The House of Government

7

THE GREAT DISAPPOINTMENT

Lenin’s death was mostly about immortality. But it was also about sorrow and despair. “In 1924, after the death of the beloved leader of the Party, Comrade Lenin,” wrote the shepherd-turned-public-prosecutor-turned-pensioner, Vasily Orekhov, “I could not bear his death and wept for about three months, resulting in traumatic nervosis.”¹

Moses had died, the promised land had been reached, but there was no milk and honey—presumably because the people had “prostituted themselves to foreign gods.” Or, in the equally productive metaphor, the real day had come, but there was still death and mourning and crying and pain. As the founder of Seventh-Day Adventism, Hiram Edson, wrote after the “Great Disappointment” of October 22, 1844, “our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before.” And as a Xhosa peasant said after the world failed to come to an end on February 18, 1857, “I sat outside my hut and saw the sun rise, so did all the people. We watched until midday, yet the sun continued its course. We still watched until the afternoon and yet it did not return, and the people began to despair because they saw this thing was not true.”²

Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur is one of the most eloquent Bolshevik laments over the apparent nonarrival of Communism. Comrade Chepurny and his assistant, the Chekist, Piusya, have exterminated the bourgeoisie and expelled the “half-bourgeoisie” along with most of the animals. Only twelve people are left in the town: eleven Bolsheviks and a woman, who, “being the raw material of communal joy, was kept in a special house, away from the dangerous life of the masses.” Chepurny “sat down on the ground by a wattle fence and softly, with two fingers, touched a burdock that was growing there; it too was alive—and now it was going to live under communism. Somehow dawn was a long time coming, though surely it must have been time for the new day. Chepurny went very still and began to feel afraid: would the sun rise in the morning, would morning ever come—now that the old world was no longer?”³

The Bolshevik spas and sanatoria of the 1920s were mostly about croquet, caviar, chess, concerts, billiards, boats, and “bubbles all over your body.” But they were also about sickness and sorrow. At the time of Lenin’s death, Voronsky was staying at a rest home (as was his friend and patron Trotsky, who was suffering from a mysterious melancholy). Smilga and Arosev had recently returned from sanatoria in Germany; Podvoisky was on his way to one there. Orekhov would never return to active work (he was forty when he started weeping); Lander would retire for health reasons within three years, at the age of forty-four; and Kritsman would be judged too sick to teach in 1929, when he was thirty-nine. Bukharin would remain active and energetic, but, in the words of his last wife, Anna Larina, “his emotional constitution was extraordinarily delicate, I would even say, morbidly frail.” On the day Lenin died, most of the leader’s disciples cried, “but no one sobbed as much as Bukharin.” Indeed, “this trait—emotional fragility and acute sensitivity—would often send him into a state of hysteria. He wept easily.”⁴

Orekhov and Bukharin were not alone. Of the 144 people who received medical treatment at the Central Executive Committee Rest Home in Tetkovo in the summer of 1928, 98 (or 68 percent) were diagnosed with emotional disorders: “Neurasthenia—18; Psycho-neurasthenia—6; Psychosis—1; Exhaustion—73.” A year earlier, in 1927, the Lenin Rest Home in Maryino (the Central Executive Committee Rest Home No. 1) had received 1,266 guests. Of these, “six people (0.47 percent) were healthy, while the other 1,260 had various complaints.” Almost one-half (598 of them) had “functional diseases of the nervous system”; 27 had “organic diseases of the nervous system”; 59 were diagnosed as “neurotics”; and 130, as “suffering from exhaustion.” Altogether, 65 percent of the guests complained of some form of emotional distress. Neither of the homes was a specialized medical institution: both were vacation resorts designed for sociability and recreation, with one or two doctors sent over from the Kremlin Health Department.⁵

Rest and therapy produced the need for more rest and therapy. As Stalin’s father-in-law, S. Ya. Alliluev, wrote to the head of the CEC Housing Authority in June 1930, “I would be very grateful if you could find it possible to place me in one of the CEC rest homes for a couple of weeks. Somewhere in the middle of a thick forest, where it’s quiet. I recently returned from Matsesta [a balneological spa outside Sochi], where I was trying to cure my old man’s ailments and my heart. The sulphur baths have made me quite weak, and I need to restore my health.”⁶

At the height of the collectivization campaign (and three months before his son-in-law’s “Dizzy from Success” article ordered a temporary halt to the mass violence), Alliluev may have had other reasons for wishing to be in the middle of a thick forest. Two years earlier, Olympiada Mitskevich’s reasons seem to have been perfectly straightforward. The daughter of Siberian peasants, Olympiada had joined the revolutionaries at the age of sixteen when she married a prominent Bolshevik, Sergei Mitskevich (who had joined the revolutionaries at the age of fourteen when he read Turgenev’s The Virgin Soil). By 1928, they had separated. He was working as the director of the Museum of the Revolution, and she was an employee of the Institute of Party History (and future employee of Adoratsky’s Lenin Institute). Her main occupation, however, was to work on recovering from a life of self-deprivation that had begun when she dedicated herself to the future revolution and ended when she became a professional keeper of the past. In July 1928, she wrote from Czechoslovakia to the Society of Old Bolsheviks asking for help in moving from one resort to another. “After receiving treatment at Carlsbad, which always weakens me, I need rest.… I am not asking for financial assistance from you at this point. All I need is a ticket to Nizhny Novgorod and then down to Samara, and then another one, to return by the same route.”⁷

The Society of Old Bolsheviks had been created soon after the Civil War for the purpose of preserving the common memory, passing it on to future generations, and attending to the welfare of its current members (all Bolsheviks with at least eighteen years of uninterrupted Party affiliation). The Society provided them with financial assistance, access to elite housing, and preferential college admissions for their children and grandchildren. The most frequent petitioners among the members were pensioners, who had plenty of time to convalesce and reminisce, and former workers, who did not have access to comparable benefits at their place of work. Since the salaries of Party members could not exceed a certain limit (the “Party Maximum”), and since even under NEP the supply of goods and services was uneven, most elite consumption took place through a highly stratified system of exclusive benefits. The Society of Old Bolsheviks mitigated the effects of this stratification among the original converts. The most common requests—even from the neediest members—were for rest and therapy.

On July 4, 1928, the baker-turned-trade-union-official, Boris Ivanov, reminded the Society of a request he had made in his previous letter.

I appealed to the society of old bolsheviks through a secretary with a request to be sent to a Kislovodsk spa for free treatment which request was denied due to the reason that I hadn’t been a member for six months even though I was feeling bad and lay in bed sick for a whole month. I did get the treatment paid for by the central committee of the party so in that regard I am okay but they didn’t include the railway ticket which means I’ll have to pay my own way.

Although I receive the Party Maximum I am in very dire straits. Besides the family of four persons who are all my dependents of whom my wife is sick, I was on top of everything burgled about ten months ago which is to say that in my absence they robbed my apartment clean and took all our winter coats and some of our fall clothes and underwear of my whole family and of course they never found neither the theives nor the things. So I had to go into debt to get clothes for my children and will myself go around in a fall overcoat for the second winter in a row due to not having the necessary resources for the purchase. In this situation it’s not so easy to add to your existing debts.⁸

Ivanov did not ask for money for a new coat; he asked for free train tickets to the spa. His request was granted.

The former shepherd, Vasily Orekhov, wrote to the Society in late 1927 asking for money. The board members received a typed version of the original letter.

In 1924 I got a bad case of traumatic nervosis for which I received treatment in Korsikov’s sanatorium for three months. During this period I relatively rested and returned to work. Having worked until January 19, 1925, my illness came back, but in a more serious form. I lost the use of my tongue and legs. My physical condition was greatly affected by the cold. At the end of February the Moscow Committee sent me for treatment to Sevastopol, to the Institute of Physical Therapy, where I stayed for three months. At the end of the treatment my doctors suggested that I stay in the south.… In Simferopol, my apartment was broken into by some bandits, who killed my sixteen-year-old son, whose funeral cost 186 rubles. My family was so frightened by the attack that it entered into a mental condition, and my wife and daughter are still suffering from it. My wife fell very seriously ill, to whom was recommended by the Medical Commission to proceed to Evpatoria to take salt and mud baths, and, for the children, sea baths and electric treatments. I had to send my whole family to Evpatoria for two months. This treatment cost me 476 rubles.… Appealing to you with this request, I am asking you to lead me out of this vortex into which fate has thrown me.⁹

The Society arranged for him to receive a special pension of 175 roubles a month. In June 1930, his pension was raised to 200 roubles, but his financial situation and medical condition remained unsatisfactory, and he continued to request, and receive, free treatments at Crimean spas and free services not available at the Kremlin Hospital. In December 1930, he asked the Society to pay for “the replacement of two rows of teeth to the total amount of 26 teeth as well as the placement of two crowns on the two remaining teeth.” The Society approved the request.¹⁰

Whatever the nature, symptoms, and etiology of the particular affliction, the 1920s were a time of deep malaise among those who believed that the real day would “sweep away everything weak, feeble, and old.” The proclamation of the NEP retreat from Communism was followed by the onset of Lenin’s illness, which was followed by the apparent rise of everything weak, feeble, and old. “After the death of the bourgeoisie, Chepurny had no idea, at first, how to live for happiness, and used to go off to distant meadows in order to concentrate and, there, alone in the living grass, to experience a premonition of communism.” Or, as Aron Solts put it in a speech at the Sverdlov Communist University in 1925,

We are going through a period when the nerves of a great number of people have suffered and experienced so much that they have no strength left to do what the Party requires of them. There are some young Party members who have gone through the Civil War, fought at all the fronts, worked in the punitive organs of the GPU [formerly Cheka], etc., and have become totally emotionally exhausted, because of the colossal self-control that has been demanded of them. The ones who lacked sufficient self-control thought that, after one last effort, they would enter the Communist paradise, but when they saw that things were more serious and required a longer period of work, they experienced a certain disappointment.¹¹

One much-discussed problem was that the Party was too closed. A band of book-reading converts and dragon-slaying warriors had turned into a rigid hierarchy of state officials. Some concessions had been made to specialization, professionalization, and uniform regulations; some Party comrades had moved into exclusive apartment houses, dachas, and rest homes; and some had prostituted themselves to the gods of “bubbles all over your body.” The “proletarian vanguard” had moved away from the proletariat and succumbed to “bureaucratism” and “degeneration.” As Se-rafimovich, the author of The Iron Flood, wrote to a friend from the Trotsky Sanatorium in Kislovodsk in 1926, “the sanatorium is so beautifully appointed that I am afraid I might turn into a bourgeois myself (what? you say I already am one?!). In order to resist such a transformation, I have been spitting into all the corners and onto the floor, blowing my nose, and lying in bed with my shoes on and hair uncombed. It seems to be helping.”¹²

The other much-discussed problem was that the Party was too open. The New Economic Policy engendered capitalism “continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a massive scale.” Or, as Chepurny noticed soon after he ordered the extermination of the “residual scum” of the half-bougeoisie, “the bourgeois are gone, but the wind continues to blow.” Peasants were acting like peasants; traders were acting like traders; and some workers and even Bolsheviks were acting like peasants and traders, too—spontaneously and on a massive scale.¹³

The Houses of Soviets were being besieged by ragpickers, knife-grinders, “painted women and young ladies with ringlets,” and street urchins guilty of “begging bordering on extortion, outrageous conduct (up to the baring of hidden parts of the body),” and assaults “involving the breaking of windows.” Some of the contagion seeped into the Houses. Staff members were routinely exposed as drunks, prostitutes, speculators, counterrevolutionaries, and former exploiters. According to a 1920 report, the Second House of Soviets, which had been liberated “in the grievous torments of revolutionary struggle,” had since become “a den of iniquity and greed.” One employee was fired for saying that “Jews should be given a gold medal for revolutionary activity and then exiled to Palestine.” Another had “uncovered drunkenness” on the part of three House administrators: “I am telling the truth and always will. Blood is being shed at the front, while here, in a Soviet house, bottles clink and people get drunk. I found wines from the Caucasus, some ashberry vodka, 3 bottles of champagne, a bottle of cognac, and another bottle of some really spicy stuff that tastes like pepper vodka and makes your mouth burn.”¹⁴

Contagion was not only metaphorical. According to one of many such reports, “on the stairs and in the cafeteria, kitchen, and other areas there is a great deal of dirt; there are cigarette butts and paper everywhere. The employees see all this dirt and trash and pay absolutely no attention to it.” The worst offenders, and an independent source of contagion in their own right, were the residents themselves. They chopped firewood and used primus stoves in their rooms, clogged the sinks and toilets with garbage, lay on their beds with their boots on, carried food and hot water up and down the stairs, hung up their wet clothes in the halls, brought in unauthorized guests, claimed to be someone they were not, and often behaved “in a rude and downright outrageous manner.” On January 20, 1925, the director of the Third House of Soviets (which served as a dormitory for congress delegates and visiting officials) wrote a report about “one of those intolerable events that have been occurring on a daily basis for some time now.” A “mentally disturbed” citizen had attempted to throw himself out of a third-floor window.

Although a house employee arrested his downward fall, the glass in the big framed window was nevertheless broken. For a long time afterward, Citizen Volkov roamed the halls, cursing, whistling, and shouting, as a result of which, the war invalid, blind Citizen Tsibis, lost all patience and attempted to walk down the stairs, and fell and cracked his head. The comrades who live on that floor started a noisy fight, as a result of which, three of them simultaneously experienced severe seizures. Watching them thrash about and hearing their screams, blind Tsibis also suffered a severe seizure. The House doctor was summoned, and he ascertained that the House was in an intolerable condition. At present, the dormitory is populated by epileptics, brawlers, and the mentally ill, and it is hard to believe that the Third House of Soviets serves as a refuge for such comrades because it was originally intended for normal comrades. In its present state, it resembles a lunatic asylum and, if there are still any sane people left, their likeliest fate is to follow the example of blind Tsibis and end up crazy, too.¹⁵

One of the main reasons for both the distress and contagion was kinship and procreation. Lovers and relatives kept moving in and out, and children kept being born and growing bigger. Problems of space, services, and supplies were compounded by “problems of Communist everyday life.” One report complained that there were “some unscrupulous comrades ‘from the upper crust,’ who live outside of the Second House of Soviets, but keep special rooms there for their ‘second wives’ or for their so-called retired wives.” Another report, by the director of the Second House of Soviets, Comrade Rosfeldt, alleged that, on November 7, 1921, a non-Party woman without identification had attempted to enter the building with the intention of visiting Comrade Lander (who had just left his job as the Special Cheka Plenipotentiary in the North Caucasus and Don Region to become head of Moscow Agitprop, three years before his retirement for health reasons):

When I stated that Comrade Lander, who resides in Room 408, must provide me with a note that he can vouch for her, she called Room 408, and Comrade Lander suggested that I let her in without further ado, to which I suggested that Comrade Lander make sure that his acquaintances carry their identification with them, to which he responded that she was his wife, however, considering the fact that Comrade Lander is registered with us as a single person and that I had seen various ladies leaving his room early in the morning, during the day, and late at night, a fact that can be confirmed by several of my staff members, and that on November 6, at about 11 p.m., after the pass bureau had closed, he had attempted to bring in two young ladies but had been prevented from doing so by Comrade Klaar—based on these and other considerations, I asked Comrade Lander, what wife, you must have at least half a dozen of them, and promised him an explanation at a later date. When, around 2 p.m. he showed up in my office and demanded an explanation, I promised to give him one after the end of my work day, but he was very unhappy and kept saying words to the effect that you are not my father, priest, or protector, and what do you want from me, to which I responded that what I want is for the Second House of Soviets not to be turned into a brothel, to which he said that you are being insolent, and so I told him that if in your opinion I am being insolent, then in my opinion you are ten times more insolent, and asked him to leave the office, after which he went away.

Rosfeldt concluded his letter by saying: “Perhaps my view of such things is too moral, but I was brought up in a country where the working class looked at family life from a different, more moral, point of view.”¹⁶

■ ■ ■

Was there such a thing as a Communist moral point of view? According to Bukharin, there was not, because traditional morality was “fetishism,” or “the submission of human behavior to an authority that comes from some unknown place and demands obedience for some unknown reason.” What the building of socialism required was a conscious submission of human behavior to the needs of the building of socialism. Or, in Lenin’s formulation, Communist morality was a system of ethics that rejected all “extra-human and extra-class concepts” in favor of the realization that all proletarian behavior should be “entirely subordinated to the interests of the proletariat’s class struggle.”¹⁷

The main Party expert on Party ethics was Aron Solts, otherwise known as “the Party’s conscience.” The central principle, he wrote, was simple enough: “At the foundations of our ethics are the requirements of our goal. Correct, ethical, and good is whatever helps us reach our goal, smash our class enemies, and learn to organize our economic life according to socialist principles. Incorrect, unethical, and inadmissible is whatever harms this. This is the point of view we must adopt when we try to determine whether a certain action by a Party member is ethical or not.” The determination of whether a certain action by a Party member had helped or harmed the achievement of the Party’s goal was the Party’s job. “We, the government of the majority, can say openly and frankly: yes, we hold in prisons those who interfere with the establishment of our order, and we do not stop before other such actions, because we do not believe in the existence of abstractly unethical actions. Our objective is to institute a better life; this objective must be pursued, and all resistance to it must be crushed. This, in our view, is ethical.”¹⁸

Aron Solts

The Party was justified in pursuing its goal by any means necessary; individual Party members were to measure their behavior according to the requirements of the goal and the official Party strategies of its pursuit. The main principle of Communist morality was “usefulness to the Party” or “Party discipline”—that is, the submission of human behavior to an authority that comes from a known place and demands obedience for a known reason (which, in the case of Party members, was freely and voluntarily accepted). Obedience to the Party came before “one’s own household, family, etc.,” but obedience by itself was not enough. “Can there be free discipline in the absence of sufficiently good comradely relations? No, this would be barracks discipline.” On the one hand, “only by looking at each other as comrades who have come together to reach a common practical goal can we have the kind of discipline that would help us overcome all kinds of difficulties.” On the other, “the necessary comradely relations—love and friendship toward our comrades—are reinforced by the realization that they are my helpers and that it is only thanks to them that I have been able to preserve what is dear to me, what makes me a member of the Party in the first place.”¹⁹

A mutually reinforcing unity of faith, obedience, and love for fellow believers is the central principle of all sectarian communities. According to Jesus of Nazareth, the two most important commandments were: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Loving God meant submitting to the inevitable; loving God with all your heart meant submitting absolutely and without qualification. Particular forms of submission were outlined in the scripture and revised by God’s special representatives (“you have heard …, but I tell you”). As for “loving your neighbor,” Jesus was not referring to those who were rich, those who had “already received their comfort,” or anyone else who deserved to be thrown into the fiery furnace. He was referring to those who had followed him in abandoning their brothers and sisters and father and mother and children and fields, and those who were prepared to follow his followers at least part of the way. There could be no sufficiently good comradely relations in the absence of free discipline any more than there could be free discipline in the absence of sufficiently good comradely relations.

By the time the Christians finally became a ruling party, they had stopped being millenarian and arrived at a series of compromises between the sect they would have liked to remain and the society they had grown to be. The Bolsheviks took over a large heathen empire while still believing that “this generation will not pass away until all these things have happened.” But before they could determine what to do with the millions of non-neighbors who had suddenly become would-be neighbors, they had to determine what to do with the thousands of certified neighbors they were expected to love as much as themselves. As Solts put it, “It is, of course, very difficult to preserve those close, intimate relations that we used to have when there were just a handful of us. The common fate and common persecutions of the comrades working in the tsarist underground drew us closer together and united us more than our current conditions do. There are many more of us now, and it is very difficult to have the same feelings of closeness toward every communist.”²⁰

But the biggest problem, as always, was not that there was not enough love for countless remote neighbors, but that there was too much love for a few close ones. Sects, by definition, transcend the bonds of kinship, friendship, and sexual love by dissolving them in the common devotion to a particular path of salvation (and, when available, to the prophets who represent it). The sects’ greatest enemy, along with Babylon, is marriage—because of its centrality to all nonsectarian life and its traditional claim to primary loyalty. But marriage is not just a powerful source of alternative devotion; the reason it is central to all nonsectarian life is because it regulates reproduction, and reproduction is, by definition, at odds with sectarian life, which is based on a voluntary union of conscious (adult) converts. Sects are about brotherhood (and, as an afterthought, sisterhood), not about parents and children. This is why most end-of-the-world scenarios promise “all these things” within one generation; most radical Protestants object to infant baptism; and all millenarian sects, in their militant phase, attempt to reform marriage or abolish it altogether (by decreeing celibacy or promiscuity). Jesus’s claim that his family was not his real family and his demand that his disciples hate their erstwhile fathers, mothers, wives, children, brothers, and sisters were as central to his ministry as they were impossible for his later followers to imitate (monastics being the rule-proving exception).

During the time of floods, massacres, and wanderings through the desert, the Bolsheviks assumed that marriage and the family would wither away along with private property, inequality, and the state. After the temporary postponement of Communism under NEP, it became clear that the Lander-Rosfeldt argument would have to be resolved, however provisionally, and that childbirth and childrearing would have to be supervised and regulated until the state could take them over completely. This meant that marriage as an institution had to be defined and, until further notice, consolidated. The former proved impossible; the latter, very difficult.

The main Bolshevik expert on the marriage problem was Yakov Brandenburgsky, an Old Bolshevik from the Pale of Settlement who had severed relations with his family as a gymnasium student radical, attended the Odessa (New Russia) University before being expelled for revolutionary activity, joined the Party in 1903, graduated from the Sorbonne law faculty in 1911, and served as a roving plenipotentiary in charge of food requisitioning during the Civil War. By 1925, he had become a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Justice, first dean of the Department of Soviet Law at Moscow University, and chairman of the new family law commission.²¹

In bourgeois jurisprudence, wrote Brandenburgsky, what made matrimony different from cohabitation (concubinage) was its permanence. In the Soviet Union, because of the freedom of divorce, this distinction did not apply. The view that marriage was a cohabitation between two individuals who considered themselves husband and wife was, according to Brandenburgsky, circular and legally meaningless. Attempts to define marriage in terms of its goals (most commonly, child rearing) were not satisfactory, owing to the large number of exceptions. The argument that marriage was a legal contract could not be accepted because “some elements, conditions, and, especially, consequences of marriage depend on nature and not on the will of the parties.” In the final analysis, definitions did not matter. “A legal definition will be found easily and effortlessly when the new forms of everyday life have established themselves.” Or rather, the new forms of everyday life would obviate the need for a definition because there would be no marriage. In the meantime, cohabitation and reproduction would have to be regulated, whatever the terminology. “The family, which, in bourgeois countries, is based on marriage and creates certain rights and obligations for the spouses, parents, and children, will, of course, disappear and will be replaced by a state system of socialized child-rearing and social welfare. But until that happens, for as long as the individual family still exists, we impose certain mutual obligations, such as alimony, on family members.”²²

Yakov Brandenburgsky

The early Soviet drive to destroy the family had been, in principle, appropriate, but “on the other hand, the population is justified in wishing that it not be destroyed so precipitously because this does not correspond to the current conditions of life.” Under current conditions, there was no alternative to recognizing “de facto marriages” and “protecting the weak.” Soviet legislation was based on realism, not moral “fetishism.” In the case of family law, this meant—perhaps paradoxically—that it was based on biological kinship. “Abroad, in bourgeois countries, kinship is a relationship based on the legitimacy of marriage, so that, if I have a child out of wedlock, there is no family relationship—no kinship—between me and that child. We, on the other hand, have built our law on a different principle, according to which the relations between parents and their children are based on blood ties, on actual birth origins.”²³

The family was real and, for the time being, both useful and inescapable. But what was a new Bolshevik family? What did it mean for a Communist to be a good husband, wife, parent, or child? According to Solts, “the family of a Communist must be a prototype of a small Communist cell” or, to be more precise, “it must be a collectivity of comrades in which one lives in the family the same way as outside the family, and in which the members of the family must, in all their work and life, represent a unit of assistance to the Party.” This was the Calvinist (Puritan) model of the family as a congregation in miniature or, insofar as the secular commonwealth managed to be separate-but-godly, a state in miniature. But what was the specific contribution of the family if one was to live inside it the same way as outside? In Brandenburgsky’s formulation, the point was “for the relations between the spouses to be completely free of all prejudices, survivals, and preposterous conventions of bourgeois ‘virtue,’ for the woman to be fully emancipated from the power of the man, and for the wife to become economically independent from her husband.”²⁴

But what did it mean to be free of all prejudices? Had Lander gotten it right? According to the Presidium of the Party Control Commission, he had not—and neither had Rosfeldt. “In this matter, the Party can adopt neither the position of denying personal enjoyment, nor the position of priestly hypocrisy, nor the position of indifference toward unhealthy phenomena that arise in this sphere, provoking a strongly negative reaction among the toiling masses and producing socially damaging consequences.” The reasoning, as usual, was purely pragmatic. As Solts put it,

The fact that we advocate a total freedom of feelings does not mean that one can change partners according to random and temporary moods—that would be incorrect. There is no doubt that sexual promiscuity damages the organism, saps a person’s strength, and weakens that person as a fighter and a Communist. Human capacity is limited: the more time and attention—emotional or any other kind—devoted to this aspect of life, legitimate and appropriate though it may be, the less strength remains for other functions that a Communist must perform. If a Communist seeks too much variety in the sexual sphere, then it will undoubtedly sap too much of his strength and will produce a flawed Communist.²⁵

The same was true of masturbation, promiscuity, drunkenness, and other expressions of free feelings that might distract Communists from the task of building Communism. To the surprise and unease of many young Party members, the message seemed to be one of “moderation,” which they associated with lukewarm appeasement and “bourgeois philistinism.”²⁶

Judging by repeated recitals of alarming statistics on moral laxity among Communists, the message was not being heard. As Bukharin put it, “our young people find themselves in the gap between the old norms that have already disappeared and the new ones that have not yet arisen. The result is a temporary anarchy in the rules of behavior and norms of personal relationships.” Or, as Trotsky put it, “the family is shaking, disintegrating, collapsing, reemerging, and falling apart again. Everyday life is going through the trials of harsh and painful criticism. History is felling the old forest, and the chips are flying. But are elements of the new family being prepared?” The answer seemed lukewarm, if not philistine: “In the most important spheres, the revolutionary symbols of the workers’ state are innovative, clear, and powerful: the red flag, the hammer and sickle, the red star, the worker and the peasant, “comrade,” the “Internationale.” But in the closed-off cells of family life, these new elements are almost nonexistent—or too few, at any rate.… That is why, in Communist circles, there are some signs of a desire to counter old rituals with new forms and symbols not only in the life of the state, where they are quite widespread, but in family life, too.”²⁷

Trotsky approved of the new revolutionary names such as Ilich and Oktiabrina, new Bolshevik baptisms involving “semi-facetious” induction-into-citizenship ceremonies, new rituals surrounding wedding registrations, and solemn “processions, speeches, marches, and fireworks” at Communist cremations. He spoke of such things “semi-facetiously,” however, and had no specific suggestions to make or official policies to propose. Both he and Bukharin considered literature incomparably more important for “sentimental education” (as Bukharin put it). The “gap” remained.²⁸

In a 1926 article called “My Crime,” Mikhail Koltsov describes a visit by a group of peasants who want “a godless Soviet liturgy for deceased, honest, non-Party peasants, as well as a full schedule of Red Baptisms (‘Octoberings’) and a register of revolutionary saints’ names for each day of the year for the naming of peasant infants.” The narrator’s reaction is predictable: “I tried to convince them that this was all nonsense and did not matter at all, and that what was important was not rituals but libraries, the liquidation of illiteracy, agricultural cooperatives, mutual aid committees, collective plowing, the fight against moonshine production, tractors, agronomists, newspapers, movies, and rural mail deliveries.”

The visitors persist, however, and the narrator “commits an act of bourgeois philistinism and intellectual backwardness at the level of one village” by taking them to a stationary store and helping them buy “portraits of leaders, red lampshades, ribbons, slogans, and posters.… A cardboard poster ‘Save Time: When Your Work Is Done, Go Home’ may soon rustle above the head of a corpse. A fancy picture of airplanes and gas masks may well be displayed over the respectfully bent heads of newlyweds. A ‘No Smoking’ poster may hang before the tiny blue eyes of an unschooled newborn.… But none of this matters! I have committed a crime, but have yet to repent it.”

Koltsov’s conclusion is serious. “If laborers lost in the forests want to climb out of the pit of ignorance and superstition, we need to bring a step-ladder or stretch out a helping hand—not simply order them to jump.” But what awaited them outside the pit? What were those honest non-Party peasants and thousands of confused “young Communists” to do once they no longer needed cardboard posters and “semi-facetious” Octoberings? Koltsov’s essay implies that he, “a progressive person free of prejudices,” did not need any of those things. But what did he need? If he, Solts, and Bukharin were in “the vanguard,” and if their own sentimental education was more or less complete, then the future of the Revolution might very well depend on what their own “family cells” looked like.²⁹

■ ■ ■

In 1918, when he was twenty years old, Koltsov married an actress fifteen years his senior. In the early 1920s, he married another woman, but remained free of prejudices. As he wrote in one of his essays, “men and women live together without long and boring matchmaking, mediation by church or state, false witnesses, divorce trials, or the hypocrisy of forced cohabitation within marriage.” He did not divorce his second wife when he moved in with another woman.³⁰

Koltsov was famous for his good looks. According to another Pravda journalist, Sofia Vinogradskaia, he was “graceful, elegant, and neat,” preferred suits to leather jackets and military tunics, and had a “slender, pale-ivory face shaven to an Egyptian blue, soft white forehead, perfectly chiselled lips, and an equally perfect shiny row of close-set teeth.” Or, in the words of the director of the Moscow Children’s Theater, Natalia Sats, “his wavy, dark-chestnut hair crowned a beautiful forehead, aquiline nose, and smiling, slightly capricious lips.” He was famously short (“like a tiny penknife”), vain (gathering, like a bee, “the honey of impressions, praise, recognition, approval, and smiles”), and witty. “Little Koltsov with his beautiful sad eyes was full of jokes, funny stories, and bons mots.… He loved to pretend to be someone else, wear disguises, and write acrostics.” Once, when he was in Natalia Sats’s room, he suddenly asked her to dance. “But,” she said, “if I sit down at the piano, how can I dance, and if I don’t sit down at the piano, who will play for us?” Koltsov picked up the telephone, “called his brother Boris, asked him to hold the receiver next to his gramophone and turn on the song ‘Valencia,’ and we danced for three minutes, holding on to the telephone cord.”³¹

Mikhail Koltsov

Natalia Sats

(Courtesy of Roksana Sats)

Koltsov was famous for driving his own car, knowing all the cafés in Moscow, and being everywhere at once. He was famous as the founder of the journals Ogonyok (The little flame), Za rulem (At the wheel), Krokodil (Crocodile), Za rubezhom (Abroad), and Zhenskii zhurnal (The women’s magazine), among other ventures. He was very famous and very powerful. In 1927, when Natalia Sats’s theater was threatened with eviction, he published an essay arguing that a children’s theater was no less useful than an orphanage. A Pravda article had the force of a government decree; the theater got its own building. (Natalia Sats was appointed head of the children’s section of the Moscow Soviet’s Theater and Music Department by Platon Kerzhentsev in 1918, when she was fifteen. Soon afterward she founded her own theater and, by the late 1920s, was already a celebrity. She married early, had a son, divorced, and married the director of the Moscow City Bank, who later became the Soviet trade representative in Warsaw and then in Berlin. She had a daughter, directed in various theaters in Europe and South America, collaborated with Max Reinhardt and Otto Klemperer, and, in 1935, left her second husband for the people’s commissar of internal trade, Izrail Veitser. The following year, a special Party and government decree announced the creation of a much bigger Central Children’s Theater on Sverdlov Square.)³²

Koltsov had a dacha on the Kliazma, north of Moscow, where he often spent his weekends in the company of friends. According to one of them, the editor of Za rulem, N. Beliaev (Naum Beilin), “the hospitable host would spend the whole day on the volleyball court or playing forfeits or some other children’s game, joking, telling stories, and entertaining his guests. Monday morning, everyone would go back to Moscow, and the dacha would grow silent again.” In the early 1930s, four of the regular guests—the writers Boris Levin, Ilya Ilf, and Evgeny Petrov, and the artist Konstantin Rotov—bought the dacha from Koltsov and started using it as a common summer home. (Levin’s former wife was Eva Rozengolts, the sister of the ghostly leader of the Moscow uprising, Arkady Rozengolts, now people’s commissar of foreign trade. Eva studied painting under Robert Falk at the Higher Art and Technology Studios and graduated in 1925, the same year as Mayakovsky’s La Gioconda, Maria Denisova. Her graduation painting, Old People, represented three elderly Jews, probably from her native town of Vitebsk. After the birth of their daughter, Elena, in 1928, Eva and Boris separated. Arkady remarried at about the same time, soon after his new appointment.)³³

Koltsov’s brother, Boris Efimov, was a political cartoonist. He married his first wife in 1919 when he was nineteen years old. He married his second wife in 1930, but without leaving the first one. He had sons by both women and spent the rest of his life sharing his time between the two families. The younger wife, Raisa Efimovna Fradkina, had three brothers and two sisters. One brother was a secret police interrogator, another a military intelligence agent, and a third, Boris Volin (Iosif Fradkin), had a distinguished Party career before becoming head of the press department of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and then, in 1931, of Glavlit (the central censorship office). Raisa’s older sister died during the Civil War; her younger sister, Sofia, married a secret police interrogator, Leonid Chertok, and joined the service herself. According to Efimov, she had been required to seek permission for both her employment and marriage at a special interview with the OGPU (secret police) chief, Genrikh Yagoda, and his wife Ida. Ida Yagoda was Yakov Sverdlov’s niece (the daughter of his sister Sofia). Her brother, Leopold Averbakh, a prominent proletarian literary critic, was married to the daughter of Lenin’s closest friend and biographer, Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich.³⁴

Yakov Sverdlov’s son Andrei married one of the daughters of the commander of the assault on the Winter Palace, Nikolai Podvoisky. They first met as children and then again, for good, at the CEC resort of Foros in Crimea in 1932, when he was twenty-two and she was sixteen. Podvoisky and his wife, the Old Bolshevik Nina Didrikil (Diedrich-Kiel), had five daughters and one son. Their son, Lev, married Milena Lozovskaia, the daughter of Solomon Lozovsky (Dridzo), the head of the Red International of Labor Unions (Profintern); they, too, met in Foros. Milena’s half-sister, Vera, Solomon Lozovsky’s daughter from a previous marriage, was the secretary of Lenin’s wife, Krupskaia. When Milena’s mother died in 1926, she was adopted by the family of Gleb Krzhizhanovsky, the Old Bolshevik in charge of the “electrification of the whole country” and the first head of Gosplan. Milena’s best friend was Elsa Brandeburgskaia (nicknamed Bryndia), the daughter of the author of the 1926 family code. One of Nina Didrikil’s sisters was married to the organizer of Red Terror in northern Russia, Mikhail Kedrov; her nephew Artur Artuzov (Frauci) was Kedrov’s protégé and collaborator in the Cheka Special Department before becoming head of Soviet foreign intelligence. The Bolsheviks were not just reproducing—they were reproducing themselves as a group.³⁵

By all indications, the Podvoiskys were a happy family. As Nikolai wrote in a letter to his wife, Nina, “I don’t know a wife, mother, friend, or comrade better, dearer, purer, stronger, or saintlier than you.… I stand before you as if gazing up at the warm sun, so high above.” They took the task of preparing their children for life under Communism very seriously and often talked about it—to each other and to their children. Nikolai believed in education through industrial labor (two of their daughters, including Andrei’s wife, worked as factory workers before becoming engineers); Nina put more emphasis on personal example. As she wrote in her diary on May 2, 1927, “I insist that parents (both of them) have a duty before mankind, for the sake of its progress, to teach their children and pass on to them the lessons of their own experience.” This did not have to be an act of self-sacrifice. “I have a lot of fire in my soul,” she wrote in July 1920, “and I feel guilty about not having given anything to mankind. Fire cannot be contained, it will burst forth, and I am certain that if it does not burst forth within me, it will do so through my children, who will make me immortal.” The progress of mankind and immortality through one’s children was one and the same thing—now that philistine domesticity was no more. As Nina wrote in an 1922 entry, “Now that the whirlwind of revolution has swept away the specter that was known in bourgeois society as ‘the Family,’ leaving nothing but the cloying and, sometimes, for our children and young people, nightmarish atmosphere of ‘the hearth,’ and since the emerging society has not yet grown a trunk that would be able to nurture and cherish its young leaves, we must be especially sensitive, especially loving toward the young shoots that are growing next to us.”³⁶

But what was a family that was not a family, and what was a home without a “hearth”? Could one pass on to one’s children the lessons of one’s own experience without reproducing philistine domesticity? And what if the new trunk turned out to be the same old tree of the knowledge of good and evil? The Podvoiskys’ answer was the same as Solts’s: the new biological family must become the primary cell of the Party family; life inside the family should be the same as life outside the family. As Nikolai wrote to his children, “if you want to love Vladimir Ilich [Lenin] deeply, diligently, and eagerly, you must be your mother’s friends, you must talk to her about Lenin.” And as Nina wrote to her daughter on her seventeenth birthday, months after she had said “yes” to Andrei Sverdlov,

Congratulations, you are seventeen years old! Life at seventeen is like the sea in April: it changes colors in response to the spring wind, the sun, and the density of the air; it is like a young birch covered with tender leaves and adorned with little earrings; it is the most powerful and the most beckoning of springs. You are the spring, and life all around you is the spring. You are happy, and you will be even happier when you realize just how happy you are. And I think you already do, don’t you? You are the youngest and the strongest, and the whole life of your society is young and strong. My wish for you, in your seventeenth spring, is that you continue to move closer and closer, in all your interests, feelings, and thoughts, to the camp of the youngest and strongest: to Marx, Engels, Lenin, all the true Bolsheviks.³⁷

The task was to build socialism in one family within socialism in one country within the unfolding world revolution. The point of the pursuit was happiness, especially the happiness of the current generation of children. The most well-known take on children and the pursuit of happiness in the Soviet Union was Stanislavsky’s production—to the music of Ilya Sats, Natalia’s father—of Maurice Maeterlink’s The Blue Bird, which premiered in 1908, quickly became a classic, and survived the Revolution to become a required rite of passage for elite Soviet children (and eventually the longest-running theater production of all time: in 2008 it celebrated its hundredth anniversary). In her evocation of the play on May 8, 1923, Nina Podvoiskaia seems to have been thinking about both the Soviet state and her own children. In the play, the little boy and girl, Tyltyl and Mytyl, find the bird of happiness and release it out into the world. In the diary entry, Podvoiskaia meets a German Comintern agent at a Black Sea resort and feels proud that she has

held in [her] hands the magic “blue bird” that is flying over the sea to bring happiness to mankind. I want to work in the Comintern—that miracle-producing magic garden of communism, from where blue birds fly to every corner of the world, spreading the news of communist happiness. I want to caress and nurture those birds, breathe into them the strength that they need for their flight.… Oh the enchantingly beautiful sea! The sea, the “magic garden,” and, in that garden, the great magician Lenin and the fabulous “blue birds.” There are lots of them, and there will be many many more. I love them with all my heart, I have boundless love for these “blue birds” that will overturn the world.³⁸

Podvoisky family

Nina Podvoiskaia’s actual job was to prepare Lenin’s manuscripts for publication at the Lenin Institute, and, on the home front, to talk about Lenin to her children. Nikolai Podvoisky’s job was to prepare Soviet bodies for future happiness. Having lost the fight to become the Revolution’s “iron hand throughout the world,” he became the head of the Supreme Council on Physical Culture, the founder and leader of Sports International, and the main champion of what he called “an alliance with the sun.” His comparison of his wife to the “warm sun” was not entirely a metaphor. “Man, like all living things,” argues his representative in a Platonic dialog he wrote in 1925, “is a piece of the sun, and this piece must be in constant contact with its whole, or it will fade away.” The solution is to eliminate “artificial barriers between us, that is, our body, and the source of life, the sun.”

“In other words,” retorted Yuri, “just walk around in the nude. Right.”

Well, aren’t your hands bare, for god’s sake? And your nose and the rest of your face? That’s not a problem, is it? Not too scary? Almost all parts of the body could easily be left naked for most of the year. You don’t catch a cold because your hands are wet, do you? But the minute you get your feet wet, you go straight to bed. That’s your punishment for wrapping them up all the time, for hiding them from the sun….

We can—and must—discard all the ballast that separates our body from the sun: coats, jackets, vests, shirts, women’s fashions, socks, and boots. Nine times out of ten, people wear them not because they need them, but because they want to show off or outdo others. Of course, in our climate we must protect ourselves from the elements for part of the year. But I am talking about an alliance with the sun, and when the sun is willing to enter into an alliance with us, we must not miss our chance.”

Yuri the skeptic objects by saying that he cannot imagine the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Aleksei Ivanovich Rykov, showing up at an official reception in only his underwear. But the protagonist is ready for this objection. “It is very easy to imagine a perfectly natural setting in which a high-ranking official might appear in public in only his underwear…. The very fact of such an appearance would inspire the masses to debate the problem of developing and reinforcing the strength of the working people.” Eventually, the masses would understand that “the sun is the best proletarian doctor.” Yuri, for one, is persuaded.³⁹

Podvoisky practiced what he preached—both in the matter of discarding the ballast and in making his family the primary cell of a larger transformation. In 1923, they received a dacha in Serebrianyi Bor (Silver Forest) on the Moskva River, next door to the Trifonovs. Yuri Trifonov describes the experiment in his novel The Old Man. The Burmins resemble the Podvoiskys, and Sanya—the author as a boy:

Burmin, his wife, his wife’s sisters and their husbands were devotees of “the naked body” and of the “down with modesty” society, and often used to walk around near their dacha in the garden—and sometimes even in the public vegetable plots where many people would assemble in the evenings—in an indecent state: that is, in the nude. The other residents were outraged—the professor wanted to write to the Moscow Council—but Sanya’s mother just laughed and said it was an illustration of the tale of the emperor’s new clothes. She once quarreled with his father, who forbade Sanya to go the vegetable plots while those “buffoons” were larking about. Father really had it in for Burmin because of that “down with modesty” business. Yet the others just laughed. Burmin was gaunt, tall, and bespectacled and reminded one more of Don Quixote than of Apollo; the Burmin women were no raving beauties, either. True enough, they were marvelously sunburned.

Sanya’s father knows Burmin from their Civil War days. “Father thought Burmin was stupid (Sanya used to hear him say: ‘That fool Semyon’), and adopted a skeptical attitude to his feats of military prowess and even to his decoration.” As for discarding the ballast, some of the children talk others into imitating the grown-ups, and it all ends in a terrible scandal. “But was it really stupidity as his father said? Was he truly stupid, that land surveyor’s son with the goatee, who was swept up onto the crest of a wave of monstrous force? Now, more than three decades later, what had seemed axiomatic then, Burmin’s stupidity, seemed doubtful.” (Valentin Trifonov and Nikolai Podvoisky had served together; Podvoisky’s father was actually a priest, not a surveyor.)⁴⁰

Valentin Trifonov was free of prejudices in a different way. After the Civil War, he moved back in with his common-law wife, Tatiana Slovatinskaia, and her daughter from a previous marriage, Evgenia Lurye. Several years later, he left the mother for the daughter, and, in 1925, their son Yuri was born. At the time, Tatiana was fifty-six, Valentin, thirty-seven, and Evgenia, twenty-one. They continued to live together as one family. Tatiana worked as head of the visitors’ office of the Party’s Central Committee and director of the Politburo archive; Valentin was chairman of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court; Evgenia postponed her studies at the Agricultural Academy to take care of the children (they had a daughter two years later). According to Yuri, Tatiana was a rigid, unsentimental true believer. “She is not a human being,” says one of his characters, “she is some kind of an iron closet.” Valentin seemed less orthodox but almost as impenetrable. “By temperament he was silent, reserved, even a little gloomy; he did not like to ‘stick out,’ so to speak.”⁴¹

Valentin Trifonov, Evgenia Lurye, Tatiana Slovatinskaia, and little Yuri

The Trifonovs’ closest friend was Aron Solts, “the conscience of the Party,” the cousin of Evgenia’s father, and the mentor of both Tatiana and Valentin in matters of doctrine and Party ethics. Yuri remembered him as “a small man with a large, gray bumpy head. He had big lips and big, bulging eyes that looked at you shrewdly and sternly. I thought of him as very smart, very cross, and very sick: he always breathed heavily, with a loud wheeze. Also, I thought of him as an exceptional chess player. I always lost to him.” Solts never married and lived with his sister Esfir. In the early 1930s, they were joined by their niece, Anna, who had been left by her husband, the Party boss of Uzbekistan, Isaak Zelensky. At about the same time, they adopted a boy from an orphanage who, according to Anna’s daughter and Yuri Trifonov, was rude to the old people and talked of them with contempt.⁴²

Tatiana Slovatinskaia, Anna Zelenskaia, Isaak Zelensky, Aron Solts, and the Zelensky children, Elena and Andrei

It is not known what Solts thought of Valentin Trifonov’s new living arrangement or his own expanding household. At the height of his power in the mid-1920s (when Koltsov’s friends would restrain his playful imagination by threatening him with “a reprimand by Solts”), he believed that the greatest danger for Communist families lay in unequal marriages with class enemies. He considered such marriages to be in poor taste.

This poor taste consists in the fact that such things should be considered in the same way in which the old society considered a marriage between a count and a housemaid. The public would be scandalized: How dare he, he has abandoned our traditions, it is improper, he should be ashamed of himself! Such was the attitude in those days. Today, we are the ruling class, and we should have the same attitude. Intimacy with a member of the enemy camp when we are the ruling class—such a thing should meet with such public condemnation that a person would think thirty times before making such a decision. Of course, every feeling is individual, and it is not always appropriate to interfere in a person’s private life, but we can condemn such things the way the old society did when any of its members refused to obey its demands. We call this “prejudice,” but when it comes to self-preservation, it is not prejudice at all. One should think long and hard before taking a wife from an alien class.⁴³

Solts’s warning came too late for Arosev. In 1916, he became engaged to the sixteen-year-old daughter of a Kazan prosecutor and a housemaid. The father died early, and the daughter was educated at an institute for noble maidens. When Arosev was drafted into the army, she married another man, with whom she had a son. In 1918, Arosev returned to Kazan as a hero (he had just presided over the closure of all non-Bolshevik newspapers in Moscow) and took her away from her husband, apparently against her will. Her son soon died, but they had three daughters, born between 1919 and 1925. Her name was Olga Goppen; she spoke French, wrote poetry, liked to dress up, did not know how to cook, and prided herself on being “frivolous.” Her mother, the former housemaid, treated her son-in-law with ironic forebearance and had all three girls secretly baptized. Soon after the birth of their third daughter, when Arosev was working at the Soviet embassy in Stockholm, Olga left him for his junior colleague and followed her new husband to Sakhalin, where he became regional Party secretary (having also left a wife and three children behind). Arosev refused to let Olga have any of the girls and raised all three with the help of a Swedish nanny, who accompanied them around Europe. In 1932, while serving as ambassador to Czechoslovakia, Arosev married his eldest daughter’s dance teacher, Gertrude Freund. He was forty-two; she was twenty-two. Because she was a Czechoslovak citizen, he was not allowed to continue as ambassador and returned to Moscow to head the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries. The girls hated their stepmother “ferociously,” as one of them put it. “She was the German version of a ‘well-organized’ European woman—cold, restrained, and very stingy.” His comrades condemned him for once again marrying a member of the alien class.⁴⁴

Alexander Arosev

Olga Goppen

One of Arosev’s comrades from the time of the Moscow uprising was Osip Piatnitsky. His first wife and fellow revolutionary, Nina Marshak, left him for Aleksei Rykov, and in 1920, at the age of thirty-nine, he married the twenty-one-year-old daughter of a priest (and widow of a general), Yulia Sokolova. She had partially redeemed her origins by serving as a Bolshevik spy in a White Army counterintelligence unit in Cheliabinsk. According to one fictionalized history of the Civil War, when her identity was discovered, she had hidden in a barrel of pickles and stayed there until the Red troops found her the next morning. Yulia and Osip met when she was convalescing in a Moscow hospital. Their first son, Igor, was born in 1921; the second, Vladimir, in 1925. Vladimir describes his father as taciturn and ascetic, and his mother, as “very emotional” with an “exposed conscience.” Shortly before his birth, she left the Party because she considered herself unworthy.⁴⁵

Osip Piatnitsky

Yulia Sokolova

Boris Zbarsky only partly heeded Solts’s warning. His first wife, Fani, was from his hometown of Kamenets-Podolsky in Ukraine. They got married in Geneva, where they were students together, and moved to the northern Urals in 1915, when their son, Ilya, was two years old. In January 1916, they were joined by Boris Pasternak and his friend, Evgeny Lundberg. Zbarsky knew Pasternak’s father and gave Boris a job as a clerk in one of his factories. Fani had nothing to do and felt bored and lonely. According to her son, Ilya, “My father usually came home late. I used to spend whole days with my nanny or by myself while my mother sought consolation in the company of E. Lundberg and B. Pasternak. The latter played the piano, improvised, and wrote and recited poetry. My mother and Boris Pasternak must have had an affair, which later became one of the reasons for my parents’ separation.”

When the Zbarskys divorced in 1921, Ilya stayed with his father. Around 1927, Boris Zbarsky went to Berlin on business, met a college friend of Lydia Pasternak (Boris’s younger sister), and eventually brought her to Moscow, first as his assistant and then, his wife. Her name was Evgenia Perelman. She was the daughter of a lawyer, granddaughter of a rabbi, and not a Communist herself. According to Ilya, she “turned out to be a mean, hysterical, miserly woman” who “constantly demonstrated her dislike of all things Russian and talked about her émigré past.” She was also self-consciously and emphatically Jewish—something Ilya was not used to and found distasteful. Many people in his father’s world, and the high Party elite in general, came from Jewish families, but they tended to assume that internationalism meant having no motherland and possibly no parents at all. Nationalism was the last resort of the enemy classes; “nationality” was a remnant of the past tolerated in “laborers lost in the forests” but not in “progressive people free of prejudices.” The Russianness of Russian internationalism was taken for granted and noticed only when it was violated. Ilya Zbarsky’s stepmother fired his peasant nanny “and hired as a servant an unpleasant Jewish woman who did not feed me and who brought into the house an alien and unpleasant atmosphere…. The food was unfamiliar and did not taste good, and I had to listen to my stepmother’s mocking comments. Finally, I moved into my mother’s communal apartment in the Arbat, which she shared with twenty other people.” Ilya went on to become his father’s assistant at the Lenin Mausoleum. Boris and Evgenia had two sons; the first, Feliks-Lev, was named after the chemist Lev Karpov and the Cheka head Feliks Dzerzhinsky.⁴⁶

Vladimir Vorobiev and Boris Zbarsky with his son, Ilya

(Courtesy of I. B. Zbarsky)

■ ■ ■

In the top ranks of the Bolshevik leadership, such violations of Solts’s injunction were rare. Most elite Communists socialized, one way or another, with other elite Communists—either because of shared loyalties or because there were few other people in their offices, houses, clubs, dachas, and resorts. In the 1920s, the most talked-about Party union was between two of the most celebrated Party propagandists: Karl Radek and Larisa Reisner. Radek’s biographer described the couple as Quasimodo and Esmeralda. One of Karl’s high school classmates described him as “short, skinny, and physically underdeveloped; from his earliest youth, he always had a pair of glasses perched upon his nose. Yet in spite of his general ugliness, he was very arrogant and self-confident.… His ugly nose, his gaping mouth, and the teeth sticking out [from below] his upper lip marked him clearly. He was forever carrying a book or a newspaper. He was constantly reading—at home, on the street, during recess in the school—always reading, day and night, even during classes.”⁴⁷

He later abandoned Germanophilic Jewish enlightenment for Polish nationalism and then Bolshevism (although he continued to wear sideburns in honor of Mickiewicz). He was expelled from the Social Democratic Party of Poland-Lithuania, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and, after the failure of the German revolution in 1923, from the Executive Committee of the Comintern and the Central Committee of the Party. He was known for his wit, sarcasm, slovenly bohemianism, self-deprecating buffoonery, ferocious personal attacks on ideological opponents, and eloquent defense of various causes in three different languages. Rosa Luxemburg had refused to sit at the same table with him, and Angelica Balabanoff “despised him personally and considered him a vulgar politician.”

He was—and is—a strange mixture of amorality, cynicism, and spontaneous appreciation for ideas, books, music, human beings. Just as there are people who have no perception of colors, so Radek had no perception of moral values. In politics, he would change his viewpoint overnight, appropriate for himself the most contradictory slogans. This quality, with his quick mind, his sardonic humor, his versatility and his vast reading, was probably the key to his journalistic success….

Because of his insensibility, he had no resentment about the way he was treated by other people. I have seen him attempt to go with people who refused to sit at the same table with him, or even put their signatures next to his on a document, or to shake hands with him. He would be delighted if he could merely divert these people with one of his innumerable anecdotes. Though a Jew himself, his anecdotes were almost exclusively those which dealt with Jews and which put them in a ridiculous or degrading light.⁴⁸

He became a prominent Left Communist alongside Bukharin and Osinsky, a loyal Leninist after May 1918, and, after Lenin’s stroke in March 1923, the chief promoter of “Leon Trotsky, the Organizer of Victory” (as he titled his programmatic article about Lenin’s succession). According to a much-repeated anecdote, when Voroshilov accused Radek of being Leon’s—or the lion’s—tail, Radek responded that it was better to be Leon’s tail than Stalin’s ass. (A decade later his Pravda article, “The Architect of the Socialist Society,” would become one of the cornerstones of the Stalin cult.) He was widely regarded to be the author of most anti-Soviet jokes. In the words of the journalist Louis Fischer, “he was a witty imp and an ugly Puck. He had dense, curly disheveled black hair which looked as if he never combed it with anything but a towel; laughing, nearsighted eyes behind very thick glasses; prominent moist lips; sideburns that met under his chin; no moustache, and sickly sallow skin.”⁴⁹

Karl Radek

Larisa Reisner

Larisa Reisner was universally, almost ritualistically, acclaimed as the most beautiful woman of the Russian Revolution (or, in Nadezhda Mandelstam’s words, “the Woman of the Russian Revolution”). Koltsov called her a “magnificent, rare, choice human specimen”; Mikhail Roshal, the secretary of the Helsingfors Bolshevik Committee in 1917, compared her to La Gioconda; the author of The Week, Yuri Libedinsky, wrote that she reminded him of “either a Greek Goddess or a Germanic Valkyrie”; and Trotsky called her “the Pallas Athena of the revolution.” Vadim Andreev, the son of her literary mentor Leonid Andreev, claimed that “when she walked down the street, she carried her beauty like a torch, so that the coarsest objects seemed to acquire softness and tenderness at her approach.… Not a single man could walk by without noticing her, and every third one—a statistic I can vouch for, would stand rooted to the spot and look back until we had disappeared in the crowd.”⁵⁰

A law professor’s daughter, poet, journalist, and, after 1919, commissar of the naval general staff, Reisner seems to have been the only person in Russia who appeared convincing as both a decadent writer and leather-clad Bolshevik, a “heavenly wagtail” and a “slayer and avenger.” She had poems dedicated to her by Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Gumilev (with whom she had an affair while he was married to Akhmatova). Pasternak named his heroine in Doctor Zhivago after her, and Vsevolod Vishnevsky used her as the prototype for the “female commissar sent by the Party” in his canonical play, An Optimistic Tragedy. In 1918, she married Trotsky’s deputy for naval affairs, Fedor Raskolnikov, who called her his “warrior goddess, Diana.” She accompanied him to the Volga Fleet, the Baltic Fleet, and finally to Afghanistan, where he was sent as ambassador after the Kronstadt debacle. Sverdlov’s assistant Elizaveta Drabkina saw her on the Volga in 1918: “In front, on a black stallion, rode a woman in a soldier’s tunic and a wide, light-blue and navy checkered skirt. Sitting gracefully in her saddle, she galloped bravely across the ploughed field. Clods of black earth flew from under the horse’s hooves. It was Larisa Reisner, Chief of Army Scouts. The rider’s enchanting face glowed from the wind. She had light gray eyes, chestnut hair pulled back from her temples and coiled into a bun at the back of her head, and a high, clear brow intersected by a single tiny, stern crease.”⁵¹

All millenarian sects committed to poverty and fraternity are men’s movements. Bolshevism was aggressively and unabashedly masculine. Its hero was a blacksmith, énorme et gourd, and its most iconic war poster was Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. Its main enemy was the swamp and everything “resembling jelly.” Women produced children; women and children formed families; and families “engendered capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a massive scale.” The only women who did not threaten the rule of the iron scepter were mothers of prophets or Amazons. Larisa Reisner was the Bolshevik Marianne in the flesh.

“Legends have enveloped her memory in a special aura, and it is difficult to think of her outside these semifictitious tales,” wrote Vadim Andreev. “Stories have been told about how she was on the Aurora on the memorable night of October 25 and how she ordered the bombardment of the Winter Palace, or how she dressed up as a peasant woman, crossed the enemy lines, and started an uprising in the Kolchak Army.” Most of these stories were not true, but she did seem to embody something Mayakovsky tried to create with words: the poetry of the Revolution. She was a living protest against the Great Disappointment, the divine bluebird of eternal revolution.⁵² According to Voronsky,

Lazar Lissitzky, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge

During the decisive days of the revolution’s bloody harvest, her noble, determined, feminine face, like that of a legendary Amazon with its halo of chestnut hair, and her nimble, self-confident figure could be seen in armored cars, on our Red warships, and among the rank-and-file soldiers.…

Larisa Reisner hated everyday philistinism, wherever it might be found. She did not know how to accumulate or settle down, did not like sinking into a quiet and dull everyday routine. In life’s prose, she—an artist and fighter for the revolution—could always find the lofty, the gripping, the substantive, and the great.⁵³

And according to Radek, who was not loved by anyone but the Woman of the Russian Revolution, “She knew that the petit bourgeois element was a swamp that could swallow up the grandest of buildings, and she could see the strange flowers blooming in that swamp. But, at the same time, she could see the path of struggle against the dangers that threatened the republic of labor: the dams that the proletariat and the Communist Party needed to erect in order to protect themselves.”⁵⁴

Karl Radek and Larisa Reisner got together in 1923, when she returned from Afghanistan and asked him to take her with him to witness the revolution in Germany. He obliged; she wrote about “the barricades of Hamburg”; and they became lovers. Larisa separated from her husband; Karl continued to live part-time with his wife, Rosa, and their four-year-old daughter, Sonia. The German revolution failed, Karl fell from grace, and three years later, at the age of thirty, Larisa died of typhoid fever in the Kremlin hospital. “This beautiful young woman has flashed across the revolutionary sky like a burning meteor, blinding many in her path,” wrote Trotsky.⁵⁵

Her coffin was carried by Isaak Babel, Boris Pilnyak, Vsevolod Ivanov, and Boris Volin (Boris Efimov’s brother-in-law), “among others.” Varlam Shalamov, who felt “purified and elevated” by his love for her, was there, too. As he wrote later, “Karl Radek was being supported on both sides as he followed the coffin,” he wrote. “His face was dirty and had a greenish tinge, while a never-ending stream of tears blazed a trail down his cheeks lined with red sideburns.” Boris Pasternak addressed the deceased directly (“Wander on, heroine, into the depths of legend), and one of Larisa’s oldest friends wrote to the grieving father: “Many, many years ago, when I often used to visit, you once said that you lived and worked to serve a special religion—a Religion without God. All religions in the world, my dear M. A., serve as a refuge from sorrow. That, after all, is their ultimate purpose.”⁵⁶

The second-most-famous Bolshevik romance was between Bukharin and Anna Larina, the adopted daughter of the Old Bolshevik and radical anti-NEP economist, Yuri Larin (Mikhail Lurye). Bukharin was as commonly admired as Radek was despised (the two were close friends for a while). According to Ilya Ehrenburg, everyone loved “Bukharchik” for his “contagious laughter” and “sense of fun” when he was a gymnasium student, and, according to Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, “everyone adored him” when he visited her father’s dacha when she was a little girl. “He used to fill the whole house with animals, which he loved. There would be hedgehogs chasing each other across the balcony, garter snakes sunning themselves in jars, a tame fox racing through the park, and a crippled hawk glaring from a cage…. He used to play with the children and tease my nurse, whom he taught how to ride a bicycle and shoot an air rifle. Everyone always had a good time when he was around.” Anna Larina claims to have singled him out among her father’s friends because of his “irrepressible love of life, his mischievousness, his passionate love of nature, and his enthusiasm for painting.”⁵⁷ They met the day Anna saw The Blue Bird for the first time:

I spent the whole day under the impression of the show, and when I went to sleep, dreamed of Bread and Milk and the Land of Memory, which was calm and serene and not at all scary. I could hear Ilya Sats’s beautiful melody: “Here we come, to find the Blue Bird’s home.” And just as the Cat appeared, someone tweaked me on the nose. I was frightened—for on stage the Cat had been very big, as tall as a man, and I screamed: “Go away, Cat!” In my sleep, I could hear Mother saying: “Nikolai Ivanovich, why wake the child?” But I did wake up, and the Cat’s face slowly dissolved into Bukharin’s features. At that moment, I caught my own “Blue Bird”—not a fairy-tale one, but a flesh-and-blood one—one that I would pay a heavy price for.⁵⁸

Bukharin had married his first cousin and fellow sectarian, Nadezhda Lukina, when they were both very young. She had a serious back problem and spent long periods of time in bed. “During such periods,” wrote Lenin’s wife, Krupskaia, “Nikolai Ivanovich would run the household, put sugar instead of salt into the soup, and talk animatedly to Ilich.” In the early 1920s, he got together with Esfir Gurvich, who at the time was working at Pravda, studying at the Institute of Red Professors, and living in Gorki with Lenin’s sister Maria (her boss at Pravda). In 1924, their daughter Svetlana was born; in 1927, Stalin asked Bukharin and Nadezhda to move into the Kremlin; in 1929, Esfir left Bukharin. Soon afterward, he found himself in a compartment of the Moscow-Leningrad train with a young woman named Alexandra (Sasha) Travina. They started an affair, and a year and a half later she told him she was a secret police agent. Seven years after that, he wrote to Stalin “directly and openly about … what one doesn’t normally talk about”:⁵⁹

In my life, I have been with only four women. N. was ill. We separated de facto back in 1920. When I got together with Esfir, she (N) almost lost her mind. Ilich sent her abroad. To give N. time to recover, I temporarily separated from E. and then, fearing for N’s health, kept my relationship with E. secret. Then our daughter was born, and the situation became unbearable. Sometimes I couldn’t sleep for weeks on end. Objectively, I tormented E. by putting her in such a false situation. In the winter of 1929, she left me (perhaps partly because of my political problems at the time). I was in a terrible state because I loved her. She started another family. Then I got together (quite quickly and suddenly) with A. V. Travina, knowing that she was also close to some GPU circles. It didn’t bother me at all since there was no reason for concern. We lived very well together, but soon the old problems returned, greatly magnified. That was when N. tried to poison herself, and Sasha began suffering from nervous paralysis. I rushed madly back and forth between the two sick ones, and, at one point, even thought about renouncing any kind of private life altogether. I had been living openly with Sasha. I went everywhere with her, including vacations, and everyone considered her to be my wife. But once again my soul was being devoured by all these growing torments, and there was a break-up. What made all of this even harder was that these women were kind, intelligent, and extraordinarily attached to me.… Meanwhile, Niusia [Anna] Larina had been in love with me for a long time (you were wrong about the “ten wives”—I was never with more than one woman at a time). And so what happened is that there was another horrible scene at Sasha’s, and I didn’t go “home” to sleep. I went to the Larins instead and stayed there. I am not going to go into all the details, but eventually Aniuta and I started living together. N. put up a partition in our apartment and calmed down. For the first time, a new life began for me in this regard.⁶⁰

In the summer of 1930, when Anna was sixteen, she and her father had stayed at a government sanatorium in Mukhalatka, in Crimea. Bukharin was at his dacha in Gurzuf, down the coast. His “Right Opposition” to forced collectivization had been defeated and forced to apologize; the Sixteenth Party Congress was proceeding without him; he was forty-two years old. One day she came to visit. She was wearing a light blue calico dress with white daisies around the hem; her black braids (she reports in her memoirs) hung down, almost touching the daisies. They went down to the beach, and, having found a shady spot under a cliff, he started reading from Knut Hamsun’s Victoria: “What is love? A wind whispering among the roses—no, a yellow phosphorescence in the blood. A danse macabre in which even the oldest and frailest hearts are obliged to join. It is like the marguerite which opens wide as night draws on, and like the anemone which closes at a breath and dies at a touch.” He may or may not have read four more paragraphs of similes before getting to the last one: “Love was God’s first word, the first thought that sailed across his mind. He said, Let there be light, and there was love. And every thing that he had made was very good, and nothing thereof did he wish unmade again. And love was creation’s source, creation’s ruler; but all love’s ways are strewn with blossoms and blood, blossoms and blood.”⁶¹

Victoria had been required reading for the gymnasium students of Bukharin’s generation. It was—perhaps appropriately—a modernist fairy tale about the doomed love of an Underground Man. Bukharin read two more passages: one about a woman who cut off her hair after her sick husband lost his, and the other about a man who threw acid in his face after his wife became “crippled and hideous.” In the novel, both tales are the main character’s fantasies about how his love might have ended, had it not been doomed. When he finished reading, Bukharin asked Anna if she could ever love a leper. She was about to respond (in the affirmative, she writes in her memoirs) when he stopped her and, still reenacting Victoria, said he feared an answer. A few days later she came to visit again. Bukharin had just received a letter from his fellow-“Rightist” Aleksei Rykov, who wrote that he had conducted himself with dignity at the Sixteenth Party Congress and that he loved Bukharin “the way even a woman passionately in love with you never could” (he, too, had read Victoria). This time, there was no ride back to Mukhalatka; Anna stayed overnight and “experienced a thrilling, romantic Crimean evening.”⁶²

Nikolai Bukharin

Anna Larina

A long and checkered courtship followed. Bukharin continued to “rush madly back and forth between the two sick ones”; Anna had an affair with Zhenia Sokolnikov, the son of Bukharin’s childhood friend; both, according to Anna, suffered greatly from jealousy and uncertainty. Anna’s father, Yuri Larin, seemed much more worried about Bukharin. “You should consider very carefully how serious your feelings for him are,” he said once. “Nikolai Ivanovich loves you very much; he is a delicate, emotional person, and, if your feelings are not serious, you must step aside, or this will end badly for him.” She asked if he meant suicide. “Not necessarily suicide,” he said, “but he certainly does not need any more suffering.” In January 1932, as he lay dying, Larin told Anna that it would be “more interesting to live ten years with Nikolai Ivanovich than a lifetime with someone else.”

These words of my father’s became a sort of benediction. Then he gestured for me to bend down even closer because his voice was growing weaker and weaker, and barely managed to wheeze out:

“It is not enough to love Soviet power just because you live fairly comfortably as a result of its victory! You must be prepared to give your life for it, to shed your blood, if necessary!” … With great difficulty, he slightly raised his right fist, which quickly fell back down on his knee. “Swear that you will be willing to do this!”

And I did.⁶³

Two years later, “after another horrible scene at Sasha’s,” Bukharin ran into Anna not far from where she was living in the Second House of Soviets. It was her twentieth birthday. She invited him over. Two years after that, their son Yuri was born. By then they were sharing a Kremlin apartment with Bukharin’s father and Nadezhda Lukina-Bukharina (as she continued to sign her name). According to Anna, Nadezhda gave their family “all the warmth of her heart, and loved [their] son in a way that was deeply touching.”⁶⁴

The challenge of combining personal love with love for Soviet power—as prescribed by Solts and implied in Yuri Larin’s blessing—was of immediate personal importance to Bukharin’s former friend, cellmate, and fellow Left Communist, Valerian Osinsky. As Osinsky wrote to his own Victoria, Anna Shaternikova, in February 1917, love “over there” would “reveal without shame all of its profound tenderness and its charity without embellishment, without the tinkling bells of magnanimity and philanthropy.” Life under Communism, he explained, quoting Victoria, would be “the kind of ‘good time when any grief is easy to bear.’” Osinsky and Shaternikova had read Victoria aloud to each other in Yalta, where they had met a few months earlier. Several years later, he wrote to her that he had decided to reread a few passages—“to take a quick look, that’s all, because I was sure I wouldn’t like it this time.… I read 5–10 pages from the middle, went back to the beginning, read some more, then a little more, and by four in the morning had read it all.… What I find moving about Victoria (the ending) is not the sense of pity it evokes, but the enormous power of feeling. In its own way, it is comparable to revolutionary enthusiasm. It belongs to the same category. It has the same power, clarity, and purity. There is no doubt that Victoria is a novel of genius.”⁶⁵

Osinsky, like Bukharin, had married a comrade-in arms when he was a young man. In 1912, his wife, Ekaterina Smirnova, gave birth to a son, Vadim. In late 1916, he met Anna Shaternikova in a Yalta sanatorium. She was a volunteer nurse, a true believer, a would-be Party theoretician, and, as far as Osinsky was concerned, “young, tall, intelligent, and beautiful.” They walked in the park and read Victoria by the sea. He left for the front and, on the eve of the February Revolution, wrote her the letter about “insatiable utopia.” She joined the Party; he spent most of 1917 in Moscow with Bukharin and his wife’s brother, Vladimir Smirnov, agitating for a military uprising. A few days before the October Revolution, he left for Kharkov—officially because he was frustrated by the old guard’s foot-dragging and possibly because he wanted to be with Anna, who was there at the time. Soon afterward he left for Petrograd, where he was put in charge of the empire’s economy (as director of the Central Bank and the first chairman of the Supreme Economic Council). In March 1918, as the chief ideologue of the defeated Left Communism, he resigned this position, and, after a stint in the provinces, became head of the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture and the chief advocate of “massive state coercion” against peasants (in the form of forced labor and a variety of “repressive measures”). Love was on the verge of revealing without shame all of its profound tenderness and charity, and in September 1920 he told his wife that he was in love with another woman. As he wrote to Anna, “Ekaterina Mikhailovna, whom I told what needed to be told and who knows how to deal with it correctly, is digesting it with great effort and pain. It is very, very understandable for a person who has known and loved somebody for a very, very long time. She has asked me to leave her in peace and not talk to her about the situation until things have settled…. Don’t worry, it will all get sorted out, because Ekaterina Mikhailovna is a good and intelligent person, but this is a delicate and tricky matter. It is not pleasant to be writing this, but one has to, of necessity.”⁶⁶

Valerian Osinsky and his wife, Ekaterina

(Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

Soon Ekaterina and their son Vadim (“Dima”) left for Finland, where she found a job as a cryptographer at the Soviet embassy, and Anna moved into the Osinskys’ Kremlin apartment. She was not happy there because, as she put it later, “everything smelled of another woman.” He was not happy either; one day, Anna came home to find a note that he had left for Finland to rejoin his family. He was appointed ambassador to Sweden; he and Ekaterina had another son, who died as an infant, and then, in 1923, another, whom they named after his father but called “Valia.” Two years later, they had a daughter, Svetlana. (Bukharin and Esfir Gurvich had started a trend: Stalin and Molotov would name their daughters “Svetlana,” too.)⁶⁷

In 1925, the Osinskys returned to Moscow and moved back into the Kremlin. At first they lived next to the Sverdlovs (Svetlana remembered Klavdia Novgorodtseva-Sverdlova as “taciturn, cold, dry, and colorless”), but then moved to a nine-room, two-story apartment (from which they could see Bukharin’s pet squirrel and fox running around in their cages). At the beginning of 1926, Osinsky was made director of the Central Bureau of Statistics, but he still considered himself, above all, a scholar. “The most important thing we children knew about him was ‘Father is working and cannot be disturbed,’” writes his daughter Svetlana. “Since he demanded absolute silence, his rooms in our second Kremlin apartment were separate from ours, across the stairway. His bed was covered with a white camelhair blanket. At the dacha his rooms were on the second floor—again, so that no one would disturb him. He was very irritable. Everyone was a little afraid of him.”

He was tall and slim, wore a pince-nez with a gold rim, was always neat and clean-shaven, and preferred light suits. Their maid called him “the Master,” or “Himself.” According to Svetlana, “there was something cold and rational about him. I remember being shocked by something my mother once told me. When he was young, there were two women in love with him—both sisters of friends (and one of them my mother). As he later confessed, he chose as a wife the one who was healthier and more cheerful because that meant she would be a better mother for his children.”

After his friend and brother-in-law, Vladimir Smirnov, was driven out of the Party (by his other friend, Bukharin), Osinsky no longer seemed to be close to anyone. According to Svetlana, “he almost never saw his brother and sisters, was for many years not on speaking terms with his mother, and did not even attend her funeral. None of this, however, prevented him from helping them in all sorts of ways.” He liked to play Beethoven and Chopin on the piano and often read aloud to his children. After Vladimir Smirnov’s arrest in 1927, he and Ekaterina adopted their four-year-old nephew, Rem (“Revolution, Engels, Marx”). As Osinsky had written earlier to Anna Shaternikova a propos of Victoria, “I have inherited my father’s flaw: sentimentality. I don’t know how to cry, but I get a catch in my throat during the emotional passages—even when I am reading silently to myself.”⁶⁸

In the meantime, Anna had married and given birth to a son, Vsemir (or “Worldwide,” for the “Worldwide Revolution”). He had a congenital disorder, which had caused him to grow quickly to a gigantic size, and he was not expected to live long. In the late 1920s, Anna and Osinsky ran into each other at an official reception. She fainted, was taken to a hospital, and somehow lost her Party card. The only way to restore it was to have the original recommenders confirm the endorsements. Her original recommender was Osinsky. They met again and resumed their relationship. He wrote to her often—about his work, his children, his reading, and his feelings; about their secret meetings and their shared faith. He called her “dear Annushka,” “darling comrade,” and his “Caryatid,” and kept assuring her that socialism—and, with it, the profound tenderness and charity of love without shame—would arrive “just as unexpectedly and just as quickly as when it first came to Russia.” Any day—and any letter—might be the last one.⁶⁹

■ ■ ■

But what if the power of love and the power of revolutionary enthusiasm pulled men and women in different directions? What if a Communist couple was, in fact, a cell of the Communist Party, and both the cell and the Party were torn by doubts and deviations? Could a difference of opinion destroy love? And if so, could a destroyed love create a difference of opinion?

Those were some of the questions that Mayakovsky’s original Gioconda, Maria Denisova, and her husband, Efim Shchadenko, kept asking themselves. She was the “Maria” of the famous poem and, since 1925, a certified sculptor specializing in portraits (she did several of her husband and one of Mayakovsky). He was the son of a worker from the Don Cossack area and a high Red Army official known for his suspicion of “bourgeois specialists.” He was twelve years her senior. He, too, wrote poetry, and believed he was close to finding his own voice. She was not convinced. He attributed her doubts to class difference and her impatience. “I don’t know why you are accusing me of being a retrograde and reactionary in style and form and of backwardness,” he wrote to her. “Yes I am backward like the working class as a whole is backward and right now we are trying to master knowledge but what does reactionary have to do with it? Simply as a new class while mastering the science and the arts which used to be a powerful weapon in the hands of the enemy class as a means of our exploitation naturally we are afraid to make fools of ourselves to go wrong and to become simply an educated intelligentsia no different from the old intelligentsia.”

What Maria needed, he argued, was not poems “that are strong in form but meaningless in content,” but a new monument by a genuinely new artist rooted in a genuinely new worldview—“that of Marx Engels Plekhanov Lenin and in part Trotsky.”

It is not true that futurism is the new style of contemporary art which can be adopted wholesale by the proletariat no and a thousand times no because this style was taken not from the factories and plants and mines and shops, but from the street the in part rebellious hell-raising street from the cafés and restaurants and bawdy houses consequently it can’t be proletarian it can only be rebellious it can delight by tickling the nerves of neurotic degenerates and in general the lovers of cheap thrills who look for strength and meaning not in content but in form because that whole crowd is empty of ideological content and it can’t be otherwise because being determines the consciousness of the Briks and Co.

To Shchadenko, Mayakovsky’s poem about Maria, A Cloud in Pants, was just that, a stuffed futurist blouse. “The Briks and Co.” were Mayakovsky, his new muse, Lilya Brik, and her husband, Osip. Lilya was Moscow’s most celebrated salonnière and an amateur sculptor. She, too, created portraits of both Mayakovsky and her husband. For several years, Lilya, Mayakovsky, and Osip Brik had been living together in the same apartment. A Cloud in Pants had been, ex post facto, dedicated to Lilya and published by Osip Brik. They had not stolen La Gioconda; they had stolen her portrait. But why should she care? And why should he? “My darling Marusia I can feel that I am growing day by day and there is no force that can stop my growth…. I just remembered what you wrote about how our difference of opinion had destroyed our love. It is necessary to create works that we would both like without reservation and not just like but absolutely love. I believe that in the end I’ll be able to create a work (I am very close) that will meet the aesthetic demands of your capricious (but in many ways correct) artistic demands.”⁷⁰

When, in the late 1920s, the matter came to a head, it was no longer about whether he would be able to live up to her aesthetic demands; it was about whether she could live up to his political and personal ones:

Efim Shchadenko

Maria Denisova

Marusia! Our breakup is self-evident and I believe that it owes itself to the difference between our political views, our economic physical and moral interests.

Ever since you first felt over you the political economic and moral-physical oppression of a male fighter prepared by his whole prior experience of Party military and public struggle to be a part of an organized force you began to protest with your whole rebellious nature against the confines of our common living which limited and constrained your will….

Very often you and I could not help considering each other sworn class enemies because in this time of intensifying class struggle there can be no other kinds of contradictions in public and family life.

As far as Shchadenko was concerned, NEP was over; the class struggle was inescapable; Bolshevism was identified with masculinity, and the new revolution might as well begin at home. He, as a man and proletarian, would no longer tolerate degeneracy. It was her turn to choose:

It’s one or the other either there will be a radical shift in the direction of reconciliation with the existing new system and with the new relations of the submission of the bourgeois anarchic element to the communist i.e. organized element as a result of which comradely fraternal relations will establish themselves between two previously disagreeing elements of the same party, society or family or they should go their separate ways once and for all professing in their outlook two different philosophies of building social and family life.

It is obvious that we have chosen this last option and are going our separate ways in order to never meet again on the political, social and family road, we are becoming enemies in content even though it may not be obvious in form.⁷¹

Maria agreed. She asked Mayakovsky for money to pay for her studio materials, complained to him about “patriarchy, egoism, tyranny,” and “moral murder” at home, and thanked him for “defending women from the domestic ‘moods’ of their Party husbands.”⁷²

The upshot seemed clear: if all contradictions in family life were class contradictions, and if one was to “live in the family the same way as outside the family,” then a domestic enemy-in-content was to be treated the same way as any other enemy. The ultimate conclusion was provided by Shchadenko’s fellow veteran of the First Cavalry Army, Sergei Mironov, when, around the same time, he was asked by his mistress, Agnessa Argiropulo, what he would do if she turned out to be an enemy:

I expected to hear him say that he would give up everything in this world for me, that he would defy everyone and everything. But without hesitating for a moment, his face frozen into a mask, he replied, “I’d have you shot.”

I couldn’t believe my ears.

“Me? You would have me shot? Me—shot??”

He repeated just as resolutely:

“Yes, shot.”

I burst into tears.

Then he recollected himself, put his arms around me, and whispered, “I’d have you shot, and then I’d shoot myself.” He covered my face with kisses.⁷³

■ ■ ■

Sergei Mironov was born into a well-off Jewish family in Kiev. His real name was Miron Iosifovich Korol. He studied at the Kiev Commercial Institute but was drafted during World War I and later joined the Red Army. Once, in a hospital, he overheard some incriminating information in the ravings of a wounded soldier. He informed the head of the local “special department” and was recruited on the spot (“according to the classic rules of recruitment,” as he said many years later). Having distinguished himself as an intelligence and sabotage specialist during the Polish War, he was made the head of the “active unit” of the Special Department of the First Cavalry Army. In the first half of the 1920s, he served as a top Cheka-OGPU official in the North Caucasus and the Kuban Cossack area, receiving two Red Banner decorations for anti-insurgent operations in Chechnya. He and Agnessa met in Rostov around 1924, when he was thirty and she was twenty-one. Agnessa was the daughter of a Greek entrepreneur from Maikop. After the Revolution, her father had left for Greece, and her sister had married first a White officer, who was shot by the Reds, and then an engineer, who was arrested for “wrecking” and exiled. Agnessa had married the chief of staff of the North Caucasus border troops. Sometime after moving with him to Rostov, she went to a Red Army Day rally. “The speakers, our local Rostov Party types, were poorly educated and uninteresting. Suddenly an unknown figure mounted the podium, a man in black leather, an army cap, a revolver at his waist. He was saying something about world revolution and about the interventionists, who had been chased away, but were raring to attack us again, but I wasn’t listening—I was admiring his strong, handsome face. He had such beautiful brown eyes and amazing eyelashes—long and thick, like fans. His whole expression was nice—good-natured and appealing.”⁷⁴

Some time later the wives of the local military commanders were told to stop “thinking of nothing but dresses and housework, which was philistine behavior,” and to start attending weekly political literacy classes. Agnessa’s husband told her that she should not “compromise” him by playing hooky, so she went. The instructor was the speaker from the rally, who introduced himself as “Mironov.” “He wasn’t wearing his cap this time, so I was able to get a better look. He had a noble face with a high brow and arched eyebrows. His smiling eyes were unusual—the upper lids arched, the lower straight. And those amazing luxuriant eyelashes. He had dimples, a large, beautifully shaped mouth, straight white teeth, and thick wavy hair that framed his face. He was broad-shouldered and strong, with a thrusting, powerful gait. His smile was charming, and I could see that all the ladies were smitten.”⁷⁵

Agnessa applied herself to the study of Marxism-Leninism, beat the competition (with some help from her husband on her homework), and soon became Mironov’s lover. He was also married and worked outside Rostov, so they met in hotel rooms and took walks together in the parks. “That’s why I love rereading Anna Karenina,” said Agnessa later. “I recognize my relationship with Mirosha in that book. No, I’m not speaking of what Anna subsequently suffered. I recognize the beginning of their romance. Those secret meetings, those quarrels, those violent reconciliations.” He called her “Aga”; she called him “Mirosha.” Parodying Party questionnaires, he called that period their “underground apprenticeship.” It lasted six years.

In the summer of 1931, Mironov was transferred to Kazakhstan as deputy head of the republic’s secret police (OGPU). Agnessa came to his train compartment to say goodbye. He asked her to come with him:

I was wearing a light dress and jacket and carrying a small purse.

“How can I go like this, with nothing?”

That seemed like an irrefutable argument to me, but he rejected it right away:

“Don’t worry, we can buy it all. You’ll have everything you need!” Suddenly the conductor came down the corridor saying:

“The train is leaving in two minutes!”

On the platform, the bell rang.

Sergei Mironov

(Courtesy of Rose Glickman)

Agnessa Argiropulo

(Courtesy of Rose Glickman)

“I won’t let you go, Aga,” Mironov said, laughing and gripping my hand.

“Hey,” I laughed. “You’re hurting me.”

The bell rang twice, the train shuddered, and the railway buildings glided past the windows.

Agnessa considered getting off at the next station but did not. At the third station, they sent a telegram to her husband and mother. Mironov did not sleep at all that night, fearing she might run away. “In Moscow we stayed at the Metropol [the Second House of Soviets]. In those days couples didn’t have to show their marriage certificate to get a room in a hotel. Marriages didn’t even have to be officially registered. On the very first day we went to a store together. I picked out whatever I liked, and he paid for it. I wanted one thing, and then another—my desires kept growing. Sometimes I felt a little embarrassed, but he noticed what I liked and bought everything, although in those days there wasn’t much to choose from.”⁷⁶

■ ■ ■

By marrying Agnessa, Mironov clearly violated Solts’s “poor taste” injunction, but he does not seem to have worried much about “Party ethics” (his favorite activities outside of work were cards and billiards). For those who did worry about them, marriage loomed larger than other non-Party loyalties because it involved free choice but could not be reduced to it.

Or rather, there were three fundamental kinds of such loyalties. The first, friendship, was seen as a fully rational alliance based on shared convictions. Communists were not supposed to have non-Communist friends, and most of them did not. Solts did not have to say much on the subject because everyone seemed to agree and because compliance was taken for granted. Jesus did not have to mention friends among the loved ones to be hated, either. Committed sectarians can be trusted not to form strong, personal, nonsexual attachments to unrelated nonsectarians.

Erotic love was, of course, different insofar as it was widely acknowledged to be based on a feeling “comparable to revolutionary enthusiasm in power, clarity, and purity.” One was free to resist and overcome that feeling if it interfered with revolutionary enthusiasm, but even Solts, who may never have experienced it himself, agreed that it was a serious challenge. Love and marriage are a problem for all sects because of their sect-destroying reproductive function (some try to limit all amorous activity to actual or symbolic sex with the leader, others fight long-term loyalties by prescribing promiscuity, and all worry a great deal about matrimony’s non-coincidence with fraternity), but they are also a problem for all sects because they combine the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom in ways that seem compelling and mysterious in equal measure. Love is the law of life, Solts seemed to be saying, but a random meeting that leads to a particular attachment is not (especially if one considers the unpredictability of reciprocity). As Lev Kritsman, the advocate and theoretician of War Communism, wrote to his wife, Sarra, back in 1915, “I have always known that private life is a house of cards—too fragile to be reliable. I keep realizing that it is possible to know one thing and feel another. I cannot make myself accept that it is so.”⁷⁷

The third type of personal attachment, blood relationship, lay entirely in the realm of necessity: one did not choose one’s father, mother, children, brothers, and sisters. One could, of course, leave them behind, as all sects prescribe and as the underground Bolsheviks did—permanently in the case of most of the proletarian members and almost permanently in the case of many of the “students.” But the Party did not make it a formal requirement and, after the Revolution, seemed uncertain about how to proceed.

On the one hand, “class,” the central category of Soviet life, was a heritable trait. As Kritsman wrote about War Communism, “Just as in a society built on exploitation anyone who wishes to gain ‘public’ respect tries to trace his origins to exploiters (titled feudal lords or capitalist magnates), so in this case anyone who wished to become a full-fledged member of Soviet society desperately tried to prove his undiluted proletarian or peasant origins by providing all sorts of documents and testimonies.” In the 1920s, the intensity of violence subsided, but the centrality and heritability of “class” remained unchanged. Hirings and promotions, high school and college admissions, Party and Young Communist League (Komsomol) membership, access to housing and services, tax rates, and court decisions depended on class belonging, which depended on “origins” and occupation. In cases of doubt, origins trumped occupation: a top manager “of proletarian origin” was, for most practical purposes, a “worker”; a registry office clerk “of bourgeois origin” was always a potential hidden enemy. On the other hand, class heredity was Lamarckian, not Mendelian, and one could—by working in a factory, serving in the army, or renouncing one’s parents—blunt the power of descent and hope to pass the newly acquired virtue on to one’s children. More obviously, the heredity principle did not apply to the Bolshevik leaders, who were almost exclusively of nonproletarian origin, or to their close relatives, who qualified for elite privileges without tests of loyalty.⁷⁸

The Kremlin and the Houses of Soviets were teeming with the fathers, mothers, children, brothers, and sisters of “the flower of the Russian Revolution.” The conscience of the Party, Aron Solts, a wealthy merchant’s son, lived with his sister and, later on, his niece and her children. Lenin, also of “bourgeois” origin, lived with his wife and sister. So did Arkady Rozengolts, who came from a family of wealthy Rostov merchants. The Krzhizhanovskys, both from the gentry, had taken in and were raising Milena Lozovskaia because she was their niece. (Milena’s father, Solomon Lozovsky, was the son of a melamed.) The Larins had adopted Anna for the same reason. Larin’s own father had been a railroad engineer, his mother, the sister of the famous publishers, the Granat brothers (who financed Larin’s revolutionary activities). Sergei Mironov and Agnessa Argiropulo would also adopt a niece and have Agnessa’s mother, sister, and sister’s sons come live with them for long periods of time. (Mironov had fond memories of his own grandmother Khaia, who had owned a dairy store on Kiev’s central street, Kreshchatik.) Osinsky, of gentry background, who would later adopt his nephew, considered his son Valia “his best creation.” Bukharin’s father, a retired teacher of mathematics, lived in his son’s Kremlin apartment. In The Economics of the Transition Period, Bukharin had singled out nine groups of people to be subjected to “concentrated violence”: teachers were number five on the list (under “the technical intelligentsia and the intelligentsia in general”). Voronsky’s and Podvoisky’s fathers had both been priests (number nine on the list), and Podvoisky was surrounded by his wife’s many sisters, clothed or not. (Their father had been an estate manager.) Lev Kritsman, who had written with approval that “belonging to the class of exploiters could guarantee a place in a concentration camp, prison or, at best, a shack left behind by proletarians who had moved to better houses,” was the son of a dentist.⁷⁹

Such relations and cohabitations were taken for granted and assumed to be theoretically unproblematic. There were, however, occasional exceptions. Kritsman’s wife, Sarra Soskina, came from one of the wealthiest Jewish merchant clans in the Russian Empire (number one on Bukharin’s list: “parasitic strata: bourgeois entrepreneurs not directly involved in production”). Unlike many others, the Soskins had not lost all of their wealth after the Revolution because an important part of their grain-exporting business was based in Manchuria, along the Eastern Chinese Railroad. (One of the brothers, Semen, had supplied the Imperial Army during the Russo-Japanese War.) In the 1920s, the Harbin-based “S. Soskin & Co., Limited” sold grain throughout the Far East, including the Soviet Union. Sarra’s father, Lazar, was a minor member of the family, with no great fortune of his own, but he had been able to help Kritsman’s father establish a dental practice outside Elisavetgrad and, in the early 1920s, to offer his daughter financial help.

In 1924, his wife came down with spinal tuberculosis, and he wrote to Sarra asking if “as the mother of Communists, she could be treated in a Soviet sanatorium at a discount.” Sarra responded with indignation, and on April 8, 1926, Lazar wrote to her from Harbin, in imperfect Russian: “Sarra, let us talk heart to heart. For our relationship is not what a father-daughter relationship should be, and it is not my fault…. The fact that I supposed that you had the right to have your relatives, in the person of your mother, treated at a discount, is only natural, given my philistine mentality. And I wouldn’t boast so much that you never ever accept privileges, because that is no great act of heroism if privileges are a matter of mercy, not merit.”

Lev Kritsman (Courtesy of Irina of Shcherbakova)

Sarra Soskina (Courtesy of Irina of Shcherbakova)

The Kritsmans were, of course, receiving privileges of every kind—from housing, food, and health care to Black Sea resorts and theater tickets—and their relatives were, indeed, eligible for special treatment, but the fact that Sarra’s mother lived abroad and was married to a “bourgeois entrepreneur not directly involved in production” could very well make her stay at a CEC sanatorium impossible. It is not known whether Sarra made inquiries. She does not seem to have tried very hard to explain the workings of the system to her father, who was not amused, “There is no need to be so ironic in your letter about how it’s not your fault that not everything in life complies with your father’s wishes. Mother’s illness came as a terrible blow to me, and the fear of losing her is too great. For better or worse, she and I have lived our lives together, and now, in our old age, we need each other too much. There is no one in the world closer to us, because you children have gone your own way, you have your own higher interests, and have no time for us.”

There was nothing uniquely Soviet about Lazar Soskin’s predicament, but of course the young Kritsmans did believe that “the parasitic strata” belonged “in a concentration camp, prison or, at best, a shack,” and that any feelings that might interefere with revolutionary enthusiasm were to be extinguished (“If it is needed, it exists, if it is not needed, it will be destroyed”). Lazar addressed the matter directly—relying on both Dostoevsky and the traditional diaspora Jewish genre of parental lament:

It seems that it is too much trouble for both of you to maintain family relations by writing an occasional short letter. Well, I am not asking for that, either. In your view, it is all a philistine prejudice not worthy of you, so please feel free to act toward us in accordance with your views and convictions about life in general and family relations in particular. After all, Lev Natanovich doesn’t seem troubled and, since you arrived back in Russia, hasn’t once deigned to add even a few words as an attachment to your letters. Who are we, really, to seek to be in touch with such a pillar of the great movement as our Lev Natanovich. He has more important things to do, and of course we are not complaining…. Far be it from us…. Well, enough of this, or God knows where this will lead me. But I dare say that I am no less a communist in the profound sense of the word than you are, except that I don’t have communist conceit. So don’t worry, Sarra. Mother is not going anywhere, and we don’t need any help from you.

“Communist conceit” was a term coined by Lenin to refer to members of the Communist Party “who have not been purged yet and who imagine that they can resolve all problems by issuing Communist decrees.” But the point was not Lenin; the point was King Lear.

But, daughter dear, let’s not fight. I am writing this letter in a hospital, waiting for an operation, which is scheduled for tomorrow. They say it’s quite serious, something to do with my bladder. It’s been five days since they started preparing me, but the operation itself is tomorrow. Mother can’t come to visit because she is not allowed to go out yet. Thank you for ending your letter by saying that you kiss us both…. Mother has not yet learned how to write lying down, so I allowed myself to write you one more letter. Well, take care of yourself, I kiss you many many times, my darling little girl. Forgive me if I was too harsh in this letter.

Take care, yours, L. Soskin⁸⁰

Four days later, Sarra’s brother Grisha, a Red Army officer, received the following telegram: “Father died yesterday after prostate operation. Tell Sarra. Mother.” Grisha, who was living in a small apartment in Kiev at the time, decided to bring his mother to live with him. “The only thing that has me a bit worried,” he wrote to Sarra on April 12, 1926, “is the terrible dampness of our apartment (the walls leak). I think dampness is dangerous for Mother’s health, but I hope to get her a place in a sanatorium as my dependent.” Grisha did arrange for his mother to move in with him. But later, in 1929, when he was expecting a transfer in advance of an imminent war with Poland, he wrote again to Sarra to ask if their mother could come live with her. Sarra responded that it was not possible.⁸¹

Sarra’s own son, Yuri, died of scarlet fever in 1920 at the age of nine (Bukharin had arranged a special car to take him to the hospital, but it was too late). Kritsman’s classic, The Heroic Period of the Great Russian Revolution, opens with a picture of Yuri in a sailor suit and the following dedication:

Title page of Lev Kritsman’s The Heroic Period of the Great Russian Revolution

To the memory of little Yurochka,

my only child,

To the memory of countless children,

Who fell victim to the intervention

of world capitalism,

And to all those who have not perished

and have now become

the cheerful young pioneers of the wonderful country

of the happy children of the future.⁸²

■ ■ ■

In Party discussions and private conversations, the connection between the remnants of the family and the postponement of the prophecy was drawn repeatedly but inconclusively, and often defensively. In Bolshevik fiction, it was at the center of the plot. Bolshevik fiction, unlike Party discussions and private conversation, dealt in “types” and reached for the myth. It strove to express the universal in the particular and to understand the present by appealing to the eternal. It put the Revolution to the test of love and marriage.

Arosev’s story “The White Stairway,” about the old doorman in the former imperial palace haunted by the Bronze Horseman, was published in 1923 by Voronsky’s Krug (Circle) Press. Another story included in that collection, “A Ruined House,” is about a young woman named Masha, who lives in a small provincial town but traces her lineage “to a worker’s family from the Obukhov Works in St. Petersburg.” Masha is nineteen years old, “slender, not very tall, with bright red lips and firm breasts.” She is married to a phlegmatic Latvian by the name of Karl but feels a powerful attraction to the Chekist Petr, who wears black leather and talks in short “imperious” sentences.

Masha works in the local army unit’s secret police department but feels unfulfilled and wants to move to Moscow; Karl “does not seek anything” and is “perfectly happy to have served two years without a break as commissar in various army regiments.” They live “in a small hotel in a tiny, filthy room suffused with the smell of mice and rotten food.” One day, when Karl is away, Petr stops by and tells Masha to come out with him. They walk through the dark, snowbound town until they reach the ruins of a large mansion.

It used to contain human life—petty, stupid life, not amusing but meaningless and cruel, like a rock. Even love here used to be stiff and puffed up, like a paper rose.

There was “she,” a medalist from some local school, wrapping her shawl around her shoulders and trying to stay warm by the fireplace or fingering the keys of a piano and summoning the hopeless sounds of a maudlin romance.

And there was “he,” sitting beside her, smoking cigarettes, stroking her hands, or reciting poetry. It wasn’t clear what he wanted: her, her dowry locked away in iron-bound coffers, both at once, or neither—or whether he was simply going through the motions inherited from the inertia of successive generations.

The walls of that house had witnessed many unnecessary tears—and soaked them all up. Its corners had absorbed the warmth of human blood. The doors in all the rooms had learned to imitate human sighs. The sofas, like loyal, sleeping dogs, had been able to tell the difference between strangers and masters and used to squeak in different ways under their soft human behinds. The mirrors had had their favorites, whom they reflected in true portrait style. Porcelain cats, clay cats, painted cats, and live cats had served as household gods and were used by the owners to perfect their Christian love of their neighbor.

Masha and Petr feel the warmth of this vanished life and submit to “blind instinct, as old as the earth.” On the way back, Masha tells Petr that she does not even know his last name. He says that it is better that way. She asks what he means. He says: “An apple can only be eaten once.” She asks whether they are going to see each other again. He says yes, once she has rid herself of the “old yeast” and they have built a new life in which there are neither husbands nor wives. She asks whether it will be death, not life. He says it will be “better than life”—a Shrovetide festival.⁸³

The Communist literature of the 1920s came out of “The Ruined House.” The proletarian Adam and Eve had joined the secret police and tasted their apple. What followed was both a new beginning and the Fall; the acquisition of knowledge and, for that very reason, an expulsion from paradise; the promise of a Shrovetide festival and, in the meantime, the curse of having to earn their food by the sweat of their brow, give birth to children with painful labor, and return to the ground from which they had been taken, for dust they were, and to dust they would return. NEP literature retained the memory and the hope of the last days, but it was, more than anything else, a literature of the great disappointment, of unquenchable weeping, of the realization that the sun had not stopped at its zenith and that the serpent (the blind instinct as old as the earth) had not been forced to crawl on its belly, after all.

At the center of NEP laments was the ruined house, at the center of the house was the hearth, and next to the hearth were “she,” “he,” their reflections, and the inertia of successive generations. In 1921, Comrade Rosfeldt had offered to resign from his post as director of the Second House of Soviets because he could no longer preside over a brothel. Milk and honey, mixed together, had reproduced a “bubbling, rumbling, rotting, and gurgling” swamp. The New City had turned out to be the old one. “What can be done?” asked Lenin as early as 1919. “We must fight against this scum over and over again, and, if this scum crawls back in, clean it out over and over again, chase it out and watch over it.”⁸⁴

There were two main ways of representing the profaned Houses of Soviets. One was the ruined mansion with its sighing doors, squeaking sofas, and shimmering mirrors; the other, Karl and Masha’s room, suffused with the smell of mice and rotten food. One was the old imperial palace transformed into a House of Soviets; the other, a gray wooden box with blooming geraniums in the windows. One was a stage for gothic horror; the other, a swamp of deadly domesticity. One was descended from the myth about a town sacrificing its young brides to a dragon; the other, from the story of Samson in Delilah’s arms and Odysseus on Calypso’s island. One was about rape; the other, about castration.⁸⁵

In Arosev’s The Notes of Terenty the Forgotten (1922), the Old Bolshevik Derevtsov, a former carpenter, comes to see his comrade Terenty, who works in a former governor’s mansion:

Derevtsov was sitting in a large, oaken armchair with lion-paw feet. His pale face stood out against the back of the chair, like the portrait of a knight. The deep, sunken eyes, ringed by dark circles, glowed on that immobile face. Derevtsov stared at the round dark-green tile stove, standing in the corner like a forgotten, moldy servant left behind by his previous owners, a silent witness…. It seemed as if someone had smeared blood over the transparent blue sky: the sunset was nearing extinction. Its dark-purple reflections flickered on the white windowsill and the white door. This produced a slight drowsiness and a desire to listen to medieval tales about mysterious castles and parks with old ponds. It was as if there were traces of former life nestled behind every square inch of silk wallpaper.

Like most Bolsheviks, Derevtsov is suffering from postclimactic melancholy. Unlike most, he also writes poetry. “He’s like a saint or small child; his eyes are light blue, like a monk’s.” Late one evening, Terenty is sitting alone in the palace, writing an appeal to the peasants about grain requisitioning. “Suddenly, my eye fell on the armchair in which Derevtsov had been sitting. What the devil! How absurd! I thought I saw Derevtsov’s pale face shining whitely against the back of the chair. Shuddering, I threw down my pen and leapt up. How ridiculous. It was only the bright, white door throwing its reflection on the back of the chair.” In the middle of the night, the telephone rings. The Chekist, Kleiner (who wears leather, conducts mass executions, and believes that what is necessary does not corrupt), informs Terenty that Derevtsov shot himself earlier that evening. He left a suicide note that said: “I’m tired, and, in any case, it’s all in vain.”⁸⁶

Infants, saints, monks, and poets are commonly used as surrogates, but the sacrificial lamb par excellence, especially in gothic tales, is a maiden. In Arosev’s Nikita Shornev (1926), a young woman named Sonia, a peasant (Shornev), and a student (Ozerovsky) all meet in the Moscow Soviet building during the October uprising. At one point, Shornev embraces Sonia, but an exploding shell interrupts their kiss. Several years later, she comes to see the two men in their separate rooms in one of the Houses of Soviets. The student Ozerovsky is now a coldly articulate Chekist executioner. The peasant Shornev is a high Party official. He tries to kiss Sonia, but she pushes him away.

“But Sonia,” he said, “back then, it was the struggle that got in the way.”

“You don’t understand,” she said, also using the intimate form of the pronoun. “It is still the struggle getting in the way.”

“How?”

“Because it doesn’t provide an answer about how we—you and I—are supposed to live.”

Unable to decide between the Chekist’s “lies that contain truth” and the true believer’s “truth that contains lies,” Sonia leaves Moscow on a Party assignment. Some time later, during a May 1 rally on Red Square, in front of the Chapel of the Virgin Mary of Iveron, Ozerovsky tells Shornev that Sonia has committed suicide by throwing herself out of a window. “Because Ozerovsky’s words seemed impossible to him, their meeting also seemed impossible. And for that reason, everything—the crowd and the May 1 celebration—suddenly became impossible. It was all a dream.”⁸⁷

NEP was a gothic nightmare, and Masha’s suspicion that Petr was a messenger of death, not life, might prove accurate, after all. In Gladkov’s Cement, an idealistic young woman who suffers from “leftist infantilism” and has recurrent dreams about Babylon is raped in her House of Soviets room by a “strong and imperious” Party official. “On one of those sultry, sleepless nights, something she had long expected as inevitable had happened.” She cries uncontrollably, spends time in a sanatorium, and is “purged” from the Party. A purge was a symbolic death with the possibility of resurrection. In V. Kirshon and A. Uspenskii’s Korenkovshchina, the violated heroine kills herself for good; in Malashkin’s Moon from the Right Side, she attempts suicide, recovers, “leads a maidenly life” in the woods, and rejoins the struggle.⁸⁸

A virgin fearing and anticipating “the inevitable” represented the loss of revolutionary innocence. A self-confident woman to whom the inevitable has already happened was NEP incarnate. One of the main reasons for Derevtsov’s emasculation was a certain Comrade Sheptunovskaia (“Whisperer”), who had “small, mousy eyes,” collected things out of “spontaneous greed,” communicated by “chirping” or “rattling,” had burrowed her way into the Party, become a Women’s Department activist, and secretly married Derevtsov, who “followed her around like a trained animal.” Not all predators were equal, it seems. The greatest danger was not that Petr the Chekist might turn out to be a vampire—it was that Masha, with her “bright red lips and firm breasts,” might turn out to be a witch. The greatest danger was not the haunted House of Soviets—it was the small room containing an emasculated commissar who “does not seek anything.” In the 1920s, nothing seemed more frightening and more inevitable.⁸⁹

In Arosev’s Recent Days (1926), a Chekist of proletarian origin, Andronnikov, remembers how, as an exile on the White Sea, he used to take German and math lessons from a young Socialist Revolutionary by the name of Palina (“Scorched”). As they sat by the hot stove, one of her eyes would look directly at him, the other, “somewhere into the corner.” One night, Andronnikov tosses his book down and embraces her, but she “threw back her head, her eyes sparkling with a devilish mischievousness, and, still facing his burning gaze and flushed lips, stuck out her tongue.” Suddenly, a fellow exile runs into the cabin crying that there is a wolf outside. They rush out, but “the wolf, of course, runs away.” And so, of course, does Palina. Several years later, during the Civil War, they meet at a Red Army headquarters on the Volga. Palina is in the kitchen mixing batter for blini, “looking like a young witch stirring her brew.” Andronnikov recognizes her, realizes that she is “the enemy,” and shoots her in the back. “She fell backward into the gaping black jaws of the Russian stove…. She flopped into those jaws on top of the soft blini, hot as blood, which splattered under her.”

The she-devil had gone back to where she came from, but was the spell broken? Was there more to milk and honey than the hot, soft, splattering blini? Back in NEP Moscow, in his room “under a glass dome,” Andronnikov suffers from doubts, headaches, “the murky stream flowing in the narrow ditch of half-gossip,” and terrible nightmares in which Palina’s crossed eyes seem to beckon him on. “And just a few steps away, all around the Second House of Soviets, huge, multicolored Moscow is teeming with noises and people.” Tsarist generals, speculators, spies, and prostitutes go about their business, and, in the middle of Theater Square, an old Jew plays his violin.⁹⁰

Andronnikov lives alone in his room, but of course most people in the Second House of Soviets did not. The most widely debated NEP-era book about the NEP era was Yuri Libedinsky’s The Birth of a Hero. An Old Bolshevik and Party judge, Stepan Shorokhov, lives in one of the Houses of Soviets with his two sons and his late wife’s younger sister, Liuba (short for Liubov, or “love”). One day he sees her naked, loses his peace of mind, and, after a short and inconclusive inner struggle, marries her. His older son, a teenager named Boris, calls him an “appeaser” and her, “a bitch.” Boris is right: Liuba reveals herself to be a mindless philistine and sexual predator, and Stepan grows listless and irritable from sleeplessness and remorse. He moves out of her bed, but she pursues him with reproaches and caresses until he flees to Turkestan on a Party assignment. His coworker is a soulless bureaucrat by the name of Eidkunen (“Eydtkuhnen” was the East Prussian town closest to the Russian imperial border); the case he is investigating involves a Communist who shot his “class-alien” wife.

Meanwhile, Boris realizes that all the evil in the world comes from the fact that grown-ups are always busy dealing with “that shameful, important, and not really comprehensible thing that leads to the birth of children.” The father of one of his friends leaves his wife for a typist; the father of another beats his wife because he suspects that his son is not his own; and the father of a sweet girl named Berta kills Berta’s stepfather and drives her mother to insanity. Worst of all, Boris notices that his moustache is beginning to grow, and that some girls in his class seem to enjoy being touched. In an attempt to break the cycle, he proposes the creation of Children’s Cities, or Houses of Soviets the way they were meant to be—truly fraternal. He imagines “grandiose games by thousands of children without any nannies, under the supervision of some intelligent people, and completely free from the grown-ups, from all those Moms and Dads.”

While Stepan is away, Liuba moves in with a fellow philistine and gives birth to Stepan’s son. Suddenly free, as if awakened from a nightmare, he realizes that the two dangers—Eidkunen’s dry bureaucratism and Liuba’s lush domesticity, are two faces of the same evil. He returns to confront Liuba:

Liuba was pacing up and down the room, cradling the baby in her arms and singing the eternal mother’s lullaby, and there was an instinctive, protective, predatory power in her supple movements and the husky, almost moist tones of her cooing, low voice…. Next to her, Stepan suddenly felt brand new, as if he were the one who had just been born and still had his whole life ahead of him. And in the emptiness and desolation of that large room, he could see the barely visible signs of Liuba’s domestic little world: the colorful embroidery on the window sill, the new meatgrinder glistening in the corner, and her cozy, worn little slippers under the bed. And he saw all these things, which used to be so dear to him, as a reappearance of the old enemy, the spontaneously regenerating perennial and loathsome forms of life.

Liuba tells Shorokhov that she will not give up the baby, but Stepan says that all he wants is to make sure the child is not corrupted by her influence. At the end of the novel, they stand “on either side of the cradle, intense in their hostility toward each other and ready for new struggles.”⁹¹

The hero of the title has been born. Or rather, two heroes have been born. Or rather, two protagonists have been born, a father and a son. Revolutions do not devour their children; revolutions, like all millenarian experiments, are devoured by the children of the revolutionaries. Stepan feels truly free for the first time when he realizes that he is past the age of unreason; to use Osinsky’s formula, “revolutionary enthusiasm” can finally prevail over “the enormous power of feeling.” But what was Boris to do? Revolutions, Boris’s nascent moustache seems to suggest, begin as a tragedy and end at home.

For Platonov, this was the greatest tragedy. Platonov’s Communism is an eternal Children’s City for orphans of all ages, but Platonov’s Communists do not know how to build it and what to protect it from:

Prokofy wanted to say that wives were also working people and that there was no ban on their living in Chevengur, so why not let the proletariat go take by the hand and bring back wives from other settlements, but then he remembered that Chepurny wanted women who were thin and exhausted, so they would not distract people from mutual communism, and he said to Yakov Titych:

“You’ll set up families here and give birth to all kinds of petty bourgeoisie.”

“What’s there to be afraid of, if it’s petty?” asked Yakov Titych with some surprise. “Petty means weak.”⁹²

Petty meant weak, and weak meant strong. Nothing was more dangerous than women, even the exhausted kind, and nothing was more justified than worrying about the cozy, worn little slippers under the bed. In an article defending Arosev from accusations of faintheartedness, Voronsky writes that “Terenty’s hamletizing may be harmful for some people, but it prevents self-satisfaction and, for the Party as a whole, represents ‘the water of life’ and ‘the God of a living person.’” It proves that the faith is still strong—because “it is not Hamlet’s spirit, it is the spirit of Faust: that irrepressible, indestructible, active element of the human soul that is not satisfied with what has been achieved, but seeks new untrodden paths, so the heart is rejuvenated and the mind always remains engaged.” This was not an easy argument to make. Goethe’s Faust is saved in the end; Arosev’s Derevtsov loses his faith and commits suicide, while his comrade, Terenty, dies of typhus (and is, of course, forgotten). As Platonov’s Prokofy puts it, earnestly and hopefully, “Everyone is dead, now the future can begin.”⁹³

The future was best described by Mayakovsky. In his 1929 play, The Bedbug, the young Communist, Ivan Prisypkin, leaves his loyal, proletarian girlfriend, Zoia Berezkina, for a rich hairdresser’s daughter. Zoia shoots herself. Ivan celebrates his wedding in a hair salon, amidst bottles and mirrors. (“On the left side of the stage is a grand piano, its jaws wide open, on the right, a stove, its pipes snaking around the room.”) The party ends in a fight, which leads to a fire. Everyone dies, but one body is missing. Fifty years later, Ivan’s frozen corpse turns up in a flooded cellar in the “former Tambov.” The director of the Institute of Human Resurrections and his assistant, Zoia Berezkina, who, as it turns out, has survived her suicide attempt, bring Ivan back to life. He reveals his foreignness to his Communist surroundings by demanding beer and pulp fiction (both long extinct) and is placed in a special cage at the zoo. The bedbug, defrosted along with him, is placed next to him. As the zoo’s director explains, “there are two of them, of different sizes, but identical in essence. They are the famous ‘bedbugus normalis’ and ‘philistinius vulgaris.’ Both live in the musty mattresses of time. ‘Bedbugus normalis’ gets fat drinking the blood of one person and falls under the bed. ‘Philistinius vulgaris’ gets fat drinking the blood of mankind and falls on top of the bed. That’s the only difference!”

Lenin’s metaphor would soon be realized: the Russian land would be purged of bugs. In a poem from the same period, Mayakovsky writes about hearing, through the noise of “domestic mooing,” “the rumble of the approaching battle.” The Revolution’s last act was about to begin. The “hearth’s family smoke” would soon be extinguished. Maria Denisova, his stolen Gioconda, had sent him a note thanking him for protecting women from the “domestic moods of their Party husbands.”

But there was another possible interpretation. Ivan, his bedbug, and the world of sour-smelling “soups and diapers” they represented might be indestructible, after all. Having survived the fire, the flood, and the freeze, they would reenter the world of the future. On April 14, 1930, four months after receiving Maria’s letter, Mayakovsky shot himself. His suicide note ends with a poem, which begins with a pun.

“The case has been revolved,”

as they say.

The boat of love

has crashed on domesticity.”⁹⁴