The House of Government

12

THE VIRGIN LANDS

The First Five-Year Plan was about construction: “installing special foundations capable of ensuring the stability of structures on swampy land” and building eternal houses “that shone with more light than there was in the air around them.” But it was also about destruction: draining the bubbling, rumbling swamps and slaying the wreckers who lived there. The real revolution—the most radical of Stalin’s “revolutions from above”—was to take place in the damp, rural shadow of the cranes, chimneys, and masts. The goal was to do what Peter the Great, in his “small-artisan way,” had not considered, and what no state in history had ever attempted: to turn all rural dwellers—peasants, shepherds, trappers, reindeer breeders—into full-time laborers for the state.

Industrialization could not be accomplished without foreign equipment; foreign equipment had to be bought for cash; cash could only be raised by selling grain; grain had to be procured from the peasants in the form of “tribute” (as Stalin put it). Because a steady flow of tribute from traditional peasant households could not be counted on (as the grain crisis of 1927 clearly demonstrated), traditional peasant households were to be destroyed once and for all.

In a millenarian world, whatever is necessary is also inevitable, and whatever is inevitable is also desirable. “Collectivization” had been predicted (mandated) by Marx, Engels, and Lenin; the fact that its fulfillment was urgently needed meant that it was about to begin, and the fact that it was about to begin meant that those who had ears were ready to hear. The policy of wholesale collectivization was launched on November 7, 1929, by Stalin’s speech, “The Year of the Great Breakthrough,” which revolved around a series of Lenin’s predictions and proclaimed, contrary to what most eyes could see, that the majority of the peasants had decided to give up the old ways and, “in the face of desperate resistance by all manner of dark forces, from kulaks and priests to philistines and right opportunists,” follow the Party on the path to a “radical breakthrough.”¹

The Central Committee plenum of November 1929 made the new policy official. On December 27, 1929, Stalin told Kritsman’s Conference of Agrarian Marxists that, since the countryside was not going to follow the city of its own free will, “the socialist city can lead the small-peasant village only by imposing collective and state farms upon it.” And, since the peasants who were not kulaks were now ready to have the collective and state farms imposed upon them, the Party could move on to the policy of the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class.” On January 6, 1930, the Central Committee formalized the new policy, and on January 30, the Politburo issued a “strictly confidential” decree “On Measures Regarding the Liquidation of Kulak Households in the Areas of Wholesale Collectivization.”²

All rural residents in the Soviet Union were divided into three categories: poor, middle, and rich (kulaks). Selection criteria varied considerably and tended to be improvised by local officials, most of whom were specially mobilized urbanites. The poor peasants were expected to welcome the imposition of state and collective enterprises (the collectives, or kolkhozes, were also run by the state). The middle peasants were expected to be persuaded by the success of the poor ones and the fate of the kulaks. The kulaks were to have “their backs broken once and for all” before they had a chance to reveal their intentions. According to the January 6 decree, they were to be deprived of their possessions and subdivided into three categories. The first group was to be “immediately liquidated by means of imprisonment in concentration camps, not hesitating to use the death penalty with regard to the organizers of terrorist acts, counterrevolutionary actions, and insurrectionary organizations.” The second was to be exiled to “uninhabited and sparsely populated areas” in “remote regions of the USSR,” for use as forced laborers. The third group was to be resettled in specially designated locations within their native districts.

According to approximate quotas, the Middle Volga OGPU was to arrest and execute 3,000–4,000 people and deport 8,000–10,000; the North Caucasus and Dagestan OGPU, 6,000–8,000 and 20,000; the Ukrainian OGPU, 15,000 and 30,000–35,000, and so on, for a total of 49,000–60,000 people to be imprisoned or executed and 129,000–154,000 people to be deported. The OGPU order of February 2, 1930, made it clear that family members of first-category individuals were to be treated as second-category, and that quotas for the second and third categories referred to families, not individuals. “The measures” as a whole, therefore, targeted about a million people (based on the standard average of five persons per family), but the numbers were subject to negotiation among various deporting officials interested in overfulfilling the plan, bosses of “uninhabited and sparsely populated areas” interested in receiving fewer starving and homeless charges, and industrial managers like Granovsky interested in obtaining free labor. The head of the Middle Volga OGPU, Boris Bak, proposed the deportation of 6,250 families but added that, if necessary, “this number can, of course, always be increased.” A week later, on January 20, 1930, he reported that he was about to launch “a mass operation involving the extraction from the countryside of active counterrevolutionary and kulak–White Guardist elements” numbering ten thousand families (Bak was a relative of the head of the Gulag, Matvei Berman, and his neighbor in the House of Government.) During the most intense period of collectivization, 1930–33, about two million second-category exiles were deported to uninhabited and sparsely populated areas. Those who did not die en route built their own “special settlements.”³

Boris Bak (Courtesy of Nikita Petrov)

The kulaks, “subkulaks,” and would-be kulaks who were not deported left their villages to become the Tower of Babel of Berezniki, Kuznetsk, and Magnitogorsk. “From Perm they came, and from Vyatka, and from all the provinces where the old peasant ways passed down from their forefathers were no longer possible, but new ones had not yet arrived.” Those who stayed behind were searched, beaten, robbed, and starved until they joined the collectives. According to a March 1930 report on “excesses” in one rural district in Boris Bak’s Middle-Volga Territory,

In the village of Galtsovka, Lunin District, the middle peasant Mishin was dekulakized because he spoke out against collective farms at a village assembly. All his possessions, including soup spoons, children’s skis, and toys, were confiscated. Mishin had worked for forty years as a day laborer and railroad patrolman, paid ten rubles’ worth of agricultural tax, and was an activist. His children had received a present from N. K. Krupskaia: a little library of books.

In the village of Ust-Inza, Lunin District, during the dekulakization of the kulak Imagulov, the entire family was evicted at 1 a.m. and forced out into the winter cold. The baby froze to death and Imagulov’s sick daughter-in-law was badly frostbitten. (She had given birth two days previously.)⁴

Once inside the collectives, the peasants, herders, hunters, gatherers, and fishermen were given production plans calculated on the basis of yield forecasts and the need for urban food supplies and export revenues. A failure to fulfill the plan resulted in more searches and beatings. According to Bak’s report of June 28, 1932, the most common peasant response was to try to leave the collectives. “Usually, after submitting their resignations, collective farmers attempt to repossess their horses, which must then be retaken by force—and stop reporting for work, thus sabotaging such important activities as weeding, mowing, and silaging, as well as fallow preparation and fall plowing.” Other common practices included flight, the slaughtering of animals, and the killing of local activists. Bak’s response was to restrain the local activists guilty of “excesses” while also “arresting anti-Soviet elements, improving the dissemination of political information, and taking preventive measures through our agent network.” The central government’s response was the decree of August 7, 1932, which equated newly collectivized household possessions to state property and punished theft (attempts at repossession) by applying “the ultimate method of social defense in the form of execution, accompanied by the confiscation of all possessions.” The determined enforcement of ambitious production plans resulted in a famine that killed between 4.6 and 8 million people.⁵

Collectivizers at all levels were to demonstrate Bolshevik firmness without committing excesses or suffering from “dizziness from success” (decried by Stalin in March 1930). The line between firmness and excess was both mobile and invisible. Roman Terekhov, who joined the revolutionary movement because of his “great hatred for those who did not work and lived well, especially the bosses” (and began his armed struggle by trying to kill a mechanic in his shop), had since become the Party secretary of Kharkov Province and a member of the Ukrainian Central Committee. In December 1932 he inspected the Kobeliaky District and found “an orgy of brazen deception of the state.” Local officials, he wrote in his report to the Ukrainian Party secretary, had abetted the “plundering and wasting of grain” by violating the Party’s directives on “discontinuing the supply of grain for communal consumption,” allowing the farmers to “cut off individual ears of grain,” distributing bread “to the lazy and the greedy,” and setting aside emergency funds for the teachers and the disabled. On Terekhov’s recommendation, all those responsible were arrested and put on trial. The district officials were sentenced to ten years of forced labor “in remote areas of the Union.” A large number of kolkhoz employees (accountants, millers, warehouse guards, and beehive keepers), were unmasked as kulaks. “In addition to that,” concluded the report, “we have taken measures to restore the health of the local Party organization and cleanse it of degenerate elements and kulak agents.”⁶

Roman Terekhov with his daughter, Victoria

Within days of writing this, Terekhov traveled to Moscow and told Stalin that the plan was unrealistic and that the collective farmers were starving. Stalin’s response, according to Terekhov, was: “We have been told, Comrade Terekhov, that you are a good speaker, but it turns out that you are a good storyteller. You came up with this fairy tale about a famine, thinking to scare us. But it won’t work! Wouldn’t it be better for you to resign your posts of provincial Party secretary and Ukrainian Central Committee member and join the Writers’ Union? Then you can write fairy tales, and fools can read them.” On January 24, 1933, Terekhov was relieved of his duties, transferred to the Committee of Soviet Control in Moscow, and given an apartment in the House of Government, which he shared with his wife, Efrosinia Artemovna (who was made deputy director of Clinic No. 2 of the Kremlin Health Service), and their two children, nine-year-old Victoria and two-year-old Gennady.⁷

Terekhov was replaced in Kharkov by the first secretary of the Kiev Provincial Party Committee, Nikolai Demchenko, who was firmer in his struggle against sabotage and wiser in not approaching Stalin directly. According to Khrushchev, who worked under Demchenko in Kiev and greatly admired his loyalty to the Party, he approached People’s Commissar of Supplies Anastas Mikoyan instead. In Khrushchev’s version of Mikoyan’s account,

One day Comrade Demchenko came to Moscow and stopped by my place. “Anastas Ivanovich,” he said, “does Stalin know, does the Politburo know what the situation in Ukraine is like?” (Demchenko was the secretary of the Kiev Provincial Committee at the time, and provinces were very large back then.) Some train cars had arrived in Kiev, and when opened, turned out to be full of dead bodies. The train was on its way from Kharkov to Kiev via Poltava, and somewhere between Poltava and Kiev, someone had loaded up all those corpses. “The situation is very difficult,” said Demchenko, “but Stalin probably doesn’t know about it. Do you mind, now that you know about it, letting Comrade Stalin know, too?”⁸

Demchenko remained in Ukraine until September 1936, when he became the deputy people’s commissar of agriculture and moved into the House of Government with his wife, Mirra Abramovna (who was made head of the Department of Colleges in the People’s Commissariat of Transportation), and their two sons—Nikolai (seventeen) and Feliks (eight, born the year Feliks Dzerzhinsky died).

Another high-ranking Ukrainian official who combined public firmness with private pleas for mercy was the chairman of the Ukrainian Central Executive Committee, Grigory Petrovsky. “Another reason for providing help,” he wrote to Molotov on June 10, 1932, “is that starving peasants will harvest unripe grain, much of which may perish in vain.” As co-chairman of the All-Union Central Executive Committee and candidate member of the Politburo, Petrovsky had received a permanent apartment in the House of Government—as had his son Leonid, a division commander and an Old Bolshevik in his own right. Petrovsky’s other son, Petr, was in prison as an unrepentant Right Oppositionist.⁹

Grigory Petrovsky and his son Leonid

Terekhov, Demchenko, and Petrovsky were all Ukrainians open to accusations of softness on account of local commitments, but even the republican and territorial viceroys (none of whom was a native of the area he was collectivizing) were often accused of writing fairy tales. Their main job was to fulfill the plan; famines and unrealistic plans made fulfillment less likely. At the October 1931 Central Committee plenum, Molotov had to rebuke the normally firm Filipp Goloshchekin, who called the quotas for Kazakhstan “impossible.”¹⁰

The most obvious remedy for softness born of nepotism, vested interests, and participant observation was to send central officials out on short-term missions. Yakov Brandenburgsky, the family law expert, was sent to the Lower Volga; Solomon Ronin, the planning economist, to the Black Sea–Azov Territory; and Osinsky, still head of the Main Directory of Statistics, to Tatarstan. Boris Shumiatsky, the founder of the People’s Republic of Mongolia and president of the Communist University for the Toilers of the East, was put on the Moscow Province Dekulakization Committee. But they, too, proved unreliable. Brandenburgsky, according to his daughter, cried “so much that, had I not been a witness to those scenes, I would never have believed it.” (He was brought back home in disgrace in March 1931, before the famine had begun to spread.) Ronin, according to his daughter, was shocked by the violence of collectivization and came home in time for the Congress of Victors in January 1934. Osinsky, according to Anna Larina, was among those friends of her father who “were not in opposition to Stalin’s collectivization policy, but reacted with horror to the news of the situation in the countryside.” In May 1933, more than three years after his own stint on the grain procurement front, he wrote to Shaternikova from Ronin’s territory: “During my trip, I saw all those things the local plenipotentiaries had been telling me about, and that I told you about. They can be seen in all their glory all over the western part of the North Caucasus from the Sea of Azov to the mountains.” Shumiatsky, for reasons unknown, was transferred from the dekulakization commission to the chairmanship of the Soviet film industry after seven months. Even Sergei Syrtsov, a strong proponent of the extermination of the Don Cossacks in 1919 and one of the organizers of the anti-peasant violence in Siberia in 1928, had his career end over his objection to the “inflated plans” and the “solution of difficult economic problems with GPU methods.”¹¹

The method of last resort was the formation of emergency commissions headed by members of the inner sanctum known for their firmness, most particularly Andreev, Kaganovich, Molotov, and Postyshev. Pavel Postyshev, the former “calico printer” from Ivanovo-Voznesensk and a member of the commission charged with the “supervision and overall direction of the deportation and resettlement of the kulaks,” was sent to two of the most important, and most challenging, grain-producing regions: the Lower Volga and Ukraine. Soon after his arrival in the Lower Volga, he received a telegram from Stalin and Molotov about the arrests of two local officials accused of halting grain procurement. “We propose, first, that all such criminals from all the districts be arrested, and, second, that they be put on trial immediately and given five or, better, ten years in prison. Sentences and the reasons for them should be published in the press. Send report upon fulfillment.” The goal of the campaign was, as Postyshev put it at a meeting in Balashov in December 1932, “to fulfill the grain-procurement plan by any means possible.” According to a local official present at the meeting, one of the district Party secretaries said: “‘Comrade Postyshev, we won’t be able to fulfill the plan because we have winnowed the chaff and threshed a lot of straw, but are still a long way from fulfillment. We have nothing left to winnow or thresh.’—‘Is this really a district Party secretary?’ asked Postyshev, addressing the room. ‘I propose relieving him of his post.’ And they did.”¹²

Pavel Postyshev

Postyshev did veto some local initiatives by “dizzy” activists, but his job was to ensure plan fulfillment by any means possible. District prosecutors and people’s courts were told to “proceed to the immediate extraction of all uncovered grain” and “apply a maximum level of repression … to all the malicious non-fulfillers of the grain procurement plan.” On June 12, 1933, the territorial Party secretary reported that, “if not for the help of the Central Committee secretary, Comrade Postyshev, the Lower-Volga Territory would not have managed to fulfill the grain procurement plan.” Over the next year and a half, the population of the area (split between the Saratov and Stalingrad territories) fell by about a million people. By then, Postyshev had received his next assignment. In late December 1932, he, along with Kaganovich, had been told to “leave immediately for Ukraine in order to help the Ukrainian Central Committee and Council of People’s Commissars” and “take all the necessary organizational and administrative measures needed for the fulfillment of the grain procurement plan.” The Central Committee decree of January 24, 1933 (which also announced the firing of Roman Terekhov), appointed him second secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee. He, along with his wife, a fellow Old Bolshevik, T. S. Postolovskaia; their three sons (Valentin, eighteen; Leonid, twelve; and Vladimir, ten); and his wife’s sister and mother moved from the House of Government to Kharkov and, shortly afterward, to Kiev. (A different—smaller—apartment in the House of Government was reserved for their visits to Moscow.) According to Leonid, Valentin accompanied their father on his first trip to the countryside and was so distressed by what he saw that Postyshev had to assemble the family and tell them not to conduct anti-Party conversations at home.¹³

■ ■ ■

The Lower Volga and Ukraine, along with the North Caucasus, accounted for the largest total number of famine deaths, but, per capita, the most affected area was Kazakhstan, where, according to estimates based on official statistics, 2,330,000 rural residents (39 percent of the whole rural population) were lost to death and emigration between 1929 and 1933. The ethnic Kazakh population was reduced by about 50 percent: between 1.2 million and 1.5 million died of starvation, and about 615,000 emigrated abroad or to other Soviet republics.¹⁴

Filipp Goloshchekin

The man in charge of Kazakhstan during those years was Sverdlov’s friend, the “regular Don Quixote,” chief regicide, and former dentist, Filipp Goloshchekin. According to the head of the Central Committee Information Section at that time, “F. I. Goloshchekin was a rather strongly built, gray-haired man of about fifty, animated and extraordinarily mobile. His blue, expressive eyes seemed to follow everyone and notice everything. While thinking, he would stroke his pointed beard with his left hand. On formal occasions, he was a lively, fluid, energetic speaker whose gestures merely enhanced his already expressive voice.” In an apparent imitation of Stalin, he liked to pace with his pipe in his mouth.¹⁵

In principle, the “revolution from above” was the completion of the October Revolution and the fulfillment of Lenin’s prophecy (at a pace Lenin could only dream of). In Kazakhstan, it was also a restaging of the entire course of the Bolshevik Revolution and much of human history. “Right now, comrades,” said Goloshchekin at the Sixteenth Party Congress, “we are living through a time when the backward national republics are undergoing the transition from semifeudal to socialist relations, bypassing capitalism.”¹⁶

The transition began in 1928 with the confiscation of the property of all “semifeudal” nomads. In the Aktiubinsk District, for example, the expropriation of sixty households yielded 14,839 head of livestock, as well as “16 yurts, 11 earth dugouts, 6 haymowers, 4 horse rakes, 7 self-rake reapers, 3 bunkers, 26 carpets, 26 felt mats, etc.” “One thing that makes this experiment interesting,” wrote Goloshchekin in December, 1928, “is that, for the first time in history, we are carrying out the confiscation of livestock, which is considerably more difficult and complicated than the confiscation of land.” Despite the additional difficulties, Kazakhstan was to be in the forefront of collectivization. “I have heard the view,” said Goloshchekin in December 1929, “that the kolkhoz movement will proceed more slowly in our republic than in other regions of the USSR. I consider such a view incorrect.” Collectivization, “sedentarization,” and the final abolition of “feudal, patriarchal, and clan relations” were to proceed all at the same time and without delay. This achievement was going to be, “literally, of global importance.”¹⁷

On March 2, 1930, Stalin accused overzealous collectivizers throughout the Soviet Union of “dizziness from success.” At a Party conference held in Alma Ata in June, Goloshchekin accused his employees of “misunderstanding the Party line.” “In Alma-Ata province,” he told the delegates, the rate of collectivization was “17% in January and 63.7% in April (laughter); in Petropavlovsk, 38% in January and 73.6% in April; and in Semipalatinsk, 18 and 40%, respectively (here the approach was a bit more god-fearing) (laughter).” The highest rates had been recorded in areas of nomadic pastoralism. In Chelkar (where Tania Miagkova had spent time in exile), 85 percent of all households had been collectivized. “We, the Bolsheviks, are seriously alarmed,” said Goloshchekin in his concluding speech (according to the minutes of the conference). “Alarmed, but not panicked.” The conference resolved “to publish Goloshchekin’s complete works in Russian and Kazakh (applause)” and “to name the new Communist university being built in Alma-Ata ‘The Comrade Goloshchekin Kazakh Communist University’ (applause).” Goloshchekin joked that he might get dizzy, but “voices from the audience” assured him that he would not.¹⁸

The campaign resumed at the end of the summer and did not let up until most of the surviving peasants and pastoralists had been collectivized. In February 1931, Goloshchekin announced a new phase of the transition from semifeudal to socialist relations: “In our discussions of Kazakhstan, we often wrote: ‘given the special conditions of Kazakhstan.’ In other words, the achievement of the objectives set by the Party only partially concerned us. But now? Now the situation is different. Now Party decisions concern Kazakhstan absolutely, fully, and completely, and not only partially. Do we still have peculiarities and backwardness? Yes, we do, but they are no longer the ones that prevail and dominate.”¹⁹

Some local officials were slow to respond. “In this procurement season,” wrote Goloshchekin in the fall, “we face a new phenomenon: the fear of excesses.” A special telegram from the Kazakhstan Party Committee ordered provincial Party officials to rehabilitate all those previously reprimanded for dizziness. “The provincial Party committees must be able to guarantee the total fulfillment of the plan without having to fear the consequences.” The most obvious consequence was famine. According to a report by the Secret-Political Department of the OGPU, “based on obviously incomplete data, between December, 1931 and March 10, 1932, there were 1,219 officially registered cases of death from starvation and 4,304 cases of swelling due to starvation.”²⁰

The agency responsible for collecting this information—as well as for arresting and deporting kulaks, suppressing rebellions, and assisting collectivizers with force of arms—was the OGPU Plenipotentiary Office in Kazakhstan. The formal head of the office was V. A. Karutsky, but the man doing most of the work was his first deputy, Sergei Mironov (Korol), who had arrived in August 1931 in the company of his mistress Agnessa Argiropulo (after their elopement from Rostov and shopping spree in Moscow). According to Agnessa,

V. A. Karutsky (Courtesy of A. G. Teplyakov)

Karutsky—paunchy, swollen—was a big drinker. His wife had been married to a White officer and had a son by him. People began to throw this in Karutsky’s face. So he said to his wife: “I think it would be better if the boy lived with your mother.” They sent him away, but Karutsky’s wife missed him terribly and not long after we arrived she killed herself.

Karutsky had a dacha outside of Alma-Ata where he used to throw bachelor parties. Soon after we arrived, he invited us over. There I saw some pornographic pictures done by a very good French artist, but I don’t remember who. I still remember one of them. It was of a church in Bulgaria. Some Turks had forced their way in and were raping the nuns.

Karutsky loved women. He had an assistant, Abrashka, who used to procure them for him. He would pick them out, butter them up, and then hand them over. This same Abrashka started dropping in on me every morning as soon as Mironov left for work. And each time he would bring me something different: grapes, melons, pheasants—all sorts of things.²¹

Afraid to leave Agnessa in Alma-Ata by herself, Mironov took her with him on his inspection trip around Kazakhstan. As she recalled,

We traveled in a Pullman car that was built in the days of Nicholas II. The salon was upholstered in green velvet, the bedroom in red. There were two large sofas. The conductors, who doubled as cooks, fed us magnificently. Besides me, there was only one other woman—a typist.

It was late fall, but in northern Kazakhstan it was already winter with fierce winds, freezing temperatures, and snowstorms. The car was well heated, but it was impossible to go out anywhere. Being from the south, I was always cold. So they found me a coat that was lined with fur as thick as your hand. I could wrap myself up in it and go out wherever I wanted—even in a snowstorm or the freezing cold—and still be warm.

Everything was fine, except that for some reason, Mirosha was becoming gloomier and more withdrawn with each passing day, and even I could not always shake him out of it.

One day we arrived at a way station completely buried in snow.

“This,” we were told, “is the village of Karaganda. It is still under construction.”

Our car was uncoupled, and some of the staff went to see what kind of place Karaganda was. I wanted to go with them, but Mirosha wouldn’t let me. They were gone a long time, and Mirosha and I went into the bedroom. Mirosha lay down on the couch, was silent for a while, and then fell asleep. I got bored and went to look for the others again. They were all squeezed into one compartment. The ones who had gone to the village had come back and were talking about it.

“This Karaganda” they were saying, “is just a word. It’s only some temporary huts built by exiled kulaks. The store has nothing but empty shelves. The saleswoman told us, ‘I have nothing to do because there’s nothing to sell. We’ve forgotten what bread even looks like. But you say you don’t need any bread? What can I offer you then? I think there may be a tiny bottle of liqueur somewhere. Would you like to buy that?’” They bought it and got into a conversation with her, and she told them:

“Some exiled kulaks were sent here in special trains, but they’re all dying off because there’s nothing to eat. Do you see that hut over there? The mother and father died, leaving three small children behind. The youngest, a two-year-old, died soon after. The older boy took a knife and started cutting pieces off and eating them and giving some to his sister until there was nothing left.”

When Mironov woke up, Agnessa told him about what she had heard, “thinking to shock him.” He said he knew all about it and had himself seen a hut filled with corpses. “He was very upset, I could tell. But he was already trying not to think about such things and to brush them aside. He always believed everything the Party did was right, he was so loyal.”²²

A few weeks or possibly days earlier, on October 7, 1931, Mironov had written the following memo: “According to the information at our disposal, owing to a lack of housing, inadequate health care, and insufficient food provision, large numbers of the special settlers distributed among the hamlets of the Chilikskii District New-Hemp-Trust State Farm No. 1 are suffering from contagious diseases, namely typhus, dysentery, etc. Those sick with typhus have not been isolated and continue to live in the general barracks. As a result, there has been some flight and high mortality among the special settlers.”²³

The northernmost point of Mironov’s and Agnessa’s inspection trip was Petropavlovsk. It was a real city, and Agnessa was happy for the chance to socialize:

As soon as we arrived, the head of the Petropavlovsk OGPU came to see Mirosha. Mirosha was supposed to inspect the work of these officials, but he didn’t act the part of the dreaded inspector-general—just the opposite.

“We’ll start working tomorrow,” he said in a friendly way, “but why don’t you and your wife come over for dinner today? We’re having roast suckling pig.”

They did come. His wife, Anya, was pretty, but really fat. And her dress! Why on earth would you wear something like that if you are overweight? A pleated skirt always makes you look even fatter! I remember her trying to make excuses: “The reason I’ve gained so much weight is because we were in Central Asia, where it’s really hot in the summer, so I drank water all the time.”

The table in the salon was set unimaginatively, but sumptuously. Our cook came in carrying a huge platter with the suckling pig, cut into pieces and covered in gravy. As he was passing by and probably trying to avoid Anya’s extravagant hairdo, he slightly tilted the platter—and some of the gravy splashed out onto her dress! She jumped up screaming, “This is simply outrageous!” and then began cursing.

The cook froze, and his face turned white as a sheet. What would happen to him now?!

I tried to calm her down and told her to sprinkle salt on the stain, but the dinner was ruined. Mirosha turned to her and said:

“Surely you’re not going to let a dress keep you from sampling this suckling pig?”

Her husband frowned at her, as if to say—“that’s enough!” but she didn’t calm down for the rest of the dinner.

The next day we were invited to their house. Now that was a feast! All kinds of flunkies and servants and various types of toadies and bootlickers serving every kind of fresh fruit imaginable—even oranges. And I’m not even talking about all the different kinds of ice cream and grapes!²⁴

On January 11, possibly on the return leg of the same trip, Mironov wrote a report on the situation in the Pavlodar District:

Recently, according to the data collected by our Pavlodar district network, 30 secret grain pits have been discovered. Animal theft and the mass slaughter of animals have increased.

Grain procurement is being conducted in an atmosphere of sheer coercion. The following instructions have been issued by the procurement plenipotentiaries to the Party cells and local soviets: “during procurement, confiscate all grain and use all possible measures except beatings,” as a result of which there have been reports of flight by kolkhoz members.

The District Party Committee’s plenipotentiary in Settlement No. 1, Matveenko, conducted full-scale searches of kulak families deported from their home districts and confiscated all personal-consumption grain, as a result of which 40 cases of mortality, mostly among children, have been reported. Others feed themselves by consuming cats, dogs, and other carrion.²⁵

Such numbered settlements had been built for the newly “sedentarized’ nomads. In a long “Short Memo” written four days after the Pavlodar one, Mironov described the “unplanned, slow, and criminally wasteful” way in which the campaign was being implemented. Most settlements, according to him, had no water; some were too far from their pastures; some were organized “according to the clan principle”; some had been built on sand and were sinking; and some consisted of buildings that “had begun to collapse after the rains.” The officials responsible for this state of affairs were “great-power chauvinists” who believed that Kazakhs were not ready for settled life, and Kazakh nationalists, who agreed with the great-power chauvinists. Both revealed their hostile intentions by blaming the Party for what they called “hunger and misery.” By spring, the “difficulties with food provision” had, according to Mironov’s report of August 4, “acquired extremely acute forms.” In the Atbassar District, “as a result of starvation, numerous cases of swelling and death have been reported. Between April 1 and July 25, there were 111 registered deaths, 43 of them in July. During this period, there were five reports of cannibalism. In this context, there have been reports of the spread of provocative rumors.”²⁶

In October 1932, a prominent Kazakh journalist and fiction writer, Gabit Musrepov, traveled to the Turgai District. He was accompanied by a territorial Party Committee official, a coachman, and an armed guard (“or else they might eat you,” said the local executive committee chairman, himself a deportee). In the steppe, they lost their way in a blizzard, but then came upon rows of dead bodies stacked up like firewood. “Thanks to them, we found the road: the corpses were lined up along both sides.” According to a later version of Musrepov’s original account,

They dug themselves out of the snowdrifts and set off down this road of the dead. They kept passing villages that were completely empty. The coachman, who was from the area, called out the names of these settlements—known only by number. There was not a soul in sight. Finally, they arrived in a yurt town that appeared strange to Kazakh eyes. Since the beginning of collectivization, a great many of these had sprung up in the steppe. For some reason, the yurts were laid out in rows, and each one had a number as if it were a city house on a city street. The white felt yurts were spacious and new. The coachman explained that they had recently been confiscated from the local kulaks. Two or three months ago, he added, there were a lot of people here. Now the place was deathly still. The absolute silence was broken only by the sound of the wind-driven snow: a dead city of white yurts in the white snow.

They walked into one yurt, and then another. All the household items were there, but there were no people.

In one yurt, the mats and carpets were frozen, and snow was coming in through an opening at the top. In the middle of the floor lay a large pile with a small hole at the bottom.

Suddenly, they heard a shrill, thin sound that made their flesh crawl—like the squealing of a dog or the shrieking of a cat, followed by a low growl.

From a tiny hole in the pile, some sort of small creature darted out and rushed toward the men. It was covered in blood. Its long hair had frozen into bloody icicles that stuck out at all angles. Its legs were skinny and black, like a crow’s. Its eyes were wild, and its face covered with clotted blood and streaks of fresh blood. Its teeth were bared, and its mouth dripped with red foam.

All four men recoiled and fled in fear. When they turned to look back, the creature was no longer there.²⁷

Goloshchekin was bombarded with letters. Stalin and Molotov wanted to know what was being done to stem the flow of Kazakh refugees to China; the Party boss of West Siberia, Robert Eikhe, complained about the invasion of starving Kazakhs and asked, sarcastically, whether it was the kulaks who had uprooted “thousands of poor and middle-income households”; Gabit Musrepov accused the Party Committee of “being afraid of Bolshevik self-criticism when it comes to the catastrophic reduction in livestock population and famine”; Mironov and his colleagues reported regularly on the many “cases of mortality” and how they were being used for hostile propaganda; and an unknown number of people wrote to beg for food and mercy.²⁸

In August 1932, the chairman of the territorial Council of People’s Commissars and second-most-important official in Kazakhstan, Uraz Isaev, wrote a letter to Stalin in which he accused Goloshchekin of blaming his own “sins” on the kulaks and low-level officials; believing his own myth “that every single Kazakh had decided to join the kolkhozes”; engaging in “ritual curses and incantations” against the kulaks instead of correcting his own mistakes; and trying to solve every problem by transferring the same—and sometimes “totally corrupt”—Party activists from one place to another.²⁹

Goloshchekin defended himself by arguing that, “slanderous claims” and real excesses notwithstanding, the fact remained that, in accordance with Comrade Stalin’s prediction, the poor and middle Kazakhs had “voluntarily, in powerful waves, turned toward socialism.” The new campaign of violence unleashed by Moscow in the fall of 1932 seemed to vindicate his approach. On November 11, 1932, Goloshchekin and Isaev ordered mass arrests, deportations, and a goods blockade in all kolkhozes accused of “artificially slowing down grain collection.” (“The task,” wrote Stalin in a telegram praising the order, “is, first and foremost, to hit the communists at the district and below-district level, who are wholly infected by petit bourgeois mentality and have taken up the kulak cause of sabotaging the grain procurement campaign. It stands to reason that, in such conditions, the territorial Council of People’s Commissars and Party Committee would have no choice but to engage in repression.”) In October and November 1932, when top-level emergency commissions were being sent to all the important grain-producing areas, Goloshchekin remained his own emergency commission. In early January, speaking at a joint plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission, he said: “The enormous successes achieved by the implementation of the Five-Year Plan in Kazakhstan … are the best argument against the opportunists and nationalists and their counterrevolutionary slander, which exaggerates certain negative phenomena that are inevitable given the very complicated processes that are taking place in Kazakhstan.”³⁰

A few days after the plenum, Goloshchekin was dismissed from his post and sent to Moscow as head of the State Arbitrage Court. He, his second wife, Elizaveta Arsenievna Vinogradova, her mother, and her son from a previous marriage moved into the House of Government, Apt. 228. According to Voronsky’s daughter Galina, who saw a great deal of them, Elizaveta Arsenievna was “broad-faced, very lively, and, despite her plainness, extremely charming.” She was also relatively young (twenty years younger than Goloshchekin) and a strict disciplinarian: when her son started getting bad grades in school, she forced him to work at a factory and live in a workers’ dorm for a year before allowing him to come back home. According to Galina,

She was just as strict with her husband. At one time F. I. Goloshchekin had been a first district party secretary. For some sins, real or imagined, Stalin had dismissed him from that position. Filipp Isaevich was very depressed and kept moping about, talking of suicide all the time.

“I had completely had it with his ‘I’m going to shoot myself’ talk,” Elizaveta Arsenievna once told us, “so the next time he made one of those speeches, I walked up to his desk, pulled out the drawer where he keeps his gun, and said: ‘Go ahead then, shoot yourself!’”

“Stop it, stop it,” Filipp Isaevich cried, throwing up his hands.

“Fine, you don’t want to shoot yourself. So don’t let me hear any more of this suicide talk. I’m sick of it.”

And the subject never came up again.³¹

■ ■ ■

Mironov and Agnessa remained in Kazakhstan until September. Once, Agnessa wrote to her sister Lena in Rostov, asking if she would like her to send some stockings, dresses, and silk. Lena asked for food instead.

Later Lena told me: “I was giving everything to Boria (her son), everything I could get with my ration coupons, and wasting away myself. The streets and doorways were full of corpses, and I kept thinking—I’ll be one of them soon…. Then suddenly a car stopped in front of the house, and a soldier unloaded some sacks. He rang the doorbell and said, with a shy smile: ‘This is for you … from your sister, I think.’

I couldn’t believe my eyes. I opened one of the sacks—millet! I poured out a bit for him, of course, then quickly ran inside to make some porridge. I tossed some millet into a pot, added some water, and started cooking it, but then couldn’t wait till it was done and began gobbling it down raw.”³²

Soon afterward, Agnessa went to Rostov with a large food parcel herself. What struck her most was the behavior of Lena’s son, Boria, “who was just a little boy then. Somber, joyless, silent—all he did was eat. He ate his way through everything I had brought.” When Agnessa got back to Alma-Ata, she heard that one of Mironov’s employees—“pretty, with a delicate porcelain face, black shoulder-length hair, and bangs”—had been flirting with Mironov at an office picnic.

I was immediately on my guard!

“Did they go off alone? So, what did they do?”

“She offered him a pastry from her basket.”

I wasn’t too happy about that either. It was right before the holidays, and we were planning a party.

I always watched my figure. If I let myself go and started eating everything I wanted, I’d get fat in no time! But I didn’t and was always half starved because I was so careful about my diet. Everyone was amazed at how slender I was. I decided to have a dress made for the party and designed it myself. Just imagine—black silk (black is very slimming) with multicolored sparkles, close fitting around the waist and hips, and diagonal pleats…. Here, let me draw it for you. I’ve never seen anything like it since. It had these pleats flowing down from the top, and then, at the bottom, just below the knees, it widened out into a flounce skirt—as light and airy as a spring fog at dusk. And here, on the side, there was a large buckle, which shimmered with color, just like the sparkles on the fabric.

We had several servants: Maria Nikolaevna, who cooked for us and went everywhere with us just like a member of the family (I couldn’t possibly have managed without her); Irina, who used to bring us our meals and whatever we were entitled to from the special stores and cafeterias; a housemaid, who cleaned and served at table; and a laundress, who did the washing and ironing and helped the others when there wasn’t any laundry to do. And then my mother came to live with us as well.

Agnessa Argiropulo, 1932 (Courtesy of Rose Glickman)

They all loved to dress me. They’d pull here and tug there and fasten me up—and then just stand and marvel. On the evening of the party even my mother, who was more restrained than the servants, couldn’t help saying:

“You’ll outshine them all tonight!”

And that’s exactly what I intended to do. To outshine them all! To outshine and sweep away like a grain of dust any who dared to rival me.

And so I appeared among the guests in that dress, and all eyes turned to me, while she, that employee with the black bangs and little porcelain face, in her plain white blouse and skirt, stood arm-in-arm with a girlfriend…. How could she think she could compete with me? She ceased to exist the moment I walked into the room. Mirosha was able to see with his own eyes the kind of woman I was, and the kind she was.³³

In September 1933, Mironov was transferred to Ukraine as the OGPU’s plenipotentiary in Dnepropetrovsk Province. (Ekaterinoslav had been renamed in 1926 in honor of Grigory Petrovsky.) It was an important promotion. They moved into a large house and sent for both of Lena’s boys, Boria and Lyova. (Agnessa’s brother’s daughter, Aga, was already living with them.) “I remember an old two-story mansion,” wrote Lyova. “On the second floor there were dozens of rooms for family and guests, a viewing room for movies, a billiard room, and a toilet and bathroom in each wing. My uncle’s chauffeur and his family lived on the first floor, where there was also a huge study that opened out onto a glassed-in terrace. I had been brought to Dnepropetrovsk and enrolled in the kindergarten. As soon as I began to boast that Mironov was my uncle, everyone—the teachers, my playmates’ parents, and even my playmates—started fawning all over me and trying to curry favor. Everyone knew I was special: after all, I was the nephew of a very powerful man, Mironov himself!”³⁴

Mironov’s job remained the same: enforcing collectivization, “repressing” its enemies, and dealing with its consequences. In March, before they arrived, the Dnepropetrovsk OGPU office had reported the death from starvation of 1,700 people and the swelling from hunger of 16,000. Over the next two years, the province lost about 16 percent of its rural population.³⁵

When not working, Mironov played cards and billiards with his friends or spent time with Agnessa:

Mirosha had two lives. One was with me. That’s the one I knew and that’s the one I’m telling you about—because I knew nothing about his other life, his working life. He made it very clear that he was determined to keep it separate.

When he came home, he would cast off his official cares like a suit of armor and not want to think about anything except having fun together. Though he was eight years older, I never felt the difference in age between us. We were friends and used to fool around and play our game of love without ever growing tired of it.

Sometimes we went on long hikes together. We really loved those walks. Or we might go to the theater or take a trip and “live it up” somewhere like Tbilisi, Leningrad, or Odessa.³⁶

Every fall, they went to the Black Sea resorts (in Sochi, Gagra, or Khosta), and in the summer, to Berdiansk on the Sea of Azov, where the OGPU (renamed the NKVD in 1934) had its own sanatorium.

Three times a day a policeman would bring us food from a special sanatorium. For dessert after lunch we sometimes got a whole bucket of ice cream.

Once, the woman who worked for us there asked, “Is it okay if I take the leftovers home? I have three children …”

“Of course!” my mother exclaimed.

Two days later the same woman asked, “Is it okay if I bring my children to play with yours?”

Sergei Mironov and Agnessa Argiropulo (Courtesy of Rose Glickman)

She brought them—a little boy and two girls. We were shocked at how thin her children were. The little boy, Vasia, had ribs that stuck out like a skeleton’s. He looked like a picture of death next to our Boria, who had grown quite chubby. Someone had photographed them side by side. I said, “Remember that old advertisement for rice flour? Showing someone very skinny before he began eating rice flour and very fat afterward? This photo is exactly like that ad—with Vasia before the flour, and Boria after it.”

Then, this woman, our servant, could see that we felt sorry for them, and she brought her fourteen-year-old niece from Kharkov to live with us, too. When she arrived, she was so weak the wind could have blown her over.

We were now up to nine (including Boria and Lyova). The sanatorium started providing lunches for all of us. They didn’t dare refuse. We were a tiny island in a sea of hunger.³⁷

■ ■ ■

The House of Government was and was not an island. Among the residents who helped shape collectivization and determine its course were the head of the Kolkhoz Center and one of the most radical advocates of antipeasant violence, Grigory Kaminsky (Apt. 225); the head of the Grain Trust and Kaminsky’s close collaborator and personal friend, Mark Belenky (Apt. 338); the head of the Center of Consumer Cooperatives (and the former husband of Solts’s niece), Isaak Zelensky (Apt. 54); and the head of the Grain and Fodder Department at the People’s Commissariat of Internal Trade (and Natalia Sats’s husband), Israel Veitser (Apt. 159).³⁸

Some residents—including Postyshev, Terekhov, Demchenko, Goloshchekin, and Zelensky (in his dual capacity as head of the Central Asian Bureau and Party boss of Uzbekistan)—enforced collectivization as high-ranking regional officials; some—including Ronin, Shumiatsky, and Brandenburgsky—assisted the enforcers as special emissaries; and some—including Gaister, Kritsman, Kraval (and Osinsky, who was still living in the Kremlin)—drew up plans and collected procurement statistics (while also serving as occasional special emissaries). Some top OGPU/NKVD officers, including Matvei Berman and his brother-in-law, Boris Bak, presided over arrests, deportations, executions, surveillance, and forced labor. (Sergei Mironov did not become eligible for a House of Government apartment until 1936, when his old comrade, M. P. Frinovsky, was appointed deputy head of the NKVD.) Some top industrial managers, including Granovsky, employed the forced labor supplied by the NKVD.

The Central Executive Committee’s Housekeeping Department, to which the House of Government belonged, ran several farms that provided the House cafeteria and various nearby resorts with food. On November 13, 1932, the director of the Maryino State Farm and Resort wrote to the head of the CEC Housekeeping Department, N. I. Pakhomov:

Dear Nikolai Ivanych!

During my absence, several more people were picked up, so now there have been eighteen arrested, of whom twelve were released. Just now, they brought a warrant for the arrest of our agronomist-zootechnician, Zelenin, and our veterinarian, Zhiltsov, but then relented and allowed them to remain under their own recognizance. Our best workers keep leaving—for fear of being arrested themselves. The same phenomenon can be observed among our technicians. The local OGPU organs are on a rampage looking for hidden theft and wrecking—but what can a laundress or a mute cowherd possibly wreck? Therefore, Nikolai Ivanych, I ask you to inform Mikhail Ivanovich and Avel Sofronovich that measures must be taken to set up an inquiry into the correctness of the arrests and further threats. We need to create a normal working environment. With these abnormal and incorrect arrests, we may find ourselves in the kind of situation and the kind of conditions where we have no one left here to do the work.³⁹

Most Soviet institutions adopted one or more kolkhozes as the recipients of moral, intellectual, physical, and, if possible, financial assistance. The House of Government Party cell had become the official sponsor of the “Lenin’s Path” collective farm north of Moscow. On December 7, 1933, during a respite on the collectivization front, it received a reprimand from the Party Committee of Moscow’s Lenin District (where the House was located) for an “unacceptably formal approach” to its responsibilities. “Having been sent by the cell, the Communists Ivanchuk and Tarasov committed a gross distortion of Party policy and violations of revolutionary legality at the sponsored kolkhoz by engaging in coercion and by initiating and carrying out criminal acts of abuse against a group of adolescents (intimidation, beatings, etc.).” Most members of the House of Government Party cell were House employees; the leaseholders and their family members tended to register at work and travel to their own adopted kolkhozes.⁴⁰

Some House residents encountered collectivization indirectly. Nikolai Maltsev (Apt. 116), Molotov’s and Arosev’s childhood friend and a member of the Central Control Commission, was asked to respond to a letter sent to Stalin by a peasant named Nikulin. “The heads of the benighted and undeveloped collective farmers and proletarians,” wrote Nikulin, echoing Doubting Makar, “are being laid down like bricks in the foundation of socialism, but it’s the careerists, curly-haired intellectuals, and worker aristocracy who will get to live under socialism.” Maltsev replied: “Your letter addressed to Comrade Stalin is not a good letter at all. In it, you are thinking in a non-Party way.” The Zbarskys’ encounter was more substantial. “In the 1930s,” wrote Ilya Zbarsky, “a collective farmer named Nikitin attempted to shoot at Lenin’s body, was apprehended, but managed to kill himself. In a letter found in his pocket, he wrote that he was avenging the terrible conditions of life in the Russian village. The mausoleum guard was increased; the sarcophagus was provided with bullet-proof glass; and a metal detector was installed.”⁴¹

Some House residents had friends and relatives in the countryside. Olga Avgustovna Kedrova–Didrikil (Apt. 409), Andrei Sverdlov’s aunt by marriage and the wife, mother, and aunt of three prominent secret police officials (Mikhail Kedrov, Igor Kedrov, and Artur Artuzov), interceded, at the request of a friend, in behalf of two dekulakized peasants. A subsequent investigation established that the two peasants, Efim and Konstantin Prokhorov, had been dekulakized correctly (for owning four houses, two horses, two cows, six sheep, a threshing machine, and thirteen beehives); that both had been sentenced to one year in prison, but that one of them, Efim, “had, on account of poor health, been released from prison and, while at large, been conducting anti-Soviet propaganda in the following cunning way: after dekulakization, he had begun walking door to door in rags not only in his own village but also in neighboring villages asking for testimonies that would support the return of his property and vouch for the fact that he had never hired labor.” The investigation concluded that “in this matter, Comrade Kedrova does not have a clear sense of the class struggle in the countryside and the Party line, which circumstance we find it absolutely necessary to convey to the Party bureau of the Society of Old Bolsheviks.”⁴²

Kedrova’s brother-in-law, Nikolai Podvoisky, kept up a vast correspondence with former comrades-in-arms, who wrote asking for character references, various favors, and help getting out of prison. Podvoisky’s former “personal orderly, the cavalryman Kolbasov, Stefan Matveevich,” had been fired from his position as chairman of his village soviet and secretary of the Party cell for what he claimed was embezzlement perpetrated by his subordinates. According to a letter from Kolbasov’s brother, “while carrying out, from 1929 until the present, the Party’s hard-line policy on the liquidation of the kulaks as a class, all the kulaks and subkulaks, having become openly hostile toward him and, in connection with his arrest, keep concocting false accusations.” Another old comrade wrote from the Vishera camp (in Granovsky’s Berezniki or in nearby Vizhaikha). “I was so distressed by the wholesale collectivization campaign of February–March, 1930, before the Party directives were issued, that I kept grumbling and complaining—probably not in the best manner, but for the best of reasons.” A third letter writer, the Civil War veteran Tit Aleksandrovich Kolpakov, understood that good intentions were no excuse for weakness but confessed to feeling “like a pencil without lead.” He asked for Podvoisky’s help in obtaining release from prison and saving his family from starvation:

From September 3 to October 26, 1932 I worked in the Kuban Grain Council as head of a department in charge of 10,000 hectares, but I was unable to overcome the difficulties that stood in our way, gave in to weakness, and quit my supervisory position….

I fully realize my mistake and sincerely repent for giving in to weakness on the labor front—something I never did on the bloody battlefronts. Dear Nikolai Ilich! On behalf of my children and their sick mother, on behalf of my Red-Partisan soul, I am not just asking, I am begging you….

How is the health of your family? Your boy must be quite big by now. How is the health of your better half, your spouse, Nina Avgustovna?⁴³

Efim Shchadenko was at the center of his own large patronage network. One of his correspondents, a Civil War hero and now collectivization official in Kalach-on-the-Don, A. Travianov, wrote about the difficulties and rewards of rural activism:

You’d die of laughter if you knew how we live next to them and them next to us we taught them many political and economic words for example they now know bourgeoisie exploitation speculation contractation wholesale collectivization and so on and so forth etcetera. I apologize for not writing for a long time because I was mobilized by the district committee for all the grain procurement campaigns, my throat is sore from making speeches and ordering up whatever is needed and necessary, like let’s do the five-year plan in four years if we fulfill all the plans drawn up by our Soviet government then things will get good for you peasants and workers in all things and we won’t want for anything we just need to endure a little bit longer and gather our strength to improve the sowing and improve animal breeding and so on more faith in socialist construction—be selfless firm well-organized united friendly loving united all together workers peasants day laborers poor and middle on the economic front. And now dear Comrade to the most important thing the campaigns are going not too badly and not too well so far nothing to brag about and nothing to complain about the fulfillment is getting close to 100% the kolkhozes exceeding and the individual peasants still having some difficulties.

In other news, according to Travianov, the harvest had been bad in fourteen rural soviets on the left bank of the Don, and twenty people had been arrested for conspiring against the Soviet state. “And they all confessed and testified against each other and for this thing they got ten years each from the GPU collegium but in my own opinion I would bite off their noses and ears with my own teeth.”⁴⁴

The writer A. S. Serafimovich went home to Ust-Medveditskaia every summer—to see his friends and relatives, ride in his motorboat, and do research for his novel about collectivization. Throughout the rest of the year, he stayed in touch by writing letters. One of his regular correspondents was his wife’s friend, Sonia Gavrilova, who spent parts of 1931, 1932, and 1933 on grain-procuring missions. On the whole, she wrote on December 3, 1931, the situation was “nightmarish”:

All this squeezing out of grain, hay, flax, and other crops is taking place under difficult circumstances. They whine and whimper that there’s nothing left, but when you grab them by the throat, they deliver both grain and hay, and whatever else they’re required to. My nerves are always on edge. You have to be on guard or else they might bash you on the head, but I’ve gotten used to it by now, and I can walk from one village to another at night. I’m still alive, but who knows what will happen next. And yet, in spite of all the hurdles and difficulties, we have emerged as victors, met our grain and hay targets 100%, and managed to kolkhozify this whole petty, private-property peasant mass.⁴⁵

A few years later she got her reward: “Please congratulate me on my new Party card. I received it today at 1 p.m. My heart was overcome with incredible joy, like I’d never felt before. When the district committee secretary handed me my new card and said, ‘Take it, Comrade Gavrilova, you have worked hard for it,’ and firmly shook my hand, I almost cried with joy, but somehow managed to keep my composure.”⁴⁶

Another one of Serafimovich’s frequent correspondents was his elderly relative, Anna Mikhailovna Popova (Serafimovich’s real name was “Popov”). On January 18, 1932, she wrote that her grandson, Serafim, had moved away and not been in touch with her since. “I live in very difficult conditions. I have no money or bread. I wish he would send me something, anything at all. Other people feed me sometimes, I have nothing left to sell.” She asked for some dried bread cubes and a little money. “I don’t know what to do. I have nothing left but debts. I wait for death to bring salvation. Please forgive a poor wretch and invalid for bothering you. I pray for you all every day and thank you for your help and kindness, my dear ones! I never thought I’d live to such a state…. My friend has asked me to move out, what else can she do? She is in need herself, we are now eating cakes made of grass.”

On March 3, 1933, she heard of the renaming of Ust-Medveditskaia and sent her best wishes—from the new town of Serafimovich to: Aleksandr Serafimovich Serafimovich, No. 2 Serafimovich Street, Apartment No. 82. “Dear Aleksandr Serafimovich: Congratulations on your 70th jubilee and the cross you received and the renaming of our town in your honor as a fighter for the people’s freedom, such merit as yours will live on for many generations.” She had still not heard from her grandson, Serafim. “I am now all on my own. Please take pity on me and send some dried bread cubes. I’ve been waiting for them all this time and am sending you my very best regards and wishes for good health…. For food, I have oak bark mixed with chaff. For over a month I’ve had no bread, and no death either. You’re the only person, who, I hope, will not abandon me.”

Her last letter was sent twelve days later. “Dear Aleksandr Serafimovich: I am dying, I beg you please send 70 rubles for my burial, I owe Agafia Aleksandrovna 11 rubles that need to be returned. She fed me the best she could, I was a burden to her but she never abandoned me, if you cannot send this money tell Serafim to send this money right away to Agafia Aleksandrovna Kozmina. This is my last request of you. You treated me like a true relative, you and your whole family. Anna Mikhailovna Popova March 15, 1933, town of Serafimovich.”⁴⁷

Several months later, Serafimovich arrived in “his own” (as he put it) town to witness the final scene from his own Iron Flood. He described it in a letter to one of his proletarian-writer protégés, V. P. Ilyenkov:

It was, you might say, a triumphal entry on a white horse: the bridge on the other side of the Don (the meadow, forest, devilish sun)—the flags, the glistening brass, and the thunderous, unimaginable roar. The band roared; the kids, eyes popping and red cheeks puffed out, roared into their long trumpets; it was utter madness; the drums—of the 900 young pioneers, both local and those brought in from Stalingrad (where they have a summer camp)—roared; and the district Party committee, district executive committee, trade unions, cooperative officials, fishermen, grape growers, cobblers, goldsmiths, outhouse cleaners, old men, women, and infants (drowning out everyone else) all roared. Then I puffed up like a rooster and began roaring, too. I made speeches at them, and they made speeches at me, and then they bent my head down, placed a young-pioneer scarf around my neck, and presented me with some ears of grain, as a symbol of the harvest.⁴⁸

Sometimes collectivization arrived in the flesh, close enough for some House of Government residents to see. Tatiana Belenkaia, the daughter of one of the architects of collectivization, Mark Belenky, was five years old in the winter of 1933. Every day around noon, her nanny, Aniuta, would put her on a sled, and the two of them would cross the river to a government take-out cafeteria on Granovsky Street. “Once,” writes Tatiana, “I heard Father tell Aniuta (and made a note to myself): ‘Don’t throw away a single crumb. Take any leftover food to the bridge.’ There, under the Big Stone Bridge, is where the beggars stood: grown-ups and children, who looked like little skeletons, with their hands stretched out.” Elina Kisis from Apt. 424 was three years older. Her school was on Yakimanka, south of the Ditch. “Grandma would wrap up some sandwiches for me, but I never got to eat them because every morning I used to run into some boys by the Small Stone Bridge, and they would open my bag, pull out my breakfast, and eat it right on the spot. They often used to fight over a piece of bread.”⁴⁹

Bridges, large and small, were traditional shelters for outcasts and breeding grounds for swamp creatures. Sometimes, however, the “documentary proof of the planless creation of the world” made it as far as the gate. According to Kisis, “during the first years of the existence of the House of Government, security was very strict, but skinny children from the nearby houses would slide through the bars of the metal gates and fences, hide beneath the columns, and beg for food. This continued until ration cards were abolished” (in January 1935).⁵⁰

There were also those who did not need to hide, those who were not seen as documentary proof of anything: the various guards, painters, gardeners, carpenters, janitors, laundresses, floor polishers, and cafeteria servers, most of them former peasants. And then there were the domestics. Every apartment had a maid, and most maids were refugees from the countryside. Belenkaia’s nanny Aniuta was one, and so was Kisis’s Dunia. Dunia went on to marry one of the House guards, but most nannies never married. Some residents knew about the families of their “home workers” (Nadezhda Smilga-Poluian sent food packages to the starving relatives of her children’s nanny). Others did not. The House of Government was and was not an island. One of the consequences of collectivization was that almost every child raised in the House of Government was raised by one of its casualties.⁵¹

■ ■ ■

Another casualty of collectivization was its fictional representation. Serafimovich never finished his novel, The Kolkhoz Fields, and what he did write about the transformation of Ust-Medveditskaia was entirely within the industrial framework of the creation/construction myth. “You cannot imagine how unrecognizable the Ust-Medveditskaia landscape will be,” he wrote to his brother in August 1933. “In Kalach-on-the-Don, a 35-meter-high dam is going to be built. In Ust-Medveditskaia, the water will rise by 25–28 meters and flood the lower part of the town of Serafimovich, as well as Berezki, the meadow, the forests, the sands, Novo-Aleksandrovka, and perhaps Podolkhovskie, too. The land will remain on the horizon. It will all become a large bay. I can’t help feeling sorry for the forests, the meadow, and the lakes I know so well, but it is better this way, it will be magnificent.” As for the surviving settlement, “it is going to be a garden city, a city of schools, study, and rest.”⁵²

But what about “the kolkhoz fields”? And who would be left on them after the flood? “Who,” asked Mikhail Koltsov in a 1931 Pravda essay, “will tell us about the march of one hundred thousand people from the south to the north of the Central Black-Earth Region during the cold winter of 1930–1931?”

It was with astonished incredulity that the people—individual households—entered the unheard-of world of common labor and economy. Everything terrified them. Everything seemed—and was—amazing, stupefying, topsy-turvy, contrary to everything they knew about the way the world worked. But this old way, which had been protected for a thousand years by their oppressors—this powerful, gray-haired way covered with the moss of centuries—turned out to be foolish and feeble-minded compared to the young and vigorously intelligent Bolshevik way.

Every individual owner who has been drawn into the collective by the masses or has joined it himself must experience a moment when the new truths, imposed from the outside, enter the head through the ears, clash with the old truths, and come out on top. The kolkhoz propaganda becomes the individual’s personal conviction. It is this decisive battle inside the peasant’s head that marks the true, actual—not just on paper—registration of a new kolkhoz member.⁵³

One of the earliest attempts to give shape to this story was Andrei Platonov’s “For Future Use: A Poor Peasant’s Chronicle” (1931). While traveling through the Central Black-Earth Region in March 1930, “a certain soulful poor peasant”—innocent, like Makar, of “both selfishness and self-respect”—comes across a large assortment of melancholy enemies: left deviationists, who “take their own individual mood for universal enthusiasm”; right opportunists, who want to postpone the building of socialism “until the distant time of a lofty universal consensus”; and unmasked wreckers, who are “marched to the district center and left there for eternity.” Arrayed against them are conscious kolkhozniks, who “have no need for any urging coercion,” and honest activists, who “have the courage of gloomily telling the kolkhozniks that what awaits them in the near future is the grief of unruliness, incompetence, unreliability, and want.” One particularly “indomitable” collectivizer watches his family “become extinct” from hunger and tells the people “in the words of the Gospel because he did not know the Marxist words yet”: “these are my wives and fathers and children and mothers: I don’t have anyone but the indigent masses.” After many trials, he finally realizes that spirit alone is not enough for those who are looking for the city that is to come: “what we need is a live person—but the same as Lenin. As soon as I finish the sowing, I’ll go looking for Stalin. I feel my source in him.”⁵⁴

The story seemed right, but it was not. Once again, Platonov had reached for a myth but written a picaresque folk tale; imagined a Divine Comedy but produced Menippean satire; celebrated the indigent masses by representing lone eccentrics. Igor Sats (Lunacharsky’s brother-in-law, Natalia Sats’s uncle, and Elena Usievich’s friend and colleague) wrote in his reader’s report for Red Virgin Soil that the novella was very well written and full of “hatred for all things that damage the socialist construction,” but that it could not be published in its current form because the author “did not understand the true meaning of the reconstruction as a mass movement.” Fadeev, the new editor of Red Virgin Soil, published it anyway—perhaps because there were no other manuscripts about collectivization. Stalin read it, called it “a story by an agent of our enemies,” and ordered Fadeev to apologize in print. Fadeev apologized, called it “an attack by an agent of the class enemy,” and wrote that, “in order to falsify the true picture of kolkhoz construction and struggle,” Platonov “turns all the kolkhoz builders into idiots and holy fools. On Platonov’s instructions, these idiots and holy fools do everything they can to embarrass themselves in front of the peasantry, so as to benefit the kulaks, while Platonov, pretending to be an idiot and holy fool himself, sneers at the reader by rhapsodizing over their actions. Saintly simplicity, indeed!”⁵⁵

Platonov wrote to Pravda and Literaturnaia gazeta, renouncing all his “previous creative work” as non-Party and “therefore in poor taste,” and to Maksim Gorky, assuring him that he was not a class enemy. “No matter how much I suffer as a result of my mistakes, such as ‘For Future Use,’ I cannot become a class enemy, and it is impossible to reduce me to that condition because the working class is my motherland, and my future is connected to the proletariat.” His other response might be hidden in the text of “For Future Use”: “The rich peasants, after becoming the bureaucratic leaders of the village, taught the people to think and talk in such an officially tongue-tied way, that many a poor peasant’s phrase, though expressing a sincere emotion, sounded almost ironic. A listener might suppose that the village was inhabited by sneering subkulaks, while in fact these were poor peasants, tomorrow’s builders of a great new history, expressing their thoughts in an alien, ambiguous, kulak-bureaucratic language.”⁵⁶

The task was to demonstrate the true meaning of the reconstruction as a mass movement while having the masses speak their own language; to show how the new truths, imposed from the outside, enter the head through the ears, clash with the old truths, and come out on top. It was fulfilled almost a year after Platonov’s fiasco, by Mikhail Sholokhov’s Virgin Soil Upturned. One of the novel’s central characters, Makar Nagulnov, is Platonovian in more than first name. During the Civil War he “hacks at the vermin” until he begins having epileptic fits; during collectivization he “hunkers down and drags everyone into the kolkhoz, closer and closer to the world revolution”; and in a rare moment of quiet reflection, he confesses that he does not need a wife because he is “all sharpened up for the world revolution: it’s her, my sweetheart, I’m waiting for.” But Makar Nagulnov—unlike Platonov’s Makars—eventually figures out the true meaning of the reconstruction as a mass movement. The plot is propelled by the confrontation between Bolshevik collectivizers (who have their own maturing to do) and kulak and White Guardist wreckers (whose opposition has psychological, as well as political, motivation), but the novel’s true center is the “decisive battle inside the peasant’s head.” Virgin Soil Upturned is centered on the conversion episode from the canonical construction plot—without the construction. In the kolkhoz fields, the work of creation was mostly invisible.⁵⁷

No other novel about collectivization would enter the Soviet canon. (F. Panferov’s Bruski was warmly acclaimed on arrival but irreparably damaged—Serafimovich’s defense notwithstanding—by Gorky’s 1934 attack on its literary quality.) One reason may have been the long shadow cast by Sholokhov. (Serafimovich, the first and most forceful champion and publisher of The Quiet Don, seemed unable, in the drafts of his The Kolkhoz Fields, to escape the influence of Virgin Soil Upturned.) But the main reason was the much longer shadow cast by the cranes, chimneys, and masts of the great construction sites. The true meaning of the reconstruction as a mass movement was the building of the eternal house, not the decisive battle inside the peasant’s head. The real reason for Serafimovich’s barrenness was not the success of Virgin Soil Upturned, but the irresistible image of the purifying flood washing up against the brand new city of Serafimovich.⁵⁸

■ ■ ■

The greatest exceptions to the reign of urbanism were “the backward national republics undergoing the transition from semifeudal to socialist relations, bypassing capitalism.” In central Asia and Kazakhstan, the greatest effort was directed at “feudal, patriarchal, and clan relations,” and Koltsov’s appeal for more descriptions of how the gray-haired way turned out to be foolish compared to the vigorously intelligent Bolshevik way applied all the more. Some necessary plot twists related to backwardness included a starker contrast between the two ways (separated as they were by most of human history) and the centrality of young women and children as positive characters (given the association of backwardness with immaturity). One of the pioneers of what would become the “long journey” literature was the proletarian writer and member of Serafimovich’s circle, Fedor Kallistratovich Fedotov.⁵⁹

Fedotov was born in 1887 in a peasant family. He joined a socialist circle as a young man, spent time in prison for distributing leaflets, and, around 1914, emigrated to America. In New York he met his future wife, Roza Lazarevna Markus (who had arrived from Nikolaev by way of a Paris millinery shop). According to an interview she gave many years later, the only time he ever kissed her was in 1917, when he heard the news of the Russian Revolution. According to a personnel form he filled out in 1931, he stayed in the United States for about five years. “Worker (a miner), but employed as a turner and stevedore. In 1914 joined the Bolshevik section in New York. In 1915–16 president of the dockworkers’ union. One of the organizers of the Communist Party of the United States. Arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison. Spent one year in Trenton Prison before escaping to the Soviet Union.” In the 1920s and early 1930s, he served as secretary of the Semirech’e Provincial Party Committee (based in Alma-Ata), member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Turkestan (based in Tashkent), and head of the organizational department of the Osh District Party Committee in the Kyrgyz Autonomous Republic.⁶⁰

Fedor Fedotov and Roza Markus

During collectivization, Fedotov was in the Bazar-Kurgan District in the Fergana Valley. He kept a diary, which may or may not have been edited by his biographer.

The situation is as follows. Here in the Bazar-Kurgan District, where we have been conducting wholesale collectivization, there is an emergency situation.

On March 7th, at 10 a.m., we received the news: In Bazar-Kurgan, armed kulaks had incited a peasant rebellion.

I jumped on my horse and rode to Kokand-Kishlak, from where I called the Andijan OGPU and requested help. Then I mobilized the local militia, which sent fifteen men to Bazar-Kurgan.

Our Machine-Tractor station was in danger. When I got back with the militia men, I discovered that in Bazar-Kurgan, the kulaks who were demanding the release of all arrested kulaks, had organized an uprising by the local population. In the melee, three people—a militia man and two local activists—were killed, and one, the secretary of the district committee, injured. At the same time, a crowd of peasants led by the kulaks and religious leaders were demanding the dissolution of the kolkhozes.⁶¹

Help arrived; the siege was lifted; and wholesale collectivization continued in accordance with Party policy. But Fedotov’s real ambition was to become a fiction writer. His first attempt had been a play written in 1916 for the dockworkers’ union in Erie, Pennsylvania. “I am yet to write my big book,” he wrote fifteen years later in his diary, “a book that will be about life and still be a piece of life: full of passion, risk, and adventures.”⁶²

In 1930, the year of the Bazar-Kurgan uprising, he published a fictionalized memoir about the adventures of five unemployed workers in America. Frank is a dark, hot-tempered, Italian anarchist; Red is a red-haired Irish union organizer; “Negro Willie” dreams of getting rich and moving to Africa; “Punch, the American” has big fists, but no principles or convictions; and Fred, the narrator, is a Russian revolutionary. They wander around the country doing odd jobs and often going hungry. A mining executive wants to employ them as scabs, but they refuse. An insurance company official offers them money for burning down uninsured houses, but only Frank, Punch, and Willy agree. Fred and Red get hired as sailors, discover that the ship they are on is transporting weapons to the anti-Bolshevik forces in Murmansk, organize a mutiny, and are sentenced to ten years in Trenton Prison. According to Aleksandr Isbakh’s review, the book was “interesting, but artistically weak.” In 1931, Fedotov was admitted to the literary seminar at the Institute of Red Professors in Moscow. On March 12, he, Roza, and their eight-year-old son Lyova moved from the First House of Soviets to the House of Government, Apt. 262.⁶³

Fedor, Roza, and their son, Lyova

According to Isbakh, who was in the same seminar, “learning did not come very easily for him. At first he was too hard on the classics, inveighing against Gogol’s reactionary views, deflating Turgenev, and making sarcastic remarks about Hugo…. At Party meetings and during seminars on the international situation, Fedor liked to talk about America. On this subject, of course, he knew a lot more than the rest of us—and not just about America: he had crossed two oceans and knew Mongolia well.”⁶⁴

He did publish two books. One was an illustrated children’s book about two Mongol orphans, a boy and a girl, who stop fearing “the lamas, rich people, and Chinese and Japanese generals,” join the young pioneers, and start singing the song of the Soviet drummer-boy with new lyrics:

Puntsuk the Mongol hunter,

Puntsuk the Mongol hunter,

Puntsuk the Mongol hunter

Got himself a gun.

Did a little jumping,

Did a little shouting,

Made the greedy lamas

Turn and run.

Both plan on going to Moscow to study. The boy will learn how to build “not yurts, but houses, factories, and railroads”; the girl will become a schoolteacher.⁶⁵

The second, more grown-up book was set in the Bazar-Kurgan District during wholesale collectivization. The main character is a Kyrgyz cotton-procurement plenipotentiary named Galim Isakeev, and the central scene (soon to become common in long journey narratives) is a meeting of poor peasants who begin by denying that there are any kulaks in their village, but then, as new truths, skillfully conveyed by Isakeev, enter their heads through the ears and come out on top, draw up a list of forty-two households to be liquidated as a class. Surrounding the decisive battle is a traditional hero’s quest narrative, as Isakeev, with the help of some children and young women, searches for the hidden cotton, which is being guarded by a giant bandit, a rich trader, and a two-faced innkeeper.⁶⁶

In January 1933, at the height of the famine, the Party’s Central Committee created political departments in rural machine-tractor stations. Their responsibilities included plan-fulfillment, political supervision, and secret-police work. They were to be independent from local Party and state control. The chairmen were to be experienced Party functionaries selected by the Central Committee (seventeen thousand in all), and their deputies would be OGPU officers appointed by provincial plenipotentiaries and confirmed by OGPU head, G. Yagoda. In March 1933, Fedotov was summoned to the Central Committee but, according to Isbakh, was not selected because his big book had not been finished yet. He protested and received an appointment as head of the political department of the Altai State Farm. He got there by mid-April.⁶⁷

Fedotov’s first brief letter to Isbakh was followed by a long silence. “I couldn’t write earlier,” he explained in his next letter, “because there was no time for letter writing. Can you imagine a situation in which all the state farm officials (with a few exceptions) have turned out to be wreckers? They had an organization of up to fifty members and needed to be rooted out.” He mentioned the hard work and the “incredible tension,” but he did not complain (“there is no difficulty a Bolshevik cannot overcome”). He described the steppe and the harvest; promised to write an article about his experiences; and asked for a printing press and a women’s organizer. His department was headquartered in the houses of the deported peasants.⁶⁸

You ask what my life is like. It’s a wonderful life: I’m absorbed in my work, enjoy it immensely, and do it easily (despite the great difficulties) and with the kind of desire that I did not, to be honest, feel in Moscow. The only thing that sometimes ruins my mood is that I don’t have any time to read or do literary work. I keep up with my diary, but the book—the book, my dear Sasha, is exactly where it was when I left off. And that pains me. I sometimes feel the absence of a literary environment and of you, Sasha, our songwriter-poet (“off to the political department, you rush at full speed”), and I miss my son.⁶⁹

Fedor Fedotov with his son, Lyova

On September 4, 1933, Fedotov’s OGPU deputy sent the following telegram to Moscow:

On August 29, at around 5 or 6 p.m., Fedotov, the director of the garage (political officer Kliushkin), and company commander, Kirillov, left to go hunting in the area of meadows that is located 10 to 12 kilometers northwest of the farm headquarters. The meadows are dotted with lakes, marshes, brush, grass, and so on.

Upon arrival, Fedotov left the others and went on ahead. In the meadows, on one of the lake shores, Fedotov had an epileptic seizure, fell into the shallow water, and, apparently, drowned. At said time and place, he was alone and of sound mind.

The next day (August 30th), around 6 or 7 p.m., I personally discovered Fedotov’s body and pulled it out of the water, but did not find any signs of violence. The medical specialists who performed the autopsy did not detect any signs of physical violence, either.⁷⁰