The House of Government

29

THE END OF CHILDHOOD

When Maksim Vasilievich Zaitsev, chairman of the Information Section of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, and his wife, Vera Vladimirovna Vedeniapina, member of the Presidium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, from Apt. 468, were arrested in the spring of 1938, their twelve-year-old son, Igor Zaitsev, wrote a poem titled “Alone”:

Nothing made sense to me.

I wandered, and brooded, and cried,

I thought of a Yalta pony

That took me around for a ride.

I called out for Mom and Dad

I broke into a sweat

I bit my lip till it bled,

I lit up a cigarette.

I have to go looking for food,

No one will help me now.

Will I grow up to be good?

Can I be good somehow?¹

Vladimir (Vova) Osepian, from Apt. 60, was also twelve when his parents (deputy head of the Red Army’s Political Department, Gaik Aleksandrovich Osepian, and personnel officer in the Political Department at the Commissariat of Transportation, Elizaveta Fadeevna Gevorkian) were arrested. Three years later, in June 1940, he wrote a letter to the commander of the camp where his mother was serving her eight-year sentence as a family member of a traitor to the motherland. His father had been executed (“sentenced to ten years with no right to correspondence”) on September 10, 1937. He had moved in with his mother’s father and changed his last name:

Igor Zaitsev

Vova Gevorkian (Osepian) with his parents

Petition

It has been three years since I last saw my mother. I have been living with almost complete strangers. It is very hard for me to live without my dear Mommy. I miss her very much. I ask you, I beg you to allow me a visit with my Mommy. She is very sick and I am afraid I may never see her again. I count on your kindness and hope that you will not refuse. My mother, Elizaveta Fadeevna Gevorkian, receives our letters at the following address: Novo-Sibirsk Province, Tomsk Railroad, Station Yaya, P.O. Box No. 247/13.

Anxiously awaiting your reply at the

address Marx Street 20, Apartment 12,

Vova Gevorkian

Greetings, Vova Gevorkian

The resolution across the page read: “Hand to Prisoner Gevorkian. Write a petition requesting a visit.”²

■ ■ ■

Volodia Moroz, the fifteen-year-old son of the former head of the Cheka Investigations Department, Grigory Moroz, gave up trying to be good. After his parents’ arrest, he and his eight-year-old brother, Aleksandr, were sent to Orphanage No. 4 in the village of Annenkovo in Kuznetsk District, Kuibyshev Province. On December 7, 1937, he wrote in his diary:

Again I feel so miserable and alone. But what can I do? Absolutely nothing. The same thought keeps going through my head, over and over again: “What am I guilty of?”

Why did they send me here, into this undeserved exile? …

I thought of writing a letter to Stalin, but then changed my mind: he won’t believe me anyway and won’t understand, even though he’s considered a genius.

I’ll keep it as a last resort. My only consolations are nature, cigarettes, and books.

The nature here is really extraordinary. A person from the capital would be amazed by it, while rejecting it as a “pastoral delight.”

The vast meadows, covered with crystal snow, the small peasant huts, clean and cozy on the inside and unprepossessing on the outside, the river, the forest, and finally, looming over them all, the white stone building of Orphanage No. 4, in which I have the honor to reside—all this is beautiful but at the same time unpleasant as a reminder of my undeserved exile.

Most of the teachers in the local school were “uncultured and ignorant.” Life at school and in the country at large was being poisoned by “sycophancy, lies, slander, infighting, and other squabbles.”

But why? Is it because the people are base? No, it’s because a few scoundrels holding all the power in their hands are base.

If a person who had fallen into a deep sleep twelve years ago were to wake up now, he would be amazed by the changes that had taken place.

He wouldn’t find the old leaders. Instead, he would see a government of callow fools, who had done nothing for the victory of the revolution, or aged scoundrels, who had sold out their comrades for the sake of their personal well-being. He wouldn’t see the “former” legendary Red Army commanders, the builders and organizers of the revolution, the talented writers, journalists, engineers, artists, theater directors, diplomats, statesmen, etc. Everything is new: the people, the human relations, the contradictions, the country as a whole. Everything has taken on a new appearance. But have things changed for the better? On the surface, yes. In essence, no. Toadies are respected; slanderers are apparently excoriated but in fact feared; and scoundrels are in fashion.

Thousands of people are unhappy. Thousands of people are badly, dreadfully embittered. This bitterness will burst forth and wash away all this filth. Happiness will triumph!

Volodia’s style and imagery were influenced by contemporary political rhetoric, but his main inspiration, both stylistic and programmatic, came from the books he had read in the House of Government (and continued to read in the orphanage school). Amid the crystal snow of distant exile, the aesthetic of Soviet happy childhood reasserted itself along familiar golden age lines. When Volodia heard from his brother that three more women from the House had “followed their husbands,” he wrote:

Insatiable beasts, have you not had enough sacrifices? Go on destroying, robbing, and killing, but remember that the day of reckoning will come. Remember Lermontov:

The court and justice may condone your crime

But God’s tribunal stands beyond all time.

The dread Judge waits, and on his lips, behold

No smile responds to clink of bribing gold.

According to Volodia’s diary, the reign of terror had begun the day Kirov was murdered and had now destroyed the state that Lenin had built:

The whole top layer of the Party and government have been arrested. Meanwhile, their old friends from prerevolutionary prisons and exiles are trying to save themselves by screaming: “Death to the enemy of the people,” “Death to the spies,” etc. And they call this justice!

It is amazing. A handful of well-fed, fat people are brazenly ruling over a population, 90 percent of whom are unhappy people. Molchalinism and Khlestakovism are flourishing. The facade of general progress is concealing the decline in morality in our country. I feel like crying out:

How much longer will the Russians

Be their masters’ mute possessions?

Men and women,

Just like cattle,

How much longer will be sold?³

Molchalin is the toady from Aleksandr Griboedov’s Woe from Wit (1825); Khlestakov is the braggart from Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General (1836); the poem is by the Decembrist Kondraty Ryleev, who was hanged for attempted regicide in 1826.

On January 20, 1938, Volodia wrote a letter to his seventeen-year-old brother Samuil (Mulia), who was sharing Apt. 402 in the House of Government with his friend Nikolai Demchenko while working at the nearby Institute of Local History and Museum Studies (inside the “Little Church”):⁴

Dear Mulia: When are you finally going to write?!

I beg you: write and write again! But don’t write anything important in your letter. Remember—absolutely nothing. It’s obvious that they are not giving me your letters. Mulia, as soon as you get this letter, send me some cigarettes. I have nothing to smoke. I have no money. I am completely miserable. Soon I will write such a letter to the NKVD that they will put me away in a safe place. Let them, I’ll be glad of it!!! They want me to become stupid, they want to make sure I won’t be able to fight against evil, which is to say, against them, but that trick is not going to work. The gentlemen from the NKVD have miscalculated. I’ll be fighting, screaming, and sounding the bell! I’ll be talking about their cruelty and direct violence everywhere! I am not afraid of them now! Down with fear!

Long live the struggle!

Mulia, write to me, and then write again and again. I am waiting for your letter and parcel.

Love,

Vova⁵

Samuil never received the letter because he was arrested on the day it was mailed. On February 18, having heard about Samuil’s arrest from a House of Government friend, Volodia wrote to Stalin, describing his parents’ unexplained arrest and his own undeserved exile:

Imagine my position in the orphanage. I have turned into a kind of misanthrope: I avoid people, see hidden enemies everywhere, have lost all faith in humanity. Why am I lonely? Only because the general intellectual level of the children in the orphanage and at the local school is so much lower than mine. This is not a boast. And the school? The school is so pathetic, and the teachers, with two exceptions, are so mediocre that I do not even feel like attending. I wish to receive as much knowledge as possible, and here I’m not even receiving the bare minimum. How can I be satisfied in such conditions? You may think that I am too effete and sentimental, but that is not at all the case. All I demand is happiness—genuine, lasting happiness. Lenin said: “In the Land of the Soviets, there should be no destitute children; let all young citizens be happy.” But am I happy? No, I am not. So who is happy? You must have heard of the “gilded youth” from the tsarist period. Sad as it sounds, such “gilded youth” exist today, too. They are mostly children of important, esteemed people. These children do not respect anything: they drink, lead dissolute lives, and are rude to others. Most of them are terrible students, although they are given every opportunity to study. They are the ones who are happy! It seems strange, but it’s true. Comrade Stalin, I am sinking farther and farther, falling with dizzying speed into a dark abyss from which there is no escape. Please save me, help me, and don’t let me perish!

I believe that is everything. I hope you will answer soon and help me.

I await your response with great anticipation. Vl. Moroz.⁶

Two months later he was arrested. At first he denied his guilt, but when the interrogator showed him his letters, he admitted that the arrest of his parents and especially the arrest of his brother had provoked in him the feeling of “hatred toward the Soviet state and the leaders of the Communist Party and Soviet government.” He was found guilty of counterrevolutionary activity, but, as a minor, he could not be formally charged according to article 58–10, part 1, of the criminal code. After a special review by the attorney general’s office, he was sentenced to three years in a labor camp.⁷

Volodia Moroz shortly before his parents’ arrest

A year later, on September 9, 1939, Volodia’s mother, Fanni Lvovna Kreindel, who was being held in the Temnikovsky Camp for Family Members of Traitors to the Motherland, wrote to the new commissar of internal affairs, Lavrenty Beria, that her sons “could not have committed any crimes independently” and that they had probably been arrested as “family members,” in clear violation of Comrade Stalin’s statement that sons should not answer for the crimes of their fathers. “I have been working honestly from an early age and even in the camp I have been, since January 1938, working in my professional capacity, as a pharmacist. I am enduring my imprisonment as a family member courageously, but the fact that my children are suffering at such an early age is depriving me of all strength, and only the hope of your legal intervention and review of my children’s case gives me the strength to endure this suffering, too.”⁸

Kreindel’s petition was reviewed by an official of the NKVD’s Special Commission, Captain of State Security Chugunikhin, who found that Samuil had been convicted independently as a member of an anti-Soviet organization and that Volodia had revealed himself to be “viciously hostile toward the leaders of the Communist Party and Soviet government.” On March 25, 1940, Chugunikhin formally rejected Kreindel’s appeal. Neither one of them knew that almost a year earlier, on April 28, 1939, Volodia had died in prison of “tuberculosis of the lungs and intestines.”⁹

■ ■ ■

Stalin probably never read Volodia’s letter, but he would hear more about the “gilded youth.” On June 3, 1943, on the Big Stone Bridge, the fourteen-year-old Volodia Shakhurin (the son of the people’s commissar of aviation industry, Aleksei Shakhurin) shot the fifteen-year-old Nina Umanskaia (the daughter of the newly appointed Soviet ambassador to Mexico, Konstantin Umansky) and then shot himself. Nina died on the spot (on the stairs leading to the House of Government). Volodia, who lived on Granovsky Street (the former Fifth House of Soviets) died in the hospital the next day. The police investigation revealed that Volodia had been determined not to allow Nina to follow her father to Mexico; that he had borrowed the gun from Mikoyan’s fifteen-year-old son, Vano, who always carried one to school (as did his brother, the thirteen-year-old Sergo); and that he had been the leader of a secret society that included Leonid Barabanov (the fourteen-year-old son of the head of Mikoyan’s secretariat, Aleksandr Barabanov), Feliks Kirpichnikov (the fourteen-year-old son of the deputy chairman of Gosplan, Petr Kirpichnikov), Artem Khmelnitsky (the fourteen-year-old son of the director of the Exhibition of Military Trophies, Rafail Khmelnitsky), Petr Bakulev (the fifteen-year-old son of Moscow’s surgeon general, Aleksandr Bakulev), Armand Hammer (the nephew of the American “red millionaire” by the same name), Leonid Redens (the fifteen-year-old son of the late Stanislav Redens and Stalin’s sister-in-law, Anna Allilueva), and Sergo Mikoyan.

Unlike Volodia Moroz, whose Byronism had stayed within the romantic mode by evolving from scorn for surrounding mediocrity to a self-sacrificial rebellion against injustice, Volodia Shakhurin had moved toward Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin—and beyond. His dream had been to create a world government that would combine the might and the ruthlessness of the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany. He had called it the Fourth Reich and himself the Reichsführer. His bedside reading had been Nietzsche and Hitler’s Mein Kampf (available in Russian translations to high Party and state officials). The other boys claimed to have been indifferent to his intellectual quest, but they did seem to enjoy the trappings of secrecy and the esoteric reenactment of their fathers’ power and privilege. (They were all students in School No. 175, also attended by Svetlana Molotova, who was the same age, and Svetlana Stalina, who was three years older.) After a five-month investigation, the boys were sentenced to one year of exile “in various cities of Siberia, the Urals, and Central Asia.”¹⁰

Volodia Shakhurin

Nina Umanskaia

Anatoly Granovsky (b. 1922), the son of the director of the Berezniki Chemical Plant, Mikhail Granovsky, belonged to an earlier generation of “gilded youth” (which also included Stalin’s son Vasily and adopted son Artem Sergeev). According to his memoirs, he and his friends “danced, flirted with girls, went to the theater, had parties and enjoyed [themselves] tremendously” until November 6, 1937, when his father was arrested. On January 27, 1938, he asked to be arrested, too, in the hope of seeing his father. After almost six months in prison, three severe beatings, several eye-opening conversations with cellmates, and lots of Goethe, Hugo, Balzac, and Tolstoy, he wrote a letter to Beria, pledging his loyalty to the NKVD. On July 20, 1939, he was released in exchange for a formal commitment to serve as a secret agent. His job was to reestablish contact with his old friends from the House of Government and provoke the children of the enemies of the people into revealing their hostility toward the Soviet state.

His first assignments were Igor Peters, the son of the prominent Chekist and Party Control official, Yakov (Jēkabs) Peters, formerly of Apt. 181, and Aleksandr Kulkov, the son of the Party Control and Moscow Party Committee official, Mikhail Kulkov, formerly of Apt. 268. In his memoirs, he describes a sleepless night at the Botkin Hospital, where he was being treated for his prison injuries (a hernia and a damaged cheekbone): “I would have to spy on my friends. And my murdered father, or my imprisoned father, or my tortured father would be a bait to entice their indiscretion.” But did he have a choice? Did he need a choice? “It was still dark as I lay there on my back in the comfortable bed and I knew I must think this thing out. Even when one sees one is trapped one must think. Of course, it was quite logical. It was the most logical thing in the world. I belonged to two conflicting parties, one of which could hurt me while the other could not. It was quite logical that I should be asked to serve the former by betraying the latter. What reason had I to expect sentiment to sway the stronger party one way or the other? None. If I was dejected it meant I was still a child.”¹¹

But he was no longer a child. He was seventeen years old, his father was gone, and he had his helpless mother and two little brothers to look after. And did he really have any friends?

I remembered Butyrki Prison, and the degradation in which we had lived for a year before that. Had anyone helped us then? Bruskin had helped, but Bruskin had gone, liquidated. But what about the others on our side of the fence, had any of them offered help? Roubles and kopeks apart, the help of a hand to lift a heavy cupboard, the help of a visit, of a kind word? No one had helped, only Erik Korkmasov who had posted a letter to my mother. Who were my friends, then? As I lay quietly awake in the dark, I almost smiled to myself with relief. I had no friends. I owed loyalty to none but those who could exact it from me—and to myself.¹²

Aleksandr Bruskin, the former director of the Cheliabinsk Tractor Plant and people’s commissar of machine tool industry (from Apt. 49), had been a friend of his father’s who had given him a job as a turner’s assistant after his father’s arrest. Erik (Jelal-Erast) Korkmasov, the son of the recently arrested former chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of Dagestan and deputy secretary of the Chamber of Nationalities, Jelal-Ed-Din Korkmasov (from Apt. 401), had been his best friend, whom he had asked to post his farewell letter to his mother before leaving for the NKVD headquarters. Otherwise, he had no friends and was, therefore, in no position to betray anyone. He had become what others called a “bad person,” that is, one who owed loyalty to none but those who could exact it from him—and to himself (as well as to his immediate family—something implied in the definition of a “bad person”).

When Igor Peters told him that he had renounced his parents, he responded, by way of provocation, that a person who was so quick to betray his parents could not be trusted not to betray his friends and lovers. Igor punched him in the face, but he did not punch back, even though he was stronger. He was going to punish Igor for betraying his parents (and for punching him in the face) by betraying Igor to the secret police. He did, but the chain had come full circle when his NKVD supervisor told him to stop reporting on Igor because Igor was now a secret agent, too. For Granovsky, the Soviet Faust—including the cult of self-reflexivity and “work on oneself”—was ultimately about the pact with the devil. He was Lyova Fedotov’s evil double: he, too, pursued limitless self-awareness and a seamless blend of experience and reminiscence; he, too, aimed to embody the age of “great planners and future geometers.” As he wrote about one of his conversations with Aleksandr Kulkov, “my mind had been fully occupied with the task of recording his conversation and taking care to reply in such a way as would not seem unnatural and would not discourage him from continuing. That is the quality of steel, I thought with pleasure. That is self-mastery and perfect self-subordination to a predetermined objective. Power over others begins with power over oneself.”¹³

He did well as an agent and, after the beginning of World War II, was sent to the newly created “special sabotage and reconnaissance training school.” There, his “work on the self” became an extension of the state’s work toward victory: “Memory, memory, memory, and the mastery of the disciplined mind over the emotions and over the weaknesses of the flesh. There are only two things that must occupy the mind of the true tchekist: the objective and the means to attain it. No preconceptions, no absolutes, no principles, no values besides efficiency. The tchekist is the perfect servant and guardian of the state. Train, train, train to improve, to achieve perfection, to become a one hundred per cent efficient human machine.” He claimed to have benefited from the training and to have performed well on several assassination missions behind enemy lines. “I found that the swift, precise, lethal action that preceded the calculated death exhilarated me. I found with satisfaction that my body responded to urgency with a clean and unhesitant directness and my mind was as cool as if I had been playing a game of chess against an inferior opponent.”¹⁴

In between foreign assignments, he continued to work as a secret agent in Moscow, specializing in seducing and incriminating young women. According to his memoirs, “there was provocation after provocation, investigation after investigation and I introduced myself into the private lives of so many people and so intimately that, were it not for the fact that my memory is as trained as it is, I would by now have become utterly confused with the mass of my recollections.” In the spring of 1944, he was told to infiltrate another group of children of arrested high officials (mostly graduates of School No. 175 in their early twenties). Among the group’s members was his childhood friend, Erik Korkmasov, who had recently returned from the front because of a shoulder wound, and Romuald Muklevich’s daughter, Irina (formerly of Apt. 334).¹⁵

Anatoly Granovsky

Irina remembered running into Granovsky in the Metro one day. He was a “fine-looking officer,” “handsome and supremely self-confident.” He was very happy to see her and later that day he and Erik came over to chat. He started picking her up after college in his limo, to her girlfriends’ envy and astonishment. When he found out that Irina was living with her aunt because her room had been occupied by someone else while she was in evacuation, he took her to the courthouse, asked her to wait outside, returned with a judge who told her not to worry, drove over to her old apartment, forced the door open, made a list of the new occupant’s possessions, moved them all out, and changed the lock. Soon afterward, Erik told her that Anatoly was being sent somewhere on a special mission. Before leaving, he came over and asked her to marry him, but her aunt did not think it was a good idea, and Irina said no. She never saw Anatoly again. A little while later, Erik Korkmasov and twelve other people were arrested for planning an attempt on Stalin’s life. Erik spent five years in prison and several more in exile in Kazakhstan. Later Irina heard that Anatoly had been killed on a mission behind enemy lines. Another friend of theirs, Nadia Belenkaia (the daughter of the arrested NKVD official and, formerly, Lenin’s chief bodyguard, Abram Belenky, of Apt. 53) said once that of all of them, Anatoly’s fate had been the most tragic. According to Irina, they did not discover Anatoly’s book, published in the United States, about his work as an agent provocateur until much later, and she could not help noticing that in his chapter about the people he had betrayed, he mentioned Erik and Nadia, but not her.¹⁶

■ ■ ■

Granovsky’s supervisor in this and several other operations was Yakov Sverdlov’s son, Andrei, whom he describes as the Mephistopheles to his Faust—a relentlessly ironic man with an “annoying, conceited air,” “the braying laugh of one who is not too sure of himself,” and an intense eagerness for “power for its own sake.” After a brief imprisonment in 1935 (for saying “Koba must be bumped off”), he had worked as a foreman and shop floor supervisor at the Stalin Automobile Factory before being arrested again in January 1938. It is not clear whether he became an agent after the first or the second arrest. (According to one of his superiors, he had been used as an in-cell agent provocateur during the case of the “Rightist-Trotskyite Bloc.”) In December 1938, after almost a year in prison, he was formally released and made a full-time investigator. Ten months later, when Anna Larina was sitting in the office of her Lubyanka interrogator, Yakov Matusov, the door opened and Andrei Sverdlov walked in. She had always believed that her conviction for belonging to a “terrorist youth organization” had something to do with Sverdlov’s (and Dima Osinsky’s) 1935 arrest, so she immediately assumed he was a fellow prisoner brought in for a confrontation:¹⁷

But when I took a closer look at Andrei, I realized that he did not look like a prisoner. He was wearing an elegant gray suit with well-ironed slacks, and his smooth, self-satisfied face projected perfect contentment.

Andrei sat down on a chair next to Matusov and studied me carefully, though not without some emotion.

“Please meet your new investigating officer,” said Matusov.

“What do you mean, ‘investigating officer’? I exclaimed, in utter bewilderment. “It’s Andrei Sverdlov!”

“Yes, Andrei Yakovlevich Sverdlov,” said Matusov proudly (as if to say, “see what kinds of investigators we have here”), “the son of Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov. He’ll be handling your case.”

Matusov’s announcement terrified me, and I felt completely lost. The hostile confrontation that I had originally expected would have been easier to deal with.

“What, you don’t like your investigator?” asked Matusov, noticing my shock and confusion.

“I don’t know him as an investigator, but there is no need to introduce us: we have known each other for a long time.”

“Was he a friend of yours?” asked Matusov, looking at me curiously.

“Let Andrei Yakovlevich answer that question.”

I would not have called Andrei my friend, but I had known him since early childhood. We used to run around the Kremlin and play together. One fall, Adka, as we called him then, snatched my hat off my head and ran away. I ran after him but couldn’t catch up. I went over to his place (Yakov Sverdlov’s family had continued to live in the Kremlin after his death). Andrei grabbed some scissors, cut off the top part of the hat (it was a knit cap), and threw it in my face. He was around thirteen, and I was around ten. Perhaps that was his first cruel act, and he was cruel by nature. Later we used to spend our summer vacations in Crimea at the same time. Andrei would come over from Foros to see me in Mukhalatka. That was before his marriage and mine. We used to go walking, hiking, and swimming in the sea together.¹⁸

Now he was twenty-eight, and she was twenty-five. He asked her why she had mentioned his name in her previous interrogations, and she said that she had assumed that his first arrest would be used against both of them. Two or three days later she was brought in for more questioning:

This time Andrei was gentler and looked at me with more warmth. When walking past me, he put an apple in my hand. But he did not forget his job as an interrogator. He sat behind the desk in the small, narrow office. We looked at each other in silence. My eyes filled with tears. It seemed to me that Andrei, too, became agitated, but maybe I saw what I wanted to see.

We had similar biographies: we were both children of professional revolutionaries. Both our fathers had managed to die in time, we were equally loyal to the Soviet state, and we both admired Bukharin. This had been the topic of a conversation I had with Andrei before my marriage. Finally, we had both suffered a catastrophe—to different degrees, but a catastrophe nonetheless.

Andrei Sverdlov’s actions could not be regarded as anything but a betrayal. It was Cain’s eyes that were looking at me. But the person responsible for the catastrophe, his and mine, was one and the same—Stalin.

Andrei’s silence was unbearable, but I also lost the ability to speak for a while. Finally I exploded:

“What are you going to interrogate me about, Andrei Yakovlevich? Bukharin is dead, so there’s no point in trying to obtain more false evidence against him, is there? As for my life, you know it as well as I do, so you don’t need to interrogate me about it. And yours, up to a certain point, was pretty clear to me, too. That’s why I defended you, saying you couldn’t have been involved in any counterrevolutionary organization.”

Hunched over his desk, Andrei was looking at me with an enigmatic expression on his face, apparently not having heard a thing I said. Suddenly he blurted out something completely unrelated to the investigation, or rather to the conversation we were having.

“What a pretty blouse you have on, Niuska!” (“Niusia” was the affectionate nickname my parents and friends used.) I believe I felt sorry for the traitor at that moment, thinking that he was in the same trap, but had just entered it from the other end.

“So, you like my blouse” (I also kept switching from the formal to the informal ‘you’ with Andrei, depending on how I was feeling)—“and what is it that you don’t like?”¹⁹

He responded by saying that she had been slandering the show trials and denying Bukharin’s guilt. At the end of the conversation, he told her that, “by the way,” his wife, Nina Podvoiskaia, had asked him to say hello.

This “by the way, hello” provoked nothing but irritation in me. I doubt that Andrei’s wife knew anything about our dramatic encounter.

I did not remain in his debt for long, however, and responded to his one hello with several of my own. I passed on greetings from his aunt, Yakov Sverdlov’s sister Sofia Mikhailovna, whom I had seen in the Tomsk camp, and from his cousin, Sofia Mikhailovna’s daughter and Yagoda’s wife, whom I had not seen, but said hello anyway. According to camp rumor, Yagoda’s wife had been in one of the Kolyma camps before the trial, then transferred back to Moscow after the trial and shot. Finally, I said hello from Andrei’s nephew, his cousin’s son, and told him about Garik’s tragic letters from his orphanage to his grandmother’s camp: “Dear, dear Grandma, again I haven’t died!”²⁰

Andrei Sverdlov (seated in the middle of the front row) with friends. Next to him (front row, right) is Dima Osinsky.

But there was a lot about Andrei Sverdlov she did not know. She probably had not heard about the execution of his other cousin, Leopold Averbakh; his uncle, Veniamin Sverdlov; or his childhood friend, Dima (Vadim) Osinsky. Nor was she likely to know that Andrei had another uncle, Zinovy Peshkov, who was an officer in the French Foreign Legion, or that his daughter, Andrei’s cousin Elizaveta, had returned to Moscow from Italy in 1937 and had recently been arrested. Anna did find out later that Andrei had also interrogated her aunt, the wife of the former deputy chairman of Gosplan, V. P. Miliutin (from Apt. 163), and that he had been “rude to her, threatened to beat her, and waved his whip in front of her face.” Dima Osinsky’s sister, Svetlana, considered Andrei “a traitor and vile creature” and claimed that when their mutual friend, Khanna Ganetskaia (Hanna Hanecka, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of the founder of the Polish Social Democratic Party, Jakub Hanecki, from Apt. 10), “entered the investigator’s office, saw Andrei, and rushed toward him with a cry of joy, assuming that now everything would be cleared up, he pushed her away, screaming ‘you bitch!’” According to Elizaveta Drabkina, whom Andrei had known since early childhood and referred to as “Aunt Liza,” he had come to her prison cell sometime after her arrest and said: “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? You used to be Yakov Sverdlov’s secretary, and now you are an enemy of the people!” According to Ruf Valbe, Ariadna Efron (the daughter of the poet Maria Tsvetaeva), who had also known Andrei before her arrest, was shaken by his “cynical and vile” behavior when he was interrogating her. And according to Roi Medvedev, the Petrovsky family archive contains documents showing Andrei’s participation in the repeated beatings of Grigory Petrovsky’s son, Petr Petrovsky.²¹