The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  Three days after my father’s arrest, my aunts Nina and Meli (my father’s sisters) walked into the entryway and saw my parents’ close friend, the Old Bolshevik, Mikhalina Novitskaia [Michalina Nowicka], who had worked for many years at TASS, as Doletsky’s personal secretary. They were all waiting for the elevator. When she saw my aunts, Mikhalina did not say hello and did not enter the elevator. She simply stepped aside and turned away. My aunts were shocked. It was as if she had spat in their faces.

  Of course, Mikhalina did not know then that a month later her own husband, an Old Bolshevik and top official of the Comintern Executive Committee [Waclaw Bogucki], would be arrested; she would be sent to a camp for eight years; and her son [Vladimir] would be taken to an orphanage. And that after her return she would spend many years looking for her son and that she would never find him because he had been sent to prison for ten years for stealing a watermelon and a cantaloupe from the field when he was hungry. And that she would come to me when she had no place to go in Moscow, and I would take her in. All that happened. She would end her days in a retirement home, lonely and sick.42

  Vatslav Bogutsky’s (Waclaw Bogucki) arrest photographs

  Mikhalina Novitskaia’s (Michalina Nowicka) arrest photograph

  Vladimir Bogutsky (soon after his parents’ arrest)

  In memoirs and reminiscences, such actions are featured prominently and represented as acts of betrayal, often followed by providential retribution. Most House of Government residents—including those like Piatnitskaia, who thought of themselves as Bolsheviks and were not convinced of their relatives’ (or even their own) innocence before the Party—seem to have expected loyalty from their friends, lovers, and relatives, irrespective of whether they were Party members or not. Some self-sacrificial actions and individuals might be singled out for admiration, but most such actions and individuals were mentioned without comment, as part of the normal course of things. Friends, lovers, and relatives were, then and later, depicted as having been subjected to a test of humanity. Some passed, proving themselves to be “true” (in the sense of both “loyal” and “genuine”), and some did not. And since friends, lovers, and relatives were expected to be true, by definition, those who did the right thing might or might not, depending on the other factors involved, be seen as heroic. Those who did not were consistently singled out—and often deliberately exposed—as traitors and “bad people.” There were countless shades of gray, forgiven trespasses, and attenuating circumstances in between, but the endpoints on the scale of goodness were clear enough. “Good people” were those who were prepared to risk their own safety and that of their immediate family for the sake of friends, lovers, and other relatives. “Bad people” were those who wished to protect themselves and their immediate family to the exclusion of all other loyalties and commitments. The orthodox Bolsheviks who turned away their nephews and nieces because the only true family was the Party were acting like bad people. In accounts written in the post-sectarian world, these orthodox Bolsheviks and bad people became indistinguishable. Feliks Demchenko’s and Inna Gaister’s uncles were bad people—both at the time and in the retelling—irrespective of whether their reasons were self-servingly egotistical or self-denyingly sectarian.

  Family morality within the House of Government, like the sectarian morality of Party purges, was centered on trust and betrayal. But whereas the purge morality was concerned with secret thoughts as opposed to actions (or rather, with hypothetical actions as emanations of deviant thoughts), family morality was focused on actions as proof of moral choices. Lydia Mefodievna Stechkina, Matvei Yakovlevich Sheiniuk, and Anton Ionych Shpektorov were good people irrespective of whatever private fears they may have had to overcome. Indeed, they were all the more remarkably good people for having overcome their private fears and silently reconciled their sectarian commitments with those toward kith and kin (all three were Party members). The Party itself could not quite make up its mind: it exiled entire clans and punished “family members of traitors to the motherland,” while proclaiming, from Stalin’s mouth, that “sons do not answer for their fathers” and encouraging, inconsistently but forcefully, the reintegration of those sons into the Soviet family. In a note to her from prison, Irina Muklevich’s mother wrote: “Whatever happens to us, always remain a true Soviet.” And that is how Irina’s aunt, a good person and a true Soviet, brought her up. The key to being a good Soviet while having a mother in prison was silence.43

  The more intimate the relationship and the thicker the web of mutual obligations, the greater the expectation of loyalty and the more painful the betrayal (very rare in the case of parents and children). The more distant the relationship and less anticipated the favor, the greater the virtue. The Loginovs took in an enemy’s son because he was their own son’s friend. Irina Muklevich had a school friend, Shura Elchugina, who lived in the dormitory for Military Academy cadets across the river. (Her father was a maintenance worker at the Academy.) After the arrest of Irina’s parents, the Elchugins invited her to stay at their place, and Shura’s mother made her a dress. Vasily Shuniakov, a former Petrograd worker and Central Control Commission official specializing in purges, and his wife, Iudif Charnaia, a former seamstress and education official specializing in pedology (until it was banned by Volin and Rabichev), let their daughter’s friend, Katia Dushechkina (from Apt. 422), stay with them for a while after her parents were arrested. According to their daughter, Tamara, they were visibly frightened by what was happening and burned many of their books; Vasily started drinking.44

  Boris Ivanov, “the Baker”; his wife, Elena Yakovlevna Zlatkina; and their three children (Volodia, Anatoly, and Galina) occupied two rooms of their three-room apartment and rented out the third. Their first tenant, Professor Lebedev, was arrested very early, perhaps as early as 1935. Their next tenants were a Marxism-Leninism instructor named Krastins (Krastiņš, in Latvian) and his wife and daughter. Once, in the middle of the night, the doorbell rang. Anatoly, who was seventeen at the time, opened the door, saw several NKVD agents, walked over to where his father was sitting at his desk (he used to work late), and said: “Get up, Dad, it turns out you’re a bastard. They’ve come for you.” The agents came in, asked everyone for their names, and moved on to the room where the Krastins lived. A few days later, that room was occupied by the wife and two daughters of the recently arrested head of the Cattle-Purchasing Trust, N. A. Bazovsky, from Apt. 377 three floors above. Shortly afterward, Bazovsky’s wife was also arrested. Her daughters were not home at the time, and Elena Yakovlevna told Anatoly and Galina (who was fifteen) to save as many of the Bazovskys’ belongings as they could. She also told Galina to stand watch downstairs and warn the Bazovskys’ older daughter, Nina, not to come up. (The younger one, Olga, was out of town, visiting her aunt.) The guard on duty, named Niura, told Galina to go back to her apartment and promised to call her when Nina showed up. (According to Galina, the guards liked her family and treated them well.) She did; Galina warned Nina; and Nina went to live with her relatives. Meanwhile, the husband of Elena Yakovlevna’s sister, an aviation engineer, had been arrested, and the sister had moved in with the Ivanovs. One day, on the Big Stone Bridge, she ran into the fifteen-year-old Olga Bazovskaia, who told her that her aunt had thrown her out and that she had no place to stay. Elena’s sister invited her over, and she ended up moving in with them. Boris Ivanov (who had known the Bazovskys as apartment neighbors for about three months) registered her in one of his two rooms. (The third room was now occupied by the Commissariat of Finance official, V. M. Buzarev, and his family.) Galina and Olga became close friends and treated each other like sisters. According to Galina, her parents remained orthodox Bolsheviks. Her father had recently become secretary of the Party organization and head of the personnel department at the People’s Commissariat of Food Industry; her mother was a member of the Moscow City Soviet. They never talked about their arrested relatives and neighbors, including Olga’s parents. When Krastins returned from prison a year
or so later, he stayed with them for several days. According to Galina, he had no teeth and was dressed in rags; he went straight to the bathroom, saw the soap, and started crying. Olga lived with the Ivanovs for about ten years; they raised her as a daughter. When Olga’s mother came back from the camps, she also stayed with them for a while. According to Galina, she once said: “If I had been in Elena Yakovlevna’s place, would I have done what she did? Would I have taken Galka in? No.” The world was divided into good people and bad people. Everyone—Party and non-Party—seemed to agree that Boris Ivanov and his wife, Elena Yakovlevna Zlatkina, were very good people.45

  ■ ■ ■

  The Elchugins’, Shuniakovs’, and Ivanovs’ actions may have had something to do with the fact that they were former workers and peasants, not “students,” and that they assumed that being a good Soviet was compatible with fulfilling traditional neighborly and kinship obligations (just as it was compatible with not celebrating New Year’s Eve and adults’ birthdays). Perhaps they found it easier to use silence as a bridge between faith and social practice.

  Yakov Brandenburgsky

  The House of Government’s most articulate intellectuals and prominent experts on Bolshevik morality—the author of Soviet family law, Yakov Brandenburgsky, and his coauthor and chess partner, Aron Solts—were not up to this task. In late 1936, Brandenburgsky, who was then chairman of the Collegium for Civil Cases of the Soviet Supreme Court, began to act strangely, telling his family that he was afraid to go to work. In December, his wife and twenty-three-year-old daughter, Elsa, received a call from the mental hospital (“Kanatchikov’s Dacha”) that he had been picked up on the street in a state of complete disorientation. After some time, they were allowed to bring him home, but he refused to eat and was taken to the Pirogov Hospital. “When we came to visit,” said his daughter in an interview sixty years later, “we found a complete stranger, suffering from fatigue. A sybarite by nature, he seemed totally unaffected by the company of madmen, screaming, squealing, and crawling on the floor beside him. The room was filled with very sick people, but my father seemed perfectly comfortable there. He had even found a friend—a dwarf with a contorted face—whose company he seemed to enjoy…. He would sometimes say things that made no sense to us. Once he became agitated: ‘Why did you write my name on the box of chocolates? They might find me that way!’” In late 1938, after the mass operations were over, Brandenburgsky suddenly recovered and returned home. He retired from the Supreme Court and became a volunteer lecturer at the Moscow Party Committee. He died in 1951 at the age of seventy, while playing chess. He never talked about his illness.46

  Aron Solts

  Solts was serving as first deputy prosecutor-general for criminal cases and living with his adopted son, Evgeny, and his niece, Anna Grigorievna Zelenskaia. His sister, Esfir, had died in 1935. After the arrest of Anna’s former husband, Isaak Zelensky, their two children, eighteen-year-old Elena and sixteen-year-old Andrei, joined their mother in Solts’s apartment, and he adopted them, too. On February 14, 1938, he had a violent argument with his boss, Prosecutor-General A. Ya. Vyshinsky, about the case of his friend and disciple, Valentin Trifonov, who had been arrested on June 21, 1937. According to Elena, he came home very upset and said that Vyshinsky had threatened him, too. He decided to stop eating in the hope that Stalin would agree to talk to him. Several days later, he was taken to the ward for the violently insane at the Sokolniki Psycho-Neurological Hospital. According to his doctor, who knew him from her previous work as consultant for the Amnesty Board, which Solts chaired, he blamed the demise of the Old Bolsheviks on the rise of opportunists. “‘Who is Ezhov? Why should I believe Ezhov? The Party does not know Ezhov!’ Solts would say. ‘Vyshinsky, a former Menshevik, is going to interrogate me? A Menshevik is going to sit in judgment over Bolsheviks?!’” He abandoned his hunger strike and, a month and a half later, was allowed to return home in exchange for a guarantee from his niece Anna that he would not pose any danger to himself or others. Two and a half months later, Anna was arrested. Solts wrote a letter to his former colleague, the chairman of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court, Vasily Ulrikh, but received no response. He was removed from his position and then worked as a literary consultant for the Young Guard Publishers and director of the archive of the Museum of the Peoples of the USSR, before retiring in 1940 at the age of sixty-eight. “He suffered terribly from the enforced idleness,” wrote Elena. “He spent hours lying in bed reading or pacing around the apartment writing long columns of numbers on pieces of paper or in newspaper margins.”47

  ■ ■ ■

  Fedor Kaverin’s 1933 production of Yuri Smolich’s The Other Side of the Heart dealt with the problem of Bolshevik trust and damnation. The blue-eyed idealist, Klim, with whom the audience was expected to sympathize, was unmasked as an unreconstructed enemy. His double, the demonic Sixfingers, turned out to be not only his shadow (the other side of his heart), but his true self, the irredeemable evil of his origins. At the discussion in the Commissariat of Enlightenment, Kaverin’s main defender against the champions of the still reigning construction/conversion plot had been the State New Theater’s administrative director, Sergei Ivanovich Amaglobeli, who claimed that no one had a “fully transparent soul,” that naive self-deception was as dangerous as deliberate deception, and that the cat-and-mouse game that the theater was playing with its audiences was, understandably enough, “painful for those who find themselves in the role of the mouse.” Kaverin’s main critic and the most senior participant in the discussion had been the deputy head of the Theater Department of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, Pavel Ivanovich Novitsky, who argued that the possibility of redemption was at the heart of socialist construction and that the job of every Soviet citizen was to “engage in the inner struggle aimed at reeducating human beings.” The right balance, according to Novitsky, had been struck by Kaverin’s next production, Uriel Acosta, in which the vacilating young idealist who resembled the blue-eyed Klim (and was played by the same actor) overcame his fears, retracted his false confession, and stood up for the tradition of heroic authenticity represented by Galileo, Bruno, and Spinoza, “all the way to Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.”48

  In March 1936, two years after the discussion of Uriel Acosta, Novitsky traveled to Sverdlovsk to give a series of lectures on socialist realism. Since there were no rooms available in the local hotels, he stayed at the apartment of his official host, the director of the Sverdlovsk Theater and Entertainment Department, Ya. A. Grinberg. At the end of his visit, he held a confidential meeting with the directors of the local theaters about the recently launched campaign “against all forms of formalism, naturalism, vulgarization, and spineless liberalism.” In his talk, he discussed the reasons for the closing down of Moscow’s Art Theater II and mentioned a conversation about the Party’s theater policy that Stalin had had with Platon Kerzhentsev, the head of the Committee for the Arts, and A. S. Shcherbakov, the Central Committee’s supervisor of cultural matters. Comrade Vinitsky, the head of the Sverdlovsk Committee for the Arts, who was present at the talk, accused Novitsky of slandering Comrade Stalin and reported him to the Provincial Party Committee. Novitsky was briefly detained and interrogated by the NKVD before being allowed to return to Moscow.

  Upon his return, he wrote a letter to his boss, Kerzhentsev’s deputy for theater affairs, Yakov Iosifovich Boiarsky (Shimshelevich), in which he apologized for exaggerating the virtues of Art Theater II and for revealing the content of Stalin’s conversation with Kerzhentsev and Shcherbakov that Boiarsky had related to him “in confidence.” His explanation for his “enormous political blunder” was that he had been suffering from severe headaches and that his audience consisted entirely of Party members. He knew that his behavior could not be justified, but he hoped he deserved another chance:

  I am not deluding myself. I know that there are three options: (1) a severe Party reprimand and my retention in the world of Soviet theater; (2) my expulsion from the Party without dis
grace and defamation and my retention in the theater world; (3) my expulsion from the Party with disgrace and defamation and my ruin.

  Dear Yakov Osipovich, I do not think that you will find it possible to defend me under these circumstances.

  But, while making a decision, it is necessary to take into account a person’s qualities as a Party member and an employee and his creative potential. I can still do a great deal in this life. I have many ideas and even more willingness to work and create at a time like this, in a country such as ours. Over the last three years, I have been living with a feeling of enormous happiness at the fullness of life and pride in my country and the Party. This feeling has been growing with each day. This feeling is an organic expression of my personality, my sincerity, my honesty toward our epoch. These are not the right words, but it is not the words that matter, it is a person’s worth and the way he lives his life…. It is easy to destroy a person and turn him into a useless rag. I am asking for the tiniest bit of your understanding and attention.

  Novitsky’s view of his own predicament was consistent with his position on The Other Side of the Heart. His letter’s last paragraph dealt with innocence, not redemption: