The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  At first, all Vadim can see is an enormous rectangular building with tunnel-like round windows. Inside one of them is a tiny puffing locomotive and a stream of overloaded trucks that look “Lilliputian within this monstrous Cyclopean colossus.” On top of that rectangular foundation are two pillars “whose frightening scale seemed to rival the ancient wonders of the world. Both cylinders of irregular shape, they served as twin supports for the architecturally indeterminate granite mass towering over them.” On closer inspection, the pillars assume “the familiar shape of ordinary shoe heels.”

  Then suddenly, some hundred and fifty meters higher up, Vadim perceived the equally impressive accordions of a pair of men’s boots, but further identification was complicated by the jagged fringe of the clouds. Thanks to the almost daytime brightness of the illumination over the left block, he could see immeasurably tiny suspension scaffolds with advanced brigades of finishing workers poking around with their polishing machines in the cavelike folds of the boot leg, while the apparent laggards on the right block still swarmed around the welt of the heel. Reason still resisted the conclusions of a perplexed mind, but then, through an accidental tear in the cloud and at a terrible height, there appeared and soon vanished the elongated granite figure eight of a military trench coat half-belt.5

  The house of socialism, built by the proletarians of all countries, turns out to be a pyramid, and the pyramid turns out to be an enormous statue of Comrade Stalin. Or, as one character in The Pyramid suggests, the New Man molded by Comrade Stalin is in fact Comrade Stalin himself. In 1934, at the first Congress of Soviet Writers, Leonov had said that his creative mirror was too small for “the new master, the great planner, the future geometer of our planet.” In 1946, he had written, with resignation, that he was “not a sea, not even a tender northern lake that could reflect, to the tiniest degree, the majesty of the celestial body visible today from all corners of the universe.” In 1994, in The Pyramid, Leonov’s doomed alter ego is allowed to see parts of this body from the “dizzying height” of the chief architect’s bridge. “Around the entire perimeter of the platform there was not a single railing to lean on in case of a sudden attack, in equal measure, of nausea and vertigo, as the bottomless abyss peered in through the cracks in the wooden planks underfoot.”6

  The romanticism of this fantastic sight, when viewed through binoculars, shattered into a multiplicity of everyday scenes. Moving upward, isolated sections of the ongoing construction work slid into view. A convoy of heavy trucks gradually climbed the steep slope toward the foot of the statue and disappeared into the enormous tunnel under the heel, only to reappear a hundred meters higher on a highway built into one of the folds of the boot. Further up, on the left side, a brigade of workers suspended on a block and tackle were using—clearly as a matter of great urgency—dozens of blinding ultraviolet rays to cut through the almost finished outer casing on the statue’s chest. “In all the bustle of big history, they seem to have overlooked the trifling matter of the giant’s heart,” said the guide by way of a poor joke, looking into Vadim’s soul and smirking devilishly. Even higher, through the haze of distance, Vadim could see a molding of spiral curls float, suspended on cables, toward the row of powerful cantilevers on the statue’s half-shaven upper lip: the mounting of the moustache was nearing completion. Meanwhile, through an open cut in the little finger, Vadim was able to peer, despite the egregious difference in height, into a railwaylike building, where a staff meeting was taking place, and the speaker appeared to be lopping off truths with his hand each time a new one arose.7

  Most of The Pyramid’s world and the whole of socialism are contained within this “universal idol,” and the bewildered minds of most of the characters foresee the scale of the catastrophe. The action is propelled by the contest between the angel, Dymkov (“Puff of Smoke”), who comes down to Earth to see what has gone wrong, and the devil, Shatanitsky, who represents “that power which would the evil ever do” (and does). Dymkov is gradually sapped of his miracle-working powers; Shatanitsky works steadily in concert with the Party leaders, who see in him a fellow “activist of forced happiness.” Dymkov gets a job as a circus magician; Shatanitsky is “the leading practitioner of the advanced science that resolutely denies its own existence.” Dymkov comes out of a door painted on a church pillar and eventually flees in despair; Shatanitsky abandons the pyramid project and lives on in the Swamp, in what used to be the House of Government:8

  It was an ordinary, overcrowded communal apartment building with rooms off long corridors. A stinging light was coming from a burning lamp somewhere, and the entire host of infernal servitors must have been home, for one could not escape the unbearable, brain-tingling, feverish sound of its vespertine activity: the barking of a dog, a telephone ringing, the unconvincing crying of a dubious infant, a fretsaw cutting glass, furniture being moved around, the hammering in of four-inch nails, and, finally, a coloratura singer calling to her lover, with the help of a gramophone, to come back into her arms. The sound refuse trickling down on all sides dropped resoundingly into the boundless echo of the stairwell.9

  ■ ■ ■

  The Soviet government remained an ideocracy (theocracy, hierochracy) until the end. All decisions deemed important were made by the Party, whose legitimacy was based on the original prophecy and whose members were admitted—at least in theory—on the basis of their adherence to that prophecy (as canonized in sacred texts and interpreted by current leaders). The original sect (a fraternal community of the faithful opposed to the surrounding world) had become a priesthood (a hierarchical corporation of professional mediators between the original prophecy and the community of the faithful, redefined as all citizens), but the faith remained the same. The faith remained the same, but the majority of the faithful—including, most vocally, the children of the original “student” sectarians—turned away from it. One could be loyal to the Soviet state and the various rites, myths, practices, and institutions it spawned, but no one seemed to recognize the original prophets as prophetic, the foundational texts as sacred, or the coming of Communism as either inevitable or desirable (no matter how long the delay).

  Why was that? Why did Bolshevism die after one generation, like sects that have never become successfully institutionalized (let alone conquered much of the world)? Why did Bolshevism not outlive its own ideocracy? Why could the children of the Bolshevik believers not maintain their fathers’ faith while breaking most of its injunctions and ignoring its many false claims and failed prophecies? Why was the fate of Bolshevism so different from that of Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, and countless other millenarian faiths? Most “churches” are vast rhetorical and institutional structures built on broken promises. Why was Bolshevism unable to live with its own failure? The House of Government was meant to stand in the shadow of the Palace of Soviets. Why did the government succeed in building only the shadow?

  The assumption that the Communist prophecy was uncommonly factual and therefore easily falsifiable seems insufficient: many millenarians set more or less specific dates for the end of the world, prepare accordingly, miss the deadline, weep from disappointment, postpone the inevitable, and continue to wait, more or less eagerly.

  A related, but perhaps more effective, explanation has to do with the place of the supernatural in the Marxist vision of history. The drama of universal degradation and proletarian salvation is preordained and independent of human will (except in the same dialectical sense in which the coming of the Kingdom of God is dependent on Jesus’s ministry); Communism is a time beyond time: history without the locomotive. The core of Marxism may, therefore, be seen as supernatural—incapable of empirical verification and ultimately a matter of what Osinsky, following Verhaeren, calls “luminous faith.” The doctrine’s vocabulary, on the other hand, is primarily sociological and economic, with no overt references to magic, mystery, or transcendence. This strategy—of wrapping faith in logic—offers considerable advantages in the post-Renaissance age, but it suffers from a
rigidity that explicitly irrational prophecies do not have. A Christian who misses an end-of-the-world deadline may escape into mysticism or to heaven; a Marxist stuck inside the hollow statue of Comrade Stalin has fewer such resources. The problem is not so much that the original claims were false: it is that they cannot be explained away as riddles or allegories.

  Another possible explanation has to do with Marxism’s economic determinism—its claim that economics is the “base” that props up the social “superstructure” and the fuel that feeds the locomotive of history. A change in the economic base is the key to a change in human condition. The key to the last and decisive change in the economic base is the abolition of private property. Most millenarian sects are opposed to private property (on account of its obvious incompatibility with sectarian fraternity), but only Marxists believe that control over the economy is the main condition for universal salvation. As committed Marxists, the Bolsheviks built the world’s first state devoted above all to the suppression of non-state property. After Stalin’s death, that state pledged to fulfill the promise of socialism in providing “to each according to his needs.” Its failure to do so in competition with Babylon’s money changers was difficult to justify. Capitalism proved better at meeting the needs that it shaped for the purpose.

  But Marxism’s economic determinism had an even more fatal consequence—one most obviously on display in the House of Government and most pointedly not seen by those who had eyes. Focused on political economy and “base”-derived sociology, Marxism developed a remarkably flat conception of human nature. A revolution in property relations was the only necessary condition for a revolution in human hearts. The dictatorship of unchained proletarians would automatically result in the withering away of whatever got in the way of Communism, from the state to the family. Accordingly, the Bolsheviks never worried very much about the family, never policed the home, and never connected the domestic rites of passage—childbirth, marriage, and death—to their sociology and political economy. Party, Komsomol, and Young Pioneer members were registered and monitored in school and at work, not at home, and the only House of Government residents subject to outside surveillance were those who worked there. Not only did the Bolsheviks never devise a policy analogous to Christian pastoral care or its “child protective” successors in the modern therapeutic state: they had no local parishes (missions) at all. District Party committees supervised work-based primary cells and coordinated plan fulfillment by local enterprises, leaving “hen-and-rooster” problems and whatever their opponents called “spiritual needs” to history and an occasional exhortation campaign.10

  Most millenarian sects attempt to reform or abolish the family (by decreeing celibacy, promiscuity, or the leader’s sexual monopoly), but if they are to survive, they must incorporate it as part of the providential plan. Jesus said: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father, mother, wife, children, brothers, and sisters, as well as his own life, he can’t be my disciple.” Jesus’s disciple, Paul, told his (much more numerous and diverse) disciples: “I say this as a concession, not as a command. I wish that all of you were as I am. But each of you has your own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that. Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.” And then, following Augustine’s reconciliation with the indefinite postponement of Jesus’s return, marriage became a sacrament enforced by the church and, in later Protestant practice, the institution anchoring the community of the faithful. The Bolsheviks’ early attempts to reform the family, halfhearted and marginal to begin with, were soon abandoned in favor of an acceptance that remained untheorized and apparently irrelevant to the building of Communism.11

  Christianity attached itself to the law of Moses and kept devising new ways of monitoring the family. Muhammad codified and reformed Arabian common law. Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin had nothing to say about everyday human morality and left their disciples no guidance on how to be good Communists at home.

  The Münster Anabaptists banned monogamy and burned all books except the Bible; the Bolsheviks did not realize that by having their children read Tolstoy instead of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin, they were digging the grave of their revolution. That by having children at all, they were digging the grave of their revolution. The house of socialism—as a residential building with family apartments—was a contradiction in terms. The problem with Bolshevism was that it was not totalitarian enough.

  The sects that survive the death of the first generation of believers are those that preserve the hope of salvation by maintaining a strict separation from the outside world (physical, ritual, and intellectual—including the unceasing study of sacred texts and a ban on Babylon’s art and literature). The Bolsheviks, secure in their economic determinism, assumed that the outside world would join as a matter of course, and they embraced Babylon’s art and literature as a prologue and accompaniment to their own. Even at the height of fear and suspicion, when anyone connected to the outside world was subject to sacrificial murder, Soviet readers and writers were expected to learn from Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Goethe. (This changed briefly in the late 1940s, but the fact that the motivation was nationalist, not Marxist, made the paradox all the more obvious.) The children of the Bolshevik millenarians never read Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin at home, and, after the educational system was rebuilt around Pushkin, Gogol, and Tolstoy, all Soviet children stopped reading them in school. At home, the children of the Bolshevik millenarians read the “treasures of world literature,” with an emphasis on the golden ages (the Renaissance, romanticism, and the realist novel, especially Balzac, Dickens, and Tolstoy) and modern historical novels (especially by Romain Rolland and Lion Feuchtwanger). They almost never read Soviet literature at home: the most common exceptions were Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered and Veniamin Kaverin’s The Two Captains, but of course How the Steel Was Tempered ends in almost the same way as David Copperfield, with a marriage and the publication of the hero’s autobiography, and The Two Captains, according to Valia Osinsky, was praised by the critics, “with good reason, for its resemblance to Dickens.”

  What most of those books had in common was their antimillenarian humanism. Some particular favorites, including Charles Dickens’s The Tale of Two Cities and Anatole France’s The Gods Are Athirst, were expressly antirevolutionary; most did the opposite of what Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, the Jacobins, and the Bolsheviks preached by embracing the folly and pathos of human existence. The point of the golden ages, as opposed to the silver ones and any number of modernisms, modern or not, is the affirmation of “really existing” humanity. The books proclaimed as models at the first Congress of Soviet Writers and imbibed religiously by the children of the original Bolsheviks were profoundly anti-Bolshevik, none more so than the one routinely described as the best of them all: Tolstoy’s War and Peace. All rules, plans, grand theories, and historical explanations were vanity, stupidity, or deception. Natasha Rostova “did not deign to be intelligent.” The meaning of life was in living it.

  Something else all those books had in common was that they represented life at other times and in other places. The children of the original Bolsheviks lived in the House of Government the way Tom Sawyer lived in St. Petersburg, Missouri: there and not there; in the present and in the past; on Serafimovich Street and in the mysterious caves leading to the Kremlin, America, or the center of the earth. Lyova Fedotov’s journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg was a heroic quest for a living past, with Verdi’s Aida as the golden key. Indeed, the books, paintings, and operas Lyova and his friends loved were not just set in other times and places—they were “historical” in the sense of being self-consciously concerned with the passing of time and the past as a foreign country.

  The children of the Revolution did not only live in the past—they loved it for being past and, like most readers and writers of historical fiction, tended
to focus on lost causes: Scott’s Scots, Boussenard’s Boers, Cooper’s Mohicans, Sienkiewicz’s Poles, Mayne Reid’s Seminoles, Mérimée’s Corsicans, Pushkin’s Pugachev, Gogol’s Taras Bulba, Stendhal’s Napoleon, and everything Dumas’s Musketeers pledged to preserve, from Her Majesty’s honor to the head of Charles I. Even the great socialist classics, Raffaello Giovagnioli’s Spartacus and Ethel Voynich’s The Gadfly, were about romantic self-sacrifice. And of course no one doubted that the greatest of them all was the one that focused on the most hopeless of lost causes: the pursuit of historical causality. Tolstoy did not deign to be intelligent. Georg Lukacs, who worked in the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, did. His The Historical Novel, written in Moscow in 1937, analyzed the books that the House of Government children were reading from the point of view of historical materialism. But the House of Government children who were reading those books never read The Historical Novel.

  Revolutions do not devour their children; revolutions, like all millenarian experiments, are devoured by the children of the revolutionaries. The Bolsheviks, who did not fear the past and employed God-fearing peasant nannies to bring up their children, were particularly proficient in creating their own gravediggers. As Plato’s Socrates says in The Republic,

  Shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up?

  We cannot.

  Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorised ones only. Let them fashion the mind with such tales, even more fondly than they mould the body with their hands; but most of those which are now in use must be discarded.12