Andrei Sverdlov’s address is: No 2, Serafimovich Street, Apt. 319 (the very same House of Government, from which so many victims were taken away). His telephone numbers are: 231–94–97 (home), 181–23–25 (work).15
■ ■■
On March 5, 1953, Stalin died. The Party had lost what Bukharin called “the personal embodiment of its mind and will.”
Maya Peterson and her mother, Maria, heard the news in the village of Pikhtovka, in Novosibirsk Province, where they were living in exile. “In those days, my mother and I did not hold Stalin responsible for the tragedy whose victims and witnesses we were. My mother saw its causes in wrecking: a conspiracy against the cream of the Bolshevik Party by the enemies who had made their way to the top, including the Ministry of State Security. When Stalin died, we felt the same grief as everyone around us.”16
So did Rada Poloz’s grandmother (Tania Miagkova’s mother), Feoktista Yakovlevna Miagkova, who kept Stalin’s portrait on the wall and explained the fate of her daughter and son-in-law by saying that “there were so many enemies that it was impossible not to make a mistake.” At the time of Stalin’s death, Yuri Trifonov had finished school in Tashkent, worked at an airplane factory in Moscow, graduated from the Literary Institute, gotten married, published his first novel in Tvardovsky’s Novyi mir, received the Stalin Prize of the Third Category, and turned twenty-seven. “I heard that Tvardovsky cried on stage during the Stalin memorial meeting in the House of Cinema,” he wrote many years later. “Those tears were, of course, genuine. I saw the same sincere grief in my own family. My mother, who had passed through the Karaganda and Akmolinsk camps, feared that things would get worse. My grandmother grieved desperately.” (Stalin’s On Lenin and Leninism, with the inscription “To Dear Comrade Slovatinskaia, in memory of joint work underground, from the author,” was prominently displayed in her bookcase.)17
Fedor Kaverin had been abandoned by most of his actors, ridiculed in the press, chased out of a succession of temporary buildings, and eventually fired as artistic director. He continued to direct in other theaters and dreamed of staging “one final production summing up [his] entire creative life” (rereading Faust, among other things, for the purpose). During the war he had produced shows for the cadets of the School of Aviation in Borisoglebsk, wished for a “communion with the Soviet state through blood sacrifice,” and hoped to direct a play in which “the Russian soul takes on the salvation of the world and appears before the world and the spectator in all its holy majesty.” On the day of Stalin’s death he wrote in his diary: “What grief—general for the entire nation and personal for each one.”18
On the same day, Boris Ivanov wrote: “The radio announcement of the death of our leader and teacher, Comrade Stalin, felt like a stab in the heart. When the announcer’s voice died away, I looked out the window at the dark red walls of the Kremlin where, inside the quadrangle formed by those walls, the Great Stalin had lived and worked.” Several days later he spoke at a memorial rally at the Kalinin Bread Factory. “I knew what needed to be said, but I could not utter a sound because the sobs rising in my throat were choking me and tears were welling in my eyes.” Anatoly Ronin, the secretly circumcised son of the planning official, Solomon Ronin, and a friend of Boris Ivanov’s younger son, Anatoly, and Stalin’s sons, Vasily and Artem, was trampled to death at the funeral.19
Boris Ivanov with daughter Galina and grandson Volodia
Stalin’s body was embalmed by Boris Zbarsky’s deputy, S. R. Mardashev, because Zbarsky (who had recently embalmed Georgi Dimitrov in Bulgaria) had been arrested a year earlier and accused of Jewish nationalism, spying for Germany, ties to Trotsky and Bukharin, former membership in the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and “minimizing Lenin’s greatness” by comparing his body to Egyptian mummies.20
With his body in the mausoleum, Stalin was no longer the personal embodiment of the mind and will of the Party. The Party, separated from Stalin, needed a new personal embodiment; Stalin, separated from his body and from the Party, became open to critical scrutiny. If his body was comparable to an Egyptian mummy, his rule might be comparable to that of a pharaoh.
Rada Poloz remembered telling her grandmother that it was all Stalin’s fault. Yuri Trifonov spent the day of the funeral walking with two friends, one of whom, the future children’s writer, Iosif Dik, startled the other two by saying that they would live to see the day when Stalin would be taken out of the mausoleum. Svetlana Osinskaia was taken aback by her mother’s reaction: “When Stalin died, our whole school was in shock and I, like everyone around me, was full of worry about how we would live without our dear father. My mother listened to me and said, with a simplicity and certainty that startled me: ‘Actually, it’s wonderful that he is dead.’”21
Three years later, on February 25, 1956, Khrushchev said as much in his “Secret Speech” at the Twentieth Party Congress—on behalf of the Party, history, and the Revolution. The bond that had held the scattered survivors of the House of Government together was broken. Boris Volin, the former chief censor and, more recently, premier ideologue of official Russian nationalism, came home from the congress “completely devastated,” according to his daughter, and died within a year, never regaining his former self. Yuri Trifonov’s grandmother, Tatiana Slovatinskaia, died six months later. The author of The Road to Ocean, Leonid Leonov, “went into deep spiritual shock” and lost control of the left side of his face. In the Kremlin Hospital, he ran into the Writers’ Union president, Aleksandr Fadeev, who shot himself several weeks later.22
Fedor Kaverin
Fedor Kaverin compared the news to reading Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. “How awful,” he wrote in his diary. “What terrible things one learns about our Soviet past.” He had suffered a stroke but was beginning to recover, spending much of his time at his dacha in Pushkino, working on several new productions, and writing his memoirs. On Sunday, October 20, 1957, he wrote in his diary: “I feel very happy inside. The main thing is that I know I am needed. There’s so much to do. And that makes me feel good.” Later that evening he, his wife, and their dog Johnny got on the suburban train for Moscow. Johnny was not wearing a muzzle, and the conductor told them they had to pay a fine. In Moscow they were escorted to the Yaroslavl Railway police station. When Kaverin attempted to argue his case, the station chief seized him by the collar and pushed him to the floor. He died on the spot.23
Boris Ivanov and Elena Ivanova (Zlatkina)
Around the same time, Boris Ivanov added a note to his diary entries on Stalin’s death: “These entries about the day Stalin died were written on the day of his funeral, they show how when he was alive he was able to deceive us and if my pain at the time was great, equally great today is my hatred for this man who was able to ensnare us so completely in the feeling of love for him, while in fact he was a beast and a sadist with hundreds of thousands of destroyed lives on his conscience among them dozens of my friends and comrades.”24
■■■
Meanwhile, the survivors from among the banished House residents kept returning from prisons, camps, and exile. A few were allowed back into the House. The widow of the executed Chekist, Yakov Peters (and the mother of Anatoly Granovsky’s “subject,” Igor Peters, who had since died in the war), Antonina Zakharovna Peters, moved in with Lyova Fedotov’s mother, Roza Lazarevna Markus. Boris Zbarsky’s old apartment, one of the largest in the House, had been occupied by the new prosecutor general, former member of the Donetsk execution troika, and lead Soviet prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trial, Roman Rudenko. Zbarsky was given a new apartment (Apt. 197), went back to teaching (but not to the mausoleum), and died in the middle of a lecture he was giving on October 7, 1954, nine months after being let out of prison.25
Most of the recently released residents had no chance of returning to the House of Government or recovering their former possessions (hard as some of them tried). They moved in with their children, who had little to say to them; procured rooms in communal apartments; or found refuge in th
e Home for Party Veterans in Peredelkino, not far from the “heavenly place” where Lyova Fedotov and Zhenia Gurov had spent a day “frolicking by the river” ten days before the start of the war. (When Antonina Zakharovna Peters and Roza Lazarevna Markus could no longer manage by themselves in the House of Government, they moved to the Peredelkino home together. Antonina Zakharovna died soon afterward. Roza Lazarevna lived to the age of ninety-two. Zhenia Gurov was present at her funeral.)
To have the “stain” removed—and to become eligible for better pensions, health care, and living space, the returnees needed to be formally “rehabilitated” (proclaimed legally innocent) and—crucially important for many of them—reinstated in the Party. To save their previous lives from meaninglessness and their families from oblivion, they also needed posthumous rehabilitation and Party readmission for their vanished relatives. What was required for the purpose, among other things, were character references from prominent Old Bolsheviks who had known them before their fall. Finding such people was not easy. Of those who had not been arrested, Platon Kerzhentsev had died in 1940; Feliks Kon, in 1941; Panteleimon Lepeshinsky, in 1944; Sergei Alliluev, Aron Solts, and Vladimir Adoratsky, in 1945; Rozalia Zemliachka, in 1947; Nikolai Podvoisky, in 1948; Aleksandr Serafimovich and Georgi Dimitrov, in 1949 (Dimitrov’s body was embalmed by Zbarsky and displayed in a mausoleum in Sofia); Yakov Brandenburgsky, Maksim Litvinov, and Efim Shchadenko, in 1951. Others were not willing to vouch for those who had not been vouched for. Those still in power—with the exception of Anastas Mikoyan—had other things to worry about.26
The most prominent exception was the oldest of the Old Bolsheviks, Elena Dmitrievna Stasova. Born in 1873 into a prominent intelligentsia (noble) family, she had met Nadezhda Krupskaia while working for the Political Red Cross in the mid-1890s; joined Lenin’s party in 1898; served as a “technical worker” (under the alias “The Absolute”) and underground Iskra agent; spent time in prison, exile, and emigration; worked as the Central Committee secretary in 1917 (before Sverdlov took over); and held high office in the Comintern, Central Control Commission, and International Red Aid (MOPR) before being removed by Stalin in 1938, for reasons she claimed—in her letter to him—not to understand (“it is especially hard because I have never had, do not have, and will never have a life outside the Party”). From 1938 to 1946 she had worked as editor in chief of the French and English editions of the International Literature magazine. In 1948, she had received a “severe reprimand” for saying in a public lecture that “Lenin treated all comrades equally and even called Bukharin ‘Bukharchik.’” (“These words slipped off my tongue,” she wrote to Khrushchev in 1953, “but of course they constituted a grave political mistake because after the Bukharin trial I had absolutely no right to say what I did.”) She was famously humorless, irritable, and difficult to please. (According to Goloshchekin’s wife, once, when Goloshchekin made a grave political mistake, Stalin threatened to force him to marry Stasova.) On October 15, 1953, on the occasion of her eightieth birthday, she received her second Order of Lenin. Four years later, on the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution, she received her fourth. She was celebrated as the paradigmatic Old Bolshevik, frequently featured as the keynote speaker at public events, and consulted as a living archive at the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute. But her main job, after the Twentieth Party Congress, was to affirm the Bolshevik credentials of former enemies of the people. She was a one-woman rehabilitation committee, the last living memorial to the sacred origins, the only bona fide link among the remnants of severed lives. She received hundreds of letters, answered them with the help of a secretary and several volunteer assistants, and signed countless appeals to the Military Procuracy and the Party Central Committee. “In all our meetings, our conversations were always friendly,” she wrote in behalf of Valentin Trifonov, “and I have always considered Valentin Andreevich a firm Bolshevik, who always followed the Party line. If you need any further clarifications regarding particular aspects of the Trifonov case, I will be happy to do whatever is necessary.”27
Elena Dmitrievna Stasova
She wrote such letters for Bukharin, Rykov, Goloshchekin, and Voronsky, among others. She needed help and was impatient with her assistants. On May 17, 1956, she wrote to an old comrade (whom she was helping to return from exile) about her shock over the suicide of the writer Aleksandr Fadeev and her need for a new secretary: “So now my nerves are on edge, and I have to work hard to keep them in check. And here is this young lady, who helps me read in the mornings and afternoons and is so extraordinarily ignorant and stupid that her reading often perplexes me and rattles my nerves. I am looking for a person who could be a real secretary to me—someone with knowledge of another language, typewriting skills, and clear political thinking. I don’t include Party membership because if I need help reading strictly confidential materials, one of my Party comrades can always do it for me.”28
A year later, Voronsky’s daughter Galina came from Magadan to Moscow to thank Stasova for her help with her father’s rehabilitation and Party reinstatement. Stasova was living in Apt. 291, in Entryway 15. “She opened the door herself. Before me stood a very old, tall, thin, slightly stooped woman with snow-white hair and a long face carved with wrinkles. In the small study, with a balcony overlooking the courtyard and full of old furniture and bookcases, were two portraits of Stalin.” A third, very large, portrait of Stalin hung in the bedroom, over her bed. She asked Voronskaia if she had a place to stay and offered her a bed in her apartment. (Voronskaia declined.) Staying with her at the time was Zinoviev’s first wife, Sarra Ravich, who had just returned from exile (and died within the next few days, before Stasova had a chance to place her in the Home for Party Veterans).29
In the fall of 1960, Voronskaia moved permanently to Moscow and became one of Stasova’s assistants.
Elena Dmitrievna had had an operation on her eyes and could barely see. She could not read herself. Each reader had her own day, once a week. My day was first Friday, and then Monday. We always read Pravda and Izvestia. Elena Dmitrievna preferred Izvestia. We used to read the entire newspaper (especially Izvestia), but later on she would often say: “This article is boring, let’s not read it,” or simply announce: “I’m very tired. That’s enough for today. Let’s play cards instead.”
The newspaper was to be read quickly, “without feeling,” and God save you if you mispronounced a word: Elena Dmitrievna would correct you and sometimes lose her patience….
Sometimes Elena Dmitrievna would become very irritable, and it would be hard to be around her. “You did not sit down properly,” “did not get up properly,” “did not respond properly.” Sometimes I would leave with a heavy heart: it was not easy to be the object of constant attacks. But sometimes she could be very welcoming, kind, and friendly.30
She left no letter unanswered (checking regularly on her assistants’ progress), was very generous with money, supported countless relatives, and was rumored to be paying the college tuition of two students. Ainu Kuusinen, the wife of the Finnish Communist Otto Kuusinen (Apt. 19), wrote to her from exile: “You are the best person in the world. You are an angel.” Galina Voronskaia had seen too much to fully share that view. At the end of her life, the Old Bolshevik had turned into an old noblewoman.31
Kindness, the desire to help, extraordinary selflessness, and complete indifference to money, things, and the material side of life in general coexisted with a contemptuous treatment of those who lived near her. Not wanting her to live alone after the death of a relative, her comrades tried to find a companion for her. But it was simply impossible to live with Elena Dmitrievna. She had no regard for anyone. After they came home from work (and many of them did work), she would make them play cards with her for hours on end, order them around, and humiliate them in the presence of others. No one could stand living in her apartment for long. Different women kept coming and going.32
As she approached ninety, she could no longer listen to an entire newspaper or have t
he radio on all day long. (She used to turn it off only for reading and sleeping.) In 1962, at the age of eighty-nine, she asked for her ashes to be buried in the former Tikhvin Cemetery, currently the Artists’ Necropolis in Leningrad, next to her uncle, the famous art and music critic (and whatever other family graves had not been destroyed during the reconstruction after the war). In January 1966, she wrote her will, leaving her archive to the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute and her savings to her relatives. Several months later, she became ill. In late December, Voronskaia came to visit her. “She was unconscious and mumbling indistinctly, sometimes in French.” She died shortly before New Year’s, at the age of ninety-three (the same age as Princess Natalia Petrovna Golitsyna, the original Queen of Spades). Her wish to be buried next to her family made no sense for someone who had “never had a life outside the Party.” It was, therefore, disregarded. Her ashes were interred in the Kremlin Wall, not far from Otto Kuusinen, Grigory Petrovsky, Rozalia Zemliachka, her friend Nadezhda Krupskaia, and the grave of Joseph Stalin, whose remains had been removed from the mausoleum five years earlier.33
■ ■■
Most of Stasova’s erstwhile House of Government neighbors who survived “the catastrophe” also died alone. Stanislav Redens’s widow and Stalin’s sister-in-law, Anna Allilueva, had been arrested in 1948 along with several other members of her family (including Anna’s sister-in-law, Evgenia Allilueva; her second husband, N. V. Molochnikov; and daughter Kira). According to Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, whose House of Government apartment shared a balcony with Anna’s,
She came back six years later in the spring of 1954. She had spent part of the time in solitary confinement. But most of it she’d spent in the prison hospital. The curse of heredity—the schizophrenia that plagued my mother’s family—had caught up with her. Even Aunt Anna failed to weather all the blows visited on her by fate.
The House of Government Page 125
