Moscow, 1937

by Karl Schlogel

  The man who said this, Mikhail Moskvin (Meyer Abramovich Trilisser), a member of the Presidium and the Secretariat of the ECCI, an employee of the Comintern information service, the long-standing leader of the Foreign Section of the OGPU, a figure who embodied the unity of the secret police and the military more than almost anyone, would himself be arrested as an ‘enemy of the people’ and a ‘spy’ on 23 November 1938 and sentenced to death.

  If it had long been clear that – as Dmitrii Manuil'skii, the éminence grise of the ECCI, put it – ‘the enemies of the USSR and the Comintern use political emigration as a channel for infiltrating their agents into the USSR and even the VKP(B)’,45 then the only solution was to shed light on the Comintern itself and destroy that channel. Everything was in readiness for that, since there was easy access to the Comintern organizations through the countless thousands of dossiers, protocols and card indexes. All that remained was to draw the different strands of the evidence together. In a directive concerning the progress and the sentences in the third great Moscow show trial, the ECCI itself wrote: ‘The central point of the campaign associated with the trial of the “Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites” must be the explanation of the fact that there is a world conspiracy of reaction and fascism directed immediately against the Land of Socialism, but also against the peace and liberty of all peoples.’46 This is also an instruction to dissolve and destroy oneself. The NKVD was an integral part of the ECCI. All entry permits, residence permits and personnel files passed through the hands of the NKVD. All information was gathered there and stored: name, place of birth, social origin, profession, Party career and political allegiance, expressions of sympathy or critical opinions. The secret police had access to this information and could use it as they wished. We can see from the list of arrested former members and candidate members of the ECCI Party organization, which was compiled on 11 September 1939, that those worst affected came from Moscow, Poland, Lithuania and Germany. But there were also names from France, Holland, Britain and the USA. List No. 7 shows that, in fact, the communications and personnel departments were the hardest hit – in other words, those who found themselves at the intersection of the USSR and the hostile capitalist world.47 Between 20 January 1936 and 1 April 1938, the size of the organization shrank from 394 members to 171, a reduction of 223 members. Ninety-five people were arrested, and the effects were so devastating as to make it impossible for many ECCI departments to function.48 In his diary entry of 8 May 1943, Dimitrov approved of the dissolution of the Comintern on the grounds that it had become an ‘obstacle to the independent development of the Communist movement’, and ‘the further existence of the CI would contribute to the further discrediting of the idea of the International, a result we did not wish to see’. In reality, the Comintern had been given the coup de grâce as early as in 1936–8.

  27

  Arcadia in Moscow: Stalin’s Luna Park

  On 18 May 1937, Gorky Park of Culture and Rest opened its gates. 300,000 people came on the first day of the summer season, which was the tenth day since the park had opened. ‘Visitors found a wide choice of opportunities for recreation and entertainment, depending on their age, preferences and taste’, as the tourist guide phrased it. Situated on the right bank of the Moscow River and easily accessible from a newly opened metro station and the Crimea Bridge, the park occupies 296 hectares. The main entrance, with the ticket office, tourist information and a post office, is situated on Krymskii Val. The park is divided into three zones: the parterre, the green zone along the river bank and the Lenin Hills. ‘The park is to be a centre for health and recreation. It should cater for the cultural needs of millions of visitors and encourage them to take part in artistic and sporting activities.’

  ‘A centre of culture and rest’

  In the jubilee year of the October Revolution the amenities on offer were especially ambitious.

  Amateur singers, dancers, musicians and acrobats are able to display their talents either individually or collectively. Symphony orchestras, folk music orchestras and jazz bands – there is room for them all in the huge expanse of the park. Spontaneous singing is frequently organized; clubs for art and sport, anglers’ circles, gardeners, photographers and radio hams have formed. Leading theatrical troupes from all over the USSR give performances in the theatre and on the open-air stages, among them the Moscow Art Theatre, the Vakhtangov Theatre, theatres from Leningrad, Ukraine, etc. More than 30,000 spectators visit the theatres and the circus every day. Worthy of particular mention is Green Theatre, where mass performances took place in the open air before over 20,000 spectators. Carmen was performed in the 1935 summer season, and in 1936 there was a performance of Quiet Flows the Don, an opera of Cossack life by Ivan Dzerzhinskii, as well as the brilliant ballet The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. In the evenings Green Theatre was used for film showings. It had a giant screen of 170 square metres with fantastic visibility and sound. Poets, writers and artists cooperated with the park’s management in the arts education programme. Exhibitions of the works of poets and writers, literary evenings in which authors met their readers are all part of the programme. The park placed special emphasis on working with children.1

  The guide has the following tourist information about the children’s village:

  The children’s village of Gorky Park of Culture and Rest organizes leisure activities for children of pre-school age. The pre-school centre is intended for children of between four and seven. The children are under the constant supervision of experienced teachers. They spend their entire time engaged in carefully planned activities. The centre is equipped with a large collection of books and games. Under the guidance of a director, the children act out various stories on stage, wearing the appropriate costumes. Carnivals, mass festivals, recitations, concerts, storytelling, puppets and so forth take place regularly in the pre-school centre. The centre has an exhibition dealing with children’s education, and an adviser employed to explain the exhibits. There are regular talks for parents. The Schoolchildren’s Centre consists of the ‘Archimedes Club’ for young inventors and a special interest room where children can do drawing, sculpture and carving. There is also the Young Pioneers’ Centre, which organizes the study of nature, play, expeditions to the Moscow suburbs and practical activities in farming, experimental agriculture and animal husbandry. There is a large dodgem-car track for children and a large number of playgrounds and sports facilities. The work of the ‘Archimedes Club’ merits particular mention. The club comprises an exhibition room and laboratories for popular science and technology, as well as equipment for work on building, photography, telegraph, etc. In the laboratory, the instructor gives an introductory talk to every child and explains in detail what they can make with the available components and what experiments they can perform with the machines or equipment. The club facilitates discussions about engineering developments and the most important scientific discoveries, the projects of great natural scientists of the past and present, and the latest technological achievements of the USSR. Children will be able to meet scientists and engineers as well as leading factory workers.2

  With this exhaustive guide in our hand, the programme of activities and a map, we can reconstruct this leisure park in great detail and undertake a virtual tour.3 With Gorky Park, a central topos of Soviet culture came into being in the 1930s – there were also three further such parks in Moscow.4 It was a place that combined the elements of the old amusement and Luna parks with the tasks of political propaganda, of improving literacy and public education, and, finally, with the carnival. It was a culture and leisure centre of a novel kind, a social and cultural topos. In her study of this subject, Katja Kucher has analysed this rich, complex and unique institution by reconstructing a walk through the facilities in 1937. The park of culture and rest was the place where kulturnost could be transmitted in exemplary fashion, which is as much as to say that it was an ambitious plan to demonstrate how leisure time should be spent and how good manners could be acquired – a
basic task for any country that had been torn out of its traditional path and catapulted into the modern world.5

  The programme was unusually elaborate. It included gymnastics, rowing, ball games, mass exercises and mass choirs, lessons in modern Western dancing, literary readings of the works of Gorky and Blok, and scientific talks. Pleasure had its price: the waiting time for a restful hour in a hammock could sometimes be as long as fifty minutes. The attractions must have been as fantastic as their names: ‘Flying People’, ‘Swaying Tower’, ‘Windmill’, as well as panoramas with such titles as ‘Our North Pole’, ‘Turksib’, Giant Wheel and Parachute Tower.6

  But Gorky Park also became a showplace for important events in 1937. This was where exhibitions were mounted for the jubilee – a retrospect of industrialization and the construction activities of the year, film showings, mass rallies associated with the show trials and welcome-back ceremonies on the return of the Soviet pilots from America and the Papanin team from their North Pole expedition.7

  ‘What a summer!’

  Visitors, especially children and the young, thought the park was a paradise. It is no accident that white is the dominant colour in the well-known paintings by Samokhvalov and Svarog, showing the national leaders paying their respects to Gorky Park: the white of summer clothing, the white of the balustrades along the embankments of the Moscow River and the statues of sportsmen. The influence of the St Petersburg parks – the Summer Gardens, the Petrodvorets – is as evident as the models of the Luna parks or the Tivolis to be found in many large European towns of the day. Visits to the culture and rest parks have left their traces in the diaries of many boys and girls, as can be seen from this entry from the diary of the young Nina Kosterina on 29 August 1937:

  We three, Stella, Liolia and I, are sitting on comfortable chairs on the edge of an artificial lake in the Park of Culture. We are eating ice-cream. Little boats are floating on the lake; with their human cargoes, they look like baskets of flowers. A new attraction: there is a bang and immediately after it a brightly coloured cloud in the sky.

  Figure 27.1 Parachute Tower in Gorky Park

  ‘The attractions must have been as fantastic as their names.’

  You can really relax here in the park. Beautiful fountains, arbours and paddling pools. We have been in Moscow since 25 August, but nothing has come of my plans. Met Lida in the street. She has been kept back in school because she failed in physics.

  Yesterday I visited Lena Gershman. She is back from Sochi, which she liked very much. She was delighted to see me again and we resolved to sit next to each other again.8

  The sunny summer days in in the park have left their mark on literature, whether it is in Il'f and Petrov or in a scene by Andrei Platonov, where the horror of social warfare shimmers through the erotically charged air.

  The Pioneer band moved some way off and then began to play a youthful march. Precisely in step, conscious of the importance of their future, the barefoot girls marched past the forge; their frail, maturing bodies were clothed in sailor suits, their alert, thoughtful heads were crowned by loose red berets, and their legs were covered with the down of youth. Each of the girls was smiling with a sense of her own significance, an awareness of the seriousness of the life that was essential both to the unity of the column and to the impetus of the march. They had all been born in the days when the dead horses of the Civil War were still lying about on the fields; their mothers had had nothing to feed on but the reserves of their own bodies, and so at their moment of origin not all of the girls had had any skin. The imprint of this early infirmity, a genuine physical gauntness and want of expression, was still visible, but the happiness of childhood friendship, the embodiment of the future in their youthful play and in the dignity of their stern freedom endowed their young faces with a solemn joy that made up for the girls’ lack of beauty or comely plumpness.9

  Osip Mandelstam gave his view from the perspective of an ‘older generation’:

  I’ll never walk in step with the lads

  into the regimented sports arenas.

  I won’t jump from my bed at dawn.

  Woken by the dispatch rider with my call-up papers,

  and I will not, even as a shadow,

  enter the nightmarish crystal palaces.

  … . .

  What a summer! The young workmen’s Tartar backs are glistening.

  Women’s kerchieves are wound round their necks.

  They have narrow, mysterious shoulder-blades,

  and childish collar-bones. Greetings

  to the mighty pagan backbone,

  Which will carry us through a couple of centuries.10

  Figure 27.2 A dance performance in Gorky Park

  ‘The whole place is pervaded with a kind of joyous ardour. In one spot you find games being organized; in another, dances; they are generally started, led and directed by a man or woman captain, and are carried out in perfect order.’

  A visit to Gorky Park was an essential part of the programme for every foreign visitor. André Gide wrote in the summer of 1936:

  I used to go there often. It is a pleasure resort, something like a Luna Park on an immense scale. Once inside the gates, you feel yourself in a foreign land. These crowds of young men and women behave with propriety, with decency; not the slightest trace of stupid or vulgar foolery, or rowdiness, of licentiousness, or even of flirtation. The whole place is pervaded with a kind of joyous ardour. In one spot you find games being organized; in another, dances; they are generally started, led and directed by a man or woman captain, and are carried out in perfect order. Immense chains are formed in which anyone may join, but there are always many more spectators than performers. In another place, there are popular dances and songs, accompanied usually by a simple accordion. Elsewhere, in an enclosure to which access is free, the devotees of physical jerks exercise their acrobatic skill in various ways; a professional trainer superintends the more dangerous movements, advises and guides; further on are gymnastic apparatus, bars and ropes; everyone awaits his turn patiently with mutual words of encouragement. A large space of ground is reserved for volley-ball; and I never tired of watching the strength, grace and skill of the players. Further on, you come upon the section for quiet amusements – chess, draughts and quantities of trifling games which demand skill or patience; some of these were unfamiliar to me and extremely ingenious, as were many other devices for exercising strength, suppleness or agility, which I had never seen and cannot attempt to describe, though certainly some of them would become popular with us. Enough occupations were here to fill hours of one’s time. Some were for adults, some for children. The smallest of these latter have their own separate domain where they are supplied with little houses, little boats, little motor-cars, and quantities of little tools adapted to their size. In a broad path, following on from the quiet games (there are so many candidates for these that sometimes you have to wait a long time before finding a free table), wooden boards are set up on which are posted all sorts of riddles, puzzles and problems. All this, I repeat, without the smallest vulgarity; these immense crowds behave with perfect propriety and are manifestly inspired with good feeling, dignity and decorum – and that too without any effort and as a matter of course. The public, without counting the children, is almost entirely composed of working people who come there for sports training, amusement or instruction; for reading-rooms, lecture-rooms, cinemas, libraries, etc. are also provided and there are bathing pools on the Moscow River. Here and there too, in the immense park, you come across a miniature platform where an impromptu professor is haranguing – giving object-lessons, or instruction in history or geography, accompanied by blackboard illustrations – sometimes even in medicine or physiology, with copious reference to anatomical plates. Everybody listens with intense seriousness. I have already said that I never anywhere caught the smallest attempt at mockery.

  But here is something better still – a little outdoor theatre, the auditorium of which is packed with some five hun
dred spectators, listening in religious silence to an actor who is reciting Pushkin (parts of Evgenii Onegin). In another corner of the park, near the entrance is the parachute ground. This is a sport which is highly appreciated in the USSR. Every two minutes or so, one of the three parachutes is launched from the top of a tower some 130 feet high and lands its occupant somewhat roughly on the ground. On with you! Who’ll venture next? Volunteers press forward, wait for their turn, line up in queues. And I still haven’t mentioned the great open-air theatre, where for certain performances close upon twenty thousand spectators assemble.11

  The locus of public opinion

  One of the most knowledgeable observers of the conditions in Soviet Russia in the 1930s was General Ernst Köstring, the German military attaché, who had grown up in pre-revolutionary Moscow. He notes in his diaries:

  It is an absolute mistake to do what the majority of foreigners do when they dismiss these attractions with a pitying shrug of the shoulders. For this park had educational aims that people could clearly understand. Of course, here were propaganda aims too. Especially striking was the wish to arouse people’s willingness to join the call to arms and to interest themselves in the army. At the entrance there was a giant tower for jumping off with a parachute. It was constantly besieged by a large crowd, not all of them young, but all eager to jump. Incidentally, I have seen such towers in smaller provincial towns as well, and they are always very popular. Then there were also large open-air theatres where classical operas and plays were performed. Power boats were available on the Moscow River, which flowed past the park. There was also a large selection of all sorts of weapons. They were not just for looking at; you could also practise using them. Nor was there a lack of dancing masters for people to learn the old Russian folk dances, as well as halls, always crowded, in which to play chess. But card-playing, which had always spread like a plague in small Russian towns, was no longer represented. What I found of particular interest was the number of speakers scattered around the park. They commented on topical questions for the benefit of visitors and tried to explain them. These skilful and well-prepared propagandists were expert at providing plausible answers to the many questions and objections thrown at them by visitors. These orators reminded me of the predecessors of the modern press, the medieval ballad-singers who, in an age before there was such a thing as a press to spread the news, would rove around the land, proclaiming the news. Like them, these speakers too were to be taken seriously. This became clear whenever there was a sudden change of mood. One example was the sudden change that took place when the Russian–German pact was concluded after years of recriminations. After all, had not Stalin himself said to Ribbentrop, when the latter wanted to move things forward too fast for him, that this couldn’t just be done overnight, ‘given that the Germans had pissed on them’ for years on end? But these park orators proved they were abreast of the situation. No doubt, some readers will be unable to resist a smile. They will want to know what a military attaché could find to entertain him in such a park. But judging the strength of an army and the popularity of a country’s politics calls for an understanding of popular opinion. These parks were a real treasure-trove for such purposes – and they were utterly authentic into the bargain.12