Moscow, 1937

by Karl Schlogel

  At New Year 1937, he writes:

  The New Year’s tree stood almost in the middle of the dining room. The dinner table had been moved up against the piano. The room had grown crowded and begun to smell of the woods, the country house, the skis, the dog Morka, the porch with white windows and the dirty wet floor, where they would knock their felt boots against the boards, throw their mittens down on the bare floor, without an oilcloth – all the things on the porch had a sorry, frozen look – and throwing open the felt-padded door, they would run into the warmth, into the smoky, dry, kitchen cosiness, with the crackling of the stove. Everything smelled of pine needles – that was the smell of vacations.25

  There is a fairly detailed description of the study, an interior typical of the lifeworld of the Russian intelligentsia:

  The study was large, full of mysterious things. In four cabinets there were books crowded together, thousands of books. Many of them were quite uninteresting, in paper covers, torn and tattered, dusty – old stuff that no one needed. But there were also very beautiful encyclopaedias bound in leather, with gold backs and a great number of pictures inside from which Gorik had long since peeled off the transparent cigarette paper for various needs. On the walls there, in the space between one of the cabinets and a window hung Father’s weapons: an English carbine, a small Winchester with a polished green stock, a double-barrelled Belgian hunting rifle, a sabre in an antique scabbard, a plaited Cossack whip, soft and flexible with a little tail at the tip, and a broad Chinese sword with two silk ribbons, scarlet and dark green. Father had brought that sword from China. It had been used to chop off the heads of criminals, and in an album that Father had also brought from there, Gorik had seen a photograph of such an execution. Mornings, and sometimes in the afternoon too, Father did special Chinese exercises with the sword, waving it around, assuming poses … The floor of the study was carpeted with a huge Persian rug the size of the whole room. It was much more convenient to play around on the rug than on the day-bed.26

  In the new Soviet upper class – as in the case of the of Florinskii’s household – the household naturally included a nanny, a cleaning lady or other domestic help.

  The servant, a portly lady wearing a cap, who in some way resembled Florinsky’s wife – just as dark-haired, sleek, with white skin – carried a tray of hors d’oeuvres that was loaded down like a cart. Shaking, she supported it with her shoulder and chin. Arsyushka wanted first to stun, and then to talk. Nikolay Grigorievich, bored, looked over the dining room, which had the appearance of a museum: very old dark paintings in bronze frames, porcelain, crystal, the essence of everything bourgeois. ‘Well, how about that!’ thought Nikolay Grigorievich. ‘Who’s looking after you? In earlier times your place would have been as an agent in a district office.’27

  A piano was a mandatory part of this interior:

  In the dining room the two grandmothers, Anna Genrikhovna and Vera Andreevna, were playing piano pieces for four hands. Thin candles left over from the children’s New Year’s pine tree burned in the candelabras on the old Becker instrument; their twofold reflection flickered against the darkened windows and there was a cloying aroma of candlewax and home-made cinnamon biscuits.28

  Yezhov’s salon: art and the secret police

  Elena Bulgakova’s diary entries permit us to reconstruct a topography of the ‘nests’ of the intelligentsia, the junctions and networks of the cultured elite. The Bulgakovs themselves lived in the same building as the Mikhalkovs, Viktor Shklovskii and other writers.29 There was a constant coming and going. The visitors’ list reads like a Who’s Who of the literary and artistic intelligentsia of Soviet Russia: Akhmatova, Veresaev and Sergei Prokofiev. Shostakovich played his new compositions on the piano (6 January 1936). On another occasion, Isaak Dunaevskii performed his own pieces (7 October 1938). People met in the clubs. They came across each other in the restaurants, such as the Artists’ Club. ‘Familiar faces at every table’ (28 June 1937). They met at theatre premieres. ‘The theatre was larded with famous people, as Molière would have said: Akulov and Kerzhentsev were there, Litvinov, Mezhlauk, Mogil'nyi, Rykov, Gai and Boiarskii. I can’t count them all. In addition, a select audience had come. Professors, doctors, actors and writers by the dozen …’ (15 February 1936).

  But there are also indications of rather more mixed gatherings: ‘We were at the Yakovlevs. A mixed society – artists and GPU people. Mrs Dulova played the harp, which had been specially brought in for the occasion’ (11 November 1935). The place was crammed full of strange people: ‘Konskii phoned, “I am full of longing; can I come too?” He came, but behaved very strangely. When M.A. phoned, Grisha, who had just entered the room, went up to the secretary, picked up an album, leafed through it, and tried to look into an envelope with pictures in it lying on the desk. A second Bitkov [a police informer from Bulgakov’s play on Pushkin].’30 ‘Towards the end of the evening, it was already approaching 1 a.m., an unknown man of around fifty wearing dark glasses appeared. He introduced himself as “Fedia’s friend from high school”. He looked exactly like Tuller’ [one of the Tuller twins, a secret policeman from Bulgakov’s play Adam and Eve].31

  Figure 24.1 V. Yefanov: Meeting of the actors of the Stanislavsky Theatre with an audience from the Zhukovskii Aviation Academy (1938)

  ‘Many artists profited from the positions held by their patrons, but just as many plunged to their death when their benefactors and protectors fell by the wayside.’

  The members of the Cheka belonged to the highest circles of society, and more than a few leading Chekists valued their close relationships with writers and artists. Many artists profited from the positions held by their patrons, but just as many plunged to their death when their benefactors and protectors fell by the wayside. Many circles had formed around Party leaders. Artists turned to them to obtain support against the activities of the far left. Examples are the painters Konstantin Yuon, Aleksandr Gerasimov, Sergei Gerasimov and Igor' Grabar', all of whom turned to Molotov for protection against Kerzhentsev’s Committee of Art.32 Yakov Agranov, the NKVD man (Deputy People’s Commissar), was the patron of the Vakhtangov Theatre. Dmitri Shostakovich applied to Mikhail Tukhachevskii following the attacks on him at the beginning of 1936.33The left-wing radical Leopol'd Averbakh was on the best of terms with Genrikh Yagoda, since he was married to the latter’s sister. The director Vsevolod Meyerhold had patrons who frequented the salon presided over by his wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh.34 Voroshilov, the People’s Commissar for Defence, favoured opera singers of both sexes; Vyshinskii, the state prosecutor in the show trials, was said to be an important port of call for lawyers and diplomats. Meyerhold wrote repeatedly to Avel' Enukidze and Genrikh Iagoda. Stalin himself was often approached and would telephone writers directly. Bukharin took up the cudgels on behalf of Pasternak and Mandelstam. There was nothing out of the ordinary, then, about Yezhov’s connections with the world of writers and artists.

  Yezhov was also linked to the world of writers and artists through his second wife, Evgenia Gladun, who had worked her way up from secretary to become editor of the important journal USSR in Construction. But she was more than an editor; she also ran a salon frequented by Moscow’s most prominent writers, and enjoyed intimate relations with more than a few of them. The members of Mrs Yezhova’s literary salon included Isaak Babel', Mikhail Kol'tsov, Maksim Litvinov, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, other writers and actors, and even Otto Schmidt, the polar explorer. Babel' and Schmidt were said to have been Mrs Yezhova’s lovers, but an additional lover may have been Aleksandr Kozarev, the chairman of the Komsomol, who was also the editor of USSR in Construction.35 The interrogation of Isaak Babel', who was arrested in the wake of Yezhov’s fall from favour, gives us an insight into the literary soirées and the life of the editorial board, a mixture of libertinage, orgies, literary adventures and the thrills of an involvement with the militant actors of the Revolution. In the course of the interrogations, Babel' was denounced, but he also deno
unced others. Everything could now be used against him: his good contacts with commanders in the Civil War, with foreign writers, such as André Malraux, and foreign publishers, his intimate relationship with Mrs Yezhova, who was charged with having spied for the British, and especially his association with her husband, Nikolai Yezhov, who stood accused of being the head of a conspiracy and who was executed for this. Vitalii Shentalinskii believes that it was Babel'’s literary genius that led him to seek out the heart of darkness. ‘He had long worked on a book on the Cheka; he had collected material, had spoken to prominent Chekists, had eagerly listened to their stories and taken notes about them … The writer wanted to capture “the moment of truth”. Did he really have to wait until he found himself imprisoned in the Lubianka to find it?’36

  Postscript: inventory of luxury and fashion

  Power itself has provided us with the clearest idea of what constitutes the high life for those who belong to its inner circle. At the end of March and the beginning of April 1937, five officers of the NKVD searched the home and office of their former head, the People’s Commissar Genrikh Iagoda. They produced a precise inventory amounting to 130 items. These included:

  Soviet money: 22,997 roubles and 59 kopecks, including a savings book with a credit of 6,180 roubles and 59 kopecks

  Various wines: 1,229 bottles of mainly imported wines from the 1897,

  1900 and 1902 vintages

  Collection of pornographic photos: 3,904 items

  Pornographic films: 11

  Cigarettes, various imported brands, including Egyptian and Turkish: 11,075

  Men’s coats, mainly imported: 21

  Astrakhan fur coats: 2

  Imported men’s suits: 22

  Chrome leather and kidskin boots: 19 pairs

  Imported ladies’ shoes: 31 pairs

  Imported ladies’ hats: 22

  Top-quality imported silk stockings: 130 pairs

  Squirrel pelts: 50

  Astrakhan pelts: 43

  Otter pelts: 5

  Large rugs: 17

  Imported men’s silk vests: 50

  Imported men’s silk underwear: 43

  Imported men’s silk shirts: 29

  Imported gramophones: 2

  Imported gramophone records: 399

  Imported gloves: 37 pairs

  Imported ladies’ handbags: 16

  Imported pyjamas: 17

  Imported ties: 34

  Imported ladies’ silk panties 68

  Imported fishing rods: 73

  Field glasses: 7

  Sundry revolvers: 19

  Hunting rifles and small-bore rifles: 12

  Army rifles: 2

  Antique daggers: 10

  Swords: 3

  Gold watches: 5

  Cars: 1

  Bicycles: 3

  Collection of pipes and mouthpieces in ivory and amber, the majority with pornographic motifs: 165

  Rubber penis: 1

  Folding film screen: 1

  Film reels: 120

  Antique cutlery: 1,008 items

  Imported objects: heaters, iceboxes, vacuum cleaners, lamps, etc.: 71

  Imported perfumes: 95

  Imported sanitary and hygiene products (medicines, condoms): 115

  Pianos, keyboard instruments: 3

  Typewriter: 1

  Counter-revolutionary, Trotskyite, fascist, etc. literature: 542 items.37

  This list enabled Yezhov to expose his predecessor’s love of luxury and his extravagant tastes. Barely two years passed before Yezhov’s own apartment and office was subject to a similar search. The inventory taken as a result differed little from the one taken of Iagoda’s possessions. The items confiscated included several dozen ladies’ coats, raincoats and dresses, forty-eight blouses, thirty-one hats, an endless number of pairs of shoes and suits, thirty-four marble, porcelain, copper and bronze figurines, twenty-nine ‘framed pictures under glass’ and nine portraits, as well as vast quantities of pornographic photos and films.38 The inventories resulting from these searches are curious documents. They tell us about the yearnings in the innermost circle of power: about the private lives and the souls of the heads of the secret police.

  25

  Soviet Hollywood: Miracles and Monsters

  Every despotic power is somehow aware that it remains at risk as long as it fails to achieve control of images and, with it, the right to delete images and create new image worlds. Because cinema was no peaceful, remote ‘sanctuary’ in the tempestuous year 1937, there was massive confusion between fact and fiction, reality and the imagination, fairy tale and horror story. The fantasy world of film could barely keep pace with the fantastic tales of murder and conspiracy of the master narrator and impresario of the Moscow show trials. Actors were often too frightened by the prospect of certain roles: the enemy of the people, the saboteur and the spy. Directors who were supposed to portray the fight against sabotage, wrecking and terrorism found themselves suspected of terrorism. The fake stage weapons turned into the instruments of a real murder. The film industry reproduced and intensified the lunatic worlds of 1937.

  Lenin in October: the Revolution corrected

  The world premiere of Mikhail Romm’s Lenin in October, which took place on the evening of 6 November 1937 in the Bolshoi Theatre, stood at the very centre of the festivities commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution. A more glittering occasion can scarcely be imagined. The theatre, magnificently fitted out in gold and red velvet, the leadership seated on the stage while the diplomatic corps and the nation’s elite sat fully assembled in the boxes, minus a number of figures who had been prominent until just a few moments before. The screening was preceded by the official address given by Molotov in his capacity as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, a speech that was described as ‘uninspiring’ by Ambassador Davies, one of the invited guests, and followed by a programme consisting of songs and folk dances that lasted into the following morning.1 The performance of the commissioned work, which had only just been completed, demonstrated the modernity of the country’s leaders: film was the very latest medium, and it was shown against the backdrop of the venerable old theatre. Furthermore, this premiere had been awaited with great excitement. It was the first time that Lenin, portrayed here by Boris Shchukin, had appeared as a character in a film. Would it be possible to present an audience with a living, true-to-life, convincing revolutionary leader who, for all his humanity, should not be all too human and ordinary and who, however naturalistically depicted, should not be shown warts and all? And, lastly, Stalin would have to be brought out of the secondary role he actually played in the October events and moved into the limelight as the future leader. How would it be possible to manipulate the history of events that had occurred only twenty years previously and were remembered by many still living activists? It remained uncertain until the very last minute whether the film would be completed. There were a number of hitches in the actual performance, as Mikhail Romm recalled with a shudder even after thirty years:

  When I arrived I saw the technicians and engineers assembling the equipment and heard them swearing. They were far from ready, and there was only three-quarters of an hour before the start of the performance. They were all terrified, and so was I. Shumiatskii shook my hand [the People’s Commissar responsible for film; he was arrested only two months later, on 18 January 1938, and was condemned to death in July of that year]; he too was very nervous. At last the film began, and it was a disaster. The screen was tiny, the image even tinier and so pale that it was barely possible to distinguish anything. To cap it all, the sound was too faint and almost impossible to hear. I rushed up to the projector, my shadow fell across the screen, and I shouted, ‘It’s too quiet!’2

  The film broke fifteen times during the showing. Even so, it was praised in the following day’s papers, admittedly with the proviso that it would have to be taken out of the programme so as to eliminate various defects. Two scenes – the storming of the Winte
r Palace and the arrest of the Provisional Government – were to be filmed again and inserted into the final take. In actual fact, Romm did redo those two scenes in two days so that the film could be shown in the cinemas a month later, on 12 December 1937 – just in time for the first elections conducted under the new constitution. It soon became a Soviet film classic.3 Stalin himself had duly noted the ‘weaknesses’ in the film but had finally given it his blessing. This incident shows the close interest Stalin took in film and, more generally, how conscious political power was of the power of images, and especially of motion pictures.4

  The USSR as a land of film, picture palaces and stars

  From the very outset the Bolshevik leadership had grasped the significance of film for the reconstruction of the nation. Here too they latched on to the film fever of the pre-war era together with the fantasies unleashed by the novel medium. It was a medium capable of reaching a mass public – a public, moreover, that was not yet able to read and write; a medium that could be installed everywhere without great preparations or the need for major infrastructural innovation, and which could then extend its influence and be used for spreading information, for political agitation and education, for popular culture and, not least, for entertainment. The message of moving pictures was easily comprehensible; it created a horizon of understanding and a picture language of slogans, symbols and types. In short, the cinema was ideally suited to becoming the ‘leading medium’ in a country that had been catapulted into modernity, and this is undoubtedly the historical explanation for the unique flowering and originality of the Soviet film, an art in which all the questions of filmmaking and film aesthetics presented themselves in a radical and urgent form. The pioneers of this cinema – Dziga Vertov, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Lev Kuleshov – all receded into the background at the end of the 1920s, or else they fell silent altogether, or were indeed silenced.5