The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  Remember, she wrote, that love between a man and a woman is but one part of that love that cannot be kept within the shores of life and is fuller and wider than the love for one person, which is its earthly incarnation. If love between two people does not contain that all-encompassing force, it is not as interesting and certainly not full. She wrote that most of all she felt the presence of that great feeling in her love for her children, but that she had also known true love for one person, one man, and that she had always tried to make it part of that other, exalted love. I may not be remembering that letter precisely, but I am certain of its lofty meaning, which was exactly what my soul—romantic, like those of most young people of that time—thirsted for.28

  Svetlana’s favorite book, Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts, seemed to be saying the same thing. “It taught me,” she writes, “to see love and friendship as life’s highest blessings.” It also taught her—to quote from her quote from My Past and Thoughts—that “love is passionate friendship” and that “friendship between two young people has all the ardor of love and all of its characteristics.”29

  Svetlana’s best memories of her time in Shuya are about a passionate friendship. Her friend’s name was Galina Volkova. They met in the Shuya music school. Galina was sixteen, and Svetlana was a year younger. Svetlana had arrived in the middle of the school year and, at first, had not been allowed to enroll, but one of the teachers heard her story and let her in. She was not very good at the piano, but she wanted to recreate her Moscow home life and started coming regularly. The orphanage director, Pavel Ivanovich, gave her the key to the grand piano that stood in the assembly hall, so she could practice “at home.” Galina and Svetlana started going on long walks every Sunday after class. They ate ice cream and watched couples dancing to brass bands. “The women had short hair curled at the ends like Liubov Orlova’s in the film Circus and wore silk dresses that draped loosely below the knee. Young girls wore white blouses, colorful knitted vests, and white canvas shoes with light blue trim and button straps. For young men two-tone zippered jackets were the height of fashion.” Sometimes they talked about Svetlana’s past life, her parents’ fate, the waves of arrests, and the coming war. “But all that lay in some other dimension.”30 Mostly they talked about other things.

  What did we not talk about! We talked about what it means to be a true human being and how one must live by one’s conscience. But most of all we talked about books. I remember our endless conversations about Romain Rolland’s The Soul Enchanted. I read it … first, then Galina, at my suggestion. How we loved its heroine, the strong and beautiful Annette; how extraordinary her relationship with her son seemed, and what a beautiful name he had—Marc! And Sylvie, who as an aging woman learned to play the piano! Marc and Assia, Marc’s death, Annette’s tears…. I wanted to be just like her. In our conversations there was never a trace of anything materialistic. Dresses, success? Never! How could they compete with the question of what it meant to become a true human being? It must have been either the times or our youthful romanticism.31

  It was both, of course. Those were the times of youthful romanticism. Most girls in white blouses and boys in zippered jackets had intimate friends, and the closer they were to the urban professional and artistic world connected by books and music to the House of Government, the more likely it was that they were talking about how to become a true human being (Galina’s late father had been a well-known doctor, and she was planning to apply to college in Moscow). They played a lot of music together. “My absolute favorite in those days was Mozart’s Fantasia, which she played beautifully and with great feeling, pausing occasionally to tell me how much she liked a certain passage. I did, too: our feelings and opinions always coincided. She played a lot of Chopin—waltzes, mazurkas, one after another, each with its own associations, sometimes quite funny…. She also played Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Tchaikovsky. I played, too, but I was so bad, it was almost funny.”32

  Svetlana Osinskaia (left) and Galina Volkova twenty years after they first met (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

  The romantic age called for romantic music and romantic literature. Svetlana and Galina did not start out by modeling their friendship on Herzen’s and Ogarev’s: they found their friendship reflected, and then reinforced, in what would become their favorite book in college. Galina had enrolled in the History Department of the Moscow Regional Teachers’ College, and Svetlana joined her there. “We were inseparable all through college.… Together we ‘discovered’ Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts, and it was one of the strongest impressions of our youth…. We were struck by the similarity between our relationship and Herzen and Ogarev’s friendship. Everything felt the same, and even the vow they swore in the Vorobiev Hills (we made a special trip to find the spot) seemed to be our very own. Except that they had also sworn to be faithful to their cause, and we didn’t have one.” Herzen’s and Ogarev’s cause—transformed into the huge blacksmith’s insatiable utopia—had been fulfilled by Svetlana’s father. Svetlana’s and Galina’s cause was their friendship.33

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  Most of Svetlana’s peers from the House of Government shared her cause. Exiled to camps, orphanages, and communal apartments or surrounded inside the House by sealed doors and the shadows of departed playmates, they continued to live in a world of love that could not be kept within the shores of life, in an “atmosphere of one single family” (as Svetlana Osinskaia would put it many years later). It was a family as wide as the Soviet Union, a state as close-knit as a sect, a prophecy realized in the body of believers, and a make-believe world that would remain real for as long as the believers continued to believe (and for as long as Fedor Ivanovich and Natalia Trofimovna continued to make it possible).

  Aleksandr Serafimovich had a literary protégé by the name of Aleksei Evgrafovich Kosterin, author of several autobiographical Civil War stories set in the Caucasus (including Beyond the Mountain Pass, an exodus tale that came out at the same time as The Iron Flood). In 1936, he went to Magadan to work as a reporter for the Soviet Kolyma newspaper. In 1938, he was arrested and sentenced to five years in a camp as a “socially dangerous element.” His wife, Anna Mikhailovna, continued to write to Serafimovich asking for help and vouching for Kosterin (“although in his private life K. could, perhaps, be a bit of a bastard sometimes, in his work and in the Party he is a pure and loyal person”) and for herself (“I swear a terrible vow on the lives of my three children that I know nothing and am not guilty of anything”).

  Their eldest daughter, Nina, was fifteen when her father left Moscow. She did not live in the House of Government, but she belonged to the same world of Soviet happy childhood—urban, romantic, white-collar, self-reflexive, and fervently patriotic. (Her apartment was in No. 19, Trubnikovsky Alley, formerly the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities.) She loved Pushkin, Mérimée, Goethe, Heine, Romain Rolland, Levitan, and Beethoven; appeared as Masha (from The Captain’s Daughter) at the Pushkin masked ball (“in a long orange dress with white lace at the neck and sleeves”); disapproved of the Second Bolshoi production of Gounot’s Faust (which seemed to trivialize Faust’s pact with Mephistopheles); made presentations in the school literary and history societies; worked tirelessly on herself (focusing, at the age of eighteen, on “the wicked emotion of vanity”); thought of knowledge as a “left-luggage room” with separate shelves for labeled suitcases; worried that such different poets as Heine, Esenin, Longfellow, and Mayakovsky could coexist within her “like good neighbors in a large apartment”; “drew up a plan to read all of Feuchtwanger and write an essay ‘On Feuchtwanger’s Antifascist Novels’”; “resolved to go to the stadium every weekend” (to prepare for the running, jumping, cycling, rowing, and grenade-throwing “Ready for Labor and Defense” tests); wondered how the author of Victoria could have “sunk into fascism” and vowed “to become acquainted with the literature on Hamsun”; believed that life without friendship was impossible and that love revealed the “intelligent, g
enuine essence of life”; measured love according to Stendhal’s De l’amour; loved her father’s Civil War stories and yearned for a moment of self-sacrificial transcendence in her own life; admired Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered and “went to see him in his casket”; took pride—at the age of fifteen—in being one of only seven Komsomol members in her class (“that is why we have to do so much volunteer work, but the respect and influence are accordingly great”); helped her Young Pioneer charges make a picture album about Khrushchev and a mock-up model of a border-guard checkpoint; helped the elderly and infirm on election day December 12, 1937 (“this day will remain in my memory for a long time”); cherished her close friendship with her “class mentor” and school Komsomol organizer; struggled against the “swamp of bourgeois domesticity”; and divided the girls in her high school senior class into “the swamp dwellers,” “the young misses,” and “the Komsomol activists.” The Komsomol activists were those who were participating in the building of socialism by doing volunteer work, keeping diaries, acquiring knowledge, going to the theater, realizing that “there is nothing more important in life than friendship and love,” and learning how to appreciate Pushkin, Mérimée, Goethe, Heine, Romain Rolland, Levitan, and Beethoven.34

  Meanwhile, “frightening, incomprehensible things” were happening. Her Uncle Misha, “a Party member since the first days of the revolution,” and his wife, Aunt Anya, were arrested, and Nina’s cousin Irma was sent to an orphanage. Then “a terrible tragedy” happened to her dacha owners, her friend’s father, and her other uncle. When her father sent a telegram that he might lose his job and have to come back early, she wrote in her diary: “I will not deny my father!” When he wrote that he had been expelled from the Party and fired from his job, she wrote, quoting from Gogol’s Taras Bulba: “I am with you, Father!” When her class mentor, Tatiana Aleksandrovna, seemed to get into trouble, she wrote: “No one and nothing will make me turn my back on Tatiana Aleksandrovna!” When she found out that her father had been arrested, she wrote that it had to be “a terrible mistake.” And when her mother, grandmother, and aunts told her that she should not have told the truth about her father to the president of the Geology Institute, she wrote, quoting Saltykov-Shchedrin: “They want me to follow their example and act ‘in conformity with meanness.’ No, my Komsomol honor is worth more to me!”35

  “Komsomol honor” stood for a combination of Soviet patriotism (“Party-mindedness) and traditional honor as loyalty to kith and kin. Andrei Sverdlov chose the state (and himself); Volodia Moroz chose his family (and himself); Nina and most children of the Revolution did not have to choose: they were all like Ostap Bulba, for whom faith and father were one and the same. Any suggestion that a choice must be made was a “terrible mistake.” The “frightening, incomprehensible” days were also a “time of excitement and joy” (as Nina wrote several months later). On September 10, 1938, she wrote in her diary: “My father and Uncle Misha are supposed to be enemies of the people. How can I, their flesh-and-blood daughter, possibly believe that?” Three days later, she spoke at a Komsomol meeting, arguing “passionately” against admitting a politically passive young man and denouncing several of his friends as equally unworthy. “Our fathers may have been arrested,” she wrote, addressing one of them, “but I am not your comrade!” “When he becomes a lawyer,” she wrote about another one, “he may become a dangerous enemy of our socialist society.” On August 23, 1939, she discovered that she had not been admitted to the Geology Institute because she had told the director the truth about her family. She had joined, she wrote in her diary, the ranks of “lepers for their fathers’ sake.” Three days later, she conducted a “casual survey” of the most recent additions to her “literary stockpile,” which included Anatole France’s The Gods Are Athirst, a story of a young Jacobin who keeps executing enemies of the people until he is executed himself. “A powerful writer,” she wrote, “but I cannot agree with his interpretation of the Jacobins and the French Revolution.” Six months later she received an official commendation for her company’s performance during some Komsomol war games marking Red Army Day. “In sum, I am ready for war. The only problem is that, because of my poor eyesight, I cannot learn how to shoot properly. I could get glasses, but they don’t look good on me.”36

  The world around her seemed to merit her trust. Her class mentor, Tatiana Aleksandrovna, gave her money for her cousin who was in an orphanage. Her Komsomol organizer, Nina Andreevna, comforted her when her father was arrested and, after the “catastrophe” of Nina Andreevna’s husband’s arrest, sent her a copy of Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism with a dedication that urged her to stop “whimpering” and to remain “sincere, … active, and battle-ready.” During the October 1938 elections to the school Komsomol committee, she wanted desperately to be elected but felt obliged to withdraw her candidacy because of her father’s arrest—and was then elected anyway, by twenty-nine votes out of thirty-four. Standing in line in the Committee for Higher Education office after not being admitted to the Geology Institute, she met a girl who had spent the year after her father’s arrest living in her school principal’s office (“an amazingly brave principal”). Having been unsuccessful in Moscow, Nina enrolled in a college in Baku but was denied a stipend. Her mother wrote a “blunt” letter to Stalin “asking why the principle that sons did not answer for their fathers was being violated,” and Nina was admitted to the Moscow Geology Institute. Three weeks later, she celebrated the coming of the New Year 1940. Her wish was “to study, read, grow.”37

  Nina Kosterina

  But her main source of comfort—as well as thrill, worry, joy, and occasional disappointment—were her closest friends: Lena Gershman and Grisha Grinblat. During her last two years in high school, they saw each other almost every day: doing homework, visiting Tatiana Aleksandrovna, preparing Komsomol events, walking in Gorky Park, working in the Lenin Library, reading each other’s diaries, and talking endlessly about love, friendship, books, and their feelings for each other. Grisha was in love with Lena, then Nina, then Lena, and then Nina again. He was the only person who got more votes than Nina in the October 1938 Komsomol committee election. He vowed to devote his life to science and wrote poems dedicated first to Lena and then to Nina. Nina—“having been spoiled by poets, from Pushkin to our days”—thought them weak but liked them because they were dedicated to her. Lena cried from happiness when she was admitted into the Komsomol and “came close to tears” when Grisha stopped being in love with her. When the three of them were not together, they wrote letters to each other. Life, “in spite of everything,” was “incredibly good.” On the night of January 20, 1940, Nina could not sleep, got up at 3:00 a.m., went for a walk around snowbound Moscow, and “felt an intense renewed connection to Red Square, the Kremlin, and the scarlet flag over the Kremlin.” When she returned home at 6:00 a.m., she picked up a book of Goethe’s poems, got back into bed, and read the lines that seemed to define the age:

  Wouldst thou ever onward roam?

  Lo, the good lies very near.

  Learn happiness to seize at home, For happiness is always here.38

  The following year, her “New Year’s gift” was a “bright and cheerful” letter from her father, with “vivid colors about nature and about the people he was living and working with” (on a labor-camp drilling crew in minus 50-degree Celsius weather). “Before pitching a tent, they had to clear away snow that was a meter deep…. And between the lines of the letter was an elusive ironic smile.”39

  ■ ■ ■

  Earlier that same day, December 31, 1940, Lyova Fedotov stepped off the train in Leningrad and set out for the city center, “trudging through the slushy snow in his galoshes.” He stayed with his cousin Raya; her husband, Monya (the cellist Emmanuel Fishman); their little daughter, “Trovatore”; and their maid, Polya, in their large room in a communal apartment on the Moika Canal 95. They celebrated New Year’s with the family of the “former baron,” cellist, and Lening
rad Conservatory professor, Boris Aleksandrovich Struve. (Lyova refused to drink any alcohol, even “for the sake of the New Year.”)

  The next day, his friend Zhenia Gurov also arrived from Moscow, and they began their journey through Wonderland, with Lyova recording each day’s events and conversations in his diary (eighty-nine pages altogether, or about seven and a half pages of dense handwriting per day). They saw the “long-awaited and celebrated” Nevsky Prospect, the “enchanting” monument to Catherine the Great, the “graceful Kazan Cathedral” (“Voronikhin’s masterpiece”), the Pushkin Drama Theater (which Lyova called by its prerevolutionary name, “Aleksandrinsky”), the Alexander Column “with the cross-wielding angel on top,” the “Peter and Paul Cathedral with its pot-bellied dome and thin belfry and spire,” the “heavy, chestlike marble tombs of the tsars with enormous gold crosses on the lids,” “an empty fountain surrounded by numerous sculptures depicting Glinka, Lermontov, Nekrasov, and other Russian geniuses,” and, of course, the Hermitage. “It was divine: the magnificent gold decorations, combined with the blindingly white marble, created a vision of stunning harmony that produced simultaneous cries of delight from Zhenia and me…. Each new room presented us with new marvels: magnificent tables, armchairs, paintings, colonnades, double marble columns, gold plating, malachite, and glass. All of this glittered and sparkled before us—a whole city made up of magnificent rooms and passageways.”40