The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  Some relief was provided by the trial of Bukharin, Rykov, and other enemies. They were the ones “who had sowed mistrust, hostility, slander, and cruelty.” Their unmasking and destruction would make it “easier to breathe.” On March 3, the day Koltsov’s article about the pack of bloodhounds came out, Yulia stayed home all day:

  I have used up all my physical strength. During the day, while I was alone in the apartment (Grandma had brought me the newspaper), I suddenly woke up with a stomach cramp. Without quite realizing it, I had broken into a “dance of joy” at the decisive routing of those “beasts.” To think that I used to respect some of them, although Piatnitsky had warned me about B. and what a scumbag he was. He told me about how he had sat on the floor in their midst, unshaven and clad in some old suit, and that no one had said hello to him. They already viewed him as a stinking corpse. And now he has turned out to be even more frightening, more treacherous than anybody could have imagined. “Death” is too easy a punishment for them, but the working people should not have to breathe the same air as them. Oh Piatnitsky, you cannot be with them, my heart refuses to accept it.

  If it must be, if they haven’t withdrawn their accusations against you, then I will adopt the official view in all of my dealings with you and will never be near you, but I cannot think of you as a liar before the Party or a counterrevolutionary. But if it turns out to be true, can I remain among free Soviet citizens? And die? At a time when the dark forces are rising against us, when the last and perhaps decisive battle is coming, and soviets are being formed in other countries? And leave my children behind? I feel like I can’t sleep, don’t want to see anyone, don’t want to move. It frightens me to be wearing Piatnitsky’s slippers (flat ones with no heels), and I feel really sick to my stomach after my dance. This was the first time my body has been inspired by anything since Piatnitsky’s arrest.26

  Yulia and Vova followed the trial in the newspapers. Vova read the transcripts every day after school. He asked his mother how the murderers had prepared poison and told her that he thought Koltsov’s description of Krestinsky’s attempt to retract his testimony was very funny. (“In a brilliant display of cross-questioning, the public prosecutor Comrade Vyshinsky corners the mangy Trotskyite rat. Its squeaking is growing more confused.”) They spent their evenings reading Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island aloud.27 On March 13, the sentences were announced.

  Today at 4 p.m. they will be liquidated—these terrible villains of our land. They managed to weave such a vast and intricate web that even those who hate them as much as Comrade Ezhov hates them and as much as every honest and conscientious citizen of our country hates them have been caught up in it. In addition to the colossal material damage, they have inflicted moral wounds on us. So much remains to be untangled, pondered, destroyed, cured, and neutralized in time, and among them there is, of course, some of the “living flesh” of Lenin’s and Stalin’s Party, whose suffering has been immeasurable, even though I have only a dim understanding of it. Who will pay for it? Who will give back the lost months of my life, the possibility of working shoulder to shoulder with my comrades at such a time? Who will make up for this unmarried loneliness? Their disgraceful, vile blood is too small a price for all the grief felt by the Party and by all those who have some feeling left, for the suffering of those innocent people who have been removed from society, people who have given everything for the revolution, every drop of their strength, not realizing that there existed such two-legged monsters, such cretins who were so good at dissembling. I do not know of a more terrible creature than Bukharin, it is hard for me to express what I feel. Now they will be destroyed, but my hatred will not be diminished. I would like a terrible punishment for them—we could put them in cages built especially for them in a museum, labeled ‘counterrevolutionaries,’ and take care of them as if they were rare specimens. That would be terrible for them: citizens would come and look at them the way you look at animals. Hatred for them would never die, and they would be forced to see how we fight for a happy life, how united we are in our struggle, how much we love those of our leaders who remain true, how we triumph over fascism while they sit around idle, being fed like animals and not being considered human…. I curse you all, curse you for eternity.28

  On March 9, she went to see the chief military prosecutor, Naum Rozovsky. She was nervous and, according to her diary, “spoke unintelligently and said all the wrong things.” So did the prosecutor:

  Comrade Rozovsky is also exhausted, he screamed at me angrily, with great emotion. I even felt sorry for him, for I only subsist while he works, and such a hard job it is, too. Oh how dear they are to me, how I wish they could trust me! I would happily give my life for something useful, but coming from me it must sound untrue…. I know that the best thing for me is death. But then again, it’s probably wrong for me to kill myself. What did I feel in Rozovsky’s office? One should always rise above one’s private interests—always, but especially in my state, when I have and will have nothing, so I must find work I can live for.29

  Such work could be found. She needed the NKVD in order to find out what had happened to her husband and son; she admired the NKVD for the difficult work they were doing; and she needed the NKVD’s trust in order to resolve her doubts. Working for the NKVD might be the best, and perhaps the only, way to become whole again. On April, 14, she went to see Rozovsky again:

  I spoke of my intention of putting myself at the disposal of the NKVD and military organs. He told me that I should express this wish in writing and not be shy about being long-winded, so that I could make myself completely clear. He did not promise anything concrete, but he did promise to try to help me. The letter must be handed to Medvedev. He must have been as humane with me as his position allowed. I could tell that he was exhausted and that he truly cared. I shook his hand firmly, although perhaps that was excessive sentimentality, which I keep trying to overcome, but when I saw in him a person who was doing a job that was difficult yet so necessary at this time, I wanted to express my admiration for those comrades, my heartfelt kinship with those who are uprooting all kinds of scum from our Party.30

  It did not work. Next time she saw Rozovsky, he was cold and indifferent. She began to doubt the one thing that had seemed solid:

  The most frightening thing within me is the growing distrust for the quality of people who conduct investigations and have the right to arrest. Of course, I realize that Ezhov and some others, both top-level and low-level officials, are wonderful, genuine people who are doing extraordinarily difficult work, but the majority—they are also doing difficult work, but as stupid and petty people capable of meanness. It’s a shame I feel this way, but the facts (the things I have experienced myself, things I have seen, as single strokes here and there, things I happen to have heard from other people standing in prison lines) make it impossible to feel differently.31

  She tried to talk to different people, but they would not listen. Some laughed at her. She used to have Piatnitsky to talk to, but he was not there anymore and might or might not be the reason for the silence that surrounded her. The last entry in her diary, under May 28, 1938, is: “I used to talk his ear off, but I never needed anyone else to talk to, and I still won’t, except perhaps to someone from the NKVD. In spite of everything, I feel closer to them.”32

  Several weeks later she got a job as an engineer at a hydroelectric power plant in Kandalaksha, on the White Sea. She took Vova with her. On October 27, 1938, she was arrested for telling an NKVD informer that her husband was innocent. Her diary was used as evidence against her. She was sentenced to five years in a labor camp and sent to the Dolinsky Camp in Kazakhstan, where she saw Igor. Vova ran away to Moscow and was taken in by the family of his friend, Zhenia Loginov, from Apt. 89. After three months of living with the Loginovs, Vova overheard one of them say that his stay was causing Zhenia’s father problems at work, so he went to the Executive Committee of the Moscow City Council and was sent to an orphanage.33

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  According to the grown-up Vladimir Piatnitsky, Zhenia Loginov’s father worked in Stalin’s secretariat. The Loginovs’ act—taking in the enemy’s progeny—was uncommon but not unheard of. But most “family members of traitors to the motherland” (as they were described in Order No. 00486) were helped by other family members. And most families’ central figure—not targeted by the mass operations and not questioning the duty to help—was the grandmother. Svetlana Osinskaia’s maternal grandmother, Ekaterina Nartsissovna Smirnova, was not unusual:

  She was quiet, but firm and unflappable. Short, with soft gray hair cozily pinned back with horn hairpins, she wore long, dark skirts and buttoned-up blouses with a tie or bow at the collar and a small brooch with tiny pearls. Several letters from my grandmother to my mother that I have kept suggest that she was a person of great integrity. Her letters are plain: she talks unaffectedly about her health and simple chores, but her dignity comes through clearly. Those traits of hers bordered on coldness. She was never openly affectionate with us or particularly curious, and never singled anyone out. With the calm of a self-confident and deliberate person, she made jams at the dacha, provoking my great admiration for her ability to remove cherry pits by means of a hairpin, mended clothes, and made wonderful toys for New Year’s: a tiny little chest with blue silk lining, a small leather bag stuffed with candy, and little dolls in bright dresses. Spared miraculously by life’s upheavals, they stayed with me for a very long time. When my parents were arrested, she did not become frightened, but came over the morning after my father’s arrest and stayed with my mother until she was arrested. After that, she came over almost every day and did her best, along with several other people, so that we could go on with our normal lives.34

  Ekaterina Nartsissovna Smirnova (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

  She did eventually take Svetlana (who was twelve), Rem (fourteen), and Valia (fifteen) to an orphanage—she lived with her niece in a twelve-meter room in a communal apartment—but she remained the center of the truncated family and regularly sent news, food, and money to her daughter and grandchildren. The same was true of Arkady Rozengolts’s mother-in-law, who took care of her grandchildren until the war made it impossible. Many children, including Inna, Natalia, and Valentina Gaister, Yuri and Tania Trifonov, and Rada Poloz (Tania Miagkova’s daughter), were raised by their grandmothers—all of whom were described as dry, unsentimental, and unquestioningly devoted. The fact that two of the three—Tatiana Aleksandrovna Slovatinskaia and Feoktista Yakovlevna Miagkova—were orthodox Bolshevik sectarians does not seem to have diminished their family loyalty. The fact that their families were punished for unexplained reasons does not seem to have diminished their Bolshevik orthodoxy. The two sets of loyalties—shared by their children, instilled in their grandchildren, and maintained painstakingly to the end of their lives—were connected to each other by silence.

  Uncles and aunts—the brothers and sisters of arrested enemies—had a more difficult choice to make. They were vulnerable to arrest and had reason to believe that associating with a contaminated relative might increase the risk. Some had children of their own, to whom they owed primary loyalty. Some were members of the Party, to which they owed primary loyalty (and from which they expected extra scrutiny and harsher punishments). Some were both parents and Party members.

  The children of the people’s commissar of the food industry, Abram Gilinsky, twelve-year-old Nelly and two-year-old Tania, were sent to an orphanage, but Nelly refused to cooperate (“breaking windows, rolling on the floor”), until the principal informed her aunt (her mother’s sister, Lydia Mefodievna Stechkina). When the aunt arrived, she asked the principal what would happen to her and her husband, both Party members, if they adopted the two girls. The principal said (accurately, according to Order No. 00486) that there would be no negative consequences, and the aunt took them back with her. The six of them—Nelly and Tania, their aunt and uncle, and their aunt’s grown-up adopted daughter and her husband—shared two rooms in a communal apartment. Nelly and Tania were to call their aunt and uncle “mom” and “dad.” A month later, the uncle, Vasily Stepanovich Kraiushkin, was arrested. The aunt went on to become the girls’ adoptive mother. (Their mother died in exile in 1949.) Their half-brother, the nineteen-year-old David (Gilinsky’s son from a previous marriage) became “like a father” to them. Gilinsky’s three brothers, who lived in Leningrad, helped out the best they could.35

  When the deputy commissar of the defense industry, Romuald Muklevich, returned home to Apt. 334 after the arrest of his wife, Anna (head of supplies at the State Planning Committee), he was visited by his brother-in-law and old Civil War comrade, the director of the Aviation House, Matvei Yakovlevich Sheiniuk. Muklevich’s daughter, Irina, heard her uncle say that, if Muklevich was arrested, he would take Irina to live with him and take care of her as long as he lived. After Muklevich’s arrest, he did take her to live with him. Several months later, he, too, was arrested, and Irina was raised by her aunt and grandmother.36

  Was Sheiniuk arrested because of his loyalty to the Muklevichs? No one knew for sure, but it made sense to assume a connection. When the people’s commissar of state farms, N. N. Demchenko, and his wife, Mirra Abramovna, were arrested, their eldest son, nineteen-year-old Kolia, talked his uncle into sheltering his eleven-year-old brother Feliks (named after the founder of the Cheka). When he next came to visit, his uncle opened the door without undoing the chain and told him through the crack that, in order to sever all links with the enemies of the people, he had taken Feliks to an orphanage. At the orphanage, Kolia was told that he was not in a position to adopt his brother. In order to qualify, Kolia married his girlfriend, Tatiana, thereby provoking the “desperate envy” of his roommate, Samuil Moroz. A week later, both Kolia and Samuil were arrested.37

  Inna Gaister’s Uncle Veniamin (a researcher at the Institute of World Economy and International Politics), attempted to cut off all contact with his arrested relatives, but was seemingly left with no choice but to take in his mother, who was visiting from Poland, after three of his sisters (Lipa, Adassa, and Inna’s mother, Rakhil) were arrested. Their twenty-year-old brother Lyova was a student at the Bauman Institute at the time. As Inna wrote in her memoirs,

  After my mother and Lipa were arrested, Grandma Gita went to live with Adassa. After Adassa was taken to prison, her son Veniamin took her in. Sometime in early December, Elochka, Aunt Lipa’s daughter, came home from school one day to find Grandma Gita sitting on the stairs in front of their apartment. Veniamin, without warning Niuma (Lipa’s husband) or Lyova, had brought her there and left her by the locked door. Grandma moved in with them. I would often see her there. She was no longer the same proud and happy Grandma I had seen arrive from Poland. I can still picture her with her red wig all twisted round and her bun hanging over her ear. She could not understand why her children had been imprisoned. She kept pacing up and down the apartment, intoning: “It’s all my fault. I have brought grief to my children. I must return home immediately. As soon as I leave, things will get better again.” She was saying all this in Yiddish. Of course, Elochka and I did not understand a word of Yiddish, so Lyova had to translate for us.38

  Inna’s mother, Rakhil Kaplan, had been sent to the Akmolinsk Camp for Family Members of Traitors to the Motherland in Kazakhstan. One of her letters contained a note to Veniamin, in which she asked him to take care of her children. “After what had happened with Grandma Gita, I did not want to go to Veniamin. But Niuma and Lyova talked me into taking the note to him, and so Lyova and I went over to his place. He and Sarra were home. They took my mother’s note and went into his study. Then Sarra came out and said: ‘Go away and never come back.’ Veniamin did not come out. Lyova and I left without saying a word. That did not save Veniamin from prison, however.”39

  Dima Osinsky’s wife, Dina, was being exiled to Kharkov, which meant that his younger siblings Svetlana and Valia and their adopted brother Rem Smirnov would have no place to live and be tak
en to an orphanage. According to Svetlana,

  The matter resolved itself, somehow. We would go to the orphanage, but not for long because, of course, everything would soon be cleared up. But, just in case, Dina sent us over to my father’s sister, Galina, who was also my mother’s closest friend, to ask for advice. She lived with her husband, the chemist, S. S. Medvedev, the future famous scholar and full member of the Academy of Sciences, and their son, who was a little younger than me. I had been to their place—three small rooms in a communal apartment in a tall building with a dark stairway on the corner of Krivokolenny and Armiansky Alleys—many times before with my mother. The walls of Galina’s room were covered with pictures, including a large portrait of her: a handsome, thin, perfectly proportionate face, dark wavy hair, and a blue blouse with a wide-open white collar. Next to it were some of her own drawings. Aunt Galia was an artist and worked at the Vakhtangov Theater.

  That spring day in 1938, Valia and I went to Aunt Galia to ask for advice about our future, which had, in fact, already been decided. We climbed up the tall staircase and rang the doorbell. Aunt Galia opened the door. My God how scared she was! She didn’t know what to do. We stood in our coats in the large dark entryway, while she disappeared somewhere into the bowels of her rooms. Soon she came back and started stuffing our pockets with candy. “You can’t stay here,” she said quickly and softly, “Sergey Sergeevich is working. He mustn’t be disturbed.” She kept pushing us gently toward the door. When we had all walked out onto the stairway, she seemed relieved. “Don’t ever come back again, okay? Now go.” So we left and walked home in silence. When he got home, Valia, who had never cried once during those six months, buried his face in his pillow and sobbed.40

  Close friends were in a similar position—and were frequently referred to as “uncles” and “aunts.” One of Irina Muklevich’s real aunts, her mother’s sister Maria, had a friend named Anton Ionych Shpektorov, an official at the People’s Commissariat of External Trade (headed, after Rozengolts’s arrest, by A. I. Mikoyan). He had “a personal car with a chauffeur, two secretaries, and the use of the government cafeteria, exclusive sanatoria, etc., etc.,” but he “was not afraid of anything and came to see us almost every day.” (He may have been in love with Irina’s aunt, but the risk remained the same, whatever the reason for such open loyalty.)41 Other friends, according to Irina, acted differently: