The House of Government

30

THE PERSISTENCE OF HAPPINESS

Volodia Moroz was a lone rebel. (His brother, Samuil, who also ended up in a camp, “argued furiously” with other inmates in defense of the Party.) Volodia Shakhurin was preparing to become a Reichsführer. Anatoly Granovsky owed loyalty to none but those who could exact it from him. Andrei Sverdlov loved either power for its own sake or Soviet power in its struggle against its enemies (most of whom happened to be his former friends).

Most of Andrei Sverdlov’s former friends considered him a traitor but did not question the cause he was serving. They did not feel that they had to choose between their loyalty to the Party and their loyalty to their friends, family, and themselves. No matter how great the catastrophe, they continued to live in a luminous, premillennial world—a world that made sense even if their own exclusion from it did not. The Great Terror spelled the end of most Old Bolshevik families and homes; it did not bring about the end of faith.

Ten days after being sentenced to eight years in a labor camp, Anna Larina wrote a poem dedicated to the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution (a poem that, according to her memoirs, offered a fair reflection of her frame of mind at the time):

This prison may bring me to tears,

And make me feel lonely and sad,

But this day I mark with my dear,

Beloved Soviet land.

…

Today I am certain it’s near—

The day I’ll reenter the ranks

And proudly march on Red Square

Along with my Komsomol friends!¹

Natalia Rykova wrote to Stalin on June 10, 1940, a year after being sentenced to eight years in a labor camp:²

I was accused of conducting anti-Soviet agitation, but not only did I not conduct it, I could not possibly have conducted it because both before and after the arrest I was faithful to the Soviet state and the Party. I am a person for whom life means work for the benefit of the Soviet people. I was brought up in a Soviet school, in the Pioneer and Komsomol organizations, and in a Soviet university. I am only twenty-two years old, but I have never been able to conceive of any other life than study or work for the benefit of my country, in my own field or in any place the Komsomol chooses to send me, to work first in its ranks and then in the ranks of the Party. This is how I have always thought, and this is how I think now….

I know how odious my last name is, and I understand that I cannot be trusted now the way I was trusted before Rykov’s unmasking, and yet I would like to ask you to consider my case because I am not guilty of anything and because I am able and willing to give all of myself for our country’s great cause. I was and I remain a Komsomol member, for whom life is worth living only if it means working for the Soviet country.³

The Soviet country as one big family continued to exist for most former residents of the House of Government. It took four meetings and a speech by the Party secretary to persuade the Komsomol organization of the Moscow Aviation Institute to expel Nikolai Demchenko (the son of the people’s commissar of state farms and Samuil Moroz’s best friend). In the case of Leonid Postyshev, four times proved not enough. Only the commissar and Komsomol secretary of his regiment at the Air Force Academy voted for expulsion; everyone else, according to Postyshev, voted against the motion. After the fourth meeting, the commissar called him in and demanded that he surrender his membership card. He did, but said that from now on he considered himself a Party member.⁴

When Inna Gaister and Zaria Khatskevich (the daughter of the recently arrested secretary of the Council of Nationalities of the Central Executive Committee, formerly of Apt. 96) applied to join the Komsomol, they were both asked about their fathers, and both said that the arrests had been a “tragic mistake.” Both were admitted unanimously (Gaister in Moscow and Khatskevich in Mogilev, after several months in an orphanage). Isaak Zelensky’s children, Elena and Andrei, were expelled from the Komsomol but appealed to the Central Committee and were reinstated.⁵

Natalia Rykova a year and a half before her father’s arrest

Gaister, Khatskevich, the Zelenskys, and most of their friends believed that enemies were, in fact, everywhere and that only their own parents, and perhaps those of their closest friends, were innocent. But even those whose parents they believed to be guilty were not guilty themselves—because Comrade Stalin had said that “sons do not answer for their fathers” and because in their world—the world of happy childhood and the “treasures of world literature”—one did not betray one’s friends. There were bad people, tragic mistakes, moments of utter loneliness, enemies posing as commissars, and double-dealers posing as friends, but the Soviet world as a whole was just, transparent, and naturally compatible with private love and friendship. Most of the children who were expelled from the House of Government remained children of the Revolution. Yuri Trifonov’s inspirational discussions in the literary club of the Moscow House of Pioneers, led by the editor in chief of the journal Pioneer, Comrade Ivanter, took place after the arrests of his parents. Inna Gaister’s parents were arrested in the summer of 1937. Two weeks after the beginning of the school year, she and her cousin Igor (whose father, Semen Gaister, had also been arrested) went to see their “class mentor,” Inna Fedorovna Grekova, in order to report what had happened: “She looked at us strangely and said: ‘So what? What difference does it make? Go and do your work.’ And that was that. A little surprised, we went back to our classroom, wondering why she had ignored our declaration. As if nothing had happened.”⁶

Inna’s other teacher, Anna Zinovievna Klintsova, made the point of looking after Vova Piatnitsky, who needed to re-register at the school after his return from Karelia, and his older brother, Igor, who was one of the stars of the school math club, over which she presided. When, in the fall of 1940, school fees were introduced, Anna Zinovievna paid Inna’s tuition and arranged some private lessons for her. And when Inna’s grandmother received a telegram with the address of the camp where Inna’s mother was being held, she called the school principal, Valentin Nikolaevich, who went and found Inna and escorted her to his office. “When I hung up, I must have looked completely dazed. Valentin Nikolaevich only asked, ‘Will you return to class or go home?’ I went back to class.”⁷

During the Bukharin trial, Inna Gaister’s father was mentioned as one of the organizers of the murder of Valerian Kuibyshev (after whom he had named her sister, Valia), but no one in her class held it against her. When the time came to elect a leader for the “Pioneer detachment,” they elected Inna. When she said that she could not accept because her father was an enemy of the people, one of her classmates counted all such children in the classroom and produced a list with twenty-five names on it (about three-quarters of the total). The rest of the students felt that he had betrayed their trust and questioned their loyalty, and stopped talking to him. Later, when he did “another dishonorable thing,” they decided to teach him a lesson. They caught him on the embankment in front of the British Embassy. The boys formed a semicircle in front of the balustrade, and the girls kept hitting him until one of the policemen posted at the embassy chased them away.⁸

Inna loved her friends and teachers, believed that School No. 19 was unique, and felt vindicated in having refused, as a grade-school student, to transfer to the Moscow Exemplary, where “children were being forced to publicly renounce and disown their parents.” The students of the Moscow Exemplary, for their part, seem to have felt that it was their school that was uniquely nurturing (as well as academically distinguished). Svetlana Osinskaia, who was the same age as Inna Gaister (twelve in 1937), remembered telling her class mentor, Kapitolina Georgievna, about her parents’ arrest. “She fell back against the wall and said: ‘Yours, too?’” Svetlana spent only four years at the school, but she remembered enjoying her time there and admiring Kapitolina Georgievna (“we loved her, even though we were afraid of her”); her choir teacher, Viktor Ivanovich Pototsky (who “wore a velvet jacket with a bow and was not simply a music teacher, but a true artist”); and her physical education teacher, a former imperial army officer, Tikhon Nikolaevich Krasovsky, who was pointedly “attentive and affectionate” toward her after her parents’ arrest. Svetlana’s brothers, Valia and Rem Smirnov, who were two years older and had spent more time at the Moscow Exemplary, “praised their teachers very highly”; Zaria Khatskevich, who was in the same class as Rem (and believed he was in love with her), did not remember any hostility following her parents’ arrest; and Elena Kuchmina, who was a year younger than Svetlana, wrote in a 1991 letter that she had preserved “the most wonderful memories” of the Moscow Exemplary. “I am still amazed at our teachers’ nobility of spirit: the school was overflowing with the children of ‘enemies of the people,’ but we were invariably treated with kindness and forbearance.”⁹

Moscow Exemplary School, fifth grade. Svetlana Osinskaia is seated in the front row, third from left. (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

Tatiana Smilga, who was five years older and also a Moscow Exemplary student, did not remember any hostility from strangers or betrayal by relatives or friends, but her main “comfort and joy” in those days was her first love, Pushkin. Her nanny made her and her younger sister new dresses for the Pushkin jubilee and someone got her a ticket to a series of lectures on Pushkin at Moscow University—“by Bondi, Brodsky, Grossman—all the best Pushkin scholars.” Tatiana’s schoolmate, Lydia Libedinskaia (who was two years younger), did remember one Komsomol meeting at which a friend of hers, John Kuriatov, was expelled, but pointed out that the meeting had been presided over by an outsider rather than someone from the school, that John (named for John Reed, the author of Ten Days That Shook the World) had refused to renounce his father or surrender his Komsomol card, and that John’s friends (including Libedinskaia) had stood by him. One of them, Valentin Litovsky, had run after a little boy who called John an “enemy,” caught him, grabbed him by the collar, and said, desperately drawing out his words so as not to stutter: “You creep, how da-a-a-re you? Wha-a-t do you understa-a-and? If his father re-e-eally is an enemy of the people, it is a tra-a-a-agedy, a terrible tra-a-agedy, like sickness or death, you u-u-u-understand? And he-e-e-re you are, atta-a-a-acking him. He is no-o-ot guilty of a-a-a-nything!”¹⁰

Valentin was the son of the prominent censor, theater critic, Mikhail Bulgakov’s nemesis, and Uriel Acosta’s champion, Osaf (“Uriel”) Litovsky. He had recently returned to school from the set of The Youth of a Poet, in which he played the young Pushkin. Lydia Libedinskaia fell in love with him because she was already in love with Pushkin. As she wrote in her memoirs (about herself and her generation), “Might we be fated to relive the days of his lycée fraternity? Might there be a new Pushkin among us? We dedicated our poems, essays, and hopes to Pushkin. We dreamed of Pushkin. We dreamed of a pilgrimage to his Mikhailovskoe estate: to Pskov by train and then on foot, only on foot! In the meantime we walked around Moscow, looking for the buildings that were associated with his life there.” Soviet happy childhood was a golden age built on all the previous golden ages, and the most golden of them all was Pushkin’s “lycée fraternity.” When the boys and girls from the House of Government talked about their beloved country, they meant the center of the world revolution, but they also meant Russia, and the Russia they loved had been created by an eternally young poet, the highest of the Pamirs. In 1937, on the one hundredth anniversary of his death, he stood for both. “We spoke of Pushkin as if he were alive. We kept asking each other if Pushkin would like our Metro, our new bridges that spanned the Moskva, the neon lights on Gorky Street.”

After toasting the New Year of 1937, Libedinskaia and her friends went to the Pushkin Monument on Tverskoi Boulevard, in the center of Moscow. That night is one of the central episodes in her memoirs:

The light, transparent snowflakes fluttered down and gathered in the folds of his bronze coat and in his curly hair. The ice-covered tree branches shone in the dark.

We read his poems to him—one after another, on and on: Eugene Onegin, “The Forest Sheds Its Purple Attire,” “Reminiscences in Tsarskoe Selo,” “To the Sea,” “Tsar Saltan.” …

Suddenly, in the frosty silence of that New Year’s Eve, a boy’s voice, trembling with excitement, rang out:

While freedom kindles us, my friend,

While honor calls us and we hear it,

Come, to our country let us tend

The noble promptings of the spirit.

It sounded like a vow. That is how, in solemn silence, warriors take their oaths. Happy are those who had such moments in their youth….

The snow kept falling, melting on our flushed faces and silvering our hair. Our hearts were overflowing with love for Pushkin, poetry, Moscow, and our country. We yearned for great deeds and vowed silently to accomplish them. My generation! The children of the 1920s, the men and women of a happy and tragic age! You grew up as equal participants in the building of the Soviet Union, you were proud of your fathers, who had carried out an unheard-of revolution, you dreamed of becoming their worthy successors.¹¹

On October 7, 1939, the remnants of the Trifonov family had been expelled from the House of Government. Five weeks later, Yuri, who had just turned fourteen, wrote a poem that seemed to transform his new apartment into Pushkin’s Mikhailovskoe and his future life into that of a historian:

Faithful Lyova, are you there?

Oleg, still the jesting man?

Carefree Misha, do you care

That I won’t be back again?

Time is counting out the hours,

Days file by but never end,

Our past life’s no longer ours,

Long forgotten your old friend.

Long forgotten my apartment

And my lyre’s timid chord.

Only I, by fate discarded,

Will remember every word!¹²

Yuri Trifonov

■ ■ ■

Volodia Lande from Apt. 153 was nine years old in December 1937, when several NKVD agents came to arrest his mother, an editor from the Party Publishing House, Maria Yusim. (His father, the head of the Planning Department of the Soviet State Bank, Efim Lande, had been arrested six months earlier.)

My mother woke me up right before it was time to leave the house. While I, still too sleepy to understand what was happening, was getting dressed, she was nervously packing her things and mine into suitcases. Along with clothes, she put in some family photographs and a few books. In honor of the 100th anniversary of Pushkin’s death in 1937, a five-volume edition of his works had been published. My mother packed those small volumes into my suitcase. Right before leaving the apartment, probably with the permission of the NKVD men, she put some money in the pocket of my overcoat. On the surface, my mother appeared calm, but when they led us out into the dark street, she started sobbing, threw her arms around me, and held me tight. The NKVD men literally dragged my sobbing mother away from me, started forcing her into a car, then put me in a different car, and drove us away, in opposite directions.¹³

After a short stay at the Danilovsky Children’s Reception Center in the former Danilovsky Monastery, Volodia was taken to an orphanage in the town of Nizhny Lomov, in Penza Province. The local schoolteacher, Antonina Aleksandrovna, welcomed him, introduced him to his new classmates, told him about her own arrested relative, and invited him to her house for a dinner of fried potatoes. “I suppose that for me both the school and Antonina Aleksandrovna’s house,” he wrote in his memoirs, “were tiny parts of that small world I’d left behind.”¹⁴

His orphanage (also a former monastery) turned out to be yet another part of the same world. When he walked into the 1938 New Year’s Eve party soon after he arrived, he saw “a tall New Year’s tree, shiny new vinyl tablecloths, a whole stockade of lemon soda bottles, a smiling cook, and girls on cafeteria duty handing out steaming rice porridge with raisins and hot chocolate.” Soon, what had first appeared as an imitation of home became home. Volodia liked his new friends (who quickly accepted the new arrivals from Moscow), the church cemetery where they told scary stories, the river Lomovka “with an eddy by the opposite, high bank,” the campfires, the orphanage director, with his “big mustache and teasing half-smile,” and especially his carpentry teacher, the unflappable Fedor Ivanovich, who “patiently and unobtrusively taught the kids his trade. He would begin by teaching us how to use carpentry tools and how to plane a plank. Lean and agile, Fedor Ivanovich would lift each plank to eye-level and, with a quick stroke of a pencil, mark the places that needed more work. Having learned how to plane, we would begin working on a stool. Having finished his first stool, a newcomer would become a full-fledged member of the carpentry shop and could aspire to other, more complicated tasks. I often remember my first, painstakingly manufactured, unprepossessing, wobbly-legged stool.”

In the evenings, Fedor Ivanovich taught an optional photography class. “Everything was almost the same as when, not so long ago, my father and I used to lock ourselves in the bathroom to develop and print photographs.” Once he got sick and was taken to the town hospital, where his life story provoked a great deal of curiosity. Among those who came to see him were two “self-assured, insolent” young men who subjected him to “something like an interrogation,” but his roommates defended him, saying that he was not responsible for his parents. No one at the orphanage had treated him any differently from the other children, so he was “caught completely by surprise.” Later, he discovered that “the unpleasant episode in the hospital was not typical of ordinary people’s perception of the events of 1937.” After three years in the orphanage, he moved to Leningrad to live with his aunt, a Party official. His suitcase contained family photographs, some shirts and underwear, and the five-volume collected works of Pushkin that his mother had given him on the day she was arrested. After graduating from high school, he was admitted to a military college and eventually became a naval officer.¹⁵

■ ■ ■

Valia, Rem, and Svetlana Osinsky were sent to an orphanage in the town of Shuya, Ivanovo Province. According to Svetlana, Valia did not change at all. “He found everything interesting, lived a fun-filled, joyous life, and was ready to share his joy with everyone. His future looked bright to him, and he was sure life would not let him down.” He loved his orphanage, his school, his teachers (especially the chemistry, geography, and history ones), and his new friends (especially Misha Kristson, who knew the whole of Eugene Onegin by heart). He kept up with his Moscow friends, Sasha Kogan and Motia Epstein, who sent him parcels with books and “all sorts of yummy things.” He enjoyed acting (his stutter disappeared on stage), singing (especially “Wide Is the Sea,” a prerevolutionary ballad revived in 1937 by Leonid Utesov), and sleeping under the stars (“wrapped in a coat with grass for a mattress”). He served with distinction as his ninth-grade elected representative; admired Boris Shchukin in the role of Lenin in Lenin in October and Lenin in 1918; loved “The Song about Stalin,” which he, as a member of his school choir, sang on the third anniversary of the Stalin Constitution; enjoyed a play “about how a bunch of spies and wreckers slander an honest Party member”; rejoiced at being found fit for military service (having read Goethe while waiting for his medical exam); and trained hard in order to pass his “Ready for Labor and Defense” test. Getting ready for labor and defense—and working on oneself as preparation for the general future—involved ascetic self-restraint. “Rem and I,” he wrote to his mother, “do not smoke and do not intend to. First, it’s bad for your health; second, it’s a waste of money; and, third, it would make things harder during a time of war or something else. As for drinking—we don’t drink, either. Recently I tried some beer in the theater—I was thirsty, and there was nothing else—and thought it tasted terrible. So no need to worry on that score.”¹⁶

Svetlana and Valia Osinsky in the orphanage (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

But mostly, he read. After a year and a half of searching for their parents, Valia, Rem, and Svetlana found their mother in a “family members’ camp” in Mordovia. In his first letter from the orphanage, Valia wrote:

Mom, in Shuya there is a library—actually, not one, but four. I use all of them, and check out books for Svetlana and Rem, as well as for myself. I’ve read all three novels by Goncharov, a lot of L. Tolstoy, A. K. Tolstoy, “Kozma Prutkov,” a lot of Saltykov-Shchedrin, Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done and tons more. Of the Europeans, I’ve read a lot of Heine—the poems in German and the prose in Russian, and Goethe. I particularly liked Faust and read Part I three times. I’ve read a little Balzac—Le père Goriot and Gobseck, Ibsen—a lot of plays, Hoffmann, and many others whom I can’t recall at the moment.¹⁷

Everything on Valia’s list came from his parents’ own list, with the usual exception of socioeconomic books. Heine was still the sentimental favorite:

Recently, I checked out the fifth issue of October that you wrote to me about. The Heine biography is very good. And I liked it even more because Heine is now my favorite poet. Remember, Dad once gave me a book of his poems as a present? I didn’t read them for a long time, but now that I’ve read most of them, I’m not sure which I like better—the lyrical or the satirical ones. His long poem Atta Troll, in which lyricism and satire are intertwined, is a marvelous work. I also like Heine as a human being. Goncharov, for example, wrote brilliantly, but I don’t like him because he was so narrow-minded as a person. With Heine it’s completely different. I’ve read at least three biographies, but none of them so far has been entirely good or complete. I wish the October biographer had written a more complete one.¹⁸

Valia Osinsky (right) and his friend, Motia Epstein (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

The Geist of Soviet happy childhood involved a marriage of lyricism and completeness. “Man’s best strivings,” as well as the best men who excelled at striving, were to be tenderly loved and methodically appropriated. In the Shuya orphanage, Valia’s, Svetlana’s, and Rem’s motto was: “Life goes on, the most important thing is to study!” All three were excellent students, but the most important studying was done at home—or, in their case, in the orphanage. As Valia wrote to his mother, “I’ve become fairly well-versed in literature—at least from the historical point of view. But there’s a lot I don’t know yet. For example, I’ve barely read any of the French classics. Le père Goriot, Gobseck, and Eugénie Grandet by Balzac, “A Simple Heart” by Flaubert, and nothing at all by Stendhal. There’s still plenty of reading left to do. I’ve just started on ancient literature—the Greeks. I found Homer a bit boring, but loved Aeschylus, Sophocles, and especially Aristophanes.”¹⁹

Several months later, and now in the tenth grade, he was farther along but still working on filling in the gaps:

There’s still plenty of work to do. Recently I read Voltaire’s Candide and was very impressed. Too bad I can’t get my hands on anything else by Voltaire. I also quite like Anatole France and have made my way through his The Gods Are Athirst, Penguin Island, The Revolt of the Angels, At the Sign of the Reine Pédauque, The Opinions of Jerome Coignard, and some stories. On my bookshelf I still have Lucian, Shelley, and A History of Western Literature. I read very few contemporary writers: there’s no time. I am reading a good novel by Kaverin, The Two Captains, which all the critics rightly praise for its resemblance to Dickens.

He never seemed to have enough time to read contemporary Soviet writers because they did not measure up to the Pamirs and because one could not measure anything without conquering the Pamirs first: “I am slowly mastering Don Quixote, which is not as difficult as I expected. Sancho Panza is wonderful. I am also reading Romain Rolland’s Jean-Cristophe, one installment at a time, whenever I can get them. It seems to me that Romain Rolland is not inferior to Dickens or any other writer of that calibre. After Leo Tolstoy, he is my favorite novelist. I have also read Sophocles and find that I like him.”

“Completeness” presupposed hierarchy. Only a fully ranked world could be complete. Literary rankings were based on a combination of depth and beauty. At sixteen, Valia had no doubt about which summit was the highest:

I fell in love with Faust for a variety of reasons. First, I like the main characters—Faust and Mephistopheles. Their thoughts are very intelligent and profound. Gretchen is a bit silly, but very touching. Faust is good because it is written in simple, clear, but elegant language. Shakespeare uses a lot of metaphors, similes, and elaborate phrases, so it is not always easy to get at the meaning. That’s why reading him can be exhausting, in my view. But Goethe has none of that. The play has some very beautiful verses, especially the songs. On the whole, the verse in Faust is wooden—written, as Heine said, in the meter of a German puppet theater comedy. But, at the beginning (in the first section), the Archangels’ Song, the Chorus of Spirits, and Gretchen’s songs are very beautiful. In the second part, too, although it’s harder to understand. But it has even more of these beautiful passages.²⁰

Because of his perfect grades, he could enroll in any university without taking the entrance exams. He took a long time deciding between biology and philology and ended up choosing classics. His mother wanted him to stay in Moscow, but he decided to go to Leningrad University to study with the legendary Olga Mikhailovna Freidenberg. He spent several nights at the railway station before asking his class representative, Elena Monchadskaia, if she would help him get a place in the dormitory. She took him in, and he spent several days living in her apartment. Her father, the zoologist Aleksandr Samoilovich Monchadsky, whose half-brother had been arrested in 1937, talked to the dean of philology and leading Soviet Assyriologist, Aleksandr Pavlovich Riftin, and Valia was allowed to live in the dorm.²¹

According to Monchadskaia, “He was a brilliant student. He got perfect grades. He stood out from us because of his knowledge of languages (we knew he had been born in Berlin). But he also studied harder.” Olga Freidenberg tried to help him with money and started a collection, “but he was proud in such things and would not accept any help.” As he wrote to his mother during his first semester at the university, “I sometimes go to the movies and afterward feel that, if it weren’t for such occasional outings, things might get pretty bad. I tend to work without a break and without realizing how tired I am or noticing that I am not being as efficient. But I won’t drive myself into exhaustion. I recently saw Valery Chkalov, a very good movie, and Vasilisa the Beautiful—which was also not bad.” As a member of the Student Scholarly Society, he also worked on his own research projects. “I gave my paper on Racine and Euripides to our department chair, Olga Mikhailovna Freidenberg, and she read it and, contrary to my expectations, said that it was very good. And I had just about decided to burn it. Yet I know that I could have written something better, more substantial. But still, it’s good news. We are going to have one of our Society seminars, and Freidenberg herself is going to talk about my paper. I am sure she’ll have criticisms, but when they’re fair, it doesn’t bother me.” He had several new friends and reported in detail about their interests and virtues. They talked about history and literature and went to the movies and theater together. According to Monchadskaia, “Valia was an active Komsomol member. Our Marxism instructor, I think his name was Safronov, had a lot of respect for him. During our first class, he asked if he was related to that Osinsky, and Valia told him he was. I remember in seminars they used to have long conversations, talking like equals. And Valia used to gesticulate a lot.”²²

Valia Osinsky (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

■ ■ ■

Valia’s sister, Svetlana, who was two years younger, describes herself as less good-natured, less sociable, and less open to the world. Her first several months in the orphanage were very difficult, but the teachers “showed a great deal of tact,” and eventually she understood that there was life—indeed, a more authentic life—outside the House of Government. “I understood,” she writes in her memoirs, “that different people had different values, that I was not the moral lawgiver, and that from then on I was equal to everyone else whom fate had brought to that orphanage.”²³

Her memories of orphanage life, like those of her original home, were shaped by the sacred calendar, which centered on the celebration of the New Year.

Children from the Shuya orphanage (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

Children from the orphanage carrying water in 1941 (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

Children from the orphanage marching. Svetlana Osinskaia is in front. (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

For New Year’s they used to set up a tree in the assembly hall, and we would stage a masked ball and concert, and sing and dance. Once we performed the children’s opera, The Magic Swan Geese. I sang in the choir, and Valia acted the silent role of the Wood Sprite. The costumes were borrowed from the theater in town…. But in our own theater club, which we organized and led without the help of any of the teachers, we put on a play from prerevolutionary life, in which I played an old laundress, and then we even acted out Timur and His Crew, in which I played Zhenia…. On New Year’s Eve, the teachers from the school used to come sometimes and pass out presents.

We also celebrated November 7 and May 1. Dressed in our sports costumes—short bloomers and light blue T-shirts (they were called vests then) with white collars and white bands on the sleeves—we would perform a trick that was very popular in those days called the pyramid. We older girls would also prepare folk dances of different ethnic groups of the Soviet Union. Our choir would sing both revolutionary and new songs—either military ones or children’s ones such as “The Heroic Pilots Are Flying Away,” “The Red Flag Is Flying Overhead,” “Our Horses, Horses of Steel,” “Our Big Brothers Are Marching in Columns,” and many others. On Lenin Memorial Day we would create a commemorative bonfire by placing some lightbulbs in a circle on the assembly hall floor and then covering them with a red cloth and some red narrow strips of red fabric that seemed to flicker like flames. We would turn off the light and sit on the floor around the bonfire singing and reciting poetry.²⁴

She also remembered trips to the Godless Movie Theater inside an old church and dancing to the accordion at the summer camp, among many other things, but her fondest memories were those of her teachers.

We had a wonderful director, Pavel Ivanovich Zimin. I think it was probably thanks to him that we were always treated the same way as all the other children. Many years later he told me that he had had to report on us and on our behavior, but we never felt any special attention and, of course, knew nothing about it. No one ever reproached us about anything to do with our parents. Only once either a new Pioneer leader or a young teacher started asking me whether I realized who my parents were and whether it might not be better for me to forget them. I listened to him in amazement. Someone interrupted our conversation, and I never heard any more speeches like that again.²⁵

Pavel Ivanovich Zimin (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

What the carpentry shop was to Volodia Lande, the sewing shop was to Svetlana:

The noise inside the shop was easily tamed by our sewing instructor, Natalia Trofimovna, who, though not noisy herself, was firm and decisive in her own quiet way. Short and thin, she had an attractive face with small, sharp features, gray eyes, small hands, and small feet. She always wore the same carefully ironed, light gray satin smock, under which a silk cream-colored blouse peeked out. She always had a measuring tape around her neck and a row of pins and needles stuck in the lapel of her smock. She would cut the thread with a precise movement of her small teeth, although she warned us not to do this, pointing to a chipped spot on her upper tooth. On my first day Natalia Trofimovna gave me an assignment: to gather a sleeve into a cuff—a five-minute job at most. She showed me how it was done. I worked for at least an hour. When it was finished, she looked at it and, in order to encourage me, showed it to the class as an example of good work. The other girls maintained an ironic silence. Alas, it was probably the only exemplary piece I ever made.

I started coming to the sewing shop every day, on schedule, although I did try to play hooky sometimes. Secretly, I became very attached to Natalia Trofimovna and felt that she, too, liked me and felt sorry for me. I watched her agile movements and listened intently to what she had to say (trying not to be too obvious about it). She was forty, an old woman as far as I was concerned back then. She lived with her son and often talked about him.²⁶

The person who helped Svetlana the most during her first difficult days in the orphanage was her “class mentor,” Tatiana Nikolaevna Guskova (known to the children as “Tian-Nikolavna”). “Pretty, nervous, thin, quicktempered, blunt and quite strict, she was wholly devoted to the children and to the orphanage.” When she saw that Svetlana did not know how to wash the floor, Tatiana Nikolaevna brought the rag, got down on the floor, and did it with her. But the real test—for both of them—came later, after the orphanage had, for most purposes, become home: “Once, one of my aunts decided, for some reason, to take me home to live with her family in Moscow. In the orphanage everyone was trying to talk me out of it. I wrote to my mother. I remember sitting in a small classroom and suddenly hearing quick footsteps. The door flew open, and in ran a beaming Tatiana Nikolaevna, holding a telegram from my mother in her hand (how did Mother manage to send a telegram from the camp?): ‘Do not agree no matter what.’ How happy Tatiana Nikolaevna was!”²⁷

Tatiana Nikolaevna Guskova (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

Svetlana’s and Valia’s mother, the Old Bolshevik and former senior editor at the Children’s Literature Publishing House, Ekaterina Mikhailovna Smirnova, wrote often. Once Pavel Ivanovich, who read all the letters received at the orphanage, took Svetlana into an empty bedroom, sat her down on the bed, sat down beside her, put his arm around her, and started, “unhurriedly and sympathetically,” asking questions about her mother. “Her letters—about books and poetry, and full of advice—not the everyday kind but about life in general—had made a strong impression on him.” When love of friends and lovers began to replace love of parents and teachers in Svetlana’s life (and letters), her mother responded by quoting from a poem by A. K. Tolstoy: “My love, wide as the sea / Cannot be kept within the shores of life”:

Remember, she wrote, that love between a man and a woman is but one part of that love that cannot be kept within the shores of life and is fuller and wider than the love for one person, which is its earthly incarnation. If love between two people does not contain that all-encompassing force, it is not as interesting and certainly not full. She wrote that most of all she felt the presence of that great feeling in her love for her children, but that she had also known true love for one person, one man, and that she had always tried to make it part of that other, exalted love. I may not be remembering that letter precisely, but I am certain of its lofty meaning, which was exactly what my soul—romantic, like those of most young people of that time—thirsted for.²⁸

Svetlana’s favorite book, Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts, seemed to be saying the same thing. “It taught me,” she writes, “to see love and friendship as life’s highest blessings.” It also taught her—to quote from her quote from My Past and Thoughts—that “love is passionate friendship” and that “friendship between two young people has all the ardor of love and all of its characteristics.”²⁹

Svetlana’s best memories of her time in Shuya are about a passionate friendship. Her friend’s name was Galina Volkova. They met in the Shuya music school. Galina was sixteen, and Svetlana was a year younger. Svetlana had arrived in the middle of the school year and, at first, had not been allowed to enroll, but one of the teachers heard her story and let her in. She was not very good at the piano, but she wanted to recreate her Moscow home life and started coming regularly. The orphanage director, Pavel Ivanovich, gave her the key to the grand piano that stood in the assembly hall, so she could practice “at home.” Galina and Svetlana started going on long walks every Sunday after class. They ate ice cream and watched couples dancing to brass bands. “The women had short hair curled at the ends like Liubov Orlova’s in the film Circus and wore silk dresses that draped loosely below the knee. Young girls wore white blouses, colorful knitted vests, and white canvas shoes with light blue trim and button straps. For young men two-tone zippered jackets were the height of fashion.” Sometimes they talked about Svetlana’s past life, her parents’ fate, the waves of arrests, and the coming war. “But all that lay in some other dimension.”³⁰ Mostly they talked about other things.

What did we not talk about! We talked about what it means to be a true human being and how one must live by one’s conscience. But most of all we talked about books. I remember our endless conversations about Romain Rolland’s The Soul Enchanted. I read it … first, then Galina, at my suggestion. How we loved its heroine, the strong and beautiful Annette; how extraordinary her relationship with her son seemed, and what a beautiful name he had—Marc! And Sylvie, who as an aging woman learned to play the piano! Marc and Assia, Marc’s death, Annette’s tears…. I wanted to be just like her. In our conversations there was never a trace of anything materialistic. Dresses, success? Never! How could they compete with the question of what it meant to become a true human being? It must have been either the times or our youthful romanticism.³¹

It was both, of course. Those were the times of youthful romanticism. Most girls in white blouses and boys in zippered jackets had intimate friends, and the closer they were to the urban professional and artistic world connected by books and music to the House of Government, the more likely it was that they were talking about how to become a true human being (Galina’s late father had been a well-known doctor, and she was planning to apply to college in Moscow). They played a lot of music together. “My absolute favorite in those days was Mozart’s Fantasia, which she played beautifully and with great feeling, pausing occasionally to tell me how much she liked a certain passage. I did, too: our feelings and opinions always coincided. She played a lot of Chopin—waltzes, mazurkas, one after another, each with its own associations, sometimes quite funny…. She also played Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Tchaikovsky. I played, too, but I was so bad, it was almost funny.”³²

Svetlana Osinskaia (left) and Galina Volkova twenty years after they first met (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

The romantic age called for romantic music and romantic literature. Svetlana and Galina did not start out by modeling their friendship on Herzen’s and Ogarev’s: they found their friendship reflected, and then reinforced, in what would become their favorite book in college. Galina had enrolled in the History Department of the Moscow Regional Teachers’ College, and Svetlana joined her there. “We were inseparable all through college.… Together we ‘discovered’ Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts, and it was one of the strongest impressions of our youth…. We were struck by the similarity between our relationship and Herzen and Ogarev’s friendship. Everything felt the same, and even the vow they swore in the Vorobiev Hills (we made a special trip to find the spot) seemed to be our very own. Except that they had also sworn to be faithful to their cause, and we didn’t have one.” Herzen’s and Ogarev’s cause—transformed into the huge blacksmith’s insatiable utopia—had been fulfilled by Svetlana’s father. Svetlana’s and Galina’s cause was their friendship.³³

■ ■ ■

Most of Svetlana’s peers from the House of Government shared her cause. Exiled to camps, orphanages, and communal apartments or surrounded inside the House by sealed doors and the shadows of departed playmates, they continued to live in a world of love that could not be kept within the shores of life, in an “atmosphere of one single family” (as Svetlana Osinskaia would put it many years later). It was a family as wide as the Soviet Union, a state as close-knit as a sect, a prophecy realized in the body of believers, and a make-believe world that would remain real for as long as the believers continued to believe (and for as long as Fedor Ivanovich and Natalia Trofimovna continued to make it possible).

Aleksandr Serafimovich had a literary protégé by the name of Aleksei Evgrafovich Kosterin, author of several autobiographical Civil War stories set in the Caucasus (including Beyond the Mountain Pass, an exodus tale that came out at the same time as The Iron Flood). In 1936, he went to Magadan to work as a reporter for the Soviet Kolyma newspaper. In 1938, he was arrested and sentenced to five years in a camp as a “socially dangerous element.” His wife, Anna Mikhailovna, continued to write to Serafimovich asking for help and vouching for Kosterin (“although in his private life K. could, perhaps, be a bit of a bastard sometimes, in his work and in the Party he is a pure and loyal person”) and for herself (“I swear a terrible vow on the lives of my three children that I know nothing and am not guilty of anything”).

Their eldest daughter, Nina, was fifteen when her father left Moscow. She did not live in the House of Government, but she belonged to the same world of Soviet happy childhood—urban, romantic, white-collar, self-reflexive, and fervently patriotic. (Her apartment was in No. 19, Trubnikovsky Alley, formerly the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities.) She loved Pushkin, Mérimée, Goethe, Heine, Romain Rolland, Levitan, and Beethoven; appeared as Masha (from The Captain’s Daughter) at the Pushkin masked ball (“in a long orange dress with white lace at the neck and sleeves”); disapproved of the Second Bolshoi production of Gounot’s Faust (which seemed to trivialize Faust’s pact with Mephistopheles); made presentations in the school literary and history societies; worked tirelessly on herself (focusing, at the age of eighteen, on “the wicked emotion of vanity”); thought of knowledge as a “left-luggage room” with separate shelves for labeled suitcases; worried that such different poets as Heine, Esenin, Longfellow, and Mayakovsky could coexist within her “like good neighbors in a large apartment”; “drew up a plan to read all of Feuchtwanger and write an essay ‘On Feuchtwanger’s Antifascist Novels’”; “resolved to go to the stadium every weekend” (to prepare for the running, jumping, cycling, rowing, and grenade-throwing “Ready for Labor and Defense” tests); wondered how the author of Victoria could have “sunk into fascism” and vowed “to become acquainted with the literature on Hamsun”; believed that life without friendship was impossible and that love revealed the “intelligent, genuine essence of life”; measured love according to Stendhal’s De l’amour; loved her father’s Civil War stories and yearned for a moment of self-sacrificial transcendence in her own life; admired Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered and “went to see him in his casket”; took pride—at the age of fifteen—in being one of only seven Komsomol members in her class (“that is why we have to do so much volunteer work, but the respect and influence are accordingly great”); helped her Young Pioneer charges make a picture album about Khrushchev and a mock-up model of a border-guard checkpoint; helped the elderly and infirm on election day December 12, 1937 (“this day will remain in my memory for a long time”); cherished her close friendship with her “class mentor” and school Komsomol organizer; struggled against the “swamp of bourgeois domesticity”; and divided the girls in her high school senior class into “the swamp dwellers,” “the young misses,” and “the Komsomol activists.” The Komsomol activists were those who were participating in the building of socialism by doing volunteer work, keeping diaries, acquiring knowledge, going to the theater, realizing that “there is nothing more important in life than friendship and love,” and learning how to appreciate Pushkin, Mérimée, Goethe, Heine, Romain Rolland, Levitan, and Beethoven.³⁴

Meanwhile, “frightening, incomprehensible things” were happening. Her Uncle Misha, “a Party member since the first days of the revolution,” and his wife, Aunt Anya, were arrested, and Nina’s cousin Irma was sent to an orphanage. Then “a terrible tragedy” happened to her dacha owners, her friend’s father, and her other uncle. When her father sent a telegram that he might lose his job and have to come back early, she wrote in her diary: “I will not deny my father!” When he wrote that he had been expelled from the Party and fired from his job, she wrote, quoting from Gogol’s Taras Bulba: “I am with you, Father!” When her class mentor, Tatiana Aleksandrovna, seemed to get into trouble, she wrote: “No one and nothing will make me turn my back on Tatiana Aleksandrovna!” When she found out that her father had been arrested, she wrote that it had to be “a terrible mistake.” And when her mother, grandmother, and aunts told her that she should not have told the truth about her father to the president of the Geology Institute, she wrote, quoting Saltykov-Shchedrin: “They want me to follow their example and act ‘in conformity with meanness.’ No, my Komsomol honor is worth more to me!”³⁵

“Komsomol honor” stood for a combination of Soviet patriotism (“Party-mindedness) and traditional honor as loyalty to kith and kin. Andrei Sverdlov chose the state (and himself); Volodia Moroz chose his family (and himself); Nina and most children of the Revolution did not have to choose: they were all like Ostap Bulba, for whom faith and father were one and the same. Any suggestion that a choice must be made was a “terrible mistake.” The “frightening, incomprehensible” days were also a “time of excitement and joy” (as Nina wrote several months later). On September 10, 1938, she wrote in her diary: “My father and Uncle Misha are supposed to be enemies of the people. How can I, their flesh-and-blood daughter, possibly believe that?” Three days later, she spoke at a Komsomol meeting, arguing “passionately” against admitting a politically passive young man and denouncing several of his friends as equally unworthy. “Our fathers may have been arrested,” she wrote, addressing one of them, “but I am not your comrade!” “When he becomes a lawyer,” she wrote about another one, “he may become a dangerous enemy of our socialist society.” On August 23, 1939, she discovered that she had not been admitted to the Geology Institute because she had told the director the truth about her family. She had joined, she wrote in her diary, the ranks of “lepers for their fathers’ sake.” Three days later, she conducted a “casual survey” of the most recent additions to her “literary stockpile,” which included Anatole France’s The Gods Are Athirst, a story of a young Jacobin who keeps executing enemies of the people until he is executed himself. “A powerful writer,” she wrote, “but I cannot agree with his interpretation of the Jacobins and the French Revolution.” Six months later she received an official commendation for her company’s performance during some Komsomol war games marking Red Army Day. “In sum, I am ready for war. The only problem is that, because of my poor eyesight, I cannot learn how to shoot properly. I could get glasses, but they don’t look good on me.”³⁶

The world around her seemed to merit her trust. Her class mentor, Tatiana Aleksandrovna, gave her money for her cousin who was in an orphanage. Her Komsomol organizer, Nina Andreevna, comforted her when her father was arrested and, after the “catastrophe” of Nina Andreevna’s husband’s arrest, sent her a copy of Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism with a dedication that urged her to stop “whimpering” and to remain “sincere, … active, and battle-ready.” During the October 1938 elections to the school Komsomol committee, she wanted desperately to be elected but felt obliged to withdraw her candidacy because of her father’s arrest—and was then elected anyway, by twenty-nine votes out of thirty-four. Standing in line in the Committee for Higher Education office after not being admitted to the Geology Institute, she met a girl who had spent the year after her father’s arrest living in her school principal’s office (“an amazingly brave principal”). Having been unsuccessful in Moscow, Nina enrolled in a college in Baku but was denied a stipend. Her mother wrote a “blunt” letter to Stalin “asking why the principle that sons did not answer for their fathers was being violated,” and Nina was admitted to the Moscow Geology Institute. Three weeks later, she celebrated the coming of the New Year 1940. Her wish was “to study, read, grow.”³⁷

Nina Kosterina

But her main source of comfort—as well as thrill, worry, joy, and occasional disappointment—were her closest friends: Lena Gershman and Grisha Grinblat. During her last two years in high school, they saw each other almost every day: doing homework, visiting Tatiana Aleksandrovna, preparing Komsomol events, walking in Gorky Park, working in the Lenin Library, reading each other’s diaries, and talking endlessly about love, friendship, books, and their feelings for each other. Grisha was in love with Lena, then Nina, then Lena, and then Nina again. He was the only person who got more votes than Nina in the October 1938 Komsomol committee election. He vowed to devote his life to science and wrote poems dedicated first to Lena and then to Nina. Nina—“having been spoiled by poets, from Pushkin to our days”—thought them weak but liked them because they were dedicated to her. Lena cried from happiness when she was admitted into the Komsomol and “came close to tears” when Grisha stopped being in love with her. When the three of them were not together, they wrote letters to each other. Life, “in spite of everything,” was “incredibly good.” On the night of January 20, 1940, Nina could not sleep, got up at 3:00 a.m., went for a walk around snowbound Moscow, and “felt an intense renewed connection to Red Square, the Kremlin, and the scarlet flag over the Kremlin.” When she returned home at 6:00 a.m., she picked up a book of Goethe’s poems, got back into bed, and read the lines that seemed to define the age:

Wouldst thou ever onward roam?

Lo, the good lies very near.

Learn happiness to seize at home, For happiness is always here.³⁸

The following year, her “New Year’s gift” was a “bright and cheerful” letter from her father, with “vivid colors about nature and about the people he was living and working with” (on a labor-camp drilling crew in minus 50-degree Celsius weather). “Before pitching a tent, they had to clear away snow that was a meter deep…. And between the lines of the letter was an elusive ironic smile.”³⁹

■ ■ ■

Earlier that same day, December 31, 1940, Lyova Fedotov stepped off the train in Leningrad and set out for the city center, “trudging through the slushy snow in his galoshes.” He stayed with his cousin Raya; her husband, Monya (the cellist Emmanuel Fishman); their little daughter, “Trovatore”; and their maid, Polya, in their large room in a communal apartment on the Moika Canal 95. They celebrated New Year’s with the family of the “former baron,” cellist, and Leningrad Conservatory professor, Boris Aleksandrovich Struve. (Lyova refused to drink any alcohol, even “for the sake of the New Year.”)

The next day, his friend Zhenia Gurov also arrived from Moscow, and they began their journey through Wonderland, with Lyova recording each day’s events and conversations in his diary (eighty-nine pages altogether, or about seven and a half pages of dense handwriting per day). They saw the “long-awaited and celebrated” Nevsky Prospect, the “enchanting” monument to Catherine the Great, the “graceful Kazan Cathedral” (“Voronikhin’s masterpiece”), the Pushkin Drama Theater (which Lyova called by its prerevolutionary name, “Aleksandrinsky”), the Alexander Column “with the cross-wielding angel on top,” the “Peter and Paul Cathedral with its pot-bellied dome and thin belfry and spire,” the “heavy, chestlike marble tombs of the tsars with enormous gold crosses on the lids,” “an empty fountain surrounded by numerous sculptures depicting Glinka, Lermontov, Nekrasov, and other Russian geniuses,” and, of course, the Hermitage. “It was divine: the magnificent gold decorations, combined with the blindingly white marble, created a vision of stunning harmony that produced simultaneous cries of delight from Zhenia and me…. Each new room presented us with new marvels: magnificent tables, armchairs, paintings, colonnades, double marble columns, gold plating, malachite, and glass. All of this glittered and sparkled before us—a whole city made up of magnificent rooms and passageways.”⁴⁰

They also went to the Russian Museum (where “the masterpieces of our own painters, so dear to our hearts, were collected”) and to a Tchaikovsky concert at the Leningrad Conservatory. But just as no composer could compare to Verdi and no Verdi opera could compare to Aida, nothing in the incomparable city of Leningrad could compare to St. Isaac’s.

It was stunning. In short, I was looking at St. Isaac’s! The somber walls, tinged purple in the winter cold, the powerful crimson colonnades under their triangular porticoes, the numerous sculptures of divinities, the four belfries with their bright gilded domes and, finally, the huge, blindingly yellow main dome presented a breathtaking picture. Under its winter veil it was even more extraordinary than it had been that summer in 1937 when I was here…. Winter had softened it, shrouding it in snowy garments, coloring it blue and violet, leaving only the belfry domes and the main dome unchanged. It seemed so solid, heavy and yet majestic, that it made me feel proud for this whole city.⁴¹

They spent a long time exploring the cathedral’s interior and then climbed to the balcony at the base of the main dome. “From here you could see all of Leningrad: the sparkling spire of the Admiralty, the red shape of the famous Winter Palace in the distance, and right below us, the snow-covered Bronze Horseman scaling the cliff astride his stallion. The view of this treasure-trove from above was truly world-conquering.” Finally, they made it to the very top:

The bright golden arrows of the sun’s rays peeked through the tattered, ghostly, gauzelike clouds and lit up the surroundings. From above, the city seemed like some kind of fairy-tale village with its snow-covered roofs sparkling in the sun. Thick clouds of steam rose from the houses in the devilishly bitter cold, and the shimmering, fluorescent layers of vapor and fog flowed through the air, blurring and obscuring distant buildings and the horizon’s edge in an interesting way…. In the distance you could see the blue shapes of the churches, the Peter-and-Paul spire, and even, to my delight, the dark dome of the Kazan Cathedral. Right below our little balcony were the gold plates of St. Isaac’s dome, curving steeply downward, and looking at them, for some reason, made me feel a little dizzy.⁴²

They did their best to see as many of those churches as possible, following predetermined routes through the city and making sketches of as many “architectural treasures” as they could. As Lyova explained to his cousin Raya, his scholarly interests were now concentrated on “geology, particularly mineralogy and paleontology, and biology, in the form of zoology.” In the Zoology Museum, he and Zhenia “contemplated the gigantic skeleton of a whale, which took up two floors, fish, mammals, birds, and even some incredibly gorgeous butterflies on the top floor.” Lyova kept asking himself if he was dreaming. Describing his walk on the Moika Embankment on January 5, he wrote: “I was walking next to the railing looking down at the icy surface of the river and humming the finale of Act 1 from Aida to myself. The joyous thought that I was in Leningrad continued to flutter within me! I had not yet calmed down and could hardly believe it was not a chimera or an illusion.” The next morning his first words were: “Dear God, can this really be Leningrad?” The answer, assuming God was paying attention, might have been: “No, not really.” They did not go to see the cruiser Aurora, which had given the signal for the storming of the Winter Palace; the Smolny Institute, which had served as the Bolshevik headquarters during the October Revolution; or the Kirov Museum, which Lyova had vowed to visit on the fifth anniversary of the assassination. As children of the Soviet Augustinian Age, reared among the Pamirs, they took no interest in revolutionary Petrograd and emerged from St. Petersburg back into Leningrad on only a few rare occasions—such as when they saw Hitler standing next to Molotov in a newsreel (“the executioner was smiling and trying to act polite”); when Lyova told Zhenia that if they were in Germany, they would be hanged “for being, first, Slavs and, second, Jewish”; when they asked a “bearded man who was furiously sweeping the sidewalk” whether there was a museum inside the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood (built on the site of Alexander II’s assassination) and were “totally shocked to hear that it contained a warehouse instead”; and—finally and irreversibly—when the time came to return to Moscow:⁴³

For the last time I looked around the room that I had always found remarkable, trying to engrave every detail in my memory (who knew when I’d be there again?) and left my Leningrad abode. Even the stairway was difficult to say goodbye to!

Walking through the square, I kept looking at the powerful shape of the cathedral, purple in the frost, and, when it disappeared behind the hotel, thought out loud:

“So, that’s it!!!”

I walked down the Moika Embankment, past the kindergarten where Trovatore already seemed far removed from me, and turned onto Nevsky Prospect. To cheer myself up, I started humming the march from Aida and, to this accompaniment, walked down the prospect to the Fontanka Canal, saying goodbye to the Kazan Cathedral, the Catherine Monument, and various other treasures.⁴⁴

Lyova and Zhenia met at the railway station. Their train left at 1:00 p.m. They “honored the memory of Leningrad” by eating the food that each of their hosts had packed for them, commiserated with each other about having to leave, climbed into their bunks, and went to sleep.

At around seven in the morning, the train stopped at the Leningrad Station in Moscow.

Good old Moscow greeted us with its fiercest morning cold. It was still completely dark, and when we walked out onto the square, we saw that it was lit up by the floodlights on the station roofs.

“Don’t even dream, Zhenya, of finding a street that would lead to St. Isaac’s!” I said tragically.

“That’s right!,” he said. “In one short night, we’ve put so much distance between us…. And now it’s gone!”

We were both clearly depressed, but the insidious cold drove us into the Metro, and we set off along that underground road for the city center.

We said goodbye at the Lenin Library station.

“Don’t worry,” said Zhenia cheerfully. “Not all is lost!”

“True! We’re still alive, after all,” I nodded gravely.⁴⁵