The House of Government

6

THE NEW CITY

Most millenarian sects died as sects. Some survived as sects, but stopped being millenarian. Some remained millenarian until the end because the end came before they had a chance to create stable states. Christianity survived as a sect, stopped being millenarian, and was adopted by Babylon as an official creed. The Hebrews and Mormons survived their trek through the desert and traded milk and honey for stable states before being absorbed by larger empires. The Muslims created their own large empires bound by routinized millenarianism and threatened by repeated “fundamentalist” reformations. The Münster Anabaptists and the Jacobins took over existing polities and reformed them in the image of future perfection before losing out to more moderate reformers. Only the Bolsheviks destroyed the “prison of the peoples,” vanquished the “appeasers,” outlawed traditional marriage, banned private property, and found themselves firmly in charge of Babylon while still expecting the millennium in their lifetimes. Never before had an apocalyptic sect succeeded in taking control of an existing heathen empire (unless one counts the Safavids, whose millennial agenda seems to have been much less radical). It was as if the Fifth Monarchists had won the English Civil War, “reformed all places and all callings,” contemplated an island overgrown with plants that the heavenly father had not planted, and stood poised to pull up every one of them, “root and branch, every plant, and every whit of every plant.” The fact that Russia was not an island made the challenge all the more formidable.

There are two fundamental ways in which states relate to organized salvation professionals. The first is to assume a position of neutrality and treat various claims to a monopoly of the sacred with more or less equal condescension. This is characteristic of many traditional empires (including those ruled by nomadic warrior elites) and post-Christian liberal states “separate from the church.” As Gibbon said of the Antonines, “the various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.” This does not mean that such states are “secular” in the sense of being indifferent to sacred legitimacy; this means that they are self-confident enough about their own claim to sacred legitimacy not to need reinforcement from prophets unrelated to the divinity of the ruling lineage. The Western liberal states are no exception in this regard: by calling other would-be monopolies of the sacred “religions” and not calling their own anything in particular, they demonstrate the un-self-conscious strength of the official faith.¹

There is no such thing as a “disenchanted” world or a profane polity. No state, however routinized, is fully divorced from its sacred origins, and no claim to legitimacy is purely “rational-instrumental.” Particular governments may justify their right to rule in terms of due process, but the states they represent do not. Some laws may be proclaimed more “fundamental” than others, and some fundamental laws may be protected by priestly interpreters or Supreme Court justices whose mission is to sanctify changing practices in their light, but such constitutional traditions are much weaker than their rabbinical predecessors because of their more obvious circularity (all positive legislation is bound by a constitution, which is itself a piece of positive legislation). One solution is to root constitutional regimes in “natural law” and derive the rights of citizens from the “rights of man” and their heirs (“human rights”). Another, much more powerful, solution is to prop up legal-rational forms of authority with the sacred attributes of immortal nations. Monoethnic liberal states that can rely on existing tribal myths invest a great deal of effort in their elaboration and nationalization; those that cannot tend to equate nations with states and celebrate them accordingly. In the United States, the cult of national shrines, the ubiquity of the flag and the anthem, and the frequency of the ritualistic public praise of the warrior class are remarkable for their un-self-conscious ostentation. A state insulated by its own sacrality has no reason to worry about the flimsiness of its legal-rational scaffolding or the claims of a few self-doubting “denominations” (salvation monopolies that have lost the belief in their monopoly). Threatened by a serious challenge to the sacred center of its legitimacy and by the danger of mass conversions within the elite, the twentieth-century American state proclaimed its Communist subjects “un-American” and vigorously defended itself for as long as the threat remained serious. “The doctrine of tolerance” is reserved for the vanquished and the irrelevant.²

The other way for states to relate to competing salvation-granting institutions is to identify with one of them. Such monogamous states are usually classified according to the nature of the relationship between their political and ecclesiastical branches. At one end are the regimes in which the priestly bureaucracy is clearly subordinate to the political one, as was the case in the Russian Empire. At the other are what Weber calls “hierocracies” (the rule of the holy, otherwise known as “theocracies” or “ideocracies”), in which salvation specialists dominate the polity, as in some Tibetan, Judaic, or late Egyptian states; Calvin’s Geneva; the Puritans’ Massachusetts; and the Islamic Republic of Iran; among others.

States associated with a particular salvation-granting institution can be classified according to how they deal with alternative (unofficial) salvation providers on their territory. At one end are the unitary states (mostly hierocracies at the height of their salvation enthusiasm and strictly monogamous states such as Catholic Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella) that attempt to impose absolute uniformity of practice and conviction through expulsion, conversion, or extermination. Elsewhere along the spectrum are various forms of accommodation.³

The state that the Bolsheviks presided over at the end of the Civil War was a would-be hierocracy with serious unitary aspirations. All branches of rule—administrative, judicial, military, and economic—were controlled by the Communist Party, which remained a faith-based group with voluntary membership contingent on personal conversion. It remained a sect, in other words: the only requirements for entry and retention were scriptural competence and personal virtue as measured by senior members. It was not a priesthood ruling over a full-fledged hierocracy, insofar as most of the state’s subjects were unconverted heathen. The head of the Party was the head of the state, whatever his formal title. The state itself was the Russian Empire run by a millenarian sect.

In regard to rival revelations, the NEP-era Bolsheviks were less consistently totalitarian than some of their predecessors: they violently attacked Christianity, Islam, and other keepers and vessels of false sacrality, but they did not ban them outright—partly because of the extraordinarily large number of the unconverted they had to deal with, but mostly because they considered beliefs that did not speak the language of social science as unworthy opponents. They viewed “religion” the way dominant Christian churches viewed “pagan” beliefs and practices: with scorn but without fear or a sense of immediacy. Such relative tolerance was not extended to the servants of the bourgeoisie or the appeasers from among their fellow sectarians.

All enemies of the Bolsheviks could be roughly divided into defenders of the old world or false prophets of the new. The latter consisted of various pseudo-Marxists, classified according to degree and method of appeasement; non-Marxist socialists, classified according to distance from Marxism; and integral nationalists, seen as unwitting representatives of the bourgeoisie (all non-Bolsheviks were seen as unwitting representatives of the bourgeoisie, but fascists and their kin were considered central to the pre-Armageddon phase of bourgeois false consciousness).

In fact, all early-twentieth-century revolutionaries, wherever they found themselves on the class-as-nation to nation-as-class continuum, shared a loathing for the world of old age, decay, effeminacy, corruption, selfishness, irony, artificiality, and cowardly compromise (including liberalism, parliamentarism, and democracy). Opposing them were the ideals of vengeance, violence, masculinity, simplicity, sincerity, certainty, self-sacrifice, brotherhood, and a faith in the coming renewal and necessity-as-freedom. Communists and integral nationalists were to the French and English revolutions what the Protestant Reformers had been to early Christianity: rebels against routinization and restorers of the original promise. Some of them were millenarians. But only the Bolsheviks were in power.

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The Soviet state rested on two pillars: specialized government ministries inherited from the old regime (as “People’s Commissariats”) and a hierarchy of regional Party committees culminating in the Central Committee and its various bureaus. The regional committees supervised all aspects of life in their jurisdictions; the Central Committee supervised everything without exception. All Party officials, including people’s commissars and their key deputies, belonged to a universal system of appointments that emanated from the Central Committee Secretariat and radiated downward through various regional committees: the closer to the top, the greater the proportion of former students and the broader the expected area of expertise. The person at the very top had to be omniscient and irreplaceable. Sverdlov, who had “carried in his memory a biographical dictionary of Communists,” was replaced by large administrative staffs and formal chains of command, but key appointments continued to be made on the basis of personal acquaintance that stretched back to the prerevolutionary underground and the Civil War revolutionary-military committees. A three-year interregnum at the top of the Central Committee Secretariat (filled, more or less ineptly, by Krestinsky and Molotov) was followed by the appointment of Stalin as general secretary in May 1922. Lenin had had Sverdlov; Sverdlov had had his “magic notebook.” After Lenin’s death, Stalin would become a perfect blend of Lenin and Sverdlov.⁴

The Party was surrounded by millions of unconverted “non-Party” outsiders who were now subject to Party rule. As a villain in Andrei Platonov’s 1926 The Town of Gradov puts it, “So, like I was saying, what exactly is this Provincial Party Committee? Well, I’ll tell you: the party secretary is the bishop, and the Provincial Party Committee is his—bishopric! Right? And the bishopric is wise and serious ’cause this is a new religion, and it’s a lot stricter than the Orthodox kind. Just try skipping one of their meetings—or Vespers! ‘Hand over your party card,’ they’ll say, ‘so we can put a little mark in it.’ Just four little marks, and they’ll put you down as a pagan. And once you’re a pagan, there’ll be no more bread for you! So there!” The main difference was that there was no one above the Party secretary in his region, that the general secretary was the de facto head of state, that the lowliest priest could also be a judge and executioner, and that no priest had a permanent parish.⁵

No one except the leader had a permanent position (or street address). Bolshevik officials kept being transferred from one job to the next on the assumption that, as Sverdlov put it, a pharmacist, even “an inexperienced one,” could run a state. Vasily Orekhov, the former shepherd who was exiled from Moscow in 1908 for “overturning a bowl of cabbage soup onto Kudelkin’s head and boiling his whole head,” served as a brigade commander in the Don Area, where he “received seven wounds, three of them severe,” and then as a member of the Moscow revolutionary tribunal before becoming a deputy provincial prosecutor. Roman Terekhov, the Donbass miner who began his armed struggle by trying to kill a mechanic in his shop, organized underground Bolshevik cells in White-held territory, served as an “agitator” in the Red Army, and held various Party positions in his native Yuzovka before becoming director of the Ukrainian Central Control Commission. The calico printer, Pavel Postyshev, remained in Siberia after the February Revolution, became one of the top Bolshevik commanders in the Far East, and served as a Party official in Kiev before becoming secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee. The “politically underdeveloped” baker, Boris Ivanov, was sent by his mentor Sverdlov to nationalize the flour industry, then worked as an agitator in the Astrakhan fisheries, before returning to Moscow to spend the rest of the 1920s as an official in the food workers’ union. Sverdlov’s friend and chief regicide, Filipp Goloshchekin, worked as director of the Iron Ore Trust, chairman of the Kostroma and Samara Provincial Executives, and, after 1924, secretary of the Kazakh Party Committee. Ivanov’s fellow worker, Semen Kanatchikov (they had worked together as propagandists in the Petersburg Women’s Mutual Aid Club in 1908, several years after Kanatchikov’s apprenticeship at Gustav List in the Swamp), spent the Civil War in various Party posts in Siberia, the Urals, and Kazan before being assigned to the “culture front.” He helped to found the Sverdlov Communist University in Moscow and served as rector of the Zinoviev Communist University in Petrograd, head of the Press Department of the Party’s Central Committee, a TASS correspondent in Prague, and, after 1928, a member of the editorial boards of several journals and publishing houses.⁶

Kanatchikov’s main competitor on the literature front was the former seminarian Aleksandr Voronsky, who was transferred from Odessa to Ivanovo, where he worked as secretary of the Party Committee and editor in chief of the Worker’s Path newspaper; then to Kharkov, where he ran the Political Department of the Donetsk Railroad; and, in February 1921, to Moscow, where Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia, put him in charge of the Publishing Department of the Main Committee for Political Enlightenment. Within weeks, he would become the head of the Modern Literature Department at the State Publishing House; editor in chief of the official literary journal, Red Virgin Soil (Krasnaia nov’); and the main judge, champion, and ideologue of new Soviet literature.⁷

One of Voronsky’s literary protégés was Arosev, the conqueror of Moscow and a “memoirist of intra-Party emotional states” who thought of himself as a writer even as he continued to serve as deputy commander of the Moscow Military District, commissar of the Tenth Army, chairman of the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal of Ukraine, deputy director of the Lenin Institute in Moscow, secretary at the Soviet embassies in Latvia, France, and Sweden, and then as ambassador to Lithuania and Czechoslovakia. Arosev’s former commander Arkady Rozengolts, who had once seemed to “move from one room to another through the walls,” now seemed to move—with equal ease—through positions of political commissar of transportation (during which time he sent Voronsky to Kharkov), member of the Collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Finance, head of the Main Directorate of the Air Force, Soviet ambassador to Great Britain, and people’s commissar of foreign trade. Another participant in the Moscow uprising, Osip Piatnitsky, served as head of the Trade Union of Railroad Workers before becoming a member of the Comintern Executive Committee and one of the chief administrators of the international Communist movement. One of the leaders of the assault on the Winter Palace, the former seminarian Nikolai Podvoisky, had been named head of the Office of Supreme Military Inspection and was set on becoming the Revolution’s “iron hand throughout the world,” but Lenin disapproved of his subsequent performance as the people’s commissar for military affairs of Ukraine, and had him transferred to the Supreme Council on Physical Culture and Sports International.⁸

Filipp Mironov’s prosecutor, Ivar Smilga, served as head of the Main Fuel Directorate, deputy head of the Supreme Council of National Economy (VSNKh), deputy head of the State Planning Committee (Gosplan), and rector of the Plekhanov Institute of National Economy. Smilga’s associate during the Filipp Mironov affair, Valentin Trifonov, worked as his deputy and then as head of the Oil Syndicate at the Fuel Directorate before becoming chairman of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. In 1925, he was replaced by Vasily Ulrikh and sent abroad: first to China as deputy military attaché and then to Finland as head of the trade mission. One of Trifonov’s successors in the Don area was Karl Lander, the son of Latvian day laborers who had lived with several Christian evangelical sects before converting to Bolshevism. As the special Cheka (secret police) plenipotentiary in the North Caucasus and Don region, Lander directed the executions of thousands of Cossacks in the fall of 1920. After the war, he served as head of the Agitprop Department of the Moscow Party Committee, Soviet representative at the foreign famine relief missions in 1922–23, and member of the Collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Trade.⁹

Osinsky, the main ideologue of “War Communism” and the first chairman of both the State Bank and the VSNKh, went on to serve as chairman of the Tula Executive Committee, deputy people’s commissar of agriculture, deputy director of VSNKh, member of the presidium of Gosplan and the Communist Academy, ambassador to Sweden, and head of the Central Directorate of Statistics. Osinsky’s deputy in the Directorate of Statistics (and his predecessor as ambassador to Sweden) was Platon Kerzhentsev, who had converted him to Bolshevism twenty-five years earlier by defeating him in a debate about the Decembrists at Moscow Gymsnasium No. 7. Kerzhentsev had also run the Russian Telegraphic Agency, the section of the Scientific Organization of Labor at the Worker-Peasant Inspection, and the Soviet embassy in Italy. After two years at the Directorate of Statistics, he became deputy head of the Central Committee Agitprop and director of the Institute of Literature, Arts, and Language. Closest to the top of the pyramid—or so it seemed—was Osinsky’s and Kerzhentsev’s younger comrade from the early days of the Moscow Bolsheviks, Nikolai Bukharin. As he wrote in his official autobiography in 1925, “at present I am working as a member of the Central Committee and Politburo, member of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, as well as a writer, lecturer, party agitator, propagandist, etc.”¹⁰

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Most of those working in Moscow moved into the Kremlin or into one of several mansions and hotels designated as “Houses of Soviets” and administered by the Central Executive Committee’s special Housekeeping Department. The old residents were expelled and their property confiscated, or, as Arosev put it, “all the old trash was shaken out.” Lenin ordered the removal of all the icons and royal statues in the Kremlin. According to the Kremlin commandant, Malkov, “Vladimir Ilich could not stand the monuments to the tsars, grand dukes, and all those celebrated tsarist generals. He said on more than one occasion that the people, having been victorious, should tear down any such filth that reminded them of autocracy, and leave, by way of exception, only genuine works of art such as the monument to Peter in Petrograd.” The “ruler of half the world” would remain on his steed (if not always on his pedestal) even after Petrograd became Leningrad; Moscow’s most conspicuous horseman, General Skobelev, was replaced by the Liberty Obelisk. The building from which the ghostly Rozengolts ordered Arosev to go out and take over the city never fully recovered from the visit by the “man in the black-leather shell.” The headquarters of the Revolution had moved down the street to where Lenin now lived and worked. Or, as Arosev put it, “for ‘both now and ever, and unto the ages of ages,’ the Kremlin has stopped being the crown on the head of ‘all Russias’ and turned into a stone engagement ring used to wed ‘all the earth’s nations in the name of peace, labor, and truth.’”¹¹

Among the few old residents allowed to stay in the Kremlin were several palace doormen, retained in their previous capacity, but told not to wear liveries. According to Malkov and Novgorodtseva (who was now calling herself “Sverdlova”), the old men began by disapproving of the new masters but soon understood that their informality concealed real power and “became warmly and sincerely attached” to them. In 1918, Arosev wrote a short story about “an old servant of the old dead masters,” left behind in an old empty palace. One day, soon after the Revolution, the old man revolts against the bronze statues of tsars and generals standing in niches along the palace’s white stairway. The largest of all is a life-size Peter “wearing jackboots and wielding a sword,” whom the old man accuses of having “stuck us all in a Petersburg swamp.” Then, frightened by his own bravery, “the old man started and staggered back, grabbing onto the bannister and spitting over his left shoulder, before running as fast as he could down to the doorman’s chamber, feeling a cold chill behind him all the way, as if he were being chased by a dead man.”¹²

Malkov was not afraid of statues. Within a year of the introduction of the New Economic Policy, his Kremlin household had evolved into a vast real estate empire that included the Kremlin and eighteen Houses of Soviets with approximately 5,600 permanent residents and 1,200 dormitory beds. In 1922 alone, the Central Executive Committee (CEC) Housing Authority granted living space to 28,843 individuals—2,441 of them as permanent residents. The hierarchy of the buildings corresponded to the hierarchy of the officials. The Kremlin was reserved for the top Party leaders and their families. The First House of Soviets (formerly the National Hotel) housed the members of the Central Committee of the Party, Central Executive Committee, Central Control Commission, and governing boards (“collegia”) of the People’s Commissariats. The Second House of Soviets (the Metropol Hotel) was used for those who did not make it into the First House, as well as for the Central Committee and Central Executive Committee department heads and other “responsible officials” affiliated with the CEC. The Third House of Soviets (the former Orthodox Seminary on the corner of Sadovaia-Karetnaia and Bozhedomsky Alley) served as a dormitory for congress delegates and visiting high officials; the Fourth House (the Peterhof Hotel, on the corner of Vozdvizhenka and Mokhovaia) housed the CEC offices and staff members; and the Fifth House (Count Sheremetev’s apartment building on Granovsky Street), which was added to the list later than the others, served as a respectable alternative to the first two. The remaining Houses of Soviets, which were less comfortable and farther away from the Kremlin, housed the lower officials and CEC staff and their families. Individual commissariats and other Soviet institutions had their own real estate, including residential housing.¹³

Over the course of the 1920s, the number of Houses of Soviets kept fluctuating (twenty nine in early 1924, then back down to eighteen the next year) as the need for housing clashed with a lack of funding. The greatest challenge for the Housekeeping Department was to keep up with the various transfers, promotions, and demotions by evicting some residents, installing others, and shifting the rest among rooms, floors, and houses. Rules connecting space to rank were undercut by countless complaints and demands citing special needs and patronage precedence. As the head of the housing authority wrote in the summer of 1921, “I was forced to make exceptions following requests and instructions from higher authorities, whom I was duty-bound to obey.” Most of the claimants were higher authorities, and most of them objected to the strict ranking on personal or doctrinal grounds. The head of the Cheka Investigations Department, Grigory Moroz, who wanted to move to a lower floor in the First House of Soviets because he had TB, a small infant, a recalcitrant nanny, and a twenty-four-hour workday, enclosed a list of neighbors who did not have comparable qualifications (his request was approved). The head of the Archival Authority, David Riazanov, wrote that a certain comrade was “of proletarian origin, and consequently entitled to a room” (request denied). The residents of the Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Houses signed a petition arguing that they could not be taken off the budget just because they were service personnel, and thus proletarians (request approved but later ignored).¹⁴

In addition to being officials with secretaries and other employees, the residents were human, and consequently, mammals, who ate, drank, slept, procreated, grew hair, produced waste, got sick, and needed heating and lighting, among other things. All this required a vast and intricate infrastructure and a growing staff of service personnel (around two thousand in 1922–23). The Housekeeping Department’s priorities were centralization, symmetry, transparency, cleanliness, accountability, and surveillance. All things and people were to be catalogued and, if possible, correlated. Doormen’s chambers were to be free of “trash, cigarette butts, and spittle”; doormen were to accompany duly identified guests to their rooms; residents were to have passes corresponding to their status and location; and clerical staff were, in the interests of saving time, to drink tea at their desks. No one was to sleep with his boots on or eat on windowsills; everyone was to report all violations.¹⁵

Before 1921, all services and household items were free; after the introduction of private trade under NEP it was up to the management to set the prices. In January 1923, the head of the Housing Authority decreed that a regular male haircut should cost 3 rubles; a flat top, 3.75; a beard trim, 2.25; a head shave, 3.75; a beard shave, 3.75; a female haircut, 3.75; and a perm, 6. In August, after a currency reform, these prices rose sharply, but not all at the same rate (with head shaving emerging as the most expensive operation by a considerable margin). The same was true of the cost of firewood, laundry, and cafeteria meals. The drive for consistency (apartment rent was to vary according to house, floor, size, view, facilities, and so on) was partially thwarted by the demands of patronage and privilege (special conditions for those with greater responsibilities and their associates). The list of officials entitled to free use of Central Executive Comittee cars consisted of those who could transfer that right to others, those who could not transfer that right to others, and those who were not officials, but had certain unspecified rights. Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Allilueva, was on the list “by order of Comrade Stalin”; Sverdlov’s widow, K. T. Sverdlova, was on the list “by order of Comrade Enukidze.” Stalin and other top Party leaders rarely interfered, as various services were increasingly offered to them as “initiatives from below.” Enukidze, as CEC secretary and one of Sverdlov’s official successors, distributed favors from above as well as from below. Large and variously defined groups of officials and their dependents received special discounts.¹⁶

First House of Soviets (the National Hotel)

Second House of Soviets (the Metropol Hotel)

The extraordinary thing about the living conditions of high Soviet officials in the 1920s was how extraordinary they were by Soviet standards. As the head of the Housing Authority Food Supply Department wrote in 1920, the work of an organization “that serves the needs of the Kremlin, which is the political center of the country, as well as the needs of the Houses of Soviets, which contain the high officials who constitute the flower of not only the Russian, but also the world, revolution, must be considered of paramount importance, with all the consequences that that entails.” There was no need for a special decree: the needs of the flower of the world revolution were considered paramount by all of the agencies charged with meeting them.¹⁷

All sects are, in theory and by definition, equal and fraternal. All are, in fact, hierarchical. Some consist of a teacher and several male disciples; some consist of a teacher and a commune including women and children (which may or may not belong to the teacher); and some grow large enough to contain ranked officials. The Kremlin and the most important Houses of Soviets had their own cafeterias as well as a bakery and kvass factory. During the famine of 1921–23, eleven special agents were sent to procure meat in the North Caucasus, Penza, and Saratov; grain and flour in Ukraine; vegetables in the Moscow and Vladimir Provinces; and rice in Turkestan. “In order to improve the quality of the food in the cafeterias, a special dietary office was created. A nutritional scientist with experience working abroad was invited to head it. In the cafeterias themselves, almost the entire staff was composed of individuals with special training in popular nutrition and the culinary arts.” The dependents of CEC members received a special cafeteria discount irrespective of their place of residence; the dependents of CEC staff received the discount only if they lived in the Houses of Soviets. As few staff members as possible were to be assigned to the top five Houses of Soviets.¹⁸

The inhabitants of the top five Houses of Soviets had their own laundry services and a telephone station. They had their own club with sports, music, dance, and drama classes. They had their own “Kremlin” hospital, with outpatient clinics in the First, Third, and Fifth Houses and doctors available for home visits. They had their own school, day-care centers, kindergartens, and summer camps for about 850 children (with K. T. Sverdlova in charge). They had special passes “valid for free travel on all the railways and waterways of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic”—and, after 1922, of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (Those who did not have such passes received free tickets to particular destinations, as Sverdlova did in September 1924 for a trip to Crimea with Andrei, Vera, and an unspecified fourth party, probably a nanny).¹⁹

They had special seats reserved for them in all the Moscow theaters, the circus, and State Movie Theater No. 1. In 1924, ad hoc demands for free admission were replaced by a formal obligation by the theaters to provide comfortable boxes to officials of certain ranks (more or less corresponding to residency in the Kremlin and the First, Second, and Fifth Houses of Soviets). Eligible officials could be accompanied by one adult or two children. Access to the CEC boxes was to be “regulated in such a way that only comrades with CEC tickets could enter them, while individuals with regular tickets could not.” Enukidze, who wrote the decree, was famous for his love of opera and his appreciation of female beauty. In 1926, the women in the CEC Secretariat traded in their dark smocks for English suits with “elegant” shoes and blouses. According to one employee of the Statistics Department, the women decided to have two skirts made for each suit: one for everyday use and one for special occasions. They worked long hours, and often went to the theater straight from the office.²⁰

After the first wave of housing requests had subsided, the most sought-after perquisites of high office were country houses (dachas) and stays at CEC “rest homes” and sanatoria. In 1920, Housing Authority agents began traveling around the country in search of appropriate gentry estates. In 1922, Enukidze created a special Department of Country Property. Later that year Prince Bariatinsky’s estate in Maryino, Kursk Province, became Lenin Rest Home No. 1. The home included an 1816 palace “in the Italian style” for 150 guests; a twenty-seven-acre park; a large pond on a river with one motor boat and several rowboats; newly created courts for tennis, croquet, and skittles; gymnastics equipment; and a small library.²¹

By 1924, the Department of Country Property was overseeing a network of dachas outside Moscow and ten “rest homes” in the North Caucasus, the Caucasian and Crimean Rivieras, and central Russia (including several close to Moscow, used for weekend getaways). In 1925, at the suggestion of Rykov (Lenin’s successor as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars), a special commission headed by Enukidze divided this rapidly growing “country property” into Group 1, for one hundred individuals and their families, and Group 2, for other eligible officials. All homes in both groups were further subdivided into three categories: general health spas, “balneological” spas (mostly around Kislovodsk and Sochi), and rest homes, “where medical treatment is provided on an individual basis.” In Maryino, which belonged to the first category, guests were supposed to get up at 7:45, do calisthenics until breakfast at 9:00, receive various water and electrical treatments until lunch at 1:00, take a nap from 2:00 to 3:30, have tea at 4:30, receive more treatments or play games until dinner at 8:00; and take a compulsory constitutional until lights-out at 11:00. In 1927–28, most violations of the regimen “were of an innocent, inoffensive nature: missing afternoon naps, smoking in the rooms, and being out past bedtime.”²²

Vladimir Adoratsky

One of Lenin’s close associates and, after Lenin’s death, one of the deputy directors of the Lenin Institute, Vladimir Adoratsky, spent the summer of 1927 at a balneological spa in Essentuki. As he wrote to his daughter, who was in a different sanatorium, he was enjoying all his treatments: the “saline-alkaline baths with stray, tiny bubbles popping up in different places on your body”; the drinking water from Spring No. 4 and Spring No. 20; the “galvanization of the spine” (“tingles most delightfully as tiny ripples go down your body”); the electrical shower (“also a very pleasant invisible downpour”); the carbon dioxide baths (“bubbles all over your body” and “gas right up your nose”); the “circular shower” (“tiny little torrents raining down on you”); and the Charcot shower (“a ferocious pleasure—your body turns as red as our red flag”). He also enjoyed the billiards, the chess, the dominoes, the improvised concerts, the pleasant company, the attentions of his doctor, and the daily 5:00–7:00 p.m. musical performances, especially after the conductor, Brauer, from the Stanislavsky Studio had “simply transformed the orchestra.” But most of all, he enjoyed the food:

Breakfast at half past eight: a chunk of butter about two inches long and as thick as your thumb, a dollop of caviar of approximately the same size, a couple of eggs, coffee, and as much cucumber and tomato salad as you want. The second breakfast at 11 a.m.: four fried eggs and a glass of milk or tea. A three-course lunch at 2 p.m. Tea with a bun at 5 p.m. (The buns are fresh!!) (I don’t drink the tea.) Dinner at half past seven: a good-sized piece of schnitzel (or chicken) with cucumbers and tomatoes and a dessert (kompot, apple mousse with whipped cream, or simply fruit—apricots, pears, etc.) All four meals come with a cup of buttermilk.²³

■ ■ ■

Having won the war, taken over the state, established stable administrative hierarchies, and rewarded themselves with a system of exclusive benefits and a good-size piece of schnitzel (or chicken), the Bolsheviks began to reflect on their past. Most memoirs of anticipation and fulfillment were written in the 1920s. Everyone was writing histories—to preserve the past, legitimize the present, and align personal experience with sacred time. Some did it spontaneously, as an affirmation of faith; some did it professionally, on behalf of special institutions; some did it as leaders of people and makers of events; some did it as followers of leaders and witnesses to events; some—such as the members of the Society of Old Bolsheviks—did it as a matter of institutional requirement; and most Soviets did it, in the form of official “autobiographies,” as part of their regular interactions with the state—from college admissions and job applications to requests for apartments, services, and balneological treatments. Everything had to corroborate and constitute the story of fulfilled prophecy. Some parts of the story were more important than others.

Rituals that celebrate connections to sacred origins are acts of remembrance and reenactment. The most elaborate early Bolshevik eucharists were mass stagings of the storming of the Winter Palace. One of the main theorists of such celebrations—and of “people’s theater” in general—was Platon Kerzhentsev. The point, he wrote in 1918, was not to “perform for the popular audience” but to “help that audience perform itself.” The people were to perform by themselves, without professional or priestly mediation, and they were to perform (represent and celebrate) themselves, as both form and subject. Kerzhentsev took as his model the festivals of the French Revolution, especially the Fête de la Fédération of July 14, 1790, which, according to Kerzhentsev, centered on the swearing of the oath of allegiance to the constitution and the performance of musical and choral pieces. “The people expressed their joy by shouting and singing.” But because the French Revolution had been a bourgeois revolution, such revolutionary festivals could not become permanent:

In today’s France, nothing is left of those majestic revolutionary festivals. The famous “14 July” is a pathetic, gaudy fairground for the benefit of wine sellers and merry-go-round operators…. The same signs of decay and degradation are evident in the historic festival of another bourgeois revolution, the anniversary of the liberation of the United States from the yoke of absolutist England. In today’s America, “the Fourth of July” has turned into a boring official celebration, at the center of which are fireworks that each year send hundreds of children and grown-ups to an early grave. When, two years ago, this dangerous entertainment was banned, the festival quickly wilted and lost all its color—so superficial and artificial had it become.²⁴

Under socialism, the line separating sacred events from their ritual reenactment would be erased. Commemorations would dissolve “into those free expressions of joy that only become possible at a time of complete liberation from the heavy shackles of economic oppression.”²⁵

One of the earliest pieces of popular theater and the most consistent realization of the flood metaphor associated with the real day was Mayakovsky’s Mystery-Bouffe, first performed on the first anniversary of the October Revolution (“sets by Malevich, directed by Mayakovsky and Meyerhold, acted by free actors”). After the deluge that destroys the old world, “seven pairs of the Clean” (“an Abyssinian Negus, Indian Raja, Turkish Pasha, Russian merchant, Chinaman, well-fed Persian, fat Frenchman, Australian and his wife, priest, German officer, Italian officer, American, and student”) and “seven pairs of the Unclean” (a chimney sweep, lamplighter, driver, seamstress, miner, carpenter, day laborer, servant, cobbler, blacksmith, baker, washerwoman, and two Eskimos—one a fisherman, the other a hunter) escape in an ark. The Clean form an autocracy and later a bourgeois provisional government before being thrown overboard in the course of a proletarian revolution. Once the Unclean are left on their own, the plot changes from the flood to exodus. The Unclean suffer great privations but vow to withstand storms, heat, and hunger as they travel to the promised land. Suddenly they see Jesus, played by Mayakovsky. He walks on water and offers “a new Sermon on the Mount”:

Come hither—

Those who have calmly plunged their knives

into enemy flesh

and walked away with a song.

Come, those who have not forgiven!

You’ll be the first to enter

my heavenly kingdom.

The Unclean journey to hell, which looks like a gaudy fairground compared with the oppression they have suffered on earth; to heaven, which they find populated by pompous windbags (including Rousseau and Tolstoy); and finally back to earth, which, in the absence of the Clean, is overflowing with milk, honey, and “Comrade things,” eager to be possessed in a never-ending orgy of unalienated labor.

Day Laborer

I’ll take Saw. I’m young and ready.

Saw

Take me!

Seamstress

And I’ll take Needle.

Blacksmith

I’m raring to go—give me Hammer!

Hammer

Take me! Caress me!

The blacksmith leads the way.²⁶

Mystery-Bouffe, “The Clean.” Sketch by Mayakovsky

Mystery-Bouffe, “The Unclean.” Sketch by Mayakovsky

Karl Lander, in his capacity as head of Moscow Agitprop, did not approve. Mystery-Bouffe, he wrote, “is some type of primitive, unconscious, unreal communism.” Voronsky, from his position as supervisor of Soviet literature, did not approve, either. “Mayakovsky’s socialism, which sees things as the only value and rejects everything ‘spiritual,’ is not our socialism.” Mayakovsky’s hero is huge and belligerent, but he is still too pale and abstract, “perhaps because Babylon has sucked too much of the blood and life’s juices out of him.” There were two major problems with Mystery-Bouffe, besides the lack of spirituality and life’s juices. First, the flood metaphor had outlived its usefulness because the real day had been followed by the Civil War, and the Civil War required a more substantial (more mythic) representation of Babylon. And second, theatrical reenactments were too ephemeral to serve as history, let alone myth.²⁷

The farther one moves from the sacred origins, the greater the ascendancy of narratives over participatory rituals (and their “people’s theater” incarnations). As last suppers turn into regularly scheduled eucharists, written accounts of foundational events congeal into gospels (sutras, hadiths) that define the moral and aesthetic foundations of the founder’s inheritance. The failure of the prophecy creates a world of expectation shaped by canonical stories of what once was and might yet be. The Bolsheviks took over the state before the past took over the present, and they made the writing of scripture a matter of state policy. History as Literature of Fact was too pedestrian to serve that purpose; Literature as Myth became a crucial part of “socialist construction.” The New City’s legitimacy depended on an army of fiction writers, with Voronsky in the lead. The winner’s reward was immortality.

■ ■ ■

The main task of Bolshevik gospel-writers was to mythologize the Civil War. Most attempts to do so relied on the contrast between Babylon and the raging elements—winds, storms, blizzards, and inchoate human masses.

Babylon came in two varieties. One was the traditional biblical kind—drunk on the wine of her adulteries and overflowing with cinnamon and spice, myrrh and frankincense. In Aleksandr Malyshkin’s corrupt city of Dair (The Fall of Dair, 1921), “yawning mouths pressed down on tender, oozing fruit flesh with hot palates; parched mouths slurped up delicate, fiery wine, shimmering jewel-like against the light; jaws, convulsed with lust, ingested, with loud smacking noises, all that was soft, fatty, or spiced.” In Vsevolod Ivanov’s Armored Train 1469 (1921), Babylon’s doomed bodies “oozed sweat, and hands became glued to walls and benches.”²⁸

The second, more “realistic” Beast was the provincial town of the intelligentsia tradition—a swamp where time stands still and dreams come to die. Yuri Libedinsky’s A Week (1922) begins with a “heavy afternoon nap”:

In every window of every house there is a geranium in bloom, its flowers perched on top like so many pink and blue flies. Oh, how many of these gray wooden boxes there are, stretching for street after street, and how cramped and suffocating it is inside each one of them! There is an icon shining dimly in the front corner and velvet-covered albums resting on small tables covered with lace doilies. In the dirty kitchens, there are cockroaches running up and down the walls and flies buzzing despondently against the windowpane.

The life led by the people living in these stifling houses resembles a gray September day, when a drizzling rain patters monotonously against the window, and through the glass covered with raindrops, you can just make out the gray fence and the red calf plodding through the mud. Every day, early in the morning, the woman of the house milks the cow before setting off with her basket to the market, and then, after lunch, she washes the greasy dishes in the kitchen.²⁹

Andrei Platonov’s “town of Gradov” (Gorod Gradov [Townstown], 1926) consisted of both huts and “more respectable dwellings,” with “iron roofs, outhouses in the backyard, and flowerbeds in front. Some even had small gardens with apple and cherry trees. The cherries were used to make liqueur, and the apples were pickled…. On summer evenings, the town would fill with the sound of floating church bells and smoke from all the samovars. The townfolk existed without haste and did not worry about the so-called better life.”³⁰

The difference between a pastoral and the netherworld is mostly a matter of literary genre and police vigilance. Boris Pilnyak’s town of Ordynin (The Naked Year, 1922) smells of mold and rotten pork; Isaak Babel’s Jewish shtetl stinks of rotten herring and “sour feces”; and Voronsky’s swamp swarms “with myriads of midges, soft, plump tadpoles, water spiders, red beetles, and frogs.” Most of the residents are weeds planted by the devil. “Look at him,” says Voronsky’s Valentin: “Observe his excitement as he turns over and digs through the lumps of fat and lard! His eyes are oily; his lower lip hangs loose; his filthy, foul-smelling mouth fills with saliva.” Babylon II has merged with Babylon I. “Seen from a hill,” says Libedinsky’s narrator, “all these little houses look so quiet and peaceful.” But the local Chekist (secret police official) knows: “somewhere among them, our enemies are hiding.”³¹

There are three main ways of representing the Civil War between the old world and the new: the apocalypse, the crucifixion, and the exodus.

The first is the story of mass slaughter: the storming of Babylon, the battle of Armageddon, or some combination of the two. The central theme—as in the original model—is merciless retribution through total violence against feminized evil: “Give her as much torture and grief as the glory and luxury she gave herself.”³² Such is the fate of Malyshkin’s Dair:

Fire burst forth from the terrifying carts as they dashed and scampered about, cutting wide swaths with the invisible blades of their machine guns. Streams of bullets issued from the carts and raked through the cloud of men on horseback—slicing, pruning, cutting them down in full gallop, and mowing down whole columns; the unburdened horses, shrieking and twisting their heads, rushed wildly past and disappeared into the murk. Broken bones disintegrated; mouths, still bearing the imprint of a mistress’ kiss from the night before, gaped darkly; and the streets, colored fountains, artistic elegance, and solemn hymns of dominion collapsed and were trampled into a bloody pulp.³³

Every remnant of Babylon must be trampled into a bloody pulp. In Vsevolod Ivanov’s Colored Winds (1921), the Red partisans attack a Siberian village defended by the Beast’s branded servants: “The officer is at the head; the officer always stands at the head…. He gets an axe in the mouth. There are teeth on the axe. The officer lies on the ground. If you are going to kill, then kill. If you are going to burn, then burn. Kill everyone, burn everything. There is a slaughtered woman in every yard. A slaughtered woman in front of every gate. No men left? Then kill the women. The red flesh of their wombs lies exposed.”³⁴

Riding or walking at the head of the holy host is Jesus the Avenger. He is always at the head, leading his followers: “the eleven” (Boris Lavrenev), “the twelve” (Aleksandr Blok), “the nineteen” (Aleksandr Fadeev), or the countless armies of those who have inherited the earth. “With justice he judges and makes war. His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God.” In Lavrenev’s comic answer to the Book of Revelation, Commissar Evsiukov wears a bright red leather jacket:

If one adds that Evsiukov is short, squat, and shaped like a perfect oval, then, in his bright red jacket and pants, he ends up looking like a dyed Easter egg.

And, on Evsiukov’s back, the straps of his combat gear cross to form the letter “X,” so when he turns to face you, you are expecting to see the letter “B.”

Христос Воскресе! [Khristos voskrese!] Christ is risen!

But no, Evsiukov does not believe in Christ or Easter.

He believes in the Soviets, the “Internationale,” the Cheka, and the heavy blue-steel revolver he holds clenched in his hard, knotty fist.³⁵

All commissars are both saviors and avengers. Pilniak’s “leather people” hold their executive committee meetings in a monastery. “And it’s a good thing, too, that they wear leather jackets; you can’t dampen them with the soda pop of psychology.” Firmness comes at a price, especially for “the sluggish, unruly Russian people.” Pilniak’s head commissar, Arkhip Arkhipov, spends long nights thinking. “Once, daybreak found him bent over a sheet of paper, his brow pale, eyebrows knitted, and beard slightly disheveled, but the air around him clean and pure (not the way it usually was at the end of the night), for Arkhipov did not smoke. And when the comrades arrived and Arkhipov handed them his sheet of paper, the comrades read, among other words, the fearless phrase: ‘to be shot.’” As Jesus says in Mayakovsky’s new Sermon on the Mount, “come hither—those who have calmly plunged their knives into enemy flesh and walked away with a song.” To join the army of light, one had to learn what Babel’s narrator in Red Cavalry (1924) calls “the simplest of skills—the ability to kill a man.”³⁶

In Arosev’s The Notes of Terenty the Forgotten (1922), the Chekist Kleiner wears “the same leather jacket winter, summer, day, and night.” He is full of a “hidden inner enthusiasm,” and he kills people as a matter of personal vocation and historical inevitability. One of his ideas is to project the executions onto a large screen outside the Cheka building. “What is necessary does not corrupt,” he says. “Try to understand. What is necessary does not corrupt.” Arosev’s literary patron, Aleksandr Voronsky, agrees: “Absolutely right is Arosev’s Kleiner, who states that ‘what is necessary does not corrupt.’” The trampling of arms and legs and the slaughtering of women is part of the providential plan, and therefore beyond morality. “There can be no justice, no categorical imperatives; everything is subordinated to necessity, which, at the moment, knows only one commandment: ‘Kill!’”³⁷

Some scriptural texts produced by the Bolshevik gospel-writers rival the Revelation of St. John in their exuberant sense of moral clarity and rhetorical elevation; others are, to varying degrees, touched by self-reflexivity and ambivalence. Andrei Platonov and Isaak Babel, in particular, struggled to produce myth but seemed unable to escape irony. As Bakhtin wrote about Dead Souls, “Gogol imagined the form of his epic as a Divine Comedy, but what came out was Menippean satire. Once having entered the sphere of familiar contact, he could not leave it, and could not transfer into that sphere his aloof positive characters.” Platonov and Babel, too, kept imagining Paradiso, but getting stuck in Purgatorio, in full view of the Inferno. Their characters tend to be saintly simpletons: senile children (all of them orphans, one way or another) in the case of Platonov, and infantile warriors (“monstrously huge, dull-witted”), in the case of Babel. In Platonov’s Chevengur (1928), the chief dragon slayer is a Soviet Don Quixote called Stepan Kopenkin. He rides a horse named Proletarian Power, worships the image of “the beautiful young maiden, Rosa Luxemburg,” and fights the ghostly enemies of the Revolution as he rides toward Communism. “He did not understand and did not have any spiritual doubts, considering them a betrayal of the Revolution. Rosa Luxemburg had thought of everything on everyone’s behalf—all that was left were the great deeds of the sword for the sake of the destruction of the visible and invisible enemy.”³⁸

By parodying medieval romance, Cervantes invented the novel; by parodying Cervantes, Platonov attempted to return to the innocence of medieval romance: “Unlike the way he lived, [Kopenkin] normally killed indifferently, though efficiently, as if moved by the force of simple calculation and household utility. In the White Guardists and bandits, Kopenkin saw unimportant enemies, unworthy of his personal fury, and he killed them with the same scrupulous thoroughness with which a peasant woman might remove weeds in her millet patch. He fought precisely, but hastily, on foot and on horseback, unconsciously saving his emotions for future hope and movement.”

Platonov’s problem as an orthodox gospel-writer was that he could not write the way Kopenkin killed. In the Communist town of Chevengur, Kopenkin’s fellow Bolshevik orders the extermination of the town’s bourgeoisie as part of the general plan for the end of the world. The Second Coming is scheduled for Thursday, because Wednesday is a day of fasting and the bourgeoisie will be able to prepare itself “more calmly.” When the former exploiters (those who, in Luke 6:24, “have already received their comfort,”) have assembled on the cathedral square, the head Chekist, Comrade Piusya, fires a bullet from his revolver into the skull of a nearby bourgeois, Zavyn-Duvailo. “Quiet steam rose from the bourgeois’s head—and then a damp, maternal substance resembling candle wax oozed out into his hair; but instead of toppling over, Duvailo just sat down on his bundle of belongings.” After shooting another member of the bourgeoisie, the Chekist returns to Zavyn-Duvailo.

Piusya took hold of Duvailo’s neck with his left hand, got a good, comfortable grip, and then pressed the muzzle of his revolver against it, just below the nape. But Duvailo’s neck was itching, and he kept rubbing it against the cloth collar of his jacket.

“Stop fidgeting, you fool. Wait—I’ll really give you a good scratch!”

Duvailo was still alive, and not afraid. “Take my head between your legs and squeeze it till I scream out loud. My woman’s nearby and I want her to hear me!”

Piusya smashed him on the cheek with his fist, so as to feel the body of this bourgeois for the last time, and Duvailo cried out plaintively: “Mashenka, they’re hitting me!”

Piusya waited till Duvailo had pronounced the last drawn-out syllables in full, and shot him twice through the neck. He then unclenched his gums, which had grown hot and dry.³⁹

The district executive committee secretary and town intellectual (as well as hidden enemy), Prokofy Dvanov, expresses the official Soviet objection to such a representation of the apocalypse. “Prokofy had observed this solitary murder from a distance, and he reproached Piusya: ‘Communists don’t kill from behind, comrade Piusya!’” The Chekist’s answer to Prokofy is Platonov’s response to his critics: “Communists, Comrade Dvanov, need Communism—not officer-style heroics. So you’d better keep your mouth shut, or I’ll pack you off to heaven after him! Nowadays every f——ing whore wants to plug herself up with a red banner—as if that’ll make her empty hole heal over with virtue! Well, no banner’s going to hide you from my bullet!” But Prokofy is right. By dispensing with the red banner and describing Armageddon as a solitary murder, Platonov undermines his identification with the “great deeds of the sword,” dooms his attempt to write a great revolutionary epic, and consigns his narrator to the empty hole of ironic detachment. Once having entered the “sphere of familiar contact,” he cannot leave it—much to the benefit of his posthumous (post-Communist) reputation.⁴⁰

Babel, too, gains his share of immortality by failing to get a firm grip on the sacred. His Red Cavalry narrator, like Abraham, is ready but unwilling to sacrifice a human being and is given an animal instead: “A stern-looking goose was wandering about the yard, serenely preening its feathers. I caught up with it and pressed it to the ground; the goose’s head cracked under my boot—cracked and spilled out. The white neck was spread out in the dung, and the wings flapped convulsively over the slaughtered bird. ‘Mother of God upon my soul!’ I said, poking around in the goose with my saber. ‘I’ll have this roasted, landlady.’”⁴¹

Babel’s Cossacks, unlike Babel’s evangelists, do not accept substitutes. They—like Comrade Piusya—slaughter humans with the same scrupulous thoroughness with which a peasant woman might remove weeds in her millet patch. They do to Abraham what Abraham was unwilling to do to Isaac:

Right under my window several Cossacks were preparing to shoot a silver-bearded old Jew for spying. The old man was squealing and struggling to get away. Then Kudria from the machine-gun detachment took hold of the old man’s head and tucked it under his arm. The Jew grew quiet and stood with his legs apart. With his right hand Kudria pulled out his dagger and carefully slit the old man’s throat, without splashing any blood on himself. Then he knocked on the closed window.

“If anyone’s interested,” he said, “They can come and get him. He’s free for the taking.”⁴²

Voronsky, Babel’s chief sponsor and publisher, admitted that “Babel’s Red Cavalry never did any fighting” and that, in his stories, “there was no Red Cavalry as an entire mass—no thousands of armed men advancing like lava.” Instead, there were solitary individuals and “what certain circles refer to as beastliness, brutality, animal stupidity, and savagery.” The truth, however, was that those individuals were “almost all truth-seekers,” and that Babel had a talent for seeing saintliness in savagery. Comrade Piusya was right: Communists could kill from behind as long as the killing was “for the benefit and victory of Communism.” But Babel knew better (and could not help himself). As he would say at the First Congress of Soviet Writers, “Bad taste is no longer a personal defect; it is a crime. Even worse, bad taste is counterrevolution.” For a true believer, to represent the guiltless mass murder of the apocalypse as solitary acts of ritual sacrifice was in bad taste.⁴³

The apocalypse is a version of the myth about dragon slaying. Dragon slaying, when seen from the point of view of an individual dragon, is self-sacrifice (crucifixion). The second Civil War plot is about the death and rebirth of a martyr. Ivanov’s Partisans, Libedinsky’s A Week, Lavrenev’s The Forty-First, Fadeev’s The Rout (1926), Dmitry Furmanov’s Chapaev (1923), and, in their “empty-hole” way, Platonov’s Chevengur and Babel’s Red Cavalry are partly or wholly about the death and resurrection of Bolshevik saints. The revolutionary commander Chapaev, like Moses, can see the promised land but is not allowed to cross the Ural River. He is killed midstream; most of his men—the rank-and-file as well as the Levites—are captured while still ashore: “Jews, Commissars, and Communists—come forward! And they did, hoping to keep the Red Army soldiers from being executed, though they could not always save them in this way. They stood before the ranks of their comrades, so proud and beautiful in their silent courage, their lips trembling and eyes shining with wrath, cursing the Cossack whip as they fell under the blows of sabers and hail of bullets.”⁴⁴

The counterrevolutionary uprising in Libedinsky’s novella takes place during the Holy Week of the Christian calendar, and the slaughter of the town’s Communists is followed by church bells announcing the beginning of the all-night Easter vigil. This completes the conversion of one of the central characters. “Listening to the chiming of the bells, Liza realized that she was here—not in church, not at Vespers, but at a Party meeting.”⁴⁵

The two plots—the apocalypse and the crucifixion—are either two ways of looking at the same event or one way of looking at cause and effect. In the Christian New Testament, the apocalypse is revenge for the crucifixion, and the permanent branding of the combatants is a way to keep the two armies separate (and, in the apocalyptic mode, anonymous). In the center of Malyshkin’s Babylon can be found the reason for its destruction: “The night of the world was falling. In the murky doom of the squares, three figures hung on lampposts, with heads meekly bent and gaping black eye sockets gazing down at their chests.” Calvary justifies the apocalypse. What follows the vision of the crucifixion is the dashing and scampering of terrifying carts, the raking of bullets through a cloud of men on horseback, and the trampling into a pulp of solemn hymns of dominion. But in describing the recent and still lingering Bolshevik past, as opposed to the sudden explosion of an imminent Christian future, it is difficult to end the story with countless armies of nameless and faceless enemies being thrown into a lake of fire. Even Malyshkin, who tries to avoid all “familiar contact,” cannot help taking a closer look. In the novel’s finale, the apocalypse reverts to the Passion of Christ as the last of Babylon’s defenders are shot by a Red Army firing squad. “Pale, with eyes like still candle flames, they were silently and hastily lined up against the stone wall. Beyond the hush of the deserted alley, the rumble and noise that heralded the new dawn kept growing. Abruptly and eerily in the gloom, a truck rattled past the gate. With a sudden, muffled cry, unheard by anyone, Death passed on its way.” The crucifixion is followed by the apocalypse, which is followed by the crucifixion. And so on.⁴⁶

The main challenge of all salvation myths is to avoid falling into the trap of eternal return. Communism—like Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and their incalculable progeny—is a comedy, in which the world of youth rebels against the tyranny of corrupt old age and, after a series of trials and misrecognitions, expels or exterminates the incorrigible, converts the undecided, and celebrates its victory with a wedding or its happily-ever-after equivalent. A prophecy’s promise is that the honeymoon will never end; the young lovers will never turn into old tyrants; and “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain.”

For the Soviet gospel writers of the 1920s, one way to avoid ironic circularity is to focus on the journey separating the Passion from the apocalypse. The third and most important Civil War master plot is the exodus, or the story of the march from Egypt to the promised land, from suffering to redemption, and from a band of “stiff-necked people” to “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” Most Civil War stories involve all three plots; the exodus chapter focuses on the hardships of the journey and the joy of homecoming, not on the original martyrdom or the eventual retribution.

In Lavrenev’s The Forty-First, a Red Army unit wanders through the desert until it finds salvation in the waters of the Aral Sea (or so they think before the flood comes). In Furmanov’s Chapaev, the “doomed Red regiments” embark on “the last exodus” that takes them to the shores of the Caspian Sea. In Malyshkin’s The Fall of Dair, thirsty “hordes” march through the steppe and the swamp to the land of “milk, meat, and honey,” where “summer never ends” and “evenings are like fields of golden rye.”

In Ivanov’s Colored Winds, the partisans emerge from the mountains and forests to find the spring fields of blue-green grass. “Baptize it with the plow! The pale golden wind is thrashing about—bleed it by sowing! It is your birth we’re celebrating, earth, your birth!” And in Fadeev’s The Rout, the partisans emerge from the swamp to find “the vast sky and the earth, which promised bread and rest.”

The forest ended abruptly and a vast expanse of high, blue sky and bright russet fields, freshly mown and bathed in sunshine, stretched out on either side as far as the eye could see. On one side, beyond a knot of willows, through which the gleaming blue surface of a swollen river could be seen, lay a threshing-ground, resplendent with the golden crowns of the fat haystacks…. Beyond the river, propping up the sky and rooted in the yellow-tressed woods, loomed the blue mountain ranges, and through their toothed summits a transparent foam of pinkish-white clouds, salted by the sea, poured into the valley, as frothy and bubbly as milk fresh from the cow.⁴⁷

Platonov would not write his own Soviet Exodus—Dzhan—until 1935. In the 1920s, he was still unable to escape the confines of the exodus’s profane double—the knightly road quest. His Stepan Kopenkin was Don Quixote, not Moses: “Although it was warm in Chevengur, and smelled of comradely spirit, Kopenkin, perhaps from exhaustion, felt sad, and his heart yearned to ride on. He had not yet noticed in Chevengur a clear and obvious socialism—that touching but firm and edifying beauty in the midst of nature that would allow a second little Rosa Luxemburg to be born, or the first one, who had perished in a German bourgeois land, to be scientifically resurrected.”⁴⁸

In the original Exodus story, the failure to discover milk and honey remains outside the narrative, and the main characters are two larger-than-life questing heroes: Moses and the Israelites. The chosen people walk from slavery (a forced submission to false, transitory authority) to freedom (a voluntary submission to true, absolute authority); Moses must remain himself even as he represents God to the chosen people and the chosen people to God. He belongs to both and can play his role only if he remains in the middle: close enough to ultimate knowledge to know where to lead, and close enough to his people to know that he will be followed. It was a line too thin for anyone not fully divine to tread. The original Moses both succeeds and fails: he talks to God, but he is “slow of tongue and speech” and has difficulty talking to his people. He takes them to the edge of the promised land but is not allowed to enter because he had broken faith with God in the presence of the Israelites at the waters of Meribah Kadesh in the Desert of Zin.

What was needed in the Soviet version of Exodus, according to Voronsky, was “the life-giving spirit of the dialectic.” All literary Bolsheviks were to combine “universalism and internationalism” with a “connection to our factories, our villages, and the revolutionary movement of past eras and decades.” In the meantime, the Moses puzzle remained unsolved. Ivanov’s Red commander, Vershinin, is a “rock and a cliff” (and his last name is derived from the word for “summit”), but he remains a Russian peasant, with few signs of universalism. Pilniak’s leather men are “the best of the sluggish, unruly Russian people,” but “none of them has ever read Karl Marx.” Fadeev’s Red commander, Levinson, has read Karl Marx, but he is not from the Russian folk at all, and Voronsky does not believe that Bolsheviks should appear as “foreign conquerors.” The same is true of Malyshkin’s “army commander,” whose “stone profile” makes him “a stranger to the peaceful dusk of the peasant hut,” and of Leonid Leonov’s Comrade Arsen, whose eyes, words, veins, and scars are all blue “from iron.” These people, according to Voronsky, are “strangers, who live by themselves.” Even Libedinsky’s Communists, led by the human-size Comrade Robeiko (who is slow of tongue and speech and says “exodus” instead of “escape”), are, in Voronsky’s words, “a closed heroic caste that has almost no links to the surrounding world.”⁴⁹

One solution is to split Moses in two: a commissar who talks to History and a popular hero who leads the march through the desert (and becomes a crusader in the process). In Ivanov’s Colored Winds, the wild, truth-seeking peasant, Kalistrat, is paired with the merciless Bolshevik, Nikitin, who explains their division of labor as follows:

“Some need bread, and some need blood. I supply the blood.”

“And what about me? What am I supposed to supply?”

“You’ll supply the bread.”

“No I won’t!”

“Yes, you will.”⁵⁰

He does, of course. His job is to baptize the grass with the plow.

In Chapaev, the proletarian commissar Klychkov initiates the peasant warrior Chapaev into the secret knowledge of Communist prophecy. He molds him “like wax” until Chapaev is ready to embrace the “life-giving spirit of the dialectic.” Chapaev’s sacrifice by drowning means that Klychkov has learned how to mold the people, and the people have learned how to follow Klychkov.⁵¹

The twin dangers of straying too far in either direction are—as usual—represented by Platonov and Babel. Platonov’s Communists are indistinguishable from other village idiots (he created folklore, not myth, whatever his original intentions). Babel’s narrator, with glasses on his nose and autumn in his soul, never masters “the simplest of skills” and suffers silently from an unrequited longing and secret revulsion for his Cossack listeners.⁵²

Platonov, Babel, and their characters strive to “pull heaven down to earth” but fail—and suffer for it. In the hands of an unbeliever, the exodus can become an eternal march through hell. Lev Lunts’s short story, “In the Desert” (1921), has no beginning and no end. “It was frightening and boring. There was nothing to do—except walk on and on. To escape the burning boredom, hunger, and desert gloom and to give their hairy hands and dull fingers something to do, they would steal each other’s utensils, skins, cattle, and women, and then kill the thieves. And then they would avenge the killings and kill the killers. There was no water, but plenty of blood. And before them lay the land flowing with milk and honey.”⁵³

■ ■ ■

The inferno, by most accounts, is Exodus without the promised land. The inferno justified by an eventual homecoming is a purposeful “tempering of steel,” or Exodus the way it is meant to be. The most canonical Bolshevik representation of the Civil War is also the most complete Soviet version of the Exodus myth.

Aleksandr Serafimovich’s The Iron Flood, published in 1924, was immediately hailed as a great accomplishment of the new Soviet literature and remained required reading in Soviet schools until the end of the Soviet Union. It is based on the story of the march of about sixty thousand Red Army soldiers and civilian refugees across the Caucasus Mountains in August–October 1918. Serafimovich, who was sixty-one at the time of publication, was a veteran radical writer and the official patriarch of “proletarian” literature. He was born into the family of a Don Cossack officer and raised in the Upper Don settlement of Ust-Medveditskaia (which was also the home of Filipp Mironov, who was nine years younger and several social rungs lower). Having been caught up in student “circle” life at the University of St. Petersburg in the 1880s, he had started writing in exile (on the White Sea, like Voronsky and Arosev) and later worked as a reporter, editor, and fiction writer in the Don Area and eventually in Moscow (for Leonid Andreev’s Moscow Courier). During the Bolshevik uprising in Moscow, he had served as chief literary editor of the Moscow Soviet’s Izvestia. In early summer 1919, he traveled to the southern front as a Pravda correspondent and wrote an article against de-Cossackization. “The victories blinded [the Red Army] to the local population, its hopes for the future, its needs, its prejudices, its expectations of a new life, its tremendous desire to know what the Red columns were bringing, and its unique economic and cultural traditions.” One of Serafimovich’s two sons served as a commissar in the Special Expeditionary Corps for the suppression of the Upper-Don uprising (with Valentin Trifonov) and was killed at the front in 1920 at the age of twenty.⁵⁴

The Iron Flood begins with a scene of utter confusion: “From all sides came the din of voices, the barking of dogs, neighing of horses, and clanking of metal; the crying of children, rough swearing of men and shouting of women; and the raucous, drunken singing to the accompaniment of an accordion. It was as though a huge beehive had lost its queen, and its hum had become chaotic, frenzied, and discordant.” The only force that can give shape to this chaos is the army commander, who makes his appearance as a nameless and motionless bearer of the revolutionary will. “Near the windmill stood a short, stocky man, with a firm, square jaw, who looked as though he were made of lead. His small, grey, gimlet eyes glittered under his low brows as he surveyed the scene, missing nothing. His squat shadow lay on the ground, its head trampled by the feet all around him.”⁵⁵

His name is Kozhukh, and he is slow of tongue and speech. “Comrades! What I mean to say is … well … our comrades are dead … and … we must honor them …’cause they died for us…. I mean … why did they have to die? Comrades, what I mean to say is that, Soviet Russia is not dead. It will live till the end of time.’” For the prophecy to come true, the people have to cross the wilderness. “The last station before the mountains looked like a scene from the Tower of Babel. Half an hour later Kozhukh’s column set out and no one dared try to stop them. But the moment it set out thousands of panic-stricken soldiers and refugees took off behind them with their carts and cattle, jostling and blocking up the road, trying to pass one another and shoving into the ditches anyone who got in their way. And the long column began to creep up the mountain like a monstrous serpent.”⁵⁶

The first miracle they encounter after they reach the top is the sea, which “rose, unexpectedly, like an infinite blue wall, whose deep hue was reflected in their eyes.”

“Look, the sea!”

“But why does it stand up like a wall?”

“We’ll have to climb over it.”

“Then why, when you stand on the shore, does it look flat all the way to the end?”

“Haven’t you heard about how, when Moses led the Hebrews out of Egyptian slavery, like us now, the sea stood up like a wall and they passed over on dry land”?⁵⁷

They do pass over on dry land, and keep going, on and on—a “dishevelled, ragged, blackened, naked, screeching horde, pursued by the sweltering heat, by hunger and despair.” Enemy armies and “myriads of flies” stalk, attack, and lie in wait, but the column crawls on—“in order to reach the top of the range and then slither back down to the steppe where the food and forage are abundant and their own people await them.”⁵⁸

The other two Civil War plots—the crucifixion and the apocalypse—perform their usual functions. When all the heat, dust, flies, roar, and exhaustion become unbearable, Kozhukh orders a detour, so that the people may see both the heroic self-sacrifice made on their behalf and the reason for the slaughter they are about to unleash.

In the heavy silence, only the tramping of feet could be heard. All heads turned, and all eyes looked in one direction—toward the straight line of telegraph posts, dwindling into the distance like tiny pencils in the shimmering haze. From the four nearest posts, motionless, hung four naked men. The air around them was black with flies. Their heads were bent low, as if pressing down with their youthful chins on the nooses that held them. Their teeth were bared, and the sockets of their eyes, pecked out by the ravens, gaped emptily. From their bellies, also pecked and torn, hung green, slimy entrails. The sun beat down. Their skin, bruised black by the beatings, had burst open in places. The ravens flew up to the tops of the posts and watched with their heads cocked to one side.

Four men, and then a fifth … and on the fifth hung the blackened body of a girl, naked, with her breasts cut off.

“Regiment, ha-alt !”⁵⁹

The violence visited on the poor and the hungry—back in Egypt, here in the desert, or anywhere since the beginning of time—is returned a thousandfold. They grind the Edomites, Moabites, Bashanites, and Amorites into the sand, raze their fortresses, and kill them all to the last man. “Neck-deep in the water, the Georgian soldiers stood with arms outstretched towards the vanishing steamers. They shouted and cursed, begging for mercy in the name of their children, but the swift sabers came down upon their necks, heads, and shoulders, staining the water with blood.” The Cossacks did not beg for mercy. “When the sun rose above the hills and over the limitless steppe, one could see all the Cossacks with their long, black moustaches. There were no wounded, no prisoners among them—they all lay dead.”⁶⁰

Before entering one of the towns they come to, Kozhukh gives orders to two of his commanders. To the first he says: “Annihilate them all!”; to the second—“Exterminate them all!” And so they do: “The embankment, pier, streets, squares, courtyards, and highways were strewn with dead bodies. They lay in heaps in various poses. Some had their heads twisted round, and some were missing their heads. Brains were scattered over the pavement like lumps of jelly. As if in a slaughter-house, dark, clotted blood lay in pools along the houses and stone fences, and blood trickled through the cracks under the gates.”⁶¹

Most of the violence is in the biblical mode of indiscriminate mass murder, but Serafimovich has enough faith and mythopoeic consistency to take a guiltless closer look. The scenes of individual sacrifice he pauses to describe do not substitute for Armageddon, the way they do in Platonov and Babel: they explain and illustrate it with the same scrupulous thoroughness with which Kopenkin killed:

From the priest’s house they led out some people with ashen faces and golden epaulettes—part of the Cossack headquarters’ staff had been taken. They cut off their heads by the priest’s stable, and the blood soaked into the dung.

The din of the cries, gunshots, curses, and groans drowned out the sound of the river.

The house of the Ataman was searched from top to bottom, but he was nowhere to be found. He had fled. The soldiers began shouting:

“If you don’t come out, we’ll kill all your children!”

The Ataman did not come out.

They began to slaughter the children. Grovelling on her knees with her braids streaming down, the Ataman’s wife clutched desperately at the soldiers’ legs. One of them turned to her and said reproachfully:

“Why are you yelling like a stuck pig? I had a daughter just like yours—a three-year-old. We buried her up there in the mountains, but I didn’t yell.”

And he hacked down the little girl and then crushed the skull of the hysterically laughing mother. ⁶²

The Iron Flood became the canonical Book of the Civil War because it was the most complete realization of the flood metaphor, the most elaborate Soviet version of Exodus, and the most successful solution of the Moses puzzle—the “life-giving dialectic” between the transcendental and the local, the conscious and the spontaneous, predestination and free will. As the human mass turns into an iron flood, the Commander acquires a measure of humanity. By the time they arrive in the promised land, they come together for good.⁶³

“Our father … lead us where you will! We will lay down our lives!”

A thousand hands reached out to him and pulled him off; a thousand hands lifted him over their heads and carried him. And the steppe shook for many versts, roused by countless voices:

“Hurrah -a-ah! Hurra-a-a-a-a-ah for Kozhukh!”

Kozhukh was carried to the place where the men stood in orderly ranks and then to the place where the artillery stood. He was carried past the horses of the squadrons—and the horsemen turned in their saddles and, with shining faces and mouths opened wide, let out a continuous roar.

He was carried among the refugees and among the carts, and the mothers held up their babies to him.

They carried him back again and set him down gently upon the cart. When Kozhukh opened his mouth to speak, they all gasped, as if seeing him for the first time.

“Look, his eyes are blue!”

No, they did not cry out because they could not put words to their emotions, but his eyes, when seen up close, really were blue and gentle, with a shy expression, like a child’s….

The orators spoke until nightfall, one after another. As they talked, everyone experienced the ever-growing, inexpressibly blissful feeling of being linked to the enormity that they knew and did not know, one that was called Soviet Russia.⁶⁴

■ ■ ■

By the mid-1920s, the sacred foundations of the Soviet state had come to include the “October Revolution,” which centered on the storming of the Winter Palace, and—much more prominently—the Civil War, which consisted of the Civil War proper (the war on the battlefield) and “War Communism” (the war on property, market, money, and the division of labor). War Communism was the murkiest part of the “glorious past”: it represented the heart of Bolshevism (the transformation of a society into a sect), but it was scrapped in 1921 as unenforceable and later given its posthumous name, which suggested contingency and perhaps reluctance. The definitive Soviet text on its meaning and significance was written by one of its designers, the economist, Lev Kritsman. It was published in 1924 under the title The Heroic Period of the Great Russian Revolution (An Analytical Essay on So-Called “War Communism”).

Kritsman grew up in the family of a People’s Will activist (who was also a dentist), attended Khaim Gokhman’s Odessa Commercial Institute, joined his first reading circle at the age of fourteen, studied at the Odessa (New Russia) University before being expelled for revolutionary activity, graduated from the University of Zurich as a chemist, returned to Russia in a sealed train after the October Revolution, engineered (at the age of twenty-seven) the nationalization of the sugar industry, participated in the writing of the decree on the nationalization of all large industry, and, in 1924, became a member of the Communist Academy and a leading Bolshevik expert on rural economics and the “peasant question.”⁶⁵

According to Kritsman, the “Great Russian Revolution” (the term was modeled on the standard Bolshevik name for the French Revolution) made “the unthinkable real.” It proved “the correctness of Marxism, which, decades earlier, had predicted the inevitability of everything that occurred in Russia after 1917: the collapse of capitalism, the proletarian revolution, the destruction of the capitalist state, the expropriation of capitalist property, and the onset of the epoch of the dictatorship of the proletariat.” The Revolution’s socioeconomic dimension, or “so-called War Communism,” was “the proletarian organization of production and reproduction during the decisive period of the proletarian revolution; in general, therefore, it was not something that was imposed on the revolution from the outside.” In fact, it was “the first grandiose experiment in building an autarkic proletarian economy—an experiment in taking the first steps in the transition to socialism. In its essence, it was not an error on the part of certain individuals or a certain class; it was—although not in its pure form and not without certain perversions—an anticipation of the future, a breakthrough of that future into the present (now already past).”⁶⁶

This “heroic” phase of the revolution rested, according to Kritsman, on five fundamental principles, all of them sacred, still relevant, and necessary for the transition to socialism. The first was the “economic principle,” which meant that members’ labor contributions were not distorted by “commercial, legal, and other considerations unrelated to production.” Emancipated labor finally resolved the bourgeois contradiction “between the abstract, and therefore hypocritical, political system, in which individual citizens are seen as ideal, interchangeable atoms, and the economic system, in which real individuals coexist with other individuals in real life (and, most important, in relations of class domination and subjection.)” The state of the revolutionary proletariat was one of unprecedented transparency and consistency. It was a state without “politics” in the Babylonian sense.

The second was “the class principle,” or “the spirit of ruthless class exclusivity.” A member of the former ruling classes “was not simply deprived of his superior status—he was expelled from Soviet society and forced to huddle in dark corners, like barely tolerated dirt. A bourgeois was a contemptible outcast, a pariah devoid of not only property, but also honor.” Proof of “untainted worker or peasant origins” replaced titles and money as a ticket to social advancement: “The stigma of belonging to the class of exploiters could guarantee a place in a concentration camp, prison or, at best, a hovel left behind by proletarians who had moved to better houses. Such ruthless class exclusivity, such social extermination of the exploiting class was a source of tremendous moral inspiration, of a passionate enthusiasm of the proletariat and all the exploited classes. It was a mighty call to the victims of domination, an assertion of their inner superiority over the dirty world of exploiters.”

The third “organizing principle of the era” was the “labor principle,” or the uncompromising adoption of St. Paul’s motto, “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.” In Kritsman’s Marxist formulation, “the path to the realm of freedom passed through necessary labor.” This involved forced labor for the former exploiters and more labor for the laborers. Contrary to the petit bourgeois view of production (rooted in unspecialized small-scale work), “modern productive labor is not an expression of man’s free creative potential; it is not pleasurable as such. In this regard, the proletarian revolution does not bring about any fundamental change. On the contrary, because it presupposes a continued development of large-scale production, it leads to a further intensification of the necessary character of productive labor.” What was different was the fact that, under the dictatorship of the proletariat, hard work would—eventually, lead to leisure, and leisure, under socialism, would become an expression of free human creativity. “The proletarian revolution returns necessary labor to its original purpose of achieving leisure by restoring the connection, severed by capitalism, between productive labor and leisure, thus creating a powerful incentive for a further intensification of labor.” To conclude (in the style of the original scripture), “the emancipation of necessary labor from elements of free creativity means the emancipation of free creativity from the chains of necessary labor.”

The fourth principle was collectivism, which manifested itself most forcefully in the nationalization of industry, but also in collective management (collegiality), barter, education, and housing, among many other things. “Probably nothing was more typical of that epoch than the desire to eradicate individualism and implant collectivism.”

The fifth and final principle was “rationalization,” or the rejection of tradition. “In revolutionary eras, the fact of the existence of a given social institution is not an argument in favor of its continued existence…. The motto of organic eras, ‘it exists, therefore it is needed,’ is replaced by a very different one: ‘If it is needed, it exists, if it is not needed, it will be destroyed.’” In bourgeois revolutions, this principle had been applied to “religion, morality, law, domestic life, and political order,” but not to the economy. During the proletarian revolution, the whole society was subject to reform, and the most important reform of all was “the destruction of fetishistic relations and the establishment of direct, open, and immediate connections among various parts of the Soviet economy.” This meant, in the first place, “the destruction of the market, the destruction of commodity, cash, and credit relations.”⁶⁷

Most of Kritsman’s book was about the destruction of the market as the central feature of the proletarian revolution (“a principle that enveloped all spheres of social life” and resulted in attempts to abolish law and religion, among other things). The predicted resistance of the enemies of the Revolution inevitably led to the Civil War, and the Civil War inevitably led to “the forcible strangling of the market,” “the suppression of money-commodity relations,” “the total ban on trade,” and “the expropriation of property owners.” Unfolding “as an irresistible, all-destroying flood,” this process inevitably went beyond economic rationality because only an all-destroying flood could deprive the counterrevolutionary capital of “the air of the market that it needed in order to survive.” “This transcendence of immediate economic rationality was both the reason for the victory of the revolution and the root of the perversions that marked the autarkic proletarian economic order.” This dialectic was the result of a pact between two mythic giants: the proletariat and the peasantry. The proletariat agreed to allow the peasantry to keep its land in exchange for military support from “the vast majority of the population”; the peasantry agreed to allow the proletariat to “strangle the market” in exchange for proletarian leadership in the war against the feudal order. Once victory over the feudal order was achieved, the peasantry withdrew its support for the strangling of the market. “Thus, the military and, most important, political victory of the proletariat inevitably led, under these conditions, to its economic retreat.”⁶⁸

Under these conditions, the peasantry seemed to stand for “economic rationality,” but Kritsman did not take the logic of his argument in that direction. “What was a retreat for the proletarian revolution,” he argued, “was the completion of the antifeudal peasant revolution.” NEP was to last for as long as necessary for this process to run its course. In 1924, it was clear that a new—“cautious and methodical”—offensive was getting under way. The point of this offensive was to prepare for “the coming world-historical battle between the proletariat and capital.”⁶⁹

■ ■ ■

Having won the war, taken over the state, established stable administrative hierarchies, rewarded themselves with a system of exclusive benefits, worked out a canon of foundation myths, and retreated temporarily in the expectation of the coming world-historical battle between the proletariat and capital, the Bolsheviks were about to face the most difficult moment in the history of any sect: the death of the leader-founder.

In March 1923, after Lenin suffered his second stroke and lost his ability to speak, Karl Radek wrote that the world proletariat’s greatest wish was “that this Moses, who led the slaves out of the land of captivity, might enter the Promised Land along with us.” On January 21, 1924, Lenin died. The next day, the Central Committee of the Party issued an official statement (“To the Party, to All Working People”), in which it summarized the main points of the new iconography of the Bolshevik leader.⁷⁰

First, he was “the man who founded our party of steel, kept building it year after year, led it while under the blows of tsarism, taught and tempered it in the fierce struggle with the traitors of the working class—with the lukewarm, the undecided, the defectors.” He was the man “under whose guidance our party, enveloped in powder-smoke, planted the banner of October throughout the land.” As Bukharin wrote on the same day, “like a giant, he walked in front of the human flood, guiding the movement of countless human units, building a disciplined army of labor, sending it into battle, destroying the enemy, taming the elements, and lighting, with the searchlight of his powerful mind, both the straight avenues and the dark back alleys, through which the workers’ detachments marched with their rebellious red flags.”⁷¹

Lenin could be the founder and leader because he was a prophet. According to the official statement, “Lenin could, like no one else, see things great and small: foresee enormous historical shifts and, at the same time, notice and use every tiny detail…. He did not recognize frozen formulas; there were no blinders on his wise, all-seeing eyes.” He could, in Bukharin’s words, “hear the grass growing beneath the ground, the streams running and gurgling below, and the thoughts and ideas going through the minds of the countless toilers of the earth.” As Koltsov wrote almost a year before Lenin’s death, “He is a man from the future, a pioneer from over there—from the world of fulfilled communism…. Treading firmly on the wreckage of the past and building the future with his own hands, he has moved far above, into the joyous realm of the coming world.”⁷²

Like all true prophets, Lenin was as close to the earth as he was to the world above, as close to his people as he was to the bright future. He was both a teacher and a friend, a comrade and “a dictator in the best sense of the word” (as Bukharin put it). “On the one hand,” wrote Osinsky, “he is a man of such ‘common’ and ‘normal’ appearance that, really, why couldn’t he get together with Lloyd George and chat with him peacefully about European affairs? But, on the other hand, that could result in both Lloyd George and the entire Genoa conference being blown sky high! For, on the one hand, he is Ulianov, but, on the other, he is Lenin.” Or, in Koltsov’s formulation, “There is Ulianov, who took care of those around him and was as nurturing as a father, as tender as a brother, and as simple and cheerful as a friend…. And then there is Lenin, who caused Planet Earth unprecedented trouble and stood at the head of history’s most terrible, most devastatingly bloody struggle against oppression, ignorance, backwardness, and superstition. Two faces—and only one man; not a duality but a synthesis.”⁷³

Lenin’s synthesis went well beyond the unity of the Son of God and the Son of Man. Lenin, in both his incarnations, was equal to his followers, and his followers—in all their “countless units”—were equal to Lenin. On the one hand, according to the Central Committee obituary, “everything truly great and heroic that the proletariat possesses … finds its magnificent embodiment in Lenin, whose name has become the symbol of the new world from east to west and from north to south.” On the other, “every member of our Party is a small part of Lenin. Our whole Communist family is a collective embodiment of Lenin.” This meant that Lenin was, by definition, immortal:

Lenin lives in the soul of every member of our party….

Lenin lives in the heart of every honest worker

Lenin lives in the heart of every poor peasant.

Lenin lives among the millions of colonial slaves.

Lenin lives in the hatred that our enemies have for Leninism, Communism, and Bolshevism.⁷⁴

But Lenin was immortal in another sense, too. He was immortal because he had suffered and died for mankind in order to be resurrected with the coming of Communism. “Comrade Lenin gave his whole life to the working class, all of it from its conscious beginning to its last martyr’s breath.” Or, in the words of Arosev’s eulogy, “he accepted the enormous and terrible burden—to think for 150 million people”—lifted the whole of Russia, and, “having lifted it, lost his strength and broke down.”⁷⁵

The announcement of Lenin’s death coincided with the nineteenth anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the massacre of a peaceful demonstration by imperial troops in January 1905. According to Koltsov, “Lenin, the leader of the working people of the world, sacrificed himself to them nineteen years after those first bodies fell on Palace Square in Petersburg…. The date of January 21st, written in black to mark Lenin’s death, says simply and firmly: “Don’t be afraid of tomorrow’s bloody-red date—the 22nd. That day of blood on the snow in Petersburg was the day of awakening. This awakening will come—albeit in blood, too—to the rest of the world.” Lenin was the spring “of energy and faith” that Sverdlov had prophesied twenty years earlier—the “noisy and tempestuous” real day that was “sweeping away everything weak, feeble, and old.” Lenin, according to Koltsov, “signifies a joyous and tempestuous awakening from a long sleep full of bloody nightmares to a new energy of struggle and work.” The Easter egg commissar from Lavrenev’s The Forty-First (published in 1924) was a miniature Lenin—as were all commissars, Party members, honest workers, poor peasants, and colonial slaves. Lenin was the chief Easter egg commissar and the original savior. His sacrality (immortality) resided in his “cause” and his disciples—but also in the icons, rituals, and myths that preserved his likeness. Ulianov was as immortal as Lenin—and so, it turned out, was their body.⁷⁶

“Dear one! Unforgettable one! Great one!” wrote Bukharin, addressing “our common leader, our wise teacher, and our dear, precious comrade.” Most of Lenin would live on through “his very own beloved child and heir—our Party,” but the immediacy of physical affection might be gone forever. “Never again will we see that enormous brow, that marvelous head which used to radiate revolutionary energy, those vibrant, piercing, impressive eyes, those firm and imperious hands, that whole solid, robust figure that stood at the border of two epochs in the history of mankind.” By switching from the physical “figure” to the metaphorical one within the same sentence, Bukharin suggests a solution. The images and personal objects of the dead help preserve the immediacy of physical affection for as long as live memories last; the icons and relics of sacred founders and heroes can preserve such immediacy for as long as the sacred universe they founded remains sacred. Most sacred objects associated with particular heroes—temples, icons, texts, meals, priests—acquire sacrality indirectly, by symbolic transfer; some are believed to be the hero’s personal items (the closer to the body—tunics, cloaks, chains—the better); and some are actual bodies or bodily remains (the mummies of Christian and Buddhist saints, the tooth of the Buddha, the hair of the Prophet Muhammad, the head of Orpheus, the thumb of St. Catherine). The fact that Lenin’s remains were sacred and would be venerated in some form was beyond doubt; the question was how. The answer was provided by the government Funeral Commission, which, in late March, was renamed the Commission for the Immortalization of the Memory of V. I. Ulianov (Lenin).⁷⁷

The day after Lenin’s death, an official delegation took a train to the Gorki estate outside of Moscow, where Lenin had been living. Mikhail Koltsov, in his capacity as Pravda correspondent, traveled with them. “In the middle of the night, in the frozen mist, the elders of the great Bolshevik tribe set out for the place where they were to receive the still body of their departed chief: receive it, bring it back, and display it to the orphaned millions.” From the station, a convoy of horse-drawn sleds took the delegates to the manor house. Sverdlov and Malkov had chosen it as Lenin’s country residence in September 1918, soon after the assassination attempt. Its last prerevolutionary owner was Zinaida Morozova, the widow of the wealthy industrialist, Savva Morozov, who had financed the Bolshevik Party until his death in 1905.

The tall white old house with slender columns is enclosed within a noble frame of silver forest and blue snow. The glass door opens easily to let us in. This small forest palace, the leader’s final resting place, the place where an inimitable life and an unquenchable will for battle have ended, will always remain before the tired, expectant, and believing eyes of millions of oppressed people.

The house is quiet, spacious, and comfortable. The carpets guard the silence. Every inch is history; every step leads to an object of devout reverence by future generations. Through these windows, patterned with frost, he, the giant who apprehended the whole world and was then cut down in his prime and forced to suffer the inexpressible torment of imposed powerlessness, peered into the future and saw, beyond the short forest path and overgrown village garden, the extended hands of the hundreds of millions of our brothers being crucified on the Golgotha of industrialism and roasted in the multi-storied capitalist hell of the entire world.

The delegates walked through the house and ascended the stairs to “the death room.” “Here he is! He hasn’t changed at all. He is just like himself! His face is calm, and he is almost—almost—smiling that inimitable, indescribable, sly childlike smile of his that is obvious only to those who knew him. His upper lip with its moustache is mischievously lifted and seems very much alive. It is as if he himself were puzzled by what has just happened. Going back down the stairs, a soldier—a Bolshevik—murmurs to himself: ‘Ilich looks great—just the way he did when we last saw him.’”⁷⁸

Lenin’s heart and brain were handed over to Arosev, who was the “responsible custodian” at the Lenin Institute, created the year before. The rest of the body was transported to Moscow, placed in the Hall of Columns of the Trade Union House, where it lay in state for three days, and, after a solemn funeral ceremony, moved to a temporary crypt in Red Square. One of the members of the Funeral Commission, the commissar for foreign trade, Leonid Krasin, proposed preserving the body indefinitely by submerging it in embalming liquid and placing it in a metal box with a glass top. Krasin was a professional engineer who used to preside over the St. Petersburg electric cable system and Savva Morozov’s electrical power plant in Orekhovo-Zuevo—as well as Bolshevik bank “expropriations,” bomb making, and fund-raising. (Most of the funds he raised came from Morozov, whose mysterious death in May 1905 had led to much inconclusive speculation about Krasin’s involvement.) Krasin was the most consistent Bolshevik advocate of the technocratic path to human redemption (and, possibly, resurrection). In 1921, in his speech at the funeral of the director of the Chemical Institute and Old Bolshevik, Lev Yakovlevich Karpov, he had said: “I am certain that the time will come when science will become so powerful that it will be able to recreate a deceased organism. I am certain that the time will come when one will be able to use the elements of a person’s life to recreate the physical person. And I am certain that when that time does come, when liberated mankind, using all the might of science and technology, whose power and scale we cannot now imagine, is able to resurrect the great historical figures, fighters for the liberation of mankind—I am certain that at that time, our comrade, Lev Yakovlevich, will be among those great figures.”⁷⁹

It was Lev Yakovlevich’s friend and protégé, Boris Zbarsky, who beat Krasin out for the job of preserving Lenin’s remains. Born in 1885 to a Jewish family in Kamenets-Podolsky, Zbarsky graduated from the University of Geneva and, in 1915–16, worked as an estate manager and director of two chemical plants in Vsevolodo-Vilva, in the northern Urals. The estate and the factories belonged to Zinaida Morozova (who also owned “the tall white old house with slender columns”). In 1916, Zbarsky invented a new method of purifying medical chloroform for frontline hospitals and launched, together with L. Ya. Karpov, its industrial production. After the Revolution, he moved to Moscow to become deputy director of the “Karpov Institute.” When Zbarsky was consulted about the preservation of Lenin’s body, he rejected Krasin’s plan (along with various refrigeration alternatives) and proposed “moist embalming” as practiced in the anatomical museum of Professor Vladimir Vorobiev in Kharkov. In March 1924, after much lobbying and maneuvering and in the face of the body’s steady deterioration, Zbarsky managed to persuade Feliks Dzerzhinsky (the head of the Immortalization Commission) to opt for the Vorobiev method and to persuade Vorobiev (a former White émigré) to agree to be involved.⁸⁰

On March 25, 1924, the Funeral Commission announced that it had decided “to take measures available to modern science to preserve the body for as long as possible.” On March 26, Vorobiev, Zbarsky, and their assistants began their round-the-clock working vigil in the freezing crypt. The goal was not simply to preserve the body but to preserve the likeness, thus creating an icon in the flesh. This ruled out traditional mummification, because, according to Zbarsky, “if you were shown the mummy of a loved one, you would be horrified.” Moreover, that likeness had to look naturally uncorrupted, not visibly manipulated like body parts “in glass jars filled with antiseptic fluids.” Soviet scientists, wrote Zbarsky later, “had been given a completely new task. The goal was to make sure that the body of Vladimir Ilich remained in the open air, at normal temperatures, accessible for daily viewing by many thousands of people—while preserving Lenin’s appearance. Such an assignment was unprecedented in world science.”⁸¹

Boris Zbarsky

(Courtesy of I. B. Zbarsky)

Zbarsky and Vorobiev had been asked to produce a miracle, and they did. On June 16, 1924, Dzerzhinsky inquired whether the body could be shown to the delegates of the Fifth Congress of the Comintern. Zbarsky went to see N. K. Krupskaia to ask for some clothes. Krupskaia told him she did not approve of the idea and did not believe it could possibly work, and, when she did bring “some shirts, long underwear, and socks, her hands were trembling.” On June 18, the Comintern delegation and family members arrived at the newly built wooden mausoleum. According to Zbarsky, Krupskaia burst into tears. Lenin’s brother Dmitry said: “I can’t say much. I am very emotional. He looks exactly the way he did right after his death, perhaps even better.” On July 26, exactly four months after the beginning of the work, a government delegation saw the body and approved its appearance. Enukidze said that “hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of people would be extremely happy to see this man’s image.” On August 1, 1924, the mausoleum was opened to visitors. Vorobiev went back to Kharkov, and Zbarsky became the body’s chief guardian.⁸²

The chief guardian—“responsible custodian”—of Lenin’s textual heritage was Arosev (who had transferred Lenin’s heart to the mausoleum and Lenin’s brain to the special Laboratory for the Study of V. I. Lenin’s Brain). Arosev’s main job at the Lenin Institute was to catalog Lenin’s writings and compile the “calendar” of his life, but his most creative contribution to Leniniana was his short book On Vladimir Ilich, published in 1926. The book consists of several apparently unconnected episodes. In the first, two boys are having a race. The shorter, “light-haired” one, wins, and buys three birds in a cage. The boys go to a place called the Golden Crown to set them free, but one of the birds is sick and cannot fly. The tall boy is impatient, but the light-haired one cradles the bird in his hands, gives it water to drink, and insists on taking it to the bushes on the bank of the Volga, where it will be safe. “Now the tall one ran ahead because he wanted to get rid of the bird as quickly as possible, while the light-haired one lagged behind, blowing lightly on the bird and stroking it. He did not want to part with it.”⁸³

In the next scene, the light-haired little boy has become a ginger-haired university student “with the kind of brightness in his face that marks children who are developed beyond their years but have not lost their physical freshness.” After he and his comrades are arrested for staging a student demonstration, one of the students asks him what he is going to do now:

“What am I going to do?” he said, squinting toward the corner of the cell. “What can I do? My path has been set for me by my older brother.” [Lenin’s older brother had been hanged for attempted regicide when Lenin was seventeen.]

He said this quietly, but everyone seemed to shudder. They looked at each other in silence.

“So that was your brother?” asked someone quietly, as if Doubting Thomas had just thrust his fingers into the fresh wounds.

The ginger-haired student continued to sit with his arms around his knees and left the question unanswered.⁸⁴

In one of the later episodes, a balding young man reads a book (Hauptmann’s The Weavers) to a circle of disciples. After the reading, he is approached by a worker named Grigoriev, who asks him many questions about meeting times and addresses. “For a moment, he looked hard at Grigoriev, as if trying to remember something deeply hidden. But Grigoriev could not look him in the eye. In the same way, Judas had not been able to look his teacher in the eyes at the last supper in Jerusalem, when the teacher said: ‘One of you will betray me.’”⁸⁵

In the next scene, a smiling, bald exile persuades a village storekeeper to take pity on a peasant who does not have enough money for an Easter present for his daughter. But when the peasant thanks him “from the bottom of his heart,” the exile suddenly stops smiling. “The more ‘kindness’ we show toward the small producer (e.g., to the peasant) in the practical part of our program,” he writes several months later, “the ‘more strictly’ must we treat these unreliable and double-faced social elements in the theoretical part of the program, without sacrificing one iota of our position. ‘If you adopt our position,’ we tell them, ‘you can count on “indulgence” of every kind, but if you don’t, well then, you’ve been warned! Under the “dictatorship,” we will say about you: “there is no point in wasting words where the use of power is required.”’”⁸⁶

In the final episodes, only one man is prepared to use power when it is required. The meaning of the light-haired boy’s Golden Crown has been revealed. Bukharin, Voronsky, and other Bolsheviks who grew up reading the Apocalypse, would have had no trouble recognizing Revelation 14: “I looked, and there before me was a white cloud, and seated on the cloud was one ‘like the son of man’ with a crown of gold on his head and a sharp sickle in his hand. Then another angel came out of the temple and called in a loud voice to him who was sitting on the cloud, ‘Take your sickle and reap, because the time to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is ripe.’ So he who was seated on the cloud swung his sickle over the earth, and the earth was harvested.”⁸⁷

Arosev worked at the Lenin Institute for slightly more than a year before moving on to other things. (His next assignment was the press bureau of the Soviet embassy in Paris, under Ambassador Krasin.) A much more prolific writer on Lenin and Leninism was Platon Kerzhentsev (who continued to contribute to the canon throughout his life). But the most resonant words were Mayakovsky’s. Several days after the Immortalization Commission announced its decision to preserve Lenin’s body, he wrote the words that would later become the Soviet Union’s motto: “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will always live.” By October, he had finished his poem about Lenin’s life, death, and resurrection. “Lenin, even now, is more alive than the living” because he is both “a slayer, an avenger” and “the most humane of humans” (“the earthiest of those who have ever walked the Earth”). Above his mausoleum, “Red Square rises like a red banner,”

And from that banner,

with every flutter,

Lenin,

alive,

beckons:

“Proletarians,

prepare,

for one last battle!

Slaves,

stand straight

and stiffen your backs!⁸⁸

V. I. Lenin, by Maria Denisova

Himself an avenger and savior, Mayakovsky first prophesied the last battle (“I’ll rip out my soul … and hand it to you—all bloodied, for a banner”) after his Gioconda was taken away from him. But of course no one took her away. She chose her own battles. After Mayakovsky left Odessa in 1914, Maria Denisova married an engineer, followed him to Switzerland, gave birth to a daughter, studied sculpture in Lausanne and Geneva, separated from her husband, left for the Civil War front, served as head of the Art Agitation Department in the First and Second Red Cavalry armies, and moved in with the famous Commissar Efim Shchadenko (who served in the Military Revolutionary Council under both Semen Budennyi and Filipp Mironov). In 1924, at the age of thirty, she enrolled at the Higher Art and Technology Studios in Moscow. For her graduation project, she submitted a marble sculpture of Lenin’s head resting in his coffin.⁸⁹