, Mitia, in spring 1937

  They continued to live together. In early summer 1937, Arosev, Gera, their two-year-old son Mitia, and Arosev’s fourteen-year-old daughter Lena went to Sestroretsk, on the Gulf of Finland. (Seventeen-year-old Natalia lived with her mother, and eleven-year-old Olga was in a pioneer camp.) They stopped briefly in Leningrad on the way, and Arosev left his diaries with his sister, Augusta, who hid them at the bottom of a basket filled with firewood.48 Lena’s account begins in Sestroretsk on June 26, one day before Gaister’s and Khalatov’s arrests:

  One evening there was a knock on the door. Two young men in military uniform walked in, one of them a sailor. They said they had come for Gertrude and that they had an arrest order for her. Gera started to cry. My father got angry and said he would not let her go without him. They said it wasn’t allowed, so he told them they would have to wait and ordered a car from the VOKS Leningrad office.

  To my surprise, they agreed. This was followed by a strange, unnatural pause. It felt as if life had stopped, or rather, as if a fragment had been edited out of a movie. This went on for quite a while. Finally, we heard a car honk. My father and Gera began to say goodbye. They stood huddled against each other. They were not embracing, but just stood there not moving. Maybe they were silently telling each other something, or perhaps promising … I don’t know. They were saying goodbye. Suddenly Gera started and turned to walk to the bedroom to say goodbye to her son. She stopped and looked back … and I saw her face. I will never forget the look on her face as long as I live. It was pure, indescribable agony. She said softly in German: “No, I cannot do it. Lord, why do you send me such trials?” The two came up on either side and led her away, already under arrest. My father went after them, and I was left alone.

  The next morning Arosev and Lena left for Moscow. From the railway station they went straight to the House of Government.

  My father spent a long time walking through the rooms, pondering something, and then came up to me and said: “When they come and ring the doorbell, don’t open the door for them.” I was surprised: “What do you mean? They’ll break it down anyway.” “Yes, of course, but we’ll gain a little time.” I have no idea what he intended to do: I couldn’t imagine then, and I can’t now….

  My father kept pacing around the room and even tried to joke: “I’ve escaped from exile and prison so many times, but there’s no escaping this place. Why did I have to choose an apartment on the tenth floor? I can’t even jump out a window, it’s so high.” He kept trying to reach Molotov, but whoever answered would either hang up or breathe into the receiver without speaking. My father kept saying: “Viacha, I know it’s you, I can hear you breathing, please say something, tell me what to do!” Finally, after one of these calls, Molotov wheezed into the phone: “See that the children are taken care of,” and hung up. My father said: “So this is the end,” and took me, Mitia, and the nanny to our dacha in Nikolina Gora. There, after lunch, he lay down on the little couch on the terrace, took off his jacket, and covered his face and chest with it. I sat down next to him and refused to budge. Perhaps I sensed that I would never see him again. Finally, he stood up and got ready to leave. We said goodbye. Then he kissed me and said: “Lena, dear, don’t worry, I’ll be back in the morning. For now, you’re in charge. Take care of Mitia.”49

  According to Arosev’s secretary, he summoned his limousine, went to see Ezhov at the Lubyanka, and never came back. He was sentenced to death twice: the first time, on November 1, by Molotov, Stalin, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and Zhdanov, as part of a Category 1 list that contained 292 names of former high officials, and, the second, on Novemb
er 22, by Stalin and Molotov. The sentence was not formalized by Ulrikh’s collegium until February 8, 1938. He was shot two days later. Gera had been shot two months before.50

  ■ ■ ■

  Arosev’s commander during the October uprising in Moscow, Arkady Rozengolts, had since lost his ability to walk through walls. He was arrested on October 7, 1937. His wife was arrested two weeks later. Their two daughters, ages four and six, were adopted by their maternal grandmother.

  Another participant in the Moscow uprising, Osip Piatnitsky, was told at the June plenum that he had lost the Party’s trust. His closest Comintern colleagues, Vilgelm Knorin (Wilhelms Knorins, from Apt. 61) and Béla Kun, were arrested during the plenum and soon started testifying against him. Piatnitsky remained in his House of Government study, pacing up and down in his socks. His wife, Yulia, kept a diary. “I really wanted to die. I suggested it to him (the two of us together), knowing it was wrong. He categorically refused, saying that he was as pure before the Party as the first snow and that he couldn’t leave without first removing the stain against him.” He kept calling Ezhov, asking to be allowed to see his accusers. On the night of July 2, he was summoned to Frinovsky’s office for a formal confrontation. “I kept thinking about his sufferings and lay down in his study to wait for him. Finally, at 3 a.m., he came back. He was utterly exhausted and unhappy. All he said was ‘Things are very bad, Yulia.’ He asked for some water, and I left him.” On July 6, Osip and Yulia went for a long walk around their dacha in Serebrianyi Bor. According to Yulia, it was a “gray, rainy day.” She told him that life for a Bolshevik would be impossible after that, even if he were exonerated. “He asked me not to talk that way. He said, very earnestly and deliberately: ‘After such words, Yulia, it would, indeed, be better for me to shoot myself, but right now it’s out of the question.’”51 They dropped in on their dacha neighbor, the director of the Special Technology Plant of the Commissariat of Defense Industry, Ilya (Ilko) Tsivtsivadze:

  Aron Piatnitsky

  Yulia Piatnitskaia

  Ilko looked completely green, with bluish lips and tears in his eyes.

  In a quiet, trembling voice, he said: “Yesterday I was expelled from the Party.” He told us how it happened.

  Piatnitsky was truly something to see. He forgot himself and became just a comrade: he urged Ilko not to torment himself so, comforted him, and offered advice. They parted beautifully. Ilko, shaken and unhappy, gave him his hand. Piatnitsky said: “Think of the things we have done and gone through for the sake of the Party. If the Party requires a sacrifice, no matter how hard, I will bear it all joyfully.”

  Was he saying this to comfort Ilko or to sanctify his own last, difficult journey? I do not know … only the tears were choking me, and no one could have been holier or more beautiful to me at that moment than that man.52

  The next day, on July 7, Yulia went to work. (She worked as an engineer in a design bureau.) As Yulia wrote in her diary, when Piatnitsky’s chauffeur brought her back to the dacha, he told her that the car would not be available the following day. “That’s when I understood that the arrest would take place very soon. I did not tell Piatnitsky about it, and we ate in oppressive silence. Piatnitsky had become a shadow of his former self and had lost half his weight. I did not act at all sentimental toward him: those last few days there was something special and otherworldly about him. He and I never discussed mundane things (everyday chores and ordinary feelings), in any case.” Their sixteen-year-old son Igor was with them at the dacha. Twelve-year-old Vladimir was at the Artek Young Pioneer Camp (with Svetlana Khalatova, among others).53

  Piatnitsky and his son Vladimir (next to him, in the first row) with dacha neighbors

  That night several NKVD agents came to arrest Piatnitsky. “Before I could rise, a tall, pale, angry man ran into the room and when I tried to get up from the bed to get my robe that was hanging in the wardrobe, he grabbed me hard by the shoulder and pushed me back toward the bed and away from the wardrobe. He handed me the robe and pushed me out into the living room. I said: ‘So, the black ravens have come. Bastards.’ I repeated the word ‘bastards’ several times.” One of the agents heard Yulia and told her that Soviet citizens did not speak to state officials that way. She kept trembling. “There were moments or perhaps seconds, I’m not sure, when I was not aware of what was going on around me, but then I would come to again … and think that I would never see him again, and get this terrible feeling of helplessness and of the saintliness of his life, his unstinting devotion to the cause of the working class, and here were these people—young, rude, shoving me around …”

  Piatnitsky came up to me and said: “Yulia, I had to apologize to them for your behavior. Please be reasonable.” I decided not to upset him and immediately apologized to the “man.” He extended his hand to me, but I did not look at him. I took Piatnitsky’s two hands in mine but did not speak to him. That was our farewell. I wanted to kiss the footprints he had left behind.

  I decided to wait … to try to be strong. Igor had not come back yet.

  Finally, Igor came. He immediately understood everything. I told him that his father had been taken away and asked him to sleep in his father’s room, but he went upstairs to his own room. I did not get any sleep that night. I don’t know who did. I wanted desperately to die.54

  Car in Courtyard No. 1

  The family—Igor, Yulia, her father (the former priest, whom everyone called “Grandpa”), his second wife, and their daughter—were told to leave their dacha and move from Apt. 400 to Radek’s old apartment in the House. It was very hot, so they kept the windows open and could hear the loud knocking of the pump in the river below (the Big Stone Bridge was about to be moved a few hundred meters to the north). Yulia kept smelling something odd. “I’ve discovered that grief has a certain smell. Igor and I have the same smell, both our bodies and our hair, even though I take a bath every day. Yesterday I even scented the room, but then Grandma came in with her cigarette. She wanted to iron Grandpa’s old, torn pillowcases, while he was taking his bath. Igor was ironing his sheets.”55

  ■ ■ ■

  On July 3, the day Arosev was arrested and Piatnitsky returned home from his confrontation, the Politburo had sent out its letter “On Anti-Soviet Elements,” which extended the “extraction” campaign from the former oppositionists and state officials to “kulaks,” “criminals,” and “others.” The arrests began to spread from the House of Government leaseholders and their immediate relatives to the families of the nannies, guards, laundresses, floor-polishers, and stairway cleaners. The German and Polish national operations, launched on July 25 and August 11, added a large new contingent to the target lists, both inside and outside the House. One such person was the former representative of the Communist Party of Poland at the Comintern, Vatslav Bogutsky (Waclaw Bogucki, Apt. 342), whose reaction to the news about Kirov’s assassination had made such a strong impression on his son, Vladimir. Bogutsky was arrested on September 2. Vladimir was sent to an orphanage.56

  On August 15, Ezhov issued Order No. 00486, mandating the arrest and imprisonment of the “wives of traitors to the motherland” and “those of their children over fifteen years of age who are socially dangerous and capable of engaging in anti-Soviet activities.” The women were to be sentenced to five to eight years in special camps; the socially dangerous children, to various terms in camps, “correctional labor colonies,” or “special-regime orphanages” (“depending on age, degree of danger, and likelihood of rehabilitation”). Children under fifteen were to be placed in regular orphanages; children over fifteen, in orphanages, schools, or workplaces. Adult relatives wishing to “provide full support to the orphans left behind” were “not to be prevented from doing so.”57

  Most wives and children of arrested House of Government leaseholders—including Moroz’s, Trifonov’s, Gaister’s, Khalatov’s, Voronsky’s, Shumiatsky’s, Piatnitsky’s, and Bogutsky’s—were removed from the House of Government in accordance with this l
aw. Anna Larina was exiled to Astrakhan in June 1937 and then arrested and sent to a camp on September 20; her son was sent to an orphanage. Bukharin’s first wife, Nadezhda Lukina, was arrested in their House of Government apartment on April 30, 1938 (and shot two years later). In Astrakhan, Larina had met the wives and children of the recently executed Tukhachevsky and Yakir. She had also seen Radek’s wife, Roza Mavrikievna, but refused to talk to her because of Radek’s testimony against Bukharin. When both were arrested a month later, Larina received a note from Roza, which said: “Believe me, with N.I. it will all be the same—a trial and false confessions.” In the camp, Larina became friends with Sofia Mikhailovna Averbakh (Sverdlov’s sister, Leopold Averbakh’s mother, and Genrikh Yagoda’s mother-in-law), who had been given permission to write to her eight-year-old grandson, Genrikh (“Garik”) at the orphanage he had been sent to. According to Larina, he responded twice. The first letter said: “Dear Grandma, again I didn’t die! You’re the only one I’ve got in the world, and I’m the only one you’ve got. If I don’t die, when I get big, and you’re already very, very old, I’ll work and take care of you. Your Garik.” The second said: “Dear Grandma, I didn’t die this time, either. I don’t mean the time I already wrote you about. I keep on not dying. Your grandson.”58