The House of Government

8

THE PARTY LINE

Different millenarian sects have different ways of bringing about the inevitable, from praying and fasting to self-mutilation and mass murder, but they all have one thing in common: the inevitable never comes. The world does not end; the blue bird does not return; love does not reveal itself in all of its profound tenderness and charity; and death and mourning and crying and pain do not disappear. As of this writing, all millenarian prophecies have failed.

There are various ways of dealing with the great disappointment. One is to point to failures in the implementation. Hiram Edson founded Seventh-day Adventism on the assumption that the millennium had to be postponed because of the continued practice of Sunday worship. For the Bolsheviks, the most popular early explanation of the apparent nonfulfillment of the prophecy was the failure of the world outside Russia to carry out its share of the world revolution. As Arosev wrote in 1924, “the young, northern country flashed its red fire, through the wilderness of its forests, at European life, and then fell silent, expecting an answer from the west.” The fact that the answer was slow in coming had to do with tactical miscalculations, not the original prediction, and large numbers of Old Bolsheviks spent much of the 1920s abroad ushering in the world revolution. The most durable success came in Mongolia, where Boris Shumiatsky helped create a nominally independent Soviet state. (The son of a Jewish bookbinder exiled to Siberia, Shumiatsky was a lifelong revolutionary and top Bolshevik official in Siberia and the Far East. Having supervised the Mongolian Revolution of 1921–22, he became ambassador to Persia, and, in 1925, rector of the Communist University of the Toilers of the East. In 1930, he was made head of the Soviet film industry.)¹

Other commonly cited reasons for the postponement of the end were the recalcitrance of evil (which, according to Kritsman, was both foreseen and excessive); the peculiarity of the Russian situation (especially the size of the predictably unwieldy peasantry); and the tendency of the proletariat to prostitute itself to foreign gods, especially those of soups and diapers. In theory, the Bolsheviks subscribed to the strong version of the circular mythological conception of fate, in which every freely chosen departure from the oracular prophecy is a part of that prophecy; in practice, they followed the Hebrew god’s practice of blaming the nonfulfillment of the promise on the chosen people’s lack of proletarian consciousness. The fact that immaturity was part of the original design was no excuse for immaturity.

The next, more radical step in dealing with the great disappointment is to adjust the prophecy itself. Augustine turned the millennium into a metaphor; Miller moved the end of the world from 1843 to 1844; Stalin and Bukharin proclaimed that socialism could first be built in one country. A particularly productive subset of this strategy is to proclaim that the prophecy has been fulfilled and that the remainder of human history is a mopping-up epilogue. Among the disappointed Millerites and their descendants, the Seventh-Day Adventists believed that Jesus had been briefly detained in a special antechamber, while the Jehovah’s Witnesses argued that he had returned as prophesied but remained invisible so as to allow the faithful to make their final preparations. Christianity as a whole is based on a similar claim: the failure of the founder’s prophecy about the imminent coming of the last days became the main confirmation of the truth of that prophecy. Jesus’s arrest and execution before any of “those things” could happen became both an act of fulfillment and a sacrifice needed for the future fulfillment. NEP-era Bolsheviks were in a similar position: there was much weeping, of course, but the fact that the revolution had begun was the best indication that it would end.

In the meantime, they had to learn how to wait. All millenarians who do not burn in the fire of their own making adjust themselves to a life of permanent expectation in a world that has not been fully redeemed. Special texts, rituals, and institutions are created in an attempt to mediate between the original prophecy and the fact that it has not been fulfilled and that nobody lives in accordance with its precepts. The millennium is postponed indefinitely, claimed to have been realized in the current unity of the faithful (as in Augustine’s new orthodoxy in Christianity), and either transformed into an individual mystical experience or transferred to another world altogether. Promises become allegories, and disciples who have abandoned their old families start new ones. Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are all examples of successfully routinized, bureaucratized millenarianisms—and so, to all appearances, was the Stalin-Bukharin Party line of the 1920s. As the new regime settled down to wait, its most immediate tasks were to suppress the enemy, convert the heathen, and discipline the faithful.

Money changers had to be allowed into the temples and “bourgeois specialists” had to be used as their own gravediggers, but the policy of “ruthless class exclusivity” (as Kritsman put it) remained the main guarantee of final liberation. It was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a former rich man or his children to enter a high-status Soviet institution (not counting all the special exceptions for the “flower” of the world revolution). As a matter of self-conscious, self-fulfilling prophecy, class aliens were continually being unmasked as active enemies. As Koltsov wrote in a 1927 essay,

The Cheka has become the GPU, but the only things that have changed are the outward conditions and methods of work.

In the old days, the chairman of a provincial Cheka, a worker, would sit down on the remnants of a chair and, fully armed with his sense of class righteousness, jot down an order in pencil on a scrap of paper: “Milnichenko—to be shot—as a vermin of the international bourgeoisie. Also the seven men in the cell with him.” Now, the GPU works in collaboration with the courts, worker-peasant inspection, and control commissions, under the supervision of the Procuracy. The methods and rules of the struggle have become more complex, but the dangers and number of enemies have not diminished.

One thing that had not changed, according to Koltsov, was the pride that the revolutionary state took in its commitment to violence. The Soviet secret police possessed the same advantage as its predecessor, the Jacobin Committee of Public Safety: it was not secret. The agents of the ancien regime had snooped around in dark alleys and hidden their victims in dungeons. The Jacobins had nothing to hide. “On the Place de Grève, the glittering blade of the guillotine worked day and night, and all could see the fate that awaited the enemies of the people. The Jacobin police did not conceal its work. It carried out its activities openly and in public view. Armed with the righteousness of an ascending class, it relied on a vast number of supporters, voluntary helpers, and collaborators.”

The GPU (Soviet secret police) was in an even better position. Unlike the Jacobin police, it represented the last class in history and could rely on total, unconditional support. Koltsov asked his readers to imagine what would happen if a White Guardist spy were to come to the Soviet Union and stay in the apartment of a coconspirator.

If the White guest appears, in any way, suspicious, the alarmed Party cell of the building will take a special interest in him. He will be noticed by the Komsomol member who comes to fix the plumbing. The maid, upon returning home from a meeting of household employees where she has just heard a lecture on the external and internal enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat, will begin to examine this strange new tenant more closely. Finally, the neighbor’s daughter, a Young Pioneer, will lie awake at night feverishly trying to make sense of a conversation she had overheard in the corridor. And, suspecting a counterrevolutionary, a spy, or a White terrorist, they will all—together and separately—refuse to wait for someone to come question them, but will go to the GPU and recount what they have seen and heard in great detail, and with great feeling and certainty. They will lead the Chekists to the White Guardist; they will help capture him; and they will join in the fight if the White Guardist tries to resist.²

To make sure this was the case, the Soviet state had to fulfill its second fundamental task: to convert the majority of the population to the official faith. It was an enormous task: the Bolsheviks had taken over the world’s largest empire. NEP represented a “retreat,” but most Bolsheviks, including Arosev, continued to hope that the present generation—or today’s young children, at the very latest—would live under Communism. Christians had not become the ruling party in the Roman Empire until more than three centuries after the death of the sect’s founder; the NEP-era Bolsheviks counted sacred time in years and clearly assumed, as had Paul, that “the world in its present form is passing away.” As Kritsman put it at the end of The Heroic Period of the Russian Revolution, NEP’s function was to prepare for “the coming world-historical battle between the proletariat and capital.” Such hope and expectation clashed with the fact that most of the Party’s subjects were not proletarians, and most proletarians were not fully “conscious.” NEP was the time of fomenting world revolution outside the Soviet Union and educating the revolution’s beneficiaries within. The second task had a much higher ratio of free will to predestination. The numbers were huge, and the time was short. The point, as the Puritan Richard Baxter said of a similar commonwealth, was to force all men “to learn the word of God and to walk orderly and quietly … till they are brought to a voluntary, personal profession” of the true faith. Fulfillment had been postponed and some “hamletizing” was natural, but the faith remained strong and the faithful remained a sect.³

The main Bolshevik conversion strategy was to transform all stable face-to-face communities—peasant villages, factory shopfloors, school classes, kindergarten “groups,” university departments, white-collar offices, and apartment building associations—into would-be congregations of fellow believers collectively contributing to the building of Communism. This was achieved by having every one of such units (known, after the mid-1930s, as “collectives”) house a Party “cell.” There were Komsomol cells for young people, Young Pioneer “stars” (or primary units of five members, each representing a point on the Red Army star) for children between the ages of ten and fourteen, and “Octobrist detachments” for schoolchildren under the age of ten. With the Party as their guide, communities of classmates, neighbors, and colleagues were to become cohesive units with their own elected officials responsible for discipline, hygiene, literacy, “physical culture,” political education, and in-house newspaper. Koltsov knew what he was talking about: in 1927, every resident of his hypothetical apartment would have been a member of a “collective” and, as such, a regular participant in meetings, rallies, “volunteer Saturdays,” and other Party-sponsored activities. The overall structure was a combination of the Calvinist-style network of self-disciplining congregations and Catholic-style supervision by licensed ideology professionals, with the not insignificant difference that the Soviet rank and file were mostly pagan. Eventually, all Soviets would become Communists; in the meantime, some members of the “collective” needed to be told what Communism meant. No one could refuse to participate, but not everyone was assumed to be a believer. The Party was a hierarchy of licensed ideology professionals; the “collectives” were not yet full-fledged congregations of fellow believers.⁴

The process of conversion consisted of three main elements. One was doctrinal training—through classroom instruction, “political education” seminars (modeled on prerevolutionary “reading circles”), public lectures, speeches at rallies, and newspaper reading, among other things. Participation in most of these activities was compulsory for “collective” members, from the neighbor’s Young Pioneer daughter to the maid registered by the building residents’ council. Study of the “classics” was rare; most people learned about Marxism-Leninism from school textbooks, popular summaries (such as Bukharin and Preobrazhensky’s The ABC of Communism or Kerzhentsev’s Leninism, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and The Bolshevik’s Handbook), and lectures similar to those delivered by Sergei Mironov to the wives of the Rostov military commanders. Most of the instruction focused on Party policy, not Communist theory.

Another important element of the makeover was mandatory participation in collective activities. Like most comprehensive faiths, Bolshevism was a communal affair that required attendance at public rituals and disapproved of individualism; like most missionaries, the Bolshevik mass-education ideologues insisted that the initiates spend as much time together as possible; like the Calvinists, whose congregation model the Soviet “collectives” most closely resembled, the Bolsheviks demanded constant mutual surveilance and public transparency from their members.

The third and largest part of the Bolshevik conversion effort was the “civilizing process.” Missionary work involves more than the transfer of belief and the creation of new communities. The message of salvation comes accompanied by words, gestures, stories, rituals, and routines associated with the original prophecy and its journey toward the present. All conversions involve some degree of “civilizing”; the Bolshevik kind, because of Marx’s identification of universal salvation with European urban modernity, was forcefully and self-consciously civilizational. Becoming Soviet meant becoming modern; becoming modern meant internalizing a new regimen of neatness, cleanliness, propriety, sobriety, punctuality, and rationality.⁵

Podvoisky’s “alliance with the sun” was but a small part of the massive NEP-era campaign for hygiene, “physical culture,” “the culture of everyday life,” “rational nutrition,” and other measures aimed at creating clean, trim, healthy, and—as a consequence—beautiful bodies. Young people were to be “tempered” and disciplined through exercise; women, in particular, were to be liberated from the stifling confines of home life (the “gray wooden boxes”). According to the head of the Committee on People’s Nutrition, Artashes (“Artemy”) Khalatov, family kitchens were dark, filthy caves “where the female worker was forced to spend much of her time,” undermining her own health and tormenting her “hungry, tired proletarian husband” with unbalanced and unappetizing meals. The answer was to create “factory kitchens” stocked with “mechanical meat grinders, potato peelers, root cutters, bread slicers, knife cleaners, and dishwashers.” As Andrei Babichev from Yuri Olesha’s Envy wants to say to Soviet women (but does not), “We will give you back all the hours stolen from you by the kitchen; one-half of your life will be returned to you.” (Khalatov himself came from a middle-class Armenian family in Baku. He joined the Party in 1917, when he was a student at the Moscow Commercial Institute and a member of the presidium of the Trans-Moskva Military-Revolutionary Committee.)⁶

What were Soviet families to do with so much leisure? The challenge, according to Podvoisky, was to institute “an organized, healthy, sober, and cheerful full-day regimen; games in a healthy environment involving movements that would expand your chest, fill your lungs with fresh air, stimulate your heart, make your blood flow faster and spread vital forces everywhere, fuel an appetite for healthy food—bread, fruit, and vegetables—improve your mood, and enhance the state of your whole being.” Thus invigorated, human beings would respond more readily to guidance and instruction. Three minutes of purposeful activity by specially trained organizers—and a festive “crowd of many thousands” would be transformed into “a rigid framework of two single-file formations; those left behind would run up to see what was happening and end up joining the ranks.” The goal was “political propaganda in an entertaining form: through joking, singing, dancing, and staged speeches and meetings, people would imbibe the ideas of international proletarian solidarity.”⁷

Platon Kerzhentsev, the main ideologue of the Soviet self-disciplining campaign, started out as a theorist of mass theatrical performances that would “help audiences perform themselves.” By 1923, he had concluded that spontaneity required consciousness. Russian workers had to learn how to work and dream “according to a plan and a system.” They were to “organize themselves,” internalize social discipline, and develop a “love of responsibility.” The Bolshevik work ethic, like its Puritan predecessor, consisted of “regarding one’s work, no matter how petty it might be at any given moment, as important, significant work on whose success the common great cause depended.”⁸

It also depended on “developing a sense of time.” Peasants and noblemen had regarded time as “an elemental force that operated according to arbitrary, incomprehensible laws.” The intelligentsia, too, “bore the same stamp of sluggish somnolence and disdain for time.” Capitalism “taught everyone to carry around a watch so you can’t help seeing it several hundred times a day.” Communism was about conquering the kingdom of necessity by submitting to it. It was “embodied harmony, where everything happens with accuracy, precision, and correctness, and where the sense of time is so deeply ingrained that there is no need to look at a watch because the proper flow of life will endow all things with a distinct temporal form.” In the meantime, according to Kerzhentsev, the task was to imitate and overtake capitalist modernity by reversing, cargo-cult-style, its causes and consequences. “All Englishmen, with the exception of a tiny handful of people, go to bed at 11 or 12. They all get up at a certain time, too—between 7 and 8 a.m. During the day, rest periods are rigidly fixed: between noon and 1 p.m., the English, irrespective of social status, have lunch; at 4:30 they all drink tea, and at 7 p.m. they all have dinner. Such scheduling norms have entered the flesh and blood of members of every class because the industrial way of life requires the creation of orderliness, with the correct alternation of periods of work and rest.”⁹

Well-ordered time required well-ordered space. Soviet work and rest were to unfold amidst properly arranged objects whose aesthetic appeal was in direct proportion to their functional utility. In a 1926 article devoted to the “Worker’s Home” exhibition at the State Department Store, Koltsov listed spotless “cupboards, shower stalls, iceboxes, and wardrobes”; “blindingly bright pots, tea kettles, coffeemakers, and pans”; and “splendid enamel bathtubs, sinks, and even urinals.” But wasn’t this bourgeois philistinism? Was not an Englishman who ate his porridge at 9:00 a.m. and shaved over his enameled sink the epitome of middle-class vacuousness? Didn’t Kerzhentsev, who liked to read Dickens aloud to his daughter, remember the pompous Mr. Podsnap from Our Mutual Friend and his “notions of the Arts in their integrity”?

Literature; large print, respectfully descriptive of getting up at eight, shaving close at a quarter past, breakfasting at nine, going to the City at ten, coming home at half-past five, and dining at seven. Painting and Sculpture; models and portraits representing Professors of getting up at eight, shaving close at a quarter past, breakfasting at nine, going to the City at ten, coming home at half-past five, and dining at seven. Music; a respectable performance (without variations) on stringed and wind instruments, sedately expressive of getting up at eight, shaving close at a quarter past, breakfasting at nine, going to the City at ten, coming home at half-past five, and dining at seven.¹⁰

“This is not the worst of it,” wrote Koltsov. “Answering the call of nature and taking daily baths are not necessarily signs of philistinism. But what would you say after seeing the model three-room proletarian apartment on exhibit at the State Department Store? Rugs! A china cabinet!! Curtains on the windows!!! A lampshade embroidered with little flowers!” What you would say, it turns out, is that “the revolution has come into contact with the rug and the curtain, but the Soviet order is not dying—it is getting stronger, along with the worker and peasant who are getting stronger in their material well-being and their enjoyment of life.” The proletarian revolution required bourgeois civilization, and bourgeois civilization required rugs and curtains. “It would be silly and criminal to grab the proletarian by the sleeve and try to convince him to despise rugs and not to wear ties or use cologne. In our present circumstances, this would be the worst kind of bourgeois philistinism.” Koltsov himself, after all, wore suits and spent weekends at his dacha. “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.”¹¹

■ ■ ■

There were many ways for the Soviet state to stretch out a helping hand. NEP was about creating the Revolution’s preconditions: modern industrial development and proletarian self-awareness. Industrialization was going to take some time; conversion—officially known as “enlightenment,” “agitation-propaganda,” or the need to “learn, learn, and learn,”—was NEP’s primary task in the meantime. Besides formal schooling and a variety of lectures, study groups, and literacy campaigns, the state could reach the masses by means of posters, newspapers, movies, radio broadcasts, and books. Different educational tools could be effective in different contexts, but for most Old Bolsheviks presiding over the Soviet state, none was of greater importance or personal interest than literature. Reading had been central to their own conversion and their early efforts to convert others; reading imaginative literature was of special significance because of the “enormous power of feeling” that it could generate. As Osinsky wrote to Shaternikova, it was “comparable to revolutionary enthusiasm” in its “power, clarity, and purity,” and it could fan or temper that enthusiasm, if directed accordingly. He himself could not think of a better representation of the “psychology of future times” than Verhaeren’s poem, “The Blacksmith”; Bukharin attributed his discovery of love without God to Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent; Voronsky had found the best portrait of a ruthless revolutionary in Ibsen’s Brand; Sverdlov’s favorite prophecy of future perfection came from Heine’s “Germany”; and Sverdlov’s (and Voronsky’s) friend Filipp Goloshchekin, who oversaw the massacre of the tsar’s family, had left behind an epitaph from Heine’s “Belsazar.” Fiction had structured, nuanced, and illustrated the Bolshevik experience. The new Soviet fiction was going to immortalize it.

The task of organizing and guiding Soviet literature fell to Aleksandr Voronsky. In February 1921, the Central Committee appointed him editor in chief of the new “thick” journal, Red Virgin Soil, and, after a brief stint as a volunteer, helping to put down the Kronstadt uprising, he set to work. “He is a good, decent person, even though he doesn’t seem to know much about the arts,” said Gorky. “But, judging by his temperament, he’ll learn. He is extremely tenacious.”¹²

Voronsky agreed that he owed everything in life to his love of hard work and did his best to maintain the “self-discipline, punctuality, and rigid daily schedule” that he had perfected in prison. In 1921, Russian literary life consisted mostly of writers reading their work to each other in private seminars. According to Vsevolod Ivanov,

Voronsky would go from one seminar to another, listen to the discussions, and then ask the participants which of the young writers they considered the most talented. The writer who got the largest number of votes would receive an invitation to publish in Red Virgin Soil.

At first, Voronsky was suspicious of the writers. Their extreme sensitivity struck him as odd, and the low level of their political consciousness often exasperated him. Sometimes, having read a manuscript and discussed it with the author, he would throw up his hands in indignation and say, while blinking rapidly:

“I am not sure he has ever heard of the October Revolution!”¹³

He persevered, however, and found most of them open to direction. The talented young writers had all heard of the October Revolution, and many of them had participated on the right side, if not always at the appropriate level of political consciousness. Ivanov continues: “His manner was informal, and he preferred to talk about literature in his own home or the writers’ rather than in the editorial offices. ‘It is easier for us to understand each other this way,’ he would say. Most conversations were about the manuscripts he was planning to publish. It seems to me that those conversations took the place of an editorial board, which Red Virgin Soil did not have for a while. He gradually developed his own taste and eventually began to write decent fiction himself. It was not for nothing that Gorky had called him ‘tenacious.’”¹⁴

In the 1920s, Voronsky lived in a two-room apartment in the First House of Soviets with his mother, Feodosia Gavrilovna, a priest’s widow; his wife, Sima Solomonovna, whom he had met in exile and whose eyes, as he put it, projected “the soft, ancient Jewish sorrow”; and their daughter, Galina, born in 1916. After a while, Feodosia Gavrilovna moved into a room of her own in the Fourth House of Soviets, but she continued to spend much of her time in her son’s apartment, cooking on the primus stove and taking care of her granddaughter. During the day, Voronsky wrote at his desk, often stopping to answer the phone or “talk with some comrade from another floor who stopped by to ask for a cigarette or a book, or just to share some impressions about a trip or a newspaper article.” In the evenings, he used to talk to writers and anyone else who showed up. “We often got together at Voronsky’s,” wrote Ivanov. “We used to bring a bottle of red wine and sit over that bottle all night, talking expansively and reverently about literature. Esenin read his poems, Pilnyak—The Naked Year, Babel—Red Cavalry, Leonov—The Badgers, Fedin—The Garden, and Zoshchenko and Nikitin—their short stories. Voronsky’s friends, the Old Bolsheviks and Red Army Commanders Frunze, Ordzhonikidze, Eideman, and Griaznov, used to come, too.” Ivanov himself read his Partisans and Armored Train 1469. Among other frequent visitors, according to Galina Voronskaia, were Arosev, Boris Pasternak, “the ugly and very witty Karl Radek, in his heavy horn-rimmed glasses,” and the close family friend, Filipp Goloshchekin, whom Voronsky affectionately called “Philip the Fair.”¹⁵

For about two years, Voronsky was the supreme and uncontested discoverer, promoter, publisher, censor, and dictator of the new Soviet literature. His job was to separate the weeds from the good seed and to champion the very best of the good. “Political censorship in literature,” he wrote a propos of the first task, “is a complex, important, and very difficult endeavor that requires great firmness but also flexibility, caution, and understanding.” As he explained to the author of We, Evgeny Zamiatin, “We have paid for this right with blood, exiles, prisons, and victories. There was a time … when we had to keep silent. Now it is their turn.” As for finding “the most talented,” Voronsky may have been influenced by those he was guiding (as Vsevolod Ivanov claimed), but his general sense of what constituted good literature was derived from his prison reading, which—like that of all “student” revolutionaries—was centered on the “classics.” His particular favorites were Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekhov, Homer, Goethe, Dickens, Flaubert, and Ibsen. His most prized protégés were Babel, Esenin, Ivanov, Leonov, Seifullina, and Pilnyak.¹⁶

In 1923, Voronsky’s monopoly began to be challenged by a small but vocal group of “proletarian” critics, who argued that all literature that was not militantly and self-consciously revolutionary was counterrevolutionary, and that Voronsky was, “objectively” and perhaps deliberately, advancing the cause of the proletariat’s class enemies. None of the proletarian ideologues was a proletarian. Most of them were young men from Jewish families (at the time of the formation of the “October” group of proletarian writers in 1922, Semen Rodov was twenty-nine; Aleksandr Bezymensky and Yuri Libedinsky, twenty-four; G. Lelevich, twenty-one, and Sverdlov’s nephew Leopold Averbakh, seventeen). They were all Party members, however, and believed that the job of leading the Bolshevik artistic production should be transferred from the lukewarm Voronsky to a true “Party cell.” Which of the feuding “proletarians” should receive the commisson was a matter of dispute, but everyone agreed that Voronsky and his “fellow-travelers” had to go.¹⁷

Aleksandr Voronsky

Voronsky responded by describing his detractors as false prophets of the apocalypse (and caricatures of his underground alter ego, Valentin): “Those righteous and steadfast men ate locusts and wild honey, did not drink alcohol, walked not in the counsel of the ungodly nor stood in the way of sinners, but did unceasingly rebuke the men of little faith and of no faith in public squares, and whenever the prophetic trumpet failed them, they would, by all accounts, apply themselves sullenly and noisily to shattering glass, smashing window frames, and breaking down doors.” More important, he responded by formulating a theory of literature that added Freud and Bergson to Belinsky and Plekhanov to produce a synthesis he believed to be genuinely Marxist. Literature, according to Voronsky, was not a weapon in the class struggle but a method of discovering the world. “Art, like science, apprehends life. Art and science have the same object: reality. But science analyzes, art synthesizes; science is abstract, art is concrete; science is aimed at man’s reason, art, at his sensual nature.”¹⁸

Artistic process was about neither class nor “technique”: it was about “intuition” (formerly known as “inspiration”). Intuition was a way of getting at the truth “by going beyond conscious, analytic thought.” Every true artist was Pushkin’s “seeing and perceiving” prophet. “He steps aside from the daily routine, the petty joys and disappointments, and the clichéd views and opinions, and becomes suffused with a special sympathetic sense, a feeling for the life of others that exists separately and independently from him. Beauty is revealed in objects, events, and people irrespective of how the artist would like to interpret them; the world separates itself from man, frees itself from the self and its impressions, and appears resplendent in its original beauty.” The whole of human life was organized around the memory of that beauty and the hope of recovering it:

Surrounded by the world distorted by his impressions, man preserves in his memory, if only as a faint, distant dream, the unspoilt, genuine images of the world. They make themselves known to man in spite of all the obstructions. He knows about them from his childhood and his youth; they reveal themselves to him in special, exceptional moments, or during the periods of public upheavals. Man yearns for those pristine, bright images, and creates sagas, legends, songs, novels and novellas about them. Sometimes consciously but mostly unconsciously, genuine art has always sought to restore, find, discover these images of the world. This is the true meaning of art and its true function.¹⁹

Art, in other words, had “the same goal as religion.” But “religion” (by which Voronsky meant the latter-day Christianity he had learned in the seminary), sought pristine beauty in another, ultimately false, world, whereas art “seeks, finds, and creates ‘paradise’ in living reality.” Religion competed with art on its territory (Tolstoy and Gogol lost their gift of clairvoyance when they turned toward religion), but art, as true revelation, had nothing to fear in the end. “The more successful an artist is at surrendering to the power of his immediate perceptions and the less he insists on correcting those impressions by imposing general rational categories, the more concrete and independent his world becomes.”²⁰

The dictatorship of the proletariat had nothing to fear, either. Lenin was, in a sense, “possessed,” and had “the prophetic sight given by nature and life to geniuses.” “Such ‘possessed’ men look at everything from the same angle and see only those things that their main idea, feeling, and mood force them to see. The keenness of their sight, hearing, and powers of observation are superhuman. But to be possessed by one great idea does not mean to miss the details.” The best illustration of this was Lenin’s relationship with his early disciples, the Old Bolsheviks—“those special human beings ‘who are looking for the city that is to come.’” On the one hand, he “unites, organizes, disciplines, and welds people together into one collective, one cohort of steel.” On the other, he judges them on the basis of passion, intuition, and “the immediate perception of the very core of their beings.” He was both an Old Testament prophet and an artist who surrendered to the power of his gift with the “almost feminine tenderness toward the human being.” Bolshevism as a whole was both about science (the Law) and art (the intuitive recovery of the original beauty of the world). It was exactly like religion except that it was true.²¹

True art, and especially great literature, had “the same goal” as Bolshevism. Voronsky’s “proletarian critics” were like Gogol’s doomed seminarian haunted by a flying witch: “They are drawing a magic circle around themselves lest the bourgeois Viy give the Russian Revolution over to the unclean and the undead. This is, of course, praiseworthy, but it should be done with some sense: the circle should have a radius.” The true artists from the past did not just belong on the inside—they had helped reveal the sacred realm that, under Communism, would encompass the world. “In order to find the new Adam, who yearns for his new, very own paradise, … we must keep fighting tirelessly against the old Adam within us and without. In this struggle, the classical literature of past epochs is one of our most loyal friends.” Without the classics, one could neither vanquish the undead nor locate the new paradise—“discovered, in spite of everything, in spite of logic and intelligence, in spite of all things evil and unjust by Homer, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Lermontov, and Flaubert, among others. They love such happy and rare revelations and seem to want to exclaim, along with Faust: ‘Oh moment, stay a while—you are so fair!’”²²

The response of Voronsky’s critics amounted to a reminder that Faust’s words were part of his bargain with the devil and that he had never uttered them, anyway. Voronsky’s quest for “exceptional moments” was a fool’s errand; Voronsky’s “Circle” (the name of the publishing house he had founded) was filled with the unclean and the undead. To counter the political support that Voronsky was receiving from Trotsky, Osinsky, Radek, and Mikhail Frunze, the proletarians recruited several patrons of their own, including the ideologue of the Bolshevik “sense of time,” Platon Kerzhentsev, and the only Old Bolshevik proletarian taking part in the literary debate, Semen Kanatchikov. According to Voronsky’s November 11, 1924, letter to Stalin, Kanatchikov, in his capacity as head of the Central Committee’s Press Section, was “creating the impression that the Communist Party does not need literature except as a form of blunt and narrowly conceived propaganda and that the Central Committee supports the vulgar and aggressive position of Rodov and company.”²³

Among the established writers, the main supporter of the “proletarians” was the author of The Iron Flood, Aleksandr Serafimovich, whose Moscow apartment served as the headquarters of the anti-Voronsky forces. “How many evenings did we spend in that small, warm, cozy apartment!” wrote one of its members, Aleksandr Isbakh. “We used to sit around a large table under a bright lamp, a samovar hissing noisily before us.” The young writers would read their works and argue “for hours” about literature. Serafimovich always presided, occasionally “rubbing his bald head and straightening his signature white shirt collar, which he wore pulled out over his suit jacket…. He liked to joke and to laugh at our jokes. Whenever a new guest arrived, he would squint slyly, introduce him formally to his wife, Fekla Rodionovna, invite him to the table, and begin the ‘interrogation.’ ‘Well, young man, I can see by your eyes that you have written something extraordinary. Don’t try to hide it, my dear man, don’t try to hide it.’”24

Fekla (Fekola) Rodionovna Belousova was Serafimovich’s second wife. A peasant from the Tula province, she had worked for several years in his house before marrying him in 1922, when he was fifty-nine years old and she was thirty. They lived with Fekla’s mother, whom everyone called “Grandma,” in the First House of Soviets in the apartment next to the Voronskys, and later in a small house in Presnia. Serafimovich’s favorite pastime was singing folk songs. According to one of his proletarian protégés, “His voice was rather mediocre, but he sang with great feeling, waving his arms about like a choir conductor. Our most devoted listener was Serafimovich’s mother-in-law, who was a great admirer of his singing. As we sat together, singing, she would sit with her hand on her cheek, looking at him with awe and repeating over and over again: ‘What a voice! What a voice!’ He would be flattered, of course, and say, with feigned indifference and a bit of bravado: ‘Wait till you hear what I can really do, Mother-in-law, dear!’”²⁵

Aleksandr Serafimovich

But literature came first. According to Isbakh, the most memorable gathering of their reading group was the evening Serafimovich read his manuscript of The Iron Flood:

It was a remarkably solemn evening. The brightly polished samovar gleamed festively; the table was laden with all sorts of delicacies. Fekla Rodionovna had baked some exceptionally good, absolutely delicious pies.

Seated around the table were the writers of the older generation: Fedor Gladkov, Aleksandr Neverov, and Aleksei Silych Novikov-Priboi. We youngsters stood modestly in the rear.

Serafimovich was wearing a blindingly white shirt collar.

Fekla Rodionovna was serving out wine and pie.

Serafimovich winked at us, his other eye squinting, as usual.

“I’m a sly fox…. My plan is get you all drunk, so you’ll be a little kinder. And then you can criticize all you want.”

He read well, not too fast, and with feeling.

He did not stop until midnight.

Oh how proud we were of our old man!²⁶

The old man was proud of them, too. “Go after them!” he used to say, according to Gladkov. “You’re sure to win. Why are you coddling these types? They may be wreckers, for all we know.” “The most important public discussions usually took place in the Press House. Serafimovich would sit in the presidium like a patriarch, surrounded by Komsomol members. When making one of our tough, aggressive speeches, we would look back at him, see his encouraging smile and slyly squinted eye, and reenter the fray with renewed confidence.”²⁷

In June 1925, the Politburo ordered a ceasefire. A special decree on Party policy toward literature, written by Bukharin, declared: “In a class society, there can be no such thing as neutral art,” but “the class nature of the arts in general and of literature, in particular, is expressed in forms that are infinitely more diverse than, for instance, in politics.” On the one hand, the Party considered proletarian writers to be “the future ideological leaders of Soviet literature” and wanted to “support them and their organizations.” On the other, it was determined to struggle against “any careless or dismissive attitude toward the old cultural heritage” and “all forms of pretentious, semiliterate, and self-satisfied Communist conceit.” In literature, as in many other spheres of life involving the mysteries of human emotion, there were limits to how far and how fast the Party could go. “While directing literature in general, the Party cannot support one particular literary faction (classified according to its views on style and form), any more than it can issue decrees on the proper form of the family, even though it obviously does direct the construction of a new everyday life.”²⁸

Both sides felt vindicated, and, after a short lull, hostilities resumed. Leopold Averbakh, who had emerged as the uncontested leader of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), proclaimed that “Voronsky’s Carthage must be destroyed.” Voronsky responded with a generalization and a warning: “The Averbakhs of the world don’t appear by accident. They may be young, but they are going places. We have seen our share of such clever, successful, irrepressible, everywhere-at-once young men. Self-confident and self-satisfied to the point of self-abandonment, they harbor no doubts and make no mistakes. Naturally they swear by Leninism and naturally they never depart from official directives. But in our complex, multicolored world, their cleverness can sometimes turn downright sinister.”²⁹

It could turn particularly sinister when supported by official directives. On October 31, 1925, Voronsky’s old prison comrade and main Central Committee patron, the people’s commissar for military and naval affairs, Mikhail Frunze, died of chloroform poisoning during a routine stomach ulcer operation. Three months later, Boris Pilniak wrote a novella called The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon, which opens with a dedication to Voronsky (“in friendship”) and a disclaimer that any resemblance to the circumstances of Frunze’s death is coincidental, and goes on to tell the story of how a famous Red Army commander dies of chloroform poisoning during a routine stomach ulcer operation. In the “Tale,” Commander Gavrilov does not want to have an operation, but “the unbending man,” whose movements are “rectangular and formulaic” and “whose every sentence is a formula,” tells him that the operation, and the risks associated with it, are in the interests of the Revolution. “The wheel of history, and especially the wheel of the revolution—regrettably, I suppose—are mostly moved by death and blood. You and I know this only too well.” The night before the operation, Gavrilov goes to one of the Houses of Soviets to see his old comrade, Popov, who tells him that his wife has left him for an engineer and “a pair of silk stockings” and that he now lives alone with his little daughter. “Popov related the petty details of the separation, which are always so painful precisely because of their pettiness—the kind of detail, the kind of pettiness that obscures the important things.” Gavrilov responds by telling Popov about his own wife, “who has grown old but is still the only one for him.”

Finally, late at night, he gets up to leave. “Give me something to read, but, you know, something simple, about good people, a good love, simple relations, a simple life, the sun, human beings and simple human joys.” Popov did not have such a book. “That’s revolutionary literature for you,” says Gavrilov, as a joke. “Oh well, I’ll reread some Tolstoy, then.” He does reread Tolstoy’s “Youth” and, the next morning, dies during the operation. The operation reveals that the ulcer has healed. Popov receives a letter with Gavrilov’s last testament: “I knew I was going to die. Forgive me, I realize you’re no longer young, but I was rocking your little girl, and I thought: my wife is growing old, too, and you’ve known her for twenty years. I’ve written to her. You should also write to her. Why don’t you move in together, get married, perhaps, and raise the kids. Please forgive me.”

There is the kind of pettiness that obscures the important things, and there is the all-important revolutionary necessity that ends up being a mistake. And then, perhaps somewhere in between, there are the good people, good love, simple relations, simple life, sun, human beings and simple human joys, including the most important ones—getting married and “raising kids.” Only Commander Gavrilov—“a man who has the right and the will to send other men to kill and die”—understands this—and only because it is now his turn to die. “Revolutionary literature” cannot provide either solace or understanding. Tolstoy can.³⁰

Voronsky’s antiproletarian stance ended up being a Faustian bargain, after all. Within days of the publication of the Tale (in the May issue of Novyi mir), the Politburo issued a decree calling it “a malicious, counterrevolutionary, and slanderous attack on the Central Committee of the Party,” and ordering an immediate confiscation of the entire print run. “It is obvious that the whole plot and certain elements of Pilniak’s Tale of the Unextinguished Moon could only have been made possible as a result of the slanderous conversations that some Communists were having about Comrade Frunze’s death, and that Comrade Voronsky bears partial responsibility for this. Comrade Voronsky is to be reprimanded for this.” He was also to write a letter to the editor of Novyi mir, “rejecting the dedication with an appropriate explanation approved by the CC Secretariat.”³¹

In a written explanation to the chief censor (head of Glavlit) I. I. Lebedev-Poliansky, Pilniak claimed that the novella was based on a conversation he and Voronsky had had once—“about how an individual … always follows the wheel of the collective and sometimes dies under that wheel”—and that it was during the same conversation that Voronsky had told him “about the death and various habits of Comrade Frunze.” In his letter to the editor approved by the CC Secretariat, Voronsky wrote that Pilniak’s dedication was “highly offensive” to him as a Communist, and that he rejected it “with indignation.”³²

The proletarian writers were triumphant: the destruction of “Voronsky’s Carthage” was now a matter of time (and method). Writing in the May issue of Red Virgin Soil, Voronsky addressed his official boss, People’s Commissar of Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky: “I love life, and it is hard for my soul to part with my body. But if it is fated that I accept the end, then let it not be from the hand of Averbakh. It would not be dignified to die that way. It is hard but honorable to die on the battlefield from a frontal attack—‘there is joy in battle’—but to suffocate from Averbakh’s ‘literary gases’—let this cup pass from me.”³³

Voronsky’s wish was partially granted. The attack was not frontal, but it came from Bukharin, not Averbakh. On January 12, 1927, Pravda published Bukharin’s “Angry Notes,” in which he attacked Voronsky by attacking some of Voronsky’s protégés. The “peasant poets” that Red Virgin Soil was championing, and especially Voronsky’s favorite, Sergei Esenin, were, according to Bukharin, guilty of “blini nationalism” and “chauvinistic swinishness.” “Eseninism” was a “disgustingly powdered and gaudily painted Russian obscenity,” and the “broad Russian nature” that Esenin stood for was nothing but “internal sloppiness and lack of culture.” “If in the old days the traditional intelligentsia admiration for its own mawkishness, impotence, and pathetic flabbiness was disgusting enough, it has become absolutely intolerable in our own day, when we need energetic and resolute characters, not the rubbish that should have been thrown out a long time ago.”³⁴

The attack was, in a sense, justified. Voronsky did admire peasant poets and published them regularly in his journal, and his memoirs, which he had recently begun writing, did represent “blini Russia” as an aesthetic and perhaps moral value to be reckoned with. (“The light-colored river lay tranquil, its gentle curves gleaming with copper flashes. Behind the river, fields stretched into the distance. Little hamlets dotted the hills. Behind them was the silent, solemn pine forest. The cadenced tones of distant church bells floated slowly through the air.”)

More to the point, the “broad Russian nature” as understood by Voronsky was but a special case of “intuition,” which represented a way of getting at the truth “by going beyond conscious, analytic thought.” Lenin, in his clairvoyance, was “Russian from head to toe.” He had had “something of the roundness, nimbleness, and lightness of [Tolstoy’s] Platon Karataev, of the spontaneity of the muzhik stock, of Vladimir and Kostroma, of the Volga region and our insatiable fields.” The “broad Russian nature” was, of course, about “hooliganism, drunkenness, gratuitous mischievousness, idleness, and indifference to organized work and culture,” but it was also about “the huge reserves of fresh, unspent strength and powerful vital instincts; the blooming health; the wealth and variety of thoughts and emotions.” Both Tolstoy and Lenin had possessed it, and both had been the greater for it.³⁵

This view was unacceptable to the rationalist (Calvinist) wing of the Party. According to one of Voronsky’s most consistent opponents, Platon Kerzhentsev, what the Party needed was “healthy literature,” and what proletarian readers needed to learn was English-style “love of responsibility.” And according to the concluding paragraph of Bukharin’s “Angry Notes,”

What we need is literature for healthy people who march in the midst of real life: brave builders who know life and are disgusted by the rot, mold, morbidity, drunken tears, sloppiness, self-importance, and saintly idiocy. The greatest figures of the bourgeoisie were not drunken geniuses like Verlain, but such giants as Goethe, Hegel, and Beethoven, who knew how to work. The greatest geniuses of the proletariat—Marx, Engels, and Lenin—were great workers, with extraordinary work ethic. Let us stay away from the martyred “poor in spirit,” the holy fools for Christ’s sake, and the café “geniuses for an hour”! Let us stick closer to the wonderful life that is flourishing all around us, closer to the masses remaking the world!³⁶

The rest was up to Averbakh’s RAPP and the Press Section of the Central Committee, headed at the time by Sergei Gusev (Yakov Drabkin, the father of Sverdlov’s last secretary, Elizaveta Drabkina). In April 1927, Voronsky lost influence over the editorial policy of Red Virgin Soil, and on October 13, 1927, the Politburo removed him from the board. His friendship with Trotsky had contributed to the outcome.³⁷

■ ■ ■

Of the Party’s three main tasks of the 1920s—suppressing the enemy, converting the heathen, and disciplining the faithful—the third was by far the most important. As Bukharin reminded the Party in 1922, soon after the introduction of NEP and the banning of internal “factions,” “unity of will” had always been the key to Bolshevism:

What the Philistines of opportunism considered “antidemocratic,” “conspiratorial,” “personal dictatorship,” “stupid intolerance,” and so on, was, in fact, the best possible organizing principle. The selection of a group of like-minded people burning with the same revolutionary passion while being totally united in their views was the first and most necessary condition for a successful struggle. This condition was fulfilled by means of a merciless persecution of all deviations from orthodox Bolshevism. This merciless persecution and constant self-purging welded the core party group into a clenched fist that no force in the world could pry open.

The core group of leaders was surrounded by a wide circle of disciplined “cadres”:

The harsh discipline of Bolshevism, the Spartan unity of its ranks, its “factional cohesion” even during the moments of temporary cohabitation with the Mensheviks, the extreme uniformity of its views, and the centralization of all its ranks have always been the most characteristic features of our Party. All the Party members were extremely faithful to the Party: “Party patriotism,” the extraordinary passion with which Party directives were carried out, and the ferocious struggle against enemy groups wherever they could be found—in the factories, at rallies, in clubs, even in prisons—made our Party into a sort of revolutionary monastic order. This is why the Bolshevik type was so unsympathetic to all the liberal and reformist groups, to everything “leaderless,” “soft,” “generous,” and “tolerant.”

And this is why Christ, according to the Revelation of St. John, was going to spit the lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—out of his mouth. Growing up on Bolshaia Ordynka, across the Drainage Canal from the Swamp, Bukharin had read the Apocalypse “carefully, from cover to cover.” His article on Party discipline ends with the following words: “Having survived a terrible civil war, famine, and pestilence, this great Red country is getting on its feet, and the trumpet of victory is sounding its call for the working class of the entire world, and the colonial slaves and coolies to rise up for the mortal battle against capital. And at the head of that countless army, under glorious flags cut through by bullets and bayonets, there marches the courageous phalanx of battle-scarred warriors. It marches in front of everyone, it calls on everyone, it directs everyone. Its name is: the Iron Cohort of the Proletarian Revolution, the Russian Communist Party.”³⁸

At a time when the Party was gathering strength before the final battle, the challenge was all the greater. “The more our Party grows,” wrote the “Party’s Conscience,” Aron Solts, in 1924, “the harder it is to preserve the comradely relations that were formed during the common struggle, but also the more necessary, and the comrades must feel and understand all the more strongly what is needed in order to maintain such voluntary discipline. It is easier to preserve good, comradely relations when there are twenty of us than when we are a group of eighty thousand, as is the case in the Moscow party organization.” Sects in power tend to become churches, and churches tend to become more hierarchical and less exclusive (or, as the Bolsheviks put it, “bureaucratized”), especially at a time when the swamp “engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a massive scale.” In order to remain an iron cohort, the Party had to heed Lenin’s call: “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.”³⁹

The first precondition for internal unity was a strict membership policy. The Bolshevik rites of admission were similar to those of the Puritans. A preliminary screening by the Party cell’s bureau (the congregation’s elders) was followed by a public confession before a general assembly. Candidates presented their spiritual histories and answered questions from the audience. The point was to demonstrate the genuineness of the conversion by presenting a detailed account of one’s earthly career as well as the inner doubts, comforts, temptations, and blessings attendant on the process of regeneration. Witnesses vouched for the candidates’ character and corroborated certain parts of their accounts; the interrogation centered on errors, omissions, and inconsistencies. The principal innovation introduced by the Bolsheviks was the division of all candidates into three categories according to social origin: “proletarians” were more naturally virtuous than “peasants,” who were more naturally virtuous than “others.” The principal innovation introduced by the New Bolsheviks, as distinct from the Old ones, was the relatively low priority given to scriptural knowledge. Before the Revolution, proletarian Party members had needed to become intellectuals; under the dictatorship of the proletariat, most Party intellectuals had to become proletarians of one sort or another (or “Averbakhs,” as Voronsky put it). The only exceptions were the original Old Bolsheviks, who presided, at least nominally, over the dictatorship of the proletariat.⁴⁰

Within the Party, discipline was maintained by means of regular “checkups” or purges by special committees and constant mutual surveillance by rank-and-file members. As Walzer wrote of the Puritans who had passed various tests of godliness, “Those who remained were drawn into the strange, time-consuming activities of the Puritan congregation: diligently taking notes at sermons, attending endless meetings, associating intimately and continously with men and women who were after all not relatives and, above all, submitting to the discipline and zealous watchfulness of the godly. Puritanism required not only a pitch of piety, but a pitch of activism and involvement.”⁴¹

Bolshevism required the same thing—or, as Gusev, Voronsky’s nemesis, put it at the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925, “Lenin used to teach us that every Party member should be a Cheka agent—that is, that he should watch and inform.” But Bolshevism was in a difficult position: “If we suffer from one thing,” continued Gusev, “it is that we do not do enough informing.” The Party ruled over a vast empire, most residents of which knew little of Bolshevism; it believed that the entry into the first circle of the kingdom of freedom (“socialism in one country”) was possible only after most of those residents had converted to Bolshevism; and it assumed that the most promising converts were workers and peasants, who combined the purity of Jesus’s target audience (“I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children”) with the “backwardness” that made them susceptible to “that contagion, that plague, those ulcers that socialism had inherited from capitalism.” The Bolsheviks had to keep expanding their missionary work, keep producing new missionaries, and keep recruiting new untutored members, who did not do enough informing and did not have enough resistance to contagion.⁴²

Bolshevism required a pitch of activism and involvement, but it also required strict top-down policing. It could not afford to rely solely on the daily public confessions and mutual criticism sessions common among coresidential sectarians (such as the Shakers, Harmonists, and Oneida Communists), or on the mutual “instruction and admonition” practiced by the New England Puritan congregations (whose salvation did not depend on the conversion of other settlers, let alone the Indians). The Party was a large bureacracy with a monopoly on state power and special access to scarce goods, which tried to remain cohesive and exclusive even as it continued to offer substantial material benefits to potential proletarian recruits. Increasingly, Solts’s “voluntary discipline” had to be manufactured and monitored by special agencies, not least by the Party Control Commission over which Solts presided.

Party “purges” were periodic restagings of admissions rituals with the purpose of cleaning out the scum that had crawled back in or had been missed at the time of joining. Most of those reprimanded or excommunicated were new members, and most infractions had to do with character flaws and lack of self-discipline: “squabbling,” “excessive consumption,” sexual license, drunkenness, violations of Party discipline (“in the form of nonattendance at Party meetings, nonpayment of membership fees, etc.”), nepotism, careerism, embezzlement, indebtedness, and “bureaucratism.” Related to them was “participation in religious rites,” which was common among peasant members and considered a sign of backwardness, not genuine apostasy. More serious were “links with alien elements” (especially by marriage). The least common, and by far the most dangerous, were acts of willful heterodoxy.⁴³

Within sects, different interpretations of revealed truth may lead to schisms and the formation of new sects. Every orthodoxy presupposes the possibility of heresies (“choice” in the original Greek), and all true prophets must warn of false ones (“for false messiahs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect”). When one sect acquires the monopoly on political power—by building its own state, as in the case of Islam and Taiping, or taking over an existing polity, as in the case of Christianity, Bolshevism, and the Taliban—heresy can finally be suppressed. The intensity of persecution depends on the state of the orthodoxy: the greater the millenarian expectation and the more beleagered the elect, the greater the need to expose the deceivers and spit out the lukewarm.⁴⁴

The Bolshevik equivalent of the First Council of Nicaea (the banning of factions at the Tenth Party Congress) coincided with the postponement of the final fulfillment. The politics of NEP consisted of the Central Committee’s defense of the reconciled, routinized, and bureaucratized status quo from a variety of reformations that urged the return to the original millenarian maximalism and sectarian egalitarianism. The Left (the Trotsky opposition, Kamenev-Zinoviev opposition, and United Trotsky-Kamenev-Zinoviev Opposition, among others) kept returning to Lenin’s warning about small-scale production engendering capitalism “daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a massive scale,” and urging the immediate uprooting of every whit of every plant while inveighing against “the division of the Party into the secretarial hierarchy and the ‘laity.’” Names, members, and arguments of various oppositions kept changing, but the core claims remained the same: NEP as a retreat from socialism had to end, and the Party as the locomotive of history had to stop being “bureaucratic.”⁴⁵

Substantively, “the question of questions” (as NEP’s Grand Inquisitor, Bukharin, put it) was what to do with the peasants. Bukharin kept warning against a return to “War Communism” and the desire, on the part of some “eccentrics,” “to declare a St. Bartholomew’s Night against the peasant bourgeoisie.” The opposition kept accusing “the Stalin-Bukharin group” of “denying the capitalist elements in the development of the contemporary village and minimizing the class differentiation among the peasantry.”⁴⁶

Both sides used statistics produced by Soviet agrarian economists, who were themselves divided into two factions analogous to the Voronsky and Averbakh camps in literary criticism. The Organization-Production school, rooted in prerevolutionary agronomy and led by the director of the Institute of Agricultural Economics at the Timiriazev Academy, A. V. Chayanov (whose father had been born a serf), argued that the Russian peasant household was not capitalist in nature; that its purpose was not to maximize profit but to satisfy its members’ subsistence needs; that the main cause of rural differentiation was the ratio of workers to consumers (which varied according to family composition); and that the development of capitalism in the Russian village was both unlikely and undesirable. The Agrarian-Marxist school, composed of young Party members and led by the director of the Agrarian Section of the Communist Academy, Lev Kritsman (who had never lived in a village), argued that rural differentiation was caused by unequal access to the means of production; that the Soviet peasantry was becoming increasingly polarized between rural capitalists and agricultural wage laborers; that, given the Party’s monopoly on power, this polarization was a good thing (but probably not as good as the opposition claimed); and that the solution to the “question of questions” consisted of either the victory of socialism as a result of the growth of the cooperative movement (as Lenin predicted in 1923), or the victory of socialism as a result of the victory of capitalism (as Lenin predicted in 1899).⁴⁷

The key to the answers to all questions (as Lenin taught) was who had state power. All the Bolsheviks—the various oppositions and the orthodox—agreed that there was only one truth based on the one true revelation, and that any deviation from that truth was by definition “bourgeois.” All the Bolsheviks agreed—and kept repeating on every occasion—that there was nothing more important than Party unity, and that Party unity was never more important than on that particular occasion. As Radek wrote on behalf of United (“Bolshevik-Leninist”) Opposition in August 1926, “the opposition cannot possibly defend the existence of factions: in fact, it is their most resolute opponent.”

How was one to know which views were true and which were factional? One measure was the doctrinal orthodoxy of one’s views. According to Radek, “every step away from the class position of the proletariat toward the position of the petty bourgeoisie engenders and must engender resistance on the part of the proletarian elements within the Party.” The only reliable way to determine the class position of the proletariat was to determine what Lenin’s position would have been. Bukharin, who had recovered from his own “infantile leftism” a few years earlier, accused the opposition of trying to restore War Communism, from which Lenin had “retreated” in the direction of NEP.⁴⁸

What was to be done? In Lenin’s absence, who could tell what Lenin would have said? Who was, in fact, fighting “not only against the swamp, but also against those who were turning toward the swamp”? At the Fourteenth Party Congress, Filipp Goloshchekin offered a summary of what provincial Party officials expected from their Central Committee. “Comrade Lenin has died, and none of you can pretend to fill his place. Every one of you has his flaws, but every one of you also has many qualities that make you a leader. Only together can you stand in for Lenin: we demand that you work together in leading our Party.”⁴⁹

The leaders could not work together because they continued to disagree about where they should be leading the Party—and who should be leading the leaders. Claims of loyalty to Lenin’s ideas could be reinforced by claims of previous physical proximity to Lenin, but because Lenin had not appointed a successor and had said disparaging things about all of his close associates, most arguments about original discipleship turned back into arguments about ideas. Three months after signing “the Letter of the Forty-Six” (which objected to “the division of the Party into the secretarial hierarchy and the ‘laity’”) and one week before Lenin’s death, Osinsky had defended Trotsky against the Kamenev-Zinoviev-Stalin Central Committee: “Comrade Trotsky was absolutely right in telling these sinless apostles of Leninism, who have proclaimed themselves to be Lenin’s apostles and have turned Lenin’s words into holy writ, that ‘no apostleship can guarantee the correctness of the political line. If you truly follow Comrade Lenin’s line, then you are Leninists. But the fact that you are his disciples does not mean anything in and of itself. Marx had disciples who later vanished. You, too, may end up vanishing.’”⁵⁰

Another way to ensure legitimate succession and determine the correctness of the political line was to hold a vote. “Bolshevik” meant “majority”; the principle of “democratic centralism” consisted of the submission of the minority to the majority; and the most common argument against oppositions was that they did not represent the majority of the Party. Ultimately, however, the majority had to be obeyed only if it was on the path of struggle and not the path of conciliation. At the Fourteenth Party Congress in late 1925, Lenin’s widow, Krupskaia (who had been told repeatedly that physical proximity to the founder did not mean anything in and of itself), reminded the delegates that they were not “English jurists”: “For us, Marxists, truth is what corresponds to reality. Vladimir Ilich used to say: ‘Marx’s teaching is invincible because it is true.’ Our Congress must occupy itself with the search for a correct line. Such is its task. We cannot comfort ourselves by saying that the majority is always right. In the history of our Party there have been congresses when the majority was not right. Think of the Stockholm congress. The majority should not bask in the glory of being the majority; it should be impartial in its search for the correct solution. If it is correct, it will set our party on the right path.” Party congresses were not about voting: they were about a higher truth emerging from a series of public confessions. In Krupskaia’s formulation, “everyone should tell the congress as a matter of conscience what has been perturbing and tormenting them lately.” Bukharin, for one, had compounded the damage done by his conciliatory policies by “denying them three times.”⁵¹

Two years later, at the Fifteenth Party Congress, Krupskaia rejoined the majority and attributed the existence of opposition to the fact that some people had lost their class “intuition.” The Party represented “what the masses were feeling”; the Party was represented by its Central Committee; any refusal to obey the Central Committee was a betrayal of what the masses were feeling. In the final analysis, the only way to stay on the right path was to follow the leaders. As Bukharin explained, one of the most fundamental principles of the Bolshevik Party was “absolute loyalty to its leading institutions.” This was, of course, true of many institutionalized sectarian communities: bishops have the monopoly on the correct interpretation of the original revelation because they are bishops. The charisma of office does not depend on the method of investiture: the pope does not owe his role as St. Peter’s rightful successor to the fact of having been elected. Nor is St. Peter disqualified from his position as Jesus’s rightful successor by the fact that he has denied him three times.⁵²

The general recognition of the legitimacy of official succession must lead to “absolute loyalty to leading institutions.” As Bukharin put it on October 26, 1927, at the height of his struggle with the United Opposition (which brought together the leaders of various previous oppositions, including Trotsky, Radek, Kamenev, and Zinoviev), “it is either one or the other. Let the comrades from the opposition come out and say openly: we do not believe that what we have in this country is a proletarian dictatorship! But let them not get angry with us, then, if we tell them that their statement that they wish to defend such a country from an external enemy is vile hypocrisy.”⁵³

Party members who opposed the Party leadership became indistinguishable from non-Party members; non-Party members might include former Party members; former Party members were expelled Party members; “and an expelled Party member,” as Goloshchekin put it, “is someone spat out by the Party, and thus an enemy of the Party.” Any disagreement with the Central Committee was, objectively, an alliance with the enemy. As Bukharin put it, “all kinds of scum is grasping at the opposition’s coattails, trying to sneak through the cracks and proclaim itself their allies…. That is why Comrade Kamenev was absolutely right with regard to today’s situation when, in January 1925, he said that the Trotsky opposition had become “the symbol of all the anti-Communist forces.”⁵⁴

Bukharin was absolutely right with regard to Kamenev and all the other oppositionists: they, too, were against “factions.” The fact that they thought that the Stalin-Bukharin orthodoxy was heresy did not change the consensus that all heresies were treason. As Bukharin’s closest associate, Aleksei Rykov, said at the Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927, “Comrade Kamenev ended his speech by saying that he does not separate himself from those oppositionists who are now in prison. I must begin my speech by saying that I do not separate myself from those revolutionaries who have put some supporters of the opposition in prison for their anti-Party and anti-Soviet activities. (Tumultuous, prolonged applause. Shouts of “hurray.” The delegates rise.)” It was the Party’s tradition to “forbid the defense of certain views”; the only way for an oppositionist to remain in the Party was to formally “recant the views” rejected by the Party. As for those who did not, the congress, in the words of the secretary of the Moscow Control Commission and former head of the Cheka Investigations Department, Grigory Moroz, “would have to snip off the heads of the arrogant oppositionist noblemen who are taunting the Party.”⁵⁵

On November 7, 1927, on the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, Moroz presided over the dispersal of an opposition demonstration organized by Ivar Smilga (who had remained a close associate of Trotsky since the trial of the Cossack commander Filipp Mironov). Smilga; his wife, Nadezhda Smilga-Poluian; and their two daughters, aged five and eight, were living in a large four-room apartment in the Fourth House of Soviets, four stories above the Central Executive Committee Visitor’s Office and just across Mokhovaia from the Kremlin. On the morning of the 7th, Smilga, Kamenev, and Muralov (Arosev’s commander during the 1917 Moscow uprising) had hung a banner “Let’s Fulfill Lenin’s Testament” and portraits of Lenin, Trotsky, and Zinoviev from the apartment windows. As the three described the events later that day in a letter to the Politburo, “Comrade Smilga’s wife, a Party member, refused to let a group of strangers, who wanted to pull down the ‘criminal’ banners, into the apartment. Several individuals sent to the roof for the purpose attempted to tear the banners down with long hooks. The women inside the apartment thwarted their heroic efforts with mops…. Eventually, about fifteen to twenty Central Committee school officers and Military Academy cadets broke down the door of Comrade Smilga’s apartment, smashing it to bits, and forcibly entered the rooms.”⁵⁶

Nadezhda Poluian then took the two girls to the apartment of her brother Yan, who lived in the same house (but was not on speaking terms with Smilga for doctrinal reasons). Smilga and several other opposition leaders walked two blocks down the street and attempted to address the crowds from the balcony of the Twenty-Seventh House of Soviets, on the corner of Tverskaia and Okhotnyi Riad (the former Paris Hotel). Soon, cars arrived, bringing Moroz, the secretary of the Red Presnia district Riutin, and several other officials. As Smilga wrote three days later, “Under the direction of the newly arrived authorities, the crowd that had assembled under the balcony began to whistle, cry ‘Down with them!’ and ‘Beat the opposition!’ and throw rocks, sticks, cucumbers, tomatoes, etc. at comrades Smilga, Preobrazhensky, and the others. At the same time, some people standing on the balcony of Comrade Podvoisky’s apartment, located across the street in the First House of Soviets, attacked comrades Smilga and Preobrazhensky by throwing ice, potatoes, and firewood.”⁵⁷

District Secretary Riutin ordered the militia man on duty to unlock the street door, and several dozen people broke into the apartment and began beating up the opposition. At the head of the crowd, according to Trotsky, was “the notorious Boris Volin, whose moral character needs no introduction.” Smilga claimed to have appealed to Moroz, who allegedly responded: “Shut up, or it’ll get worse.” The oppositionists were locked up in one of the rooms of the house, where they were guarded by Boris Shumiatsky, the liberator of Mongolia. A little while later, they escaped from their guard, ran across the street, and disappeared into the Second House of Soviets.⁵⁸

At the Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927, the United Opposition was formally defeated. Ninety-eight oppositionists, including Radek and Smilga, were expelled from the Party. Some, including Voronsky, were expelled a bit later; many, including Radek, Smilga, and, a year later, Voronsky, were sent into exile. The secret police official in charge of the operation was Yakov Agranov, a member of the Brik-Mayakovsky salon. One of the expelled oppositionists (and one of Voronsky’s closest friends), Sergei Zorin, wrote to Bukharin: “Be careful, Comrade Bukharin! You have had many arguments in our Party. You will probably have more. Watch out, or, courtesy of your current comrades, you too will get Comrade Agranov as an arbiter. Some examples are contagious.”⁵⁹

■ ■ ■

Zorin’s warning would come true much sooner than he (or Bukharin) might have imagined. Within months of the defeat of the United Opposition, Stalin would emerge from Bukharin’s shadow, adopt a radical version of the opposition’s program, and usher in a second “heroic period” of the Russian Revolution. Lenin had described NEP as a “retreat” followed by “a most determined offensive.” The time for that offensive had come. Lenin had predicted that “some day, this movement will accelerate at the pace we can only dream of now.” That day—the real real day—had finally arrived.⁶⁰

Early signs of the return of the apocalypse, in 1927, would include the massacre of the Chinese Communists in Shanghai, the police raid on the Soviet trade mission in London, the assassination of the Soviet ambassador in Poland, the grain procurement crisis in the villages, and the “uniting” of former oppositionists into a secret army of false prophets. Over the next two years, the movement toward the final fulfillment would accelerate at the kind of pace that Lenin could only dream of. All true prophecies are self-fulfilling: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find” (or, in the words of a Soviet song, “those who desire will receive; those who seek will always find”). On closer inspection, recalcitrant grain producers would turn out to be kulaks; skeptical bourgeois experts would turn out to be wreckers; and foreign Socialists would turn out to be Social-Fascists. By “the year of the great breakthrough,” 1929, it would become clear that the last battle would be won within a decade or two. In 1931, Stalin would be able to say: “There are no fortresses that the Bolsheviks cannot take. We have achieved a number of difficult goals. We have defeated capitalism. We have taken power. We have built a large socialist industry. We have set the middle peasant along the path of socialism. We have finished the most important part of our construction plan. There is not much left to do: just to study technology and master science. When we have done that, we will achieve the kind of acceleration we can only dream of now.”⁶¹

The great breakthrough was not War Communism because what was appropriate now had been premature then, but it was a war, and it was the last stop before Communism (which Kerzhentsev, in his The Bolshevik’s Pamphlet of 1931, defined as “the only way for mankind to save itself from death, degeneracy, and decline”). The great breakthrough was about the simultaneous violent fulfillment of two different prophecies: the long-overdue one concerning the creation of socialism’s economic base and the medium-range one concerning the complete abolition of private property and total destruction of all class enemies. On the eve of the last war against capitalism, the steel and concrete foundations of socialism were to be laid, the wreckers and bureaucrats were to be routed, the rural kulaks were to be “liquidated,” the rural non-kulaks were to join the workers, the workers were to become “conscious,” and all consciousness was to become socialist. “Either we do it or we will be crushed.”⁶²

Bukharin and Rykov, having just presided over the humiliation and expulsion of the Leftists, were caught off guard. The orthodoxy they represented had suddenly become heresy; hard realism had become “appeasement”; and the center had become the “Right.” Forming an opposition was out of the question, especially at a time when—everyone agreed—war was imminent and enemies were everywhere. As Bukharin said to a hostile Central Committee audience on April 18, 1929 (after the whole point had become moot): “The old forms of resolving intra-Party disagreements by means of quasi-factional struggle are currently unacceptable and objectively impossible.” The “Rightists” argued and schemed behind closed doors and wrote scholarly articles about Lenin’s views on the worker-peasant alliance, but they kept silent in public because they had just defeated the United Opposition by arguing that any disagreement with Party leadership was tantamount to treason. As Bukharin explained, after the fact, “we kept silent because, had we appeared at some conference, rally, or Party cell meeting, a discussion would have started, and we would have been accused of initiating it. We were in the position of people who are hounded for not explaining and not justifying themselves, but who would be hounded even more for attempting to explain, attempting to justify themselves.”⁶³

In July 1928, soon after the magnitude of the coming breakthrough had become clear, Bukharin went to see the disgraced Kamenev and told him, confidentially, that Stalin was intent on imposing “tribute” on the peasantry, unleashing a civil war, and “drowning uprisings in blood.” As Kamenev wrote later that day, “[Bukharin] looks extremely agitated and exhausted…. His tone is one of absolute hatred toward Stalin and of a total breakup. At the same time, he is agonizing, wondering whether to speak openly or not. If he does, they will cut him down based on the schism provision. If he does not, they will cut him down with their petty chess game…. He is extraordinarily shaken. His lips keep trembling from nervousness. Sometimes he looks like a man who knows he is doomed.”⁶⁴

Stalin won the chess game. While Bukharin was agonizing, Bukharin’s allies in the Trade Union Council and Moscow Party organization (including the organizers of the “Beat the Opposition” raid from the previous year, Riutin and Moroz) were removed and reassigned. Bukharin’s would-be allies from among the former oppositionists were neither able nor willing to offer support. Kamenev’s notes of their secret meeting soon reached the recently exiled Trotsky, who had them published as a leaflet. The text was edited by the recently retired Voronsky.⁶⁵

Stalin won the argument, too. In a sect that defined itself in opposition to “appeasement,” prided itself on its readiness for violence, and looked forward to an imminent universal slaughter, Bukharin’s “Notes of an Economist” (as he called his September 1928 amillennial manifesto) did not generate much enthusiasm. Many Party members—both Old Bolsheviks and young Civil War veterans—had spent the NEP years suffering from “neurasthenia,” “degeneration,” gothic nightmares, “crawling scum,” spilt milk and honey, and “cozy, worn little slippers under the bed.” Most were ready for the last and decisive battle.

Different reformations hark back to different sacred origins. Christian reformers have nothing but a small egalitarian sect to go back to; radicals insist on replicating the original design; others improvise temporary solutions until such time as “there is neither need nor use for princes, kings, lords, the sword, or law” (as Martin Luther put it). Muslim reformers have a sprawling state to go back to: the question is how faithful to Mohammed’s caliphate that state should be. Lenin, like Mohammed, left behind a sprawling state, but he had called that state a profane compromise in need of future acceleration at a pace he could only dream of. The Bolshevik reformers of 1928–29 (including Bukharin, who did not doubt the need for acceleration) had nothing but Lenin’s state to go back to: the radicals yearned for the “heroic period of the Great Russian Revolution” and urged a better, fuller War Communism; the moderates stuck to “Lenin’s Political Testament” and called for a readjustment of the NEP compromise. The argument was about what Lenin had really meant; the mood of the faithful and most of Lenin’s legacy favored the radicals. On November 26, 1929, after the Central Committee vowed to annihilate peasant agriculture within a matter of months, Bukharin, Rykov, and their ally Tomsky published a formal recantation. “Admitting our mistakes,” they wrote, “we pledge to make every effort to conduct, along with the rest of the Party, a resolute struggle against all deviations from the general Party line, above all the Right deviation and appeasement, in order to overcome all difficulties and bring about the complete and earliest possible victory of socialist construction.”⁶⁶

At the Sixteenth Party Congress, in June–July 1930, the Rightists were asked to repent properly. As Postyshev said, in the very first speech of the discussion session, “prove, through your actions, the sincerity of your admission of mistakes, the sincerity of your declaration. Prove that it was not a maneuver similar to what the Trotskyites do. The Party has asked a very tough question, and comrades Rykov, Tomsky, and Bukharin must give the Congress an unambiguous answer (applause).” “The Trotskyites” had become shorthand for persistent apostates. Bukharin claimed to be sick and stayed at his dacha in Crimea. Rykov admitted his own mistakes but refused to renounce Bukharin. “I am responsible for what I have done, for the mistakes I have made, and I am not going to use Bukharin as a scapegoat. You cannot ask that of me. I, not Bukharin, should be punished for the mistakes I have made.” Several hours before Bukharin and Anna Larina spent their “thrilling, romantic Crimean evening” together, Bukharin received a postcard from Rykov. The last paragraph, according to Larina, said: “Come back healthy. At the congress, we talked about you with dignity. Know that I love you the way even a woman passionately in love with you never could. Yours, Aleksei.”⁶⁷

Tomsky made a full confession, stating that his main errors had been, first, to assume that the reconstruction of “the whole life of the country” was a matter of mere “technical and industrial reconstruction,” and, second, to forget that “any more or less long-term opposition against the Party line and its leadership inevitably leads, and will lead, to an opposition against the Party as such.” The audience did not seem convinced. Tomsky persevered:

The Party has the right to ask us: how sincere are our admissions of mistakes? Isn’t this a maneuver? (Artiukhina: “That’s right!”) Isn’t there a danger of a relapse? Some people even say: We don’t believe words, words are meaningless, ephemeral, hot air, didn’t Lenin once say, “do not take their word for it,” and so on? But if we interpret Lenin as crudely as some comrades have been doing here at the congress, then we must stop talking altogether. What is the point of talking? (laughter) …

At a certain point, I, along with Zinoviev, told Trotsky: “Bow your head before the Party.” Later, I said the same to Zinoviev, who was with Trotsky, “Bow your head before the Party, Grigory.” I have made my share of mistakes, I am not ashamed of that, and I am in no way ashamed of bowing my head before the Party. I think that, in my speech, I have admitted my mistakes with all the necessary sincerity and frankness. But it seems to me, comrades, that it is rather difficult to be in the role of a permanent penitent. Some comrades seem to be saying: repent, repent without end, do nothing but repent (laughter).⁶⁸

Tomsky’s difficulty was resolved by the Leningrad Party Secretary (and new Politburo member) Sergei Kirov, who said that true repentance consisted in acknowledging that any disagreement with the Party leadership was tantamount to enemy sabotage. “What we needed to hear from comrades Rykov and Tomsky is not just the admission of their mistakes and the renunciation of their platform, but the admission that it was, as I said, a kulak program, which, in the final analysis, would have led to the death of socialist construction.” But could one admit something like that and be forgiven? And what about the Left, whose sin had consisted in struggling against the Right when the Right was still the center?⁶⁹

Most of the original Leftists were already in exile when they learned of the victory of their long-held views. Trotsky admitted that Stalin’s policies were “undoubtedly, an attempt to approach our position,” but argued that “in politics, what matters is not only what is being done, but also who does it and how.” Stalin may have had something similar in mind when he sent Trotsky to Alma-Ata (and later to Turkey), Radek to Tobolsk, Smilga to Narym, and Vladimir Smirnov, a veteran oppositionist and Osinsky’s brother-in-law, to the northern Urals. At the Ninth Party Congress in 1920, Osinsky and Smirnov had still been leading the “Democratic Centralist” opposition against centralization, “bureaucratization,” and the employment of bourgeois experts; Osinsky later rejoined the general line (if not without his usual irritable reservations), but Smirnov remained an irreconcilable proletarian purist and was punished accordingly. On January 1, 1928, Osinsky wrote a letter to Stalin:

Dear Comrade Stalin:

Yesterday I learned that V. M. Smirnov was being exiled for three years to a place in the Urals (apparently, to the Cherdyn district), and today I ran into Sapronov, who told me that he was being sent to the Arkhangelsk Province for the same period of time. It seems they are required to leave as early as Tuesday, but Smirnov just had half his teeth removed, in the expectation of having them replaced with false ones, so now he will be going to the northern Urals without his teeth.

When Lenin kicked Martov out of the country, he made sure he had everything he needed and even worried whether he had his fur coat and galoshes with him. And that was because Martov had once been a revolutionary. Our former Party comrades, who are now being sent into exile, have committed a grave political error, but they have never stopped being revolutionaries—this cannot be denied. Not only will they be able to return to the Party some day (despite the silly nonsense they have been spouting about a new party and about the old party having outlived its usefulness), but, if hard times come, they will be able to serve it as well as they did in October.

The question arises, therefore: is it really necessary to send them to the North—adopting, in effect, a policy of their spiritual and physical annihilation? I do not think so. I do not understand why they cannot either be 1) sent abroad, as Lenin did in the case of Martov, or 2) settled in the interior, in places with a warmer climate, where Smirnov, for example, would be able to write a good book about credit.

This policy of exile produces nothing but unnecessary resentment among people who cannot yet be considered lost and for whom the Party has sometimes been more of a stepmother, than a mother. It lends credence to the mutterings that the present regime is similar to the old police state, and that “those who made the revolution are now all in prison and exile, while power rests in the hands of different people.” Such mutterings are very bad for us, so why give them extra ammunition? All the more so because our attitude toward our political opponents from the camp we call “socialist” has so far been characterized by an effort to weaken the influence of their activity, not punish them for that activity.

I do not know whether these measures are being taken with your knowledge and consent, and so I thought it was important to inform you and offer my view. I am writing on my own initiative, without their knowledge.

With comradely greetings, Osinsky.

The letter was returned to Osinsky, with an accompanying note from Stalin.

Comrade Osinsky,

If you stop to think, you will probably understand that you have no right, moral or otherwise, to censure the Party or take upon yourself the role of an arbiter between the Party and the opposition. I am returning your letter, as offensive to the Party. As for your concern about Smirnov and other oppositionists, you have no reason to doubt that the Party will do everything possible and necessary in that regard. J. Stalin, 3 January 1928.

The following day, Osinsky responded.

Comrade Stalin. I do not need any time to think about whether I can be the arbiter between the Party and the opposition, or anyone else. Your interpretation of my point of view and my general position is fundamentally wrong.

I did not realize that the decision about the exile had been taken by a Party agency and honestly assumed otherwise. I did not find it among the Politburo protocols. Perhaps it was classified. My letter to you was entirely personal. I wrote it (as I am writing this one) on my portable typewriter, and I personally delivered it to the Central Committee. I would have dropped it at your home address, but, when I tried to do that in 1924, I was told to go to your secretariat, even though the matter was top secret. I wrote “personal” on this letter, on the assumption that your personal letters were not read by your secretaries.

My general position is that I consider it within my rights to have independent opinions on some issues, and occasionally to express those opinions (sometimes—in the most sensitive cases—only personally, to you or to you and Rykov, as I did during the congress, as you will recall).

In recent days, I have been taught two lessons in this regard. In connection with the grain procurement, Rykov told me that I ought to have lead poured down my throat, and now you have returned my letter. Well, if that, too, is unacceptable, I will have to bear it in mind.

Wouldn’t it be much simpler to let me go abroad to work on my book for a year and be relieved of my bothersome presence entirely?

With comradely greetings, Osinsky.⁷⁰

Osinsky may have been within his rights to have independent opinions “on some issues,” but he was not within his rights to have independent opinions on matters of Party policy. As he had written in 1917, there was no greater pleasure or duty for a Bolshevik than to dissolve his personality in the “sacred fury” of the proletariat’s collective will. That will—then and now—was embodied in the Party, and the will of the Party—despite the silly nonsense the oppositionists were spouting—was embodied in the decisions taken by its leaders. Ultimately, only the Party’s leaders could tell where “some issues” ended and Party policy began. Ultimately, according to Osinsky’s own logic, he had no right to have independent opinons about anything—any more than he had the right, moral or otherwise, to make distinctions between Stalin the person and Stalin the general secretary of the Party’s Central Committee. Such distinctions, common among cornered oppositionists and their sympathizers, were obviously offensive to the Party (and any other sectarian or priestly institution). If Osinsky had stopped to think, he would have understood that a letter about how to deal with oppositionists could not possibly be personal. He would have understood that no letter to Stalin could possibly be personal. As Bukharin’s disgraced ally, Tomsky, would later say in his confession to the Sixteenth Party Congress,

We have seen how, in conditions of fierce class struggle, in a large Party intimately connected to the broad masses, the particular can sometimes become the general, and the personal can become the political. We have seen how ostensibly private conversations of politicians become political facts, so that if two people, one of whom is a member of the top leadership and the other one is, too, get together and talk about political matters, even in the course of a private conversation, then those are no longer private conversations. When people standing at the helm of power in the greatest country in a difficult, politically charged moment have private conversations, these private conversations—no matter how many times you say that they are private—become political, not private…. When we fight, we do not fight the way liberals do. They are the ones who separate the personal from the political. Among us, it does not work that way: if your politics are lousy, then you are a lousy, good-for-nothing person, and if your politics are wonderful, then you are a wonderful person.⁷¹

Smirnov was duly sent into exile. Osinsky and his wife, Ekaterina Smirnova, adopted their four-year-old nephew, Rem (Revolution-Engels-Marx). At the time, the Osinskys’ oldest son, Vadim, known as “Dima,” was fifteen and best friends with Sverdlov’s son, Andrei. Both were friendly with Anna Larina. Two and a half years later, when Bukharin returned to Moscow after the Sixteeth Party Congress, he went to visit some of his former allies. Among those present were Andrei Sverdlov and Dima Osinsky. According to another young man who was there: “Still under the impression of what Bukharin had been saying about Stalin, Andrei Sverdlov proclaimed: ‘Koba [Stalin] must be bumped off.’”⁷²

Smilga was exiled at the same time as Smirnov. Smilga’s older daughter, Tatiana, who was eight at the time, remembered a lot of people at the station, her own warm scarf and woolen tights, her father’s massive fur coat and hat, Radek’s words “Farewell, Bear,” and her father’s prickly moustache (he had never kissed her before). Smilga was taken to Narym, but was soon—thanks to Ordzhonikidze—transferred to the less remote Minusinsk, not far from where Lenin had once been exiled. The following summer, Nadezhda and the two girls joined him there. Tatiana remembered intense heat, bouts of dysentery, and frequent dust storms (“when dust whirls around in towers and columns”). Twice she had to run to the local planning office where her father worked: once, to bring him home because he wore glasses and could not see in the dust; and then again, when her mother started crying and could not stop. “He came to see Mother, and they talked about something for a long time. Maybe they reached the conclusion that they should try to do something, rather than just dying quietly like that.” Soon afterward, Nadezhda took the sick girls back to Moscow. Nadezhda’s brother Dmitry Poluian, a high official at the People’s Commissariat of Transportation (and the presiding judge at the trial of Filipp Mironov in 1919), provided a separate train compartment. The following summer, Smilga came down with acute appendicitis and was brought back to the Kremlin hospital for an operation. On July 13, 1929, Pravda published a statement by Smilga, Radek, and Preobrazhensky (the original champion of the “tribute on the peasantry”), in which they announced the abandonment of their opposition and their “full solidarity with the general Party line,” most particularly the policy of industrialization, the creation of collective farms, and the struggle against the kulak, the bureaucracy, Social-Democracy, and the Right (“which, objectively, reflects the unhappiness of the country’s capitalist elements and petty bourgeoisie with the policy of the socialist offensive conducted by the Party”).⁷³

Ivar Smilga in Minusinsk

Nadezhda Smilga-Poluian with the children

Voronsky was arrested on January 10, 1929. After a month-long investigation (conducted by Agranov, whom Voronsky had met at various literary events), he was sentenced to five years in a “political isolation unit,” but Rykov and Ordzhonikidze interfered, and he was sent into exile in Lipetsk instead. He lived there with his mother and was occasionally visited by his wife, daughter, and former literary protégés, including Babel and Pilniak. In one of his letters home, he complained of loneliness and asked for a dog; a friend lent him a “furry, pale-yellow husky with black eyes.” He enjoyed skating, but fell down awkwardly once and damaged his kidney. He continued to work on his memoirs: the first part had been published in Novyi mir; the second part was banned. His wife, Sima Solomonovna, managed to find out that the ban “concerned Novyi mir as a central and widely circulating publication,” and wrote to Molotov asking for a small-print separate edition. Molotov requested the opinion of the head of Agitprop (and one of Voronsky’s most influential “proletarian” opponents), Platon Kerzhentsev. Kerzhentsev wrote that much of the book had been published before “without raising any objections” and that “the Agitation, Propaganda, and Press Department considers it possible to allow a separate printing of Voronsky’s book with the run not to exceed five thousand copies, under the supervision of the chairman of the editorial board of Federatsia Press, Comrade Kanatchikov.”

Kanatchikov, the former Gustav List worker and the only former proletarian among Voronsky’s “proletarian” critics, had since gotten caught up in the Zinoviev opposition, spent a year and a half in exile as a TASS correspondent in Prague, proclaimed his loyalty to Stalin after the Fifteenth Party Congress, been reinstated as a top literary administrator, and published, to great acclaim, the first part of his own autobiography. Kanatchikov did not only comply with Kerzhentsev’s request—he became the main champion of Voronsky’s new work, sponsoring the second printing of In Search of the Water of Life and publishing the short stories and fictionalized memoirs about seminary life that Voronsky wrote in exile. Another former “proletarian” critic of Voronsky, G. Lelevich (Labori Gilelevich Kalmanson), who had also been arrested for opposition activities, wrote to Voronsky—from one place of exile to another—proposing a coauthored Marxist history of Russian literature. Voronsky agreed to write the chapters about Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Tiutchev, Tolstoy, Uspensky, Chekhov, Andreev, and “a few of our contemporaries.” In the fall of 1929, he returned to Moscow for medical consultations, signed a letter renouncing his opposition views, and was pardoned on the spot.⁷⁴

There were many reasons to renounce opposition views—loneliness, boredom, dust storms, small children, ill health—but one of the most important was the desire to rejoin the Party. For lifelong Bolsheviks, there was no truth or meaning outside the Party, and, for most of those expelled, there could be no other party, despite the silly nonsense the handful of remaining apostates continued to spout. The Party was the ontological foundation of the true believer’s universe, the vessel of sacrality on the eve of the end, the only point of support in a world where everything outside the building of socialism was a “fetish” (as Bukharin, following Lenin, put it in 1925). In 1929 and 1930, most Bolsheviks, orthodox and nonorthodox, believed that socialism was finally being built and that the end was near. Trotsky, who shared that belief but could not rejoin the ranks, claimed that “in politics, what matters is not only what is being done, but also who does it and how.” Sometimes, however, what matters in politics is not only who and how, but also what. And sometimes, politics do not matter at all. As Tomsky would tell his confessors at the Sixteenth Party Congress, Bolshevik politics were different from liberal politics in that they left no room for the personal.⁷⁵

On March 7, 1930, three months after his recantation, Bukharin wrote a response to Pope Pius XI’s protest against the persecution of Christianity in the Soviet Union. Bukharin did not claim that the Soviet Union valued “tolerance, freedom of conscience and other good things”: he claimed that the pope did not value them either—or rather, that the pope’s newfound liberalism was a symptom of old age. Quoting from Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologica to the effect that heretics, that is, those who disagree with church authorities, “deserve not only to be separated from the Church by excommunication, but also to be severed from the world by death,” he wrote: “Of course, the popes’ reach is not what it used to be: their former grandeur has faded, and their peacock’s tail has been plucked rather thoroughly by old Dame History. But when this shriveled vampire attempts to spread its claws, when it relies on the still powerful force of imperialist murderers, when it puts on the mask of tolerance, we must remember its executioner’s commandment: a heretic (i.e., anyone who is not a slave of the pope) should be ‘severed from the world by death’”!⁷⁶

The problem for Pius XI was not who and how but what, and the problem for Christianity in general was not that it was a prophecy but that it was a false one, and thus “spiritual prostitution, the ideology of perfidious castrati and pederasts, sheer filth.” The shriveled beast was preparing for one last battle, wrapping itself in “papal robes,” and issuing calls “meant to sound like the trumpet of the apocalyptic archangel.” But the “heroic proletarian army” would not be deceived. “This counterrevolutionary cancan, this cannibalistic howling of lay and church hyenas, accompanied by the jingling of spurs, the rattling of sabers, and the fuming of censers is a ‘moral’ preparation for an attack on the USSR.” In the USSR, meanwhile, “superhuman efforts are being made to lay down, for eternity, the strongest possible, steel-and-concrete foundation for the immense and perfectly shaped house of communism.”⁷⁷

There is little doubt that Bukharin did not believe in the existence of a third, lukewarm, force and that he knew which side he was on. The first thing Voronsky did when he came back from exile was to meet with Stalin and propose the creation of a new literary journal called War. (Stalin agreed: the journal appeared first as the Literary Section of the Red Army and Navy and then as The Banner [Znamya]). In January 1928, when NEP still seemed unshakeable, Osinsky had sulked behind the tall fence of his dacha; in June 1931, he was trying to determine whether, by the end of the second Five-Year Plan, “the proletariat as a class will complete its development, arrive at the realization of its tasks and interests …, master its own power, and, having become a class an und für sich, turn into its own negation.” (His answer was that it was a complicated matter and that he needed to devote himself “to the revelation, for everyone, of the dialectic method, which is hardly much less important than the building of 518 factories.”) In a private letter to his lover and fellow true believer, Anna Shaternikova, he wrote that the growth of Soviet factories gave him as much personal pleasure as the thought that his son Dima would soon become an engineer:⁷⁸

I am saying that it gives me personal pleasure not because I am an individualist, but because I think that the launching of these factories is a personal pleasure for everyone, just like the pleasure of seeing our children grow up. Because, confound it, we have grown up together with all these real, existing factories—the Stalingrad Tractor Plant (100 tractors per day), the Putilov (80 tractors per day), the Kharkov Tractor Plant (will start producing 100 tractors a day very soon), the Moscow Automobile Plant (will produce 100 automobiles a day very soon, because that sly fox Likhachev requested a postponement precisely so he would be able to present spectacular statistics right away, and, of course, everyone at that plant knows how to work), the Nizhny Automobile Plant (100 cars by the summer), Kuznetsk (a thousand tons of rails a day as soon as January), Magnitogorsk (same thing by spring), Berezniki (will be producing thousands of tons of nitrogen), etc.—and it (all) happened practically overnight! There we were, waiting and waiting, and suddenly, we woke up in a totally transformed country, unimaginable without automobiles, tractors, fertilizer, well-equipped railroads, electric power stations, thousands of new houses etc., etc. They can’t help appearing because the wheels have started turning. It’s fantastic!⁷⁹

A few weeks earlier, he had attended a discussion about the second Five-Year Plan at the Communist Academy. “The arguments,” he wrote to Shaternikova, “were about whether classes would still exist—because the kulaks have already been liquidated; 100% of the farms will have been collectivized; the majority of the population will be working in factories; and the rural population will be employed by agro-industrial combines.” They would find out soon enough. “Dear Annushka, socialism everywhere is much closer than we could ever imagine, and it will appear just as unexpectedly and just as soon as when it first came to Russia.”⁸⁰

The words about “socialism everywhere” were written in August 1931 in Amsterdam, where Osinsky was serving as head of the Soviet delegation at the International Congress of Planned Economy. His topic was “The Premises, Nature, and Forms of Social Economic Planning,” and his main thesis (in the official English translation) was the same as in his letters to Shaternikova. “The plan is the expression and the weapon of that last struggle of human history, which the working class is waging for the destruction of classes and for the building up of socialism…. Millions [of people] draw it up, carry it out, and closely watch the course of its fulfillment. This is the basis of the success of planned economy, this is the fundamental advantage of the Soviet system of economy. This is the source of the unprecedented rate of development in the USSR.”⁸¹

The other members of the delegation were Osinsky’s colleagues from the governing boards of the State Planning Committee (Gosplan) and Supreme Council of the National Economy: the thirty-two-year-old Aron Gaister, thirty-four-year-old Ivan Kraval (Jānis Kravalis), and thirty-six-year-old Solomon Ronin. Gaister, Kritsman’s closest collaborator among the “Agrarian Marxists” and, after 1932, the deputy head of Gosplan, had been criticized in 1929 for insufficient optimism. In Amsterdam, he claimed that the Five-Year Plan had fulfilled Engels’s prediction about the efficiency of collectivized agriculture and laid the foundations for “the liquidation of the contradiction between town and village.” According to his daughter, he worshipped his boss, the head of Gosplan, Valerian Kuibyshev, and named his youngest daughter Valeria after him. Kraval, the deputy people’s commissar of labor and, after 1933, Osinsky’s deputy (and later successor) at the Central Directory of Economic Statistics, had belonged to the Right Opposition and, at about the same time, violated Solts’s “poor taste” principle by marrying the daughter of a wealthy Jewish-Latvian cattle trader. His topic was “Labor in the Planned Economy of the USSR,” and his main thesis was that labor, according to Stalin’s declaration at the Sixteenth Party Congress, had been transformed “from a shameful and heavy burden into a matter of glory, valor and heroism.” He, too, worshipped Kuibyshev. Ronin, a high-ranking Planning Agency official and a former member of the Marxist-Zionist “Poale Zion” Party, had gotten into trouble in 1921 when his father, a former rabbi, had his son Anatoly circumcised (Ronin’s wife was expelled from the Party as a consequence). In Amsterdam, he argued that the First Five-Year Plan would “make it possible to move forward at a still higher speed and to write a new and still more brilliant socialist page in the history of human society.” After the conference, he asked to be allowed to participate in the construction of the Magnitogorsk Steel Mill. Instead, he was given a choice between serving in the new Soviet consulate in San Francisco or supervising collectivization in the Azov–Black Sea territory. He chose the latter.⁸²

■ ■ ■

One of Voronsky’s correspondents when he was still in exile in Lipetsk was Tania Miagkova, the daughter of Voronsky’s closest Tambov friend and revolutionary mentor, Feoktista Yakovlevna Miagkova—the same earnest, all-or-nothing, Brand-like, “olive-skinned Tania” who used to dismiss his tall tales as frivolous when she was twelve years old.

Tania Miagkova

Tania had since joined the Party, graduated from the Kharkov Institute of Economics and Sverdlov Communist University in Moscow, married the head of the Ukrainian Planning Agency, Mikhail Poloz, had a daughter, Rada (in 1924), joined the opposition, and, in 1927, been expelled from the Party and exiled to Astrakhan. In Astrakhan she collected money for unemployed exiles, organized opposition meetings, and distributed leaflets accusing the Party leadership of betraying the working class and appeasing the NEP-men and kulaks. In February 1929, she was deported to Chelkar (Shalkar), in Kazakhstan, where she, along with two other exiles, Sonia Smirnova and Mirra Varshavskaia, rented a room in the house of a local railroad engineer. At thirty-one, Tania was the oldest of the three. She had lost most of her teeth and wore dentures, which she kept in a special glass at night. She was reserved and had, according to Mirra, “great inner delicacy, tact, and integrity.” She was responsible for assigning communal responsibilities and heating up the stove. As she wrote to her husband, Mikhail, on March 15, 1929,

I use thorny brush, or “chagor,” instead of logs. I usually bring two huge bundles and sit for a couple of hours in front of the stove, tossing in the thorny branches, one at a time. They crackle and burn, my hands are full of cuts and splinters, and I can think about anything I want.… After that, we make millet porridge or fry potatoes on the stove. I do all that, too (or rather, I, too, do all that), and yesterday I made a wonderful potato soup. So you see, my friend, you should not have complained about my impracticality: all you needed to do was send me into exile early in our life together. So far, I must say, these household chores don’t really feel like a burden to me. I’ve decided to master the mechanics of all this, and it’s not so bad to have to switch my attention from my books to the poker or the well for a change.

It’s pleasant to walk to the well. It’s at the very edge of the settlement (we ourselves are pretty close to the edge). The steppe is beautiful—even here, in Chelkar. And far away, on the road, you can often see camels walking off into the distance, one after another…. In the evenings, we sometimes sit on a bench in the yard, listening to the barking of dogs and the clanking of wheels whenever a train passes by.⁸³

She did not have a job, and there was not much to do in Chelkar. The OGPU (former Cheka) provided the exiles with thirty (later fifteen) rubles a month, but Mikhail, who had been appointed the Ukrainian people’s commissar of finance, was in a position to help. She spent much of her time writing letters—mostly to Voronsky and her family. (Her mother, Feoktista Yakovlevna, had since moved to Kharkov to live with Mikhail and Rada). Her “chief obsession” was the fear that Rada, now five years old, would forget her, or that she would “miss out on” Rada’s development. She sent Rada stories (first fairy tales and then funny scenes from her own life), picture books, shirts that she sewed herself, and once she made a large appliqué for the wall over her bed. She kept asking Mikhail to send Rada out for a visit, but he never did, perhaps because “the living conditions, as well as the climate and the medical care” in Chelkar were “too difficult.” She promised not to indoctrinate her daughter: “Regarding my ‘dogmatism,’ I am, first of all, quite certain that I won’t pass it on to Rada, and, second, it can’t be done, in any case (according to my ideas about education, this is not the time to talk to a child about these things, and of course she won’t see any of my supposed ‘dogmatism’ herself).”⁸⁴

Her other obsession was the Five-Year Plan. She asked for the Soviet Trade and Problems of Trade journals, subscribed to Kazakh Economics, “mastered” a two-volume publication of the Kazakh State Planning Commission on “regionalization,” started learning the Kazakh language and history (because of Kazakhstan’s “great potential and great scale”), worried about the Ukrainian harvest, and kept asking for a book about the Five-Year Plan. “I need the Five-Year Plan so much, so very much,” she wrote on May 20, 1929. “Generally all I need are the Five-Year Plan and a pair of size-37 sandals.” In early June, it finally started to rain. “I am so happy to see the rain,” she wrote, “not only for the usual reason that it is good for the Soviet state, but also because I have missed it so much.”⁸⁵

Tania Miagkova (standing) in Kazakhstan

She missed Mikhail, too. “It’s been raining for five days now, sometimes a fall drizzle, sometimes a hard rain alternating with suffocating humidity. One night was beautiful: all around me were flashes of distant lightening and the dizzyingly bitter smell of wormwood. It was, of course, my turn to go get the water (for some reason, I always have to do it at night), and I wanted very much to keep walking far into the steppe, but … with you.” She wrote about her love for him, wondered if he missed her kisses, and offered to help him with his work. She wrote about the joy of dropping her letters in the mail car of the Moscow train and “watching them set out on their long journey,” and then, two months later, about “the terrible tragedy” that had befallen the Chelkar exiles: “the fast train that we have been using to send our mail now passes by at 2 a.m.” She kept asking for more letters, postcards, and photographs. “My darling, my dear Mikhailik. I am holding you very, very tight. Where are you now? Oh how I wish I could curl up on your sofa, when it’s dark outside, and it smells of acacia. And here all we have is wormwood, the bitter grass.”⁸⁶

Finally he came to visit. According to Tania’s roommate, Mirra Varshavskaia, “he and Tania would walk in the steppe for many hours and come back late, with Tania looking exhausted and depressed. I thought he had come to convince her to renounce the opposition, and, to my distress, he seemed to be succeeding. I also thought that he had brought some secret arguments and information that Tania was not sharing with us. After his departure, Tania was quieter and even more reserved.” When a new collective letter of recantation was circulated among the exiles, Tania signed it. Mirra felt betrayed: “Tania’s stellar moral qualities excluded the possibility of mercenary reasons for deviating from the correct line,” so it must have been her daughter (a reason Mirra, “not knowing a mother’s heart from personal experience,” considered “not good enough to betray a common cause”). Another possibility was the fact that the Party leadership was no longer appeasing the NEP-men and kulaks, and thus no longer betraying the working class. Soon Tania left—“without urging anyone to follow her example, without proselytizing, without words.” As their landlady put it, “she left the same person as she came.” Some time later Mirra received a letter, in which Tania wrote: “Don’t let life pass you by.” She didn’t say if she meant motherhood or the Five-Year Plan.⁸⁷

Tania Miagkova and her husband, Mikhail Poloz