The House of Government

10

THE NEW TENANTS

In spring 1931, the chief builders of the new world began moving into their own, as yet incomplete, eternal house. Apartments were distributed among members of the Party’s Central Committee, the Central Executive Committees of the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation, the Executive Committee of the Comintern, the People’s Commissariats of the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation, the Central Control Commission and Worker-Peasant Inspectorate, the Supreme Council of the Economy, the State Planning Agency, the Trade Union Council, the Trade Union International, the Unified Main Political Administration (OGPU, the new name for secret police), the Moscow City Soviet and Party Committee, the Lenin Institute, the Society of Old Bolsheviks, the editorial board of Izvestia, the families of late heroes and high officials, assorted fiction writers, and “the House of Government’s administrative and maintenance personnel.” The apartments varied in size and status: the largest and most prestigious faced the river and had views of the Kremlin and the Cathedral of Christ the Savior (Entryways 1 and 12). Most leaseholders (eligible individuals in whose name the apartments were registered) held positions that entitled them to extra “living space.” After 1930, each government agency kept a list of such positions. Not everyone who qualified for extra living space could receive an apartment in the House of Government. Each position within the Party and state hierarchy entitled its holder and an indeterminate number of his or her relatives to a wide range of goods and services. Any move within the hierarchy was accompanied by numerous other moves, including those within the House of Government.¹

Arkady Rozengolts, the leader of the Bolshevik insurrection in Moscow and now people’s commissar of foreign trade, who used to move through the walls like a ghost (and was described by his niece Elena as “gloomy and morose”), moved into a large apartment on the eleventh floor with a long balcony overlooking the river (Apt. 237, in Entryway 12). His first wife and their two children stayed behind in the Fifth House of Soviets on Granovsky Street. His House of Government family included his new wife; their two daughters, born in 1932 and 1934; his wife’s mother and brother; one of his brothers; his sister Eva (the painter who had recently separated from her husband, the Pravda journalist Boris Levin); Eva’s daughter, Elena, born in 1928; and the maid, “Duniasha.”²

Rozengolts, his second wife, and one of their daughters

Eva Levina-Rozengolts with her daughter, Elena

Eva’s Higher Art and Technology Studios classmate, Maria Denisova, and her “proletarian” husband, Efim Shchadenko (now a member of the Central Control Commission), received two separate apartments: a very large one on the sixth floor of Entryway 1 (Apt. 10) with a view of the river, and a smaller one at the opposite end of the complex, in Entryway 25 (Apt. 505, probably meant to serve as her studio). According to their neighbors, however, Maria tended to live in the first one, and Efim, in the second. In her December 1928 letter to Mayakovsky, she wrote that she had returned to her husband because he threatened to shoot himself. In May 1930, less than a month after Mayakovsky’s suicide and about a year before they moved into the House, she was diagnosed as a “psychopath with schizophrenic and cyclical traits.”³

Maria Denisova working on a bust of Efim Shchadenko

Rozengolts’s deputy during the Moscow insurrection, now head of the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries, and still a writer, Aleksandr Arosev, was also given two apartments: a four-room one on the tenth floor for his three daughters, a nanny, and a governess (Apt. 104, in Entryway 5), and a one-room one on the same floor (Apt. 103), for his new wife and their newborn son Dmitry. At the time of the move, he was planning “a large work based partly on personal recollections and partly on written sources about how, in the course of revolutionary work, first illegal and later legal and state-directed, the threads of human connections, sympathies, friendship, and love come together and then get torn apart; how individuals enter the revolutionary movement and sometimes move away from it, and how all of this is, in the final analysis, only a ripple on the surface of the epic class struggle, which has produced such a ‘Great Rebellion’ in our country.” The projected novel was to consist of “pictures of that rebellion that would resemble pictures of a river flowing partially underground and partially on the surface, just like now.”⁴

Aleksandr Arosev

Arosev’s old comrade and now top Comintern official in charge of finances and foreign agents, the famously “taciturn” Osip Piatnitsky, moved into a five-room apartment (Apt. 400) with his wife Yulia, their two sons (ten and six in 1931), and Yulia’s father, the former priest, with his new wife and daughter. Another famously taciturn veteran of the Moscow uprising, and now the chairman of the Main Committee on Foreign Concessions at the Council of People’s Commissars, Valentin Trifonov, moved into a four-room apartment (Apt. 137, in Entryway 7) with his wife Evgenia (an economist in the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture); their two children, Yuri (1925) and Tatiana (1927); Evgenia’s mother (and Valentin’s former revolutionary comrade and wife) Tatiana Slovatinskaia; a Chuvash boy nicknamed Undik, whom Slovatinskaia adopted during the Volga famine in 1921, when he was four years old; and a maid.⁵

The Trifonovs’ friend and author of the proposition that the family was “a small Communist cell,” Aron Solts, moved into Apt. 393 with his sister, Esfir; a young boy they had recently taken in, Evgeny; and their niece, Anna, who was separated from her husband, Isaak Zelensky. (Their marriage had been arranged by Aron and Esfir, who met him in Siberian exile in 1912.) In 1931, Zelensky was transferred from Uzbekistan, where he was serving as head of the Central Asian Bureau, to Moscow to become chairman of the Central Union of Consumer Cooperatives. He moved into Apt. 54 with his new wife, their daughter, and his and Anna’s two children, Elena and Andrei (named after one of Solts’s Party pseudonyms).⁶

Solts’s coauthor, Supreme Court colleague, and fellow expert on the family, Yakov Brandenburgsky, moved into Apt. 25 with his wife, Anna, whom he met in their native town of Balta, north of Odessa, and their daughter Elsa, born in 1913. In July 1929, Brandenburgsky was relieved of his duties as legal theorist and sent to Saratov to supervise collectivization (as deputy chairman of the Lower Volga Province Executive Committee and member of the Provincial Party bureau). In March 1931, he was fired for “dizziness from success” and transferred to the Commissariat of Labor as an expert on labor legislation. In 1934, after several months in the Kremlin hospital, he was appointed to the USSR Supreme Court.⁷

Yakov and Anna Brandenburgsky

Dizziness and domesticity were at the center of the literary work of Aleksandr Serafimovich, who moved into Apt. 82 with his wife (and former maid) Fekla Rodionovna, his son by a previous marriage, and the son’s wife and daughter (named after Lenin’s newspaper, Iskra [Spark]). After finishing The Iron Flood, Serafimovich embarked on a novel set in a large apartment building (“House No. 93”). According to the outline of one chapter draft, “The family is falling apart: (1) Sergei and Olga Yakovlevna; (2) Pania and Sakharov; (3) Petr Ivanovich Puchkov—pulling himself together, crying; (4) sitting around, talking about the people they know: mostly men changing wives, sometimes women changing husbands.” In 1930, Serafimovich’s former wife died in a mental institution. In 1931, he abandoned the “House” idea in favor of a novel about collectivization. In January 1933, the day before his seventieth birthday, he received a telephone call from People’s Commissar of the Army and Navy Kliment Voroshilov, who told him that members of the government had decided to name the city of Novocherkassk after him. Serafimovich, according to his own account, proposed his hometown of Ust-Medveditskaia instead. Voroshilov objected that Ust-Medveditskaia was not a city, but then called back to say that the problem had been resolved: Ust-Medveditskaia would first be reclassified as a city, and then renamed. All Saints Street (which formed the eastern boundary of the House of Government and connected the Big Stone Bridge to the Small Stone Bridge) also received a new name at that time. The House of Government’s official address became “2, Serafimovich Street.”⁸

Serafimovich with his granddaughter, Iskra

Serafimovich’s key ally in the struggle for proletarian literature against “Voronskyism,” Platon Kerzhentsev, moved into a five-room apartment on the tenth floor (Apt. 206, in Entryway 10) with his second wife, Maria; their daughter, Natalia (born in 1925); and maid, Agafia. Kerzhentsev met Maria in Sweden when he was Soviet ambassador and she was Aleksandra Kollontai’s secretary. After that, he became chief theoretician of the Bolshevik “sense of time,” while serving as ambassador to Italy (where Natalia was born), president of the editorial board of the State Publishing House, deputy head of the Central Statistics Directory (under Osinsky), director of the Institute of Literature, Arts, and Language at the Communist Academy, and deputy head of Agitprop (in which capacity he first helped defeat Voronsky and then allowed his memoirs to be published). Shortly before his move to the House of Government, he was appointed chief administrator of the Council of People’s Commissars.⁹

Kerzhentsev with daughter Natalia

Kerzhentsev suffered from a heart condition, and around 1935 (after he became head of the Radio Committee), the family moved down to the third floor to Apt. 197. Their next-door neighbors in 198 (a five-room apartment) were the Old Bolshevik and Kerzhentsev’s predecessor as head of the Radio Committee, Feliks Kon, who was seventy years old at the time, and his wife Khristiana (Kristina, or Khasia) Grinberg, who was seventy-seven. (“Khristiana” was the name she received when she formally converted to Orthodox Christianity in order to get married officially when they were in exile in Siberia). Kon’s new assignment was to head the Museum Section of the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment.¹⁰

Kon and Grinberg’s daughter, Elena Usievich (born in Siberia in 1893), lived in the same entryway, but on the first floor in Apt. 194. Elena and her daughter, Iskra-Marina (b. 1926), shared the apartment with the Old Bolshevik Mark Abramovich Braginsky and his wife (three rooms for Elena, Iskra-Marina, their nanny and maid, and two for the Braginskys and their maid). As Iskra-Marina put it many years later, “It never occurred to either my mother or my grandparents that it might be better for us to live with them rather than some old people we weren’t even related to.” (The Braginskys’ children had an apartment in a different entryway.) Elena and her first husband, Grigory Usievich, returned to Russia from Swiss exile in Lenin’s “sealed car” in April 1917. After Grigory’s death in the Civil War at the age of twenty-seven, Elena worked in the Cheka, the Economic Council (under Yuri Larin), and the Crimean Theater Repertory Censorship Committee, before graduating from the Institute of Red Professors in 1932. Her second husband, a Far Eastern Bolshevik and later second secretary of the Crimean Party Committee, Aleksandr Takser (Iskra-Marina’s father), died in 1931, soon after they moved into the House. Elena’s first child (Grigory’s son) died in 1934 in his grandparents’ apartment at the age of seventeen. By then, Elena was already a well-known literary critic and prominent fighter against the Association of Proletarian Writers and was serving as deputy director of the Institute of Literature and the Arts at the Communist Academy (under Kerzhentsev’s successor, Lunacharsky).¹¹

Elena Usievich

Elena Usievich’s closest friend and Institute colleague was Lunacharsky’s secretary and brother-in-law, Igor Sats. Igor’s niece and director of the Central Children’s Theater, Natalia Sats, moved into the House of Government (Apt. 159) in 1935, when she married Commissar of Internal Trade Izrail Veitser. Natalia’s patron, admirer, and onetime dance partner, Mikhail Koltsov, lived close by, in a large four-room apartment on the eighth floor (Apt. 143). Still formally married to his second wife, Elizaveta Ratmanova, he had been living since 1932 with the German writer and journalist Maria Gresshöner (who changed her name to “Osten” and broke with her “bourgeois” family soon after her arrival in Moscow, when she was twenty-four years old).¹²

Artemy Khalatov

Khalatov’s wife, Tatiana

One of Koltsov’s closest collaborators and head of the Association of State Book and Magazine Publishers (OGIZ), Artemy Khalatov, moved into a large, six-room apartment on the seventh floor of Entryway 12 (four floors below Rozengolts). His family consisted of his mother (head of collections at the Lenin Library), wife (a graphic artist), cousin (an actress at the Moscow Art Theater), daughter Svetlana (born in 1926, after Svetlana Stalina and Svetlana Bukharina but before Svetlana Molotova), and their maid, Shura. Khalatov (thirty-five at the time of the move) was famous among the Bolsheviks for his long curly hair, full beard, and Astrakhan hat, which he rarely took off. Before being put in charge of nationalizing and centralizing the publishing industry, he supervised rationing in War Communism Moscow, chaired the Commission for the Improvement of Scholars’ Living Conditions, founded the State Puppet Theater, and, as head of People’s Nutrition (“Down with kitchen slavery! Long live communal food consumption!”), inspired Yuri Olesha’s Envy. According to Khalatov’s daughter, Svetlana, Koltsov used to amuse her by riding her tricycle up and down the hall, shouting, “Time for tea!”¹³

One of Khalatov’s employees at OGIZ was K. T. Sverdlova (Novgorodtseva), who headed the department of children’s literature and school textbooks. She and her family did not move from the Kremlin to the House of Government until 1937, but in 1932, her son Andrei married Nina Podvoiskaia and joined the Podvoisky-Didrikil patriarchs in Apt. 280, in Entryway 14. The apartment residents included the senior Podvoiskys, three (but later just one) of their daughters, and, on and off, their son Lev with his wife, Milena (whose father, the head of Trade Union International, Solomon Lozovsky, was living in Apt. 16 with his new wife, young daughter, and in-laws). The Didrikil sister who was married to the Chekist Mikhail Kedrov lived in Apt. 409. The Sverdlovs, including Nina Podvoiskaia, would eventually move into Apt. 319. Andrei Sverdlov sided with the Trostkyists as a high school student in 1927, studied foreign languages in Argentina in 1928–29, conspired with Bukharin and other rightists in 1930 (proclaiming, according to an eyewitness account and his own later confession, that “Koba [Stalin] must be bumped off”), studied briefly at Moscow University and the Moscow Tractor Institute, and graduated from the Military Academy of Mechanized Forces in 1935, at the age of twenty-four.¹⁴

Podvoisky family

Yakov Sverdlov’s (and Voronsky’s) close friend, Filipp Goloshchekin, moved in permanently in 1933, after he was dismissed as Party boss of Kazakhstan and appointed head of the State Arbitrage Court. He lived in Apt. 228 with his second wife, her mother, and her son from a previous marriage. Sverdlov’s and Goloshchekin’s proletarian protégé, the “baker,” Boris Ivanov, moved into Apt. 372 on the fifth floor (Entryway 19). Before that, he had been serving as chairman of the Crimean Trade Union of Food Industry Workers and was still relying on the Society of Old Bolsheviks for basic assistance a year after the family’s clothes were stolen: “I have a family of four dependents including a nonworking wife and three children between the ages of 3 and 11 of which two children go to school and the absence of warm clothes for the children makes their school-going impossible during the period of winter besides which my wife and I are unclothed too in the absence of winter coats but these funds are being asked for the children only.”¹⁵

In May 1930, Ivanov was appointed deputy chairman of the Main Administration of the Canned Food Industry and transferred from Crimea to Moscow. Because the approval process at the Party’s Central Committee took several months “due to Wrecking in the abovementioned organization and the now occurring personnel purge,” he asked for a grant of two hundred rubles, citing the fact that his wife suffered “from nervous fits.” Ivanov’s wife, Elena Zlatkina, came from a large family of Yiddish-speaking tailors-turned-revolutionaries. One of her brothers, Ilya Zlatkin, distinguished himself as a Red Army commander during the Civil War and later served as head of political departments in various armies. In spring 1931, Ilya left for his new posting in the Soviet legation in Urumqi, China, and the Ivanov family moved into their three-room apartment in the House of Government. “Since during the move several more related expenses took place (horse-cart movers and so on) along with the necessity to purchase several household items namely a table and some chairs I request to render financial assistance in the amount of 150 rubles if not possible as a grant then payable within three months.” Ivanov’s request was granted, as were most of the requests he submitted over the next few years (several a year, mostly for free tickets to Black Sea resorts and northern Caucasus spas). After being officially diagnosed with “neurasthenia” in May 1931, Elena Zlatkina stopped working. The Ivanovs (Boris, forty-four; Elena, thirty-four; two sons, ages eleven and ten; and a daughter, age eight) decided to rent out one of their three rooms.¹⁶

Boris Ivanov

E. Ia. Ivanova (Zlatkina)

Despite their reduced circumstances, the Ivanovs, like most residents of the House of Government, had a maid (“domestic employee”). Her name was Niura, and she was sixteen or seventeen at the time of the move. One day, while walking with the children in the courtyard, she met Vladimir Orekhov from Apt. 384, who was in his early twenties. Soon afterward, they got married, and Niura moved into his apartment. Vladimir was the son of Vasily Orekhov, the former shepherd and public prosecutor who had succumbed to “traumatic nevrosis” as a result of Lenin’s death in 1924. By 1931, he had turned forty-seven, retired, and received “two rows of teeth to the total amount of 26 teeth,” but continued to suffer from poor health and spent much of his time at Black Sea resorts.¹⁷

Orekhov and the Ivanovs were not the only Old Bolsheviks having difficulty recovering from the Civil War and the great disappointment. The director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, Vladimir Adoratsky, continued his program of balneological treatment. Several months before moving into the House of Government (Apt. 93) at the age of fifty-three, he wrote to his wife from Gurzuf, on the Black Sea, that “the food here continues to be of the highest caliber. The vegetarian soups (borscht) are of excellent quality, and the roasts with fried potatoes are always delicious and so abundant that Varia cannot eat it all.” (Varia, Adoratsky’s daughter and a translator at his institute, was twenty-six at the time. She also suffered from poor health and often accompanied her father on his trips.) Several months after moving into the House, Adoratsky and Varia went to a spa in Kislovodsk. There were no oxygen treatments, but the mountain air was so good “you could get it even without all those special gadgets.” In Moscow, he had access to a special “dietetic cafeteria,” where he ate “vegetables, fruit, and meat, but no bread,” and a clinic for regular “ultraviolet” treatments.¹⁸

Adoratsky’s colleague at the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute and the first director of the Health-Care Department of the Resort Administration in Crimea, Olympiada Mitskevich, retired within a year of moving into the House (Apt. 140), at the age of fifty. Her preferred place of residence, she wrote to the Society of Old Bolsheviks, was a sanatorium; her first trip after the move was to the Borzhomi Mineral Spa, in Georgia. The former “Christian Socialist,” organizer of mass executions in the Don Area, and curfew violator at the Second House of Soviets, Karl Lander, retired four years before moving into the House (Apt. 307), “following a severe nervous illness and a series of severe emotional shocks.” As a “personal pensioner” since the age of forty-four, he devoted himself to scholarly work on “the history of the Party, Leninism (theory and practice), history of the revolutionary movement, and historical questions in general.” Another long-term invalid, the theoretician of War Communism and chief agrarian economist, Lev Kritsman, stopped teaching for health reasons in 1929, when he was thirty-nine years old. In 1931, when he and his wife Sarra moved into Apt. 186, in Entryway 9, he was made deputy head of Gosplan, but, in 1933, he retired from “operational work” and became a full-time scholar, editing Russian translations of Marx for the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, contributing to the first volume of the History of the Civil War, and working on a book titled The First World Imperialist War and the Disintegration of Capitalism in Russia.¹⁹

Kritsman’s closest ally on the agrarian front and his successor at Gosplan, Aron Gaister, moved into Apt. 167 with his wife, Rakhil (an economist at the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry); their two daughters; and their maid, Natalia Ovchinnikova. A third daughter, named after Kuibyshev, was born in 1936. Gaister’s fellow delegates to the Planned Economy Conference in Amsterdam and fellow Kritsman protégés, Ivan Kraval and Solomon Ronin, moved in at the same time (into Apts. 190 and 55, respectively).²⁰

Kritsman, as he wrote in one of his letters to Stalin, had been “an opponent of all oppositions and deviations within our Party since the middle of 1918.” The recently repentant deviationists were also made welcome. Karl Radek resumed his role as a propagandist and diplomatic negotiator (visiting his mother during a trip to Poland in 1933) and moved into Apt. 20 with his wife, daughter, a poodle named Devil, and Larisa Reisner’s portrait. The first book he published after the move was about engineers accused of wrecking (“they could not struggle against us face to face, they could only do it by hiding in our institutions and attacking us from behind, like vipers”).²¹

Radek’s fellow oppositionist (and prosecutor at Filipp Mironov’s trial), Ivar Smilga, was readmitted to the Party, appointed deputy chairman of the State Planning Agency (as head of planning coordination), and given a six-room apartment (Apt. 230) in the House of Government, where he lived with his wife; two daughters; the daughters’ nanny; Nina Delibash, the wife of his exiled friend Aleksandr Ioselevich; and an Estonian woman, who, according to Smilga’s daughter Tatiana, had nowhere else to live.²²

Aron Gaister (Courtesy of Inna Gaister)

Rakhil Gaister with daughter Inna (Courtesy of Inna Gaister)

Another repentant exile, Aleksandr Voronsky, was put in charge of the Russian and Foreign Classics Section of the newly created State Fiction Publishers (within Khalatov’s OGIZ monopoly). He lived in Apt. 357 with his wife, Sima Solomonovna, and their daughter, Galina. According to Galina, “after his return from Lipetsk, Father kept to himself and refused not only to speak publicly on literary matters, but even to attend literary conferences and seminars.” After being readmitted to the Party, he chose to join a “primary cell” at the print shop, not the publishing house. His friend Goloshchekin suggested that he attempt to improve his position by publishing (or ghostwriting) an attack on Trotsky’s autobiography, but he declined. He continued to work on various versions of his memoirs, a biography of the revolutionary terrorist, Zheliabov, and a book about Gogol.²³

Aleksandr Voronsky with his mother and daughter

Sima Solomonovna Voronskaia

Voronsky’s friends from the days of his revolutionary youth in Tambov, Feoktista Yakovlevna Miagkova and her daughter Tania, moved into one of the first completed apartments (next to the Shock Worker Movie Theater) in 1930, after Tania was released from Kazakhstan and Tania’s husband, Mikhail Poloz, was transferred from Kharkov to Moscow as deputy chairman of the Central Executive Committee’s Budget Commission. After the House was finished, they moved to a larger and quieter apartment (Apt. 199, in Entryway 10). The family also included their daughter Rada, who was six at the time; their maid; and Tania’s sister Lelia and her son Volia (Vladimir). Tania got a job as an economist at a ball bearing factory.²⁴

Some of the most resolute crusaders against “factionalism” lived next door. Boris Volin, who had led the “beat the opposition” raid in November 1927, moved into Apt. 276 with his wife, Dina Davydovna (a former gynecologist and now editor at the Music Publishing House); their daughter Victoria, born in 1920; and their maid, Katia, who had been with the family since Victoria’s birth. Volin had been as tough on the Right Opposition as he had been on the Left. As head of the Press Department of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, he had written several confidential letters unmasking his colleague, Deputy Commissar Maksim Litvinov, as “one of the worst Right opportunists in our Party” (“Litvinov hates the OGPU. He can’t talk about it without extreme, savage loathing.”). Within two years, Litvinov (Apt. 14) would become commissar of foreign affairs; and Volin, chairman of the Central Censorship Office (Glavlit).²⁵

Grigory Moroz with his mother and sons

Another leader of the raid against the Left Oppositionists, the former Chekist Grigory Moroz (who warned Smilga that things would get worse and then, at the Fifteenth Party Congress, promised to “snip off the heads of the arrogant oppositionist noblemen”) had since fallen into right deviationism, recanted, become a trade union official in charge of trade, and moved into Apt. 39, in Entryway 2, with his wife, Fanni Lvovna Kreindel, who was a pharmacist, and their three sons, Samuil (eleven), Vladimir (nine), and Aleksandr (three). According to Samuil, his father was “short, hollow-chested, and stooped,” with a moustache that “at first used to cover the whole space between his nose and upper lip, and later just the little furrow between his mouth and nose.” His eyes “were always half closed—from exhaustion, anger, or, very rarely, when he smiled.” He was able to maintain “a remarkable balance between reason and will, and hence a perfect conformity of word and deed…. He was not known for unquestioning obedience, but when a certain name was associated with an idea, he had his faith—a faith in the infallibility of Lenin and Dzerzhinsky and the correctness of the Party line as defined by Stalin.”²⁶

■ ■ ■

Upon moving in, residents had to sign detailed inspection checklists. Podvoisky’s consisted of fifty-four items, including ceilings, walls, wallpaper, tile floors (in the kitchen, bathroom, and toilet), parquet floors (in the rest of the apartment), closets, windows, hinges, lampshades, doors (French and regular), locks (two kinds) doorknobs (three kinds), nickel-plated doorstops, an electric doorbell, enamel bathtub with overflow drain and nickel-plated plug, nickel-plated shower, wall-mounted porcelain sink, water heater, cold and hot water faucets, a porcelain toilet, raisable oak toilet seat, mounted toilet water tank with porcelain pull chain, gas stove with four burners and two vents, a samovar vent, wall-mounted cast-iron enamel kitchen sink with hot and cold water faucets and chain plug, an icebox, a garbage chute with flap doors, and an extra cargo elevator with a metal door and call button (and garbage pail that a special attendant emptied out twice a day). Apartment regulations urged residents not to hang objects on electric plugs and switches; not to place paper and rugs over heaters; not to hit water pipes with heavy objects; not to clog sinks with matches, cigarette butts, and other small items; and not to throw bones, rags, and boxes into the toilet. Furniture—heavy, rectilinear oak pieces designed by Iofan—could be leased from the carpentry shop located in the basement. All the residents requested some furniture, supplementing it with pieces of their own they did not want to part with. Arosev brought a Venetian armchair inlaid with mother-of-pearl; Volin—a desk; Khalatov—a desk, couch, armchairs, and weapons collection; Podvoisky—a tall bookcase; Kerzhentsev—most of his furniture and a large German radio set; and the Ivanovs—a chandelier and a wardrobe.²⁷

The first residents moved into apartments next to the movie theater and Ditch (but some, like Tania Miagkova and her family, would later move to more prestigious parts of the house). In the spring and summer of 1931, children played in the furniture warehouse, on the wooden walkways placed over the mud, among the piles of earth and bricks in the courtyards, on the volleyball court by the laundry, and around the Church of St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker (known as tserkovka or tserkvushka: “the little church”).²⁸

The church’s most recent tenants—the State Historical Preservation Workshop and the Institute of the Peoples of the East—took a long time to move out. The only available alternatives were other churches, for which there was intense competition despite the many problems involved in converting them to secular uses. After much acrimony (and several conflicting claims to the Church of St. Nicholas in the Armenian Alley, Trinity Church in Nikitniki, and the nearby Church of the Resurrection in Kadashi), the Historical Preservation Workshop was assigned to the Assumption Church on Herzen Street, and the Institute of the Peoples of the East, to the Church of St. Martin the Confessor on Big Communist Street (in the Taganka District). In April 1932, permission to tear down “the little church” was officially withdrawn; in July 1932, most of the premises were forcibly taken over by the House of Government’s largest tenant, the New Theater; in March 1934, both the church and the Averky Kirillov residence were formally, though inconclusively, transferred to the jurisdiction of the House of Government.²⁹

By this time, the area around the House had changed considerably. The Swamp’s shops and stalls were gone, as were most of the tenements. The Maria Women’s College was now School No. 19; the Einem Candy Factory became State Candy Factory No. 1, and, in 1922, the Red October; the Gustav List Metal Works became Plant No. 5, Hydrofilter, and, later, the Red Torch; and the Kharitonenko mansion was first turned into a guesthouse of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and then, in 1929, taken over by the British embassy. The most dramatic change was the disappearance of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which was blown up on December 5, 1931, to make way for the Palace of Soviets. According to Mikhail Korshunov from Apt. 445, who was seven at the time, “salvos of rock, marble, and brick shot straight up and spread out over a large area. The ice on the river must have cracked: in any case, a loud, lingering boom sounded over the river—and in the courtyard wells. The beacons along the fence flashed on and off, and, after straining to find its voice, the siren began screaming.” Korshunov’s neighbor from Apt. 424, Elina Kisis, who was six at the time, remembered how the river “became covered with dust and smoke,” and how her grandmother “stood in the corner of the kitchen, praying and crossing herself.” Four construction foremen and their families living in Apt. 4 (which they had received as a prize from the Construction Committee), heard the sound of the explosion and ran out onto the balcony facing the river. According to the daughter of one of them, Zinaida Tuchina, “the grown-ups were very upset, and some even cried.”³⁰

It took several months to remove the rubble (referred to in official documents as “the pile”). According to Korshunov, “the workers brought to remove the pile worked in three shifts, with no days off. The site was lit up at night, and the shadows cast by the ruins seemed to move—as if the cathedral were still alive.” On April 14, 1932, Adoratsky wrote to his daughter, who was staying at a Crimean resort, that the Cathedral of Christ the Savior “has disappeared for good: the brick-and-mortar Easter bread [kulich] has been completely liquidated.” The only part of the neighborhood that remained untouched was the western corner of the Swamp between the candy factory and the Arrowhead. In the words of Inna Gaister from Apt. 167, “the conditions there were terrible: two-story buildings densely packed with large families and crawling with bedbugs.”³¹

Final demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior

After the explosion. The sign on the fence surrounding the site says: “The source of opium is now a palace.” The House of Government can be seen in the background.

The House of Government was well protected from encroachment. As of November 1, 1932, the number of officially registered residents was 2,745 (838 men, 1,311 women, 276 children under the age of six, and 320 children ages six and older). They were shielded by 128 guards, 34 firefighters, 15 janitors (23 in the winter), 7 pest-control experts, a cedar hedge consisting of three hundred trees (though many died the first year), and an unspecified number of bloodhounds (fed on specially ordered meat and cared for by a full-time trainer). The guards manned all the gates and a desk in each entryway. They wore military-style black uniforms with green insignia and lived in ground-floor communal apartments.³²

One of the head guards, Emelian Ivchenko, was the son of a peasant in Briansk Province and a former Donbass miner. According to family tradition, one day in 1932, as a twenty-seven-year-old Central OGPU School cadet patrolling the platform of Moscow’s Leningrad Railway Station, he had spotted a young girl crying. She told him that her name was Anna; that she was seventeen years old; that she was originally from Borisoglebsk, outside of Voronezh; that she had been working in the port of Leningrad and been rewarded for her excellent work with a trip to Moscow; and that on the train from Leningrad someone had stolen her wallet with all her money and documents. He told her playfully that her only option was to marry him and be registered as an OGPU officer’s wife, but she chose instead to follow a young man in civilian clothes, who invited her to a party at his dorm and promised to find her a place to stay. (She was, according to her daughter, “a tough woman—she had been working as a stevedor, after all! So, naturally, she drank, smoked, swore, and all that.”) At the party, Anna discovered that the dorm belonged to the Central OGPU School, that the civilian young man was actually a plain-clothes agent, and that the cadet who had proposed to her was also there. After two weeks of futile attempts to get a job and be registered in a dorm, Anna agreed to marry Emelian because, as an OGPU’s officer’s wife, she could travel back home to Borisoglebsk for free; because he did not have any cash and could not help her in any other way; and because he struck her as a “very good, … very decent sort of person.” She did not think that she was in love with him (“she felt too scared and too confused”) but decided to return to him after her trip home anyway. Within a year, Emelian received an assignment to the House of Government and a three-room apartment there (Apt. 107). Anna got a job as a cashier at the post office. They went on to have five children: Vladimir (in 1935), Elsa (1937), Boris (1939), Viacheslav (1941), and Aleksandr (1943). Elsa got her name after a German woman whom Anna had met in the Kremlin maternity ward lost her baby daughter Elsa. Anna promised to name her daughter in her honor, and did.³³

The House administrative staff occupied the first two floors of Entryway 1 and consisted of twenty-one employees including the manager, commandant, staff supervisor, and head of the registration desk, as well as various accountants, secretaries, cashiers, and couriers. Immediately above them, serving as a cushion between the House and the Government, was the apartment shared by the four prize-winning construction foremen, including the former Party secretary of the House of Government Construction Committee, Mikhail Tuchin. Eight adults and nine children shared nine rooms, two bathrooms, and two kitchens, and—after years of living in overcrowded dorms like most construction workers—considered themselves lucky and got along well. Mikhail Tuchin found a job as an inspector at nearby Gorky Park; his wife Tatiana (née Chizhikova) worked as a salesclerk in the accessories department of the House of Government store.³⁴

Anna (front, center) and Emelian Ivchenko (on her left)

Mikhail Tuchin

Tatiana Tuchina with Zinaida and Vova

Other members of the staff were divided into service personnel (thirty-three employees, including the janitors, dog trainer, and various warehouse attendants), cleaning personnel (fifteen cleaning women and seven garbage collectors), and maintenance workers (fifty-eight carpenters, electricians, blacksmiths, metal workers, house painters, elevator technicians, and floor polishers, among others), who were joined by twenty-four heating technicians, three ventilation technicians, and sixty-nine repairmen. The House dining room had 154 employees; the laundry, 107; and the café in the movie theater, 34.³⁵

Besides staff salaries, the highest expenses involved in the early running of the House of Government were heating (which proved much more costly than expected), elevator maintenance (forty-nine elevators and five permanent employees), water and sewage, restocking, supplies, current repairs, ventilation, and snow disposal. The House was supposed to pay for itself, and, during the first two years, it did. A substantial portion of the income came from the residents’ rent and utilities payments, but the main contributors were the institutional tenants, particularly the theater, the movie theater, the department store, and the club.³⁶

The House of Government club, or “The Club of the Employees of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, the Central Executive Committee of the Russian Federation, and the Councils of People’s Commissars of the USSR and the RSFSR,” was a new and expanded version of the Rykov Club, formerly located in the Second House of Soviets (the Metropol). The new patron’s name was Kalinin, and the new location was the space above the theater, or, as Adoratsky wrote to his daughter in March 1932, “the block with the uninterrupted line of glass windows facing the river. Tikhomirnov says that it is wonderful: there is a tennis court and different rooms where you can do whatever you like: play chess, music, etc.” Besides tennis and chess, the club offered classes in fencing, painting, skating, skiing, singing, sewing, boxing, theater, volleyball, basketball, photography, stenography, target shooting, radio building, and various foreign languages. It opened a library and planned to organize three orchestras (symphony, wind, and domra) and to acquire fields for soccer and bandy (“Russian hockey”) teams.³⁷

Laundry

Tennis court

■ ■ ■

The House of Government’s most visible tenant was the New Theater, whose massive classical entrance served as the building’s facade. Its company had been formed in 1925 by graduates of the Maly Theater School and was known, up until the move to the House of Government, as the Maly Theater Studio. It enjoyed the patronage of Avel Enukidze and the reputation, in the words of one contemporary critic, of a “mischievous, cheerful, and sunny” ensemble committed to a “highly individual style of light irony and life-affirming vitality.”³⁸

The theater’s artistic director, Fedor Nikolaevich Kaverin, joined the Maly Theater School in 1918, when he was twenty-one years old. “Left behind,” he wrote in his memoirs, were

the gymnasium with its classical curriculum and unofficial student groups, one devoted to self-education and one, to Shakespeare; the three years in the Philology Department of Moscow University; the hard work in the military hospitals during the Imperialist War; the peripatetic life as a private tutor; the first ardent—and, for several years, unrequited—love; the accelerated graduation—as a junior officer—from the Alexander Military School during the February Revolution; the fever of the company, regiment, and garrison committees of the Kerensky era; the encounter with simple Russian soldiers and life and work among them; the friendship with the Bolsheviks at the front, and, finally, the return to Moscow.³⁹

The “journey through the bubbling, flooding Motherland” ended. Kaverin discovered his true home in the theater and his life’s hero in Gennady Neschastlivtsev, the tragic actor from A. N. Ostrovsky’s The Forest:

Neither my mind nor my heart could keep up with the wonderful chaos that, like a flood, came pouring down from the stage and completely enveloped me: Neschastlivtsev is an actor; the person playing Neschastlivtsev is also an actor; and this Aksiusha, whom he is initiating into the acting profession, is also a well-known actress. They are talking about the stage, about a life devoted to fame and art. That stage is right here in front of me. And then, suddenly, it is no longer a stage: the theater platform is transformed into an old garden, and the round flashlight behind the canvas sky looks like a real moon to me. But for Neschastlivtsev, on this great night of his initiation, both the garden and the moon are part of a stage setting. It is all intermingled: my swirling feelings, impressions, and thoughts raise me to dizzying heights. I want to run onto the stage, push the hesitating Aksiusha out of the way, kneel before the great madman, kiss his hand, take the oath, and, without thought or hesitation, accept initiation into the pure, knightly order of theater actors.⁴⁰

According to his friend, the playwright Aleksandr Kron, Kaverin was faithful to his oath. “He was a jolly ascetic, a cheerful saint, a normal person fully possessed…. He was never coy, unless one counts the innocent desire to surprise and confound. He loved mystification…. He was always excited about something, and not just excited, but enraptured to the point of ecstasy, of delirious infatuation.” He always smiled, “happily when he was understood and sadly and compassionately when he was not.” He walked “with his hands pressed to his sides, treading carefully on his toes and bobbing to the rhythm of his steps, as if he were always bowing.” Ruben Simonov, of the Vakhtangov Theater, claimed to have realized that he could play Don Quixote when he thought of Kaverin: “He wasn’t tall, but he always looked over the heads of the people around him.”

He was not a smooth speaker. “When excited, he often gave his actors impossible instructions such as: ‘you should walk quickly past him with slow steps.’ But the actors did not mind. They understood him.” And he was a famously inept administrator. “Outside of work, he was soft and trusting, like a child. He had no practical sense, no shrewdness, and no toughness…. But in rehearsals, he was truly daring.” Kaverin was always onstage—or backstage. According to Kron, he walked the way he did because “he always walked as if he were backstage during a performance, trying not to make any noise, stumble over a cable, or run into a piece of scenery—as if he were saying: ‘Hush! There’s a show going on.’ He loved the magic of the theater, its ability to transform nondescript rags and cheap baubles into fabulous garments and sparkling ornaments; he was intoxicated by the rattling of wooden swords and the clinking of cups wrapped in gold paper. What he loved about theater was its theatricality.”⁴¹

Kaverin objected to revolutionary theater (of the Mystery-Bouffe variety) and, with his friends from the Maly Theater School, used to boo during Meyerhold’s speeches because he believed that the avant-garde was destroying the magic of theater. “You cannot search with your mind, or search with only one of the senses,” he wrote in his diary in 1924, “because whatever is new for the eye (constructivism) or for the ear (jazz) will only offend the eye or the ear and never manage to get it right.” Theater “must be the nerve of its time and place.” It must “engage the audience.”⁴²

Fedor Kaverin, 1928

But Kaverin’s main enemy was Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater, which epitomized “the victory of prose, the triumph of the petty over the sublime”:

“Forget that you are in a theater!,” its walls, chairs, and hidden stage lights seem to be saying.

“Quiet! In just a second, I’ll move discreetly out of the way, and you, from your hiding place, will be able to spy on the lives of simple and ordinary people just like you,” the noble curtain—so modest yet oh so boring—seems to be whispering.

“Look, we’ve banished theater from the stage,” the whole production seems to be suggesting. “Don’t you appreciate how well, how intimately we know your life? At home, you have the same walls, the same chairs, and the same steam rising from the samovar and soup bowl.”

“Can’t you hear how we’re speaking?” the actors seem to be asking. “Do we look like actors? Have you noticed the silences? You, too, remain silent more often than you speak. It’s true, this play, for some reason, was written in verse, but we destroy that verse, we break it up with our prosaic coughing, grunting, and wheezing.”⁴³

And what was the result? The result was that “our stages are haunted by the dignified, tasteful ghosts of actors, who pause more than they speak, … but lack the most important thing: creativity, Sturm und Drang. In the best cases, such acting can amount to solid professionalism. But in fact, it is the worst kind of formalism dressed up, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, in the garments of verisimilitude.”⁴⁴

“Real theater” was like the Maly, or the way the Maly was meant to be. “Long live Geltser’s curtain with its gaily decorated drapery and golden tassels, festive stage lights and bright strip of light peeking out from underneath the curtain, sudden sunrises and nightfalls, elevated speech and expressive gestures”! Theater was a temple, no matter how “banal and clichéd” the expression might be: “a temple of humanity, which reveals to humans what is great about them and what they do not see in the tedium of their daily routine.”⁴⁵

Kaverin’s first independent production, in 1925, was Kinoroman, based on Georg Kaiser’s 1924 Kolportage, a comedy of errors involving a large inheritance, a stolen baby, and a collection of scheming beggars, industrialists, and aristocrats. The idea, according to Kaverin, was to create “a parody of the kind of movie melodrama that continued to attract a large audience.” Scenes were staged like a montage of film shots lit up by spotlights. “Platforms on casters moved actors from one end of the stage to the other, creating the impression of a motion picture. Black velvet curtains revealed and concealed shots as needed.” During pauses, one could hear the clicking sound of the movie projector. A very large window and portraits of aristocratic ancestors with only their legs visible to the audience made the very small stage (the Sretenka Theater, with 320 seats, of which 20 were reserved for government officials) resemble a room in a large castle. The five-person orchestra “understood the humor of the concept” and brought it into “the tired old tunes they were playing.”⁴⁶

Kinoroman (1925)

Kinoroman became a huge success and the studio’s signature production. Another popular favorite from the mid-1920s was V. V. Shkvarkin’s Harmful Elements, a comedy about gamblers and NEP-men that Kaverin staged as a vaudeville featuring dueling guitars, ringing alarm clocks, dancing curtains, jumping briefcases, swaying columns, and, most famously, a scene in prison, in which a group of gamblers, arranged around a table like the Cossacks in Repin’s painting, compose a letter to the prosecutor. Another big hit was Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, which began as “a boring comedy in verse” (with handkerchiefs falling from the ceiling to help the grieving courtiers wipe away their tears), continued in pantomime (with Helena, in typical NEP-era fashion, rejuvenating the king by means of magic surgery), and ended well, with a wedding. One of Kaverin’s teachers from the Maly Theater, N. A. Smirnova, praised the “ostentatious theatricality and exaggerated characterization of the comic figures and situations, combined with the tremendous lightness, simplicity, and sincerity in the depiction of the play’s poetic moments.”⁴⁷

Harmful Elements (1927)

With the launching of the First Five-Year Plan and the rise of the Creation plot, tremendous lightness was no longer appropriate. Kaverin responded by producing D. Shcheglov’s The Recasting, about a steelworker who invents a machine that makes his own labor redundant. What follows, in the words of one reviewer, is “the overcoming of narrow personal and guild interests, their recasting in the interests of the whole plant and the whole state.” The new invention is adopted, the wrecker is slain, and the doubting workers are born again. “By remaking the world, the proletariat remakes itself.” By staging this play, wrote Kaverin, the theater had achieved “a genuine recasting.” The principles of “nonliteral realism” had found a proletarian content. The workers from the Hammer and Sickle Plant who saw a special preview were greatly impressed, as were the critics. “Has the theater passed the test of modernity?” asked Smena. “It most certainly has.” The Maly Theater Studio, wrote the Voronezh Commune on June 18, 1930, “has demonstrated its ability to move on to Soviet subject matter.”⁴⁸

The work of recasting did not come easily to Kaverin. As he wrote in his diary in the fall of 1928, “I reject art for art’s sake, but sometimes I have trouble resisting its lure and have to struggle mightily in order to overcome it. I want to work with modern material, but all my dreams are about classical poetry and painting. I want to work for the new public, but I find the Theater of the Moscow Trade Union Council [MGSPS] disgusting and would be lying publicly if I were to accept what goes on there as art.”⁴⁹

The Recasting (1929)

He was against MGSPS’s proletarian accessibility, “prescribed by the law and the authorities as a fixed ideal”; against the literal realists from the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR), who “speculate on the ‘backwardness of the masses’ in order to hide their own backwardness”; against arts administrators such as Kerzhentsev, “who introduce Cheka methods from the War Communism period into the politics of art”; and against every other attempt to “drive all discussions about art out of the art world.” He was “no reactionary,” of course: he wanted to “work in a cultured way,” and he greatly admired his censor, Nikolai Ravich, who himself admired some of the plays he was censoring. “He is a cultured, broad-minded person and he probably has more right than most to inflict the terrible pain I have to endure as I make all these changes.”⁵⁰

According to Ravich, the workers in The Recasting suffered from too much doubt, and, according to the Vecherniaia Moskva (Evening Moscow) reviewer, the wrecker in the play was “too much of a Hamlet.” Both seemed to be talking about Kaverin himself. As he wrote in his diary on September 3, 1928, “I love theater so much that life without it is like a desert. Yet sometimes I agonize to the point of believing that theater is like a silly and totally useless piece of candy and that only totally useless people can take it seriously, and so I start making perfectly fantastic plans about my future life outside the theater. I love theater, and I hate it. I love actors and I despise them.” The key, he wrote on December 7, was “to keep on working as conscience dictates.”⁵¹

Within two years, Kaverin’s studio had passed the test of modernity and was invited to move into the future House of Government. After two more years, on April 23, 1932, a special Central Committee decree ordered the dissolution of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers and “a similar change in other forms of art.” On November 13, 1932, the newly renamed State New Theater (117 employees, including 60 actors) inaugurated its new 1,300-seat auditorium. The Prologue, which included characters from some of the troupe’s best-known productions, was followed by the seven hundredth performance of Kinoroman and an official welcome ceremony featuring addresses by the deputy commissar of enlightenment, Comrade Epstein; deputy chairman of the Moscow City Soviet, Comrade Melbart; director of Odessa’s January Uprising Factory, Comrade Ershov; spokesman from the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy, Comrade Lass; and head of the All-Russian Theater Society and celebrated Maly Theater actress, A. A. Yablochkina.⁵²

Kaverin, who had just turned thirty-five, was awarded the title of “Distinguished Artist of the Republic.” He was still subject to doubt: one month after the inaugural performance in the House of Government, he “accidentally came across” Trotsky’s My Life. “The book is filled with such passion and conviction that sometimes you can’t help having doubts: and what if all this is true? But no, it cannot be.” It could not. Following the Party’s rejection of the “Cheka methods” in the arts and owing to his own hard work of self-improvement, Kaverin had largely succeeded in recasting himself. Over the course of the summer and fall of 1932, while the theater was moving into the House, he had read Adoratsky’s On the Significance of Marxist-Leninist Theory; Lenin’s Selected Articles on the National Question (“copying out quotations chapter by chapter”), and, with particular diligence, Engels’s Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (“this one is particularly useful for the theater; I should get to know it well; I’ve taken notes on the whole book, and will proceed this way with my classics”). The old classics looked different in light of the new ones: Anna Karenina “left a completely different impression after studying Marxism. Levin’s utterly tendentious gentry point of view really sticks out in places.” Les misérables was not appropriate for the stage either: “I don’t see much point in it because I am wary of abstract romanticism and humanism.” Nothing, in the end, could compare to Lenin as depicted in N. K. Krupskaia’s memoirs. “The book touched me greatly. It forces you to think about such endless, unswerving self-abnegation in the service of an idea. As a human being, Lenin seems to be, in this sense, an ideal, … an amazing union of philosophical thought and daily activity.”⁵³

The first season in the House did not go well. According to Smirnova (who, as the studio’s founder, also became a Distinguished Artist on November 13), “in the [old] small theater, the audience was able to see and hear everything. The actors were used to speaking in normal voices, applying light makeup, acting intimately, and conveying slight nuances by means of gestures and facial expressions. Neither the directors nor the actors took this into account when they pushed for moving from a crowded space into a large theater.” In the new building, Kinoroman, in the words of Kaverin’s friend and student, B. G. Golubovsky, “got lost in the vast expanse of the never-ending stage. The barely audible dialogue did not reach the audience; the only people laughing were those who had seen the show many times before.” Kaverin called the opening night a bad omen. “The old shows did not take off on the enormous new stage; removed from the intimate space in Gnezdnikovsky Alley, they lost their charm.”⁵⁴

The new show, The Other Side of the Heart, did not take off either. Based on a Ukrainian-language novel by Yuri Smolich, it was a tale of doubles: two men who share the name Klim Shestipalyi. One “resembles a wolf, but a cunning wolf. His distinguishing characteristic is the degenerate’s low forehead, with the hairline beginning almost at the eyebrows.” The stage directions refer to him by his last name, “Shestipalyi” or “Sixfingers,” which, according to a popular construction-plot convention, indicates the stamp of the beast. The other Klim—known simply as “Klim”—is “lanky, awkward, and absent-minded. His distinguishing features are his eyes: huge, with long eyelashes, radiant, naive, and ever ready to light up with joy, excitement, and enthusiasm.”

The action begins shortly before the Revolution and ends during the Five-Year Plan. Sixfingers follows Klim everywhere, the way a last name follows a first. His job is to tempt, and possibly to reveal. Klim is a peasant who “parts with his pigs, breaks with his family, and leaves for the city to study and become a doctor.” Once there, he continues to study while his friends join the Revolution. During the Civil War, he (still shadowed by Sixfingers) goes to fight—briefly and absentmindedly—on the side of the Reds. Arrested by the Whites for speculation, he saves his Bolshevik fiancée by claiming that she, too, is merely a trader. After the war, he lives abroad for a time among Cossack émigrés, who beat him up. Back in the Soviet Union, he reunites with his friends and fiancée and resumes his studies.

The last act begins in Kharkov: “In the background is the scaffolding of socialist construction. Then, before the eyes of the audience, the scaffolding disappears and the socialist city takes shape behind it.” When Klim has only one exam left before graduation, he, his friends, his fiancée, and Sixfingers (who has been posing as a Soviet activist) decide to hire a maid. The old peasant woman who answers the ad turns out to be Klim’s mother. “Angry, threatening, her arms akimbo,” she tells him that their pigs have been collectivized and that his father has been sent to the Solovki concentration camp for attempting to burn down the house of the “whore” who presided over their ruin. Once inside the apartment, they realize that the “whore” is Klim’s fiancée and that her acolytes are his friends and roommates. Stunned, Klim drops his mask and reveals what he has been hiding “on the other side of his heart.” “The revolution has kept me from making something of myself!” he screams. “It has taken everything away from me! It has destroyed my life!”⁵⁵

By the time he pulls himself together, it is too late: he has shown himself to be the enemy. His fiancée tells their friend, the undoubting Bolshevik, Makar Tverdokhleb (“Hardbread”): “Only yesterday I was urging our comrades to be vigilant, and look at me now.” Sixfingers calls the secret police and reports on Klim’s “brazen counterrevolutionary display.” Makar Tverdokhleb orders Sixfingers to sit down and wait for the secret police. Curtain.⁵⁶

The censor ordered Kaverin to “tone down the kulak hysterics” in the final act. Even after the revisions, however, most critics were not convinced. At a special discussion in the Theater Department of the Commissariat of Enlightenment on December 17, 1933, one of them, a Comrade Vinogradov, called the whole premise erroneous. “You would like to show Klim as a class enemy under the mask of romanticism and realism. The audience likes Klim, the audience believes in him and sympathizes with him when he makes mistakes. It feels sorry for Klim and thinks that his mistakes are the result of his weakness. And then, suddenly, in the last act, in the starkest—I would even say, RAPPist—way possible, you proclaim him to be a class enemy. Who will believe it? No one will believe it because the dramatic material does not plant a single seed for such a transformation.” In fact, said another participant, “what stands out in the minds of the spectators who have seen the three previous acts is not the biological connection to the mother, which you try to demonstrate, but the development of the character that they have been observing for three hours. The spectators know Klim as someone who has been wavering for three hours, but is always on the side of the Reds, and then, suddenly, his mother comes and he is reborn. The spectators do not believe it.” The trust between the theater and the audience had been broken. “This is not theatrical deception,” argued another critic, “this is a swindle. Deception is achieved by more complex means, but if you try to swindle your audience, all it is left with at the end of the show is a sense of disappointment.” According to a certain Comrade Uspensky, “a story has been making the rounds about an old Jew, who happened to be sitting next to a Party member. At the beginning of the fourth act, he suddenly says: ‘There’s something fishy going on here’ [laughter].” “So why does the Fourth Act feel false? Because every morning, our spectator reads in the newspapers about the White Sea–Baltic Canal and the construction of the Volga–Don Canal, and reads various letters from former wreckers, … and so this spectator knows that, in our epoch, human regeneration is an everyday occurrence. But in this show, he sees the opposite: he sees that, in spite of everything, he cannot be reborn, cannot become a useful member of society. It is no wonder the spectator feels that the ending is false.”⁵⁷

Creation stories included conversion stories; conversion stories—successful or not—had to be psychologically motivated. According to the majority opinion, Klim’s character “cannot be considered from the point of view of social categories. He is a pathological character, not a social category.” There were some obvious enemies, like Sixfingers; there were some obvious paragons, “who do not oppose the personal to the collective.” And then, “lost in between these two sets of characters, is a blue-eyed boy named Klim.” He was the only nontransparent character, the only candidate for conversion, the only protagonist whose motivations needed to be understood. He might yet be saved (like those “Canal Army Fighters” baptized by Aron Solts), or he might be damned (like Ehrenburg’s Volodia Safonov in The Second Day)—but he could not simply switch masks. Vigilance was about psychological insight, not relentless paranoia.⁵⁸

Kaverin defended his creation along two interconnected lines. One had to do with his theatrical credo, his desire “to work with a text that has an edge to it, that rises somewhat above the pedestrian realism and naturalism that reigns in most other theaters and that we consider unacceptable and refuse to make our own.” The audience was shocked because the theater had done its job. “When the old Jew mentioned by Uspensky says, ‘there’s something fishy going on here,’ he is saying exactly what we want him to say. We know that when the fourth act starts, the spectator has to say to himself: ‘this makes no sense.’ There are moments on stage when we say: ‘pause.’ This pause should make the spectator believe that the actors have forgotten their lines.” The idea, it is true, is “to deceive the spectator,” but “only at a certain moment in the show, as a way of breaking with existing theatrical conventions.”⁵⁹

Kaverin’s other argument had to do with the ideological concept of the enemy and with his own efforts at self-recasting. Most of those present were of nonproletarian origin. None mentioned, and perhaps none thought relevant, that Fedor Kaverin, an intelligentsia fellow traveler, was “soft and trusting, like a child”; that he had “no practical sense, no shrewdness, and no toughness”; and that he was “always excited about something, and not just excited, but enraptured to the point of ecstasy, of delirious infatuation.” There was a special reason why he wanted to stage The Other Side of the Heart:

This Klim—this soft, trusting Klim who is so quick to fall under the influence of others and so quick to escape it—this Klim struck us all, including the actors, as a particularly familiar enemy because this Klim, lit up by the suns of his eyes, still lives in many of us. This Klim may be a greater enemy than Sixfingers because Sixfingers is an obvious enemy, whereas Klim is someone we still feel within ourselves, someone we are still trying very hard to completely strangle within ourselves, but have not been able to completely strangle yet. We realize that this Klim still lives in our attitudes toward our roles, toward each other, and toward our work. This Klim deserves more of our hatred and our anger.⁶⁰

A few speakers supported Kaverin. The actress Maria Boichevskaia (herself the daughter of a high tsarist official) said that she had realized right away that Klim would turn out to be an enemy. A Comrade Garbuzov said that Klim had not been executed yet and might still be reborn (“I can foresee a whole story of inner struggle, a whole history of regeneration,” an “Act Five”). But it was Kaverin’s colleague, S. I. Amaglobeli, the recently arrived and soon-to-be-retired administrative director of New State Theater, who spelled out the implications of Kaverin’s position:

Politically, this show is done correctly because none of us has a fully transparent soul. If we take a transverse section of our souls, including that of Comrade Vinogradov, we would find positive and negative traits—not good and evil in the general sense, but, as part of the complex creation of the socialist era, some enduring elements of individualism….

We can see that each part of the show plays with the spectator the way a cat plays with a mouse. The cat lets the mouse loose, and then pounces on it again. Our theater does the same thing. In this show, it offers a story, then grabs the spectator, confounds that story, and proclaims that it is nothing but bourgeois individualism. It is a good device, but it is painful for those who find themselves in the role of the mouse.

Yes, there is the White Sea–Baltic Canal construction. And from that we can conclude that wreckers are being reborn because our Soviet reality is so bounteous that even our enemies can be reborn…. But does that mean that we will not be watching every move they make? Of course not. It would be a mistake to say that we should not be extra vigilant toward those who engage not in deception, like Klim Sixfingers, but in self-deception, like the other Klim.⁶¹

The general Bolshevik conception of sin was identical to St. Augustine’s (“a thought, words and deed against the Eternal Law”). The key Marxist innovation consisted of the discovery that original sin (derived from the primeval division of labor and perpetuated through class exploitation) applied in different degrees to different social groups. Various nonproletarian categories were to be subjected to “concentrated violence,” close surveillance, and special requirements concerning the “inner struggle” in “act five.” This did not mean, however, that proletarians were free of the “enduring elements of individualism.” The difference was one of degree: no one’s soul was fully transparent, and no one’s thoughts adhered unswervingly to the Eternal Law. As Bukharin put it, “even some relatively wide circles of the working class bear the seal of commodity capitalism. This inevitably leads to the need for coercive discipline…. Even the proletarian avant-garde, consolidated in the party of the insurrection, must establish such coercive self-discipline in its own ranks; it is not strongly felt by many elements of this avant-garde because it coincides with internal motives, but it exists nonetheless.”⁶²

No one’s internal motives, including Bukharin’s, coincided with the Eternal Law; everyone, with the possible exception of the Eternal Law’s ex officio representative, was a mouse. Bolshevik soteriology, like its Christian rival and predecessor, assumed that full perfection in this world was impossible. Only with the coming of Communism would the seal of commodity capitalism be wiped off, the enduring elements of individualism, eliminated, and the cycle of eternal return, broken forever. The real question—for all theories of salvation—is what happens in the meantime. How can one prepare oneself and help others prepare? Amaglobeli’s (perfectly Christian) answer was that everyone—to varying degrees—was to submit, and subject others, to permanent surveillance and relentless repentance. This was obviously correct in the abstract, but what did it mean for literary plots, theater performances, and individual lives? As Bukharin’s fellow-Rightist, Mikhail Tomsky, said at the Sixteenth Party Congress, “it seems to me, comrades, that it is a little difficult to be in the role of a permanent penitent.” Sixfingers could not be trusted; the other Klim could not be trusted; Tomsky could not be trusted; and, since no one’s soul was fully transparent, the undoubting Bolshevik Makar Hardbread could not be trusted, either. If “words are meaningless,” concluded Tomsky, “then we must stop talking altogether. What is the point of talking?”

Most of the participants in the discussion of The Other Side of the Heart in December 1933 did not stop talking. A solution, of sorts, was provided by the deputy head of the Theater Department of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, Pavel Ivanovich Novitsky, who presided over the conference. “The question of the class enemy, the double-dealer, the traitor, the timeserver … must be addressed,” he said in his concluding remarks, “but I insist that the question of the class enemy is not the same question as that of the remnants of bourgeois and petit bourgeois mentality in each one of us.” There was a difference between defeating the class enemy and overcoming the enduring elements of individualism, a difference that was not directly related to class origins. “If the theater wanted to show the class enemy in each of us, in our morals and everyday behavior, if it wanted to unmask many of us, it went about it the wrong way.”⁶³

Novitsky was proposing a version of Thomas Aquinas’s distinction between mortal sins, which involve a deliberate rejection of the Eternal Law, and venial sins, which are a matter of carelessness and disorder. The story of Klim falls into the second category. “I insist that the blue-eyed Klim, as a dramatic character, is evolving in the direction of Soviet reality. For me, this is a fact…. And if he is evolving in the direction of Soviet reality, then the theme of the class enemy has been replaced by another theme, that of the possibility of class rebirth.” The play’s denouement betrayed the spectator by betraying its own “aesthetic texture”:

At issue is not whether it feels false or not; it is that the spectator does not agree with you. Why? Because this is the most important question for us, the central question of socialist construction, of a new attitude toward labor, toward work, toward the state, and toward your comrades: the question of overcoming, within each one of us, the survivals of petit bourgeois mentality, property-centered selfish mentality, self-interested mentality. Our task is to give a new, socialist birth to the whole immense mass of petit bourgeois, proletarian, and semiproletarian working people of our country, and even to all the remnants of the capitalist classes, and turn them into useful members of a classless socialist society. Not only every employee, every intelligentsia member, and every actor, but every Communist, too, should think of nothing else, as we all engage in the inner struggle aimed at the reeducation of human beings.⁶⁴

The Other Side of the Heart was not appropriate because the whole point of the reconstruction period was that even the remnants of the capitalist classes were capable of being reborn. The show was dropped until further notice.

Entrance to the theater