The House of Government

18

THE CENTER OF THE WORLD

The USSR was structured as a series of concentric circles. Tania and Mikhail found themselves in the outer layers (rings of purgatory). The House of Government, from which they had been exiled, was connected to the sacred center by the Big Stone Bridge. The sacred center included the Kremlin, where Comrade Stalin worked, and the Lenin Mausoleum, where Lenin’s body lay in state. On Soviet holy days, the two came together (with Stalin standing directly above Lenin’s tomb). Both were part of an ensemble centered on the Palace of Soviets (with Lenin on top). The Palace of Soviets served as the axis mundi connecting heaven and earth. The first circle around the Palace was the city of Moscow.

After the Congress of Victors and the first Writers’ Congress of 1934 had ushered in the last golden age, harkening back to previous golden ages, the idea of constructing a brand new city was abandoned in favor of reconstructing the old one. The General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow, adopted on July 10, 1935, proposed to “radically regularize the network of streets and squares” while preserving the traditional radial-concentric structure of old Moscow. The new “parks, wide avenues, fountains and statues, and, in the immediate vicinity of the Palace of Soviets, gigantic squares covered with colored asphalt,” were to be built along the lines of the city’s “rings.”¹

Perfect human communities tend to be represented as either pastoral or urban. Pastorals are poorly disciplined; ideal cities are symmetrical and rigidly centralized. The Heavenly Jerusalem “had a great, high wall with twelve gates, and with twelve angels at the gates. On the gates were written the names of the twelve tribes of Israel. There were three gates on the east, three on the north, three on the south and three on the west. The wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb…. The city was laid out like a square, as long as it was wide.” The capital of Thomas More’s Utopia was also in the form of a square. It was divided into four parts, with a marketplace in the middle. All the streets were of the same width, all the buildings were “so uniform that a whole side of a street looks like one house,” every house had two doors, and all doors had two leaves. All the other cities were identical to the capital, so that “he that knows one of their towns knows them all.” Albrecht Dürer’s ideal city, Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis, and Robert Owen’s harmonious settlement all had the same square or rectangular shape.²

Thomas More’s Amaurot

The other matrix of urban perfection is the circle. Plato’s Atlantis consisted of a hill surrounded by five concentric circles, “two of land and three of water”; Vitruvius’s city was radial (for defense purposes, he claimed). The ideal cities of the Renaissance repeated the classical formula: Bartolommeo Delbene’s City of Truth was a cartwheel with five spokes representing roads of virtue emanating from the central tower and cutting through the swamps of vice; Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun was “built upon a high hill” and “divided into seven rings or huge circles named from the seven planets, and the way from one to the other of these is by four streets and through four gates, that look toward the four points of the compass.” The design of the City of the Sun was based on Copernicus’s diagram of the planets revolving around the sun (as well as on St. John’s Jerusalem); its shape resembled the pictorial allegories of Dante’s purgatory as a terraced mountain with seven concentric rings. Ebenezer Howard’s 1902 Garden City was a circle divided into six equal sectors.³

Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun

Sforzinda

The circle could be squared in a variety of ways. Filarete’s ideal city of Sforzinda, designed for Francesco Sforza in 1464, derived from two superimposed squares, forming an eight-point star inscribed into a circle; the center (a public square or, in the original design, a tower) was connected to the points of the star by canals and to the inner angles, by roads. Iofan’s Palace of Soviets was a stepped cone resembling Augustine’s earthly city or Dante’s Purgatorio placed centrally on top of a square.⁴

Ideal cities are not simply spatial representations of the cosmic order: they are more or less elaborate diagrams of traditional human habitations—which tend to be spatial representations of the cosmic order. Most traditional dwellings are organized around two axes intersecting at the center to form a cross. Whether the points of the cross are connected by straight lines or a circle is secondary: the round Mongol yurt and the Russian peasant hut with its “corners” are both divided into four quarters with different practical and symbolic functions. The center is the vertical axis mundi that connects this world to its higher and lower counterparts.⁵

Some new settlements follow the same pattern: at the moment of founding, the creation of the world is reenacted; the cosmic waters are divided; the axes of the settlement aligned with those of the universe (one following the sun, the other forming the axis around which the world turns); and the center marked with a stone, tree, temple, fountain, forum, or tomb of the hero-founder. Not all cities are elaborations of traditional settlements or deliberate new creations, and not all those that are preserve their original diagrams, but no city is entirely divorced from the cosmic order, and some make the point of making the connection explicit. Prominent among the latter are holy cities (which often double as administrative centers) and administrative centers (which attempt to project holiness), including Roma quadrata (“Square Rome”) and its countless clones, the squares and rectangles of Chinese imperial centers, and the perfect circles of Median, Parthian, and Sassanian capitals (and their Muslim successor, Baghdad).⁶

Roma quadrata

Forbidden City in Beijing

Cities impose order on the world. As time goes on, swamp waters seep through, migrants and money-lenders pour in, sheds and shortcuts proliferate, circles abandon their regularity, and right angles lose their sharpness. The original vision can be restored symbolically, through ritual, or physically, by means of demolition and new construction. In post-Reformation Europe, Rome set the standard for cutting through urban flesh; and Versailles, for starting anew. Both, along with Versailles’s monumental successor, St. Petersburg, were organized around a trivium, or three streets radiating from a common center (and suggesting—at least in diagram form—the rays of the sun). All embodied the restored symmetry of heavenly and earthly power; all spawned multiple progeny (including the tridental replicas of Russia’s imperial capital in Tver and Kostroma).⁷

The next Age of Empire began in the second half of the nineteenth century. Emperor Napoleon III replaced old Paris with a network of avenues, boulevards, and star-shaped squares centered on the cross formed by the Rue Rivoli and Boulevard Sebastopol/St. Michel (but leaving the Swamp—Le Marais—intact in the northeastern quarter). Emperor Franz Josef I ordered the replacement of Vienna’s city walls with the world’s most spectacular boulevard. The British Empire did in New Delhi what it could not do in London: build a Rome “one size larger than life.” As one reporter wrote approvingly at the time, “Not a hint of utilitarianism interpolates upon the monumental affirmation of temporal power.”⁸

Other colonial capitals within the empire strove for the same combination of symmetry and legibility. The two towers, two wings, and the connecting semicircular colonnade of Pretoria’s Union Buildings symbolized the unbreakable alliance of the two South African races (Briton and Boer). Canberra was designed as a “Parliamentary Triangle” superimposed on a cross formed by the “Land Axis” and “Water Axis.” The Secretary for Home Affairs who approved of the site claimed to have felt like “Moses, thousands of years ago, as he gazed down on the promised land.” Ottawa, by way of exception, tended toward the Gothic and the picturesque, and never quite lived up to the 1897 vision of John Galbraith, who described “the city of Ottawa in 1999” as a collection of monumental buildings and “immense skeleton towers,” with “mottoes formed of electric lights stretched between them.”⁹

Versailles

St. Petersburg

The capitals of the newly restored European empires were to be firmly neoclassical. According to Mussolini’s reconstruction plan, formally promulgated in 1931, “Rome must appear marvellous to all the people of the world—vast, orderly, powerful, as in the time of the empire of Augustus.” The theater of Marcellus, the Capitoline Hill, and the Pantheon were to be surrounded by vast spaces and connected by straight avenues; “all that has grown around them in the centuries of decadence must disappear.” Hitler, himself a student of architecture, admired Paris and Vienna and was determined to transform Berlin from an “unregulated accumulation of buildings” into a proper capital aligned along two cosmic axes. The plan’s main feature was the north-south avenue two and a half times as long as the Champs Elysées, lined with government buildings as well as, according to Albert Speer, “a luxurious movie house, for premieres, another cinema for the masses accommodating two thousand persons, a new opera house, three theaters, a new concert hall, a building for congresses, the so-called House of the Nations, a hotel of twenty-nine stories, variety theaters, mass and luxury restaurants, and even an indoor swimming pool, built in Roman style and as large as the baths of Imperial Rome.” The House of the Nations was “a huge meeting hall, a domed structure into which St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome would have fitted several times over.” The inspiration, according to Speer, was provided by the large buildings of Greek antiquity in Sicily and Asia Minor. “Even in Periclean Athens,” he wrote, “the statue of Athena Parthenos by Phidias was forty feet high. Moreover, most of the Seven Wonders of the World won their repute by their excessive size: the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Olympian Zeus of Phidias.”¹⁰

Other reborn national capitals had their own dreams of Augustan and Parisian grandeur (Athens and Helsinki, in particular, entertained comprehensive reconstruction plans on a monumental scale), but, when it came to both ambition and execution, none could compete with the United States. A preview of things to come had been provided by the magical “white city” of the Chicago World’s Fair, which rose out of a swamp in 1893 before being swallowed up again (only the Palace of Fine Arts survived—as the Museum of Science and Industry). Among its legacies were the song “America the Beautiful” and the City Beautiful urban renewal movement, which transplanted the beaux arts version of the baroque city to the United States. The movement’s accomplishments included the large domes, open vistas, civic centers, landscaped parks, axial avenues, and ceremonial malls of many American cities and universities, but it was Washington, DC—the original “Versailles on the Potomac”—that benefited the most. L’Enfant’s palatial plan of 1791 (“proportional to the greatness which … the Capital of a powerful Empire ought to manifest”) was revived in 1902 and mostly implemented over the next three decades—in a way that combined symmetrical consistency with an openness to later additions along preexisting lines.¹¹

Central Washington was organized around the east-west axis of the National Mall and the north-south axis of the White House, with the axis mundi monument to the founder at the point of intersection. As National Geographic put it in 1915, “the Washington Monument seems to link heaven and earth in the darkness, to pierce the sky in the light, and to stand an immovable mountain peak as the mists of every storm go driving by.” The overall composition, according to one of the designers, was “a crusader’s shield, emblazoned with a cross.” The base of the cross was the Capitol, the two arms were the Jefferson Memorial and the White House, and the top was the Lincoln Memorial, beyond which, according to another member of the original team, lay “the low bridge spanning the Potomac (symbol of the Union of North and South as foretold by Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster) leading both to the heights of Arlington where Lincoln’s soldiers rest in eternal peace, and also to Mount Vernon, shrine of the American people. Washington the founder, Lincoln the saviour of the nation, standing on the same axis with the Capitol whence emanates the spirit of democracy.” The Capitol was directly connected to the White House by the diagonal of Pennsylvania Avenue, which formed the Federal Triangle and symbolized the signing of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. New ministries and sacred memorials were placed symmetrically along the main axes. No variety theaters, movie houses, restaurants, baths, or cafés were allowed to interfere with the solemn monumentality of the ensemble.¹²

National Mall, Washington, DC

The General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow was not as ambitious, or as consistently implemented, as the plans for New Delhi or Washington. The Palace of Soviets, the city’s vertical axis, was modeled after American skyscrapers, which were themselves patterned on classical columns and tended to serve as either corporate temples (each one its own “empire state”) or state capitols (such as the ones built in Louisiana in 1929 and Nebraska in 1932). No Soviet public building came close to the scale and symbolic legibility of the Pentagon, built in 1941–43 next to the Arlington Cemetery, where Lincoln’s soldiers rest in eternal peace.¹³

Pentagon, Washington, DC

There is no such thing as “totalitarian,” let alone “socialist-realist,” architecture—but there are degrees of “the monumental affirmation of temporal power” as a reflection of the cosmic plan. Stalin’s Moscow and Hitler’s Berlin resembled Paris and Washington in the way Paris and Washington resembled Rome and Versailles and in the way Jesus’s Heavenly Jerusalem resembled Babylon the Great: they served similar purposes and strove to supersede their corrupt predecessors by imitating their original designs. As the architect and city planner Arnold W. Brunner said in 1923 about the neoclassical “civic centers” at the heart of American cities, “the civic center is the most anti-Bolshevik manifestation possible, for here civic pride is born.” Within a decade, Bolshevik civic centers had become neoclassical, too—because neoclassicism was “essentially rational” and thus “correct irrespective of time periods.” In a 1936 article, Iofan praised the Lincoln Memorial (1922) and Folger Shakespeare Library (1932), but argued (anticipating Cold War criticism of his own work) that most other government buildings in Washington, DC, were absurdly oversized caricatures of their Greek and Roman models. As pompous as empire style buildings, but much less accomplished, “these soulless copies fail to evoke the solemnity and monumentality to which they aspire…. Overall, the architecture of US government buildings is a monumental decoration aimed at persuading the ordinary American of the permanence of the existing political order.”¹⁴

Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC

Soviet neoclassicism was to be both monumental and “essentially rational.” In the former Russian Empire, this meant that the new Soviet capital was to rival the old imperial one. According to a 1940 manual on urban planning, “the general plan of St. Petersburg is a well-thought-out and complete architectural composition, with justified street directions and well-placed squares—a monumental composition rich in detail and worthy of a capital of an immense and powerful state.” Built in a swamp and organized around semicircular canals and three radial avenues emanating from the vertical axis of the Admiralty Spire, it was superior to its contemporaries, including Paris, with its “agglomerations of haphazardly built houses amidst narrow lanes and blind alleys,” and London, which, “in spite of Wren’s brilliant efforts, would always remain an undisciplined city.” The General Plan of the Reconstruction of Moscow prescribed a well-thoughtout and complete architectural composition, with justified street directions, well-placed squares, and ceremonial waterways. Thanks to the new Moskva–Volga Canal (1933–37), the city was to become “a port of five seas.” In the words of the plan, “the Moskva embankments, clothed in granite and supporting wide avenues with uninterrupted traffic, must become the city’s main thoroughfares.”¹⁵

Intourist map of Moscow, 1938

Socialist-realist art was “Rembrandt, Rubens, and Repin in the service of the working class and socialism.” Socialist-realist literature was Goethe’s Faust for a new age (“but with the same extreme degree of generalization”). The new Moscow was “the capital of an immense and powerful state,” and thus an heir to Rome and St. Petersburg, ready to overtake Paris and Washington.

■ ■ ■

By virtue of being the capital of the Soviet Union, Moscow was the center of the world. Like all ontological centers, Moscow lay at the intersection of the east-west/north-south spatial axes and the vertical axis mundi representing the tree of time, with roots deep underground and the trunk pointing upward, toward a heavenly future. The expectant present was preceded, most memorably, by the great breakthrough of the First Five-Year Plan, the heroic period of the Revolution and Civil War, and, just below the surface, the sacred unity of prison and exile. The thickest roots included the history of Marxism and the Russian prophetic tradition that culminated in the martyrdom of the People’s Will (described and explicated by Voronsky in his Zheliabov).¹⁶

The north-south axis was just that—an axis around which Earth revolved, with only the two poles visible. Polar exploration was one of the most popular spectator sports in the Soviet Union, with various record-breaking contests covered ceaselessly in newspapers and on the radio. For Tania Miagkova’s mother, the “Chelyuskin saga” was “a test of the achievements of the revolution”; for Tania herself, it was the most emotional link between her isolator and the building of socialism. Arosev learned of the success of the operation on April 13, while he was at the Nemirovich-Danchenko theater for a performance of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. “The news arrived that twenty-two Chelyuskinites had been rescued, and that only six had remained on the ice floe, but they, too, were eventually saved. Before Act 1, Nemirovich-Danchenko, who was in the audience, announced the news to the spectators, and led them in a touching, humane ‘hurray.’ The audience gave him, and through him, the heroic aviators, an ovation.” (Two of the heroic aviators, Nikolai Kamanin and Mikhail Vodopyanov, soon moved into the House of Government.) The South Pole was less visible but still crucially important: Roald Amundsen was among the most popular non-Soviet Soviet celebrities; his books and other accounts of his travels were constantly reissued, and, in 1935–39, the Main Northern Sea Route Administration published his collected works in five volumes.¹⁷

The world between the two poles stretched along the east-west axis. The best way to represent it in its entirety was to follow the sun. At the first Congress of the Soviet Writers’ Union in 1934, Gorky issued the following challenge to the foreign delegates: “Why don’t you try to create a book that would depict one day in the life of the bourgeois world? It doesn’t matter what day—September 25, October 7, or December 5. What you need is any weekday as it is reflected in the pages of the world press. What you need is to show the colorful chaos of modern life in Paris and Grenoble, London and Shanghai, San Francisco, Geneva, Rome, Dublin, and so on, and so forth, in the cities and in the countryside, on water and on land.”¹⁸

The foreign writers did not have the means to produce such a book, but Koltsov’s Newspaper and Magazine Alliance did. “Friends of the Soviet Union” throughout the world were asked to send in newspaper clippings, calendar pages, announcements, cartoons, photographs, posters, “and all kinds of other curious social, cultural, and human documents.” The chosen day was September 27, 1935—“the third day of the six-day week” in the Soviet Union and “Friday” in most of the rest of the world. The ultimate goal, as Gorky wrote to Koltsov, was “to show to our reader what a philistine day is filled with, and to juxtapose that picture with the content of our Soviet day.” The Soviet press wrote a great deal about the decay of the bourgeois world. The challenge was “to give a vivid, clear sense of exactly how” it was decaying.¹⁹

The work took a long time because of the inherent difficulty of collecting material from around the world; the disappearance—and subsequent removal from the text—of many of the Soviet protagonists; Gorky’s last-minute demand for starker contrasts (“they have to jump out at you from every line”); and Gorky’s death on June 18, 1936, at the age of sixty-eight. On August, 10, 1936, the galleys were sent to the print shop; about a year later, The Day of the World saw the light of day. It was a large-format, richly illustrated, six hundred–page volume. The print run was 20,250 copies; the price, 50 rubles (about 60 percent of the monthly salary of the stairway cleaner Smorchkova and the floor-polisher Barbosov).²⁰

The book was organized around the world’s most “dangerous flashpoints”: first, the countries involved in the Abyssinian conflict, including England; then the visit by Hungarian Prime Minister Gömbös to East Prussia and the three parties immediately concerned; then all the countries threatened by German aggression (fanning to the east, south, west, and north); Japan and its victims, past and future; the rest of the colonial world; “the countries of the Near, Middle, and Far East, which have succeeded, after a desperate struggle, in preserving their independence from imperialist domination”; the Americas; and, finally, “a different world, which represents the exact opposite of the other five-sixths of the globe—the world of liberated labor and joyously creative life, the world of socialism, the USSR.”

Of the non-Soviet five-sixths of the globe, the largest entries were on France, Germany, the United States, and Britain (“England”). There was much on war preparations, rising prices, class struggles, and unemployment, but the emphasis was on the “colorful chaos” and boundless foolishness of daily life under capitalism: palm readers, Bible preachers, drunk drivers, cat collars, gossip columns, beauty contests, prayer meetings, spitting records, and lonely hearts advertisements. The Soviet Union (at one hundred pages, one-sixth of the book) represented the “exact opposite.” There was much on border security, labor productivity, plan fulfillment, and full employment, but the emphasis was on the small joys and satisfactions of daily life: participants in the Lake Baikal–Moscow kayak marathon approaching Moscow; children in the “crawlers’ group” at the Kalinin Factory nursery learning how to walk; housewives from the Residential Cooperative No. 1 in Podolsk forming a choir; a six-month-old calf by the name of Ataman weighing in at 313 kilograms; Professor Nevsky from Leningrad State University working on a dictionary of the extinct language Si-Sia; shock worker D. N. Antonov from the Molotov Automobile Factory receiving a free automobile; miners from the Far North arriving at the Red Krivoi Rog sanatorium in Alushta, Crimea; and E. M. Katolikova from the Molotov collective farm announcing at a tailors’ conference in Kaluga that “female kolkhoz workers are demanding new fashionable dresses.” On the day of the world, residents of Moscow purchased 156.6 tons of sugar, 51 tons of butter, 236 tons of meat and sausage items, 137 tons of fish products, 96 tons of confectionary items, 205,000 eggs, 2,709 tons of bread, 200,000 liters of milk, 1,700 tons of potatoes, 100 tons of pickles, 300 tons of tomatoes, and 300 tons of apples and pears, among many other food items. The list concluded with a comment by the editors: “In the future, Moscow plans to eat even better.”²¹

Soviet life on the eve of full socialism was about peace, prosperity, creative labor, and “cultured rest.” The French writer André Gide, who, on closer inspection, decided that he did not agree, was struck by the apparently universal Soviet conviction “that everything abroad in every department is far less prosperous than in the USSR.” The most obvious consequence of that conviction was the look of contentment on the faces of Soviet children. “Their eyes are frank and trustful; their laughter has nothing spiteful or malicious in it; they might well have thought us foreigners rather ridiculous; not for a moment did I catch in any of them the slightest trace of mockery.” But the most remarkable thing was that “this same look of open-hearted happiness is often to be seen too among their elders, who are as handsome, as vigorous, as the children.” Even in the Gorky Park of Culture and Rest, which was meant for games and entertainment, “crowds of young men and women behaved with propriety, with decency; not the slightest trace of stupid or vulgar foolery, of rowdiness, of licentiousness, or even of flirtation. The whole place is pervaded with a kind of joyous ardour.”²²

Gorky Park

Gide found this spectacle of contentment to be both genuine and staged, simple and contrived, pleasing to the eye and strangely frightening. Ultimately, he concluded, it was the result of the inescapable propaganda and “an extraordinary state of ignorance concerning foreign countries.” Lion Feuchtwanger, who visited the USSR a year later and wrote a rebuttal called Moscow 1937, attributed it to realism and justifiable pride: “I cannot take offense at the Soviet people’s love of their country, even though it is expressed in always the same, often very naïve, forms. Rather must I confess that their childlike patriotic vanity is rather pleasing to me than otherwise. A young nation has, with enormous sacrifices, accomplished something really great, and now stands before its achievement and cannot itself quite believe in it. It is overjoyed at what it has achieved, and is eager that the foreigner, too, should never cease to confirm how great and fine the achievement is.” Feuchtwanger was happy to oblige, and there is good reason to believe that most House of Government leaseholders were as pleased with his book (which was translated and widely publicized) as they were displeased with Gide’s (which only they had access to). Some of them, most prominently Koltsov and Arosev, had been specifically charged with courting foreign celebrities and shaping their impressions, and all of them, including Koltsov and Arosev, upheld the fundamental principles of Communism, shared a common love of the Soviet Union, and believed that in the near future the Soviet Union would be the happiest and most powerful country on earth.²³

Aleksandr Serafimovich traveled to Paris about a month after the chosen Day of the World and several months before André Gide arrived in the USSR. On November 6, 1935, he wrote to his wife:

The weather in Paris is like ours in early fall: around 5–6 degrees, on the damp side, the ground cold, and the walls inside cold, although there is some heating. It is (usually) either foggy or raining. They do get snow in the winter sometimes, but it doesn’t stay on the ground and melts right away. The river Seine is cold and leaden, but it doesn’t freeze. It’s that way all winter long.

The buildings are high: 5–6–7 stories. They are dark and gloomy. Some of them are hundreds of years old. At night everything is lit up.

There are different kinds of streets: some are so wide they look like squares that have been elongated, and some are so narrow they are scary to walk on: at any moment a car or a bus might hit you and run you over. The sidewalks are so tiny and narrow, you have to press yourself against the wall (as hard as you can). But in other places they are huge—even wider than our streets.

The crowds are huge. There are lots of people. They don’t walk or run—they scurry. When you look down from your window, it’s like an anthill. And what tense faces, worn out by need and anxiety! The women look emaciated, but each tries her best to dress up, i.e., to dress like the bourgeoisie. Most have crudely painted lips, and on Sundays they plaster their faces with makeup.

The air outside is so vile you can hardly breathe. When you get home, you find soot in the corners of your eyes, and on your handkerchief. A huge mass of cars flows by in an unending stream; the smell of burnt gasoline is everywhere. It is killing people. The bourgeoisie feel fine: they regularly go on trips to the beach, the mountains, or the woods, while the workers suffocate. The exploitation is expert, relentless, unceasing.²⁴

It was about four months later that the Soviet delegation consisting of Arosev, Bukharin, and Adoratsky traveled to western Europe to inspect and purchase the Marx-Engels archive. In early April, Bukharin was joined in Paris by Anna Larina, who was pregnant with their son. According to Larina, she was met at the railway station by Bukharin and Arosev. Arosev handed her some carnations, saying that Bukharin was too shy to do it himself. Bukharin blushed, and they all got into a car and drove around Paris for a while before arriving at their hotel. “The members of the delegation lived in neighboring rooms. Adoratsky used to come to Bukharin’s room only when business required it, but Arosev often stopped by. He liked to discuss things, or simply chat lightheartedly with N. I. Unlike the dry, dogmatic Adoratsky, he was a charismatic, talented person.” Before Larina’s arrival, Bukharin and Arosev “spent a lot of time together, walking around Paris. They had been to the Louvre more than once. They were both in a good mood and joked a lot.” Once, when Arosev, Bukharin, and Larina were on Montmartre, Bukharin saw some couples kissing. Saying he would do them one better, he “did a handstand and started walking on his hands, to the delight of the passers-by.”²⁵

At some point during their time in Paris, Larina witnessed a conversation between Bukharin and the exiled Menshevik (and priest’s son) Boris Nicolaevsky, who was representing the Marx-Engels archive (and had recently written a Marx biography):

Nicolaevsky asked: “So, how is life over there, in the Soviet Union?”

“Life is wonderful,” responded Nikolai Ivanovich.

He talked about the Soviet Union with genuine excitement, in my presence. The only difference between his words and his most recent newspaper articles was that he did not keep mentioning Stalin’s name—something he had to do in the Soviet Union. He talked about the rapid growth of industry and the development of electrification, and shared his impression of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Dam, which he had visited along with Sergo Ordzhonikidze. Citing numbers from memory, he described the huge steel plants built in the eastern part of the country and the accelerated development of science.

“You wouldn’t recognize Russia now,” he concluded.²⁶

When Larina was not around, he may have had other things to say, but all his fears, doubts, and criticisms had to do with Stalin’s personality, not the rapid growth of industry, the development of electrification, or the accelerated development of science, let alone the overall superiority of the Soviet Union over the capitalist world.²⁷

Overall superiority did not mean superiority in all things. Soviet modernization consisted in overcoming backwardness, which Stalin defined as a “50–100 year lag behind the advanced countries.” The Five-Year Plans’ greatest achievement had been to replicate Western achievement. The results were spectacular, but not consistent or uniform. While Bukharin was talking to Nicolaevsky, Adoratsky was writing his letters home about the oak-paneled rooms, walk-in closets, magnifying mirrors for shaving, and his new custom-tailored Cheviot-wool suit. Bukharin was wearing a tailor-made suit, too. (According to Larina, a few days before his departure, Stalin had told him: “Your suit is frayed, Nikolai. You can’t go looking like that. Have a new one made quickly. Times have changed. We need to dress well now.”) Bukharin worried about his French; Arosev was proud of his and dismissive of Osinsky’s. House of Government children were learning German, and House of Government adults traveling in the West were buying clothes, cameras, radios, gramophones, refrigerators, and fashion magazines. A bad foreigner in the Soviet Union was usually described as arrogant and condescending (as well as fearful); a bad Soviet abroad was usually described as ingratiating or uncouth (as well as belligerent).²⁸

Arosev, whose job was to preside over “cultural ties with foreign countries,” suffered from both bad foreigners and bad Soviets. Western diplomats “projected mockery and cowardice at the same time”; André Gide combined arrogance with treachery; and Lady Astor’s guests, including George Bernard Shaw, raised arrogance to the heights of innocence (“it seems that if one of them were to unbutton his pants and urinate on the carpet, no one would pay any attention, and the servants, without having to be told, would simply remove the soiled carpet as quickly as possible”). Bad Soviets were more detrimental to the cause and more personally aggravating. On November 2, 1932, while Arosev was still ambassador to Czechoslovakia, he passed through Germany and then into Poland on his way to Moscow. “After the Polish border, the train became dirtier and the staff, less disciplined and more confused. It was as if everything gradually began to lose meaning. Such is the terrible difference between a European and the resident of the Russo-Polish Plain. The latter does not seem quite sure why he was born or what his place in the world should be, while the European, by the age of seventeen, knows all this, as well as when he will die and how much capital he will leave behind.”²⁹

Aleksandr Arosev and his wife, Gertrude Freund, in Berlin

Not much had changed when, in 1935, he crossed into Poland from the other direction on his way from the Soviet Union to Paris:

19 June.

Travel impressions. Moscow-Negoreloe. Dining car.

Walked in, sat down, and for at least half an hour, no one has paid any attention to me. The two tables by the entrance are occupied: one, by a waiter, counting money and looking despondently at the abacus sitting in front of him; the other, by a man in civilian clothes, stretching his arms and looking bored. He could pass the time by reading or writing, but, like all Russians, he is lazy and does not appreciate the value of fast-flowing time. He appears to be some kind of supervisor or commissar.

Two young Englishmen walked in just now. The waiter came up to them, but couldn’t understand anything. So a second came up, but he couldn’t understand them, either. Then the idle supervisor himself came up. All three suspended their melancholy faces over the Englishmen, and all three failed to understand a single word. Then, with a slow, grudging motion, the supervisor summoned a fourth, whom he recommended as a German speaker. The waiter asked [also in Russian]:

“Roll, tea?”

At last hearing a Russian word they recognized, the two Englishmen cried in unison:

“Tea!”³⁰

The Soviet cultural celebrities engaged in establishing cultural ties were, as far as Arosev was concerned, not much better than dining-car waiters. According to his diary, at a 1932 Kremlin reception for foreign diplomats, Boris Pilniak had “loitered next to the food tables” while Leonid Leonov had “acted like a shopkeeper made a bit reckless by the sound of an accordion on a Sunday.” At a VOKS reception on October 17, 1934, the invited Soviet writers had “distinguished themselves by their bad manners and complete cluelessness about what to do or say.” In June 1935, at the Congress for the Defense of Culture in Paris, the Soviet delegates had “made the French blush.” In July 1935, some Soviet dancers touring England had shown themselves to be “enthusiasts and narcissists at the same time.” And in December 1935, in Paris, four visiting Soviet poets (Kirsanov, Lugovskoi, Selvinsky, and that “jug-eared, snub-nosed ‘genius,’” Bezymensky) had arrived “with faces frozen with self-importance.” On the day of their departure, the physiologist A. D. Speransky, who happened to be in town on an official visit, had gotten drunk and “at the railway station, babbled incoherently and kept looking for women.”³¹

■ ■ ■

Arosev did not like his job. But the reason he did not like his job was that the cause of the Revolution was being represented “by complete idiots and ignoramuses,” not because he ever doubted the cause itself. He did not want to do “the work of a maître d’hôtel” because he believed that he himself was at the top of his creative powers. “I want,” he wrote to Stalin on July 21, 1936, “to work more intensely and with greater responsibility for socialism, which is being built under your direction.” He would prefer an assignment in the People’s Commissariat of People’s Enlightenment or a full-time job as a writer, working on his “historical-psychological” tetralogy about the Russian Revolution (Spring, covering 1905–13, Summer, on the immediate prerevolutionary years, Fall, from the October Revolution to Lenin’s death, and Winter, about “our Party’s work on the economic building of socialism under your direction and the falling off of the de facto alien elements more interested in the process of the revolution than in its results.”) Ultimately—no matter who waited on tables or who shuttled back and forth as a maître d’hôtel—crossing into the USSR stood for “entering the country that is the source of all the strongest human impressions, emotions, and ideas.” The best people in the West understood that too, idiots and ignoramuses notwithstanding. “Many very honest, loyal, and heroic human beings are drawn toward us.”³²

Lev Kritsman (Courtesy of Irina Shcherbakova)

One such human being was Lev Kritsman’s childhood friend Senia, who had emigrated to America around 1913, settled in Los Angeles, gotten a job as a cobbler in a shoe shop, and become Sam Izeckman (also known as Itzikman or Eisman). He and his wife, Betia, had never liked America. It was bad enough to be a “deaf mute” immigrant, he wrote in his letters to Kritsman, but the worst part was the “atmosphere of greed and wealth” that permeated everything. People in America worked day and night and talked of nothing but material things: “here even a hungry person thinks less about getting food than buying a house of his own.” Los Angeles (he wrote in Yiddish-inflected Russian) “is a lousy boring little town a European could even die here from boredom.” There was nothing to describe and an awful lot to regret, even before he heard about the Russian Revolution. “I absolutely do not like America and do not want to write anything about it.”³³

In 1930, Kritsman visited the United States as part of a delegation of Soviet agrarian economists and met with Senia. Shortly afterward, Senia (who by then had started mixing up his Roman and Cyrillic alphabets) wrote to describe the effect the meeting had had on him. “I am seriously considering moving back to Russia and so I ask you to please let me know (1) what I have to submit in order to enter the U.S.S.R. in terms of paperwork and (2) whether it is possible to stay there upon arrival? Without securing a visa in advance? And also if possible write what things are like in our line of work and do they need people of my caliber there? I know you are very busy but I hope you won’t refuse.” Three months later, he was still trying to get a visa. “Now that you’re back home you must be busy like bee, but in the name of our good old days I ask you to steal your precious moments and write to me…. How do you feel when it comes to health? Busy day and night I imagine but Lyonia what supreme joy it is to be working in such conditions for better future and toward such wonderful goal I wish that future the best possible success. Yours forever Senia.” In April 1936, he was still hoping to move, working for the cause, and had much improved writing skills in Russian. “My son sends his comradely greetings. He lives permanently in San Francisco. He has joined the ranks and is working actively for the establishment of a Soviet government here in America. I subscribe to and read all of this year’s enormous achievements and am very interested to know what is being done in the field of mechanical shoe repair if you write let me know what progress has been made in that particular area of industrial production. Betty sends her best to Shura. I hope to receive your reply. Yours, Senya.”³⁴

Senia never made it to the Soviet Union, but many people did, and some of them stayed. The largest political émigré community was German: in 1936, there were about 4,600 German-speaking refugees living in the Soviet Union, most of them in Moscow. The top Soviet expert on German politics was Karl Radek, who was responsible for the official manifestos announcing a new pro-Versailles policy, secret negotiations suggesting a continued Soviet willingness to cooperate, and the public and private statements aimed at Communists and fellow-travelers. During the first Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, he made two speeches: a formal one—in which he called on foreign writers to face the choice between obedience to Party discipline and “dismissal from the struggle for which their soul yearns”—and an improvised one at Gorky’s dacha, in the presence of Molotov, Bukharin, and a select group of foreign visitors. One of those visitors was the German writer Gustav Regler, who described the occasion in his memoirs (which he wrote when he was no longer a Communist):

Radek spoke first in Russian. Since he spoke several languages fluently I suspected that his words were intended more for his own Government than for ourselves. I asked Koltsov to interpret, which he did.

It was a Dostoevsky speech, an act of ecstatic confession and self-flagellation. “We must look more deeply into our hearts and scatter the eggshells of our self-deception!” he cried. “We must seek our own private peace of mind.” …

He spread his shirt wider apart. There was now no stopping him. I found him terrifying, with his gleaming eyes and the little, ugly fringe of beard on his chin that served only to emphasize the thinness of his lips. He was certainly drunk, but this had loosened his tongue without impairing his wits. “He’s talking too much!” Koltsov whispered to me, and glanced anxiously towards the Government people. I noted Molotov’s tense mouth and Gorky’s wrinkled forehead. “He is in a mood to throw everything overboard,” said Koltsov, and craned his neck to see whom Radek was now facing. But what was there for Radek to throw overboard? All sound in the room had died down.

“We are still far from the objective,” said Radek in his high-pitched voice. “We thought the child had come of age, and we have invited the whole world to admire it. But it is self-knowledge, not admiration, that we need.” …

With his shirt hanging over his belt he paced up and down amid the cigarette-smoke and the clinking glasses, but always keeping at a certain distance from Molotov, and suddenly he directed his attack at the Germans. He upbraided them, talking of his bitter disappointment at their swift betrayal of the Revolution, the way the workers had adapted themselves to Hitler, and the ease with which the literary calling had been gleichgeschaltet, brought into line. It must be said that not many had fallen upon fruitful ground!

He was now speaking in German, but not out of courtesy. His purpose was to insult and offend….

Then, beneath the basilisk gaze of Molotov, he returned to selfaccusation, and in the end his discourse became a mere mumbling, the firework display petered out amid the hubbub of talk and the general indifference which finally he seemed to share. He picked up glasses as he passed, perhaps finding comedy in his own pathos….

Finally, he faded away through the tobacco-smoke and vanished like a ghost into some other part of the house, and I heard Koltsov breathe a sigh of relief.

“The party is over,” he said in an exhausted voice.³⁵

Karl Radek

Koltsov was more cautious, more polished, more influential, and more directly responsible for relations with writers. Koltsov’s House of Government apartment served as the headquarters of German cultural life in Moscow, and his common-law wife, Maria Osten, served as its principal coordinator. She worked in the Soviet Union’s main German-language newspaper, Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung; founded and managed the international German literary journal, Das Wort (financed by Koltsov’s Magazine-and-Newspaper Alliance and edited—after Osten’s unsuccessful courtship of Heinrich and Thomas Mann—by Berthold Brecht, Willi Bredel, and Lion Feuchtwanger); and arranged Soviet tours for German cultural celebrities, including Brecht and Feuchtwanger. According to Bredel (who also lived in Moscow), “Maria Osten had a poor reputation among virtually all the German writers in Moscow. It was her own fault. In spite of her relatively modest literary abilities, she, as Koltsov’s friend, played an undeservedly major role in German literature, corresponded with Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Bert Brecht, and, still as Koltsov’s friend and confidante, exercised all kinds of power and presented herself as a grande dame, so to speak. It seemed that she aspired to be the hostess of a literary salon.”³⁶

Maria Osten

The daughter of a Westphalian landowner, Maria Gresshöner (Osten) had become a visible presence in Berlin’s bohemian café life in 1926, when, as an eighteen-year-old, she got a job at the radical Malik Press, became the mistress of the co-owner, Wieland Herzfelde (who was married at the time), and joined the Communist Party. In 1929, she followed the Leningrad film director Evgeny Cherviakov to the Soviet Union, but, after discovering he was also married, returned to Berlin. In the same year, she wrote her first short story and started publishing sketches about rural day-laborers in the Rote Post Communist newspaper (under the rubric of “rural agitation”). In 1930, her photograph appeared on the cover of the Malik-produced translation of Ilya Ehrenburg’s The Love of Jeanne Ney. In 1932, she met Koltsov and followed him to Moscow. In the fall of 1933, Koltsov and Maria spent some time in Paris in the company of Boris Efimov, the writers Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, and Koltsov’s official wife, Elizaveta Rat-manova. From Paris they traveled to Saar to report on the preparations for the referendum on whether the territory should rejoin Germany. In December, in the town of Oberlinxweiler, they met Hubert L’Hoste, the ten-year-old son of a local Communist.³⁷ Hubert describes the occasion in Maria’s book, Hubert in Wonderland:

The time flew by very quickly. We were all terribly sorry when Mikhail said that he could not stay for the night because he had to return to Saarbrücken.

But the most wonderful memory that I have of that evening were his words that kept ringing in my ears:

“Why don’t we take him with us?”

Mikhail put me on his lap and patted my head.

“But only on one condition,” he said, having thought for a minute.

“What condition?”

Terribly disappointed (“were they making fun of me?”), I climbed down off his lap. Now he was sure to say: “We will take you with us only if you’ve read Marx’s Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital. In my mind, I was blaming my father for not bringing me these books, even though I had asked him to many times. In response, he would always say that I should wait a little before reading them.

Mikhail put me back on his lap.

“Our condition,” he said, “is that you will write one page each day about what you have seen.”

“I will, I will, of course I will!” I said, clapping my hands, and everyone laughed.

“And, perhaps, we’ll even use what you write in a book we’ll put together for the young pioneers of the entire world.”³⁸

Hubert’s father approved of the plan. On the way to Moscow, Hubert and Maria stopped over in Paris, where Gustav Regler showed Hubert around. On the Paris–Vienna train, Hubert read the Belgian novelist Charles de Coster’s The Legend of the Glorious Adventures of Thyl Ulenspiegel in the Land of Flanders and Elsewhere (because it was one of the most popular children’s books in the Soviet Union and because the story of a wandering trickster’s rebirth as a revolutionary hero seemed to presage Hubert’s own life’s journey). In Moscow, Hubert received a hero’s welcome, made a radio address, met Marshal Budennyi, and saw Lenin in his mausoleum. In Maria’s version of Hubert’s account, Lenin made a strong impression on him: “He is wearing a khaki jacket, and his hands are resting on a red cloth, which covers him up to his chest. I do not want to leave. Lenin seems to be asleep. His little beard casts a shadow over his cheeks and enlivens his face.”³⁹

Hubert liked everything in the Soviet Union, especially Gorky Park and Natalia Sats’s children’s theater. Even his own new home was special. It had “not one courtyard, but several. A survey of the whole huge territory revealed that there were three of them. Small fences indicated where the hedges, now mostly covered in deep snow, were hidden. Only the soft green tops of the fir trees could be seen above the huge snowdrifts. The pathways leading to the numerous entryways were completely free of snow. In the middle courtyard was a grocery store, whose shop windows faced the street. It was a cooperative building for workers.” In fact, it was the House of Government, but Hubert’s—and Maria’s—job was to describe the typical, not the particular (what is becoming, not what is).⁴⁰

Hubert L’Hoste with Natalia Sats

Hubert was enrolled in Moscow’s Karl Liebknecht German school (which Arosev’s daughters also attended). In the summer, he and his classmates went to the Ernst Thälmann pioneer camp, where he learned “to submit to discipline and live within a collective.” When he came back in August, he saw Gustav Regler, who was in town for the Writer’s Congress, and returned the favor by showing him around Moscow. Hubert was proud to be able to show him things that “did not exist in the entire world or were inaccessible to us in the capitalist countries.” Regler particularly liked Gorky Park. On his first visit there, he never made it to the Children’s Technical Station, where children built their own radios, turbines, and trolleybuses, because he could not stop doing the parachute jump. Another guest of the Writers’ Congress was Thomas Mann’s son Klaus, who wrote in his diary that the “all-powerful Maria” had shown him a department store, the Metro, and some specialty stores.⁴¹ Mann’s traveling companion, Marianne Schwarzenbach, liked both Koltsov and Maria:

Mikhail Koltsov and Maria Osten in Moscow

He has such wit and such a lively mind, and has grown so much in his position, that one is tempted to assume that he can do anything. Besides, he is warmhearted and friendly, and Maria loves him with a solicitous sweetness out of keeping with her usual aggressive manner. In his presence, she seems smaller and a bit quieter than usual. Actually, she is an extraordinary girl, with a very feminine, not entirely self-conscious, intelligence, extremely frank and open, a bit devious, and affectionate in an impetuous, feline, never-to-be-trusted sort of way. In short, it would be dangerous and painful to be in love with her, for it would be impossible to fully possess her or pin her down.⁴²

In January 1935, the Saar plebiscite was won by the pro-German party. Hubert’s parents emigrated to France, and he stayed on in the Soviet Union indefinitely. In spring 1936, Maria started an affair with the German Communist singer, Ernst Busch. A year later, she and Koltsov separated but remained close friends and collaborators.⁴³

■ ■ ■

Germany was by far the most important country in the world. But Germany (as Radek kept saying) had betrayed the Revolution. The country that had recently fallen in love with the Revolution, and was ardently loved in return, was Republican Spain. Germany had always been present in the House of Government apartments in the shape of books, tutors, gadgets, and governesses. Most of what the House residents came to learn about Spain came from Koltsov’s dispatches from the Civil War, reissued in 1938 as The Spanish Diary.

The Diary’s overall plot corresponded to Soviet policy toward the Spanish Republic, which corresponded to the standard exodus and construction stories about the transformation of a motley crowd into a holy army. In one of the Diary’s early entries, a group of Aragonese peasants in a tiny movie theater recognize themselves in the film Chapaev, about the Red Army Civil War hero; in another, members of the Madrid government are watching We Are from Kronstadt, about the White Army general Yudenich’s assault on revolutionary Petrograd, when someone suddenly rushes in:

“Bad news! Illescas has been taken! Our troops are retreating. Seseña may have been taken, too.”

The spectator sitting next to me asks, without taking his eyes off the screen: “How many kilometers away are they?”

“They, who? Do you mean Yudenich or Franco? And how many kilometers from where—Petrograd or Madrid?”⁴⁴

In the background, once again, is Babylon: mostly diplomats and spies posing as “representatives of arms manufacturers, correspondents of large telegraph agencies, and movie producers,” but also “bootleggers from Al Capone’s detachments, adventure-seekers from Indochina, and a disappointed Italian terrorist who is trying his hand at poetry.” “In the whole of the enormous Florida hotel, the only guest left is the writer Hemingway. He is warming up his sandwiches on an electric stove and writing a comedy.” (In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan says that “Karkov” had “more brains and more inner dignity and outer insolence and humor than any man that he had ever known.”)⁴⁵

In the foreground is a Spanish version of the Magnitogorsk melting pot. “The rough features of the Castilians and Aragonese alternate with the swarthy, feminine roundness of the Andalusians. The sturdy, heavyset Basques follow the bony, slender, fair-haired Galicians. But it is the emaciated, gloomy, destitute Estremadurans that predominate in this long, motley peasant procession.” The Spaniards, taken together, are “a colorful, full-blooded, distinctive, and spontaneous nation, and, most remarkable of all, strikingly similar to some of the peoples of the Soviet Union.” They, too, will overcome their spontaneity. Some of them already have: “Now one can say with certainty that these are brave, resolute, battle-tested detachments. When visiting units you have seen before, you cannot help being amazed by how much the men and officers have changed. One anarchist battalion is fighting courageously in Villaverde. Over the past four days, they have lost twenty dead and fifteen wounded. And this is the same battalion that caused so much trouble and had so many desertions in Aranjuez, when they tried to hijack a train in order to run away from the front!”⁴⁶

Koltsov’s job as Soviet ambassador to Spanish Petrograd was to describe and inspire the Spanish exodus. Koltsov’s charge as a post-1934 Soviet writer was to celebrate the land of red capes, black berets, roadside inns, and exotic names (“marching along the Estremadura highway, the rebels took Navalcarnero, an important transportation hub, as well as Quijorna and Brunete”). Koltsov’s young House of Government readers drew them in their albums, marked them on their wall maps, and recognized them from the translated adventure books they had been raised on. Koltsov brought Spain home by making it recognizably remote:

We have never known this nation; it was distant and strange; we have never fought or traded with it, never taught it or learned from it.

Only loners, eccentrics, and lovers of spicy, slightly bitter exoticism ever traveled from Russia to Spain.

Even in the minds of educated Russians, the Spanish shelf was dusty and almost empty. All one could find there was Don Quixote and Don Juan (pronounced the French way), Seville and seguedilla, Carmen and her toreador, [Pushkin’s] “the raucous, quick Guadalquivir,” and perhaps The Mysteries of the Madrid Court.⁴⁷

It was not quantity that mattered most, however. The age of socialist realism had descended from the “Pamirs” of classical heritage. One of the peaks, as Koltsov’s narrator suddenly realizes, is still in Toledo—“the tragic Toledo of inquisitors, rakes with swords, beautiful ladies, licenciates, and Jewish martyrs at the stake, the repository of the most mysterious works of art he knew of—the hauntingly powerful, elongated and ever so slightly puffy faces on the canvases of El Greco.”⁴⁸

The other “peak” was one of the highest. Responding to Koltsov’s demand for greater firmness in dealing with some rebels holed up in the city’s Alcazar, the governor of Toledo urges magnanimity. “You are in Spain, señor,” he says, “in the country of Don Quixote.” Some French journalists, who are present at the scene, speak in the governor’s defense:

“For Koltsov, he is simply a traitor. Whenever something goes wrong, the Bolsheviks immediately suspect wrecking and treason.”

“And Don Quixote, according to them, is nothing but a dangerous liberal …”

“Subject to expulsion from the ranks of conscious Marxists …”

I retorted:

“Don’t talk to me about Don Quixote! We are on better terms with him than you are. In the Soviet Union, there have been eleven editions of Don Quixote. And in France? You cry over Don Quixote, but you leave him all alone in his hour of need. We criticize him and help him at the same time.”

“But when you criticize, you also have to consider his nature …”

“What do you know about his nature? Cervantes loved his Quixote, but he made Sancho Panza governor, not him. Good old Sancho never claimed to possess his master’s high virtues. As for this bastard, he’s neither a Quixote nor a Sancho. The phone in his office still works, after all, and it has a direct line to the Alcazar!”⁴⁹

To prove his point, the narrator asks his driver, Dorado, to take him to El Toboso, where he finds a Potemkin collective farm and a “very young, very tall, and very sad” Dulcinea begging the devious local alcalde for an extra meat ration for her sick father. By the time he has inspected the last point on his itinerary, a horse stable full of mules, it has grown dark.

It was pitch black outside. In such darkness, you didn’t need to be a daydreamer or a Quixote to mistake the howling wind for the battle cry of the enemy hosts or the slamming of a gate for a shot fired by the perfidious enemy. Small groups and gangs of homeless fascists haunted the roads of the Republican rear: during the day, they hid in caves and ravines; at night, they crept into villages seeking loot and revenge….

The alcalde took us to an inn. Our car was already sheltered under an awning, next to a hollowed-out stone trough from which Rocinante must have once drunk. Inside the tavern, in the faint glow of an oil lamp, a hungry Dorado could be discerned, reclining next to a cold stove, a sour expression on his face. But the alcalde called the innkeeper aside and whispered something in his ear that produced a magic transformation in the cold, dismal hovel. Suddenly a bright fire was burning in the stove and an appetizing leg of lamb was browning over the coals. It appeared that in El Toboso one could get meat without a doctor’s prescription, and in amounts hazardous to your health, too.⁵⁰

At this point, no doubt remains: it is Koltsov who is the real Don Quixote, and Dorado is his Sancho Panza. The howling wind is the battle cry of the enemy hosts; the slamming of a gate is a shot fired by the perfidious enemy; and the very tall and very sad peasant girl is the beautiful Dulcinea. As Leonid Leonov put it at the Writers’ Congress, “The central hero of our time does not fit in a mirror as small as ours. And yet, we all know full well that he has entered the world.” It was not just Koltsov who was Don Quixote: it was his readers, too. They were all heroes, but their idealism had been disciplined by unblinking realism, and their enemies were real. In the kingdom of giants, there were no windmills.