The House of Government

14

THE NEW LIFE

In the First Five-Year Plan creation story, most Old Bolsheviks presiding over the work of construction had been doomed to martyrdom. Their job was to build the eternal house and leave it for “proletarian infancy and pure orphanhood.” As one of Pilniak’s dam engineers explains (deliberately invoking a Civil War image), “Comrade Moses … searched and fought for a decent living space. But he never reached the Promised Land, leaving it to Joshua the son of Nun to cause the sun to stand still. His children reached it in his stead. People who have known Sodom cannot enter Canaan—they are not fit for the Promised Land.”

The two great congresses of 1934 had revised the script—or rather, moved the action forward in time, all the way to the end. The eternal house was to become a refuge where Moses could make his home and raise a family until the wolf moved in with the lamb and the leopard lay down with the goat. During the Stalin revolution, the original Bolshevik eschatology had been expanded to include a second great tribulation preceded by a managed retreat. The new creed adopted in 1934 followed St. Augustine and most institutionalized Christianity in proclaiming the millennium to be a spiritual and political allegory. Of the three fundamental solutions to the nonfulfillment of a millenarian prophecy—the extension of the violence of the last days, the indefinite postponement of the final redemption, and the claim that the millenarian prophecy had, in fact, been fulfilled—the Stalin revolutionaries, like most of their predecessors, chose a combination of the last two. The coming of Communism was imminent but beyond anyone’s capacity to schedule; “socialism” as a prelude to eternity was, “in essence,” already there. As Sergei Kirov put it, “the central question of the proletarian revolution has now been solved completely and irreversibly in favor of socialism.”¹

There was no cause for disappointment or need for resignation. There were no cracks in the foundation of socialism and no obstacles large enough to block the future. One could not live in that era and not see the shape and beauty of the house of socialism. It was a time of both fulfillment and expectation, dignity and enthusiasm, discipline and merriment, proletarian infancy and Old Bolshevik wisdom. It was a “synthetic” era that, like Goethe’s Faust, combined the Sturm und Drang with the “essentially rational” classical antiquity, the Renaissance, and the Empire style. It was an epoch of heroic domesticity in the House of Government. It was an age without old age, and possibly without death.

■ ■ ■

For some residents of the House of Government, the announcement of the coming of eternity came too late. Karl Lander and Lev Kritsman were too ill to work outside the home, while many others, including Vladimir Adoratsky and Olympiada Mitskevich, continued to require regular treatments at various Black Sea and North Caucasus resorts. Vasily Orekhov never recovered from his wounds and persistent melancholy. In April 1934, he went to Foros, in Crimea, for the last time. On December 10, 1934, at the age of fifty, he died in the Kremlin Hospital. Two days later, his body was cremated. The Society of Old Bolsheviks paid for a niche in the columbarium, an urn, and a plaque that identified the deceased as a “member of the VKP(b) since 1913” and “member of the Society of Old Bolsheviks.”²

But the vast majority of the original revolutionaries were ready for a new beginning. Rejuvenated by a powerful feeling of pure, physical joy, they moved in, made themselves comfortable, and settled for a long stay.

In 1935, the House of Government had 2,655 registered tenants living in 507 apartments. Seven hundred residents were leaseholders assigned to particular apartments; the rest were servants and dependents, including 588 children. There were more leaseholders than apartments because some apartments (such as the Ivanovs’, the Tuchins’, and the Usievichs’) contained more than one family. Altogether, there were 24 one-room apartments, 27 two-room apartments, 127 three-room apartments, 179 four-room apartments, 120 five-room apartments, 25 six-room apartments, and one seven-room apartment. (The four remaining ones were taken up by the kindergarten, which, despite repeated requests, never received a building of its own.) Residential areas accounted for 42,205 square meters of space within the House; the movie theater, store, club, and theater took up 11,608 square meters; the rest belonged to the Central Executive Committee Secretariat (2,665 sq m); House administrative offices (500 sq m); and the Committee for the Settlement of Toiling Jews on the Land (365 sq m).³

All leaseholders were divided into “nomenklatura members” (high officials entitled to certain goods and services appropriate to their place in the Party/state hierarchy); “personal pensioners” (retired nomenklatura members still entitled to certain goods and services); and “nonnomenklatura members” (House personnel, prize-winning builders, Central Executive Committee administrators, demoted nomenklatura members, and relatives of nomenklatura members with apartments of their own, such as Arosev’s second wife and Stalin’s in-laws). Those who lost the right to reside in the House of Government as a result of demotion or dismissal were to be evicted; those promoted to higher positions had the right to move to larger apartments. Both tasks were difficult to accomplish because of resistance on the part of the losers. Such resistance could be effective because the classification of officials was not directly related to the classification of apartments and because all classifications were subject to exceptions based on formal exemptions and personal patronage.⁴

Attempts to overcome such resistance had to be based on even stronger personal patronage. The Persian poet and revolutionary, Abulkasim Lakhuti (Abulqosim Lohuti), who emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1921 and served as a high Soviet official in Tajikistan, received a one-room apartment with a large balcony in 1931, when he became a correspondent of both Pravda and Izvestia. The following year, at the age of forty-four, he married Tsetsilia Bentsionovna Bakaleishchik, a twenty-year-old student of Oriental languages from Kiev. By 1934, they had two children, and he had a new job as a “responsible secretary” of the Writers’ Union. In August 1934, he represented Tajik literature at the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers. Soon after the congress, the Central Committee Secretary, Lazar Kaganovich, ordered the Housekeeping Department to move the family to a bigger apartment.

The move was delayed because of the existence of more urgent claims (one large apartment was being prepared for the hero of the Reichstag Fire Trial, Georgi Dimitrov, who had recently arrived from Germany) and because of “great resistance on the part of those being evicted.” On October 22, 1934, Lakhuti wrote to Molotov that “the unbearable noise of the streetcars outside the apartment and the commotion and crying of an infant inside” made productive literary work impossible. “For many months now, I have been deprived of the most basic rest and sleep at night that I need after doing volunteer work outside the house. As a result, my health and nervous system are deteriorating. My children are weak and often sick. My work, which the Party seems to consider useful, suffers accordingly. I am unable to receive the collective farmers, students, and young writers from Central Asia, who, on their visits to Moscow, wish to meet with me.” Any further postponement of the move threatened “to turn a toiler for the Party and literature into a uselss invalid.” This would be a tragedy for everyone involved, he concluded. “One can patiently wait to be rescued when a leaky ship is just beginning to go down. One can wait when the ship is halfway under water. But when the waves begin to cover the deck, every second’s delay may be lethal.” It took another year and Stalin’s personal intercession for the family to move to a larger apartment (Apt. 110). Several months later, Lakhuti sent Stalin a traditional ruba’i:

Stalin, you are greater than greatness,

You know the hearts of men and the soul of beauty.

My soul is singing, and my heart is proclaiming

That Lenin’s path and Sign were given to me by you.⁵

Abulkasim Lakhuti and his wife, Tsetsilia Banu

The poem was translated by Lakhuti’s wife, who, under the pen name Banu (“Lady” in Farsi), had become a professional translator of Persian poetry—her husband’s and that of the “brilliant craftsmen of the word” that he listed in his writers’ congress speech. Three years and one child later, the family moved to an even better apartment.

The government portion of the house accounted for about 60 percent, or, if one includes personal pensioners, 70 percent of all apartments. Most nomenklatura leaseholders had been sect members since before the real day (new arrivals, such as Lakhuti and Dimitrov, and newly promoted young officials, such as Khrushchev, were a small minority). They were almost all men: in keeping with the original sectarian practice, female members were rarely promoted to positions of power outside the Women’s Section (most female leaseholders—about 10 percent of the total in 1935—were personal pensioners, not active state and Party officials). The original distinction between “workers” (including peasants and artisans) and “students” (intelligentsia members and Jews of all backgrounds) remained crucially important and readily obvious in speech, gestures, writing proficiency, home furnishings, and family celebrations, among other things. Former workers were a minority among leaseholders. They might feel more comfortable around the House guards and gardeners than around the former students (Orekhov’s son had married Ivanov’s maid); rarely rose very high within the nomenklatura hierarchy; and tended to be overrepresented among the sick, the needy, and the prematurely retired. Their hard-won privilege required constant protection and reinforcement.⁶

One such former worker (peasant, machinist, and railroad engineer, among other things) was Pavel Gerasimovich Murzin, who was given a job as an inspector in the People’s Commissariat of Transportation, but spent most of his time treating his angina, gout, rheumatism, inflammation of the gall bladder, and, as he wrote in an official request, “malignantgastritis of the stomach,” “calitis of the intestines,” and “miasthenia of the heart.” In 1930, at the age of forty-three, he “received the consent of a professor of Kremlin consultation at the Kremlin Hospital of the Council of People’s Commissars” that he be allowed to perform only “work not at all resulting in fatigue and nervous stress.” His wife, Maria Stepanovna, aged forty-five, was, according to Murzin, “totally unfit for work because she shared all of the privations of the prerevolutionary period, as well as during the revolution.” Both required frequent stays at resorts and sanatoria and various forms of material assistance from the Society of Old Bolsheviks. The Society showed a great deal of understanding, but the symptoms persisted—“exclusively because of the apartment,” which was small, full of children, and offered “neither peace nor quiet.” Murzin’s repeated requests for better accommodations met with “foolishness and slander” on the part of various officials, who thought they could do whatever they liked “while Old Bolshevik workers languish in basements.” The situation was made worse by bad news from Murzin’s native village Stary Buian, in Samara Province, where his sister Polia and her husband Markel had been forced to harness themselves to the plow but were being paid “not a penny” by the kolkhoz. After another of Murzin’s in-laws was killed “by the kulaks,” Polia’s and Markel’s daughter, Nina, came to live with the Murzins, adding considerably to their difficulties.⁷

In 1931, Murzin received a small apartment (Apt. 130) in the House of Government. Later that year, he wrote to the Society of Old Bolsheviks:

I have received an insult as a result of a brazen act of hooliganism on October 27 at 4 p.m. on the front platform of streetcar No. 10 between theater square where I got in and the house of government. First while mounting the car a certain citizen acted rudely toward a woman with child “where the hell are you going can’t you see its crowded” and sat down both of them in the front engine area as soon as the streetcar started to move this citizen crossed his legs and leaned against my side so I stated to him citizen I am not a wall and it’s hard for me to hold you up, to which he turned around and responded with rude contemptuousness toward me it’s okay you can handle it fatface I thought that the fellow was drunk and without saying anything I asked him to let me pass and walked inside the car no sooner had I entered the car than he in the presence of the driver, two militiamen, and one man of his ilk who was with him, in a similar act of rudeness stated in a loud voice “see I have liquidated him as a class from the engine platform” and both of them giggled gleefully. Then I proceeded to ask the militiamen to find out the identity of this citizen according to his ID and showed the militiamen and the citizen who had twice insulted me my society of old bolsheviks document.

The citizen and his companion refused to comply. Murzin and the two militiamen rode with them to the end of the line, enlisted the help of a third militiaman, and eventually discovered that the hooligans were plenipotentiaries of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Unit, Citizen Pashkin and Citizen Kochkin. Murzin “got into the streetcar with difficulty because of chest pains and went back home completely chilled to the bone.”⁸

Even those former workers who had risen high in the Party hierarchy tended to preserve a sense of separateness and perhaps the memory of an incomplete apprenticeship. Efim Shchadenko’s struggle against the tastes and friends of his wife, the sculptor Maria Denisova, reflected the Party’s fight against the opposition. It was not quite right to suppose (he wrote to an old friend, probably with Mayakovsky’s circle in mind), “that the point of the argument consists of the fact that the workers … can’t stand the intelligentsia in general and the Jewish intelligentsia in particular.” The point (he wrote to another friend), was that “the intelligentsia monopolists of theoretical knowledge can’t help noticing that the workers are beginning to master that knowledge, combining it with huge practical experience, which not every intelligentsia member may have.” The war had been won, but unity and equality remained precarious. The former print-shop stitcher Vasily Mikhailov was still only second in command to former “students” on both the Dnieper Hydroelectric Dam and the Palace of Soviets construction sites. The former metal worker Ivan Gronsky found himself directly under Stalin but continued—like his predecessor Semen Kanatchikov—to play the role of proletarian watchdog over unreliable intellectuals. Even Pavel Postyshev, the former calico printer who had joined Stalin’s inner sanctum and was a quick learner and capable writer, kept a low profile around his former social superiors (including the ones he formally supervised). According to the chronicler of an informal meeting of Politburo members with about fifty Soviet writers in Gorky’s house on October 26, 1932, “Postyshev is amazingly modest. He does not seem to have uttered a single word the whole evening and just tried to stay in the background.” As Postyshev had written to his intelligentsia patron in 1913, when he was twenty-six years old, “the evil, inescapable fate of the proletarian will never leave me in peace.” Most of the proletarians with successful careers (including Shchadenko, Mikhailov, Gronsky, and Postyshev) were married to women with more formal education.⁹

The majority of government officials residing in the House of Government were former “students” (provincial intellectuals “of various ranks” who had joined socialist sects while still in school). By far the largest single group among them were Jews, who constituted 23 percent of all leaseholders and about 33 percent of the nomenklatura ones (counting “personal pensioners”). If one includes family members, the proportion was even higher: Jewish women were more strongly overrepresented among socialist sectarians than Jewish men (partly filling in for the absence of “workers” among female sectarians), and many non-Jewish officials, including Arosev, Bukharin, Ivanov, Rykov, and Voronsky, were married to Jewish women. During the second wave of informal marriages, in the 1920s, female Party members of proletarian background became available but remained unrepresented at the top: most second and third marriages by high Soviet officials were to upper-class and Jewish women. The Jews who lived in the House came from a variety of social backgrounds, but almost none—including those from families of small artisans—fit the “worker” category. Of the many millenarian rebellions that comprised the eventual “October Revolution,” the Jewish one had been the most massive and radical. Of the many residents of the House of Government, the Jewish ones were the most millenarian and cosmopolitan. The modernization of late imperial Russia had destroyed the traditional Jewish monopoly on a broad range of service-sector occupations in the empire’s western borderlands. The Jewish revolution against the tsarist state had been inseparable from the Jewish revolution against traditional Jewish life. A minority of Jewish rebels chose Zionism; most of those who chose cosmopolitanism did so with an intensity and consistency unparalleled among socialists with traditional national homelands. Polish, Latvian, and Georgian residents of the House of Government seemed to assume that proletarian internationalism was compatible with their native tongues, songs, and foods. The Jewish ones equated socialism with “pure orphanhood” and made the point of not speaking Yiddish at home or passing on anything they thought of as Jewish to their children. Their children were going to live under socialism. In the meantime, they continued to list themselves as “Jews by nationality” in various forms and seemed to recognize each other as belonging to the same tribe and the same revolution.¹⁰

Some of the other groups of residents who thought of themselves as sharing a common pre-Bolshevik origins were Latvians, Poles, priests’ sons, and natives of the same regions of the Russian Empire, but such distinctions seemed minor compared with those based on position within the nomenklatura, duration of Party membership, and shared experiences in prison, exile, and the Civil War. What mattered most to the residents of the House of Government was whatever distinguished them from all the nonresidents of the House of Government.

■ ■ ■

Inside the House of Government, what mattered most to the residents was the size and shape of their apartments. Apartment geography reflected family hierarchy. The symbolic center—and largest room—of most apartments was “father’s study.” The walls of most studies were covered with floor-to-ceiling dark oak bookcases with “barrister” glass doors that could be lifted by a little knob and pushed back. Most bookcases were built to order by House carpenters, with niches carved out for a desk and couch. The most frequently mentioned books were the gold-lettered, multivolume editions of the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedia, Alfred Brehm’s Lives of Animals, and the Treasures of World Literature series from Academia Publishers. (Nomenklatura residents periodically received Academia catalogs in which they could mark the books they wanted to be delivered free of charge.) Arosev also collected rare books of different types; Volin collected first editions of Pushkin and Lermontov; and the secretary of the Council of Nationalities of the Central Executive Committee (and a permanent representative of Belorussia in Moscow), A. I. Khatskevich, liked to collect the complete works of classical authors.¹¹

Abulkasim Lakhuti’s study. The photographs are of Taras Shevchenko and Maxim Gorky.

The rest of the office furniture could be ordered from the House factory (such pieces remained government property, as indicated by the metal tags with numbers) or brought in by residents. Arosev was attached to his Venetian armchair with mother-of-pearl inlay; Volin, to his enormous desk; and Osinsky, to his enormous couch. Mikhailov brought his father-in-law’s dark-green armchair, and Khalatov his stepfather’s armchairs, couch, and enormous desk. The former trade representative in Great Britain, A. V. Ozersky, ordered all his furniture from London. According to his son, V. A. Ozersky, “there was a Mr. Trivers, who came to Moscow with my father. Father showed him the apartment. He made all the measurements and suggested a design. Father was given the required sum, and the furniture was shipped over.”¹²

Most desks had lamps with green glass shades. Mikhailov’s also had an etching of Lenin sitting at his desk. Smilga had a marble bust of Dante on his desk and a needlepoint portrait of Lenin above it. Stalin’s father-in-law, S. Ya. Alliluev, had four portraits on the walls of his study: a silk one of Lenin; an oil one of his late daughter, Nadezhda (by S. V. Gerasimov); and two watercolor portraits by P. E. Bendel: one of Stalin and one of Dzerzhinsky. Above Arosev’s desk hung a portrait of his daughter, Olga, by V. S. Svarog. Khalatov had a portrait of his daughter, Svetlana, also by V. S. Svarog, several paintings by S. V. Gerasimov (including a portrait of Khalatov himself), and, on one of the walls, a carpet covered with a collection of sabers and daggers. Gronsky, who had defined socialist realism as “Rembrandt, Rubens, and Repin in the service of the working class and socialism,” had paintings by I. I. Brodsky, E. A. Katsman, and P. A. Radimov. The head of the Ship-Building Directorate, Romuald Muklevich (Muklewicz), had portraits of sailors by F. S. Bogorodsky and, on the floor, the skin of a polar bear that had been killed (according to Muklevich’s daughter, Irina) by members of the Chelyuskin Arctic expedition. The study of Malkov’s successor as commandant of the Kremlin, Rudolf Peterson, contained a saber with his name engraved on it, a pair of field binoculars, map case, shoulder belt, and several hunting rifles. In Yuri Trifonov’s fictional version of his father’s study, the wall was decorated with “an English carbine, a small Winchester with a polished green stock, a double-barreled Belgian hunting rifle, a saber in an antique scabbard, a plaited Cossack whip, soft and flexible, with a little tail at the tip, and a broad Chinese sword with two silk ribbons, scarlet and dark green.”¹³

Boris Iofan’s study

Boris Iofan had a large studio on the eleventh floor with large windows and a skylight. His downstairs neighbor, Elina Kisis (the daughter of a Soviet Control Committee official, who turned ten in 1935), enjoyed visiting him there. “During the day, Boris Mikhailovich liked to work in his studio, and I would often go visit him there. He grew fond of me and used to show me beautiful picture books and postcards, give me apples, and pat me on the head. There, for the first time, I saw many things that we, and others, did not have. There were some dark, shiny figures and figurines (probably bronze, but also a few white marble ones) on tall stands. There were lots of paintings and other mysterious things. In the middle of the studio, on tripods, were some huge drawing boards with pictures of a tall building that looked like a Kremlin tower with a man on top (“That’s Lenin,” he said) and a blue sky above.”¹⁴

Iofan’s studio

In smaller apartments, the father’s study might also serve as a dining room and the parents’ bedroom, but most nomenklatura apartments had a separate “dining room” (also known as the “living room” or simply as the “big room”), which was used for festive meals and large gatherings. At the center would be a large table surrounded by chairs and with a burnt-orange silk-fringed lampshade hanging over it. The other required piece was a piano. (Most of the girls and some of the boys had private music tutors.) The rest was a matter of conviction and improvisation. Vasily Mikhailov’s wife, Nadezhda—a professor’s daughter, Bestuzhev Women’s University graduate, and Old Bolshevik retired in 1929 at the age of forty—felt strongly about proper living room furniture. In addition to the table and piano, they had a redwood glass cabinet, “full of various charming, antique knickknacks,” with vases on top; a couch with velvet cushions embroidered by Nadezhda and her mother; two small armchairs; a special table for the telephone; a long settee; another armchair with an ottoman; fresh flowers on the windowsills; and, next to the French doors leading into the hall, a small table with an embroidered towel and a shiny samovar.¹⁵

Yuri Trifonov, drawing of the family’s dining room (Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)

Children usually lived in a small “children’s room,” which tended to have a desk for homework, one or more beds, and a wardrobe. Kerzhentsev’s daughter, Natalia, hung up magazine reproductions of classical paintings (different ones, depending on her changing enthusiasms); many adolescents, including Natalia, put up maps. Maids, most of whom doubled as nannies, might sleep next to small children or in their own rooms, but the great majority slept in a little nook at the entrance to the kitchen, usually behind a curtain. The rest of the rooms were occupied by grown children and other relatives and dependents.¹⁶

The place of the mother (normally the leaseholder’s wife) was not predetermined. The Podvoiskys, who cultivated an exemplary relationship of mutual devotion and respect for each other’s Party work, had two studies: “Father’s” (which also served as a dining room) and “Mother’s” (Nina Avgustovna worked in the Lenin Department of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute). Some apartments had a “parents’ bedroom,” which might serve as the mother’s private space during the day. (The Petersons’ bedroom had a polar-bear skin on the floor, but most were sparsely furnished and decorated.) In families where fathers slept in their studies, the women might have their own room, known as “Mother’s bedroom” (small walk-through ones in the case of Ekaterina Smirnova-Osinskaia and Tania Miagkova-Poloz). Nadezhda Smilga-Poluian’s had a desk, bookcase, and vanity table with her perfumes, three-way mirror and photograph of her little daughters in their underwear. Nadezhda Mikhailova shared her bedroom with her daughter Margarita. It contained Nadezhda’s large, antique bed (“with some kind of drawings on it,” according to Margarita’s recollections), an antique chest-of-drawers with linen (and dried flowers for fragrance), a night table with a lamp and a pile of French novels, and Margarita’s corner with her bed, tiny desk, and toy chest. (Mikhailov’s two daughters by a previous marriage had a separate “children’s room,” and Nadezhda’s much older first daughter had a room of her own.)¹⁷

The former workers who did not pursue elite fashion and did not rise to the top of the government hierarchy did not usually have studies. The Ivanovs had three rooms, one of which they rented out. The remaining two were divided between the adults and their three children, and the maid slept in the kitchen nook (before marrying Orekhov’s son and becoming a family friend). All of their furniture, except for one wardrobe and a chandelier, was government property. Vasily Shuniakov, another former Petrograd worker associated with the food industry (as a Central Control Commission member specializing in purges), kept all three of his rooms: the “parents’ room” (Shuniakov, like Ivanov, was married to a Jewish seamstress); the “children’s room” (the Shuniakovs had three children, two of whom died young); and a dining room (which also served as the bedroom of Shuniakov’s mother-in-law). The maid slept in the kitchen nook. Much of the furniture was built by Shuniakov himself, who, like most former workers, suffered from “nervous exhaustion” and spent long periods of time at home and in various sanatoria.

The family of the prize-winning construction foreman, Mikhail Tuchin, had two connecting rooms (in a nine-room apartment that also housed the families of three other prize-winning construction foremen). The parents’ room had a bed, vanity table with three-way mirror, and desk, which was also used by the children when doing their homework (although, according to the Tuchin’s daughter, Zinaida, who was twelve in 1935, her younger brother Vova never did his). The “children’s” room contained Zinaida’s sofa bed and Vova’s tiny cot, a small wardrobe, a large china cabinet and dinner table, and a framed picture depicting a fox in the snow.¹⁸

In the fall of 1937, the first secretary of the City of Kolomna Komsomol Committee, Serafim Bogachev, was transferred to the Komsomol Central Committee in Moscow and assigned to a recently vacated apartment (Apt. 65) in the House of Government. Serafim was newly married. He and his wife, Lydia, were both twenty-eight years old, and both were from peasant families. According to Lydia,

[Serafim’s mother] was a very religious old woman—and couldn’t read or write. He was her only son. How she loved him! She absolutely adored him. He was a kind, good man. So considerate—and funny sometimes, too. He loved life. His dream was to live in the forest and work outdoors as a warden. Once, while we were still courting, he asked me: “Would you be willing to live in the forest, in a little lodge?” And I said: “Yes, I would. I love nature, too.” “That’s my dream,” he said. “But perhaps when this is all over…. I can’t do it now. You can see what the situation is like in the country. The Komsomol still needs us. But afterwards I’ll go live in the forest.”

They moved in with their three-month-old baby girl, Natasha. Serafim was often gone. (“The struggle against the enemies of the people was just getting under way, or rather, it was reaching its peak, so they were all terribly overworked. There were only three secretaries then: Kosarev, Bogachev, and Pikina.”) Lydia was preparing for her university entrance exams and had to go to a preparatory class each morning (in a special room at the Lenin Library, just across the Big Stone Bridge). She had graduated from a factory school in Kolomna, but had never been to high school. They were assigned a nanny, whom Lydia did not like. The apartment consisted of two furnished rooms.

Everything had been arranged. In the bedroom, there were two beds and a little crib in a niche, which, I think, we bought ourselves. No, we brought it from Kolomna….

But I didn’t see any of that until later. When I came into the apartment, he set out a chair for me. I sat down, with my baby in my arms, and then I just sat there and cried … and cried…. And when he came home, he found me in the same spot. I had not gotten up or done anything, except breastfeed the baby (she was still very small). I hadn’t even changed her diapers. It was so rare for me to cry like that….

He walked in and looked confused. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “I can’t do it,” I said. “I don’t want to live here. Everything here depresses me.” After our old apartment, and now with the baby, I felt some kind of chill…. It all seemed gloomy somehow….

I didn’t know any of the neighbors. One day I went to the people below or perhaps on the same floor to ask about something, and I saw (I can still remember it) a huge vase of flowers, but they weren’t real—they must have been some kind of artificial ones.

After a while, they settled in. They brought her dowry things and an extra-large table (by using the cargo elevator in the kitchen). Lydia’s mother came up from Kolomna, fired the nanny, and hired a new, much better one. The House guards recognized them as equals. “I always felt their sympathy toward me. They would hold the baby, or help get the carriage ready. They were kind and attentive. You could tell they were simple people. And they could see that we didn’t put on airs or anything like that.” They bought two carpets, one green, the other with a picture of a falcon hunt. They put them down on the parquet floor, so the baby could crawl. But they did not put up any pictures, leaving the walls “bare and dry.” Lydia did not shop or cook, either. She was too busy studying. She was also an athlete: she played volleyball and had to go to practice.¹⁹

Many House residents found Iofan’s straight lines and large windows too “bare and dry.” Most did something about it: brought in old beds and chests, hung up swords and photographs, or laid down carpets and bearskins. Some took great care to cover up as much of the constructivist frame as possible—by painting flower patterns on the walls or covering them with “silklike” wallpaper or hanging up thick curtains on the large windows (which were very drafty in the winter). Nadezhda Mikhailova attempted to recreate her parents’ Victorian domesticity. Stalin’s sister-in-law, Evgenia Allilueva (the wife of Nadezhda’s brother, Pavel, and the daughter and granddaughter of Novgorod priests), possessed, according to her daughter, Kira, “a remarkable talent for making everything around her cozy with the help of a few simple things—a bright tablecloth, some pictures…. Everyone in our house loved flowers. There were always some on the table in the big room. Dad preferred lilies of the valley, and Mom, forget-me-nots. On my birthday, people would bring roses or peonies—and, in the spring, a branch of mimosa. And there were some charming, delicate watercolors—of landscapes and barefooted ballerinas—hanging on the walls of the big room.”²⁰

Serafim Bogachev

In 1935, no one seemed entirely sure whether this was good taste for new times or the “spontaneous regeneration of the perennial and loathsome forms of life.” Some House of Government residents insisted on leaving the walls bare and dry. Some drew the line at curtains, the great disappointment’s symbol of philistine domesticity. The head of the Directorate of the Alcoholic Beverages Industry, Abram Gilinsky, did not mind a carpet on the wall, a large china cabinet with a collection of playing cards inside (he was a tireless Preferans player), or an exhibit of miniature liqueur bottles on top of his daughter’s piano, but when his mother-in-law hung up some curtains, he ordered them removed. Ivan Kraval (who, in 1935, replaced Osinsky as head of the Central Directory of Economic Statistics) compromised by allowing narrow green curtains that framed—but did not cover—his study window.²¹

In spring 1936, Adoratsky, Arosev, and Bukharin were in Europe buying documents and memorabilia for the Marx-Engels Lenin Institute (of which Adoratsky was director). Adoratsky was, as usual, accompanied by his daughter, Varvara. On April 5, he wrote to his wife from Paris: “I have bought a medallion with Marx’s portrait and hair, which used to belong to his daughter, Jenny Longuet…. I am also going to buy the armchair in which Marx died and a wooden armchair from his study, which he sat on while writing Das Kapital.” Five days later, he visited the studio of the sculptor Naum Aronson, where he admired a bust of Lenin (“his energy, will, and deep intelligence are rendered very well”), and picked up a suit made for him by a Parisian tailor (“it’s gray, well tailored, and made of Cheviot wool”). But nothing impressed him as much as the interiors of the homes he saw. In one house in Holland, in particular, everything was “exceptionally solid and comfortable. All the rooms are paneled: the dining-room, in dark oak; the study, in walnut; and the living room, in maple or birch; the bedroom is painted with white oil-based paint; and there are many walk-in closets. The kitchen is in the middle of the house, between the dining room and the bedroom. All the rooms are large and spacious, and there is lots of storage space.” Most of the Marx-Engels archive had been moved from Hitler’s Germany to Copehagen. The delegation arrived there on March 16. “We have been put up in a terrific hotel. I have never lived in a hotel like this. Everything is solid and full of all kinds of handy contraptions. For example, there’s a blue sack in the closet where you can put your dirty clothes, and they’ll wash them for you. The tub and other things are very clean, and there’s this amazing magnifying mirror in which you can see your whole face almost doubled in size—for when you’re shaving.”²²

The House of Government did not have special blue bags for dirty linen or magnifying mirrors for shaving, but it did offer laundry services (in a separate building between the House and St. Nicholas Church), and it did provide a large number of accessories, including lampshades, doorbells, and raisable oak toilet seats. For apartments that had cargo elevators, special attendants came twice a day to pick up trash (other apartments had garbage chutes, and some had both cargo elevators and garbage chutes). Mail carriers came twice a day to drop letters and newspapers through mail slots in the doors. Repair work and cleaning services, including floor polishing and window cleaning, could be requested from the House management by telephone. The hairdressing salon (located above the grocery store) offered home appointments. Dogs could be left in a special pen in the basement. There was a shooting range under Entryway 1, a kindergarten on the top floor of Entryway 7, a children’s club on the first floor of Entryway 3, and a walk-in clinic with on-duty nurses and doctors next to the laundry. And, of course, there was the large club located above the theater, which, as Adoratsky wrote in another letter, “has a tennis court and different rooms where you can do whatever you like: play chess, music, etc.” Virtually none of the residents ate in the House cafeteria (which was used by House employees and occasional conference delegates). Nor did they do much cooking: prepared food in special stackable containers could be brought up (by the maids) from the cafeteria or delivered (by personal chauffeurs, sometimes accompanied by the maids) from exclusive food distribution centers (most frequently the one in the Fifth House of Soviets on Granovsky Street, a short distance away). There were three kinds of “food receipt cards”: “employee” (issued to nomenklatura members), “dependent,” and “child.” The selection and quality were widely seen as satisfactory; one list of ingredients bought by the cafeteria included a wide variety of meats (beef, pork, lamb, chicken, tongue, liver, and several kinds of sausage), fish (including smoked fish and herring), dairy products, vegetables, eggs, grains, flour, pasta, rice, potatoes, bread, beer, fruit, dried fruit, nuts, tea, coffee, jams, and spices (pepper, ginger, vanilla, cardamom, cinnamon, and cloves).²³

The material contents of the House were protected by several layers of security. According to Nadezhda Mikhailova’s elder daughter, M. N. Kulman,

each entryway of the House of Government had its own guard, with a desk, chair, and telephone mounted on the wall. This was all near the entrance door, by the stairway. When a person entered, the guard would ask for their last name and who they were going to see and then call the resident the person had named and ask if it was okay to let them in. The guards worked around the clock, and there were always three for each entryway. They took turns working twenty-four-hour shifts and also rotated on the weekends. The guards were very strict about making sure that nonresidents did not take anything out of the building: if a person wanted to leave an apartment with a suitcase or bundle, the official resident would either have to escort that person out or call the guard to escort them. The guards knew all the residents by sight and could even distinguish them by their voices. Once, a woman tried to leave our apartment with a bundle …, but the guard would not let her pass, saying, “There are no grown-ups at home, and a child cannot be expected to know what may or may not be taken from the home.” So she had to return to our apartment and wait for my mother. When my mother finally arrived, he told her: “There’s a woman here, who was trying to leave your apartment with a bundle.”²⁴

■ ■ ■

Most of the men rarely spent time at home. As Khrushchev put it, “in those days, we were all engrossed in our work; we worked with tremendous passion and excitement, depriving ourselves of virtually everything.” And, as Natalia Sats described her third husband, People’s Commissar of Internal Trade Izrail Veitser, “He did not like to be seen in public and paid no attention to his personal appearance. His fanaticism about his work was the stuff of legends. He considered it perfectly natural to leave for work at 9 a.m. and not come back until 4 a.m. the following morning.” After their marriage in 1935, Veitser’s deputy and House of Government neighbor, Lev (Lazar) Khinchuk, sent them a line from Eugene Onegin: “They came together: waves and stone, poems and prose, flames and ice.” Sats was not so sure: “‘If he is prose,’ I thought to myself, ‘then that prose is worth all the poetry in the world.’ … They used to say ‘Soviet trade is our personal, Bolshevik cause.’ For Veitser, it truly was personal. He was the poet of Soviet trade.”²⁵

Veitser had two explanations for his “fantasy and fanaticism.” One was his love for the Party (according to Sats, he was “an ideal Bolshevik-Leninist”). The other was his Pale-of-Settlement childhood. “Most of all I feared the Sabbath. My mother, Hannah, used to put the three of us—my brother Iosif, my brother Naum, and me—all together in one tub and scrub us all with the same sponge. Mother was always in a hurry; we would be wriggling around; soap would get into our eyes; and shrieks and slaps on the head would follow. We were little boys and always getting dirty—we used to run barefoot through the puddles—and there was only one tub. Once, I remember saying: ‘God, if you exist, make the Sabbath go away.’”²⁶

Izrail Veitser

“We knew no rest,” wrote Khrushchev. “On our days off (when there still were days off—later they disappeared), we would usually hold meetings, conferences, and rallies.” When asked about Stalin, Artem Sergeev, who grew up in Stalin’s household, said: “What was his most characteristic trait? He seemed to work all the time…. He worked constantly, always and everywhere.” Most top nomenklatura members had schedules similar to Veitser’s. Mikhail Poloz and Mark Belenky worked until 2:00 a.m.; Aron Gaister, until 5:00 or 6:00 a.m. Ivan Gronsky describes his schedule as follows:

I usually got up at 8 a.m., did my exercises, took a cold shower, and ate breakfast. I had to be at the Kremlin by 9. On most days, various state and Party commissions would begin working at that time. Every ten days, at 11 a.m., there would be a meeting of the Politburo, which I was required to attend. Those meetings usually lasted until 7 p.m., with one 15–20 minute break. On other days, the Council of People’s Commissars and the Council of Labor and Defense would hold their meetings, in which I also participated. I usually arrived at Izvestia after 7 p.m. The newspaper came out in the morning…. I normally did not get home before 3 a.m.²⁷

Those who worked at home tended to have a similar schedule. Osinsky and the literary critic Elena Usievich usually worked for most of the night and never ate with their children. No one was allowed to disturb them while they were in their studies writing. According to Osinsky’s daughter, Svetlana, “‘Father is working and cannot be disturbed’ was the most important thing we children knew about him.” Koltsov, according to his colleague and friend, N. Beliaev (Naum Beilin), “did not write, but dictated his works. His secretary, Nina Pavlovna Prokofieva, or simply Ninochka, used to report to work at 11:00 a.m. “At that time, Koltsov, still groggy after three or four hours of sleep, and having quickly gulped down a cup of strong coffee and taken an aspirin for his headache, would begin dictating another chapter.”²⁸ As she tells it, “In the mornings, I used to go to his home, first on Bolshaia Dmitrovka and then to the House of Government on the Bersenev Embankment, where he lived in a four-room apartment on the eighth floor and where he had a large study with a balcony. He always walked about when dictating; he couldn’t dictate sitting down.” Her job required both speed and patience.

I would arrive, take off my coat in the hall, and then enter the study. He would greet me warmly, but I would know by the look on his face—concentrated, serious, remote—that he was ready to start dictating. I would set out both regular and carbon paper, insert two sheets into the typewriter, and sit quietly at the desk with my back to the window. The light would fall on the typewriter, leaving me in the shadow. Mikhail Efimovich, wearing slippers and an old jacket or a dark-blue knitted vest over a light-blue shirt, would pace up and down the room, stopping occasionally in front of the balcony, where he would reach up and grab the top of the door frame and stare pensively into the distance—or, as it seemed to me at the time, at the clock that used to hang in the gateway arch of the house. Then he would sit down next to the desk, cup his chin in his hand, and examine a pack of Kazbek cigarettes. Or he might rest his cheek on his hand and look off into space until I began to think he had completely forgotten about me, my typewriter, and the essay.

But then he would suddenly jump up and begin slowly dictating the first sentence, as if he were trying it out. Sometimes he would have the title ready, but more often it came only after the last word had been dictated.²⁹

Mikhail Koltsov dictating

Outside the home, Koltsov wore suits. He had always worn suits. A Pravda journalist remembered his first appearance in the editorial offices, soon after the Civil War. “There were tunics, blouses, uniforms, folk shirts, Tolstoy-shirts, field jackets, leather jackets, and trench coats—and then, suddenly, amidst all that uniformity of diversity, I spotted a real suit.” By 1935, almost everyone had switched to a real suit. Even Veitser, who was famous for always wearing the same overcoat (which also served as a blanket when he slept in his office), got himself a new black suit. Osinsky wore light suits; Rozengolts wore hats (to go with his suits); Rozen golts’s friend Arosev wore bowties and tuxedoes (and used expensive English soaps and colognes, which he brought back in bulk from his foreign trips). The head of the Trade Union International (Profintern), Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky, wore suits made by his father-in-law, the famous tailor Abram Solomonovich Shamberg (who was living in his apartment, Apt. 16). Lozovsky’s daughter by a previous marriage, Milena (named after Marx and Lenin and married to Podvoisky’s son, Lev), believed that her father “would be easy to imagine on a Parisian boulevard,” but that it was his friend, the deputy head of the Supreme Court, Petr Krasikov, who looked like the “real boulevardier.” Krasikov’s adopted daughter, Lydia Shatunovskaia, thought he looked like “a Russian nobleman.” Adoratsky bought his suit in a Parisian shop, the day he saw Aronson’s bust of Lenin.³⁰

Vladimir Adoratsky

The ones primarily responsible for the elegance of both the suits and interior decorations were the wives. Some did not work because they were invalids (as in the case of the wives of the “proletarians” Boris Ivanov and Vasily Orekhov); some because they were committed housewives (as in the case of the wives of Mark Belenky and Ivan Gronsky); and some because they were both invalids and committed housewives (as in the case of Nadezhda Mikhailova and Maria Peterson). But most of the women had professional jobs (as editors, accountants, statisticians, economists, pharmacists, doctors, and engineers), worked regular daytime hours, and rarely saw their husbands or spent much time with their children during the week. Some of them continued to favor the severe style of sectarian asceticism (gray or black suit, white blouse, and hair pulled into a tight bun at the back of the head), but most had discovered “elegance.” According to Inna Gaister, around 1934–35 her mother, Rakhil Izrailevna Kaplan, “suddenly remembered that she was a beautiful woman.” She had graduated from the Plekhanov Institute in 1932 and was working in the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry. “At some point she began having dresses made for her, and I remember feeling very indignant: ‘look at her, she is having two dresses made, no three!’” (Rakhil was thirty-two at the time, and Inna ten.) According to Irina Muklevich (born 1923), “after around 1935, things began to change quite a bit. You could already see it: all those beautiful wives.” Irina’s thirty-five-year-old mother, a Party member and section head at the State Planning Directorate, suddenly took to wearing evening dresses. The forty-year-old Nadezhda Smilga-Poluian, also a Party member and one of the editors of the Short Soviet Encyclopedia, alternated suits with black silk dresses, which she accented with a cameo brooch bought for her in Italy by her husband. Elena Usievich, the literary critic and former Chekist, developed a passion for hats. Most of the women cut their hair short and wore perfume. (Nadezhda Smilga-Poluian preferred Quelques Fleurs.) The cosmetic equivalent of curtains (as the symbol of philistine vulgarity) was lipstick. A manicure was acceptable, but lipstick was not.³¹

The women who did not work tended to cultivate domestic femininity. The night Lydia Gronskaia’s sister Elena met her husband, the poet Pavel Vasiliev, the two sisters were “perched on the couch” in the Gronsky’s dining room “engaged in the usual female tasks: sewing and embroidering.” Nadezhda Mikhailova embroidered cushions and, according to her daughter, “was a good singer and an excellent pianist, and loved to dance. Toward the end, she put on quite a bit of weight, but she still danced beautifully, and loved doing it.” She did not have many outfits, but those she did have were “in good taste,” including “a very beautiful cameo brooch.” Lydia Khatskevich liked to have her female friends over for tea. Maria (Mirra) Ozerskaia preferred to shop (a taste she had developed in London, where her husband was a Soviet trade representative). Maria Peterson spent much of her time presiding over her large household. According to one of her daughters, “Mother had a real talent for running the house and for making it cozy and efficient. She had good taste and a sense of beauty, which she imparted to our home. This beauty could be felt in the things she made herself and in the way she furnished the rooms. She passed on her talent for drawing and needlework to us. She was in charge of various maids, nannies, and even some visiting German governesses at one time. She knew how to give orders and take command…. Mother was very pretty in her youth: small and fragile with long thick dark hair down to her knees. That hair caused Mother so much trouble and was such a burden that, in the mid-1920s, she cut off her thick braid and got one of those short perms that were the fashion then…. By the time I came along, Mother had put on weight, but she was still light on her feet and always wore high heels.”³²

Evgenia Allilueva (Zemlianitsyna), according to her daughter (and Stalin’s niece) Kira, “wasn’t particularly political and wasn’t too crazy about the whole high society thing. It was all these Bolshevik women, and Mom wasn’t one of them. Mom was more feminine, more flirtatious.” She loved music and dancing, opera and ballet. “At that time, it was fashionable to wear your hair cut short and permed into waves. Mom had her hair cut, too. But she saved her braid, which she kept in a special box and would ‘wear’ on special occasions.” According to Kira, most House of Government women had their clothes made to order—“not only dresses and suits, but even overcoats and fur coats. There weren’t any Soviet fashion magazines. So it was only if someone brought them from abroad. Mom would borrow and look through them and then work some magic with the help of her dressmaker, Evdokia Semenovna. She would bring a French fashion magazine, point out a dress or a suit, and ask Evdokia Semenovna: ‘Could you make this?’ To which Evdokia Semenovna would always reply: ‘Evgenia Aleksandrovna, it won’t be easy, but I’ll try.’ And then she’d do it.”³³

Evgenia Allilueva(Courtesy of Kira Allilueva)

In 1936, there was a special event in the Kremlin on the occasion of the adoption of the new constitution, and Evgenia decided to wear a new dress. As Kira tells it,

Almost overnight, Evdokia Semenovna had to create something extraordinary: a dark dress with a white lace insert in the bodice. That insert was a masterpiece of needlework. It had tiny ruffles—very intricate and beautiful! There was only one problem: Evdokia Semenovna wasn’t able to finish in time. She was still putting in a few last-minute stitches, even after Mom already had the dress on.

That day the radio in our apartment was turned up full blast. It was a historic moment; you couldn’t miss it. It was being broadcast live. Stalin had already started speaking, and Mom was still home, getting dressed. A car with a driver was waiting for her downstairs. Dad, of course, was already in the Kremlin, waiting nervously.

Mom entered the hall in the middle of Stalin’s speech and, crouching down low (as low as she could), she made her way to her seat. When the official session ended, many of the guests walked over to St. George’s Hall, where a lavish banquet was laid out.

People were lining up to talk to Stalin, and to offer their congratulations. When Mom’s turn came, he says to her: “So, Zhenia, why were you late?!” Mom was amazed: “How did you spot me?”—“I’m farsighted,” he said with a chuckle. “I can see for miles. You were crouching down as you were walking. Who else would do something like that? Only Zhenya!”³⁴

Several months later, a large Soviet delegation went to Paris to participate in the International Art and Technology Exposition. Evgenia’s husband, Pavel Alliluev, was appointed the delegation’s commissar (Party supervisor):

When Mom found out about it, she ran over to talk to Stalin. “Iosif, I’ve never asked you for anything. I’m dying to go to Paris! I’ve heard so much about it, and I took French in school …” He looked at her, and then at Ezhov, who happened to be in his office at the time, and said, smiling under his moustache: “What do you think, should we let her go?” …

She spent twelve days in Paris. According to her, she never slept more than four hours a night. She wanted to see everything. She loved the city. She was amazed at the way the cars yielded to pedestrians because that was the custom in France.

Pavel Alliluev and Evgenia Allilueva at the Paris Exposition (Courtesy of Kira Allilueva)

She seems to have felt at home in Paris. She went to the Opera, a Josephine Baker show (she had seen her in Berlin once before), and the Louvre. She was absolutely captivated by the famous Venus of Milo. “I went around to take a look at ‘Venus’ from the back, and she was breathing!” …

She and Dad went to a restaurant and tried the famous onion soup and some oysters. She explained to us later that you were supposed to eat them with a slice of lemon, and that they even squeak.³⁵

At the exposition, the Soviet pavilion, designed by Iofan, and the German pavilion, designed by Albert Speer, both received gold medals. The two structures faced each other across a boulevard in the Trocadero. The facade of the German pavilion was a tower crowned with an eagle. The facade of the Soviet pavilion was a tower crowned with Vera Mukhina’s Worker and Kolkhoz Woman. According to Elina Kisis from Apt. 424, an early model of the Kolkhoz Woman had appeared in the House of Government courtyard around 1934 or 1935. “The model was slightly larger than life size and made of plaster or clay. In any case, it was gray, and Mukhina had it installed in the fountain in front of Entryway 21, where I lived. When the workers were removing the boards, a piece of the ‘Kolkhoz Woman’ broke off.” The Paris version was brought back to the Soviet Union and installed, along with the Worker, at the main entrance to the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition. Evgenia Allilueva came back with “presents for everyone.” including “an elegant little pipe” for Stalin.³⁶

Soviet and German pavilions at the Paris Expo, 1937

Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris Expo

The most renowned connoisseurs of beautiful things were the wives of provincial Party officials and industrial managers. Before moving to the House of Government, the Granovskys lived in a “splendidly decorated” house in Berezniki with “all the finest chinaware, silver, linen and everything needed to make a princely home.” Sofia Butenko, the wife of the director of the Kuznetsk Steel Plant, Konstantin Butenko, was one of the leaders of a nationwide women’s volunteer movement (which urged the wives of top industrial managers to see to the cleanliness, beauty, and “cultured domesticity” in the lives of their husbands’ workers). On her regular trips to Moscow, she would visit an exclusive dressmaker’s atelier, look at samples, and usually order several suits and dresses (paying about 140 rubles for a three and a half–meter length of the best dress material and about 350 rubles for the labor, or about twice the average RSFSR monthly salary per dress).³⁷

Another source of beauty—employed in a variety of ways—was the theater. When Natalia Sats’s daughter, Roksana, was in the second grade at Exemplary School No. 25, she once hit a girl named Dashenka (but only after Dashenka had pushed her off her gym stool and then bragged that no one dared touch her because of her powerful grandfather who was driven around everywhere in a chauffeured limousine). Roksana was publicly reprimanded by the principal and sent home. The next morning before school, she complained to her mother.

It must have been difficult to make sense of my confused, inarticulate mumblings, but Mom understood perfectly. She stood up, called the theater to let them know she would be late for rehearsal, and began to get dressed. It was never a simple process, but this time she dressed as if she were on her way to a diplomatic reception instead of an elementary school. And when she threw her leopard fur coat into the arms of the school cleaning lady, who suddenly appeared out of nowhere, and walked down the school corridor in her silver lacquered pumps and her bright red dress with the wide sleeves lined with white silk, the effect was truly spectacular. The long break was just beginning, and kids were streaming out of the classrooms. At the sight of Mom, however, even the wildest boys, who were already racing headlong toward the cafeteria, suddenly stopped, changed course, and ran after her, staring in amazement.

The principal was in the gym, presiding over a young pioneer induction ceremony. My mom’s sudden appearance with her large entourage in tow put an abrupt end to the proceedings. The pioneer leader forgot why she was holding a red scarf and stepped aside, letting Mom pass. The forgotten inductee craned his neck in utter bewilderment, made a 180-degree turn, and ducked back into the column of not-yet-pioneers. Mom marched straight up to the principal.

“Where is this other girl?” she demanded.

Dashenka was in the gym, too.

“I want you to tell me exactly what happened yesterday,” Mom ordered.

Dashenka began, slowly: “She was sitting … I came up … I said …”

Natalia Sats with the Children’s Theater conductor and composer, Leonid Polovinkin (Courtesy of Roksana Sats)

Not daring to repeat what she had said before, Dashenka hung her head and was silent. Mom finished her story for her.

“So is that what happened? Or did I get something wrong?” she asked at the end.

“No,” mumbled Dashenka, completely embarrassed.

“Roksana, come here,” ordered Mom.

I walked to the middle of the gym and stood between the column of young pioneers and the rapidly growing crowd of onlookers. Mom’s words rang out in the total silence:

“Even the greatest accomplishments of those closest to us do not justify arrogance. You did the right thing yesterday. Never allow anyone to humiliate you.”

She nodded to me, said goodbye to the principal, and walked out. Almost the whole school followed after her. They stood and watched as she put on her fur coat, got into her car, and shut the door. And then, when she rolled down the window and waved mischievously to the kids, they all waved back and shouted:

“Goodbye!”³⁸

Another group known for its well-dressed women and well-furnished apartments were the high-ranking military officers (especially aviators) and NKVD (secret police) officials. When they were living in Dnepropetrovsk, Sergei Mironov and Agnessa Argiropulo used to throw lavish parties for Mironov’s colleagues and their wives. Once, one of the wives, Nadia Reznik, began flirting with Mironov. As Agnessa tells the story,

Nadia, I have to admit, also knew how to rise to the occasion. She was blonde, and the cornflower blue dress she was wearing really suited her. That was too much for me. Blue was my color. It complemented my chestnut brown hair perfectly. A clerk at the hard-currency store helped me exchange my coffee-colored, crepe georgette fabric for—no, not a cornflower blue—but a very pale shade of blue that looked even better on me.

My Dnepropetrovsk seamstress was a magician. The design she came up with was a masterpiece. It had two soft folds from the waist that streamed out when you walked, like Nike’s, the Greek goddess of victory.

The table was elegantly set, with flowers at each place setting. At the table I reigned supreme, but after the meal I suddenly noticed that Mirosha and Nadia had moved to a couch in another room and appeared to be engrossed in lively conversation. I walked by once, twice, the folds in my skirt flowing like the wind, or a pale blue breeze, almost as if I were flying like Nike. But Mirosha didn’t seem to notice.³⁹

Agnessa asked her maid to call Nadia on the phone and tell her that she was wanted at home on an urgent matter. Nadia left in a hurry. When she called a few minutes later and asked what the point of the joke was, Agnessa replied that “one should know how to behave in someone else’s house” and hung up the phone. When she told Mironov what she had done, he “burst out laughing in delight.”⁴⁰

Managing the home front was relatively easy. Agnessa’s biggest challenges were the vacations at large sea resorts in the Caucasus.

Before leaving for the sanatorium I would go to Kiev to buy fabric at the foreign-currency store and then have outfits made in Kiev or by my seamstress magician in Dnepropetrovsk.

Mironov kept telling me to dress more modestly, saying that my extravagant outfits embarrassed him, but I continued to have glamorous gowns made as well as modest ones—and it’s a good thing I did.

When we arrived at the Ukrainian Central Committee sanatorium in Khosta that fall, all the young women were competing with each other to be the best dressed. I said to Mirosha: “See? It’s a good thing I didn’t listen to you!”⁴¹

One of Mironov’s oldest colleagues (they had served in the Caucasus together) was the commander of the Border Security Forces, the former seminarian, Mikhail Frinovsky.

We used to run into them at the sanatoriums in the Caucasus. Frinovsky had an arrogant, fat face. His wife Nina was terribly vulgar—plain, pug-nosed, and wore way too much gaudy makeup. Mirosha and I used to make fun of her. Mirosha once told me, howling with laughter:

“I was sitting across from her at the restaurant. It was hot, and she was sweating, and suddenly I saw two black streaks run down from her eyes and mix with the rouge on her cheeks, then roll down her chin and drip slowly onto her plate.”

Mikhail Frinovsky (Courtesy of A. G. Teplyakov)

But when we arrived in Sochi in the fall of 1936, Mirosha said to me: “Take a look at Nina! She used to dress like a prostitute, but now she’s really something!”

I saw her and couldn’t believe my eyes. She was like a different person! It turned out that she had just gotten back from Paris, where they had given her a “make-over”: found her style, taught her how to do her hair, and picked out the right makeup and clothes for her. I remember she was wearing a blue gingham dress and a blue ribbon in her hair that were so flattering you could hardly tell it was the same person. She knew it, too, and was very proud.

That fall Yagoda was dismissed (it was the beginning of his downfall), and Ezhov was appointed Commissar of Internal Affairs. As soon as the news reached us, Nina really came into her own. She didn’t try to hide her hopes from me: “This is excellent,” she said, “Ezhov is a big friend of ours.”

They had spent some holidays together somewhere, and the two families had become friends.

And sure enough, some time later I read in the paper that Frinovsky had been appointed Deputy People’s Commissar.

You should have seen the reaction at the sanatorium! All the toadies came running up to Nina and started fawning all over her.

She left the next day. I remember walking her over to the car. She was wearing a black hat, an elegant, close-fitting black suit, and white gloves. As she was saying her goodbyes, she singled me and Mirosha out, hugged me, and gave me a meaningful look….

Our hopes came true. Mirosha received an order to wind up his affairs in Dnepropetrovsk and go to Novosibirsk as head of the NKVD Directorate for all of West Siberia.⁴²