The House of Government

32

THE RETURN

About 500 House of Government residents (approximately one per apartment) went off to war; 113 of them (23 percent) did not come back. Those who did not leave on their own were evacuated in the late summer and fall of 1941. On October 16, when the German troops came within sixty miles of Moscow and most government agencies were evacuated to Kuibyshev, some of the House accounting records were burned. Within a week or two, most House employees had been let go, apartments sealed, remaining residents evicted, and the building as a whole placed under “conservation regime.” According to the official 1942 report, “as a result of the detonation of aerial bombs in the immediate vicinity of the building in the last quarter of 1941, 90 percent of all glass in the windows and stairways has been completely destroyed or partially damaged. Because the damage occurred in the winter, almost the entire heating, plumbing, and sewage systems have been rendered inoperable. There has also been substantial damage to the stucco and even some shifting of partition walls.”¹

In November 1941, an NKVD unit consisting of forty to fifty men arrived at the House in order to carry out a “special assignment” involving apartment searches. They were quartered in Entryways 12 and 17; the remaining members of the House administration, newly rehired guards (three to four per entryway), and an unknown number of repair workers moved into first- to third-floor apartments in other entryways. An investigation conducted in the summer of 1942 found that the NKVD unit and seventeen members of the House administration, including the House commandant and several of his deputies and senior guards, had stolen a wide variety of items (with a particular preference for watches, razors, revolvers, hunting rifles, leather coats, gramophone records, and sewing machines) from at least sixty-eight different apartments. At the same time, 453,638.45 rubles’ worth of furniture was evacuated from residents’ apartments and the basement warehouse (which was converted into a bomb shelter) “without any records being kept.” Items taken from the apartments “on a massive scale and for unknown destinations” included, among other things, 32 mirrors, 126 curtains, 10 radios, 43 desks, 22 dinner tables, 64 coffee/telephone/card tables, 483 chairs, 151 stools, 23 couches, 79 wardrobes, 65 bookcases, 29 silk lampshades, 33 china cabinets, 67 coat racks (including 42 oak), 84 draperies (including 41 tapestry), 28 carpet runners, 129 beds (85 nickel-plated, 38 iron, and 6 oak), 43 armchairs (including 20 children’s), 381 mattresses (305 hair, 37 cotton, and 39 bast), 3 pianos, 3 concert pianos, 17 teapots, 10 pendulum clocks, 103 enamel spittoons, 1 billiard table, 1 drum, 1 “Street Urchin” figurine, 1 “Mother and Child” sculpture, and 1 polar bear skin.²

In early 1942, some of the evacuees started returning, and the House began to fill up again. By fall 1942, the repair work had been largely completed and most apartments made habitable. By 1945, the theater had been reopened as part of the Council of Ministers Housekeeping Department Club. By 1946, the House had 970 official leaseholders (270 more than before the war) and 3,500 residents (almost a thousand more than before the war). The proportion of communal apartments had increased dramatically. Hundreds of residents who had moved in illegally or “lost the right to reside in the House” were evicted, often after a long series of petitions and court decisions; new Housekeeping Department officials were moved in as part of the “apartment consolidation” program; and many returning old residents complained about strangers living in their apartments. People and things migrated continuously—in, out, up, and down; during 1942, 50 percent of all registered House furniture was transferred between apartments. Mikhail Koltsov’s widow was evicted; Lyova Fedotov’s mother moved in with two other Old Bolsheviks; and Stalin’s daughter moved in, and later moved from a three-bedroom to a five-bedroom apartment. Dachas, suits, special passes, and, increasingly, cars and garages were to be awarded, returned, and reassigned. The House of Government was back, but it was busier, noisier, messier, less exclusive, and less directly connected to the government than it had been before the mass arrests and wartime evacuation.

Many top postwar officials (including Khrushchev, Molotov, Malenkov, Shcherbakov and Marshals Konev, Rokossovsky, and Zhukov) preferred the French baroque Fifth House of Soviets on Granovsky Street (formerly Count Sheremetev’s rental apartments) and, after the construction boom of the late 1940s and early 1950s, the “Stalin empire style” buildings along the renovated embankments and the newly laid-out Leninsky and Kutuzovsky Avenues (especially No. 26, Kutuzovsky Ave., where Brezhnev, Suslov, Andropov, and Shchelokov lived). At the same time, twenty-four special housing cooperatives were built for elite actors, artists, writers, doctors, dancers, singers, scholars, musicians, and foreign ministry officials. The Soviet elite was regenerating, reproducing, and spreading around Moscow and beyond.³

Fifth House of Soviets

Kutuzovsky Avenue. No. 26 is the first building on the left.

■ ■ ■

Meanwhile, many of the wives of the original House of Government residents began to return from the camps. “I hadn’t seen Mother in five years,” wrote Inna Gaister (who had since entered Moscow University’s Physics Department). “She was in terrible shape. It was painful for me to look at her. She had declined so much physically and looked glassy-eyed and listless.”⁴

Maya Peterson had not seen her mother in seven years. “I remembered Mother as plump, well-dressed, and always smiling. Now I was looking at a small, skinny, wrinkled woman with long dark braids.” Maya had spent two years in an orphanage before moving in with her half-brother, Igor. In July 1941, Igor had joined the volunteer militia (“He wanted very much to wash off the shameful stain of being a son of an enemy of the people”), become a candidate Party member, and been killed on December 16, 1941, three days before Nina Kosterina. Maya had walked two hundred miles with a refugee column to Kovrov; spent a hungry and homeless year in evacuation in the Urals; returned to Moscow in the spring of 1943; graduated from high school with a gold medal (“schoolwork and friends were my whole life; never in my life had I laughed so much”); been accepted into Moscow University’s Classics Department; and started writing poetry.⁵ Maya was one of three sisters:

Rakhil Kaplan (Courtesy of Inna Gaister)

When Mother was arrested and disappeared from our lives for a while, Ira was seventeen, I was eleven, and Marina was two. We had been growing up and maturing as individuals without her. When we met again seven years later, we had been through a lot and gotten used to being independent. It was not always easy for Mother and us to understand each other…. We never really managed to get used to each other again.

Ira, with whom Mother had lived before her second arrest, fought with her all the time. When Mother and I lived together in exile, we also had terrible fights. She lived out her final years with Marina, and also badly…. Mother suffered terribly because of this and felt lonely and hurt.⁶

Svetlana Osinskaia went to see her mother, Ekaterina Mikhailovna Smirnova, in her camp outside Solikamsk, just north of Berezniki, in 1944. She stayed with her mother’s friend Esfir, who had recently been released.

When Mother came to see me for the first time, we embraced and stood silently for a minute. Esfir was crying. But even then I could already sense something false in myself, and perhaps in Mother, as well. We had not seen each other for seven years. I felt so remote from her; everything that interested me was in Moscow, where I was studying at the university: my friendship that seemed extraordinary, my love that was desperate and hopeless but so intense, the exciting research I was doing in the seminar on ancient history, my presentation on the tyranny of Peisistratos—which I was telling Mother and Esfir about, when I saw the puzzled look on their faces, and Mother then cautiously asked: “Does anyone else find this interesting?” I could tell that all these things that engrossed me so utterly were not interesting to them and that my raptures were incomprehensible to them and could not really be understood because they were connected to events and emotions that I did not—I knew right away—did not want to share, since they did not seem to care! I had my young, distant, selfish world, not all happy, but still full. They, as camp inmates, must have thought of the things I lived for and worshipped as completely crazy. The tyranny of Peisistratos …⁷

In 1945, Ekaterina Mikhailovna’s camp term ended. She was fifty-six years old. She wanted to stay as a free employee in the camp hospital, but the settlement was closed down, and she had to leave. Former prisoners were not allowed to live in Moscow, but she had nowhere else to go. “She could only live in Moscow illegally. But where? In the apartment of my father’s brother Pavel, where I was living? It was impossible, and nobody wanted her there. With friends? But how long would they tolerate her? And how would she make a living?” Since she was not allowed to register in Moscow, she could not get a job. More important, according to Svetlana, “The eight years she spent there [in prison and camp] had broken her. She came back a completely different person, and only very rarely could one see a pale reflection of her former brilliance. Those who expected her to return to her former life were disappointed: there was no life left in her, only the wish to survive somehow. ‘If we are alive, we must go on living,’ she used to say, and there was bitterness and hopelessness in those words…. Very soon it became obvious that nobody wanted her and that she should leave as soon as possible.” She found a job as a bookkeeper at a dairy factory outside Uglich, and in early 1947 Svetlana visited her there. “It was a cold winter. She had a tiny room in a long barrack with blind windows. You could hear everything through the walls. Outside, in the dark hall, people were constantly walking back and forth, cursing, or having drunken fights.”⁸

In late 1948 and 1949, as the Soviet Union returned to a state of siege, some of the recently freed “family members of the traitors to the motherland,” including Maria Peterson, were rearrested and sent back into exile. Arrested and exiled along with them were some of the traitors’ newly grown children. Maya Peterson (twenty-two years old), Inna Gaister (twenty-three), and Tania Miagkova’s daughter, Rada Poloz (twenty-four) were arrested on the same day (April, 23, 1949) and found themselves in the same prison cell. Inna Gaister had defended her thesis that day. The State Security agent who came to arrest her had waited for her to finish before escorting her to the Lubyanka. Rada Poloz had spent the war as a nurse on a hospital train and was, at the time of her arrest, a student at the Bauman Institute of Technology. Maya Peterson remembered feeling “great relief” at not having to prepare for her Latin, Greek, and ancient drama exams or write her thesis on Aristophanes. They were all sentenced to five years in exile as “socially dangerous elements.” None was charged with a crime. Maya was sent to Siberia; Inna and Rada, to Kazakhstan.⁹

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

■ ■ ■

Anatoly Granovsky’s specialty of seducing the daughters of the enemies of the people was not as urgently needed anymore. He remembered being summoned once in December 1944 to Andrei Sverdlov’s office. “He sat with the rigid immobility of a corpse and only his bright, staring eyes seemed alive as I stood stiffly to attention before him…. It would not have been in character for him to have asked me to sit down, and he did not do so while this interview lasted.” Granovsky’s new assignment was to become a priest and serve as a secret informer within the Russian Orthodox Church. Unhappy at the idea, tired of working as an informer, bored by his current female “subject” (whom he described as a “hungry, despised, and hated mistress”), and desperate to get away from the “sadistic” Sverdlov, he asked for a transfer back to Pavel Sudoplatov’s Fourth Section (which directed terror and sabotage activities behind enemy lines), citing his desire to do the “man’s work” he had been trained for.¹⁰ The next day he was called in to see Sverdlov again:

He received me with an exaggerated pantomime of courtesy, bowing to me slightly and waving me to a chair. I remained standing, however.

“So?” he said. “The great Captain Granovsky does not consider that the Second Section is the place for him? He does not think he is doing a man’s work? What is his definition of a man’s work, I wonder? …

I remained silent.

“Please forgive Commissar Sudoplatov, Comrade Granovsky, because he has been unable to grant your request. I am afraid there is no other way for you except to continue obeying orders, my orders.” And his manner changed from bantering sarcasm to tight-lipped anger. “You may go now, and if I hear any more of this nonsense, I will see that you are properly punished.”¹¹

According to his memoirs, Granovsky left that same night for Minsk and then Kiev, seeking the protection of his former Fourth Section commanders. In Kiev, one of his mentors from the sabotage school took him to see the commissar of state security of Ukraine, Sergei Savchenko, who sent him to the recently reoccupied town of Uzhgorod, in West Ukraine, as part of a team charged with recruiting “sleeper agents” among the departing refugees. The principal method was hostage-taking and blackmail, and the success rate, according to Granovsky, was very high. “In the Trans-Carpathian Ukraine already occupied by Soviet troops there was plenty of material among the Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, Romanians, Slovaks, Jews, Ruthenians, Ukrainians and Austrians who lived there to serve the purpose admirably.” Granovsky did well and was retained by the Ukrainian NKVD. His subsequent missions included marrying Uzhgorod’s wealthiest woman for the purpose of accompanying her to the West (aborted, in April 1945, owing to the chronic alcoholism of the “subject”); traveling to Berlin in May 1945 in order to recover the secret files taken by the Nazis from the Kiev NKVD offices; and running a spy ring in newly liberated Prague in the winter and early spring of 1946. In late April, he was placed as a secret agent on a Soviet ship that was to travel around Europe.

Anatoly Granovsky, 1944

On September 21, 1946, he offered his services as a defector to the US military attaché in Stockholm. The intelligence officer who flew over from the Allied Command in Berlin to interrogate him found his story unconvincing, and he was handed over to the Swedish authorities. Around mid-October, he was visited in Långholmen Prison by the Soviet ambassador and consul general, who urged him to return home. When he refused, they asked him if he had a message for his mother and twelve-year-old brother, Vladimir. He responded:

“Tell them that I cannot take part in mass murders and mass enslavement of millions of people in order to secure a few years of existence for my beloved mother and brother in Soviet paradise. If you kill my brother you will kill him, but it is better for him to die as a child than to suffer the torture of life under communism. However, I am sure you will tell them whatever your masters order you to tell them.”

“You pretend to be unconcerned, but do you fully realize what it means for them that you should desert the service of your motherland?”

“I realize perfectly.”

“And you can so easily send your mother to Siberia?”

“There is nothing I can do to help now.”¹²

On October 30, 1946, the Soviet Ministry of External Affairs sent a note to the Swedish Embassy in Moscow demanding Granovsky’s extradition. According to the Swedish-Russian report of 2000 on the fate of the “savior of Hungarian Jews,” Raoul Wallenberg, arrested in Budapest in January 1945, Soviet officials may have suggested an exchange of Wallenberg for Granovsky. On November 8, the king of Sweden decreed that Granovsky not be released to the Soviet Union, “nor to any country where, presumably, he does not enjoy safety against being returned to his national country.” Later that day, he was released from custody. On November 15, the Swedish Ministry of External Affairs informed the Soviet Embassy that Granovsky would be extradited to a country other than the USSR. The Soviet ambassador, I. S. Chernyshev, made several attempts to persuade the Swedish government to reconsider (one of which was described by the prime minister, Tage Erlander, as “so naked and abrupt that one is completely taken aback”), to no avail. Granovsky left Sweden and seems to have spent several years in Brazil before arriving in the United States. Wallenberg was, by most accounts, executed in July 1947. The fate of Granovsky’s mother and brother is unknown.¹³

Andrei Sverdlov was arrested in October 1951 as part of the purge of Jewish secret police officials. According to his letter to the chairman of the Council of Ministers, G. Malenkov, he spent nineteen months under investigation, “being groundlessly accused of the most monstrous and preposterous crimes.” He was released on May 18, 1953, two and a half months after Stalin’s death, but was not readmitted to the secret police. He graduated from the Academy of Social Sciences at the Party’s Central Committee, became a Party historian, got a job at the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, and collaborated with his mother on her memoir about his father and with his father’s employee, Pavel Malkov, on his Memoirs of a Kremlin Commandant.

In the 1960s, he and his former fellow interrogator in the Anna Larina-Bukharina case, Yakov Naumovich Matusov, collaborated, under the names of Andrei Yakovlevich Yakovlev and Yakov Naumovich Naumov, on three spy thrillers for adolescents: A Thin Thread, Two-Faced Janus, and A Fight with a Werewolf. In all three, the villain, “embittered against the Soviet system” because of his class or ethnic origins or because of his father’s fall from grace, forms an anti-Soviet secret society in the late 1930s, betrays his country to the Nazis during the war, and spies for the Americans in the 1960s. The secret societies, known as “Avenging Our Fathers,” are replicas of the ones Anatoly Granovsky, on Sverdlov’s orders, used to press his classmates into joining. In A Thin Thread, the future spy “socialized with school kids and tried to tempt some of them into joining the ‘society’ he planned to create. Not with good intentions, you understand. The girls he tried to corrupt, to seduce.” The Soviet counterintelligence agents do catch him in the end, but not before one of them is fired for extracting false confessions from innocent people. The reader is given an example of his interrogation technique: “The longer you persist in denial, the worse for you. And what do you expect? If you start talking of your own free will and tell everything, it means that you have laid down your arms and stopped fighting against the Soviet state. That will be taken into account. I’ll be the first to ask for leniency for you. But if you continue your denials, there will be no mercy. You will start talking, in any case. Sooner or later, you will. And the sooner it happens, the better for you.”¹⁴

Andrei Sverdlov (right) with his uncle, German Mikhailovich Sverdlov (Yakov Sverdlov’s half-brother), from Apt. 169

It is not known whether the authors meant this to be a mockery or a confession. Andrei Sverdlov died in 1969, the same year the following notice appeared in the underground publication Chronicle of Current Events:

There are at least seven individuals living in Moscow, whom Andrei Sverdlov personally interrogated, using torture and abuse. He participated in the investigation of the case of Elizaveta Drabkina, who had been Yakov Sverdlov’s secretary in 1918–19 and who, at his request, had taken his children Andrei and Vera out of his apartment several hours before his death. Andrei Sverdlov knew very well that Drabkina had not committed the crimes she was accused of committing, but still demanded her “confession” and “repentance.” …

Andrei Sverdlov’s address is: No 2, Serafimovich Street, Apt. 319 (the very same House of Government, from which so many victims were taken away). His telephone numbers are: 231–94–97 (home), 181–23–25 (work).¹⁵

■ ■■

On March 5, 1953, Stalin died. The Party had lost what Bukharin called “the personal embodiment of its mind and will.”

Maya Peterson and her mother, Maria, heard the news in the village of Pikhtovka, in Novosibirsk Province, where they were living in exile. “In those days, my mother and I did not hold Stalin responsible for the tragedy whose victims and witnesses we were. My mother saw its causes in wrecking: a conspiracy against the cream of the Bolshevik Party by the enemies who had made their way to the top, including the Ministry of State Security. When Stalin died, we felt the same grief as everyone around us.”¹⁶

So did Rada Poloz’s grandmother (Tania Miagkova’s mother), Feoktista Yakovlevna Miagkova, who kept Stalin’s portrait on the wall and explained the fate of her daughter and son-in-law by saying that “there were so many enemies that it was impossible not to make a mistake.” At the time of Stalin’s death, Yuri Trifonov had finished school in Tashkent, worked at an airplane factory in Moscow, graduated from the Literary Institute, gotten married, published his first novel in Tvardovsky’s Novyi mir, received the Stalin Prize of the Third Category, and turned twenty-seven. “I heard that Tvardovsky cried on stage during the Stalin memorial meeting in the House of Cinema,” he wrote many years later. “Those tears were, of course, genuine. I saw the same sincere grief in my own family. My mother, who had passed through the Karaganda and Akmolinsk camps, feared that things would get worse. My grandmother grieved desperately.” (Stalin’s On Lenin and Leninism, with the inscription “To Dear Comrade Slovatinskaia, in memory of joint work underground, from the author,” was prominently displayed in her bookcase.)¹⁷

Fedor Kaverin had been abandoned by most of his actors, ridiculed in the press, chased out of a succession of temporary buildings, and eventually fired as artistic director. He continued to direct in other theaters and dreamed of staging “one final production summing up [his] entire creative life” (rereading Faust, among other things, for the purpose). During the war he had produced shows for the cadets of the School of Aviation in Borisoglebsk, wished for a “communion with the Soviet state through blood sacrifice,” and hoped to direct a play in which “the Russian soul takes on the salvation of the world and appears before the world and the spectator in all its holy majesty.” On the day of Stalin’s death he wrote in his diary: “What grief—general for the entire nation and personal for each one.”¹⁸

On the same day, Boris Ivanov wrote: “The radio announcement of the death of our leader and teacher, Comrade Stalin, felt like a stab in the heart. When the announcer’s voice died away, I looked out the window at the dark red walls of the Kremlin where, inside the quadrangle formed by those walls, the Great Stalin had lived and worked.” Several days later he spoke at a memorial rally at the Kalinin Bread Factory. “I knew what needed to be said, but I could not utter a sound because the sobs rising in my throat were choking me and tears were welling in my eyes.” Anatoly Ronin, the secretly circumcised son of the planning official, Solomon Ronin, and a friend of Boris Ivanov’s younger son, Anatoly, and Stalin’s sons, Vasily and Artem, was trampled to death at the funeral.¹⁹

Boris Ivanov with daughter Galina and grandson Volodia

Stalin’s body was embalmed by Boris Zbarsky’s deputy, S. R. Mardashev, because Zbarsky (who had recently embalmed Georgi Dimitrov in Bulgaria) had been arrested a year earlier and accused of Jewish nationalism, spying for Germany, ties to Trotsky and Bukharin, former membership in the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and “minimizing Lenin’s greatness” by comparing his body to Egyptian mummies.²⁰

With his body in the mausoleum, Stalin was no longer the personal embodiment of the mind and will of the Party. The Party, separated from Stalin, needed a new personal embodiment; Stalin, separated from his body and from the Party, became open to critical scrutiny. If his body was comparable to an Egyptian mummy, his rule might be comparable to that of a pharaoh.

Rada Poloz remembered telling her grandmother that it was all Stalin’s fault. Yuri Trifonov spent the day of the funeral walking with two friends, one of whom, the future children’s writer, Iosif Dik, startled the other two by saying that they would live to see the day when Stalin would be taken out of the mausoleum. Svetlana Osinskaia was taken aback by her mother’s reaction: “When Stalin died, our whole school was in shock and I, like everyone around me, was full of worry about how we would live without our dear father. My mother listened to me and said, with a simplicity and certainty that startled me: ‘Actually, it’s wonderful that he is dead.’”²¹

Three years later, on February 25, 1956, Khrushchev said as much in his “Secret Speech” at the Twentieth Party Congress—on behalf of the Party, history, and the Revolution. The bond that had held the scattered survivors of the House of Government together was broken. Boris Volin, the former chief censor and, more recently, premier ideologue of official Russian nationalism, came home from the congress “completely devastated,” according to his daughter, and died within a year, never regaining his former self. Yuri Trifonov’s grandmother, Tatiana Slovatinskaia, died six months later. The author of The Road to Ocean, Leonid Leonov, “went into deep spiritual shock” and lost control of the left side of his face. In the Kremlin Hospital, he ran into the Writers’ Union president, Aleksandr Fadeev, who shot himself several weeks later.²²

Fedor Kaverin

Fedor Kaverin compared the news to reading Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. “How awful,” he wrote in his diary. “What terrible things one learns about our Soviet past.” He had suffered a stroke but was beginning to recover, spending much of his time at his dacha in Pushkino, working on several new productions, and writing his memoirs. On Sunday, October 20, 1957, he wrote in his diary: “I feel very happy inside. The main thing is that I know I am needed. There’s so much to do. And that makes me feel good.” Later that evening he, his wife, and their dog Johnny got on the suburban train for Moscow. Johnny was not wearing a muzzle, and the conductor told them they had to pay a fine. In Moscow they were escorted to the Yaroslavl Railway police station. When Kaverin attempted to argue his case, the station chief seized him by the collar and pushed him to the floor. He died on the spot.²³

Boris Ivanov and Elena Ivanova (Zlatkina)

Around the same time, Boris Ivanov added a note to his diary entries on Stalin’s death: “These entries about the day Stalin died were written on the day of his funeral, they show how when he was alive he was able to deceive us and if my pain at the time was great, equally great today is my hatred for this man who was able to ensnare us so completely in the feeling of love for him, while in fact he was a beast and a sadist with hundreds of thousands of destroyed lives on his conscience among them dozens of my friends and comrades.”²⁴

■■■

Meanwhile, the survivors from among the banished House residents kept returning from prisons, camps, and exile. A few were allowed back into the House. The widow of the executed Chekist, Yakov Peters (and the mother of Anatoly Granovsky’s “subject,” Igor Peters, who had since died in the war), Antonina Zakharovna Peters, moved in with Lyova Fedotov’s mother, Roza Lazarevna Markus. Boris Zbarsky’s old apartment, one of the largest in the House, had been occupied by the new prosecutor general, former member of the Donetsk execution troika, and lead Soviet prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trial, Roman Rudenko. Zbarsky was given a new apartment (Apt. 197), went back to teaching (but not to the mausoleum), and died in the middle of a lecture he was giving on October 7, 1954, nine months after being let out of prison.²⁵

Most of the recently released residents had no chance of returning to the House of Government or recovering their former possessions (hard as some of them tried). They moved in with their children, who had little to say to them; procured rooms in communal apartments; or found refuge in the Home for Party Veterans in Peredelkino, not far from the “heavenly place” where Lyova Fedotov and Zhenia Gurov had spent a day “frolicking by the river” ten days before the start of the war. (When Antonina Zakharovna Peters and Roza Lazarevna Markus could no longer manage by themselves in the House of Government, they moved to the Peredelkino home together. Antonina Zakharovna died soon afterward. Roza Lazarevna lived to the age of ninety-two. Zhenia Gurov was present at her funeral.)

To have the “stain” removed—and to become eligible for better pensions, health care, and living space, the returnees needed to be formally “rehabilitated” (proclaimed legally innocent) and—crucially important for many of them—reinstated in the Party. To save their previous lives from meaninglessness and their families from oblivion, they also needed posthumous rehabilitation and Party readmission for their vanished relatives. What was required for the purpose, among other things, were character references from prominent Old Bolsheviks who had known them before their fall. Finding such people was not easy. Of those who had not been arrested, Platon Kerzhentsev had died in 1940; Feliks Kon, in 1941; Panteleimon Lepeshinsky, in 1944; Sergei Alliluev, Aron Solts, and Vladimir Adoratsky, in 1945; Rozalia Zemliachka, in 1947; Nikolai Podvoisky, in 1948; Aleksandr Serafimovich and Georgi Dimitrov, in 1949 (Dimitrov’s body was embalmed by Zbarsky and displayed in a mausoleum in Sofia); Yakov Brandenburgsky, Maksim Litvinov, and Efim Shchadenko, in 1951. Others were not willing to vouch for those who had not been vouched for. Those still in power—with the exception of Anastas Mikoyan—had other things to worry about.²⁶

The most prominent exception was the oldest of the Old Bolsheviks, Elena Dmitrievna Stasova. Born in 1873 into a prominent intelligentsia (noble) family, she had met Nadezhda Krupskaia while working for the Political Red Cross in the mid-1890s; joined Lenin’s party in 1898; served as a “technical worker” (under the alias “The Absolute”) and underground Iskra agent; spent time in prison, exile, and emigration; worked as the Central Committee secretary in 1917 (before Sverdlov took over); and held high office in the Comintern, Central Control Commission, and International Red Aid (MOPR) before being removed by Stalin in 1938, for reasons she claimed—in her letter to him—not to understand (“it is especially hard because I have never had, do not have, and will never have a life outside the Party”). From 1938 to 1946 she had worked as editor in chief of the French and English editions of the International Literature magazine. In 1948, she had received a “severe reprimand” for saying in a public lecture that “Lenin treated all comrades equally and even called Bukharin ‘Bukharchik.’” (“These words slipped off my tongue,” she wrote to Khrushchev in 1953, “but of course they constituted a grave political mistake because after the Bukharin trial I had absolutely no right to say what I did.”) She was famously humorless, irritable, and difficult to please. (According to Goloshchekin’s wife, once, when Goloshchekin made a grave political mistake, Stalin threatened to force him to marry Stasova.) On October 15, 1953, on the occasion of her eightieth birthday, she received her second Order of Lenin. Four years later, on the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution, she received her fourth. She was celebrated as the paradigmatic Old Bolshevik, frequently featured as the keynote speaker at public events, and consulted as a living archive at the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute. But her main job, after the Twentieth Party Congress, was to affirm the Bolshevik credentials of former enemies of the people. She was a one-woman rehabilitation committee, the last living memorial to the sacred origins, the only bona fide link among the remnants of severed lives. She received hundreds of letters, answered them with the help of a secretary and several volunteer assistants, and signed countless appeals to the Military Procuracy and the Party Central Committee. “In all our meetings, our conversations were always friendly,” she wrote in behalf of Valentin Trifonov, “and I have always considered Valentin Andreevich a firm Bolshevik, who always followed the Party line. If you need any further clarifications regarding particular aspects of the Trifonov case, I will be happy to do whatever is necessary.”²⁷

Elena Dmitrievna Stasova

She wrote such letters for Bukharin, Rykov, Goloshchekin, and Voronsky, among others. She needed help and was impatient with her assistants. On May 17, 1956, she wrote to an old comrade (whom she was helping to return from exile) about her shock over the suicide of the writer Aleksandr Fadeev and her need for a new secretary: “So now my nerves are on edge, and I have to work hard to keep them in check. And here is this young lady, who helps me read in the mornings and afternoons and is so extraordinarily ignorant and stupid that her reading often perplexes me and rattles my nerves. I am looking for a person who could be a real secretary to me—someone with knowledge of another language, typewriting skills, and clear political thinking. I don’t include Party membership because if I need help reading strictly confidential materials, one of my Party comrades can always do it for me.”²⁸

A year later, Voronsky’s daughter Galina came from Magadan to Moscow to thank Stasova for her help with her father’s rehabilitation and Party reinstatement. Stasova was living in Apt. 291, in Entryway 15. “She opened the door herself. Before me stood a very old, tall, thin, slightly stooped woman with snow-white hair and a long face carved with wrinkles. In the small study, with a balcony overlooking the courtyard and full of old furniture and bookcases, were two portraits of Stalin.” A third, very large, portrait of Stalin hung in the bedroom, over her bed. She asked Voronskaia if she had a place to stay and offered her a bed in her apartment. (Voronskaia declined.) Staying with her at the time was Zinoviev’s first wife, Sarra Ravich, who had just returned from exile (and died within the next few days, before Stasova had a chance to place her in the Home for Party Veterans).²⁹

In the fall of 1960, Voronskaia moved permanently to Moscow and became one of Stasova’s assistants.

Elena Dmitrievna had had an operation on her eyes and could barely see. She could not read herself. Each reader had her own day, once a week. My day was first Friday, and then Monday. We always read Pravda and Izvestia. Elena Dmitrievna preferred Izvestia. We used to read the entire newspaper (especially Izvestia), but later on she would often say: “This article is boring, let’s not read it,” or simply announce: “I’m very tired. That’s enough for today. Let’s play cards instead.”

The newspaper was to be read quickly, “without feeling,” and God save you if you mispronounced a word: Elena Dmitrievna would correct you and sometimes lose her patience….

Sometimes Elena Dmitrievna would become very irritable, and it would be hard to be around her. “You did not sit down properly,” “did not get up properly,” “did not respond properly.” Sometimes I would leave with a heavy heart: it was not easy to be the object of constant attacks. But sometimes she could be very welcoming, kind, and friendly.³⁰

She left no letter unanswered (checking regularly on her assistants’ progress), was very generous with money, supported countless relatives, and was rumored to be paying the college tuition of two students. Ainu Kuusinen, the wife of the Finnish Communist Otto Kuusinen (Apt. 19), wrote to her from exile: “You are the best person in the world. You are an angel.” Galina Voronskaia had seen too much to fully share that view. At the end of her life, the Old Bolshevik had turned into an old noblewoman.³¹

Kindness, the desire to help, extraordinary selflessness, and complete indifference to money, things, and the material side of life in general coexisted with a contemptuous treatment of those who lived near her. Not wanting her to live alone after the death of a relative, her comrades tried to find a companion for her. But it was simply impossible to live with Elena Dmitrievna. She had no regard for anyone. After they came home from work (and many of them did work), she would make them play cards with her for hours on end, order them around, and humiliate them in the presence of others. No one could stand living in her apartment for long. Different women kept coming and going.³²

As she approached ninety, she could no longer listen to an entire newspaper or have the radio on all day long. (She used to turn it off only for reading and sleeping.) In 1962, at the age of eighty-nine, she asked for her ashes to be buried in the former Tikhvin Cemetery, currently the Artists’ Necropolis in Leningrad, next to her uncle, the famous art and music critic (and whatever other family graves had not been destroyed during the reconstruction after the war). In January 1966, she wrote her will, leaving her archive to the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute and her savings to her relatives. Several months later, she became ill. In late December, Voronskaia came to visit her. “She was unconscious and mumbling indistinctly, sometimes in French.” She died shortly before New Year’s, at the age of ninety-three (the same age as Princess Natalia Petrovna Golitsyna, the original Queen of Spades). Her wish to be buried next to her family made no sense for someone who had “never had a life outside the Party.” It was, therefore, disregarded. Her ashes were interred in the Kremlin Wall, not far from Otto Kuusinen, Grigory Petrovsky, Rozalia Zemliachka, her friend Nadezhda Krupskaia, and the grave of Joseph Stalin, whose remains had been removed from the mausoleum five years earlier.³³

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Most of Stasova’s erstwhile House of Government neighbors who survived “the catastrophe” also died alone. Stanislav Redens’s widow and Stalin’s sister-in-law, Anna Allilueva, had been arrested in 1948 along with several other members of her family (including Anna’s sister-in-law, Evgenia Allilueva; her second husband, N. V. Molochnikov; and daughter Kira). According to Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, whose House of Government apartment shared a balcony with Anna’s,

She came back six years later in the spring of 1954. She had spent part of the time in solitary confinement. But most of it she’d spent in the prison hospital. The curse of heredity—the schizophrenia that plagued my mother’s family—had caught up with her. Even Aunt Anna failed to weather all the blows visited on her by fate.

She was in a terrible state. I saw her the first day she was back. She was sitting in her old room unable to recognize her two grown sons, apathetic to everyone. Her eyes were cloudy, and she was staring out the window, indifferent to the news we were trying to tell her about my father’s death, about Grandmother’s death and the down-fall of our sworn enemy, Beria. Her only reaction was to shake her head listlessly.³⁴

She recovered eventually, “stopped raving and only occasionally talked to herself at night.” She was back to the way she had always been (as Svetlana saw it in 1963): “a martyr in the name of goodness, a true saint, a genuine Christian.”³⁵

Once again she tries to help everyone else in sight. The day her pension arrives, myriad old ladies appear on her doorstep and she hands out money to them all, knowing perfectly well that none of them will ever be able to pay her back. People she’s never seen in her life keep showing up at her apartment to ask for help. One wants a permit to stay in Moscow. Another is looking for a job. An old schoolteacher has trouble at home and nowhere to live. Aunt Anna does what she can for all of them. She goes to the Moscow City Soviet. She spends hours waiting to see someone at the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. She peppers the Central Committee with appeals, never for herself, of course, but for someone in trouble, some ailing old woman who doesn’t have a pension and has nothing to live on.

She’s a familiar figure everywhere she goes. Everybody respects her and is kind to her, everybody except her two young, good-looking daughters-in-law, who are only out for themselves. Her home life is terrible—no one consults her or pays her any attention. Sometimes they go to the cinema and pay her to baby-sit. When they have friends in for the evening, she is an unwanted guest, a dishevelled, white-haired old woman who is sloppily dressed and keeps butting in at the wrong moment. Instead of a purse, she’ll pick up an old muff or sack and go out for a walk. She’ll have a long talk with the militiaman on the street, ask the dustman how he’s been lately and go for a boat ride on the river. If this were before the Revolution people would treat her like a holy woman and bow down before her on the street.

Neither Anna nor Svetlana knew that Anna’s late husband had been officially recognized as the country’s number one executioner. Unlike number two, Sergei Mironov, he had since been rehabilitated. “She’s convinced Redens is still alive, although she’s had official word of his posthumous rehabilitation. She thinks he has a new wife and family somewhere in the far North like Kolyma or Magadan (‘After so many years, why not?’ she’ll ask) and that he just doesn’t want to come home. From time to time she’ll insist after one of her dreams or hallucinations that she’s seen her husband and had a talk with him. She lives in a world of her own, where memories and visions and shadows of bygone years blur into those of the present.”³⁶

Svetlana Stalina finished her book of memoirs, Twenty Letters to a Friend, in August 1963. A year later, she added the footnote: “Anna Redens [Allilueva] died in August 1964, in a section of the Kremlin hospital located outside of Moscow. After prison she had a great fear of locked doors, but despite her protests she was locked up one night in a hospital ward. The next morning she was found dead.”³⁷

Anna Allilueva

Osinsky’s widow, Ekaterina Mikhailovna Smirnova, had died six months earlier. According to her daughter, Svetlana, no one would have recognized in her “the brilliant woman from many years ago or even the intelligent and sad one of more recent years.”

Fate was not kind to her in her last years. Her rehabilitation in 1955 provided her with relative comfort, an apartment in Moscow, and a chance to rent a dacha, something she had always dreamed of. But the people she loved were all in their graves, and unknown ones at that. She did have a daughter, but she was unloving, uncaring, and irritable.

When my mother became an invalid, she moved from one rented apartment to another, with her friends’ help, until the Academy of Sciences gave her, as an Academician’s widow, a room in a communal apartment. She started living with constantly changing maids, who stole from her to the best of their ability or conscience. In 1961 the Academy authorities decided, for some reason, that she was mentally ill and offered her a separate one-bedroom apartment. I moved in, too, with my daughter and against my wishes. She would live for another three years and have two more strokes. Nobody wanted to stay with her permanently, but she could no longer live by herself.

Thus began our three years of torment, which are not worth describing because they are so easy to imagine. I will only say a few words about my mother. Until the very end, she would sit completely straight in a simple, ten-rouble lawn chair made of canvas stretched over aluminum tubes, which I would push around the apartment. With unsteady, indistinct movements of her now completely smooth, “boyish hand” (as my father used to say), she would direct her food toward her mouth, spilling some along the way and greedily devouring the rest. Her main occupation was reading, but only books she had read before. Sometimes, when looking at my mother from behind, I would notice her back begin to quiver and shake. She would suddenly burst into violent sobs while reading something that brought back memories or, more often, when listening to music. (When the sweet strains of Lakmé’s aria “Where will the young Indian girl, a Pariah, go?,” poured forth from the radio, Mother, no matter how hard she tried, could not hold back the sobs, which would then turn into almost a howl.)³⁸

E. M. Smirnova (left) (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

Sometime during the war, Svetlana had been contacted by Anna Shaternikova, who told her about her twenty-year relationship with her father. They became friends. Anna lived in a communal apartment with her husband, whom she did not love, and son Vsemir, who died soon after the war. She was paid a special Old Bolshevik pension and worked part-time in the district Party committee and as a volunteer in various official campaigns. She was very proud of having joined the Party before the October Revolution. After Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, she was contacted by a man who had spent time in the same prison cell with Osinsky. She did not tell Svetlana about it because Svetlana was not a Party member (but did tell Svetlana’s nephew, Ilya, who was). Toward the end of her life she spent some time in a psychiatric institution. She once told Svetlana that she had three wishes: not to die alone, to have someone say something at her funeral, and to have her grave taken care of. She died alone in a hospital, sometime in the late 1970s, when she was in her mid-eighties. Svetlana never found out where she was buried. But she did receive the package of her father’s letters, which Anna had preserved for forty years, in a variety of hiding places.³⁹

Anna Shaternikova (Courtesy of Elena Simakova)

Bolshevism, like Christianity, Islam, and most other millenarianisms, started out as a men’s movement. Women represented a very small proportion of both the original sect members and House of Government leaseholders. Men could be married to both women and the Revolution. Women had to choose. The great majority of those who moved into the House of Government did so as family members of male Bolsheviks. Many of them were Bolshevik true believers and trained professionals, but they did not qualify for the House of Government in their own right. Those who did tended to be like Stasova: single, childless, politically irrelevant, and recognized for their past service (in auxiliary capacities).

Bolshevism, unlike Christianity, Islam, and a few other millenarianisms, was a one-generation phenomenon. When the leading Bolsheviks were homeless young men, women embodied the “insatiable utopia.” When they settled down and formed families, women represented either “the pettiness of existence” or—occasionally and often secretly—the last hope for the luminous faith. When they went to their deaths, women were not present, except possibly as the subject of their last farewell. After their husbands’ disappearances, most Bolshevik wives were not accused of any crime but were sent to special camps as “family members.” When they came back—old, sick, broken, and unwanted—there was no luminous faith left and no home to return to. They had nothing to say to their children, and their children had nothing to say to them.

Revolutions repeat themselves: first as tragedy and then as family tragedy. They begin as rebellions against the eternal return and end at home, amidst women and children. If they attempt to survive by executing their high priests for betrayal, they end a little later, amidst broken families and old love letters. When it turns out that immortality is impossible, some of the men get punished for it, and acquire a degree of immortality as a consequence (often with the help of their women and children). The women are left to be forgotten and to bear some of the blame—first in general, as carriers of the hen-and-rooster problems, and then at home, for outliving their husbands and their faith.

Valerian Osinsky had once loved his wife, Ekaterina Smirnova; his lover, Anna Shaternikova; his three children, Dima, Valia, and Svetlana (especially the boys), and the insatiable utopia, which promised profound tenderness without shame and charity without embellishment. Dima was executed along with him; Valia went missing in action; and the utopia evaporated a decade or two later, without anyone quite noticing. Ekaterina and Anna died alone. Svetlana deposited her father’s letters in the Academy of Sciences archive and published a book of memoirs—as a tribute to her father, brothers, and teachers and a mea culpa to her mother.

Eva Levina-Rozengolts, 1974 (Courtesy of E. B. Levina)

Arkady Rozengolts’s sister, Eva Levina-Rozengolts, was arrested in August 1949, as part of the campaign against relatives of executed enemies of the people. She was sentenced to ten years in exile (as a “socially dangerous element”) and spent five years in Siberia as a lumberyard worker, cleaning woman, medical orderly, nurse, and painter on a river barge, and two years in Karaganda, as artist-decorator at the Kazakh Drama Theater. In 1956, she was allowed to return to Moscow.

By the time of her death in 1975, at the age of seventy-seven, she had produced eight graphic cycles: Trees, Swamps, People, Sky, Portraits, Frescoes, Plastic Compositions, and Landscapes. Her human figures seem to emerge from the netherworld of silent despair into a crowded purgatory of ageless, sexless, anonymous souls. Some are imploring or praying; most seem resigned to whatever judgment awaits them.⁴⁰

Eva Levina-Rozengolts, People, Rembrandt series, ink on paper, 1958 (Courtesy of E. B. Levina)

Eva Levina-Rozengolts, People, Rembrandt series, ink on paper, 1960 (Courtesy of E. B. Levina)

Eva Levina-Rozengolts, People, Plastic Compositions, pastel on paper, 1972–74 (Courtesy of E. B. Levina)

Eva Levina-Rozengolts, Frescoes, pastel on paper, 1968 (Courtesy of E. B. Levina)