The House of Government

21

THE HAPPY CHILDHOOD

Most House of Government leaseholders were assured of collective immortality by virtue of being high priests of the Revolution (as confirmed by their assignment to the House of Government). Of the more personal strategies, the most obvious one was having one’s name attached to a more lasting object. Serafimovich, who doubled his (heavenly) name by making his pen name identical to his patronymic (resulting in “Aleksandr Serafimovich Serafimovich”), divided his time between Serafimovich Street in Moscow and the town of Serafimovich on the Don. A closely related approach (central to the plots of both The Road to Ocean and How the Steel Was Tempered) was to publish one’s life story—either as a memoir or as a biography produced by someone else. For those unwilling to wait (or trust in the future), the best hope for a Faustian “time, stay!” moment was a “last love,” as proposed to Kurilov by his Mephistopheles. “I have revived, I have become younger,” wrote the seventy-four-year-old Feliks Kon about the effect that his relationship with Maria Komarova had had on his life and on his ability to record it.¹

Arosev, whose diary was suffused with his “thought of thoughts” about conquering death, was unhappy in his last love, but persistent on other fronts. He asked his children to inter his ashes in the Kremlin Wall (as a “fighter of the October days and a revolutionary who has devoted his whole life to the struggle for Communism”); considered commissioning a statue of himself from the sculptor Merkurov (who specialized in death masks and Lenin and Stalin images); wrote a series of memoirs (and some drafts of an autobiographical epic); and was planning a novel with a wide cast of characters (including a Bolshevik, Trotskyite, “honest legalist,” and fascist who sides with the Trotskyite and “those who defy Stalin and our regime”). He shared his ideas with Stalin, who represented the Revolution, and kept a diary, which represented “an attempt to continue life after death.” According to an entry written three weeks after the Writers’ Congress, the idea of recording all his “encounters, conversations, and observations” had been inspired by the Persian poet Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (The Book of Kings), “as well as Stendhal and the chroniclers.” Stendhal represented a strategy of combining historical novels, heroic biographies, multiple autobiographies, and private diaries in a successful effort to immortalize the Revolution along with its chronicler.²

But the main path to salvation lay in the children. When the new world was still being born, Nina Podvoiskaia once wrote in her diary that if the sacred fire of the Revolution did not burst forth within her, it would do so through her children, “who will make me immortal.” In 1935, Nikolai Podvoisky wrote to their children that they owed their membership in the Soviet community to their mother’s effort to “nurture, raise, and educate” them. When the eternal houses were being built, Osinsky wrote to Anna Shaternikova that Soviet factories were as dear to him as his own children. In 1934, he wrote that his “best creation” was his youngest son, Valia. And Arosev, in his search for the keys to his own immortality, concluded that “the truest and most beautiful ones” were his children. “The question of death, which has tormented me for many years and prevented me from writing, working, and living straight, without wavering, seems to be coming to a resolution. Death is inevitable. I am not to blame for it any more than I am for my birth. I must simply look it straight in the eye and prepare to leave—not meekly and haphazardly, caught unawares—but having fully prepared and taken care of the children…. Once I have taken care of them—by all means!—I will not fear death and decay.”³

This looked like surrender—a return to the “ruined house” and the “loathsome forms of life.” The Revolution, according to Nina Podvoiskaia, was the blue bird of universal happiness, but Maeterlinck’s play from which she had borrowed the symbol—the play with which her children and all the other House of Government children had begun their journey of self-discovery—was about the eternal return and the circuitous road home. As the main characters, the boy Tyltyl and the girl Mytyl, discover at the end of the play (and at the beginning of their self-aware lives), the truth they seek has been with them all along: indeed, they are that truth. This was also the story of Peer Gynt, which Sverdlov and Voronsky had admired in their Siberian exile, and the most persistent theme of the “world culture” with which socialist realism had become identified. The “creation” of St. Petersburg is, like its divine predecessor, followed by a flood; Faust wins his bet partly because he loses it; Don Quixote and Sancho Panza return home, at least temporarily; and Robinson Crusoe finds nothing new in the new world. And then there was War and Peace. If seeing the Art Theater’s production of The Blue Bird at the age of six or seven was the rite of passage that ushered in the age of reason, reading War and Peace at puberty was the ticket to adulthood. And War and Peace seemed to suggest that truth and happiness were hidden in plain sight and that any attempt to build, or even plan, the eternal house was a folly best represented by Napoleon’s vanity and the German generals’ pedantry.⁴

To the House of Government dialecticians, however, the apparent surrender was the antithesis leading to the synthesis. The focus on children was not about reproducing oneself or passing on accumulated wealth, material or otherwise: it was about “nurturing, raising, and educating” the citizens of a redeemed world. The Augustinian era of Soviet history was the “happy childhood” on the eve of eternity. Children were at the center of life not because children were always at the center of life or because the Bolsheviks had to start over, but because the Soviet Union was a country where Tyltyl and Mytyl did not have to grow up. Tania Miagkova, who had been expelled from the House, discovered that her hope of return was coterminous with her daughter’s childhood. Those who still lived in the House knew this by virtue of being good Soviet citizens.

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The nomenklatura families within the House represented a great variety of traditions with very different kinship systems, divisions of labor, rules of inheritance, and patterns of cohabitation. Once inside the House, all of them tended toward the nineteenth-century Russian model as represented in “golden age” Russian literature (which, unlike most of its western European counterparts, was aristocratic, not bourgeois): the remote, admired, feared and usually absent father; the less remote, less admired, less feared and frequently absent mother; the more or less pitied German governess; the more or less dreaded piano teacher; and the beloved peasant nanny, who did most of the child rearing until it was time to see The Blue Bird and go to school.

Fathers were associated with festive day-off activities: trips to theaters and fine arts museums, stays in one-day rest homes, Sunday dinners at the dacha, book reading and chess playing in the evenings, and occasional summer vacations on the Black Sea. (Most parents traveled to resorts by themselves, leaving their children in Moscow or at the dacha in the care of nannies and female relatives.) Mothers were not associated with anything out of the ordinary, except perhaps trips to the theater in early childhood. Some families had live-in German governesses; the rest had them come every day to give German lessons. Many small children belonged to “playground groups” supervised by German teachers (who doubled as governesses with particular families). Besides language instruction, “the German women” (most of them middle-aged political émigrés, refugees from the Baltic states, or professional governesses with prerevolutionary experience) were responsible for teaching good manners and correct posture. They tended not to develop a strong rapport with their charges and were greatly resented by the Russian nannies jealous of their prerogatives. The Terekhovs (the family of Roman Terekhov, the former Donbass miner and Ukrainian Party official transferred to Moscow after Stalin called him “a writer of fairy tales”) fired their children’s governess after the nanny complained that she was cruel to the children. The Kuchmins (the family of Ivan Kuchmin, the son of Volga peasants and the prototype for Leonid Leonov’s Kurilov) fired the first of their three German governesses after repeated pleas from the children. The Belenkys (the family of Mark Belenky, the son of a Baku industrialist and head of the Grain Trust) fired their daughter’s nanny after she pummeled the German governess. The director of the Party Publishing House and the Lenin Museum (and Kerzhentsev’s deputy at the Committee for the Arts), Naum Rabichev, forbade his mother to teach his son German because of her Yiddish accent.⁵

Most girls and some of the boys took piano classes; a few attended music schools, but most studied with teachers at home. For children under seven, there were several “playground groups” and a “children’s facility” on the top floor of Entryway 7. The facility consisted of a nursery for fifteen to twenty children under the age of two and a boarding kindergarten for fifty to ninety children between the ages of two and seven, with a staff of about twenty-five employees, including a doctor, nurse, two “teaching nurses,” a German teacher, music teacher, eight regular teachers, and a “seamstress/tailor.” In addition to toys, meals, sheets, diapers, towels, and chamber pots, the kindergarten provided a large assortment of children’s clothing, including socks, trunks, mittens, slippers, dresses, garters, galoshes, “day shirts,” nightshirts, undershirts, camisoles, sailor suits, felt boots, winter coats, and masquerade costumes. On days when there was no rain or snow, the children, wrapped in wool blankets, would take their afternoon naps on the roof above Entryway 7. Every summer, the kindergarten was moved to a camp (“colony”) outside of Moscow. All the children received character references that described their “work habits” and status within the group (“she is liked by the collective”).⁶

School-age children took chess, tennis, and music classes in the Kalinin Club above the theater. After the club’s closure in 1934, two ground-floor apartments in Entryway 3 were converted into a club for children between the ages of eight and seventeen. It had a billiards room, a small stage with a piano, several classrooms, and a photo lab. The classes included photography, choir, drawing, knitting, sewing, “rhythmic dance,” theater, and “navy.” Most were very crowded; those that grew too large were divided into different age groups. The most popular ones were theater (with regular productions and intense competition for the lead parts) and navy, in which boys and girls were given sailor collars to wear and were taught how to row, march, sing sea chanteys, use flags for signaling, and identify different types of ships. Adolescents staged frequent dance parties, and several boys knew how to play the tango and foxtrot on the piano.⁷

Other places where the House children liked to congregate were the shooting gallery in the basement and the “Little Church” vacant lot, also known as the “stinkhole” (voniuchka). But the most important playgrounds and focal points of the House’s collective life were the three courtyards. Or rather, the focal points of the House’s collective life were the children, and the children were mostly in the courtyards. The House of Government was designed as a transitional building that retained old-fashioned family apartments within a growing network of innovative collective services. In practice, and possibly as a sign of things to come, the historical axis (from the individual to the collective) coincided with the generational one (from the old to the young). The adults ignored the collective services almost entirely (especially after the closure of the club)—indeed, they rarely visited each other’s apartments and almost never engaged in traditional neighborly practices such as exchanging gossip and borrowing small household items. The maids, who presided over family economies, tended to be protective of their realms and did not cooperate with each other. The availability of food items and repair services within the building made last-resort appeals to neighbors unnecessary, as well as undesirable. The dominant form of socializing consisted of exchanging greetings on stairs, in elevators, and on paths connecting entryways to outside gates.

Children by the gate of Courtyard No. 1

Members of the children’s club in Entryway 3

Tamara Matiukhina (daughter of the award-winning construction foreman, G. A. Matiukhin, from Apt. 4, where the Tuchins also lived) and Tolia Ronin (Solomon Ronin’s son, from Apt. 55), in the club’s production of La farce de Maître Pathelin

Courtyard at the House of Government

To the extent that the House of Government was a common home and not a random collection of individual family cells, it was the children who made it so. And to the extent that the House of Government, like the rest of the Soviet Union, was a children’s world, it was the three courtyards, and not the surrounding apartments, that served as its structural and social pivots. Seen from above and below, the House of Government ensemble consisted of three unequal rectangular spaces bounded by thick protective walls. The boundary was broken in several places (the courtyards were connected to each other and to the street), but, for children under fifteen or so, they represented different worlds. Infantile collectivism was limited by age, gender, and courtyard, with the latter almost as important as the first two. Outside the neutral territory of the club and the Little Church (which also served as a soccer field, volleyball court, and skating rink), most preadolescents played with “their own kind,” or “kids from their courtyard” (that is, from all the entryways that led out into that courtyard). Some games were gender specific: hopscotch, “good luck rocks,” and various jump-rope and small-ball games for girls and soccer and “war” for boys; others were common to both boys and girls, but usually played separately: tag, hide-and-seek, lapta (a traditional Russian bat-and-ball game), “twelve sticks” (a version of hide-and-seek with a home base the “it” player had to protect while searching), and shtander (a version of dodgeball). One of the most popular games was “Cossacks and Robbers,” in which the object of the robbers was to overrun the Cossacks’ headquarters, while the object of the Cossacks was to find out the robbers’ password by torturing their captives, more or less symbolically. Perhaps for the latter reason, it was normally played by boys and girls together.

Floor plan of the basement

School-age children (seven and older) were usually allowed to walk to school and around the neighborhood by themselves. The most popular destinations included the House movie theaters (the Shock Worker and, after 1934, the First Children’s, with jazz bands playing in both) and Gorky Park, especially in the winter, when many of the alleys were turned into a labyrinthine skating rink, and loudspeakers played dance music. Also popular was skiing along the Ditch and down the snowbound steps leading from the embankment to the river. Groups of girls often walked along the embankment, holding hands and talking.

All children were defined by their courtyard origin and, as they grew older, their class in school. The primary units were groups of two-to-four close friends, who spent most of their out-of-school time together. Some individuals might migrate, but core members tended to stay together throughout their school years and beyond. They would join the same classes in the club, team up in courtyard games and on city exploration trips, sit together in school (unless broken up deliberately by the teachers), and spend much of the remaining time in each other’s apartments (with a preference for those with absent or welcoming grown-ups and high-status books and toys)—talking, drawing, developing photographs, listening to the gramophone, reenacting popular books or movies, and doing homework. Teenage girls often went to the theater and opera to watch celebrity performers. The most famous were the Bolshoi tenors Sergei Lemeshev and Ivan Kozlovsky, who had large and well-organized groups of female followers. As fourteen-and fifteen-year-olds, Elena Kraval and her girlfriends would try to catch a glimpse of Lemeshev as he was leaving the theater after his death in the duel in the second act of Eugene Onegin.⁸

Skiing on the embankment (from Hubert in Wonderland)

Age, gender, and courtyard identity could be reinforced or complicated by school alliances. Most groups of friends were informally affiliated with one or two same-age groups of the opposite sex, usually from the same courtyard and school class. Common activities included shtander, skating, Cossacks and Robbers, volleyball at the Little Church, theater productions in the club, and, in later adolescence, dancing and joint trips to movies, art museums, Gorky Park, and beyond. Toward the end of high school, two to four such groups could merge into one kompaniia and eventually split into couples, but that did not usually happen until college, when new kompanii were formed. Until marriage, duos or trios of “best friends” remained the primary cell of social organization. New college friends might quickly supplant high school ones, lose out to them in the end, or coexist with them as two related clusters or as one merged threesome or foursome.

Children living in various dorms and tenements in the old Swamp were collectively known as “Tatars.” Girls from these “bedbug hotels” (as Inna Gaister called them) could be incorporated into House of Government social networks via school friendships, but rarely became full-fledged members—because of their visible awe at the wealth they observed, their status as recipients of hand-me-down clothes, and their unwillingness to invite House children to their homes (single rooms in barracks or communal apartments). When such visits did take place, girls from the House tended to express shock at the squalor they found and no wish to see it again. Boys were usually kept apart by the strongly felt need to protect territorial integrity and to prevent dating across the House-Swamp boundary. House boys on their way home from school risked being ambushed and beaten up.⁹

Valia and Svetlana Osinsky (center and right) at the dacha

Dacha life temporarily rearranged some of the children’s social networks without undermining them. Most House of Government families had their dachas along the high (Kremlin) bank of the Moskva, from Serebrianyi Bor in the east (where Yuri and Tania Trifonov lived next to the Podvoiskys, Sverdlovs, Khalatovs, and Morozes, among others) to Nikolina Gora in the west (where House and school friends Inna Gaister, Natasha Kerzhentseva, and Marina Usievich would reunite for the summer). Dacha life was at the sacred center of the House of Government version of the Soviet happy childhood. Like so much else, it was modeled—more or less consciously—on the pastoral descriptions of noble estate life from a previous golden age.¹⁰ The Osinsky children—Dima, Svetlana, and Valia—spent their summers in Barvikha, about halfway between Serebrianyi Bor and Nikolina Gora. The future family chronicler was Svetlana:

The long, happy days of summer. Sometimes you might go outside early, while everyone was still asleep, and the air was chilly, but with the promise of a glorious day ahead. The house was surrounded by sweet-smelling flowers. I might stand by the small bench near the entrance to the woods pondering where to go—down the steep stairway to the river or past the arbor to the far end of our lot where you could play in the sand above the ravine. The thought of the long day ahead that I would invariably spend playing with my brothers and their friends would fill me with a sense of joy….

We often went to visit our friends in what we called the “Plywood Settlement” near the Razdory train station. We’d form a large group and gather pine cones and play war, tossing them and sometimes painfully hitting the mark (I was actually scared of that game) or play twelve sticks or hide-and-seek. Or the three of us would play by ourselves, not really needing anyone else. We rode our bikes or played in the sand at the edge of the huge ravine on the other side of the fence, building not castles, but entire cities. On Sundays we used to walk in the forest with our mother, who loved gathering huge bouquets of flowers, and never thought she had enough. We would climb tall pine trees and play Indian. Valia used to carve boats and all kinds of small figures out of pine bark. But he liked reading best of all, and most of the time he could be found curled up in some cozy corner devouring his book.¹¹

Svetlana Osinskaia at the dacha (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

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In her memoirs, Svetlana described herself as spoiled and endlessly indulged—in part deliberately (“it was evident that my parents loved Valia more and could not help showing it, so my mother, realizing that I knew and sensing the injustice, tried to make up for it by giving me everything I wanted”) and in part because such was the life of the Party elite as it appeared to her in hindsight. She liked sweets and expensive toys, was driven from Barvikha to school in her father’s limo, took exotic foreign paints to her drawing class, and “believed, from an early age, that all people moved around in cars and that public transport existed for fun.” Inna Gaister remembered demanding expensive presents and making the point of wearing her watch to school; Anatoly Granovsky (the son of Mikhail Granovsky, the director of the Berezniki Chemical Works) described his friends as “the heirs of the universe” who exuded the “conviction of personal power as though they had been suckled to it”; and Irina Muklevich remembered sitting at her school desk and looking at her father’s portrait on the wall (while her best friend, Svetlana Tukhachevskaia, was looking at her father’s). According to Irina, she and Svetlana took care to climb out of their fathers’ limos a block or two away from school, but both knew that everyone knew: the portraits were there to prove it, and they did not seem to mind. (Their school, the Moscow Exemplary, was a fifteen-minute walk from the House.) Some House children were not shy about displaying their wealth: Roza Smushkevich, Sonia Radek, and Lelia Kobulova (the daughter of the secret police official, B. Z. Kobulov, who moved into Apt. 8 in Entryway 1 after being transferred to Moscow from Georgia in September 1938) were famous for their dresses and fur coats. According to the award-winning construction foreman’s daughter, Zinaida Tuchina, Rosa was also famous for her mother’s hospitality, which included “both kinds of caviar sandwiches [red and black], all sorts of piroshki and sweet pastry, and apples or some kind of fruit.”¹²

In a tacked-on comment at the bottom of a 1935 diary entry, a teacher from School No. 19 on the Sophia Embankment, Vera Shtrom, mentioned that some of the children from the House of Government suffered from “a sense of belonging to the elite and, considering how utterly and unremittingly busy their parents are at work, from total parental neglect.” At a District Party Committee plenum on February 11, 1940, the head of the committee’s education department described the problem as “a great evil”: “The parents spoil their children, free them from all chores at home, and cultivate great selfishness and a great sense of entitlement among their children. Some parents worship their children. For example, in School No. 19, one high official put a car and other luxuries at the disposal of his child. Obviously, the picture that emerges is not a pretty one.” At the same plenum, the director of the First Children’s Movie Theater (the heir to the State New Theater) said that one of his employees had been found guilty of trading tickets for leather gloves, and that some of the children involved “had elements of criminality.”¹³

Samuil Moroz, the son of the former Chekist, Grigory Moroz, got into trouble for selling his father’s books and robbing their neighbors’ apartments. Anatoly Ivanov, the son of Boris Ivanov, “the Baker,” was a “hooligan” often detained by the police. Vladimir Rabichev, the son of the director of the Lenin Museum, remembered being “neglected” and “difficult,” learning how to steal, fighting often, and not doing any homework until the eighth grade. And Aron Solts’s adopted son, Zhenia, preferred the company of the “Tatars” to that of the House children and, according to the daughter of Solts’s niece who lived in the same apartment, treated his father “as nothing but a sick old man and a source of income.”¹⁴

Zhenia dropped out of school and soon vanished. But he had always been an outsider. Most House of Government children were not spoiled and difficult, or not spoiled and difficult for very long. Samuil Moroz discovered the joys of reading and mathematics; Anatoly Ivanov went on to Moscow’s most prestigious engineering college (the Bauman Institute); and Vladimir Rabichev started doing his homework, graduated with distinction (with a “red diploma”), and would have become a historian if his father had not persuaded him to become a military journalist. All three were saved by other children: Moroz’s friends spent most of their time talking “about literature, history, and the country’s future,” and Rabichev’s friends demonstrated to him “that studying math and solving geometry problems could be interesting.” (He had always known that history and literature were interesting.) The teacher from School No. 19, Vera Shtrom, made it clear in her diary that most of the children from the House of Government were “talented and interesting,” and that it was “a pleasure working with them.”¹⁵

Most of the children from the House of Government were happy dwellers in the land of happy childhood. They admired their fathers, respected their seniors, loved their country, and looked forward to improving themselves for the sake of socialism and to building socialism as a means of self-improvement. They were children of the Revolution because they were their fathers’ children, because they were born after the Revolution, and because they were proud of their paternity and determined to carry on what was at once their father’s “profession,” their country’s mission, and history’s secret purpose. (Most of the women assigned to the House of Government because of their own, as opposed to their husbands’, revolutionary service, were childless. Most female Old Bolsheviks had to choose between family and revolution. Most House families were as patrilineal and patriarchal as the Soviet state of which they were a part.)

But, above all, they were children of the Revolution because they were children of the great construction. Born in the 1920s, they came of age along with socialist realism and Soviet Augustianism. While waiting to grow as big as the age—and waiting for Soviet literature to come of age at the same time—they read Don Quixote, Faust, Robinson Crusoe, and other “treasures of world literature” that combined lyricism and monumentalism, realism and romanticism, and the greatest possible generalizability with enormous inner richness. Growing up amidst this “international constellation of human types,” they measured themselves against them and thought of them as their heroic predecessors and eternal contemporaries. What Faust, the character, had been to the bourgeois age, they, the first truly self-aware generation in history, would be to the age of socialism. And socialism—as well as, by extension, socialist realism—was about “the flourishing of the individual, the enrichment of his inner world, the growth of his self-awareness.”

The heart of socialist realism, argued Bukharin at the first Writers’ Congress, was romanticism. “The soul” of “most of the young people of that time,” wrote Svetlana Osinskaia, who turned ten in 1935, was “romantic”—romantic in the sense of being exalted, vibrant, hopeful, and vulnerable, and romantic in the sense of seeking transcendence in the here and now: in nature and, above all, within itself. The fathers’ generation had been shaped by the expectation of the apocalypse; the children’s generation was “religious” about the heavenly city they inhabited. The fathers had comrades: fellow sectarians bound together by a common cause. The children had friends and lovers: unique individuals whom they loved for reasons they felt compelled to discuss but were never supposed to exhaust. The fathers’ first loyalty was to the Party and, through the Party, to history; the children’s first loyalty was to each other and, by extension, to the Party. The fathers’ “classical” reading was tempered by symbolism and disciplined by the study of Marx, Lenin, and economics. The children were bored by modernism, entirely innocent of economics, and only indirectly acquainted with Marxism-Leninism through speeches, quotations, and history-book summaries. How the Steel Was Tempered appeared as a natural sequel to the adventure books that both Pavel Korchagin and Nikolai Ostrovsky read growing up. No one ever read Das Kapital.

Schools propagated and institutionalized the new faith. After 1932, and especially after 1934, the “leftist excesses” and “harmful experiments” left over from the previous age were systematically removed in favor of massively reinforced and transparently hierarchical educational institutions charged with the organized transfer of a well-defined body of knowledge to individually graded “schoolchildren.” At the center of the new system, which closely followed the old imperial one, were standard curricula, stable textbooks, structured lessons, and professionally trained teachers—assisted, in a subordinate capacity, by parents. Exams, abolished after the Revolution, came back as “testing trials” and later as “exams”; class preceptors (responsible for good conduct, morals, and teacher-parent relations) came back as “group leaders” and, later, “class mentors.” “Pedology,” a branch of child psychology committed to intelligence testing and present in most Moscow schools in the form of special labs, was banned in 1936 (on the initiative of Boris Volin, recently transferred from the central censorship office to the Central Committee’s School Department) for “abandoning the study of a particular living child,” preaching the concept of “the fatal dependence of a child’s development on biological and social factors,” and spreading “the most harmful and ridiculous nonsense” about the impending disappearance of the family.¹⁶

School subjects were to reflect the most important branches of human knowledge, including, in particular, history, geography, physics, chemistry, and biology. Laying the foundation for everything else and taking up the bulk of class time were mathematics and the newly acclaimed queen of all subjects, language and literature. By far the largest public campaign conducted by the Moscow schools in the 1930s was the celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of Pushkin’s death, which culminated in a week-long series of events beginning on the anniversary day of February 10, 1937, and involving concerts, contests, readings, meetings, rallies, lectures, shows, tours, and parades.¹⁷

Some House of Government children attended the Moscow Exemplary School, located directly across the river and named after the Old Bolshevik, Panteleimon Lepeshinsky (who lived in Apt. 212 with his wife, a specialist in human rejuvenation and the leading proponent of the theory of spontaneous generation of life from inanimate matter). Hubert L’Hoste and the Arosev sisters went to the Karl Liebknecht German school; Vladimir Ozersky, the son of the former Soviet trade representative in Great Britain, A. V. Ozersky, went to the Anglo-American school; but the great majority of House children went to School No. 19, formerly the Maria Women’s College, on the Sophia Embankment. Rachmaninoff’s piano (a Julius Blüthner) was still there; the ground floor still contained the administrative office and the dining hall. According to Georgy Lesskis, who was a student there in the mid-1930s, “a sweeping staircase led up to the second floor and the huge assembly hall with its high ceiling. The recreation hall was slightly smaller and on the wall was an enormous clock with a pendulum that was almost the size of a small first-grader. Its chimes, which could be heard throughout the school, seemed to echo the Kremlin’s Spasskaya Tower ones, which could also be heard quite clearly. Along both sides of the assembly hall were doors leading into bright, spacious classrooms with high ceilings and windows that looked out over the tops of the small trees growing in the school yard.” The larger assembly hall had a huge aquarium flanked by two potted palm trees. According to Mikhail Korshunov (the son of the Intourist director, P. S. Korshunov, from Apt. 445), there were also some “ancient mirrors in which our girls used to admire themselves a hundred times a day,” “tall white doors with ornamental reliefs and thick glass,” tiled stoves in the corridors, and, “in the administrative office, a huge leather couch that looked like a carriage without a top.” A narrow stairway led up to the third floor with its low ceilings and small classrooms converted from young ladies’ bedrooms. The most popular one was a physics lab with two small windows leading out onto the roof.¹⁸

Some teachers had taught in prerevolutionary gymnasia, but most were the young beneficiaries of accelerated reconstruction-era training programs. The Moscow City Education Department worried about the level of preparation of some new recruits but seemed to have no complaints about School No. 19. The House of Government parents had neither the time nor the inclination to ask questions, and the children themselves loved their principal (who turned twenty-nine in 1935); their principal’s successor, whom Gaister described as “a quiet, cultured person”; their vice principal for academic affairs (who lived on the ground floor of the school with his son, Mikhail Korshunov’s classmate); and most of their teachers, who seemed to share their hopes, their enthusiasms, and their assumption that school was, in some crucial sense, an extension of the courtyard. Everyone’s favorite was the literature teacher, David Yakovlevich Raikhin, who turned twenty-seven in 1935, lived on the ground floor, next to the vice principal, and was, according to Korshunov, “a genius and an innovator.” “His obvious erudition was combined with an extraordinary narrative skill,” wrote Moroz. “His literature classes were pure joy. No one noticed how the forty-five minutes flew by, and no one wanted to leave when the class was over. But he was also strict and demanding, would punish the lazy, and occasionally (extremely rarely!) get angry and kick people out.” Of Lesskis’s eighth-grade class of sixty students, only twenty-six remained at the time of graduation. “For three years,” he writes, “all twenty-six of us were immersed in literature (although only two of us—Ira Bunina and I—went on to major in literature). We went with David Yakovlevich to the Tretyakov Gallery, attended theater performances he recommended, ran a literary society, and published a literary journal.” There were also physics and mathematics societies, citywide “school Olympics” (in mathematics and later in physics and chemistry), concerts, excursions, and newspapers. “Since we lived so close to the school, we often hung around there till late in the evening,” wrote Inna Gaister. “Even if we ran home to have lunch, we often went back afterward. It was interesting at the school: there were a lot of clubs and different activities. I really loved our school.”¹⁹

School No. 19

What was interesting in school was also what was interesting at home and in the courtyard: friendship and learning. The children learned from their teachers, from each other, occasionally from their parents, and—continually and religiously—from books. Samuil Moroz thought of himself as a late developer:

I learned to read before I was five. The first book I ever read was called Great Love Stories. All I remember from that book were the names: Abelard and Heloise, Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura. It was not until much later that I found out who they were: back then I was, like Gogol’s Petrushka, more interested in the actual process of reading.

After that, I read nonstop. By the time I was sixteen, I had read virtually everything by Jules Verne, Mayne Reid, and Cooper, and a great deal by Boussenard, Jacolliot, and Burroughs. I read Burroughs’s Tarzan several times.

Later I started reading serious books. Around the age of twelve, I read Tolstoy’s War and Peace and at fourteen or so, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. At sixteen I fell in love with foreign literature: Romain Rolland, Stefan Zweig, Maupassant. I cannot possibly list them all.²⁰

Elena Kraval, who turned fourteen in 1935, remembered her father (Osinsky’s successor as the head of the Central Statistics Bureau) coming home to find her reading Maupassant, and first saying that it was too early, but then allowing her to go on. Among her childhood favorites were “the marvelous” academic edition of Pushkin, “Scheherazade’s tales,” Robinson Crusoe, The Count of Monte Cristo, and War and Peace, which she read at the age of twelve, “skipping all the war parts.” Tatiana Smilga (sixteen in 1935) read “indiscriminately, everything from Maupassant to Turgenev and on.” She did not remember any Soviet books. “I remember mostly reading the classics. Balzac, Byron, Shakespeare, and the Russians, of course: Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and my true love, Pushkin.” (As she put it in 1998, “I consider Russian literature to be incredibly beautiful and wonderful. I think that without the Russian literary classics, the whole world would collapse.”) Inna Gaister (ten in 1935) “read a lot: at home, in class, at every free moment; read nonstop, indiscriminately: Turgenev, Gogol, Pushkin, Balzac, Zola.” Postyshev’s son Leonid (fifteen in 1935) remembered “reading a lot, nonstop, and without much discrimination.” Gaister’s cousin, Igor, who lived in Apt. 98, had to be searched before going into the bathroom, to make sure he did not lock himself in with a book. In 1935, Mikhail Koltsov spent a week as a ninth-grade teacher in School No. 27, not far from the House of Government. The most popular writer among his students was Jules Verne: none of the thirty-five students had read fewer than three of his novels, and half the class had read between eight and ten.²¹

Inna Gaister in fourth grade (Courtesy of Inna Gaister)

Most of the House children read more or less “nonstop” (the same Russian term is used for “binge drinking”), but they did not read “indiscriminately.” The “classics” were by definition extraordinary, and even the adventure books constituted a tight, mostly nineteenth-century, canon that the children had inherited from their parents (and could explore “indiscriminately” at home). They read—and went to the theater, opera, concerts, museums, and exhibitions—for pleasure, but also as a matter of social obligation and personal self-improvement. They made lists, filled gaps, set goals, took lessons, designed projects, and made informal presentations on a variety of artistic and academic topics. They thought of the world as something to be known and joyfully possessed, and of knowledge, as a finite collection of cultural achievements and scientific disciplines to be mastered and put to use. They were animated by Faust’s passion to “understand whatever / Binds the world’s innermost core together, / See all its workings, and its seeds.” They loved atlases and encyclopedias, memorized flags and capitals, and collected coins and stamps (preferably from the “colonies”). They were all Chelyuskinites and “Captain Grant’s children”: knowledge and adventure were one and the same thing. The song that defined the decade came from the movie version of Jules Verne’s The Children of Captain Grant (In Search of the Castaways), released by Mosfilm in 1936. It was called (and addressed to) “The Jolly Wind,” and sang “about wild mountains, the deep mysteries of the seas, bird conversations, blue horizons, and brave and great people.” The refrain was: “Those who are jolly will laugh, Those who desire will receive, Those who seek will always find.” The biblical references would not have been noticed by the House of Government children; the Promethean ones would.

True knowledge was inseparable from self-knowledge; the mastery of the world both presupposed and generated self-mastery. The House children prepared themselves for the journey by strengthening their bodies (Leonid Postyshev, Vladimir Kuibyshev, and Vladimir Rabichev all took up boxing, with Jack London in mind), exercising their willpower, and fine-tuning their emotions. As Faust put it, “Whatever is the lot of humankind / I want to taste within my deepest self.” Some wrote poetry, novels, or short stories; many kept diaries, in which they probed their deepest selves. The effort of careful introspection in the service of learning and self-improvement was known as “working on oneself.” The overall goal was the pursuit of truth and knowledge understood as one and the same thing. The ultimate reward was socialism understood as universal harmony.

The House of Government children admired their fathers and saw themselves as their true heirs—the legitimate children of the Revolution—but their greatest heroes came from the “international constellation of human types” that they found in literature. Most of these heroes were, in some sense, rebels, but only a few of them—the Gadfly, Spartacus, Pavel Korchagin—happened to be proper revolutionaries. What mattered was the larger romantic rebellion, the Promethean defiance of the jealous gods. Not all great heroes were lone individuals (great love—Abelard and Heloise, Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura—and great friendship, from Herzen and Ogarev to the three musketeers, were crucial parts of the quest), but they were all individuals, not party members. When asked to identify nonliterary heroes, the House of Government children, encouraged by their schoolteachers, tended to name the greatest officially celebrated individual martyrs for truth and knowledge, Galileo and Giordano Bruno.

■ ■ ■

Fedor Kaverin’s last production before the State New Theater was expelled from the House of Government was Uriel Acosta, based on the 1847 Romantic play by Karl Gutzkow. A staple of Russian and Yiddish theater, it had been staged by Kaverin’s nemesis, Konstantin Stanislavsky, and Kaverin’s close friend, Solomon Mikhoels (both had played the lead role). The action takes place in the Jewish community of Amsterdam in the seventeenth century. Uriel Acosta is excommunicated for writing a rationalist treatise questioning rabbinical dogma. His only supporter is the beautiful Judith, who is engaged to a rich merchant, Ben Jochai. Uriel and Judith persist in their defiance until Uriel, with a heavy heart, decides to recant in order to save Judith and his elderly mother from dishonor. While he is held incommunicado, preparing for the ceremony of public confession, his mother dies and Judith agrees to marry Ben Jochai, who blackmails her by ruining her father. Uriel recants his views and is about to be subjected to the ritual trampling at the synagogue’s threshold (with the triumphant Ben Jochai first in line) when he learns that his sacrifice has been in vain. He reasserts the truth of his convictions, utters Galileo’s “and yet it moves,” and condemns his judges for their blindness and hypocrisy. Judith drinks poison, and Uriel shoots himself offstage, leaving behind his disciple, the young Baruch Spinoza.²²

Kaverin had finally found his hero. On the one side, according to his conception of the show, are “the oppressive power of the Torah and the Talmud, connected with the power of money; the deadening, leaden traditions with no room for hesitation or doubt; the place of death.” On the other is Uriel Acosta, “young, ardent, in love with life and with his Judith, accepting life and not the letter of the law, the author of a treatise that undermines the foundations of the stock exchange and the synagogue, the spring wind that bursts into the grim vault and sends the thousand-year-old scrolls of the dead law flying in all directions.” Uriel and Judith stand for youth and good books: the manifestos of free thought that Uriel has written and the original book of love—the Song of Songs—that they read to each other. One of the central episodes in Kaverin’s production is a ceremony that suggests both the historical depth and contemporary relevance of Uriel’s struggle. “On a dais, the heretical books of a true scholar are piled up high. In vain does Uriel try to pull out at least one; the flames rise up and, amidst general rejoicing, the fire burns and precious, thought-provoking pages, perish.” But, of course, they do not. As one of the most articulate spokesmen for Soviet Faustianism put it (at about the same time), “manuscripts do not burn.” In the play’s final scene, the young Spinoza falls on Uriel’s body and says his last farewell. “In his teacher’s cloak he finds a book, the only one that Judith rescued from the flames and handed to Uriel before she died. The boy presses the book to his chest and walks through the frozen crowd, carrying it into real life, into the future.”²³

The response was universally enthusiastic. The censor from the Main Repertory Committee cut a few lines from Uriel’s monologue in which he praises Christianity for serving as a stage on his journey to inner freedom, and, after the pre-release discussion in the Commissariat of Enlightenment, Kaverin promised to eliminate any suggestion that there was anything specifically Jewish about “talmudism,” but the consensus was that the overall conception was a triumph. The deputy head of the Theater Department of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, Pavel Ivanovich Novitsky, concluded the discussion by congratulating Kaverin on capturing the spirit of the age. The confrontation was between dogmatism of all stripes and the tradition of free thought represented “by a number of great men from Galileo, Bruno, and Spinoza all the way to Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.” It was a tradition of spring, wind, and eager learning, and Kaverin’s best insight was to stress Uriel’s youth. “Acosta must be young, temperamental, impetuous, and, at the same time, in his everyday behavior, he must be a person who loves life, who is filled with joy and a special feeling for life. He absolutely must be young.” And so he was. “Instead of an antiquarian philosopher and wise scribe,” wrote Em. Beskin in Literaturnaia gazeta, “we have a vibrant, exciting, and excitable young enthusiast, full of the spring flowering of his feelings for his beloved Judith and of his faith in the social cause that he fights and dies for.”²⁴

Uriel Acosta at the State New Theater (Courtesy of the State Central Theater Museum)

Fedor Kaverin, 1937

The play’s achievement—and the mythology of the House of Government children—is summed up in the Pravda review: “Uriel is not a heroic titan who brings down the temple’s columns like the legendary Samson. He is a pure and exuberant youth who courageously enters into an unequal struggle against talmudic scholasticism and religious fanaticism…. The real historic Uriel may have been much older (at the time of his excommunication, he was fifty-seven), but the young one is better, more convincing. He fully ‘fits’ his passionate monologues, which contain much more romantic rebellion than mature but cold wisdom.” The fathers were the titans, ruling the world during the golden age, and possibly Samsons, succumbing to the seduction of hen-and-rooster problems. The children were both romantic Uriels and his youthful disciples, carrying his books “into real life, into the future.” Kaverin arrived at this realization too late: within five months of the publication of the Pravda review, his theater was expelled from the House of Government for not being pure and exuberant enough. The author of the exuberant Pravda review was a prominent theater critic, Osaf Litovsky (Kagan). His other pseudonym, going back more than ten years, was “Uriel.”²⁵