The House of Government

26

THE KNOCK ON THE DOOR

By the time Mironov and Agnessa moved into the House of Government, about four hundred of the original residents had moved out or been moved out. Among the first to go, in early 1934, was the recently forgiven Trotskyite (and former top Civil War commissar and prosecutor at the Filipp Mironov trial), Ivar Smilga. He had lost his job in the State Planning Commission, and the family—Smilga, his wife Nadezhda Poluian, their two daughters, the daughters’ nanny, and Nadezhda’s friend Nina Delibash (the wife of the exiled oppositionist, Aleksandr Ioselevich)—had been asked to move across the river to a four-room apartment in 26 Gorky Street (behind the Art Theater). Smilga was still formally affiliated with the Central Committee and worked for the Academia Publishing House. Shortly before the move, he had published an introduction to a new translation of Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers. “Our country’s youth,” he wrote, “will embrace everything that is useful and exciting in Dickens, while criticizing his weak points. The pedagogical role of Dickens as an artist is far from being exhausted. Our descendants will be reading him with profit and pleasure.”¹

Then, on the evening of December 1, 1934, when Smilga, Nadezhda, and the girls (fifteen-year-old Tatiana and twelve-year-old Natalia) were about to leave for a walk, the telephone rang. According to Tatiana, “Dad picked up the phone and said in an awful voice: ‘Oh no! Of course. I’ll be right over.’ He came up to us—we were all three standing in our coats. ‘My friends,’ he said in a strange voice, ‘Kirov has been assassinated in Leningrad.’” It was Bukharin calling from Izvestia; he wanted Smilga’s Civil War reminiscences about Kirov for the memorial issue.²

A month later, on the evening of January 1, 1935, Tatiana and Natalia were in bed after a sleepless New Year’s night when Smilga walked into their room and said: “Kids, I don’t want you to worry, they’re just picking up some of us old oppositionists.” He was taken away in the morning, after a search that lasted many hours. According to Tatiana, his parting words were, “You do know you are saying goodbye to an honest man, don’t you?” He was sentenced to five years in the Verkheuralsk Political Isolator (around the time Tania Miagkova was about to be released). He spent his time there studying philosophy and political economy and reading Racine and Corneille in an effort to improve his French. Nadezhda was allowed to come visit him. She asked him to swear that he had not participated in any conspiracies, but, as she later told Tatiana, he gave her such a look that she felt ashamed of herself. She was arrested herself on July 1, 1936, soon after her return to Moscow. Tatiana, Natalia, and their nanny stayed in one room; the other three were occupied by other families. Nina Delibash was also arrested, as were Smilga’s brother, Pavel, and Nadezhda’s brothers, Yan and Dmitry. Dmitry had been the presiding judge at Filipp Mironov’s trial.

As Smilga said at the time, while arguing for the death sentence, the “terrible acts” committed by the Convention in the Vendée were “terrible from the point of view of a particular human being” but “justified by history.” The other top Bolsheviks who had been involved in the de-Cossackization campaign, but were now serving in different capacities—Iona Yakir (commander of the Kiev Military District), Yakov Vesnik (director of the Krivoi Rog Steel Combine), Iosif Khodorovsky (director of the Kremlin Health and Sanitation Department), Aron Frenkel (member of the Central Committee’s Control Commission), and Sergei Syrtsov (director of Chemical Plant No. 12, after being dismissed as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Russian Republic in 1930) were all arrested and executed within two years of Smilga’s arrest. The former commander of Trotsky’s armored train, Rudolf Peterson, who was dismissed as commandant of the Kremlin after the Kremlin affair of 1935 and employed by Yakir as his deputy for supplies, was arrested a month before Yakir (on April 27, 1937). In a note to his children from prison, he wrote: “Forgive me for everything” and “It has to be this way.”³

Smilga’s closest collaborator from the time of the Mironov affair (as a fellow member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Special Group of the Southern Front in 1919), Valentin Trifonov, was arrested on June 21, 1937. One of the accusations was his continued relationship with Smilga. Since 1932, Trifonov had been chairman of the Main Committee on Foreign Concessions, but his chief preoccupation was Soviet readiness for an imminent enemy attack. Shortly before his arrest, he had sent his new manuscript, “The Outlines of the Coming War,” to Stalin and several other Politburo members but received no reply. His son Yuri was eleven at the time. He had recently passed his fifth-grade exams and was reading The Count of Monte Cristo, writing a short story, “Diplodocus,” and planning his escape to South America. The family was living at their dacha in Serebrianyi Bor.⁴

22 June, 1937.

This morning Mom woke me up and said:

“Yura, get up, there’s something I have to tell you.”

I rubbed my eyes. Tanya sat up in her bed.

Ivar Smilga’s arrest photographs

Nadezhda Smilga-Poluian and her daughters, Natalia and Tatiana, after Smilga’s arrest

Nadezhda Smilga-Poluian’s arrest photographs

“Last night,” Mom said, her voice trembling, “something terrible happened. Dad was arrested.” And she almost started crying.

We were completely dazed.

I have no doubt that Dad will be released soon. Dad is the most honest person in the world.

Today has been the worst day of my life.⁵

During the next two months, he played a lot of tennis and read “nonstop.” In early August, a new pier for passenger boats, with a café and ticket office, was opened on the Moskva not far from their dacha. On August 18, he saw a big air show and “balloons with portraits of Stalin, Molotov, Kalinin, Voroshilov and other Politburo members.” On August 28, he turned twelve. His mother and grandmother gave him two sets of French colonial stamps, an album for drawing, and a thick notebook for his short stories. In the fall, he saw A White Sail Gleams at the Children’s Theater, was elected chairman of the school literary club, finished “Diplodocus,” and wrote “Dukhalli,” “Toxodon Platensis,” and a “purely academic paper on France” (while Lyova Fedotov was working on his “Italy” album). On September 14, his uncle, Pavel Lurye, was arrested. On December 19, his other uncle, Evgeny Trifonov, died of a heart attack. It was on January 1, 1938, that he saw Lenin in October (“A wonderful movie! Excellent! Magnificent! Ideal! Superb! Terrific! Very good! Exceptional!”). And in early February, he teamed up with Oleg Salkovsky (Salo) in order to challenge the Lyova Fedotov–Misha Korshunov writing duo, but ended up—somehow—writing his first realistic story, “The Rivals.”

Trifonovs after Valentin Trifonov’s arrest. Left to right: Yuri’s grandmother Tatiana Slovatinskaia, Ania Vasilieva (the wife of Yuri’s uncle Pavel Lurye), Yuri, his mother, his sister, his stepbrother Undik.

3 April, 1938

Last night NKVD agents came and took Mommy away. They woke us up. Mommy was very brave. They took her away in the morning. Today I did not go to school. Now it’s only Tania and me with Grandma, Ania, and Undik.

On the 7th we’ll go with Ania to try to find out which prison Mommy is in. This is awful.

Ania, Pavel Lurye’s wife, had been living with them since her husband’s arrest. Undik was Yuri’s twenty-year-old adopted brother, who had recently taken up smoking and started working in a chemistry lab.

April 8, 1938.

“Misfortunes never come singly.”

My days have become completely empty. But someday this must end. On the 6th Tania, Ania, and I went to the Fine Arts Museum. We did not have time to see everything because Ania was in a hurry to feed her daughter, Katia. Grandma suggested that I write everything down, to let Mommy know how we are getting along without her.

Today, right after school, Tania, Ania, and I went to Kuznetsky Bridge to try to find out where Mommy is. It was a small room with around 20 people in it. For about 30 minutes we waited for the little window to open. All the faces were sad, mournful, and streaked with tears. Soon the window opened, and I got into line. When my turn came, I showed them my number, 1861, and my school ID. They told me that Mommy was in the Butyrki prison. On the 11th I’ll go leave some money for both Mom and Dad. At school nobody knows yet. Yesterday Tania and I went to Natasha’s birthday [Natasha was Yuri’s half-sister, Valentin Trifonov’s daughter from his first marriage]. We spent about an hour and a half there and left. Now I’m reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

I’ve finished my homework for tomorrow. My whole body feels tired. And no wonder, after two hours standing up. Ania and Tania could sit down, although Tania only did at the very end. Exams are coming up soon, but I’ll manage somehow.

Oh, I’m so-o-o-o depressed!!!

Mommy-y-y-y-y-!!!!yy!! I can’t stop cr …

9 April, 1938

I must be strong and wait.

16 April, 1938

Yesterday I got a C in Geometry. This won’t do! I need to be an even better student while Mom is away. I’m going to study a lot, I swear.

21 April, 1938

It’s evening now. Grandma went out to buy some bread. Tania, Ania, and I are at home. I feel sick at heart. Mommy! I am sending you my greetings, wherever you are. Today we received a letter from Pavel. He is in Ufa, on his way to Camp Freedom. It’s so depressing!

Mommy-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y!!!!⁶

■ ■ ■

Aleksandr Voronsky, who, in 1927, had joined with Smilga and the other active oppositionists, had continued to serve as head of the Classics Section at State Fiction Publishers. Between mid-1932 and late 1934 (when Smilga was working on his essay on Dickens), he had published the collected works of Goethe, Balzac, Flaubert, Griboedov, Pushkin, Lermontov, A. Koltsov (no relation), Saltykov-Shchedrin, Tolstoy, Ostrovsky, and Chekhov. According to his daughter, he had “kept to himself and refused not only to speak publicly about literature, but even to attend literary meetings and conferences.” He spent most of his time reading philosophy and writing fiction. As his boss put it during his purge meeting on October 21, 1933, “Aleksandr Konstantinovich has lost something in his life as a Communist, and he cannot quite find it to this day…. The breaking of his pen, which is a political weapon handed to him by the Party, will certainly be followed by the breaking of many other weapons and, ultimately, himself.”⁷

Right after Kirov’s death, he had been expelled from the Party—“for helping to organize aid for the writer Mirov, who had been exiled for anti-Soviet propaganda,” for failing to mention that fact at the purge meeting of 1933, and “for concealing his ties with Zorin, who had been arrested in connection with the murder of Comrade Kirov.” In May 1935, he appealed the decision to the Central Committee’s Party Control Commission, claiming that his relationship with Sergei Zorin (Aleksandr Gombarg, the former secretary of the Petrograd and Briansk Party committees) had been “of a purely domestic and literary nature” and that his compassion for Mirov had been a momentary lapse:

It is true that in 1931 I gave material help to the beginning writer and anarchist Mirov. I admitted and continue to admit that I did commit that crime, having been influenced by reports that his family was in need, but I ask you to bear in mind that this help, given four years ago, was a one-time act. I have never given any help to any other exiles. Nor can I accept the accusation that I deliberately concealed my help to Mirov at my purge meeting. I simply forgot about it. When, in February this year, I was asked if I had ever given financial assistance to an exile, it was not until I got home that I, with the help of my family, remembered this fact and immediately reported it to the Party committee secretary.⁸

The Bolshevik inquisitorial procedure, like its numerous Christian, Buddhist, and post-Freudian counterparts, assumed that a wholly virtuous life was impossible, but that partial reconciliation could be achieved through confession and that an unconfessed sin could be forgiven if it was honestly forgotten, not deliberately concealed. The difference between honest forgetfulness and deliberate concealment, apparent to God, history, and perhaps an experienced interrogator, was, in most human interactions, a matter of trust. But, as Stalin would tell Bukharin at the December 1936 Central Committee plenum, after Kirov’s murder, no one, even those who “volunteer to personally execute their friends,” could be trusted. It was a “hellish situation”: sincerity, as the events of the previous two years had demonstrated convincingly, had become a relative, and therefore irrelevant, concept.⁹

Voronsky’s defense was to confess again (by recapitulating the story of his fall, first formulated at his purge meeting) and to point out that he had never made any “political mistakes” in his work as a publisher of classic literature, and that no one had ever questioned the sincerity of the “very necessary” work he was doing in crafting the literary image of the underground Bolshevik:

I have decisively broken with the opposition. The Party is dear to me. Its past, present, and future are dear to me. I am certain that, under the leadership of its Leninist Central Committee and of Comrade Stalin, the Land of the Soviets will continue its steady march toward the establishment of a socialist society.

In conclusion, I would like to say that whatever decision the Control Commission of the Central Committee reaches in my case, I will continue to think of my life as being inseparable from the Party. Unconditional obedience to Party decisions and to the Party leadership headed by its Central Committee and Comrade Stalin will remain an absolute requirement for me.¹⁰

The response from the Party Control Commission did not arrive for more than a year. It was negative. Voronsky was formally expelled from the Party and the Writers’ Union and removed from his job at Fiction Publishers. At an interrogation conducted on January 25, 1935 (by Boris Volin’s and Boris Efimov’s brother-in-law, the investigator Leonid Chertok), Sergei Zorin had admitted that, “by virtue of maintaining, in 1930, 1931, and 1932, political ties with Zinoviev and Kamenev and being, on some questions, in agreement with their political views,” he had acted as a “double-dealer.” Since, for Party members, there was no such thing as a “domestic and literary” relationship distinct from a political one, it followed that, by virtue of maintaining, all the way through December 1934, domestic and literary ties with Sergei Zorin, Voronsky, too, had acted as a double-dealer.¹¹

Voronsky did not entirely disagree. His fictionalized autobiography was about doubles: Brands and Peer Gynts, Don Quixotes and underground men, the self-doubting first-person narrator and his embodied Party nickname. The literary character of the Bolshevik Moses he had championed in the 1920s was either one character with two natures or two characters with one mission. His Lenin was both a thundering Moses and an artist with an “almost feminine tenderness toward the human being.” “Double-dealing” is what had happened to Koltsov’s “two faces—and only one man; not a duality but a synthesis.”¹²

Around the time of Kirov’s murder, Voronsky had received the proofs of his new book about Gogol. According to his daughter, Galina,

My father became completely engrossed in that work. For a while, he could speak of nothing but Gogol. At home, on walks, and visiting friends, he would talk excitedly about various episodes from Gogol’s life and work. Once, on a cold winter day, when he and I were walking around the Arbat, we stopped in front of Gogol’s statue, and he said:

“Gogol was a mysterious and strange man. There was something of the devil in him. I think I have managed to lift the curtain on his work just a little and say something new about him. But I cannot escape the feeling that he will not let me say what I want to.”¹³

The key to Gogol’s genius, according to Voronsky, was his dual nature, and the greatest turning point in Gogol’s life was the novella “Viy,” in which the “philosopher” seminarian, Khoma Brut, is assailed by the forces of darkness while he is in church in the middle of the night. “The doors tore from their hinges, and a numberless host of monsters flew into God’s church. A terrible noise of wings and scratching claws filled the whole church. Everything flew and rushed about, seeking the philosopher everywhere.” Khoma is protected by the circle he has drawn around himself until he is identified by the monstrous Viy with his iron face.

“Don’t look!” some inner voice whispered to the philosopher. He could not help himself and looked.

“There he is!” Viy cried and fixed an iron finger on him. And all that were there fell upon the philosopher. Breathless, he crashed to the ground and straightaway the spirit flew out of him in terror.

A cockcrow rang out. This was already the second cockcrow; the gnomes had missed the first. The frightened spirits rushed pell-mell for the windows and doors in order to fly out quickly, but nothing doing: and so they stayed there, stuck in the doors and windows. When the priest came in, he stopped at the sight of such a disgrace in God’s sanctuary and did not dare serve a memorial service in such a place. So the church remained forever with monsters stuck in its doors and windows, overgrown with forest, roots, weeds, wild blackthorn; and no one now can find the path to it.¹⁴

In the midst of the literary battles of the 1920s, Voronsky had compared his proletarian critics to “those righteous and steadfast men” who, like Gogol’s philosopher seminarian, “had drawn a magic circle around themselves lest the bourgeois Viy give the Russian Revolution over to the unclean and the undead.” Or had he meant to compare himself to the philosopher seminarian, and his proletarian critics, to the unclean and the undead? He was a former seminarian, after all, and they were those “everywhere-at-once young men,” whose “cleverness could sometimes turn downright sinister.” Or were both he and his proletarian critics doomed seminarians, assailed by the same monster? And was it not Bukharin who had first broken Voronsky’s pen and then chased away the Averbakhs? And wasn’t Bukharin later revealed as a double-dealer?¹⁵

According to Voronsky, Gogol had two natures and lived in two worlds.

The two worlds—the real world and the world of terrifying nightmares and evil spirits—struggle against each other in Gogol’s work, becoming ever more vivid and drawing closer together. In Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka reality gets the upper hand: monsters, witches, and vile snouts enter ordinary life, but are ultimately defeated by it. Even the sorcerer in “A Terrible Vengeance” perishes in the end. In Viy the dead, undead, and unutterable triumph over reality and become an integral part of it. The Christian writer does not even spare the “holy place,” the church. The undead get stuck in its windows.

What makes Gogol different from the philosopher seminarian is that his circle protects him even when he does look. And so he is able to stay inside it and bear witness. “The vile snouts burst in and come alive. After that, the artist’s gaze is drawn inexorably toward them—for he cannot resist the temptation and looks, and sees his native land crawling with smirking monsters, and knows that there is nowhere the philosopher poet can hide.” He tries to read the psalms, like Khoma Brut, but all he can see is the apocalypse. “He is like the priest who no longer dares celebrate the mass, and when he does, his words come out powerless and lifeless, and the images and characters meant to represent the sacred and reconciliation appear artificial and unconvincing. The artist’s brush is strong only when it paints the devil’s legions in all their picturesque and hideous monstrosity. Such is the artist’s curse.”¹⁶

In Voronsky’s literary theory, all true artists are prophets with “the special gift of clairvoyance.” Gogol’s gift was to live in a world in which the dead souls had won—and not to give in.¹⁷

The reader who pores over these glorious pages and wonders about the terrible fate of their creator may think of any number of images and comparisons. But the most terrifying of them all comes from Gogol’s unfinished novel about two captives in a dungeon, a man and a woman. The smell of decay takes one’s breath away; an enormous toad stares with bulging eyes; thick clumps of cobweb hang from the ceiling; human bones are strewn about. “A bat or an owl would be a beauty here.” When they begin to torture the female captive, a dark, frightening voice can be heard saying: “Don’t give in, Hannah!” Suddenly, a man appears: “he was alive, but had no skin. His skin had been torn from his body. He consisted entirely of boiling blood. Only the blue branches of his veins spread throughout his body. The blood was dripping from him. A mandolin on a rusty leather strap hung over his shoulder. His eyes blinked hideously in his bloody face.” Gogol was that bard with the mandolin, with the eyes that had seen too much. He is the one who, in spite of himself, screamed in a dark voice, for all of Russia to hear: “Don’t give in, Hannah!”

For that, they skinned him alive.¹⁸

Who are “they”? And what happened to the “real world” in which the priest was supposed to celebrate his mass?

Voronsky spent the year 1936 waiting to be arrested. Most of his friends quit coming to see him; his daughter Galina was expelled from the Young Communist League; and the typeset of Gogol was destroyed at the print shop. He prepared a stack of books on philosophy to take to prison with him. According to Galina, “Father spent a lot of time writing and a lot reading, living an almost full life, and trying not to see or call even those few friends who had not deserted him.” The Voronskys celebrated New Year’s Eve at home. Galina remembered decorating a small New Year’s tree with Mandarin oranges and listening to Jules Massenet’s Élégie on the radio. At the end of January, Radek and several other defendants at the Second Moscow Show Trial confessed to having led double lives. According to Galina, Voronsky “did not doubt the truthfulness of the defendants’ testimony.” Two days after the verdict was announced, on February 1, 1937, Voronsky worked in the morning, went on his usual walk to Red Square before lunch, took an afternoon nap, and sat down to work again. In the evening Galina and Sima Solomonovna went down to the Shock Worker to see the last showing of Protazanov’s Without a Dowry. They got back to their entryway around midnight:

The guard opened the elevator door for us and gave us a long, strangely stern, searching look, but didn’t say anything. From the stairway we could see the windows of my father’s study. He usually kept only his desk lamp on because he didn’t like bright light. But this time the windows were brightly lit and that made me feel nervous somehow, but I didn’t have time to think why. My mother opened the door with her key. A short, fat man in military uniform was standing just inside the door holding a saber, for some reason. Five or six men in uniform were conducting a search. My father was sitting on the couch. My mother and I were not allowed to sit next to him or speak to him, but we spoke anyway, despite the constant screaming of the NKVD men. It was a very thorough search, especially when it came to the books. We had an anniversary edition of Goethe’s collected works, in gray leather bindings. They sliced into each binding and carefully examined it, with the NKVD man even making a pretence of asking our permission first.…

My father calmly and deliberately went about his preparations. Ignoring the NKVD men’s objections, he took quite a few things…. Before leaving he asked to be allowed to drink a cup of hot, strong tea.

When we were saying goodbye, I burst into tears.

He tried to comfort me: “Make sure to finish college. If they send me into exile, you can come visit me in the summer.”

I will never forget that scene: the dark hall, my father wearing his overcoat and fur hat with the ear flaps hanging down, and the large bundle in his arms.¹⁹

His manuscripts and books, including the proofs of Gogol, were arrested along with him. The arrest warrant was signed by Yakov Agranov, who was arrested himself five months later. Galina and Sima Solomonovna were moved from the House of Government to a communal apartment on 2nd Izvoznaia (Studencheskaia) Street. Galina was arrested almost immediately, in mid-March; Sima Solomonovna, in August. One of Galina’s interrogators was “a very nice guy”:

This young man turned out to be a huge fan of Esenin, and when he found out—this was during the interrogation—that Esenin was one of the writers I knew personally, he actually jumped in his seat: “No! Really?” Our subsequent interaction (as investigator and prisoner) consisted in our reciting to each other the verses of this forbidden, seditious poet (whom my father also liked very much) and correcting each other if either made a mistake, but whenever a third person (i.e., another NKVD officer) walked into the room, my K. (we’ll call him that here) would quickly readjust his manner and shout: “Voronskaia, you’d better start testifying!”²⁰

Aleksandr Voronsky’s arrest photograph

Providing testimony at about the same time were Voronsky’s “proletarian” adversary but later friend and coauthor, G. Lelevich (a former Trotskyite), and the Party patron of the anti-Voronsky forces but later publisher and defender of his autobiographical writings, Semen Kanatchikov (a former Zinovievite). Just as Voronsky’s memoirs represented the canonical life of the Bolshevik “student,” Kanatchikov’s represented that of the Bolshevik worker. Both books were proscribed after their authors’ arrests. The head proletarian critic, Leopold Averbakh, was arrested on April 4, 1937. His sister, Moscow’s deputy prosecutor Ida Averbakh, was arrested along with her husband, the former NKVD chief, Genrikh Yagoda. (Her book on “reforming the consciousness” of the prisoners employed in the building of the Moscow–Volga Canal had been published a year earlier.) Their mother, Yakov Sverdlov’s sister Sofia, was also arrested, as was Yakov Sverdlov’s brother and former deputy people’s commissar of transportation, Veniamin Sverdlov. Yakov Sverdlov’s son Andrei, who had been briefly arrested in 1935, was rearrested in January 1938. Sergei Zorin’s interrogator, Leonid Chertok, jumped out of an eighth-floor window when his colleagues came to arrest him. His wife, Sofia Fradkina, an NKVD employee and the sister of Boris Volin and of Boris Efimov’s wife, was, according to Efimov, much happier in her next marriage.²¹

■ ■ ■

In January 1936, Voronsky’s old friend, Tania Miagkova (Poloz), had finished her three-year term in the Verkhneuralsk Political Isolator and been sentenced to three years’ exile in Kazakhstan. She had traveled to Alma Ata, where she had been told to go to Uralsk. She wrote to her mother that although Alma Ata was more interesting, Uralsk was a better option because it was closer to Moscow. She had found a job as an economist in a mechanical spare parts warehouse and rented a room in a “nondescript” house with no roof (the landlady had promised to put one on by spring), a piglet and roosters in the entryway (the landlady “had bought a rooster and a hen, but the hen had turned out to be a rooster, too”) and a “dilapidated” outhouse, also with no roof. The room was “clean and pleasant,” but “very petit bourgeois” (with a crystal cabinet, lace curtains, and a carpet on the wall). The windows did not open, and there were lots of wood lice. Tania was sick a lot and asked her mother to send her more clothes:²²

Oh yes, I also wanted to let you know how I reacted to my shabby appearance when I finally crawled out of my hole into the light of day. In general, my reaction was (and still is to some extent) very subdued because of my exhaustion and my cold and also because I have been directing all my energies into achieving some essential and very practical goals. Still, my appearance did cause me some distress. My winter coat was wrinkled and stained, my boots were dirty, with patches on top of patches, and my gloves were completely worn through. My dress was also covered with patches and had a hole in the elbow, so I ended up putting on a green knit sweater that was stretched out and hung on me like a sack. It was awful! And just then some women walked by in the train in their sables, fancy shoes, cute little berets at an angle, and waves of perfume.… I even felt a little jealous. I had only a small, stained handmade purse for my money and a plain knotted rag for my coins. I have to confess that the first thing I bought here was a wallet. In general, I think it’s better to wait and buy good quality things, but during a transition period such as the one I’m in now, one should not stand on principle, so I bought myself an oilcloth wallet for 2 rubles and 5 kopeks. I also managed to buy a cheap belt and some simple stockings for a little over two rubles. My shopping spree came to an end with the purchase of a sponge for the bathhouse, at least until I find a permanent job. Still, I believe I am much more elegant now.²³

She still had not fixed her false front tooth. “The tooth is just there for show. When I talk or laugh, it more or less stays in place and there’s no gap, but when I eat, I have to take it out. In general, my teeth are in need of major repair. I clearly need bridges in at least two different places. I am not planning on doing everything at once, but I would like to fix the front tooth as soon as possible.” She wanted “to join, in that sense, the ranks of normal people (and, if possible, even a tiny bit higher than the average).” She asked her mother to knit a small beret for her. It could be dark blue, light blue, red, or black (“colors in order of preference”). In late March, her mother came to visit for two weeks. After her departure, Tania felt she had somehow lost her “taste for loneliness” (“I keep trying to convince myself, and coming up with all kinds of Herzen quotes to help, that a true human being should know how to live alone, but it isn’t really working.”) She also kept hoping that her daughter, Rada, would be able to come visit and perhaps stay permanently.²⁴

Then, in early April, she was told to go back to Alma Ata. At first she was upset about having to look once more for a room and a job, but then she decided that whereas Uralsk was a better option because it was closer to Moscow, Alma Ata was more interesting and much more beautiful. She marveled at her own buoyancy. “I suddenly grew a bit frightened of this trait of mine: might it not lead to conforming to circumstances, rather than triumphing over them? I decided to watch myself very carefully. But, actually, come to think of it, there’s no reason for panic. I simply do everything in my power to improve my circumstances and to see the good side of things when I have no control over them.”²⁵

The trip from Uralsk to Alma Ata took over a week, mostly by slow trains through the desert. “Such surroundings,” she wrote on the fourth day, “are trying very hard to provoke in me a feeling of melancholy, but I am standing firm and sticking resolutely to the rule I use in all kinds of trials: ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’” She was a priest’s granddaughter. The phrase came from the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6 (in the Old Church Slavic version):

Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?

For after all these things do the Gentiles seek: for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.

But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.²⁶

In Alma Ata, after about three weeks of searching, she found a job as an economist in the provincial Department of Internal Trade. Finding a room proved much more difficult. After several days in a hotel, she moved in with an old classmate from the Sverdlov Communist University who was also a fellow exile: “He is a very good person and in complete agreement with me when it comes to politics: firmly and unconditionally for the Party line and absolutely committed to his work, no matter how much time or effort it takes.” About three weeks later, he found her another temporary room with a roommate. The room was cluttered with old books, suitcases, fur coats, and empty bottles, but she embarked on a major “reform program” and was happy with the early results. “What is remarkable is that I find things interesting and, despite the difficult circumstances, eagerly confront life in all its manifestations.” She continued to read newspapers, worry about the situation in Mongolia, and enjoy walks in the Park of Culture and Rest. “Spring in Alma Ata is absolutely wonderful! The rains have ended, but it still hasn’t gotten hot. The blackthorn and cherry trees are already in bloom, and the apple trees are just about to bloom. The air smells as sweet as the air in Crimea in the spring. We’re surrounded by snow-covered mountains and trees. Even as I was running around wildly looking for a job, I was able to enjoy the coming of spring. I saw the movie We Are from Kronstadt. It’s extraordinary. It held me in suspense the whole time. It is excellent and very profound. Now I dream of seeing Chapaev!”²⁷

The biggest question was whether Rada (who was turning twelve in June) would join her at the end of the school year or two months later, after pioneer camp, and whether Tania would be able to find a permanent room for the two of them. The prospects were not very good, but, as she wrote to her mother, “I steadfastly credo quia absurdum [believe because it is impossible].” Meanwhile, she was developing “a taste for life outside.” “Did I write to you that I have some perfume now? One bottle of ‘Glorious Lilac’ and one of ‘Jasmine.’ I love the ‘Glorious Lilac,’ even though it’s half the price, but I’m not sure about the ‘Jasmine.’ I have to confess that it was not me who bought them. Do send me the crepe de Chine, Mommy dear, with Rada or by mail, although I think I’ll be able to get some clothes here. The comrade I’m living with right now enjoys making dresses and is very good at it. So my Ukrainian shirt is bound to be turned into a dress at some point.”²⁸

Finally, everything was ready. According to Rada, “in June 1936, they bought me a ticket to Alma Ata, found some people to accompany me, packed my things, and sent a telegram with my itinerary. When they received no reply, they sent an urgent telegram with a prepaid response. The response came back immediately: ‘The addressee no longer resides at this address.’” They heard from Tania about a month later. Rada remembered waking up at night when her grandmother and aunt turned on the light so they could see the map of the Soviet Union hanging over her bed. They were trying to find Nagaeva Bay.²⁹

Tania had been arrested on June 14 and sentenced to five years in a labor camp. She had been sent by train to Vladivostok and from there, by boat, to Magadan, in Nagaeva Bay. Her first telegram arrived sometime in July:

My dear ones: My journey is over. I am told that it has never taken place under better weather conditions. I have now sailed on the Pacific Ocean. I spent the whole time on deck—as if I were on a nice tourist excursion, with no hint of seasickness. There were some magic moments—for example, the moonlit night on a barge in Vladivostok Bay (when we were being taken to our ship). Whatever may have happened before and after that night, I will never forget it. Nagaeva Bay is large. It is surrounded by fog-covered mountains. Everything is fine. I can see the city, too. I kiss you, my darlings. Don’t worry about me, everything will be all right. Love, Tania.³⁰

The first letter was sent on July 18, 1936:

I have been here for several days, not sure how many: I seem to have lost my ability to count the days. Everything is still temporary and unsettled. We will be living in the club building of the so-called Women’s Detachment until we are moved to the barracks (which are not bad and do not have “alien elements”). I don’t have work yet. The food is not any worse than what I’ve been getting over the last three years, but very monotonous: there are no vegetables at all here. If you are going to send something, send garlic, onions, and, if available, some kind of vitamins, but don’t send a lot until I can start sending money (which I hope to be able to do soon). There’s no scurvy here, the health care is good, and the air is wonderful. In the Women’s Detachment area, we can move around freely. I have not been outside yet, but it is probably a matter of time and work. Right now I am catching up on my sleep after Alma Ata and the trip over here. I always sleep badly when I travel. The trip was good and interesting; I wish it had not ended so soon. To be honest with you, I still haven’t recovered from the shock, and the atmosphere around here is not conducive to concentrated reflection…. But you know I am indestructible, and quite soon I’ll be in good shape again.³¹

The second letter, mailed on July 29, was about the continuing uncertainty. She was hoping to get a job as a planning specialist at an auto repair plant. It seemed likely that she would stay in Magadan, the “capital” of Kolyma. This was a very good thing because Magadan had better connection to Moscow and more reliable mail service.

I don’t know much about life and work in Kolyma yet. In any case, it is not an ordinary camp. In many ways, it is better, freer than most—if only it weren’t so far away…. Mommy dear, from the tone of my letter, so different from my usual letters, you can probably tell that I am still not quite “back to normal.” I won’t lie to you: in spite of the fact that this camp is much freer than most, I am not overjoyed at being here and not exactly moved to repeat my favorite lines:

I’ll greet the coming days as cups

Filled to the brim with milk and honey.

To be honest, I am not so sure about the milk and honey. But I’ll wait and let my natural optimism take over again. It’s bound to somehow, isn’t it, and I’ll be afloat again.³²

The lines are from “Thyl Ulenspiegel,” by Eduard Bagritsky. The poem, about one of the most popular heroes of Soviet happy childhood, ends with the epitaph: “Here lies, in peace, the jolly wanderer, who never learned to cry.”

In Kolyma, Tania was reunited with Mirra Varshavskaia, her roommate from her exile in Chelkar in 1929. They had been together at the Verkhneuralsk Political Isolator, too, but they had not been on speaking terms there because Mirra had remained in opposition while Tania had embraced the Party line. In Kolyma, those differences had lost their significance.³³

■ ■ ■

In the House of Government, disagreements over orthodoxy had lost their significance several years earlier, when open opposition became impossible. Anyone already in prison was guilty irrespective of his or her particular beliefs, past or present. Anyone still in the House of Government was suspect because no one could be trusted. Former oppositionists were guilty by virtue of having been oppositionists. The arrest of Smilga and the other former participants in the 1927 demonstration was followed by the arrest of those who had suppressed that demonstration. Grigory Moroz, who had promised to “snip off the heads” of the Leftists before being unmasked as a Rightist, was arrested on July 3, 1937, at his dacha in Serebrianyi Bor. According to his son, Samuil, who was seventeen at the time, he told his family that it was a misunderstanding and that he would be released once the facts had been established. Two months later, his wife, Fanni Lvovna Kreindel, was arrested, and his two younger sons, the fourteen-year-old Vladimir and eight-year-old Aleksandr, sent to an orphanage. Samuil was moved from Apt. 39 to Apt. 402, where he was joined by the nineteen-year-old Kolia Demchenko, the son of the people’s commissar of state farms and former Party secretary of Kiev and Kharkov provinces, Nikolai Nesterovich Demchenko (who had been arrested on July 23). Kolia’s eleven-year-old brother, Feliks, had been sent to an orphanage. Kolia and his wife, Tatiana, were still celebrating their honeymoon, provoking “desperate envy” on the part of Samuil. On January 28, 1938, both Samuil and Kolia were arrested.³⁴

Ten days earlier, Boris Shumiatsky, who had helped Moroz disperse Smilga’s demonstration (and had, since 1930, presided over the Soviet film industry), had been arrested in his House of Government apartment along with his wife, Leah Isaevna. Among his belongings listed by the arresting officers were an eight-cylinder 1936 Ford, a Schröder piano, a General Electric refrigerator, a Latin-script Royal typewriter, a Cyrillic-script Mercedes typewriter, 1,040 books, and portraits of Marx and Lenin. Yakov Agranov, who had presided over the interrogations of both the Left and Right Oppositionists, had been executed ten days earlier.³⁵

Grigory Moroz with his son Samuil

The “extraction” campaign had begun to accelerate during the Central Committee plenum of June 1937. On June 17, Sergei Mironov had written to Ezhov asking for the right to issue death sentences “by means of a simplified procedure” and had proposed the creation of special troikas. On June 22, Ezhov had endorsed Mironov’s proposal in a memo to Stalin. On June 23, he had opened the plenum with a report on the total infestation of Soviet institutions with terrorists and spies. Three days later, while the plenum was still in session, the NKVD arrested Deputy People’s Commissar of Agriculture Aron Gaister. According to his secretary, he was summoned to the office of his boss, People’s Commissar Mikhail Chernov, and was never seen again. (Chernov lived in Apt. 190, not far from the Gaister’s Apt. 167.) Gaister’s wife, Rakhil Kaplan, was at work in the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry when her husband’s secretary called to say that their apartment was being searched. Later that night, two NKVD agents drove over to the Gaisters’ dacha in Nikolina Gora to conduct another search. Rakhil accompanied them. Inna Gaister, who was eleven at the time, woke up when two men in military uniforms walked into her bedroom and started breaking the lock on her desk. Several days later, the Gaisters’ dacha and House of Government apartment were sealed. Rakhil was told to move to a four-room apartment on the fourth floor of Entryway 4, which had to be shared with the wife and three children of the recently arrested member of the Committee of Soviet Control, Viktor Karpov. The Gaisters’ children—Inna, seven-year-old Natalia (“Natalka”), and one-year-old Valeria (“Valiushka”)—went to their grandmother’s dacha. On August 30, they moved back to Moscow in time for the beginning of the school year. They were accompanied by their nanny, Natasha. Inna turned twelve that day.

That night they came for my mother. I woke up right away. Natasha and Valiusha woke up, too. Natalka was still asleep. Mother kept walking through the rooms with me following behind her in my nightshirt. And Natasha followed after me with Valiushka in her arms. We just kept walking like that in single file around the apartment. At some point, Mother needed to go to the bathroom. In the Karpov apartment, the door to the bathroom had a glass window, with a curtain covering it. When Mother went into the bathroom, the NKVD officer told her to open the curtain and stood watching her. When she came out, we resumed our single-file motion.

I was sobbing the whole time. Mother kept saying: “Don’t worry, sweetie, we’re not guilty of anything. Daddy and I are not guilty of anything. I’ll be back soon.” At about 5 a.m. they took her away. I remember hearing some kind of noises on the stairs the whole time. My mother must not have been the only one to be picked up that night.³⁶

Inna’s friend, Svetlana Khalatova, returned to Moscow at about the same time. Her father, the former director of the State Publishing House and most recently chairman of the All-Union Society of Inventors, Artemy Khalatov, had been arrested on the same day as Aron Gaister. His wife (Svetlana’s mother) was arrested shortly afterward. Svetlana had been in the Artek Young Pioneer Camp in Crimea. When she came back to Moscow, her grandmother told her that her parents had gone to Leningrad, but when they arrived at the House of Government, Inna Gaister, who was playing hopscotch outside, ran up to Svetlana and said: “The same thing happened to you as to us!” Svetlana and her grandmother were transferred to a three-room apartment that they had to share with the younger brother and two children of the head of the Mobilization Department of the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry, Ivan Pavlunovsky, who had been arrested one day after Khalatov and Gaister, and the family of Gaister’s former boss, Mikhail Chernov, who had been arrested on November 7. The Khalatovs and the Pavlunovskys had been neighbors in Entryway 12. Before being assigned to the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry, Pavlunovsky had served as the OGPU plenipotentiary in Siberia and the Caucasus. In Siberia, he had claimed to uncover a counterrevolutionary military organization consisting of White officers, SRs, and kulaks. Pavlunovsky’s success had served as a model for Sergei Mironov’s discovery of the White-SR-kulak alliance within the “Russian All-Military Union.” Mironov’s success had served as a model for Ezhov’s USSR-wide campaign unveiled on June 23, four days before Pavlunovsky’s arrest.³⁷

Rakhil Kaplan’s arrest photographs (Courtesy of Inna Gaister)

Inna, Valeria (Valiushka), and Natalia (Natalka) Gaister after their parents’ arrest (photograph they had made to send to their mother in the camp) (Courtesy of Inna Gaister)

■ ■ ■

The day Gaister and Khalatov were arrested, Arosev returned to Moscow from Leningrad. He had been feeling increasingly isolated and mistrusted. “The time we live in is extraordinarily frightening,” he wrote in his diary on August 13, 1936. “Nobody trusts anybody, and even the very principle of a need for trust has been shaken. They are trying to replace trust with cunning. Everyone is afraid of everyone, everyone wears a frown. No one talks about what matters.” Arosev’s response—the same as Bukharin’s—was to prove himself to history by appealing to chosen individuals. He wrote to Stalin: “I feel depressed because of the coldness and even mistrust that I sense around me. If I have done something wrong, there are two ways of dealing with me: either teach me, lift me up, give me more responsibility and more exciting, useful work, or cast me aside and let me look for new paths in a distant world” (by “distant world” he meant his life in art and, in particular, his “historical-psychological” chronicle of the Revolution). He wrote to Voroshilov: “From you, and only from you, I have always seen deep understanding and, most important, intelligent human kindness. It is not only my personal impression, but the feeling shared by everyone who has been in contact with you, directly or indirectly. That is why the affection that I, and the whole nation, have for you is suffused with a profound personal emotion.” He kept trying to talk to Molotov, whose biography he was writing. He kept calling Ezhov, who, according to an entry in his diary, received him on at least one occasion (May 8, 1935):³⁸

He seemed utterly exhausted: disheveled, pale, a feverish gleam in his eyes, swollen veins in his thin hands. It’s obvious that his work is more than he can take. His khaki tunic was unbuttoned. His secretary kept calling him “Kolia.” She’s a plump, cheerful, aging woman with a teasing manner.

Ezhov looked at me sharply. I told him about VOKS’s “orphanhood.” He understood right away. Also understood about American Institute and immediately set things in motion. About wife’s trip abroad: agreed right away. Promised to help with apartment, too.³⁹

Arosev knew that the general mistrust was justified. The last part of his tetralogy (Winter) was going to be about “the falling off of the de facto alien elements more interested in the process of the revolution than in its results. Trotskyites, Zinovievites. etc.” On August 22, 1936, he wrote in his diary:

The 19th, 20th, 21st, and today: can’t stop thinking about the case of Kamenev, Zinoviev, and the others. The Russian revolutionary movement has always contained demons as well as pure idealists. Degaev was a demon, Nechaev was a demon, Malinovsky was a demon, Bogrov was a demon. Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Trotsky are demons. They are morally sick. They have a hole in place of moral fiber.

Politics is not the same as ethics, but each politician has and must have moral principles. “Demons” do not have them; they have only politics.

Sent a letter to Kaganovich the other day: about trust and about help with my application to go abroad.⁴⁰

In his letter to Kaganovich, he wrote that he and his wife needed to spend a month-and-a-half abroad for health reasons. “I have written all this with the utmost sincerity and leave it up to your judgment,” he concluded. “If you find it possible and expedient to help, please do. With sincere respect, yours, faithfully.” Kaganovich (who had been left in charge while Stalin was on vacation) was busy determining the degree of Bukharin’s insincerity. He had no way of knowing whether Arosev was also a demon. The permission was not granted.⁴¹

On November 6, Arosev’s courier arrived at the People’s Commissariat of External Affairs to pick up passes to the Revolution Day parade but was told there were none left. Arosev wrote to Litvinov and Ezhov reminding them that he had been one of the leaders of the October insurrection in Moscow and asking them to investigate the reason for the snub. (He watched the parade from his House of Government balcony.) On December, 19, Pravda published a short notice about Arosev’s recently printed memoir, October, 1917 (written in 1920). Titled “Advertising for the Enemy,” it asked why Arosev had chosen to end his account with a mention of Tomsky. “Why such touching ‘concern’ for a man who fought against the Party in the ranks of its most vicious enemies?” In a response published in Pravda ten days later (possibly thanks to Molotov, whom he had asked to intercede in his behalf), he admitted that the mention of Tomsky had been a mistake but defended the rest of the memoir as sincere and accurate.⁴²

He believed that he was being followed. According to Voronsky’s daughter, Galina Voronskaia, “once, during those months, my father ran into his old friend, A. Arosev …, who pointed to a man standing nearby. Arosev and my father were both veterans of the Bolshevik underground and were quite good at spotting spies. My father said that the man was probably watching him, but Arosev disagreed, saying that he had first noticed that he was being followed several days earlier.” He had recorded it in his diary. December 20: “Went for a walk in the morning. Followed by spies. At least one on every corner.” December 21: “In the morning went for a walk. Spies chasing at my heels. It must seem odd to them for a man to be out just for a walk.” He wrote to the Politburo about the constant feeling of being “under assault by something unjust or mistaken” and to tell them about his plan to write a novel about enemies of the people “in the form of interrogation transcripts.” He wrote to Stalin on the occasion of Ordzhonikidze’s death:

Perhaps the reason I was so shocked by the news and moved to write to you, of all people, is that I talked to Sergo Ordzhonikidze on two occasions, both at moments of crisis, and met with the deep and, above all, warm understanding that only he was capable of—and that you, dear Iosif Vissarionovich, possess to an enormous degree.

The feeling of loss is painful and acute. It is within me, reaching out to you. For me, for all of us, Sergo was an example and an object of awe; for you, a comrade in arms closer than a brother.

Iosif Vissarionovich, please accept these lines as the sound of my heart, a spasm in my throat rather than words. Yours, Aleksandr Arosev.⁴³

Perhaps Stalin was the only one left. According to Arosev’s diary, Voroshilov, Ezhov, and Kaganovich were too busy and possibly incapable of a deep and warm understanding. Molotov was becoming increasingly aloof. The world of fraternal comradeship had turned into a Hobbesian state of nature. “I can’t remember the last time I heard anyone say anything good, or, at least, not entirely bad, about someone else. When people talk about someone else, they look as if they were chewing and gnawing at a bleeding body. During such conversations, even their mouth movements are repulsive, rodent-like.” Arosev was accused of haughtiness and asked to engage in “self-criticism.”⁴⁴ On March 21, he spoke at a district meeting of Party activists and then wrote down his impressions in his diary:

They shouted angrily, bared their teeth, asked rude questions—let themselves go and seemed happy to be beating up on an Old Bolshevik.

I responded to every comment, not repenting at all (except to take responsibility for the fact that VOKS had employed some Trotskyites). I concluded by saying that I consider it my duty to tell the truth, whether they like it or not.

No one clapped. Stasova and Yagoda’s deputy Prokofiev were there. There was a deathly silence as I walked off the stage. I suddenly felt a chill, as if I were among people from a different social class. I thought of Esenin’s “I am a foreigner in my own land.”⁴⁵

His daughters disliked their stepmother Gertrude (“Gera”), and she disliked him and his daughters. “My wife has locked herself in her apartment and says she wants a separation. Meanwhile, we are facing much greater tragedies than family troubles. Should we let them deprive us of the chance to at least talk to each other and perhaps make it easier to bear the sense of approaching catastrophe?”⁴⁶ On April 15, he was getting ready to leave for Leningrad:

For several days now, Gera has been refusing to talk to me, coming to my apartment for lunch as if to a restaurant. Yesterday morning I broke the silence. She expressed complete indifference, said she was now fine, feeling better, and did not care at all what I thought or did. She spoke in short sentences, and looked at me as if I were an old, discarded piece of furniture.…

When I asked: “So, does this mean the end? Does it mean we’re free?” she responded: “What else did you think? Of course we’re free.” …

Just as I was about to leave for the station, Gera walked in—cold and malicious, as always, without a word of greeting, her eyes like ice. The room suddenly turned arctic.

She had come to look for the key to her apartment. After finding it, she disappeared without a word. I walked over to her apartment to say goodbye. With a smile like the ones you sometimes see on corpses, she held out her dry hand and shook mine. Then I left.⁴⁷

Aleksandr Arosev, Gertrude Freund, and their son, Mitia, in spring 1937

They continued to live together. In early summer 1937, Arosev, Gera, their two-year-old son Mitia, and Arosev’s fourteen-year-old daughter Lena went to Sestroretsk, on the Gulf of Finland. (Seventeen-year-old Natalia lived with her mother, and eleven-year-old Olga was in a pioneer camp.) They stopped briefly in Leningrad on the way, and Arosev left his diaries with his sister, Augusta, who hid them at the bottom of a basket filled with firewood.48 Lena’s account begins in Sestroretsk on June 26, one day before Gaister’s and Khalatov’s arrests:

One evening there was a knock on the door. Two young men in military uniform walked in, one of them a sailor. They said they had come for Gertrude and that they had an arrest order for her. Gera started to cry. My father got angry and said he would not let her go without him. They said it wasn’t allowed, so he told them they would have to wait and ordered a car from the VOKS Leningrad office.

To my surprise, they agreed. This was followed by a strange, unnatural pause. It felt as if life had stopped, or rather, as if a fragment had been edited out of a movie. This went on for quite a while. Finally, we heard a car honk. My father and Gera began to say goodbye. They stood huddled against each other. They were not embracing, but just stood there not moving. Maybe they were silently telling each other something, or perhaps promising … I don’t know. They were saying goodbye. Suddenly Gera started and turned to walk to the bedroom to say goodbye to her son. She stopped and looked back … and I saw her face. I will never forget the look on her face as long as I live. It was pure, indescribable agony. She said softly in German: “No, I cannot do it. Lord, why do you send me such trials?” The two came up on either side and led her away, already under arrest. My father went after them, and I was left alone.

The next morning Arosev and Lena left for Moscow. From the railway station they went straight to the House of Government.

My father spent a long time walking through the rooms, pondering something, and then came up to me and said: “When they come and ring the doorbell, don’t open the door for them.” I was surprised: “What do you mean? They’ll break it down anyway.” “Yes, of course, but we’ll gain a little time.” I have no idea what he intended to do: I couldn’t imagine then, and I can’t now….

My father kept pacing around the room and even tried to joke: “I’ve escaped from exile and prison so many times, but there’s no escaping this place. Why did I have to choose an apartment on the tenth floor? I can’t even jump out a window, it’s so high.” He kept trying to reach Molotov, but whoever answered would either hang up or breathe into the receiver without speaking. My father kept saying: “Viacha, I know it’s you, I can hear you breathing, please say something, tell me what to do!” Finally, after one of these calls, Molotov wheezed into the phone: “See that the children are taken care of,” and hung up. My father said: “So this is the end,” and took me, Mitia, and the nanny to our dacha in Nikolina Gora. There, after lunch, he lay down on the little couch on the terrace, took off his jacket, and covered his face and chest with it. I sat down next to him and refused to budge. Perhaps I sensed that I would never see him again. Finally, he stood up and got ready to leave. We said goodbye. Then he kissed me and said: “Lena, dear, don’t worry, I’ll be back in the morning. For now, you’re in charge. Take care of Mitia.”⁴⁹

According to Arosev’s secretary, he summoned his limousine, went to see Ezhov at the Lubyanka, and never came back. He was sentenced to death twice: the first time, on November 1, by Molotov, Stalin, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and Zhdanov, as part of a Category 1 list that contained 292 names of former high officials, and, the second, on November 22, by Stalin and Molotov. The sentence was not formalized by Ulrikh’s collegium until February 8, 1938. He was shot two days later. Gera had been shot two months before.⁵⁰

■ ■ ■

Arosev’s commander during the October uprising in Moscow, Arkady Rozengolts, had since lost his ability to walk through walls. He was arrested on October 7, 1937. His wife was arrested two weeks later. Their two daughters, ages four and six, were adopted by their maternal grandmother.

Another participant in the Moscow uprising, Osip Piatnitsky, was told at the June plenum that he had lost the Party’s trust. His closest Comintern colleagues, Vilgelm Knorin (Wilhelms Knorins, from Apt. 61) and Béla Kun, were arrested during the plenum and soon started testifying against him. Piatnitsky remained in his House of Government study, pacing up and down in his socks. His wife, Yulia, kept a diary. “I really wanted to die. I suggested it to him (the two of us together), knowing it was wrong. He categorically refused, saying that he was as pure before the Party as the first snow and that he couldn’t leave without first removing the stain against him.” He kept calling Ezhov, asking to be allowed to see his accusers. On the night of July 2, he was summoned to Frinovsky’s office for a formal confrontation. “I kept thinking about his sufferings and lay down in his study to wait for him. Finally, at 3 a.m., he came back. He was utterly exhausted and unhappy. All he said was ‘Things are very bad, Yulia.’ He asked for some water, and I left him.” On July 6, Osip and Yulia went for a long walk around their dacha in Serebrianyi Bor. According to Yulia, it was a “gray, rainy day.” She told him that life for a Bolshevik would be impossible after that, even if he were exonerated. “He asked me not to talk that way. He said, very earnestly and deliberately: ‘After such words, Yulia, it would, indeed, be better for me to shoot myself, but right now it’s out of the question.’”⁵¹ They dropped in on their dacha neighbor, the director of the Special Technology Plant of the Commissariat of Defense Industry, Ilya (Ilko) Tsivtsivadze:

Aron Piatnitsky

Yulia Piatnitskaia

Ilko looked completely green, with bluish lips and tears in his eyes.

In a quiet, trembling voice, he said: “Yesterday I was expelled from the Party.” He told us how it happened.

Piatnitsky was truly something to see. He forgot himself and became just a comrade: he urged Ilko not to torment himself so, comforted him, and offered advice. They parted beautifully. Ilko, shaken and unhappy, gave him his hand. Piatnitsky said: “Think of the things we have done and gone through for the sake of the Party. If the Party requires a sacrifice, no matter how hard, I will bear it all joyfully.”

Was he saying this to comfort Ilko or to sanctify his own last, difficult journey? I do not know … only the tears were choking me, and no one could have been holier or more beautiful to me at that moment than that man.⁵²

The next day, on July 7, Yulia went to work. (She worked as an engineer in a design bureau.) As Yulia wrote in her diary, when Piatnitsky’s chauffeur brought her back to the dacha, he told her that the car would not be available the following day. “That’s when I understood that the arrest would take place very soon. I did not tell Piatnitsky about it, and we ate in oppressive silence. Piatnitsky had become a shadow of his former self and had lost half his weight. I did not act at all sentimental toward him: those last few days there was something special and otherworldly about him. He and I never discussed mundane things (everyday chores and ordinary feelings), in any case.” Their sixteen-year-old son Igor was with them at the dacha. Twelve-year-old Vladimir was at the Artek Young Pioneer Camp (with Svetlana Khalatova, among others).⁵³

Piatnitsky and his son Vladimir (next to him, in the first row) with dacha neighbors

That night several NKVD agents came to arrest Piatnitsky. “Before I could rise, a tall, pale, angry man ran into the room and when I tried to get up from the bed to get my robe that was hanging in the wardrobe, he grabbed me hard by the shoulder and pushed me back toward the bed and away from the wardrobe. He handed me the robe and pushed me out into the living room. I said: ‘So, the black ravens have come. Bastards.’ I repeated the word ‘bastards’ several times.” One of the agents heard Yulia and told her that Soviet citizens did not speak to state officials that way. She kept trembling. “There were moments or perhaps seconds, I’m not sure, when I was not aware of what was going on around me, but then I would come to again … and think that I would never see him again, and get this terrible feeling of helplessness and of the saintliness of his life, his unstinting devotion to the cause of the working class, and here were these people—young, rude, shoving me around …”

Piatnitsky came up to me and said: “Yulia, I had to apologize to them for your behavior. Please be reasonable.” I decided not to upset him and immediately apologized to the “man.” He extended his hand to me, but I did not look at him. I took Piatnitsky’s two hands in mine but did not speak to him. That was our farewell. I wanted to kiss the footprints he had left behind.

I decided to wait … to try to be strong. Igor had not come back yet.

Finally, Igor came. He immediately understood everything. I told him that his father had been taken away and asked him to sleep in his father’s room, but he went upstairs to his own room. I did not get any sleep that night. I don’t know who did. I wanted desperately to die.⁵⁴

Car in Courtyard No. 1

The family—Igor, Yulia, her father (the former priest, whom everyone called “Grandpa”), his second wife, and their daughter—were told to leave their dacha and move from Apt. 400 to Radek’s old apartment in the House. It was very hot, so they kept the windows open and could hear the loud knocking of the pump in the river below (the Big Stone Bridge was about to be moved a few hundred meters to the north). Yulia kept smelling something odd. “I’ve discovered that grief has a certain smell. Igor and I have the same smell, both our bodies and our hair, even though I take a bath every day. Yesterday I even scented the room, but then Grandma came in with her cigarette. She wanted to iron Grandpa’s old, torn pillowcases, while he was taking his bath. Igor was ironing his sheets.”⁵⁵

■ ■ ■

On July 3, the day Arosev was arrested and Piatnitsky returned home from his confrontation, the Politburo had sent out its letter “On Anti-Soviet Elements,” which extended the “extraction” campaign from the former oppositionists and state officials to “kulaks,” “criminals,” and “others.” The arrests began to spread from the House of Government leaseholders and their immediate relatives to the families of the nannies, guards, laundresses, floor-polishers, and stairway cleaners. The German and Polish national operations, launched on July 25 and August 11, added a large new contingent to the target lists, both inside and outside the House. One such person was the former representative of the Communist Party of Poland at the Comintern, Vatslav Bogutsky (Waclaw Bogucki, Apt. 342), whose reaction to the news about Kirov’s assassination had made such a strong impression on his son, Vladimir. Bogutsky was arrested on September 2. Vladimir was sent to an orphanage.⁵⁶

On August 15, Ezhov issued Order No. 00486, mandating the arrest and imprisonment of the “wives of traitors to the motherland” and “those of their children over fifteen years of age who are socially dangerous and capable of engaging in anti-Soviet activities.” The women were to be sentenced to five to eight years in special camps; the socially dangerous children, to various terms in camps, “correctional labor colonies,” or “special-regime orphanages” (“depending on age, degree of danger, and likelihood of rehabilitation”). Children under fifteen were to be placed in regular orphanages; children over fifteen, in orphanages, schools, or workplaces. Adult relatives wishing to “provide full support to the orphans left behind” were “not to be prevented from doing so.”⁵⁷

Most wives and children of arrested House of Government leaseholders—including Moroz’s, Trifonov’s, Gaister’s, Khalatov’s, Voronsky’s, Shumiatsky’s, Piatnitsky’s, and Bogutsky’s—were removed from the House of Government in accordance with this law. Anna Larina was exiled to Astrakhan in June 1937 and then arrested and sent to a camp on September 20; her son was sent to an orphanage. Bukharin’s first wife, Nadezhda Lukina, was arrested in their House of Government apartment on April 30, 1938 (and shot two years later). In Astrakhan, Larina had met the wives and children of the recently executed Tukhachevsky and Yakir. She had also seen Radek’s wife, Roza Mavrikievna, but refused to talk to her because of Radek’s testimony against Bukharin. When both were arrested a month later, Larina received a note from Roza, which said: “Believe me, with N.I. it will all be the same—a trial and false confessions.” In the camp, Larina became friends with Sofia Mikhailovna Averbakh (Sverdlov’s sister, Leopold Averbakh’s mother, and Genrikh Yagoda’s mother-in-law), who had been given permission to write to her eight-year-old grandson, Genrikh (“Garik”) at the orphanage he had been sent to. According to Larina, he responded twice. The first letter said: “Dear Grandma, again I didn’t die! You’re the only one I’ve got in the world, and I’m the only one you’ve got. If I don’t die, when I get big, and you’re already very, very old, I’ll work and take care of you. Your Garik.” The second said: “Dear Grandma, I didn’t die this time, either. I don’t mean the time I already wrote you about. I keep on not dying. Your grandson.”⁵⁸

Transferred back to the Lubyanka in late 1938, Larina first found herself in the same cell with the Central Committee stenographer and, most recently, head of the Political Department of the Northern Sea Route, Valentina Ostroumova (from Apt. 436) and then with Natalia Sats, who “looked like a skinny little girl, but with gray hair” and kept saying: “Where is my Veitser? Surely my Veitser cannot really be dead?”⁵⁹

Natalia Sats had spent the summer of 1937 in the Council of People’s Commissars’ sanatorium in Barvikha, outside of Moscow, going on daily boat rides and listening to Stanislavsky read new chapters from his An Actor’s Work on Himself. On August 21, she was scheduled to meet with the recently appointed first deputy chairman of the Committee for the Arts, Naum Rabichev. Her husband had sent his limousine for her (she had her own, but Veitser’s was much better). According to her memoirs, in Rabichev’s waiting room, there was another person (“a modest, dark-haired young man”), but she was invited in first:

I enter. He meets me at the door and nods toward the chair facing his. Comrade Rabichev is short. He is almost drowning in the large, oversized armchair. The conversation starts very formally: the chairman asks me to report on my theater’s repertoire for the season. I answer eagerly: our plans are well thought through and, I believe, interesting.

There is a notebook in front of him. His right hand is holding a pencil. But he is not writing anything down. He is looking somewhere beyond me. In an indifferent tone of voice, he forces out another question or two.

Suddenly, I notice his left hand. It is resting on the desk opposite his right one. It is small and has—six fingers. I am gripped by fear. No, it cannot be. But yes! One, two, three, four, five, six! Six! Can it be? My nerves must be playing tricks on me.

The chairman has no more questions to ask. He says goodbye.

“Enjoy the rest of your vacation.”

In the lobby, she was approached by the dark-haired man, who had been waiting outside. He said he would like to help her clear up some misunderstanding and drove her to the Lubyanka Prison. She was sentenced to five years in a camp for family members of traitors to the motherland. Veitser was arrested two months later.⁶⁰

It had been five months since Rabichev published his article about the counterrevolutionary dregs; three weeks since his closest friend, the former head of the Military Political Academy Boris Ippo, was arrested; and a few days since his son Vladimir left for the School of Aviation in Irkutsk (instead of the History Department at Moscow University, because his father felt that he was spoiled and needed some discipline). Rabichev’s main job at the time, as both first deputy chairman of the Committee for the Arts and director of the Lenin Museum, was to prepare the celebrations of the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution and supervise the depiction of Lenin in film and on stage. Things did not go perfectly smoothly, and on January 15, 1938, the committee’s head, Platon Kerzhentsev, was fired and presumed arrested (in part because of an unauthorized appearance of Stalin as an episodic character in N. F. Pogodin’s The Man with the Gun at the Vakhtangov Theater). On January 21, Rabichev made a speech on the occasion of the thirteenth anniversary of Lenin’s death. On January 24, he shot himself in his study in the House of Government. His wife and mother-in-law were at home at the time.⁶¹

Naum Rabichev

Rykov’s daughter Natalia was, like Anna Larina, first exiled (in her case, to Tomsk) and then arrested. She left the House of Government on September 27, four days after the arrest of Ivan Kuchmin—the prototype for Leonid Leonov’s Aleksei Kurilov in The Road to Ocean. Kuchmin’s family (wife, sister-in-law, and two children) were exiled to Yaroslavl, where they slept in doorways until Kuchmin’s wife, Stefania Arkhipovna, got a job in the provincial education department. Kuchmin’s boss, the director of the Central Administration of Railroad Construction and former director of Berezniki Chemical Works, Mikhail Granovsky, was arrested several days later (soon after the family came back from a trip to Sochi). According to his son, Anatoly, who was fifteen at the time,

On November 5, 1937, my father returned from his office at about 11 o’clock at night, earlier than he usually did. He had with him our pass cards for attendance at the parades on the seventh as well as an invitation to the celebrations at the Bolshoi Theater commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the Revolution. This was to be on the morrow, which would coincide with my father’s birthday.

Tired after a hard day’s work, he took a glass of vodka and together with mother, brother Valentin and myself, drank the traditional toast to his birthday which would begin in a few minutes’ time. We saw his birthday in and all went to bed.

At four o’clock in the morning we were all awakened by a loud knocking on the door of our apartment.⁶²

After the search was finished and Granovsky was taken away, the family was told to move one floor down to Apt. 416, which contained several other families of recently arrested officials. They moved the next day, amidst Revolution Day festivities. According to Anatoly, his mother, “who had always been beautiful and had always appeared young, now grew suddenly old and pathetic. She sat all day quite still on a hard chair with her hands in her lap and said nothing. There was something terrifying about her. In her silence and immobility, as though hypnotized, she yet gave the impression of something slowly happening, like the cocoon when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. Only, she had been the butterfly first.”⁶³

Kuchmin’s and Granovsky’s colleague, the head of the Cargo Department of the People’s Commissariat of Transportation and Lazar Kaganovich’s deputy, Semen (“Siunia”) Gaister, from Apt. 98, had been arrested two months earlier. According to his niece, Inna Gaister, “After my father’s arrest, Siunia was fired from his job and expelled from the Party. He sat at home waiting to be arrested. Later, the kids from his courtyard told me that the whole entryway had heard him screaming wildly as he was being dragged down the stairs: ‘Lazar Moiseevich! Lazar Moiseevich, don’t you know what’s happening? Lazar Moiseevich, please help me!’”⁶⁴

■ ■ ■

Osinsky’s wife and children spent the summer of 1937 on Lake Valdai, fishing, hiking, kayaking, and sleeping in the hayloft of a farmhouse that Osinsky’s sister, Galina, had rented. Valia was fifteen, Rem fourteen, and Svetlana twelve. Twenty-five-year-old Dima was there with his pregnant wife, Dina. Suddenly, to everyone’s surprise, Osinsky showed up, too. “It was a huge event,” wrote Svetlana:

Valerian Osinsky and Svetlana at Lake Valdai (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

He brought his work with him, his higher mathematics. Everyone was worried: where was he going to work? Where was he going to sleep? He slept in the hayloft with us and, during the day, surprised everyone by working very little and going for walks with us instead.

I have a small, amateur photograph of my father and me during our trip to the island, which still had a working monastery at that time. We are sitting with our knees pulled up. I’m barefoot, with my arms around my knees, squinting from the bright sun and looking at the photographer. I’m wearing a hat with a broad brim, bought at the Valdai market. My father, as always in the summer, is dressed all in white, including his shoes. He had very sensitive skin and suffered from eczema. He is also squinting through his pince-nez, his ears protruding slightly. He has a small moustache, and his hands are clasped behind his knees. He doesn’t have his arm around me, and I’m not leaning against him: we are in our own separate worlds. I remember that moment so well! I was happy to be photographed with him, this distant and rather aloof father of mine, who had deigned to go with us to that island and had even chosen to have his picture taken not with Valia, but with me! I felt very grown up and close to him.⁶⁵

Soon after they returned to the House of Government, Dima’s wife, Dina, gave birth to a baby boy. They named him Ilya. Svetlana and the two younger boys went back to school. “My father was arrested in the middle of the night on October 14, 1937 (and Dima was taken away with him the same night). The last time I saw him was the evening before his arrest, when he and my mother came to our room to say good night. I remember asking them to buy me some kind of special knee-high socks like the ones a girl in my school had. My father was sitting by the desk and listening absent-mindedly, with an ironic smile that did not seem to fit the occasion.”⁶⁶

The agents entered the apartment using their own key. Svetlana was asleep, but “according to Dina, in the middle of the night my mother, who was sleeping in her own room at the opposite end of the corridor from my father’s study, was awakened by a bright light flooding the hallway. She ran out, half-dressed, to see what was happening. My father was being escorted to the door. ‘Farewell!’ he cried out. ‘Sell the books, sell everything!’” Svetlana woke up after Osinsky and Dima had been taken away.

The light was on in our room and seemed unusually bright and bare. My brothers were sitting up in their beds, mechanically watching the movements of two or three men, rummaging through our books. “Hush,” my mother said—“lie still. Your father and Dima have been arrested.”—I froze, frightened by the half-understood words, then sat up and started watching the search, too. The agents were very thorough and deliberate, flipping through and shaking out each book and then, with a look of satisfaction, smoothing out any pieces of paper they came across—notes, probably—and stacking them on the desk. These discoveries made them happy. After that they started pulling out our desk drawers and going through everything in them, and then concluded the search by lifting up each of our mattresses from both ends—the head and the foot, without asking us to get up first, in order to see if there was anything hidden underneath. My mother sat impassively, with a look of contempt on her face, and when they left, stood up, turned off the light, and walked out of the room. We lay there silent and still. Then I fell asleep.⁶⁷

Three days later, the agents came back for Svetlana’s mother. Several months later, they came back again:

They needed to get a suit for my father and some books for him. The list of books, both Russian and foreign, was in his handwriting. They looked for what they needed, but couldn’t find everything. They used the phone in our corridor to make a call, and I could hear my father speaking on the other end! He told them where to look for the books. But they still had to ask us for help. Valia and I went into the room where, four months earlier, we had sat on the huge couch next to our father listening to him read Turgenev’s On the Eve, and where one evening I had been timidly examining Doré’s illustrations to the Divine Comedy and been caught at it by my father, but he hadn’t gotten angry (even though we were forbidden to touch his books without permission) and had said that we would read Dante at some point.⁶⁸

Valia, Rem, and Svetlana were taken to an orphanage. Dina was exiled to Kharkov. Her son, Ilya, was raised by her mother.

■ ■ ■

Svetlana Osinskaia (right) with Dina and Ilya soon after her parents’ arrest (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

Osinsky had been a recluse—or thought he had, for certain purposes—since the February–March plenum of 1937, when Postyshev, among others, had forced him to account for his silence. Postyshev had also come under attack at the plenum—for nepotism, high-handedness, and suppression of criticism, but had been given a second chance and a new job as first secretary of the Kuibyshev Provincial Party Committee. (His wife, T. S. Postolovskaia, who had been Ukraine’s chief ideologist during his tenure there, had been expelled from the Party for her part in the suppression of criticism.) In Kuibyshev, he started slowly and was soon visited by the Politburo member A. A. Andreev, who told him to step up the fight against the enemy underground. Postyshev responded by expelling 3,300 people from the Party and disbandeding thirty-five of the sixty-five district Party committees. According to his deputy, “Comrade Postyshev changed his way of doing things. He started going around yelling that there were no decent people left, and that there were lots of enemies.… For two weeks, all the district secretaries and their staffs ran around with magnifying glasses. Comrade Postyshev set the example: he summoned all the district committee representatives to his office, picked up a magnifying glass, and started examining a batch of school notebooks. Later they tore off all the covers of those notebooks because they supposedly found a fascist swastika or some such thing on them. It got to the point where they were finding fascist symbols on cookies, candy, and other items.”⁶⁹

In January 1938, Stalin decided to slow down the purge of local Party officials (while intensifying the “mass operations,” over which the newly appointed Party officials were to preside). Postyshev was accused of staging a witch hunt against honest Communists, fired from his job in Kuibyshev, and, according to the official statement, “placed at the disposal of the Central Committee.” According to Postyshev’s son Leonid, who had recently been admitted to the military aviation school in Liubertsy, outside of Moscow (thanks to Voroshilov’s intercession), Postyshev was relieved not to receive a harsher punishment, confident of an appointment to the Party Control Commission, and happy to be back in his House of Government apartment. At the hastily convened Central Committee plenum in mid-January 1938, he apologized for his mistakes but continued to assert, in line with the policy he had been sent to Kuibyshev to enforce, that most local officials were enemies. Taunted and interrupted repeatedly (“Weren’t there any honest people there?”), he pleaded sincerity, but was told that not all sincerity was worthy of trust. When he was given the floor at the end of the discussion, he said:

I can only say one thing, comrades, and that is that I admit that the speech I made here was fully and totally incorrect and incompatible with the Party spirit. I can’t even understand myself how I could have made that speech. I ask the Central Committee plenum to forgive me. Not only have I never associated with enemies, but I have always fought against enemies. I have always fought against the enemies of the people alongside the Party with all my Bolshevik soul, and I will always fight against the enemies of the people with all my Bolshevik soul. I have made many mistakes. I did not understand them. I may not have understood them completely even now. All I can say is that I have made an incorrect speech incompatible with the Party spirit, and that I ask the Central Committee plenum to forgive me for making it.⁷⁰

He was removed from his position as candidate member of the Politburo and replaced by Khrushchev. A month later, the Control Commission found that whereas many of the Party members he had expelled as enemies of the people were actually honest Communists, many of those he had retained as honest Communists were actually enemies of the people. He was removed from the Central Committee and expelled from the Party. A day or two later, when Leonid came home for a visit, his father told him that he and his mother would soon be arrested and that he, Leonid, would also be arrested—and that it was probably a good thing because he would become stronger and wiser as a consequence. The next day, on the night of February 21, a group of NKVD agents came to arrest Postyshev. Several hours later, a different group of NKVD agents came to arrest his wife, T. S. Postolovskaia. Leonid’s two brothers were arrested soon afterward. Leonid went to see a public prosecutor, who told him that he could not help because he, too, would soon be arrested. He was, according to Leonid, shortly thereafter. Leonid himself was not arrested until 1942.⁷¹

Pavel Postyshev and Tatiana Semenovna Postolovskaia

■ ■ ■

Sergei Mironov returned from Mongolia and moved into the House of Government about two weeks after Postyshev’s arrest. One of their new neighbors was their Novosibirsk host, Robert Eikhe, who had since been appointed people’s commissar of agriculture and moved into Apt. 234. There is no evidence that they saw each other socially in the House of Government. On April 29, 1938, about three weeks after Mironov’s arrival, Eikhe and his wife, Evgenia Evseevna Rubtsova, were arrested.

Another West Siberian top official and Eikhe’s and Mironov’s close collaborator, the director of the Kuznetsk Steel Plant, Konstantin Butenko, moved in at about the same time as Mironov. In early January 1938, he and his wife Sofia, the women’s volunteer movement activist, had traveled by train from Stalinsk (Novokuznetsk) to Moscow to attend the session of the Supreme Soviet. (He was thirty-six; she was thirty-three; and both were beneficiaries of worker-and-peasant promotion programs.) Sofia could still remember a certain day of that journey sixty years later:

We were in the international car…. We had this Novokuznetsk-Moscow express train, and one car was always international…. You know, because that’s where all the officials would be. Right. So there we were in that train, traveling on and on, and then one night somewhere outside of Omsk, or maybe even before Omsk (I’m not sure, but, in any case, it used to take four and a half days because there weren’t any planes back then, or at least not the passenger kind) … so anyway, suddenly, in the middle of the night, there was a knock on the door. My husband was sleeping on the upper bunk, so that means I was below. It was a double…. I opened the door and it was the conductor. “I’m very sorry, but I have an urgent confidential telegram for your husband.” But the train was still going at full speed! I took the piece of paper, unfolded it—and then I quickly turned on the light and woke up my Kostia…. He sat with his feet hanging down and read out loud: “Omsk-Tomsk Railway. International Car” … But above that it says “Top secret.” “To Butenko, director of the Kuznetsk Steel Plant. Butenko, Konstantin Ivanovich. You have been appointed deputy commissar of heavy industry. Cable candidate replacement immediately. Kaganovich.”⁷²

They were put up in a three-room luxury suite in the recently completed Moscow Hotel in front of the Kremlin while their House of Government apartment (Apt. 141, formerly occupied by the arrested deputy commissar of health of the Russian Federation, Valentin Kangelari) was being cleaned and renovated. In early April, they moved in: Konstantin, Sofia, and Sofia’s niece, Tamara, who had been living with them since the famine of 1932. (Sofia’s family came from the Greek settlement of Styla, near Stalino. Her brother Ivan, a miner, had been arrested in late December, about a week after Ezhov launched the “Greek operation”; her other brother, Nikolai, a collective farmer and Tamara’s father, had been arrested in early January, around the time Konstantin received his new appointment.) The apartment had four rooms. The biggest was made into a study for Konstantin and was furnished with a large desk, a desk chair, a rocking chair, and a couple of wardrobes they had brought with them from Stalinsk. The others became Tamara’s room, a bedroom for Sofia and Konstantin, and a dining room. They had lived there for about a month and a half when Konstantin was arrested. The agents entered quietly in the middle of the night and surrounded the bed before waking him up. During the search, they took Konstantin’s Order of Lenin, but let Sofia keep her Badge of Honor. Several days later, Sofia got a job at a hat factory on Bolshaia Ordynka. She was not used to getting up early and did not have an alarm clock, so the entryway guards, who seemed to have recognized a fellow former peasant, agreed to wake her up every morning by ringing the doorbell. About a month later, Sofia and Tamara were asked to move to a communal apartment on the tenth floor, and were then evicted altogether. Tamara went back to Styla; Sofia found a room in Gorokhovsky Alley and got a job in a medical lab. The Butenkos’ House of Government apartment was taken over by the former head of the Gulag, Matvei Berman, who had recently been appointed people’s commissar of communications.⁷³

Konstantin Butenko

■ ■ ■

The Central Committee of the Young Communist League (Komsomol) was purged twice. In August 1937, thirty-five members and candidate members were arrested for trying “to corrupt young people politically and morally, especially through alcohol,” and for having become “young ‘old men’” married to “grandes dames.” One of those elected to replace them was the twenty-seven-year-old Serafim Bogachev, who moved into the House of Government with his wife, Lydia, and their newborn daughter, Natasha. Over the course of the next year, Serafim and Lydia got used to the barrenness of their new apartment, bought two new carpets, found a good nanny, and brought both their peasant mothers to help around the house. They still felt out of place, however, and rarely spent any time at home: he worked long hours in the Central Committee; she prepared for college entrance exams and went to volleyball practice. On November 19–22, 1938, Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, and several other Party leaders convened an extraordinary (seventh) plenum of the Komsomol Central Committee and announced that the work of self-cleansing mandated by the Party had not been done; honest young Communists had not been heard; and counterrevolutionary terrorists had not been unmasked. The general secretary of the Komsomol Central Committee, Aleksandr Kosarev (Apt. 209) confessed his errors but claimed that he had “never betrayed the Party and the Soviet people” and that his conscience was clear. His speech was officially characterized as “thoroughly duplicitous and anti-Party.” “Are you really such a political newborn,” asked Zhdanov, “that you didn’t know you were supposed to report to the plenum on everything having to do with the behavior of the Central Committee bureau?” “Perhaps it’s a pattern, and not just mistakes?” asked Stalin. Kosarev could not answer these questions, and neither could Bogachev. An incomplete confession was duplicitous and anti-Party; a complete confession meant unmasking oneself as a wrecker. For Bogachev, not denouncing his patron was duplicitous and anti-Party; denouncing him raised the fatal question of why he had not done it before. As the Central Committee member A. A. Andreev put it, “[Bogachev] is following the rotten non-Bolshevik former leadership of the Komsomol Central Committee in everything. In everything! He has not shown any independence. On the contrary, he has adopted all the negative aspects of Kosarev’s leadership style.”⁷⁴

Bogachev was expelled from the Komsomol Central Committee along with Kosarev. He wrote a letter to Stalin. The Central Committee of the Party told him to expect another assignment. He seemed relieved. On November 27, one week after the plenum, he and Lydia walked over to the Shock Worker to see Aleksandr Macheret’s newly released Swamp Soldiers (based on Yuri Olesha’s screenplay about the arrest, imprisonment, and eventual escape of a group of German antifascists). According to Lydia, at some point she realized that Serafim was not watching. She suggested that they go home, but he said it would not be right to walk out before the end. When they got back to their apartment, he asked her to read aloud to him. She read Jack London’s White Fang for a while, and then they went to bed.

We were asleep. My husband was by the wall, closer to the window, and I was on the outside. I woke up because there were people staring at me. Just standing there staring in total silence. Our little girl was sick at the time, so I had had to get up during the night. But right then I was asleep. I was terrified. I couldn’t speak. I kept rubbing my eyes: “Is this a dream or am I just imagining it?” Then they said: “Who’s that sleeping with you?” And I said: “My husband.” I told them who we were. “Don’t wake him.” They told me to leave the bedroom. But first they asked: “Where are your weapons? Put all your weapons on the table!” They asked him, too, when he woke up. But he was confused and couldn’t figure out what was going on. So he said: “Ask her where the weapons are, I don’t know.” He had some kind of engraved gun, it was a gift. And there was a rifle, but it was back in Kolomna. A hunting one. He liked to hunt. The engraved one was in the trunk. I pulled it out. The trunk was right there. I gave them the gun. But I wasn’t thinking clearly. I couldn’t even talk, let alone scream. I was completely dazed. It was frightening. I was still very young. And he was twenty-seven when we got married, so he must have been twenty-eight at the time.⁷⁵

One NKVD agent who stayed behind after the search seemed friendly. “The first thing he said was: ‘Get dressed.’ I was still walking around in my nightshirt. I couldn’t take anything in. I’d catch the first two letters—but not the rest. My mother kept following me around with my robe for me to cover myself with.” A few days later, Lydia, her daughter, and her mother went back to Kolomna, where Lydia got a job as a draftswoman at a factory.⁷⁶

On November 17, 1938, two days before the Komsomol plenum, the Politburo had abolished extrajudicial “troikas” and discontinued the mass operations. A week later (two days before Bogachev’s arrest), Ezhov had been fired and replaced by Beria.⁷⁷

When Anatoly Granovsky, now sixteen, heard about Ezhov’s dismissal, he went to the NKVD headquarters to ask whether his father’s case might not be reviewed, but was turned away at the door. The next day, he went to Red Square and started pacing up and down in front of the Lenin Mausoleum. When a plainclothes NKVD agent asked him what he was doing, he said that he wanted to be arrested in order to talk to Comrade Beria. He was taken to Lubyanka Prison, beaten, and accused of planning an assassination attempt against the members of the Politburo.⁷⁸