The House of Government

17

THE NEXT OF KIN

Socializing—particularly of the ferocious and wild variety—was limited to dachas, rest homes, and sanatoria. In Moscow, Arosev, Molotov, Maltsev, and Tikhomirnov rarely visited each other, even though all except Molotov were neighbors in the House of Government. For nomenklatura men, Moscow life was about work, and House of Government apartments were for sleeping or work. With the exception of those professionally involved in “guiding the work of the Soviet and foreign intelligentsia” and a few irrepressibly gregarious men such as Radek and Kuibyshev, most people rarely received guests outside the four annual feast days (birthdays and the three Soviet holidays), and some never received them at all. Nomenklatura men had no friends, in the sense of surrogate siblings with a claim to unconditional loyalty, and no neighbors, in the sense of next-door residents with rumors or household items to exchange. They had special comrades and more or less close relatives.

All Bolsheviks belonged to the same family and referred to each other as “comrades,” but not all Bolsheviks were welcome in each other’s apartments. As Solts wrote in the 1920s, “it is, of course, very difficult to preserve those close, intimate relations that we used to have when there were just a handful of us. The common fate and common persecutions of the comrades who worked in the tsarist underground drew us closer together and united us more than our current conditions do. There are many more of us now, and it is very difficult to have the same feelings of closeness toward each communist.” This had been true in the days of the tsarist underground, as well (Arosev had been closer to Molotov, Maltsev, and Tikhomirnov than to other Kazan Social-Democrats, not to mention those he did not know personally), but it was particularly true now, when the economic foundations of socialism had been laid and the sect had become a church. Or rather, a fraternal, faith-based group radically opposed to a corrupt world had become a bureaucratic, hierarchical, world-accepting institution with weak horizontal bonds and porous boundaries. The post-1934 Soviet Union was no longer a heathen empire ruled by a millenarian sect: it was an ideocratic (theocratic, hierocratic) state composed of nominal believers and run by a priestly hierarchy. All Soviets were assumed to be more or less observant Communists (adherents of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam were analogous to “pagans” in Christian states: awaiting remedial conversion but posing no existential danger to ideocratic monopoly). The Bolshevik priestly elite consisted of two layers: the rank-and-file Party members recruited from the general population on the basis of scriptural competence and personal virtue and retained as potential nomenklatura members; and, above them, active nomenklatura members recruited from rank-and-file Party population and assigned to positions of responsibility in the administrative, judicial, military, and economic spheres. The nomenklatura members were divided into those who tended toward professional specialization (especially in industrial management) and those who remained interchangeable universal supervisors, from the Party’s “general secretary” at the center to republican, provincial, and district secretaries throughout the Soviet Union.

The original sectarians had to adjust socially and emotionally, as well as politically. Friendship without comradeship was still inconceivable, but the fact that most comrades were now strangers made it obvious that some comrades were also friends (in the sense of having close, intimate relations rooted in a shared sacred past). As the Old Bolshevik Fridrikh Lengnik (Fridrihs Lengniks, in Latvian), from Apt. 200, wrote in his Society of Old Bolsheviks questionnaire, “I have no requests. I would like to have the warmth of comradely relationships that we used to have, but I realize that, in a Party of a million members, that is impossible.” To emphasize the point, he attached a “list of personal friends,” specifying the number of people involved and the origin of the relationship:

1. The Lepeshinskys

2: exile and emigration

2. N. K. Krupskaia

1: ditto

3. M. I. Ulianova

1: Cental Control Commission

4. The Krzhizhanovskys

2: exile and illegal work

5. A. S. Shapovalov

1: exile and emigration

6. N. N. Panin

1: exile

7. G. I. Okulova

1: Sverdlovsk

8. E. I. Okulova

1: exile and emigration

9. P. A. Krasikov

1: emigration

10. Fotieva

1: emigration

11. M. N. Liadov

1: emigration

12. M. M. Essen

1: ditto

13. I. I. Radchenko

1: illegal work

14. Lezhava

1: Dep. Comm. of Agr.

15. Shotman

16. Enukidze

17. Stasova

18. Rubinshtein¹

The warmth of comradely relations was not what it used to be even for the original sectarians (one of Lengnik’s jobs as deputy head of the Society of Old Bolsheviks was to settle conflicts among members), but some of them, especially those in their sixties like Lengnik and his personal friends, did get together regularly on Bolshevik feast days in order to reminisce and sing revolutionary songs. Most of their favorite recollections were about courtships, friendships, and homemade dumplings in Siberian exile, when spring was on its way.²

But the most common strategy for dealing with the affective consequences of sectarian dissolution was to revert back to the family. The most frequent, and often the only, guests at special holiday dinners were family members. Some House of Government residents favored the husband’s side, some favored the wife’s, and some embraced both, but virtually every apartment served as the center of an extended kinship-based patronage network. Charity began at home: in addition to the leaseholder’s wife, children, and servants, most apartments contained some combination of parents, siblings, and poor relations. Compared to the House leaseholders, most relations were poor: helping them move to Moscow and get jobs, apartments, and places in colleges and children’s camps was an important part of life for most adult House residents. Even the famously misanthropic Osinsky helped his brother with promotions and, according to his daughter, Svetlana, got his sister a job as an actress at the Vakhtangov Theater, “even though she was, of course, totally talentless.”³

Some families—the Sverdlovs, Gaisters, Kuibyshevs, Arosevs, Podvoiskys, Lozovskys, Zelenskys, and Alliluevs, among many others—received more than one apartment within the House. Some, including the ever-expanding Sverdlov-Kedrov-Podvoisky-Lozovsky-Krzhizhanovsky-Yagoda-Artuzov clan, extended their reach and welfare through in-House and out-of-House marriages. Arosev’s comrades and neighbors Maltsev and Tikhomirnov both married cousins of his second wife (before he married for the third time and received two House of Government apartments). The collectivizer of the Middle-Volga peasants, Boris Bak, moved into the House in March 1935, when he was made deputy head of the Moscow Province NKVD (under Redens); his sister, also a secret police official, was married to Boris Berman, the brother of the head of the Gulag, Matvei Berman, and a high-ranking secret police official in his own right. Boris’s brother Solomon did not live in the House because he was, at that time, head of the Karaganda Province NKVD in Kazakhstan.⁴

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Comrades and relatives who lived or traveled outside of Moscow stayed in touch by writing letters. Most adult House residents—like most literate Soviets—were active participants in the thick web of correspondence that defined and held together social circles, family networks, patronage rankings, and, ultimately, the “Soviet people” (all the more so because foreign correspondence slowed to a trickle after the house of socialism was built). At work, high officials governed the state by means of letters and telegrams (while Aleksei Rykov governed all private and official letters and telegrams as the people’s commissar of post and telegraph); at home, they maintained personal ties by writing letters, telegrams, and postcards—to old comrades, clients requesting favors (many of them old comrades), vacationing household members, and an assortment of relatives, mobile and stationary.

If old family connections did not provide “feelings of closeness,” new (or old) loves could. A separate category of personal correspondence consisted of letters to more or less secret lovers: letters that, because of their assumption of utmost privacy, intimacy, immediacy, and emotional authenticity, were similar to diaries and prison confessions (two other popular Bolshevik genres). Osinsky continued his relationship with Anna Shaternikova, writing regularly about his health, children, life at work, and life’s work: mostly Hegel and mathematics, but also Gogol, Heine, and the Soviet automobile industry. After the first few years, he stopped writing about the freedom of relationships. He and Anna had a special address in Moscow to which they sent their letters. He kept offering her money: for sanatorium stays and—his fondest wish—for her to be able to go to university and take up the formal study of Marxism-Leninism. She kept refusing, but seems to have accepted some help, possibly to allow her to take care of her son, Vsemir, who was not expected to live long.⁵

Around 1937, the Old Bolshevik Feliks Kon, who was seventy-three at the time, started an affair with Maria (“Mara”) Filippovna Komarova, an employee of the All-Union Radio Committee (which he had headed until 1933, when Kerzhentsev took over). (It is possible their liaison started earlier, but the surviving correspondence begins in 1937.) They met regularly, although it appears that he was not always up to the physical challenge. She suffered from jealousy and suspected him of being unfaithful. His best defense was his reputation as a Party veteran. “I am sorry, my dear Mara, but there is one question I cannot help asking you: is it possible to love someone and not trust him, not to trust in him? You are a Bolshevik. You will understand the full horror of this question. All my life, I have considered myself, and have been considered by others, an honest man. But you have cast doubt on this…. It is killing me.” His loyalty as a Bolshevik and faithfulness as a lover were one and the same thing.⁶ That still left the question of what should be done in a situation both found painful, as well as rewarding:

You are young. You have decades left to live. And me?! I do believe that it would be natural for you to become involved with somebody else and start living in a way that is different from the way you live now, from one meeting to the next. Would it be painful for me? Very much so, but … And there is one more thing, besides old women’s gossip. There is Khr. G. [Khristina Grigorievna Grinberg].… One way or another, I have lived with her for 45 years. How could I leave her now? … How could I even think of leaving Khr. G., an 80-year-old invalid, who has given me the best years of her life? She would not be jealous, but it would cause her great pain. You keep bringing up the A. Karenina analogy. It simply doesn’t apply.⁷

Feliks Kon

Things would eventually change because the Revolution had won, but change took time—probably more than they had. Anna Karenina’s—and Khristina Grigorievna Grinberg’s—pain had not yet become unimaginable. As he wrote to Komarova, “The modern family has many, many deficiencies. But these are growing pains. The old forms of marriage involving buying and selling (‘you’ve got the goods, we’ve got the merchant’), business contracts between the parties, the wife’s adulteries and the husband’s open debauchery both before and after the wedding (‘boys will be boys’), as well as the peculiar division of labor, with the husband earning a living while his wife runs the household, are rotted through and through, but the miasma of decay is still poisoning today’s spouses.”⁸

What mattered, in the meantime, was that Feliks and Maria had each other. “I keep remembering,” he wrote in a letter devoted mostly to Khristina Grigorievna’s illness, “how I kissed my little girl for the first time…. It was so wonderful, and it brought us so close together for the rest of our lives!”⁹ That closeness, like all true closeness between a man and a woman, was spiritual, as well as physical:

As you can see, my dear girl, we are thinking about the same things, and that is the best part of our relationship. Because, no matter what I do, I am spiritually connected to you. In everything I write, there is a little part of you, and in every one of your feelings, there is more than a little of mine. In spite of everything, our lives have become inextricably linked. As I write this, I think of all the things that have tied us so closely together. There you are, my darling Mara! Please always remember how much you mean to me, and how I wish you were free of all this … anxiety, so that you could live, for as long as possible, a full personal, spiritual, and public life.¹⁰

Aleksandr Serafimovich’s soulmate was Nadezhda Petriaevskaia (Nadia). In 1931, when they began to correspond, he was sixty-eight and she was twenty. As he wrote on August 20, 1932, from his native Ust-Medveditskaia (a few months before it became Serafimovich),

Nadia, it is amazing to what extent we complement each other. My mind is slow and heavy; it moves laboriously, like a millstone, always lagging behind. Your mind is exceptionally quick; it sparkles as it apprehends everything it touches. What saves me is my ability to reach a certain depth, to synthesize. You are brilliant at analyzing, subtly and exhaustively. (I am writing to you from the steppe: on my right is a glittering wall of rain; on my left is the mountain called the Pyramid, on top of which is a tower made of criss-crossing beams, a survey marker, the beginnings of a railroad, and the graves of some Whites killed in 1919 with secret flowers on them.) It looks like I’ll be whipped by the rain. I’m hiding here, reading [Engels’s] Anti-Dühring. At home people are always getting in the way. That is your doing. You have gotten under my skin. I have just finished Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism.¹¹

Aleksandr Serafimovich

The flip side of long-distance spiritual intimacy is loneliness at home. “Write to me, my dear Nadia: I am alone. There is no one I want to share my thoughts or anything else with. When I come, I’ll bring a whole pile of work plans I want to discuss with you.” He needed her in order to do his writing: “your fresh eye can see things that escape me, and your mind is fresh, sharp, searching, and active.”¹² He measured time by counting her letters; he measured distance by how far away she was. She was a student of science at Leningrad University; in the summer of 1932, she was doing field work in Goloshchekin’s Kazakhstan:

Your letter has just arrived, about your trip to some deserted place with a nice description of your journey and of the student Kerbalai. And I know it’s silly, but I can’t get rid of a deep-seated suspicion that Kerbalai is an agent provocateur. I have no idea where it came from. My first gut reaction was: “Does she have a gun?” I can’t sleep. I go to bed with the chickens and fall into a mute, all-enveloping blackness. And then two or three hours later, I wake up and can’t go back to sleep again. The whole house is asleep, while I, full of anguish, climb out the window, so as not to disturb anyone, and wander around the garden. I am losing weight. I know this isn’t helping anyone, but there is nothing I can do.¹³

Reading her letters from Kazakhstan, he discovered that she was a talented writer. They shared a bond, a faith, and, as it turned out, a gift. The best analogy for their relationship could be found in the life of one of the Soviet Union’s most popular writers.

Have you read Jack London’s biography? A glorious writer, really close to my heart. Sasha [Serafimovich’s secretary and daughter-in-law] and I have been reading him. And what about his second wife, Charmian? She is like you: an excellent swimmer, diver, horse rider, shooter, and mountain climber. They did everything together. They crossed the ocean in a little sailboat from San Francisco to Hawaii in twenty-five days. He called her his “Mate Woman.” When she got sick, he said: “If she dies, I’ll kill myself.” But, with all these similarities, there is one crucial difference between you two: she did not have your mental sharpness and intensity, even though she and London worked together, and she wrote a book of her own. Most important, she did not have the feeling of collectivism that you are suffused with. That is understandable: you find yourselves in totally different social circumstances—profoundly bourgeois ones in her case, the revolution and socialist construction, in yours.¹⁴

There was another difference: he and Nadia were not married. (Serafimovich’s wife, Fekla Rodionovna, was a peasant woman famous for her pies, with no apparent interest in science or literature.) Nadia was his “Mate Woman,” but in a way that appeared incomplete or temporarily split. In one of his letters, Aleksandr Serafimovich Serafimovich (or simply Aleksandr) writes to the public Nadezhda about the private Nadia. In social circumstances totally different from those of the Londons, the “Mate” has become a comrade. Or rather, “Nadezhda” is a comrade, whereas “Nadia” is a “Comrade Woman” who is all the more beautiful as a woman for being a true collectivist comrade:

Ask her [Nadezhda] to look me in the eye with her own deep eyes filled with the resolute preparedness for struggle and readiness to forge her will…. Tell her (confidentially, so she won’t laugh) that I won’t use bleach to treat myself anymore (at least not foolishly), that I am working on my publication, that I have finished one important task, about which more when we meet, and I wait for her letters here at my rest home. And tell her how my heart fluttered when she mentioned in one of her letters that “life without a collective is impossible.” She is made of healthy, firm substance, no matter which way the wind blows outside. And tell her, do tell her, that I am not idealizing her, that romanticism is a lie, that I keep adding up all the debit and credit entries, and that the total, fixing me with its cold eyes, is slowly telling me: “You will never, ever, meet another Nadia like this.”—“Oh, shut up; I don’t need you to tell me.” No, don’t tell her that—I can see the tiniest snake of a smile wrinkling the corner of her mouth. Just tell her that I firmly grasp her hand in mine, and that I am—Aleksandr.¹⁵

The former Chekist and Right Oppositionist (and, in the 1930s, head of the Union of State Trade and Consumer Employees), Grigory Moroz, liked to tease his wife by playing Aleksandr Vertinsky’s “A Song about My Wife” (“to be able to forgive my regular infatuations, one has to know a thing or two about life”). She suffered from jealousy and confided her fears to her son, Samuil.¹⁶

Roza Smushkevich was eleven years old in 1937 when her father, the Air Force commander Yakov Smushkevich, returned from Spain (where he became known as “General Duglas”). Fifty-three years later she talked about her father in an interview for a documentary:

Yakov Smushkevich

One day I was walking home from school through the little park that was across from the house…. Suddenly, a woman came up to me and asked: “Are you Roza?” Surprised, I answered, “Yes, I am.” Then she said, “Let’s sit down on a bench and talk.” That surprised me even more. We sat down, and she pulled out a large box of chocolates…. There used to be some chocolates called “Deer” in those days. She opened the box and offered me some. I took one piece. She said that her name was Aunt Tamara and that she used to be my father’s interpreter in Spain. And that she was madly in love with him, and he with her, and let’s live together, and some other things along those lines…. I completely lost control, threw her chocolate in her face, and started yelling something. When I got home, I flung my briefcase into the corner. My father was home. He asked: “What’s the matter?” And I screamed: “Leave me alone! Go back to your Aunt Tamara!” My father walked out of the room, and I could hear my mother say: “See, I’ve been trying to keep it hidden from Roza, but now she knows, too.” Without a word, my father walked over to the telephone, dialed a number, and said: “Please leave me and my family alone.” Then he took me on his lap and said: “My dear, sweet girl, there is no one who means more to me than your mother and you.” … Of course, I hated her. But then … the years passed … and I started feeling sorry for her. I heard that she loved him very, very much. I believe she even had a son by him, but I think he died.”¹⁷

Bolshevism was a men’s movement. Before the Revolution, women were junior partners in the struggle and the embodiment of a time when “any grief is easy to bear.” After the Revolution, they served as a symbol of both the dream’s vulnerability and the old world’s tenacity. In the House of Government, they stood for the preservation and renewal of sectarian intimacy.

Most high officials who left their old comrade women for new ones did it during the time of the great disappointment: a midlife crisis for both the Revolution and the revolutionaries. In the 1930s, even those who did not conceal their new liaisons seemed reluctant to abandon the women who had given them the best years of their lives (and had shared with them the best years of the Revolution). Koltsov got together with Maria Osten without breaking up with Elizaveta Ratmanova; his brother Boris Efimov openly shared his time between his two wives and their children; Ivan Kraval moved his third wife in without parting from his second (who continued to live in their House of Government apartment along with her sister and her sister’s husband and son, as well as Kraval’s daughter from his first marriage). Kuibyshev’s first, second, and fourth wives (P. A. Stiazhkina, E. S. Kogan, and O. A. Lezhava) lived in separate apartments in the House of Government, apparently on good terms with each other. His death in 1935 produced two widows with claims to benefits: O. A. Lezhava and A. N. Klushina. The Gorky Park inspector, Mikhail Tuchin, left his wife, Tatiana Chizhikova, for another woman, but continued to live in their House of Government apartment.¹⁸

What all genuinely close relationships had in common—whether among comrade friends, comrade men and women, or various family members—was the construction of socialism. This was not true of the former construction worker, Mikhail Tuchin, who was often drunk, belligerent toward his family, and, apparently, indifferent toward socialism, but it was true of many, perhaps most, nomenklatura households. Watching Soviet factories grow gave Osinsky as much “personal pleasure” as watching his own children grow; studying Marxist dialectics was “no less important than the building of 518 factories”; and one of the greatest personal pleasures in his relationship with Anna Shaternikova was the thought of her devoting herself full time to the study of Marxist dialectics. Feliks Kon reassured his distraught lover by referring to their common Party membership, and Serafimovich exiled himself to the steppe in order to read Engels and Lenin and write to Nadia about Bolshevik collectivism as the key to an exclusive reciprocal relationship (and a rival who might be an agent provocateur). On January 22, 1935, Arosev wrote a testament to his children, in which he asked them to be resolute in pursuing their dreams. “Don’t be afraid of criticism and don’t resent it. Trust the collective and test yourself through the collective. But, of course, you will be living in an age when the collective will be playing a much greater role than it does in our day.” In the same year, Podvoisky wrote to his children urging them never to forget how much their mother had done for them. “Remember it in order to nurture, develop, and strengthen your sense of duty toward not only each other and your loved ones, but also toward those who are far away, toward the entire working class.”¹⁹ Izrail Veitser had two true loves: Natalia Sats and, as the primary loyalty on which everything else depended, the Party. Natalia Sats reciprocated—on both counts:

More than anything else in the world, Veitser treasured and safeguarded the confidence of the Party. Each time he was about to leave on one of his foreign trips, he would hand me the keys to our safe deposit box, and we would always have the same conversation.

“I leave everything to you.”

“But what do you have to leave??”

He looks at me with reproach and surprise.

“My Party card and my medals.”

Abroad, he had what they called a “blank check”: all his expenses were government expenses. How dear this trust was to him, and how cheap his blank check was for the state!

For me, he was the ideal Bolshevik-Leninist.²⁰

Serafimovich’s friend, Sonia Gavrilova, “almost cried from joy” when, on July 2, 1936, she received her new Party card (as part of the Party card verification and exchange campaign of 1935–36). Another friend, Mirra Gotfrid, wrote to him in a private letter: “Are there any fortresses the Bolsheviks cannot overcome? No, none and never will be. That is true happiness…. A person who is honest and who truly loves his motherland and the Party of Lenin-Stalin cannot die.” Efim Shchadenko wrote to his “darling, sweet little Maria” to congratulate her on the “Great holiday of the October Socialist Revolution” and to his old friend, Arkady, to tell him what was going on in his life: “As far as work is concerned, I have nothing to write: in our wonderful country, all is well: everything keeps growing, maturing, and developing in the direction required by the Party and the people. Obviously you have been reading our newspapers and rejoicing in our successes and achievements as much as we have. So that’s about it then.” And as Khrushchev remembered many years later (a propos of his close friendship with Beria in the 1930s), “In those days, I looked at things as an idealist: if a person had a Party card and was a true communist, he was like a brother, and even more than a brother, to me. I believed that we were all connected by the invisible threads of a common struggle for ideas—the ideas of the building of socialism, something lofty and sacred. To speak the language of religious believers, every participant in our movement was, for me, a kind of apostle, who, for the sake of our idea, was prepared for any sacrifice.”²¹

Sofia Butenko, the wife of the director of the Kuznetsk Steel Plant, Konstantin Butenko, and one of the leaders of the nationwide women’s volunteer movement, was thirty-three years old when Sergo Ordzhonikidze, her husband’s boss and the patron of the women’s volunteer movement, died on February 18, 1937. She still remembered how she felt sixty-one years later: “When they took away my husband … I sobbed and cried. But the way I cried when Ordzhonikidze died, I never … my eyes were all swollen…. I couldn’t even open them. The secretary of our city Party committee even told me: ‘This has to stop.’ And he put me in his car and said, ‘Let me take you out for a bit of fresh air.’ You can’t imagine how I sobbed. I just couldn’t stop.”²²

At the All-Union Congress of Wives of Managers and Engineers Working in Heavy Industry, May 1936. Sofia Butenko is on the right.

When Agnessa Argiropulo was told by Sergei Mironov that he would have her shot if she turned out to be a hidden enemy, but would then shoot himself, she “accepted the compromise.” He loved her as much as the cause; for as long as the two did not clash, life could go on.²³

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Agnessa Argiropulo was not a hidden enemy, but Tania Miagkova was—or may have been. Agnessa was never a Communist; Tania was, and felt strongly about it. Agnessa’s role in the building of socialism was to make her husband happy; Tania thought of socialism as a cause she shared with her family and her country. Agnessa’s question about a possible conflict between two kinds of love was a playful test of her husband’s devotion; Tania’s commitment to both her family and socialism was tested continuously. Her mother and husband followed the Party line; she followed her heart and her Bolshevik conscience. When she was leaving Kazakhstan, her fellow exiles were not sure if she had found inner reconciliation or chosen one over the other.

After her return to Moscow in 1931, she continued to see her friends from the former opposition and, according to her OGPU investigator, appeared to believe that total collectivization threatened the country’s productive forces and that the Party suffered from insufficient rank-and-file activism. In January 1933, two years after the family moved into the House of Government and two months after her thirty-fifth birthday, she was arrested, tried as part of the “counterrevolutionary Trotskyite group of I. N. Smirnov, V. A. Ter-Vaganian, E. A. Preobrazhensky, and others,” and sentenced to three years in the Verkhneuralsk “political isolator,” fifty kilometers from Magnitogorsk.²⁴

According to a former inmate, “the Verkhneuralsk political isolator was a huge building standing all by itself on the bank of the Ural, three kilometers from Verkhneuralsk. During the day, it made a strong impression because of its enormous bulk; at night, because it was lit up with blindingly bright electric lights amid the silent steppe darkness. They started building it during World War I as a military penitentiary, but never finished, so it was the Bolsheviks who completed it to house their own political opponents. The building was subdivided into separate blocks, with long corridors interrupted by a succession of iron doors. The corridors were wide, so prisoners from opposite sides could not hear each other tapping. There were different kinds of cells: for four, three, or two people…. The worst were the solitary cells in the east wing: they had a complex system of passageways; the cells were small; the windows were high, just under the ceiling; and the whole wing was isolated from all the others.”²⁵

Judging from her letters home, Tania had several cellmates and a window with a beautiful view: “the faraway horizons, black and green ploughed fields, and mountains off in the distance.” She liked to stand by the window at dusk: “In the evening air, I can sometimes hear the rattling of horse carts from somewhere far away, or a song (probably from a kolkhoz shepherds’ encampment): a slow, sad Russian song. The horses graze nearby, and sometimes the herd approaches. Far, far away on the left, I can see the edge of the setting sun and the bright, rapidly changing colors of the clouds over the pale-blue mist of the mountains. Every evening, some kind of night bird monotonously repeats its call.”²⁶

After several weeks of uncertainty, dejection, and waiting for parcels from home, she transformed her corner of the cell into an “illusion of home” (complete with dictionaries, sugar tongs, family photographs, an apron, calendar, inkwell, teapot, medicine kit, Swiss Army knife, tiny mirror, cushion for the stool, small tablecloth for the bedside table, carpet for the wall next to the bed, and a reproduction of La Gioconda) and settled into the traditional political-prisoner routine of study, exercise, reading, drawing, and writing letters home:

We now walk from 8 to 9 and 12 to 1. I begin by tackling Das Kapital. I usually manage 5–7 pages in 2–3 hours (including note-taking, of course). I read and am horrified that I understand everything. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not being coy, but I’ve been told (and it does seem to be true) that if the first chapters come easily, it means you’re skimming the surface and not truly comprehending what you’re reading. Besides, I’ve had very few thoughts of my own about the text so far and, to be honest, even those have not been terribly profound. Well, the first step is always the hardest! Intelligent thoughts are bound to come sooner or later! After Das Kapital, lunch, and the walk—it’s math’s turn. I’m almost done with trigonometry…. I’ve been working on it with long breaks in between, but am now determined to push through. After the second lunch (or dinner, officially), I lie down to rest, though every so often some newspapers arrive, and I glance through them in bed. Then comes English—followed by a second reading of The Elements of Machines, journals, serious newspaper reading, and sleep. The next day, I start all over again.²⁷

The rigidity and intensity of the schedule did not vary much, but the program of study did. In addition to Das Kapital, English, and trigonometry, Tania worked on her specialty of industrial economics (“with an emphasis on machine-building and technology”), as well as algebra, French, German, physics, statistics, accounting, draftsmanship, economic geography, analytical geometry (a particular favorite), the history of Greece, and the history of the French Revolution (using Mathiez, Kropotkin, and a collection of Robespierre’s letters).²⁸ Her plan to study art history proved unrealistic because of the lack of material:

As for Das Kapital [she wrote to her husband on January 12, 1934], it did turn out (“just as I, poor me, knew it would!”) that I missed some very important things. I now have a new method: I take copious notes and then write out all my questions, confusions, and “revelations” (when they occur) in the margins. After that, I hand my notebook over to a very intelligent person who really knows Das Kapital well. This person then writes out his own comments, explanations, and confusions concerning my “revelations,” accompanied by exclamation marks (lots of them!). I receive a great deal of benefit and pleasure from this (he, probably, less so), and I strongly hope that by the end of my third year here, I will begin to understand some of it.²⁹

Before bedtime, she usually read fiction: Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Flaubert, Goethe, Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, and various Soviet writers. (She especially liked Bagritsky’s poems and Aleksei Tolstoy’s Peter I.) Sometimes she and her cellmates read aloud to each other: she mentions Blok, Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk, and Pushkin’s Boris Godunov. Of special significance to her were Voronsky’s The Seminary (a memoir of his student days) and Zheliabov (a biography of one of the leaders of the People’s Will executed in 1881 for the assassination of Alexander II). When Tania was still a little girl with a “critical frame of mind,” and Voronsky was her mother’s apprentice as an underground socialist, she used to dismiss his stories as fiction. Now she read them “with enormous pleasure” but remained critical: The Seminary was good, but not as good as In Search of the Water of Life, and Zheliabov, while “very exciting,” showed signs “of having been written hastily.”³⁰

Zheliabov was about the birth of Bolshevik morality, as Voronsky understood it. Whereas Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov believed that, in a world without God, “everything was permitted,” Voronsky’s Zheliabov understood that, in true Christianity, everything was permitted, but only outside the army of light. Zheliabov the terrorist did what Jesus had taught and what his Bolshevik successors would finally accomplish. “Like the mythological hero,” writes Voronsky in the book’s conclusion, “Zheliabov sowed the dragon’s teeth. From them sprouted a forest of thick-necked warriors clad in armor—the invincible proletarians.” Voronsky was not mixing archetypes: his Jesus, like Zheliabov’s, came from the Book of Revelation and belonged in the same category as Cadmus, Jason, and countless other dragon-slayers. It is not clear whether Voronsky remembered that the warriors who sprouted from the dragon’s teeth ended up killing each other. Nor is it known which part of his argument Tania found unconvincing. She could not write to him directly because she was only allowed to correspond with her husband, mother, and daughter (at their House of Government address).³¹

The main difference between Tania’s “political isolation” in the Soviet Union and Voronsky’s (and Zheliabov’s) “prison and exile” in tsarist Russia was that Tania had been jailed by a state she considered her own. “How do I feel?” she wrote in her first letter home. “I can’t say I feel good. I find myself in an extremely difficult situation because my position (I immediately announced my unconditional support for the Party’s general line) provoked a certain reaction on the part of my cellmates. I asked the administration to transfer me to a cell with comrades who, like me, support the Party line, but the matter has not been resolved yet, and I don’t know if it will be resolved favorably.” It was. About two weeks later, she was transferred to a different cell, where she was able to “feel calm” among like-minded comrades. Still, one had to be vigilant. As she wrote to her husband, the deputy chairman of the Central Executive Committee’s Budget Commission, Mikhail (Mikhas) Poloz, “you don’t have to worry: even in these conditions, just as in any other, I am able to isolate myself politically from my surroundings. You know me; you know that the fact that I am here is the result of a misunderstanding. It will be cleared up, I think. In the meantime, I have to wait patiently and use my time here for studying.”³²

The main difference between Tania’s and Voronsky’s prison study programs, besides her professional interest in economics and mathematics, was her “serious and detailed,” “pencil-in-hand” reading of newspapers: especially Pravda and For Industrialization, but also Izvestia, the Literary Gazette, and the Pioneer Pravda. She read official speeches (including her husband’s), took down plan fulfillment numbers, worried about the harvest, rejoiced in “Litvinov’s victory” (the recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States), and was “very much taken by the romance of Arctic exploration.” The main themes of her letters reflected the recently introduced main themes of Soviet public life: the love of life, the richness of everyday experience, the joy of being a witness to history. The newspapers and the letters from home conveyed and communicated the “powerful feeling of pure, physical joy” that reigned throughout the country. Tania was particularly touched by the autobiography of the head of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Dam construction project, A. V. Vinter, published in the almanac Year Sixteen. Its title was “My Happy Life,” and its concluding sentence was: “My life has been happier than what a human being is probably entitled to.”³³

Tania could not say that about herself, but her “love of life and curiosity about life” were “as strong as ever,” and her perception of happiness seemed all the more intense for being postponed. “I cannot say that I am not sad at all, but the main reason for this sadness is that I have to sit on the sidelines while such a wonderful life passes me by,” she wrote to her mother soon after reading about the USSR-1 high-altitude balloon, the Moscow–Kara Kum–Moscow auto rally, and the First Nuclear Conference in Leningrad. “But I am preparing myself for it much better now, studying a lot, and waiting…. I don’t know how long I’ll have to wait, but the day will come…. The balloon, the Kara Kum rally, and the nucleus of the atom have provoked in me the same thoughts and feelings they have provoked in you. You probably know it from my letter to Mikhas. It is so good to be a citizen of the USSR, even if you are temporarily confined to an isolator…. I am also very happy that the children have taken so much interest in the balloon. I hope they, too, will develop a strong sense of pride in the achievements of the Soviet state. I know you will be able to instill it in them.” Her mother, Feoktista Yakovlevna, did her best. According to Tania’s daughter, Rada, her grandmother “lived on newspapers and the latest news on the radio” and raised both her and her cousin Volia as fervently patriotic Soviets. (The cooking was done by the maid.)³⁴

True happiness consisted of taking “personal pleasure” in the launching of the USSR-1 balloon: in loving all good Soviets as much as one’s close relatives and loving one’s close relatives to the degree that they were good Soviets. The adults, weighed down by sins voluntary and involuntary, might not be redeemed; their children were born pure and reared within the sect. The Soviet world of happiness was, like its Gorky Park reenactment, centered on childhood—because future Communism was designed for today’s children and because Communist redemption was, like the Christian kind, about becoming a child. As Tania wrote to her mother on October 23, 1933 (with her sister Lelia in mind),

Today I read an issue of the Literaturnaia gazeta [Literary gazette] devoted entirely to children’s books. Right now, kids are at the top of our country’s agenda, and I think that the Central Committee decision on children’s book publishing is, in its own way, no less significant than the flight of a high-altitude balloon. I am very happy that both Rada and Volia will still be children when this work gets fully under way, but still, it is absolutely imperative that both Lelia and I have one more child each: she, a girl, and I, a boy, so that they will be able to take full advantage of everything (that’s one of the reasons I wouldn’t mind getting out of the isolator sooner rather than later)…. I want our children to feel that they belong not only to our family, but also to the Soviet Republic. Last week was international children’s week. Did their school do anything special? (Oh, how happy I would be to be working at their school right now!) That’s why I would like Rada to spend next summer in a pioneer camp.³⁵

She urged Rada (who was nine at the time) to read the latest appeal of the Central Committee of the Komsomol to young Octobrists, to prepare her home library for the national “inspection of the young Octobrist’s bookshelf,” and to work hard in order “to enter the broad arena of the organized Soviet child.” Her engagement seems to have been sincere, but it was up to the OGPU to decide, and, in early December 1933, the OGPU decided not to reconsider her case (originally prepared by Interrogator Rutkovsky in Moscow). As she wrote to Mikhail on December 30,

Apparently, they did not believe my application was sincere this time. I sometimes feel like writing a letter to a particular person (for example to Rutkovsky) instead of an official request. I think the opportunity to write not in the official style, but more freely would make it easier to express the sincerity of my thoughts and attitudes. I will write again, but I believe that it would be better to do it in two or three months so the matter can be reconsidered. Of course, my dear sweet Mikhailik, it is very hard for me to put it off for such a relatively long time and continue my life in this isolator apart from the real life, which keeps getting better and more amazing. I think that if I were in a concentration camp and if I were working, my true attitude toward the policies of the Party and my own past would become clear very soon…. So, my dear, this is my sad news. But don’t be sad, my love. I think—and really truly want to believe—that before long my case will change for the better. It can’t be otherwise. And so I’ll cheerfully wait for that time, while following from afar all the miracles you are performing in the USSR. I will leave here with an enormous reserve of energy and a slightly greater store of knowledge.³⁶

There was more bad news: she had lost three teeth (in addition to the ones she had lost in Kazakhstan) and was having difficulty chewing. The two teeth that might still be used for a bridge were also in poor condition, but there was no gold to be had in the isolator, and the hope of being taken to Sverdlovsk or Moscow for dental work was slight, in any case. Her hair, on the other hand, had suddenly stopped falling out (just as she “had gotten used to the idea of becoming completely bald within six months”)—probably because of the arsenic and cod liver oil treatment that she had devised. But what she really wanted to talk about, she insisted, were the “happy subjects”: the triumph of the Communists at the Reichstag Fire Trial in Leipzig, the planned publication of the Large Soviet World Atlas, her desire to learn more about Trofim Lysenko’s “vernalization,” her reading of Das Kapital, and, on the home front, Mikhail taking Rada to Gorky Park to skate, Mikhail taking Rada to the Bolshoi to see The Barber of Seville, Mikhail and Rada reading The Jungle Book together, and Mikhail’s name being mentioned in the newspapers in connection with a meeting of the Central Executive Committee.³⁷

Mikhail was very busy at work and in his Party cell. Tania was keenly interested (“Tell me more about your purge session. What theory questions did they ask you? I am dying of curiosity”)—but also understanding: “I won’t worry at all if you don’t write for some time. In general, I hope that during all these meetings you won’t be spending any of your physical or emotional energy on me. I regret having written to you about the rejection a while back. If I had only known that you hadn’t heard, I would never have done it. And please, my darling, try not to miss me too much—in spite of everything, I really am perfectly cheerful, and I trust and hope that we will see each other soon.”³⁸ But it was hard to be perfectly cheerful—especially on New Year’s Eve:

It’s a beautiful, moonlit, snowy night! Such a perfect pale blue … Oh, to be walking around on such a night, making the snow squeak underfoot … But to be walking with you, dear Mikhailik…. I stayed up until midnight. For some reason this evening was especially sad, even though I enjoyed all sorts of pleasures: went to the bath house, washed my hair, put on a completely fresh set of clothes, but felt bad that I didn’t have my “Lily” or “Acacia” perfume; their fragrance brings back a lot of good memories…. And when I was all ready to “greet” the New Year, I sat down at my desk and read through several newspapers, then looked out the window at the pale-blue plains, thinking of all of you and knowing that you must be thinking of me—when the lights went out, which meant that it was midnight. So it’s now 1934 … What will it bring? I feel somewhat curious, and my breath catches a little when I think of all the good things it might bring … It is odd how you feel the flow of time so acutely at such moments, as if the constant and varied stream of life were passing right through you—whereas, in fact, it is passing you by, far, far away.³⁹

It was even harder not to miss him too much and not to worry about not hearing from him. On January 12, when the Central Executive Committee session was over, she wrote to tease him about his portrait in the newspaper, to ask for the original photograph, and to mark the first anniversary of her arrest: “I’ve been remembering how badly I wanted to see you before being taken away, and how happy I was when you came. And how in jail I have been reading the reports about the Central Executive Committee meeting. Yes, my dear Mikhasik, it’s already been a year. How much longer? It is comforting, of course, to think that had I not ended up here, I would never have learned trigonometry, and my knowledge of Das Kapital would have remained at its previous, fairly modest level. But still, even these serious advantages do not fill me with very much joy. It’s been a year since I’ve seen our little Rada! She must have changed so much.”⁴⁰

Mikhail Poloz with his daughter Rada, with her hair shaved off for the summer

Five days later, she wrote again:

17 January

Mikhasik, my darling, my very own, beloved Mikhasik! Oh how I want to see you, to hold you, to talk to you, to be silent together in your room at dusk. Over the last several days, I have been overcome by such profound sadness, such a desire to be with you and our Rada, such boundless love for you both. Oh Mikhasik, if only I could be sure that I would get to see you this year … My dears, I love you both with all my heart, and right now my heart is aching with all this love …

My mother writes that you are very, very tired, my love, and that you need lots of care and attention. Oh how happy I would be to give it to you—like back in those days when I would come to Moscow to see you in that big, empty apartment. And as always in such cases, I can’t help thinking with acute and painful regret of all those times when I could have given you joy, but didn’t, and perhaps even made you suffer instead. It is not good to remember such things in an isolator, when you can’t actively express your feelings of love and your desire to make your loved one happy.

I am waiting for your letter, waiting patiently … It may arrive soon—tomorrow or maybe the day after tomorrow. Yesterday I received my mother’s letter of January 1; it took 17 days. The mail broke down for a while, but now everything seems to be okay, and my most recent letter to you was sent on its way at the normal time. I hope your letters will start arriving more quickly, too.

Mikhasik, my darling, if you have a free moment, please remember how I wait for your letters.

Oh well, I won’t add anything to what just got written. Don’t feel bad for me, my darling: such boundless love is a great happiness in and of itself, even in an isolator … I hope you were able to get some pleasure from my letter, too. I want you to be happy. If you are all happy, I, too, am happy and calm, even if far away.

18 January

Dear Mikhasik, a day has passed, but the intensity hasn’t diminished. I feel good and sad, and I love you and everyone there. It makes me so happy to read my mother’s descriptions of your conversations with Rada. The day will come, won’t it, when we can all be together and have such conversations? And in the meantime, I think I can allow myself to feel a little sad between Das Kapital and trigonometry.

Well, that’s all for now. I kiss you very, very tenderly, my love …

She continued to correspond with her mother: about her teeth, her shoes, her need for more cod liver oil, her disappointment with Pionerskaia Pravda, her opposition to wallpaper for their apartment (“it will only attract bedbugs”), and her worries about Rada’s winter vacation in the country. On January 24, she had still not received anything from Mikhail.

24 January

Mikhas, my darling! I thought for a long time about whether or not I should write to you what I am about to write or exercise restraint and not show my true weakness. Especially since this weakness and the way I express it will affect not only you. Still, I have decided “to react” … I do not know if it will make things better or make me feel better afterward, but I do know how hard it is for me right now … And so, after this solemn introduction, which might lead one to expect some extraordinary revelations, it’s actually something simple that should not be hard for you to understand: I am quite ill without your letters, dear Mikhas. I don’t mean this as a metaphor. I have grown much weaker physically over the last several weeks due to extreme stress. I can’t eat; I can’t sleep; and study is impossible. When I wake up at night or in the morning, I feel a heavy weight on my chest, and I think: here comes another day with nothing in the mail. I keep asking myself: why is this happening? Have I really failed to make you understand what your letters mean to me here (and not only here)? Don’t you want to write to me yourself? When I think about what kinds of letters you have been receiving recently, with what kinds of news and questions (I really do need your answers), I simply cannot understand your silence. Perhaps you have written? Perhaps I simply did not receive your letter? Or are you so tired and exhausted that you can’t write a serious letter? But surely it wouldn’t be hard to add a line to my mother’s letters (such a line could be written at any moment on any sheet or scrap of paper, so as not to tie yourself to the timing of my mother’s letters) … In the state I am now in, whatever lies ahead (for me personally) looks very gloomy. I know that I have gotten caught up in “personal emotions” … I do understand, my dear Mikhas, that this is completely unjustified weakness … It seems that this past year has left its mark on me as far as my emotional state is concerned. It is very sad. What will happen by the end of my third year? Please bear this weakness of mine in mind, my darling. No one else will help me in my moment of weakness, and that’s the way it should be. But surely I can count on you for help? All the more so because I am not asking for much: just enough for me to feel the thread that continually connects us. Really, my darling, I don’t need much for that …

She went on to talk about Rada’s upbringing. Then, after addressing several questions to her mother, she added a postscript:

Mikhas, darling, I have reread my letter and decided not to mail it, but there was no time to write another, so I only crossed out one passage and am sending the rest. I cannot say I am calm now: I am calm on the outside, but it takes a lot of effort. I am still in complete suspense. Please don’t judge my letter harshly, and try to understand. Reach out your hand to me. Tania.⁴¹

■ ■ ■

Mikhail did not respond because on January 12, the day Tania wrote the first of her “sad” letters, he had been arrested as a Ukrainian nationalist (a former member of the Ukrainian Left-SR “Borotbist” Party). According to the report submitted by the arresting officer, Edelman, to the commander of the OGPU Secret-Political Department, Molchanov, the attempt to enter the apartment without warning failed because both doors had been bolted. Mikhail opened the door in his pajamas:

After we initiated the search, we immediately became aware that Poloz had been preparing for it, since the contents of his cupboard lay in complete disarray: books, medicine, and personal items were scattered about at random, in no apparent order. All the drawers in his desk had been completely cleaned out, and only on top of the desk were a few budget committee documents that he had been using to prepare his report for the meeting. He had not set aside any extra clothing or shoes.

He spent a long time saying goodbye to his mother-in-law, the mother of the Trotskyite, Miagkova, emphasizing the parting, but also feeling compelled to say out loud: “Well, I hope things get cleared up, and we see each other again, even if it takes a little while.”

Thirty rubles (the ones we found in his wallet) was all the money he had, and he took it with him, leaving Miagkova nothing but a receipt for a suit that could be sold and a special-store pass, which he handed to her.

Also notable was the total absence of the collected works of Lenin and Stalin, except for a copy of the most recent edition of Problems of Leninism with no marginal comments, while, at the same time, there was other literature such as Bukharin and some brochures written by Rykov that had been read thoroughly.

Notable, too, was the absence of any portrait of Comrade Stalin, while at the same time there were a large number of photographs of Ukraine’s nationalist leaders, a portrait of Skrypnik (a personal gift), and several books by Voronsky with a personal dedication to Miagkova. There was nothing at all on the walls. It gave the impression of a temporary camp.⁴²

Mikhail had, indeed, “been preparing for it” (many of the former “Borotbists” had already been arrested). Rada had been sent out of town to make sure she did not witness her father’s arrest. Tania heard the news in late January, but was not allowed to write to him directly.⁴³

You must have many worries and cares, so please don’t worry about me at all, Mommy dearest, except to send news as regularly as you can (you understand, of course, how important this is for me). I am calm, dear, and not expecting anything bad. In any case, all bad things eventually pass. Try not to overwork yourself, my dear, and take care of Lelia [Tania’s sister]. Don’t forget to feed yourselves as well as the children. Lelia should remember that this is also for the sake of the kids….

So, my darlings, goodbye for now and please don’t be angry about the short letter. After I receive your letter, Mommy, dearest, I’ll write lots and lots. As for Mikhasik, my own darling Mikhasik, whom I love more than ever, please send him a very, very tender kiss from me, Mommy, dear. And kiss dear sweet Rada, too….

That is all, my darlings.

I send kisses to you all,

Your Tania

My darling, beloved Mikhasik, sun of my world and joy of my life, I am sending you a big, big, big hug and a kiss.

Dearest Mommy, I don’t have to tell you how much I look forward to your letters, do I? My teeth are not so bad and can still wait a bit longer, so please don’t worry about them, my dear.⁴⁴

During the first few days after Mikhail’s arrest Tania could only manage to read fiction (mostly Tolstoy’s Resurrection and Anna Karenina), but by February 12, she had resumed her studies (although Das Kapital was still too difficult, “maybe because my work on it, and on mathematics, was associated with a whole series of thoughts, feelings, and emotions that are a little difficult to return to right now”). She had also regained her desire for a full life understood as a seamless connection between her, her family, and the building of socialism. “That reminds me,” she wrote to her mother on February 18, “why didn’t you write about how the plan was approved, and about Lelia’s health? As for Rada, you have made me happy. That’s the kind of mood I’d like to see her in. Let her think about me and dream about a life together even less often. I am absolutely sure, for some reason, that I won’t lose her affection. I would not want for her childhood to end now.” The family members remaining in Moscow—Feoktista Yakovlevna, Rada, Tania’s sister Lelia, and Lelia’s son Volia (the maid had left soon after Mikhail’s arrest)—were evicted from their House of Government apartment and chose a new one in Orphan Alley, next to the Comintern radio station. (They were offered a choice of several apartments and given some House of Government furniture, complete with numbered tags.) Lelia became Rada’s official guardian. Both Lelia and Feoktista Yakovlevna committed themselves to making sure that Rada’s—and, to the extent possible, their own—childhood would not end. According to Feoktista Yakovlevna’s letters, and Rada’s own recollections, they largely succeeded. Tania seemed grateful and relieved. “In analyzing the work of one of our poets,” she wrote on June 4, “the Literaturnaia gazeta cites his description of young pine trees. They frolic in the breeze, like a circle of kids, who don’t know grief, and whose parents are near. The reason Rada ‘doesn’t know grief,’ even though her parents are, alas, very far away, is your doing. Yours and Lelia’s. Because one of my most painful thoughts after the news about Mikhailik was: ‘So Rada’s childhood has come to an end.’”⁴⁵

Volia, Lelia, and Rada Poloz, with Feoktista Yakovlevna Miagkova. A photo taken for Tania Miagkova.

Tania did her best to participate in the effort. When she heard that Rada and Volia had made a lot of new friends in Orphan Alley, she wrote: “I am very happy that the kids like their new apartment. What kind of families do all those children come from? What is the population of the building in general? I hope it’s mostly workers’ families (are there factories nearby?). The kids would benefit from finding themselves in such an environment.” When she decided that Rada might have literary abilities, she wrote: “I would hope that Rada would want not only to write about life, but, even more important, to create life. But it’s still very early: she can always change direction. All that is needed now is for her to march in step with our life, to feel the romance of the machine, the factory, and construction (of our Soviet machines and construction), and to fall in love with technology, or at least to become interested in it.” And when she heard that Rada had not been in Moscow for the May Day celebrations (the ones Hubert described), she wrote: “What a pity Rada missed out on the demonstration! If only I had been there with all of you to see Budenny’s Red Cavalry. This year the demonstration must have been especially rousing. It gives me so much pleasure to look at the wonderful photographs in Izvestia: the group of laughing leaders on the podium and the group of Schutzbund members, also laughing, on the same podium. Such wonderful faces! It’s a shame that the Chelyuskinites could not make it in time.”⁴⁶

The Chelyuskin was a steamship that had attempted to travel the Northern Maritime Route from Murmansk to Vladivostok in a single navigation season. It had made it to the Bering Straits, but was then crushed by ice in the Chukchi Sea on February 13, 1934. The “Chelyuskinites” set up camp on an ice floe, built an airstrip, and were eventually evacuated by Soviet polar aviators during the second week of April as part of a massive rescue operation directed by Kuibyshev. Tania repeatedly mentioned the Chelyuskinites amid news and worries about her own life and kept asking her mother, who seemed similarly engaged, about Rada’s involvement. The June 5 welcome home parade on Red Square in honor of the Chelyuskinites was the biggest Soviet public event of 1934. Tania wrote about it on June 24. Or rather, she began by writing about her own hope of delivery (referring mostly to a continued uncertainty about Mikhail’s fate): “I have certainly had more than enough practice in patience and fortitude recently. There are occasional lapses: periods of depression when I can’t do any math and generally don’t feel like dealing with the world. But, first, I used to go through similar cycles even on the outside, and, second, I tend to pull myself out of such states (they are not frequent) quite quickly.” In the next paragraph, she moved on to the Chelyuskinites:

That was some welcome you all organized! I can imagine what it must have been like! Have you been reading the articles about the Chelyuskinites and their reminiscences in the newspapers? If not, get all the Pravda issues and read them. There are a lot of articles that the kids should read. What a wonderful “episode,” which has now turned into a political event of exceptional importance. The cost of the steamship has been repaid a thousand times over. And it is not just Bolshevik fortitude that is important, but rather Bolshevik fortitude imbued, at the most difficult moments, with the spark of joyous communal living, laughter, and good cheer. Now the world has truly seen what the Bolsheviks are capable of!⁴⁷

Her next letter began with the Chelyuskinites (before moving on to Rada’s and Volia’s upbringing, her “mathematically organized way of life,” her “socialist experimental garden,” and her struggles with fraying stockings, bras, and nightshirts):

So, let us sum up the lessons of the Chelyuskin saga (I’ll write special “Chelyuskin” letters to the kids, too)…. The Chelyuskin saga has given the whole country a shot of heroism, united “one and all” around the general staff (the Party and Politburo), and helped every single person realize what it means to be a Soviet citizen, how precious each human being is for the country, and how precious the Soviet country is for its people—and this is all steeped in powerful emotion, a common, all-encompassing burst of enthusiasm, and a desire to be a hero of the Soviet Union along with a desire to excel at one’s routine daily tasks, based on the understanding that those tasks are connected to the common cause and to what the Chelyuskinites and the avaitors have done…. It’s been a dizzying year! Dimitrov (“hurray!”), the Schutzbundists (“hurray!”), and the Chelyuskinites (“hurra-a-a-a-a-ay!”)….

You are right, mommy, dearest: the Chelyuskin saga is a test of the achievements of the revolution—above all, its achievements in the countryside, in the matter of the rebirth of the peasant. The kolkhozes have won, and the “idiocy of rural life” is disappearing. Has not the Chelyuskin saga demonstrated its disappearance? …

I have a secret confession: while reading the newspaper issues devoted to the welcome parade (and all of them from cover to cover, of course), I—like those who had assembled at the railway station to greet them—couldn’t help crying (just a little).⁴⁸

Tania’s letters were not proper confessions, and they were not confidential. They were addressed to her mother, who expected Party orthodoxy; her daughter, whose happy childhood was to be preserved; her own self, which seemed to yearn for a reconciliation with life (“I discipline myself in every way possible”); and her censors, who were responsible for helping in all these endeavors as well as—presumably—determining the degree of their success. The Bolsheviks—like most priests, historians, and the participants in the discussion of the State New Theater’s production of The Other Side of the Heart—had no clear doctrine on how to judge the sincerity of contrition. It was—and is—impossible to be sure on what occasions Tania resorted to mentalis restrictio, but it does appear likely that, for the most part, she tried her best to erase the distinction between her yearnings on the one hand and her mother’s Party-minded expectations, her daughter’s happy-childhood entitlements, and her censors’ inscrutable ways, on the other. As Dante’s nuns, who were assigned to the lowest sphere of paradise, put it, “Should we desire a higher sphere than ours, / then our desires would be discordant with / the will of Him who has assigned us here.”⁴⁹

The greatest test of Tania’s fortitude—in her letters if not in her soul—came in late July, when she received the news that Mikhail had been sentenced to ten years in a labor camp.

My dear, sweet, darling mom, you are so wonderful, and I don’t know where we would be without you! Thank you and thank Lelia. You two make it possible for me to be courageous and determined and able to endure such hardships. I received your letter yesterday and marveled at myself after I read it: no depression (let alone despair) and not even much sadness. What has given me this strength at such a difficult time? It was the news of Mikhailik’s high spirits, his active desire to grab his fate by the horns and turn it back onto the right path, and his firm belief that it can be done. Mommy dear, I know Mikhas better than anyone else. I do not know what he has been accused of, but I do know Mikhas, and I know that he can and must be rehabilitated. A concentration camp? So be it! Over a period of several years? So be it! Long, difficult years? So be it! Mikhas must be accepted back into the Party. Whatever I can do to help him, I will. Above all, I must be with him for the rest of my term, wherever he may be and no matter what the conditions. I have already written a short application to the Secret Political Department, and now I must wait. I have tremendous hope that I will see Mikhailik soon—and that is the second reason why I was in an almost exultant mood after reading your letter.⁵⁰

Being together, even if in prison, was better than being apart; being involved in labor, even if forced, was better than being isolated; and being exultant over such news was proof, if proof were needed, that both Tania and her mother had passed another test.

To be honest with you, I still don’t know what constitutes a harsher punishment, an isolator or a concentration camp, but I think that, in the case of a ten-year sentence, a concentration camp is much better: first, it means working and therefore participating in the life of the country; second, it means the possibility of a shortened term. Ten years in an isolator, on the other hand, has an air of hopelessness about it. One of the many reasons we love the Soviet order is because it has no prison term fetishism, and ten years is not really ten years, but only what you manage to make of them. There is no place for hopelessness in our—very tough—system … One thing continues to make me feel good about my reaction to all this. A comrade with whom I shared some of my news and feelings in this regard asked me half seriously and half jokingly, “But you’re not angry with the Soviet order, are you, Tania?” I was silent for a while, and then gave a totally serious answer to what was probably an equally serious question, despite the jocular tone: “No, I’m not angry at all.” I needed to be silent because I wanted to test myself once more to see if all these difficult personal experiences (and not my own this time) had affected what I might call my emotional-political feelings (sorry for the clumsy word). And that’s the third reason your letter gave me such a shot of energy: your own reaction to what has been happening. I was afraid for you, mommy dear. I was afraid that these unexpected blows, and such heavy ones, too, might undermine you physically and morally and destroy your view of things, but now I see that there is not even a hint of that. So this means that, generally, everything is fine, though Mikhailik is in a concentration camp, and I am in an isolator. There is nothing to fear, “as long as we have the Soviet order and our mutual love for each other.”⁵¹

In her letter, Feoktista Yakovlevna seems to have mentioned that Mikhail’s interrogators in Kiev had made some favorable remarks about Tania’s letters. “I won’t lie to you,” Tania responded, “such an assessment from such an institution—indeed, especially from such an institution, is far from being disagreeable to me. But I’m afraid the Moscow GPU does not share this opinion of my honesty and sincerity. Say what you will, but I did receive three years in an isolator after being accused of duplicity.” And this was the final and most important benefit of the news about Mikhail:

Yes, the advantage you write about, mommy dearest—the “conclusiveness and irreversibility” and the “getting rid of all the birthmarks” is a huge thing. My comments to you on this subject have been short and dry, though I could have written much more, and in greater detail. It’s just that I am somewhat inhibited by the possibility that my letters on this topic might be regarded as a duplicitous move, and that is very unpleasant, as you can imagine … I used to be extremely skeptical of prison conversions, but now I can see what an inaccurate and superficial view that was. I can’t help thinking that, had I been sent into exile, my development would have been much slower. Sometimes it is useful to hit a person over the head with a club (at least it has been in my case). Of course that does not mean that I am very happy to have ended up in an isolator. Still, if I were faced with the dilemma: the isolator and a genuine break with Trotskyism or Moscow and my prior semi-Trotskyite views, I would not hesitate to choose the former.⁵²

There was nothing Tania could do about the obvious danger that claims of sincerity might be interpreted as proof of duplicity. All she could do was wait. “Waiting without the slightest possibility of doing anything about it ought to have been included as a separate punishment for sinners in one of the rings of Dante’s inferno … At the same time, even in the rings of Dante’s inferno, life clearly goes on.” She rearranged her belongings (“so the only thing left to do would be to put them in suitcases”), resolved to work even harder, and devoted the rest of her time to imagining the future. “My dream,” she wrote to her mother on August 12, “is for the concentration camp to be in a forest and for me to arrive in the fall when the birches and aspens are yellow and red … (But that’s just a dream: I would take the concentration camp even without the birches and aspens).”⁵³

I want to think about our future, [she wrote to Mikhail on the same day], at first tough and difficult, perhaps, but then (definitely!) sunny and joyful.

I really want to hear from you that you are also sure about our good future together … But first I want you to rest alongside me.

Because being together is a form of rest, isn’t it, my dear? I am also tired after all this time and want to lay my head on your chest …

Oh how I long for our meeting, Mikhasik, my love …

I kiss you and love you.

Don’t be angry with me for writing the same thing over and over again. It’s just that I always feel the same thing. And so strongly!⁵⁴

Mikhail responded by saying that he was, indeed, sure about their good future together, that he was on his way to Kem, on the White Sea, and that Kem was a “lovely” place. Tania could finally make concrete plans for their life together. “Let us adopt the slogan, ‘a ten-year plan in four years (and preferably less),’” she wrote on August 17, “and let us work toward that together (in case your sentence is not overturned). Together … Mikhas dear, I am a little worried about being so sure that I’ll be with you. I can’t think of any possible reason for a denial, but I’ve gotten so used to the idea of coming to live with you (I have even determined the time: I’ll arrive in September, when the forest is red and gold) that it will be very hard if there is a delay of some kind.” She agreed that Kem sounded good but worried about whether it was possible “to grow flowers and start a vegetable garden there.” She was still not sure if he was going to Kem, or via Kem, to Solovki. “The latter may be even better, because the camp up there is very well run and the nature is beautiful.”⁵⁵

Two weeks later, Tania was told that Mikhail had been sent to a timber-rafting camp within the White Sea–Baltic Canal camp system. “The fact that Mikhas is in the White Sea–Baltic Canal camp made me happy,” she wrote to her mother on August 30. “After all, it is one of the best camps, very well run, and the construction itself is interesting. But the timber rafting part has me a bit worried. Is it possible that instead of working as an agronomist or surveyor, Mikhas is wielding a pole? That would not be ideal, although, if that is the case, we should probably think of it as a period of ‘production startup costs.’ After all, even in timber rafting there are lots of jobs appropriate to his specialty, perhaps even some surveying work.” While waiting to find out, she followed the newspaper reports about the first Congress of Soviet Writers (“it’s too bad the kids did not send Gorky their letter about which books they like and what sort of books they wish writers would write”) and read a lot of poetry. One of her old favorites was Walt Whitman. “What enormous strength! What an extraordinary joy of living! What a powerful interpretation of my favorite quotation: ‘I love life equally whether I am on a horse or under it. Life is equally beautiful in joy and in sorrow.’”⁵⁶

Ten days later, Tania was informed that her application had been turned down. “I cannot say, of course, that this decision was not a blow to me,” she wrote to her mother, “but I seem to have gotten used to them over the years, so please don’t worry about my mood. I worry more about Mikhas, about how he will take this news in the first months of his ‘new life,’ especially without our letters.” Her own new life required some tightening up, but no major revisions:

Tomorrow I’ll put together a precise schedule for the remaining year and four months. Nothing came of the concentration camp idea, so we’ll try a different tack. In addition to higher mathematics, I plan to get through mechanics and draftsmanship (as well as descriptive geometry). This is the main thing, and if I can pull it off, I’ll consider it a huge achievement. I also want to finish Das Kapital and work on my languages. These last few weeks have shaken me somewhat. My self-discipline faltered a bit, though I never abandoned my studies for more than the briefest of periods. But now I will pull myself together … As for my undershirts, three are in decent shape, and the rest are all worn and thin the way Lelia likes them, but they should last through the winter just fine. My blouses are also worn and frayed, including even—you won’t believe it—the lilac gingham one (the one just like yours). For the winter, I’m planning to make a blouse out of that tangerine flannel you sent me. Also, I wonder if I shouldn’t make a white blouse with long sleeves from that linen sheet that was too wide. What do you think? I did a brilliant job washing the black wool dress in mustard, but the seams are coming apart at the armpits. The lace, on the other hand, which had faded in the wash, is now a metallic steel color and looks very festive. It would be nice to have some gloves (women’s knit ones), but only if you happen to run across them. There’s no need to go out and look for them specially: I can get by with my mittens. The same goes for felt boots. Mine are still fine, but I am writing in advance, just in case. As for shoes, the gray canvas and black leather ones are completely worn out, but both the yellow and black pairs of walking shoes are still in good shape. So, the winter and spring are taken care of (and summers here you can get by with cloth slippers) … Mommy dear, perhaps sometime you could send me photos instead of a parcel? It’s been a whole year since I’ve seen Rada (since her last photograph).⁵⁷

Almost two months later (on November 5 and November 10) she received two letters from Mikhail. He was in Solovki, and the letters had taken about a month to arrive. He was not allowed to write to Moscow, so Tania would now become the center of the family’s delicate epistolary web. “He writes that the situation there is more difficult than here. It must be true, and I have never doubted it. Besides, I think that he generally finds it much harder than I do to adapt to unfavorable circumstances. But don’t be afraid for him, my dear, and don’t worry too much. Solovki is no worse, and may be even better, than any other camp. Mikhas has inner strength. He will ‘settle in,’ and we will help him in every way we can.” In the meantime, his main worry was about the children. (Tania was very happy that he considered Volia one of his own.)⁵⁸ Now that he was gone (and along with him the maid, special passes, and House of Government services) the children needed to grow up—without leaving their happy childhoods behind:

The most efficient method, in his opinion [wrote Tania to her mother], would be to draw up a familywide socialist contract, which would list all the responsibilities of the children (cleaning their room, setting and clearing the table, helping with the dishes, doing homework, calisthenics, etc.) alongside all the duties of the grown-ups, including nondomestic ones. This would show how much more extensive the adult duties were and introduce elements of equality. Such institutionalization of the “family code” would allow the kids to regard it as a part of a larger system. We could also consider incorporating certain incentives (including those of a nonmaterial nature). The very act of drawing up such a contract would be of great pedagogical significance.⁵⁹

Tania voted for introducing the system gradually, so as not to overwhelm the children with detail and her mother with extra work, but, on the whole, she approved of the initiative. A few days later, she read a newspaper article titled “Our Children,” about a school in Moscow that had adopted a “student daily schedule” (“for the whole day, not just the school day”). “In that school,” she wrote to her mother, “every student used the model template to work out an individualized schedule adapted to the family’s schedule. Our kids need to do that, too (in the form of a socialist contract as suggested by Mikhas), so that they can become, through the pioneer organization, the initiators of this campaign in their own classes (at first only for the pioneers).”⁶⁰

The task was for the children to become responsible members of the family, and for the family to become a functioning part of the state. The family was to become a formalized institution bound by contractual obligations; the state was to become a family in which all children (and factories) were “our children.” Neither transformation was to be complete, however: no one envisioned an imminent dissolution of kinship ties and no one imagined the state as a patriarchal institution unmediated by legal codes enforced by strangers. The governing assumption—and the necessary condition for the victory of socialism—was the inherent compatibility and mutual attraction between the two.

But what if the state spurned some members of a particular family? Could Rada’s happy childhood and her parents’ possible apostasy be reconciled? “It is with tremendous sadness,” wrote Mikhail to Tania, “that I think of how Rada will find out about my current reality. I would like for it to happen after your release, so that you can explain to her about your past and my present. That would make it easier for her to absorb. The main thing I am asking for is that the children have the same understanding about you and me and that Rada still love me.”⁶¹

Could Rada still love her parents if the state was right to distrust them? Could Tania and Mikhail still love each other if one of them was irredeemably duplicitous? For as long as Tania’s answer was “no,” her love of the high-altitude balloon had to be as great as her love for her mother, Rada, and Mikhail. “I knew that the crash of the Maksim Gorky airplane would be a huge shock to you,” she wrote to her mother on May 30, 1935. “The common experience of joy and grief in our USSR is extremely precious.”⁶²