The House of Government

16

THE HOUSES OF REST

An option not available to the Tuchins was to spend regular days off in “one-day rest homes” outside of Moscow. In 1935, the Housekeeping Department of the Central Executive Committee had about a dozen such homes, all of them prerevolutionary gentry and merchant estates. The usual practice was to arrive in the afternoon before the day off, spend the night, and leave on the following afternoon. This created obvious problems for the staff. According to the director of one of the most popular one-day rest homes, Morozovka, “it was not a regular rest home, some rooms were reserved for certain people, but we had no idea who would arrive, and when. A comrade might arrive at 2 in the morning. If his room was occupied, you couldn’t send him back to Moscow, and then he would have a fit because his room was occupied.”¹

One such unhappy visitor to Morozovka was Arosev, who, in March 1935, complained to the Housekeeping Department. The head of the Section of Out-of-Town Properties, A. Chevardin, responded that, “in accordance with the established procedure, all comrades go there with the advance permission of the Housekeeping Department, depending on room availability.” Arosev responded by forwarding “Chevardin’s vacuous reply, which contains elements of rudeness and inaccuracy,” to the department head, pointing out that established procedures varied by rank. “The comrades of my category, i.e., Old Bolsheviks and high officials, are included in the list of those who have permanent access to the Central Executive Committee rest homes and need no additional case-by-case permissions. I would appreciate not being discriminated against in this matter and being put on the appropriate list.” Several weeks later, on May 17, 1935, Arosev arrived in Morozovka with his four children (to read Dead Souls to them and work on his diary) and was given a room, but “slept badly because the people who arrived at 2 in the morning banged their doors unceremoniously and talked loudly between the bathroom and their room, as if they were at home. Where does this shameless Russian parasitism come from?”²

For the most part, however, the staff were helpful; the rooms were ready; the house was quiet; and the food was good (although Adoratsky disapproved of the coffee). Located on the bank of the Kliazma River right off the Leningrad Highway, Morozovka—like Lenin’s last refuge and Zbarsky’s first house—used to belong to the Morozov merchant clan. The main building was an art nouveau version of a medieval gingerbread castle. Lydia Gronskaia, like most House residents, used to enjoy going there: “Morozov’s old house was tastefully appointed and cozy. I especially liked the library, with its stained-oak paneling, dark wooden ceilings, bookcases, and soft leather furniture. It was so cozy to curl up in a corner of the couch with a book! The billiard room was wonderful, too. I practiced a lot, and could even beat Ivan sometimes.” Billiards was the most popular pastime for guests of all ages. The House of Government boys would learn how to play there, mostly from the servants, who had little else to do on weekdays, and then show off, and perhaps make some money, in the pool halls of the best Moscow hotels. Other pastimes included chess, Preferans (the card table, covered with green cloth, was on a round balcony, so no one could stand behind the players’ backs), and various outdoor activities. Valerian Kuibyshev (according to his sister, Elena), liked to do certain tasks himself when he was there. He “planted trees, worked in the vegetable garden, took care of the rabbits, and cleaned the volleyball court.” Winter was the high season, and the most popular activities were skiing and skating. The son of the deputy chairman (and, after 1938, chairman) of Intourist, Mikhail Korshunov, remembered one winter evening in Morozovka:

Morozovka

It was growing dark. The housekeeper had sounded the dinner gong. My father, mother, and I were sitting at one end of the long dining table, surrounded by chairs with high, carved backs. No one else had arrived—yet. Through the huge windows that reached almost to the floor, you could see the deepening shadows in the park and hear the knocking sound coming from the water tank. The water tank was down at the edge of the park, and the sound of the knocking emphasized the surrounding silence. The Schooner House seemed to float along in this silence. That was the name we had given to the house because it used to creak slightly in the wind: wooden, partially draped in canvas, and with its tiny towers, intricately curved balconies, and decks, it resembled a sailing ship on the waves. At night, you would lie awake, listening, and dream of being at sea.³

Nikolai Podvoisky

Winter was high season in Morozovka (and other nearby rest homes) because in warmer seasons House residents could travel farther and stay away longer. The most popular destinations were the Black Sea resorts and the North Caucasus mineral spas. The most difficult problem—as in Morozovka, the House of Government, and throughout the Soviet Party-state—was to match ranked officials with ranked destinations amid fluid schedules, inconsistent hierarchies, and competing patronage claims. Only a few top officials close to Stalin had personal cottages reserved for them; all others had to hope for the best vacancy appropriate to their rank, connections, and persistence. On July 30, 1932, the head of the Sochi Group of CEC Rest Homes, Ivan Stepanovich Korzhikov (an experienced administrator and former director of the Second House of Soviets), wrote a routine report to the head of the CEC Housekeeping Department, Nikolai Ivanovich Pakhomov:

The other day Comrade Vlasik told me that Valery Ivanovich Mezhlauk had left Sochi in a huff, and that this news had reached the vacationer in Cottage 9. I already wrote to you once about this matter. This is basically what happened: on July 13, Comrade Mezhlauk’s wife, Ekaterina Mikhailovna, arrived in Sochi. I personally met her at the railway station and told her that a room in Cottage 8 was ready for them, but she absolutely refused to go there. She refused to go to the “Riviera” as well, so I finally took her to Cottage 4, which happened to have a small room available. Two days later I transferred her to a larger room in the same cottage. For the next three days or so, she and some military man kept coming to see me, asking for a room in Cottage 2, but there was nothing I could do since there was not a single free room left. On July 19, Valery Ivanovich Mezhlauk himself arrived from Mukhalatka [another CEC resort in Crimea]. I saw him when he arrived, and he told me that he had come to pick up Ekaterina Mikhailovna and that they would both be leaving for Mukhalatka in two days. And that is exactly what they did: on July 21 they both left for Mukhalatka…. Ekaterina Mikhailovna was very unhappy—she felt insulted and complained bitterly to Valery Ivanovich. On their return to Moscow she will probably complain to you. She made a lot of threats to me here, but I did not say anything particularly rude back to her, as I think you will understand.⁴

Valery Ivanovich Mezhlauk (Mežlauks, in Latvian) was the first deputy chairman of the State Planning Agency. (He and Ekaterina Mikhailovna soon separated, but both remained in the House of Government: he and his new wife, Charna Markovna, in Apt. 276; Ekaterina Mikhailovna in Apt. 382.) Nikolai Sidorovich Vlasik was the personal bodyguard of the vacationer in Cottage 9. The vacationer in Cottage 9 was, as Bukharin once said, “the personal embodiment of the mind and will of the Party.” Korzhikov’s next letter to Pakhomov was sent two days later:

Last night the vacationer in Cottage 9 ordered me to come by with a list of all the guests in all of our cottages. The results of our conversation are as follows:

(1) People have been calling him on the phone with all sorts of complaints. I personally believe that most of the complaints have reached him through Ekaterina Davydovna Voroshilova.

(2) The Boss asked me how things were going. I told him that everything was going fine. His questions mostly concerned the accommodation of Comrades Kabakov, Rukhimovich, and Mezhlauk. Why didn’t Comrade Kabakov get a room immediately upon request? Why didn’t Comrade Mezhlauk get a room in “Blinovka”? Why was Comrade Rukhimovich put up in the Riviera Hotel, and not in a separate cottage?

I responded: Comrade Rukhimovich has been staying at the Riviera and never approached me about this. Comrade Mezhlauk (the wife) did not receive a room in “Blinovka” because when she arrived, there was not a single free room left, and when a room did open up, they turned it down. Comrade Kabakov could not be given a room because, again, I did not have any available at the time, but when Comrade Ter-Gabrielian’s room in Zenzinovka became free, Comrade Kabakov moved in without waiting for authorization.

(3) The Boss asked about the criteria I use to assign rooms in our cottages. He asked: On what basis did I give rooms in Zenzinovka to the wives of Comrades Yusis and Vlasik? Why do the wives of Comrades Kork, Mogilny, and Semushkin live in separate cottages?

He also asked why we had closed down Cottage 3 and converted it into a walk-in clinic. And then he told me, jokingly: “As you can see, I know everything about your affairs.”

In the end, the Boss suggested that I always keep one or two rooms in reserve, just in case—for such comrades as Comrade Kabakov and the like.

He also said that he would talk to Comrade Enukidze, to make sure that separate vacation cottages are not to be given to people who do not belong there.⁵

Ivan Kabakov was the Party boss of the Urals; Saak Ter-Gabrielian—the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of Armenia; Moisei Rukhimovich—the general manager of the Kuzbass Coal Trust. Ivan Yusis was Vlasik’s fellow bodygard. Comrades A. D. Semushkin (the People’s Commisariat of Heavy Industry) and A. M. Mogilny (Molotov’s secretariat) were mid-level functionaries. The commander of the Moscow Military District (and House of Government resident, Apt. 389), August Kork, was an intermediary case. His unaccompanied wife was not.

The director of the Berezniki Chemical Works, Mikhail Granovsky, was the equal of Rukhimovich, if not quite of Kabakov and Ter-Gabrielian. When he and his family arrived in Sochi a month later (when the first stage of construction at Berezniki was nearly complete), they found everything to their liking. According to Mikhail’s son, Anatoly,

The main gates give out onto the Caucasian Riviera and there a sentry checks your papers and salutes as you enter. Immediately beyond is the area reserved for sports, with tennis courts, croquet lawns, basketball courts and so on neatly laid out and separated by wide beds of well-kept flowers and neatly tended footpaths. Then comes the area devoted to night life and indoor entertainments. There is a large dance hall, an open air and an indoor cinema, billiards saloons and a number of rooms for card games, chess and draughts. There is also a spacious restaurant beyond which is the communal kitchen. The residential area that follows comprises some thirty-two four-to five-bedroom houses, each set in a plot of ground some four hundred yards square and screened off one from the other by lines of trees, their lawns and gardens meticulously cared for by a small regiment of gardeners. The most remarkable feature about the houses is that none of them has a kitchen. No cooking is done in the houses at all as all meals are ordered from the communal kitchens. At any time of the day or night a servant may be sent to get piping hot food which is delivered on a tray under a gleaming insulating cupola. There is never, of course, any question of payment or signing of bills for anything ordered.⁶

It is not clear whether the Granovskys received a whole cottage to themselves; most people of their rank did not. It is also not clear whether they had their food delivered to their rooms; most people of their rank used the dining room. The food was, by all accounts, plentiful; most Central Executive Committee sanatoria had their own “auxiliary farms.” According to a 1935 report on the Foros resort in Crimea, “the livestock provided whole milk and dairy products; the pig farm offered a regular supply of sausages and smoked meats; the sheep farm made up for any shortages in the meat supply; and the chicken farm provided fresh eggs, so that, as a result of the work of the auxiliary farm, the rest home had no interruptions in supplies.” The farm also produced its own fruits and vegetables and made its own wine (Mourvèdre, Madeira, Muscat, Aligoté, and Riesling, among others).⁷

There were three separate categories of diners, each with its own dining room ration. In 1933, the nomenklatura guests and resort managerial personnel were entitled to (per day): 50 grams of caviar, smoked fish, ham, or sausage; 400 grams of meat (or 500 grams of fish); 3 eggs; 200 grams of milk; 40 grams of cheese; 50 grams of butter; 40 grams of “cow’s” butter; 40 grams of other dairy products; 1,000 grams of vegetables; 400 grams of fruit; 100 grams of assorted grains; 300 grams of white bread; 200 grams of black bread; 15 grams of vegetable oil; 4 grams of coffee; 2 grams of tea; and 150 grams of sugar, among other things. Mid-level resort managers and skilled workers, including drivers, received smaller and less varied meals; unskilled workers received even less. Only the salt ration—20 grams per day—was the same for all three categories.⁸

Sergei Mironov and Agnessa Argiropulo used to arrive in Sochi in the fall, “when it was overflowing with fruit”:

Just imagine, it’s October, beginning of November—the autumn season, when it is no longer hot and humid, but the sea is still warm. There are grapes of every kind, persimmons, mandarins—not to mention all the imported exotic fruits they plied us with. They used to put huge bowls of fruit on every table. Once Mirosha and I bought some nuts, but by the time we got back, the same nuts—hazelnuts and walnuts—had appeared on all the tables. Mirosha said jokingly to the manager:

“See what you have done to us? You have deprived us of the last opportunity to spend our own money!”

The manager laughed: “Forgive me, but the fact that you had to spend your own money means that I have been remiss in my duties.”

Oh, the chefs they had and the dishes they created for us! If only we could have eaten as much as we wanted…. Mirosha tended to put on weight, too, but, following my example, he tried to watch what he ate and stay in shape. The doctor ordered fasting days of only milk and dry toast for him. For each one of those days Mirosha lost over a pound. And no siestas either! Every day, right after lunch, we would head straight for the billiard room. Several hours of billiards each day kept us in good shape. I was the one who kept urging Mirosha to follow this exercise regimen, and he agreed, knowing I was right and that otherwise we would burst from all those fabulous sanatoria meals.⁹

The Gaisters, according to their daughter, Inna, “did a lot of hiking, because they thought they were too fat and needed to hike.” The Muklewichs combined walking and fasting. In Foros, they went on daylong hikes every other day. Romuald led the way, and his wife, Anna, followed. They did not bring any food with them. According to Irina, “my mother was a bit worried about my father’s health, because he was, in spite of it all, still rather stout.”¹⁰

David Shvarts and his wife, Revekka Felinzat, at a resort

Postyshevs at a resort

The Shvartses used to play a lot of volleyball, chess, and billiards. Adoratsky and his daughter went for walks, read, and played the piano (although the one in Mukhalatka had “a tinny sound” and was “not particularly pleasant to play on”). They did not have a weight problem and enjoyed good food (the Gurzuf breakfast eggs were “perfect and done just right”), but their favorite part, as always, were the bubbling mineral baths, which they took both morning and afternoon. “After the baths,” he wrote to his wife from Kislovodsk, “I lie down and rest, and then we are brought back to our rooms by car or on horseback, and I lie down and rest again. This allows us to pass the time and provides us with an illusion of activity.” Osinsky also preferred Kislovodsk to the beach resorts, but spent most of his time studying. In October 1931, however, he was so exhausted from constant travel and collectivization-related worry that he allowed himself a little vacation. “I thought of nothing,” he wrote in a letter to Shaternikova, “did nothing, and did not write to you; instead I slept, ate, and read whatever substitutes for fiction for me. I also walked, but not very far: only to the “Blue Rocks” and “The Little Saddle” (once). After vegetating for five days, I suddenly pulled myself together and thought: What about Hegel?! I’ve been wasting precious time! So I jumped into harness and started reading Hegel, though not terribly quickly. Up to now, I’ve only been rereading my notes, comparing them with Lenin’s, and then rereading Hegel in the original. I’ve managed to get through 105 pages this way, and, starting tomorrow, I’ll begin reading new material.” His goal was “to understand everything, in order to be able to launch the universal mastery of the dialectical method in its profoundest and most developed form.” His first (Hegelian) phase was mostly complete by 1934, after several more stays in Kislovodsk. While there, he normally worked for much of the day, while most of the other guests played billiards.¹¹

Terekhovs at a resort

Gronskys and the Belenkys at a spa in Essentuki, 1933

Besides billiards, the most popular evening entertainment at the sea resorts was cards. One of the oldest Party members, Elena Dmitrievna Stasova (sixty-two in 1935, from Apt. 245), played every evening on a terrace next to the main building in Mukhalatka (in much the same way as her gentry aunts and grandmothers once did). According to Aleksei Rykov’s daughter, Natalia,

With Elena Dmitrievna, one had to play Clubs. It was a card game—rather simple, but not too…. Whenever my father played with her, it would turn into a complete farce—because ten minutes into the game, she would always say: “Alesha, you’re cheating again!”—“Who, me? Elena Dmitrievna, surely you don’t think me capable of such a thing?” And then he would do something outrageous again. And they would repeat the same scene day after day…. But the main attraction was when they all played Podkidnoi Durak [Throw-in Fool] with two decks. Now that was a circus, a real circus. Then the cards could end up under the table, under the players, or just about anywhere—because everyone cheated. They would all be joking and laughing. It was so much fun!¹²

While the older people played cards, the younger ones danced. In 1935, Agnessa Argiropulo was thirty-two, and her husband, Sergei Mironov, forty-one. His boss, the “regular Siegfried” Vsevolod Apollonovich Balitsky, and the representative of the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry in the Ukrainian SSR, Daniil Ivanovich Petrovsky, were in their early forties. Once, around that time, they were all staying in the Ukrainian Central Committee rest home in Khosta, outside of Sochi. They danced on many occasions, but November 7 was special:

The manager said to us, “I’ve ordered some cars for you. You can go to the mountains for a picnic, and we’ll have everything ready for you when you get back.”

We climbed into the open cars, already loaded with baskets of wine and other delicacies. We drove to the market in Adler, then for a swim—and then up into the mountains for a walk. We had a wonderful time and came back crowned with garlands of cypress.

The banquet tables had already been set. There was a vase of flowers at each place setting and a bouquet of flowers under each fork and knife.

Sergei Mironov and Agnessa Argiropulo at a resort (Courtesy of Rose Glickman)

We rested a bit, then changed for dinner. I wore a white dress with a large white bow with blue polka dots in front and white shoes. (Nobody wore sandals back then.)

Postyshev, Chubar, Balitsky, Petrovsky, and Uborevich were all there that evening, and Mikoyan came later from Zenzinovka, where Stalin was staying.

Balitsky was master of ceremonies. As I said before, he was slender, lively, fun, and very amusing. Pretending to be angry, he shouted: “What’s going on here? Why are the ladies sitting together and not with the men? Up! Everybody up!”

He grabbed one lady by the hand, and then a man, and sat them down next to each other; then the next pair…. When he got to me, I acted coy. “I don’t want to sit next to just anyone. I first want to know who you are going to put me with.”

He paused, hesitated for a moment, then raised his eyebrows and said softly, “You’ll sit next to me.”

And he ran off to seat the others. He got everyone seated, including me, but still did not sit down himself. His wife was looking at me across the table, her eyes narrowed contemptuously. Suddenly everyone burst out laughing because Mirosha had brought a chair and squeezed in between me and Balitsky.

Balitsky said, “This will not do.”

He whispered to two of the waiters, and they picked up the chair with Mirosha in it and carried him back to the lady who’d been chosen for him. Everyone laughed until tears ran down their faces.

Finally, Balitsky sat down and began talking to me and serving me with food and drink, but not for long: as master of ceremonies he had to make toasts and keep things moving…. Meanwhile, I tried to ignore his wife’s dirty looks.

After dinner the dancing began. I think I must have danced with them all! My first partner was Balitsky, and others danced, too—but when Daniil Petrovsky and I began doing the tango, a circle formed around us, and they all stepped back to watch. We really laid it on—he would dip me, and I would lean backwards over his arm, then he’d pull me up, and we’d walk sideways, cheek to cheek, with our arms outstretched. These days no one knows how to dance a real tango. But Daniil did, and we understood each other without words. Postyshev was sitting in his chair, dying with laughter, and his wife was laughing, too. When we were done, they all applauded until their hands hurt.¹³

■ ■ ■

Besides the one-day rest homes (frequented mostly in the winter) and several-week sanatoria (frequented—following Stalin’s lead—mostly in the fall), there were permanent country houses (dachas) outside of Moscow, where some women and most of the children and old people lived all summer long (and, in the case of the better heated and insulated dachas, during winter vacations, as well). The men usually came on their days off and whenever else they could. Most dachas belonged to the state and were distributed according to rank, although, starting in the early 1930s, the top officials started buying their own “cooperative” (de facto private) country houses. The largest concentration of Central Executive Committee state dachas was in Serebrianyi Bor, on the western edge of the city. The Podvoiskys, Trifonovs, Sverdlovs, Khalatovs, Mikhailovs, Volins, Larins, Morozes, and Zbarskys, among many others, lived in close proximity to each other (usually several families per dacha), swam in the Moskva River, gathered mushrooms, rode bicycles, played tennis and volleyball, and grew fruit, vegetables, and flowers. On August 6, 1937, Yuri Trifonov, who was not quite twelve at the time, wrote a lyrical entry in his diary: “The sun and the trees. The smell of pine. All the greenery. A light breeze coming through the open window and stirring the pages of my diary…. The phlox and dahlias under my window perfuming the air. Bushes and trees and other greenery all around. Greenery, greenery, everywhere…. And the sun turning it all emerald green.”¹⁴

Trifonovs in Serebrianyi Bor

Mikhailovs in Serebrianyi Bor

The most desirable dachas were farther west, along the high bank of the Moskva River, upstream from the city. Some were rest homes with rooms permanently reserved for particular families. The aviator Yakov Smushkevich (commander of Madrid’s air defenses during the Spanish Civil War and, since 1937, deputy commander of the Soviet Air Force, from Apt. 96 in the House of Government) used to spend summers with his family in one such communal dacha in Barvikha. According to his daughter, Rosa,

He was a lifelong, passionate fisherman. He used to sit by the pond with his fishing rod. But the famous Maly Theater actor, Ostuzhev, would pace back and forth behind him memorizing his and other people’s roles in a loud voice. (He was hard of hearing, you know.) Ostuzhev adored my father. He loved being near him. So my father would come home with an empty bucket, grumbling jokingly: “Ostuzhev chased all the fish away …” I remember a lot of people in Barvikha—Ezhov’s wife, a red-haired Jewish woman, who used to call very loudly: “Ko-o-olia!” The Berias lived there, too. Beria himself didn’t come very often, but his very nice wife, Nina, did, and their son, Sergei—a wonderful young man, and Beria’s sister—a good, kind woman. They used to play with me. Among the guests in the nearby sanatorium were [the famous theater actors] Vasily Ivanovich Kachalov, Ruben Simonov (young and very handsome), Varvara Osipovna Massalitinova, Prov Mikhailovich Sadovsky, and Ekaterina Pavlovna Korchagina-Aleksandrovskaia. They loved spending time with my father. They were affectionate with me and gave me their photographs.¹⁵

In another former manor house, the Old Bolsheviks Feliks Kon, Petr Krasikov, Gleb Krzhizhanovsky, Nadezhda Krupskaia, the German Communist Clara Zetkin, and the former head of the Department of Female Workers in the Party’s Central Committee, Klavdia Nikolaeva, all ate in the same “Gothic” dining-room, walked in the woods, and—especially Krasikov and Krzhizhanovsky—hunted for mushrooms.¹⁶

But most dachas were separate houses custom built for individual families on large plots of land within “dacha settlements.” According to Osinsky’s daughter, Svetlana,

During the construction of our dacha in Barvikha (state-provided, of course), my father had a tall fence built around the huge lot so that nothing and no one could disturb him. Inside, a tennis court, volleyball court and croquet lawn were set up. A long, long stairway was built from the high bank down to the river. One whole area was planted with strawberries, fruit trees, and berry bushes. There was also a small wooded grove where mushrooms grew, a ravine, lots of hiding places, and, away from the main building, the so-called “gazebo,” which was actually a small wooden cottage where my father used to work. And what a main building it was! Wooden, with two stories and ten rooms, a deck, glassed-in veranda, running water, septic tank, and bathroom. And a grand piano in the dining room.

Most dachas had tall wooden fences, usually painted green. The Osinskys also had a guard dog, “a ferocious Caucasian shepherd named Choba”:

Everyone except my brother Valia and [the maid] Nastia was scared to death of her. My father had her put on a chain, and she used to run back and forth along a wire by the gate, greeting all our visitors with a low, fierce growl. Choba hated my father—and with good reason. For training purposes, in order to get her accustomed to loud noises and I don’t know what else, he used to fire his pistol into the fence behind her wire. I remember how Valia once brought Choba on a leash to the tennis court. When she saw my father behind the high wire fence, she started barking madly, standing on her hind legs and throwing herself at the fence, while he stood on the other side in his white slacks and tennis shoes, with his racket practically poking her in the nose. Later they took the dog back to the kennel.¹⁷

Valerian Osinsky at his dacha next to the corn he planted (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

The Gaisters’ dacha was a bit further upstream, in Nikolina Gora. Aron Gaister did some of the work himself: planting apple, pear, and cherry trees; starting a vegetable garden; and building a special shed for the white Leghorn chickens he brought back from one of his trips. As his daughter, Inna, remembers it,

The lot was right above the river, on the high side. The dacha was a large, two-story building with six rooms. There were three large rooms downstairs, three upstairs, and a huge veranda. My mother’s brother Veniamin, not without secret envy, liked to refer to it as our “villa.”

The rooms were always full of people. Some of my father’s and mother’s numerous relatives, especially my cousins Elochka, Nina, Igor, and Vitia, used to stay there regularly. My parents’ friends usually came from Moscow on their days off. The poet Bezymensky, who was a close friend of my father, came a lot. Next door were the dachas of the parents of Irina and Andrei Vorobiev and the large Broido clan. I hung out with the kids from the dachas closest to ours: Vera Tolmachevskaia, Natasha Kerzhentseva, the Broido girls. To make it easier for Grandma to get down to the river, my father built a stairway with at least a hundred steps; it was called “the Gaister stairway” for many years after that. It was built as a serpentine because the bank was very steep. Some dachas had wooden piers for swimming. By our pier, the river was deep, and I only swam there when my father was around. Most of the girls liked to gather by the Kerzhentsevs’ pier, where it was shallow and great for swimming.¹⁸

Aron Gaister (Courtesy of Inna Gaister)

Platon Kerzhentsev’s dacha was built according to his own design. It had a veranda with sliding glass walls and retractable partitions inside. Next door was a dacha that Elena Usievich used to rent for the summer; she had been offered one in the writers’ settlement in Peredelkino, but, according to her daughter Iskra-Marina, preferred not to have to worry about her own “cooperative” property. She usually came on her days off in her father Feliks Kon’s car; Iskra-Marina spent most of her days with Inna Gaister and Natasha Kerzhentseva. The Rozengolts’ dacha in nearby Gorki-10 was designed by his sister, the painter Eva Levina-Rozengolts. Downstairs was a large hall, a study with its own veranda, Eva’s studio, a dining-room with a long table for up to fifty people and an adjacent veranda, a kitchen, and, next to it, the servants’ quarters (including a room mostly used as a waiting area by the chauffeurs); upstairs there were two bedrooms, a living room, a bathroom, a toilet, and a billiard room, separated from the living room by a covered walkway. According to the US ambassador, Joseph E. Davies, who visited on February 10, 1937, “the winding approach from the road to the dacha was attractive. The house was large and comfortable and commanded a beautiful view of the snow-covered landscape on all sides. It was well and attractively furnished after the rather heavy modern German type.” Efim Shchadenko and Maria Denisova had a six-room, two-story dacha in Kraskovo 4, to the east of Moscow. One of the largest dachas (Bakovka-111, 241.2 cubic feet, not far from the Osinskys) belonged to Shchadenko’s former Red Cavalry commander, Semen Budennyi. In December 1937, it included some large apple, pear, plum, and cherry orchards, 40 gooseberry and 207 raspberry bushes, and, among many other things, a workhorse named Maruska, a black cow named Willow, a red cow named War, and a pig with no name weighing 550 pounds.¹⁹

For Arosev, nothing seemed to come easily. (He was not admitted to the Society of Old Bolsheviks until the summer of 1933 because of concerns regarding his overly detailed description of his youthful enthusiasm for SR terrorism.) In 1934, he picked out a spot for a dacha in the writers’ settlement in Peredelkino, went there a few times to oversee the construction, and talked at length to the engineer in charge, but, in 1935, was removed from the list by A. S. Shcherbakov, Gronsky’s successor as the Central Committee overseer of the Writers’ Union. He then chose a place in Troitse-Lykovo just west of Serebrianyi Bor, but was told not to bother because it was a restricted area close to Kaganovich’s dacha. He applied anyway, was turned down, applied again, this time directly to Stanislav Redens (head of the Moscow Province NKVD), and finally, on May 28, 1935, received a permit. While waiting for construction to begin, he rented various cottages (also in restricted areas), traveled unannounced to one-day rest-homes, and often visited his friend Molotov (“Viacha”), whose dacha was in Sosny, next to Nikolina Gora. On July 12, 1936, he was visiting with his daughters, Olga and Elena. Two of Molotov’s and Arosev’s friends from their Kazan days, German Tikhomirnov (now an official in Molotov’s secretariat) and Nikolai Maltsev (now head of the Central Archival Directory), were also there. As Arosev wrote in his diary, “Viacha was, as usual, playful and in a great mood. We went for a swim. He wanted to push me into the water in my clothes. I was the only one who didn’t want to swim, but I had no choice. At least he let me get undressed first.”²⁰

Aleksandr Arosev and one of his daughters at Molotov’s dacha

Meanwhile, Olga, who was ten at the time, was playing around a bend in the river, next to Molotov’s wife, Polina Semenovna Zhemchuzhina:

Floating on round, glossy green leaves next to the bank of the Moskva River were water lilies of such snow-white purity they seemed to glow a pale pink. I swam over and picked a whole bunch of these lilies. Polina Semenovna wove them into a wreath and placed it on my head. She admired me for a moment and, after saying that with these flowers and stems I was the very image of Undine herself, told me to swim over to the men’s bathing area to show myself to my father and the other guests. What I saw there shocked me.

Polina Semenovna Zhemchuzhina; her daughter, Svetlana Molotova; and Aleksandr Arosev at the Molotovs’ dacha

Molotov had always been an extremely quiet and reserved man. Newspapers often printed his photographs: old-fashioned pince-nez and a pug-nosed face, seemingly good-natured, but generally unremarkable and rather closed and expressionless. My father, despite his excitability at home, also came across in public as a man of European cultivation and reserve. But here, in the bathing area, they were fighting, dunking and grabbing on to each other’s legs and shoulders, tearing off any remaining clothes, and raising a fountain of splashes every time they climbed out onto the bank and crashed into the water again. They were acting wild and ferocious, like little boys, I thought, reproachfully, at the time. And I was right. For a few moments on that peaceful summer day at the dacha, on the grassy bank and in the water, they were transformed from statesmen into regular, spontaneous people. Could it be that they—these former swimmers, brawlers, and athletes—had suddenly recollected their Volga childhood?²¹

According to Arosev’s diary, they spent the rest of the day inside. “We watched a movie and talked about literature—about Gorky and Dostoevsky. Viacheslav loves literature and really understands it. He had some scathing things to say about Chukovsky and quoted Lenin well and very appropriately, to the effect that socialism as an ideology enters the working class from the outside and may be poisoned by bourgeois influences.”²²