The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  Mikhail Koltsov welcomed at the Belorussky railway station on his arrival from Spain, 1937. Next to him is his nephew, Mikhail. (Courtesy of M. B. Efimov)

  After his presentation Koltsov hosted a modest dinner for his friends in an adjacent room. I saw him there. He was in a good mood, joked and laughed a lot, made ironic comments, and told stories about Spain that had not made it into the newspapers. The dinner ended at midnight, if not later. A whole crowd of us walked out to say goodbye to Koltsov as he was getting into his car.30

  The next morning Koltsov’s secretary, Nina Gordon, went over to his apartment to take dictation:

  When I arrived at the House of Government around 10 a.m. and went into the entryway, I noted subconsciously that the guard, who had always been very friendly and courteous and had even caused me, a young girl, some embarrassment by holding the elevator door for me, did not move and remained seated at his desk with the phone. I said hello to him, as usual. When he did not respond, I was a little surprised, but decided he was in a bad mood and calmly went up to the eighth floor and rang the bell.

  The door was opened by Elizaveta Nikolaevna’s niece, Lyulia. Elizaveta Nikolaevna [Koltsov’s wife] was in Paris at the time.

  I entered and noticed that the entrance to Koltsov’s study was barred by a white wicker couch, and that the rest of the hallway furniture had been moved, too.

  “Are the floor polishers here?” I asked with surprise.

  “What,” asked Lyulia, amazed, “you haven’t heard? Misha was arrested last night. The search has just ended—see, the doors are sealed.”31

  He spent two and a half weeks in a cell before his interrogations began. At first he denied his guilt, but, twenty interrogations later, on February 21, he mentioned several anti-Bolshevik articles he had published in the Kiev newspapers in 1918. A month later, he wrote a long confession about the many “perversions” that had resulted from his secret doubts about Party policy. Most of the perversions concerned his work at Pravda and Ogonyok, but the problem went deeper: “I also had anti-Party doubts in 1923–27, concerning the struggle against the oppositionists, whom I, for the longest time, considered to be merely ideological opponents, not recognizing their transformation into an anti-Soviet gang, an advance detachment of the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie. I experienced similar doubts and unhappiness at the end of 1937, when, having returned from Spain, I was shocked by the scale of the repressions against the enemies of the people. I thought it was exaggerated and unneeded.”32

  Similar doubts and unhappiness were shared by many of his friends and colleagues, whose views and traits he went on to describe in his testimony. (Natalia Sats, for example, was “a crafty careerist, who knew how to promote her interests by using her connections to high officials.”) Maria Osten was not among those he exposed. He claimed to have maintained an “intimate, familylike relationship” with her until the summer of 1937, when he discovered her affair with the singer of revolutionary songs, Ernst Busch. They had remained close friends, however, and he “continued to help her and support her.”33

  While in Moscow throughout 1938, up to the moment of my arrest, I remained in contact with Maria Osten. She wrote to me several times about her wish to return to Moscow and settle here again. I was in favor of a temporary stay, but was against her moving here permanently because I did not think she could get a job, there were people living in her apartment, and our personal relationship had come to an end earlier.

  At an interrogation after my arrest, I was informed that M. Osten had links with spies and was herself under investigation for espionage. Personally, I trusted her and considered her an honest person, but I am not trying to excuse myself and admit my guilt in maintaining this relationship.34

  After several more months, he had admitted that he, Maria, and most of his friends and colleagues had spent most of their lives working for foreign intelligence services. On December 13, 1939, one year after his arrest, the investigation was completed. “The accused, M. E. Koltsov, has familiarized himself with the materials of the investigation, in two volumes, and stated that he has nothing to add.” On January 17, 1940, Stalin signed his death sentence, along with those of 345 other people. At the closed trial two weeks later, Koltsov pleaded not guilty and claimed—as quoted in the official record—that he had never engaged in anti-Soviet work and that “his testimony had been coerced while he was being beaten in the face, in the teeth, and all over his body. The investigator, Kuzminov, had reduced him to such a state that he was ready to provide testimony about working for any number of intelligence services.” After withdrawing for deliberation, the court, chaired by Vasily Ulrikh, pronounced the defendant guilty and sentenced him to death. He was shot the following day (probably sometime after midnight, a few hours after the trial).35

  Having heard about Koltsov’s arrest, Maria picked up her four-year-old son, whom she had adopted in Spain in the fall of 1936, and rushed to Moscow. According to Boris Efimov, she went straight to her apartment, but her other adopted son, Hubert, who had turned sixteen and was living there with his girlfriend, did not let her in. “Hubert in Wonderland, indeed,” she is supposed to have said. She checked into the Metropole Hotel and applied for Soviet citizenship. Her attempts to contact Koltsov remained unsuccessful. Her friends from the German Communist community in Moscow shunned her. In July 1939, a special committee chaired by Walter Ulbricht expelled her from the Party for an unauthorized relationship with Koltsov and insufficient engagement with “the policy of the Party and the theory of Marxism-Leninism.” On June 24, 1941, two days after the German invasion, she was arrested. A month later she was transferred to Saratov. On September 16, 1942, two days after the German troops reached the center of Stalingrad, she was shot. Soon after Maria’s arrest, Hubert was exiled to Kazakhstan as part of the deportation of ethnic Germans from European Russia.36

  Mikhail Koltsov’s arrest photograph (Courtesy of M. B. Efimov)

  Maria Osten’s arrest photograph (Courtesy of M. B. Efimov)

  ■ ■ ■

  Tania Miagkova was thirty-nine when she was sent to the labor camp. “I seem to have ‘settled,’” she wrote to her mother on August 9, 1936, about a month after her arrival in Magadan. “And although sometimes when I think about everything that has happened to me, I do rebel inside, those are but echoes of the way I felt before. Life around me and its demands are beginning to absorb me…. When people tell me ‘you’ll forget you are a prisoner,’ I still smile warily, but the thought that things may actually work out that way does not seem completely crazy anymore. And of course Kolyma is, in its own right, an extremely interesting place that is making seven-league strides in its development (oh what an antediluvian image—please, dear, industrialize it yourself).” The main source of both redemption and despair was her family. To safeguard the happy childhood of her daughter, to keep her bond with her Party-minded mother, to maintain the hope of being reunited with her husband, and possibly to heal what she, like Bukharin, called her “split consciousness,” she had to love Kolyma and forget she was a prisoner. And the only way she could love Kolyma and forget she was a prisoner was to stay close to her family and be certain of her daughter’s happy childhood. “If I continue to hear that everything is okay with you, then I will not be afraid of anything: I’ll keep on building Kolyma—even with pleasure, and even enjoy it, by god, in spite of everything. Well, my dear mommy, I’ll just have to muster more patience—for how many years? So I don’t make any more mistakes until the end of my life. In the meantime, I’ll be waiting patiently for a line from you and from Mikhas.”37

  Tania’s mother, Feoktista Yakovlevna, and daughter, Rada, wrote regularly, but there was nothing from her husband, Mikhail (“Mikhas”). Soon after mailing the August 9 letter, Tania went on a partial hunger strike. Her demands were “contact with my husband, the right to leave camp territory, and improved living conditions.” Her letters never mentioned the hunger strike, while continuing to describe a split consciousness striving fo
r wholeness. “What can I do? A turn for the better just keeps not happening for me. Still, I continue to believe that the question of who will win (me or my fate) will finally be resolved in my favor.” The news of the Kamenev-Zinoviev trial seemed to explain the reason for the latest blow:

  You can imagine how that trial has affected me. I would never have believed it was possible, but how can I not believe what they themselves are saying? I was in utter shock. But now the shock is gone, and I’m left with political lessons and conclusions. The fact of their physical execution made little impression on me: after all, what was executed were their political corpses. In general, however, this is a very difficult and painful phase for me. Life has not been easy for me in recent years, my dear, but don’t worry about me, my darling: you know that I, like you, can live not only for myself and through my own emotions, and that, whatever my personal circumstances, I remain interested in my environment, which, in the case of Kolyma, is changing as rapidly and excitingly as everywhere else in the USSR.38

  The environment kept changing. Magadan looked lovely at night when seen from above (“then the lights on the shore remind me of Yalta”), and the colleagues in the planning department and the atmosphere at work were “very good,” but hope and comfort came less from Kolyma and the entire USSR than from the simple things of life. “I am beginning to live again,” she wrote on October 10, 1936:

  I will probably never rid myself of this particular bad habit. Of course, I cannot claim that I am “in seventh heaven,” but I have been living on earth for a long time now, and I still endorse life as it is. Or rather, I don’t quite feel like endorsing the way I live right now, but, to be honest with you, I am beginning to derive pleasure from certain processes and phenomena, sometimes on the most unlikely occasions—like when I am chopping wood or even doing my wash. It is a joy to swing the axe and watch the log crack, or see the earth covered with frost, or feel that I am alive, doing something. You understand that everything is okay, don’t you, and that this feeling is a sure sign of returning spiritual health?39

  The link to the entire USSR was still a prerequisite for spiritual health, at least in the letters meant for Rada, Feoktista Yakovlevna, and the NKVD censors (on November 7, 1936, Tania sent Rada a telegram congratulating her on “the day of the great holiday”), but the link to the family—the part of it that was still within reach—kept growing in importance. On November 26, she sent one of her shortest letters since the day of her arrest: “My dear little girl: I only have a few minutes, and I want to give you a big, big kiss. My life is still the same. I am in good health, think a lot about you, and love you very much. Kiss everyone for me. Mommy.” Her next letter, addressed to her mother and not much longer than the previous one, ended with the words: “My dear, please forgive me for this hasty and slight little note. Oh how I wish you could all feel my huge, ardent love and immeasurable gratitude, especially you, my darling mother! I hug you all very, very tight. To rest a bit, I’ll lay my head on your shoulder, the way I did that time on the train to Chelkar, remember? It is so good to rest close to you, my darling. Your Tania.”40

  In late February or early March 1937, Tania stopped her partial hunger strike (her personnel file does not specify what it consisted of). In August, she was transported from Magadan to a remote camp in the settlement of Yagodnoe (“Berrytown”). On September 2, 1937, she wrote to Rada that she was feeling a little sad. “I haven’t gotten used to the new place or fallen into a particular routine yet. My job is less interesting, the library is much smaller, and I have no friends. On the other hand, the nature here is much more beautiful, and the weather has been warm, so I have been going for walks. But I am still a little out of sorts. I know I’ll be fine soon, but still, I am pining a bit. I don’t show it, of course, except that I laugh a lot less often and tend to walk around looking serious. It’s a perfect time to remember: ‘Smile, Captain, smile.’ Okay, I’ll start tomorrow.”41

  The injunction to smile came from the film The Children of Captain Grant, which also featured “The Jolly Wind” (“those who seek will always find”). The refrain was “Smile, Captain, smile, for a smile is the flag of a ship; be strong, captain, be strong, for only the strong can conquer the seas.” Tania’s camp was surrounded by water.

  My roommate and I go for walks together. Around here, if you get off the path, you end up in a swamp. It’s not scary—it won’t suck you in—but it is very, very wet! You hop from one clump of grass to the next, and, before you know it, you slip and there’s water in your shoe. There are creeks and ditches everywhere, and you have to cross them on narrow logs. All around are dense bushes and trees. Some trees are large and beautiful, but it is very difficult for them to grow here, probably because of the permafrost and the cold, wet earth. Their roots stretch along the surface and are often rotten inside. As a result, the forests here are filled with bare, dried-out trees, and it makes you sad to look at them.42

  Her next letter to Rada, sent on September 18, began with a description of the nearby Debin River:

  This river, with its banks covered with bushes, trees, and pebbles and the perpetual sound of running water, is very good for my mood. Sometimes I sit or lie down on a fallen tree trunk and think to myself: “If my little Rada were here, we would be crossing this river and launching little boats together.”

  Beyond the river is a swamp. You can’t see the water except for a few spots here and there. It is completely covered with an extremely thick layer of very beautiful, colorful moss. Your feet sink into it. It’s like walking on springs. There are berries in the swamp. When we first saw them, we couldn’t tell what they were: tiny red berries hanging on very thin threads. Actually, both the berry and the thread were lying on top of the moss. There were almost no leaves. We ate them and wondered if they were poisonous or not. They didn’t taste good: they were sour, and obviously green. Finally, one of us realized: “These are cranberries!” “If so, I’ll have some more. They taste better already.” But if you go up into the hills a little, you can find some lingonberries. There aren’t many of them, but today they were so beautiful and delicious: really ripe and a tiny bit frozen. I got a wonderful little posy. I wanted to take it home and draw it for you, but you can’t paint on this paper: first, because it gets smeared and, second, because, on the way home, I ate them without thinking.43

  The letter ended with an urgent request to write more often and send new photographs. “My life is not very easy these days, my little one, because I am so far away from you and all alone.”44

  Several days later she was moved back to Magadan. According to her old Chelkar roommate, Sonia Smirnova, “it was a time of new accusations and new sentences for political prisoners in Kolyma. They were being brought from faraway camps, to be informed of their new guilt and new sentences in labor camps without the right of correspondence. Those with new sentences were put in large barracks with two rows of bunks. Tania and I found ourselves in one of them.”45

  Tania was interrogated on September 26, 1937. According to a guard named Artemy Mikhailovich Kadochnikov, on September 14, when a group of prisoners being escorted to another camp had stopped by the Yagodnoe “isolator,” she had engaged in conversation with one of them, Mikhail Alekseevich (Moiseevich) Poliakov. “She did not obey my order to move away. She wanted to hand something to him. When I threatened to open fire, she started screaming at the top of her voice: ‘Fascists! Fascist lackeys! They spare neither women nor children! Soon it will be the end of you and your lawlessness!’ To which Poliakov shouted: ‘That’s right, Tania!’ Finally, she left. I knew her from before. On numerous occasions during my shift, Miagkova attempted to leave the zone at unauthorized times. When I did not let her, she would shout: ‘Fascists! Next you’ll forbid fresh air! All they know is the zone. That’s all they understand.’”46

  Assuming Kadochnikov’s story is true, it is impossible to know whether Tania’s protest was Job’s rebellion against God or a version of Eikhe’s and Goloshchekin’s true-beli
ever theory that the NKVD had been penetrated by fascist saboteurs (itself a version of Job’s tale, since the idea of testing the righteous was suggested to God by Satan). At the interrogation, Tania denied the truth of Kadochnikov’s acount. “I learned of the passing party of Trotskyites two minutes before its arrival. I did not hear any orders from the guards. Among the new arrivals was my friend, Veniamin Alekseevich Poliakov. I talked to him for exactly two minutes. I have nothing to add.” The second of two witnesses was Tania’s “roommate” from Yagodnoe, perhaps the one she went berry-picking with, who testified that T. I. Miagkova was an “unreformed Trotskyite … bitterly hostile to the regime.”47

  On November 3, the NKVD troika of the Far Eastern Territory sentenced her to death for “maintaining regular contact with convicted Trotskyites, holding a six-month-long hunger strike, and expressing counterrevolutionary, defeatist ideas.” According to Sonia Smirnova’s account, recorded by Tania’s daughter, Rada Poloz, “A group of guards would often walk in at night. Their commander would read out yet another list of the convicted, with the order to get ready ‘with your possessions.’ As we thought then, they were being taken to faraway camps. On one of those nights, they called out your mother’s name. I jumped up and helped her pack. We kissed. ‘I’ll be joining you soon,’ I said as she was leaving. But I never saw her again.”48

  The sentence was carried out on November 17, 1937. Tania’s husband, Mikhail Poloz, had been executed two weeks earlier. In late October, he had been taken from Solovki to Medvezhyegorsk as part of a group of 1,111 prisoners slated for execution by the NKVD troika of Leningrad Province. One of the accusations against him was “maintaining correspondence with his wife, a Trotskyite.” On November 3, he and 264 other prisoners, three of them women, were stripped to their underwear, driven to a place in the woods about nineteen kilometers from town, and told to dig trenches and lie face down inside them. They were shot, one at a time at close range, by the deputy head of the Housekeeping Department of the NKVD Directorate of Leningrad Province, Captain Mikhail Rodionovich Matveev, and his assistant, Deputy Commandant Georgy Leongardovich Alafer. According to Matveev’s later deposition, some of the prisoners were beaten before being shot.49