Moscow, 1937
Page 40
On 15 February 1932, he noted: ‘Zimorin came here. In Tashkent, Saratov – in the provinces – there is real hunger, even in the towns. As for the villages – a horrifying picture.’ On 18 February 1932, he wrote in his diary: ‘Vochal from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences – basically, scholarship has ceased to exist. No more bread, no more bacon – that is the entire Soviet power’ [in Ukrainian in the text: Nema khliba, nema sala, to soviiska vlada stala]. On the morning of 25 February 1932:
Tried to read Against Mechanical Materialism and Menshevizing Idealism in Biology (1931) – and finally succeeded. It is unreadable: embarrassing, clueless. Material for the psychiatrists. The very image of moral devastation. Even competent scholars such as Mikhail Zavadovskii and Nikolai Kol'tsov take these criticisms seriously, and they are not alone. Paltry ideas and the complete absence of scientific work.27
10 March 1932:
Fear of war everywhere and the expectation of a catastrophe. Devaluation of the currency, rise in prices. People everywhere are starting to complain about the incompetence (though they do not use that word) of the creators of the plan, about the inability to do a successful job … deterioration in the conditions of life, rumours of war, famine, of a fast approaching collapse. Disappearance of food supplies, deterioration in the situation of the press (disappearance of newspapers and the declining quality of their contents), fewer books are being printed (you can’t get any), oppression and arbitrary rule. That is at the back of everyone’s mind in people’s attitudes and conversations. Man is an astonishingly adaptable creature. Great ideas and projects, but all attempts to realize them are botched and destroyed piece by piece. Making a reality of freedom is already a thing of the past, as is the very idea.28
Vernadskii records whatever he observes around him and attempts to make sense of it. Thus he comments on 1 March 1938:
The papers today are full of reports of the new ‘trial’ [the show trial against Bukharin]. They have gone mad. They will end up destroying even the great things that have been achieved and that will basically not disappear. They are now undermining the power of the state which truly safeguards the interests of the masses (if we except the freedom of thought and religion); they will destroy themselves. Everyone is overcome by uncertainty and believes that the government is weak. The newspapers impute quite inane motives to the accused (in the leading articles), and then there is this curious mix of the people involved – four doctors, and among them Dmitrii D. Pletnev! Who can believe it? And if a portion of the masses does believe it, it must be the part that cannot be relied on. One is tempted to ask whether those in power are still in their right minds. They do what is great and necessary, but are at present destroying themselves. All this can have catastrophic consequences for the future. A feeling of instability and bitterness that destruction comes not from outside but from the heart of power itself. Worked on my book. Wrote the conclusion to my essay on meteorites.29
Figure 17.2 Vladimir I. Vernadskii (1863–1945)
‘They have gone mad. They will end up destroying even the great things that have been achieved and that will basically not disappear.’
At the end of the Bukharin trial on 13 March 1938, Vernadskii voices his fears that his signature might be found under the resolution ‘No mercy for the gang of fascist bandits!’, which was signed by seventeen academicians. He uses illness as an excuse to refuse the request of the president of the academy to add his signature. His own judgement on the death sentences is categorical: ‘In my view, every murder, including the death penalty, is unacceptable – I am absolutely uncompromising and unshakeable on that point. The more life goes on, the clearer I am about this conviction.’30
But even he could not keep arrest and murder at a distance. The first victim was Boris Lichkov, the academic secretary of the Commission for the Development of Natural Resources (KEPS). Lichkov was arrested as early as June 1934 and sent to work on the building site of the Moscow– Volga Canal. Vernadskii found out where he was and tried to exert his influence, with the result that Lichkov was eventually given a post as geologist in the Dmitlag camp and later in Central Asia. In September 1937, the NKVD arrested Vernadskii’s own secretary, Elizaveta Suprunova. Efforts were evidently being made to discover something unfavourable to him. Aleksandr Simorin, a doctor and graduate of the University of Saratov and a close friend, was arrested. Vernadskii discovered him in a camp in Kolyma and used all his influence to have him transferred to a job in the camp hospital. He evidently gave up all his administrative posts so as to concentrate on his own scientific work and in order not to have to become involved in general discussions and the purging campaigns. In April 1938 he employed Anna Shakhovskaia as his secretary, even though he was well aware that the employment of a ‘former person’ from a noble family was not without risk. When her husband, Dmitrii Shakhovskoi, was arrested during the night of 26 July 1938, he made efforts to have him released, and wrote a letter to Andrei Vyshinskii, who was not only the public prosecutor but also a member of the Academy of Sciences, and therefore Vernadskii’s colleague. But it was all to no avail. Shakhovskoi was sentenced to ten years in prison.31
Even after Yezhov’s Great Purge ‘the Yezhovshchina’ had faded away, Vernadskii remained an alert observer, trying to find out for himself just where Russia was going. Right up to the onset of the German invasion of Russia, he kept noting down his observations: ‘growing dissatisfaction with the authorities’, ‘the absence of everyday items of food’, ‘increasing number of complaints despite the grave risk of denunciation’ (10 September 1940).
Police communism is on the rise and is effectively eroding the structure of the state. Nowadays everything has been infiltrated by espionage. Theft has become endemic. Sales assistants in food shops have their hands full dealing with it. For the last twenty years no one has had the feeling that the regime is stable … The collective farms are all turning by degrees into a new form of serfdom – with party members at their head.
The newspapers are bursting with the stupid speeches from the Eighteenth Party Congress. Not a single living speech. The impoverishment and absence of a living thought and talent in the speeches made by the Bolsheviks is striking. The assembled officials are afraid to speak the truth. That shows, I believe, the great decline in their intellectual and moral stature in comparison to the existing potential of the nation.32
The disappearance of outline maps and geological maps, or even their censoring and distortion to the point where they are unrecognizable, is proof in his eyes not just of ‘organized ignorance’ but of the fusion of conscious and unconscious wrecking activity.33 Vernadskii speaks of a parallel government – the Central Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars – though real power lies in Stalin’s dictatorship. ‘It is this that links our organization with that of Hitler and Mussolini.’ He speaks of the GPU as a ‘state within a state’. ‘These are the deformities, the rottenness that consumes the Party – but in real life they cannot be dispensed with. The result is millions of imprisoned slaves, including the criminal elements but also the flower of the nation and the flower of the Party, which has gained its victory in a fraternal struggle.’ In Vernadskii’s eyes, Yezhov ‘has probably long been insane or a traitor who has destroyed the flower of the Party and who went on with his destructive work long after much of his destructive “work” had been completed.’ Paradoxically, the destruction of the Party intelligentsia by the GPU had led to a ‘highly positive result’, to a ‘peculiar restoration of the statehood of the Russian nation’. But no one could say what would happen to the country if Stalin, on whom everything depended, were to die. Despite all the measures to purge it, the Party was still full of criminal and morally bourgeois elements. A genuine reorganization exceeded the powers of the state, which had failed to control the GPU and to supply the basic needs of the population.
Vernadskii placed his hopes, therefore, in the period after the war, which had begun on 22 June 1941:
Basically, it has become cl
ear both in the Finnish War and the present one that radical changes are unavoidable. Against the background of our victory and that of the Anglo-Saxon powers, I have no doubt about these changes. The immediate future will bring us many surprises and a radical change to our conditions of life. Will we find the people needed to meet this challenge?34
Like Vernadskii, many people believed that the war against the aggressor would clarify matters, would put an end to the self-destructive phase and would bring people and society together under a new dispensation. He seemed happy to contemplate the liberating effect of patriotic mobilization. The first appeal by the Academy of Sciences to rise up against the German invaders appeared on 29 June 1941. Vernadskii was pleased that the appeal, which he too had signed, had appeared without extravagant praise of Stalin.35 He donated the money he received from a state prize he had been awarded to a fighting fund for the Red Army.
On 16 July 1941 Vernadskii and his wife were evacuated from Moscow to Borovoe, in the Akmolinsk region of Kazakhstan. Here too he maintained contact with old friends and concerned himself with their welfare. On 27 July 1943 he sent Stalin an essay on the noosphere, with the request to have it published in Pravda.36 In August 1943 he returned to Moscow, and he died there in Leninskie Gory on 6 January 1945.
His expectations of what would happen after the victory over Germany were not to be fulfilled. But that is unlikely to have dented the confidence he continued to feel even in the darkest night of the terror. He had no doubt that Russia would survive even those times. That was his cantus firmus. He was horrified by the intellectual and moral decline of the communists, but was convinced that life would still go on. And on 10 September 1940, after hearing depressing news about the general situation, he wrote: ‘Lies are everywhere. But life goes on, and I believe that great things are being achieved and created – beyond programmes of any kind.’ On 21 January 1941, he noted, ‘The growth process of the nation is not affected by all such programmes. Life proceeds on its way – as far as that is possible under a dictatorship – and ignores them all.’37
Excursion to the Moscow–Volga Canal: science and slave labour
The official programme of the Seventeenth International Geological Congress included a visit to one of the most important sights that the new Moscow had to offer its foreign visitors: to the newly opened Moscow– Volga Canal. This was more than a tourist excursion; it was connected to the subjects under discussion at the congress – to geology, to geomorphology, and to the new mapping of the earth’s surface, both literally and metaphorically. The building of the canal would turn Moscow, the city at the centre of the interior, into the port of five seas. It was a geological, technical, planning and engineering masterpiece, a small miracle, like the construction of the Metro or the start of the construction work on the Palace of the Soviets, which the congress visitors could likewise admire. At the congress itself, there had been sessions on gold extraction, the conditions governing permafrost, and projects in Vorkuta, Kuznetsk and Karaganda. Now the participants all went to view the canal, the work of forced labourers, who were all housed together in the largest corrective camp – Dmitlag – larger even than the concentration of slave labourers at the White Sea Canal had been in its day. It was an object lesson in which something of essential significance came into view: the interaction of science and terror, specialization and forced labour, the transformation of knowledge about the appropriation of nature into knowledge about how to subjugate human beings. Congress participants encountered here one of the foothills of the Archipelago which would encompass the destruction of the co-workers and colleagues with whom they had just been debating.
18
A City by the Sea: The Opening of the Moscow–Volga Canal
On 15 July 1937, the Moscow–Volga Canal opened for general passenger and freight transport. A water route between Moscow and the five seas had been completed. An entire flotilla of boats had travelled via the canal to the centre of the city, to the docking facilities in Gorky Park, in order to take part in a mass celebration with 20,000 spectators in the open-air theatre of the park. A witness recalls the presence of the popular singer Lidia Ruslanova and the comedian Mikhail Garkavi.1 In the evening, a celebration in the Bolshoi Theatre was attended by all the prominent figures from the Kremlin – Stalin, Molotov, the Moscow Party leadership with Khrushchev and Bulganin, the heads of the NKVD and the canal project, including Nikolai Yezhov, Mikhail Frinovskii, Stanislav Redens and Sergei Zhuk. Matvei Berman, the commandant of Dmitlag, whose inmates had built the canal, said in his address that ‘an error on the part of nature’ which had cut Moscow off from the great water courses had now been rectified after a labour lasting four years and eight months. By intervening in the processes of nature, Moscow, a city in the centre of Russia, remote from any coast, had become the port of the five seas, a city by the sea. The Volga had been halted in its flow, and henceforth its waters would lap the shores of the Kremlin. The old folksong ‘Alas, if only Mother Volga would flow upstream’ was now out of date. Another prominent figure, Lazar' Kogan, had declared that ‘The Bolsheviks have forced the Volga to reverse its course and have dug a new bed for it. The cool waters of the Volga now flow into the Moskva and refresh the water artery of the capital flowing past the walls of the Kremlin.’2 Moscow, a city by the sea! That was the refrain accompanying this great event for months on end.3
The previous day, 50,000 inmates of the camp had been released to mark the completion of the canal, and thousands of other people were rewarded and honoured with medals, distinctions and gifts.4 The capital’s newspapers published long lists of those who had been singled out for praise by the highest authorities. They failed to mention that the completion of the building works and the release of the prisoners coincided almost exactly with the arrest of the managers of the canal project and the camp and their detention in the canal zone. Moreover, the public waited in vain for the great documentation of the construction of the canal that had been commissioned and that was intended as a sequel to the report published after the completion of the White Sea Canal. At the time, following a suggestion of Maxim Gorky, a group of prominent Soviet writers had lauded the building of the White Sea Canal as a pioneering achievement not just of canal construction but of re-education through work – a feat that has remained famous or notorious to this day.5 The Moscow–Volga Canal was supposed likewise to be crowned by the publication of such a report. But it was not to be. The magnificent folio Moscow–Volga Canal, a volume of 352 pages with illustrations in colour and black and white, plans, diagrams and drawings, was ready for the press, but was never published. Why not? The authors of the volume, the directors of the canal project, had disappeared in 1937. At the very moment when the project was in its final stages and the camp was on the point of being disbanded, there had been a wave of arrests, which included Semen Firin and Sergei Pushitskii, the key organizers of the canal project, unfettered rulers over the camp and masters of life and death, and, following them, over 200 others.6 Aleksandr Komarovskii, an eyewitness on board one of the boats in the flotilla at the opening of the canal, saw some of the bosses of the construction project being forced off the boat and into black limousines on their way to the Lubianka.7 Similarly, later on – on 29 November 1938 – Aleksandr Kosarev, the long-standing first secretary of the Communist Youth Organization and author of the preface to the volume Volga and Moscow, was also arrested and executed. In this way, the dramatis personae who were originally supposed to be praised gradually vanished from the scene and the portraits of the men who had been in charge of the construction of the ‘second Stalin arterial highway’ were gradually erased or airbrushed out of existence. It has taken sixty years for the story of the building of the canal to emerge in full.8
After the White Sea Canal: Stalin’s second arterial highway
The construction of the Moscow–Volga Canal was one of the chief goals of the Second Five-Year Plan (1932–7), and the camp complex that was to make this possible – Dmitlag – was, as Varl
am Shalamov has observed, the largest complex of its kind in the Soviet Union. ‘According to the lists the largest camp was not in Kolyma, not in Vorkuta and not in the BAMlag [the Baikal–Amur Corrective Camp, whose inmates built the Baikal–Amur main railway line – Trans.]. The most extensive camp was Dmitlag on the Moscow Canal, with the town of Dmitrov as its centre.’9
As was the case with many other projects, the idea of building a canal to link the Volga with Moscow was not new. Peter the Great had already conceived the idea of replacing the tow-paths along which light boats were dragged from one river to the next and then floated back into the water, and building a proper canal. A century later – between 1825 and 1842 – building works were started between the rivers Istra and Sestra, but the construction of the Nikolai Railway between Moscow and St Petersburg postponed the further building of the canal into the indefinite future.
On 15 June 1931, the plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party resolved to build a canal whose primary task initially was to guarantee the water supply to Moscow, the rapidly growing capital, and also to provide an additional source of energy through the construction of a power station. The idea of a link for transport and freight came only later. An improved water supply was an indispensable prerequisite for the further development of the capital, with all its new factories and living quarters that were already bursting at the seams. At the same time, there was an urgent need to regulate the Moskva and tame a river that was normally rather narrow, but which frequently overflowed its banks in the spring. One of the great aims of the General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow was to transform the river into the principal arterial route of the city, build up its embankments substantially, and adapt its bridges to match the raised level of the river. The plan repeatedly emphasized the links between the main projects: the Metro, the Palace of the Soviets and the Moscow–Volga Canal. The first head of Dmitlag, Lazar' Kogan, hailed the canal in a programmatic speech as the ‘sister project’ of the Metro.10 The canal was supposed to be capable of transporting 15 million tonnes of freight annually – grain, fish, coal, oil, building materials, raw materials and ore from every point of the compass.11 There was now a direct link with the Volga, and transport was no longer dependent upon the Oka. Henceforth, Moscow would be connected with the entire country via the different waterway networks: with Leningrad, the Baltic and the White Sea via the Mariinskii canal system, with the Caspian Sea via the canal to the Volga, and with the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea through the Don.12