- [Announcer] This program is presented
by University of California Television.
Like what you learn?
Help others discover UCTV
podcasts by leaving a comment
or rating for us in iTunes.
(energetic music)
- Hi everybody.
I'm Margaret Chowning.
I'm the Chair of the Moses
Lectureship Committee.
We and the Graduate Division
are pleased to present Yuri
Slezkine the fall speaker
in the Bernard Moses
Memorial Lecture series.
In 1937, University of
California President,
Robert Gordon Sproul and
the UC Board of Regents
established the Bernard
Moses Memorial Lectureship
in the Social Sciences.
The lectureship honors the memory
of the late Bernard Moses,
a professor of history
and political science at
the University of California
from 1875 to 1911 and
an emeritus professor
from 1911 until his death in 1930.
Professor Moses earned
a worldwide reputation
as a pioneer scholar,
especially for his contributions
to understanding the historical
origins of the problems
of the Latin American republics.
Professor Moses was also an
expert on Philippine history
and he served as a member
of the United States Philippine Commission
from 1900 to 1904.
Past lecturers have
included Herma Hill Kay,
Nicholas Riasanovsky, George
Lakoff, Kenneth Stampp,
Ken Jowitt, Reinhard
Bendix, Robert Scalapino,
John Rowe, Woodrow
Borah, Carolyn Merchant,
Jean Lave, Emmanuel Saez, Mary Ann Mason
and Aihwa Ong.
And now, I'd like to say a few words
about our lecturer today, Yuri Slezkine.
Appointed the Jane K. Sather
Professor of History in 2009,
Professor Slezkine has been
a member of the UC Berkeley
Department of History since 1992.
His numerous and wide-ranging publications
have focused on ethnic
minorities in the Soviet Union
as well as, Soviet
historiography, ethnography
and ethnogenetics.
Winner of the 2005
National Jewish Book Award,
among several other prizes,
Slezkine's groundbreaking
book "The Jewish Century"
has been translated into seven languages
and remains both widely
respected and controversial.
Earlier publications include;
"Arctic Mirrors: Russia and
the Small People of the North",
"Between Heaven and Hell:
the Myth of Siberia in Russian
Culture" as a co-editor,
the article "The USSR
as a Communal Apartment
or How a Socialist State
Promoted Ethnic Particularism"
and a co-edited volume
with Sheila Fitzpatrick
called "In the Shadow of
Revolution: Life Stories
of Russian Women From 1917
to the Second World War".
Professor Slezkine earned
his Master's degree
in Russian Language and Literature
from the University of Moscow in 1978.
Departing the USSR in the late 1970s,
he worked as a translator
in Mozambique and Portugal
before moving to the United States
where he was awarded his
doctoral degree in History
at the University of
Texas at Austin in 1989.
Slezkine has been awarded fellowships
from Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin,
the National Endowment for the Humanities,
the Hoover Institution and
the Guggenheim Foundation.
He's also a member
of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences.
All these honors are
testament to the innovation
and creativity of his scholarship.
Professor Slezkine's lecture today
to quote from the enticing
blurb that drew you all here,
explores the private lives of
Bolshevik government officials
along with their wives, maids,
lovers, children and comrades.
Revolutions, Slezkine tells
us, devour their parents.
They begin as tragedy and end at home.
By framing the Bolshevik
Revolution as a family drama,
Slezkine reimagines the
story of the Bolsheviks rise.
Please join me in welcoming my friend,
Professor Yuri Slezkine.
(audience applauds)
- Thank you very much, Margaret.
Thank you you all for coming here.
Just a sec.
And thank you the Moses
Committee for inviting me.
It's a great honor for me to be here
and it feels great to be Moses
if only for a short period of time.
(audience laughs)
So follow me and I'll get you there
and I promise not to take too long.
So my presentation is
based on a book I'm writing
on the history of the
so-called House of Government
in Central Moscow where
most top Bolshevik officials
lived in the 1930s as tenants.
Husbands, fathers and neighbors
before being escorted one
by one to their deaths.
So it is a story of vanguard's backyard.
Whereas Margaret said, of a revolution
that began as a tragedy and ended at home.
Before the Russian Revolution,
the Bolsheviks were a
millenarian, apocalyptic sect.
Which is to say to use
a standard definition,
a faith-based group in
conflict with the world
with voluntary membership
contingent on personal conversion
and a strong sense of
chosenness, exclusiveness
and ethical austerity.
The main condition for joining
was unconditional faith
in the imminent and total destruction
of the existing order of things,
to be accompanied by the bloody revenge
of the weak on the strong,
with the weak inheriting the world.
And to quote from "The Internationale",
those who have been not becoming all.
And followed in short
order by a collective
this world is salvation leading to
a vaguely described state
of absolute perfection,
at least for the chosen.
As in most such sects, the
core members were young men
who had abandoned their
fathers, mothers, wives,
children, brethren, sisters
and, yes, their own lives
in order to join the charismatic leader
who served as the sect's sacred center.
Lenin's nickname was the Old Man.
Women made up a very small
proportion of the membership
and played crucial, but
auxiliary roles as poets,
muses, debate audiences, prison liaisons,
model martyrs and so-called
technical workers.
Socialist millenarians
were competing for souls
with the Christian ones.
But whereas most preachers
of a Christian apocalypse
were workers and peasants,
most theorists of the workers
and peasants revolution were students
and so-called eternal students.
Both kinds of students
tended to be the children
of clerks, clergymen,
doctors, teachers, Jews
and other so-called
proletarians of mental labor.
Or rather professional
intellectuals as metaphoric Jews;
chosen, learned and alienated.
Or Jews as honor intellectuals
irrespective of what
they did for a living.
Now, the main difference in
the nature of missionary work
was that if the Christian message
was in theory for everyone,
the Socialist one was aimed
exclusively at the elect.
Peasants in the case of the
Socialist revolutionaries
and industrial workers in
the case of the Bolsheviks.
Another difference was a
much greater intellectualism
of Socialist sectarians.
A conversion to socialism was a conversion
to the intelligentsia.
To a sacred fusion of millenarian faith
and lifelong learning.
Every text that one read
confirmed the truth of
the Communist revelation.
And no text confirmed it more decisively
than those from the Russian
and European literary canons
associated with intelligentsia membership.
Among the leading Bolsheviks
on the eve of the revolution
there were a few proletarian converts,
all of them in secondary roles.
Among the leading Bolshevik
women, there were none.
Like all millenarian sectarians,
the Bolsheviks did not
believe in the family.
The only true family
was the sect as a whole.
He looked at those seated
in the circle around him
and said these are my
mother and my brothers.
Or whatever arrangements
would prevail in the
post-apocalyptic world.
But they did mate and procreate.
Since, women were scarce and
sex with outsiders was a source
of contagion, most women
had more than one partner,
sometimes at the same time,
but mostly in more or
less quick succession.
Children were raised in
prisons, exile settlements,
communal apartments and so on
by their mothers and their
partners, old and new.
The prophecy came true
on Easter Monday 1917
when Lenin entered Petrograd on a train
and proclaimed that the time had come.
The prophecy had come true.
And this generation would not pass away
until all these things had happened.
As for those socialists who had ears,
but did no hear he knew that
they were neither hot nor cold.
And so, since they were
lukewarm, neither hot nor cold,
he was going to spit
them out of his mouth.
The welcoming reception
and the eventual storming
of the Winter Palace
were organized by a man
named Nikolai Podvoisky
a priest's son and a former seminarian.
At the time of the revolution
most top Bolsheviks
were in their 20s and 30s.
The Old Man was 47.
During the next three years,
students and eternal students
would become warriors
and boys would become men.
One of the most common flaws
of Bolshevik civil war literature
is a story of an apocalyptic slaughter;
the storming of Babylon,
the Battle of Armageddon
or some combination of the two.
The central theme as in the original model
was merciless retribution
through total violence
against feminized evil, uh, evil.
Give her as much grief
and torture as the glory
and luxury she gave herself.
The other one and by far
the most popular was Exodus.
Or the story of an escape from slavery
and the transformation
of a stiff-necked people
into a kingdom of priests
and a holy nation.
Moses speaking on the
devil could be represented
as two different characters.
The commissar who spoke
directly to history
and the inarticulate folk
hero who led the march
through the desert and
presided over the extermination
of the Hittites and the Amorites
or as one great leader.
Leather bound on the outside
and merciful on the inside.
The man who pioneered the other uniform
was Yakov Sverdlov the first
head of the Soviet state
and an eternal student from the
family of a Jewish engraver.
His favorite poet was Heine.
And his favorite stanza
according to his young
female secretary was
and this is for Yoheim
Klein in particular.
(speaking in foreign language)
Or in T. J. Reed's translation,
A different song, a better song
will get the subject straighter.
Let's make heaven on earth, my friends,
instead of waiting till later.
His best friend and fellow Heine admirer
was Philip Goloshchekin an eternal student
from the family of a Jewish contractor
who presided over the
killing of the czar's family.
When the Whites entered the basement
where the execution took place,
they found on the blood-stained
wall an inscription
from Heine's poem about
the writing on the wall.
(speaking in foreign language)
Or again in T. J. Reed's translation
before the sun could rise again,
Belshazzar by his men was slain.
Again, I should have said.
All through the war the top Bolsheviks
moved around continuously
from one front of Armageddon to another,
one assignment to the next.
Sverdlov died of the Spanish
flu he contracted in Oryol
while supervising the election
of the Ukrainian Communist
Party Central Committee.
And Goloshchekin would go on to preside
over the extermination of one half
of the Kazakh rural population.
Most, rather I should say some,
some of the top Bolsheviks
wee accompanied by their
permanent female comrades.
But most had short-term
affairs with nurses,
secretaries, cryptographers
and propaganda department
typists, among others.
The revolution and civil war were followed
by the so-called New Economic Policy
proclaimed as a temporary retreat
and analogous to what in American History
is known as the Great Disappointment.
When the world failed to come
to an end on October 22, 1844
and thousands of New Englanders,
in the words of one of them,
wept and wept until the day dawned.
The postponement of the millennium
or the failure of the prophecy
depending on which
faction you belonged to,
coincided with the death of the prophet.
Trotsky couldn't attend Lenin's funeral
because of a mysterious nervous illness.
In 1927,
1,300 top government officials
stayed at the Lenin Rest Home
Number One outside of Moscow.
Six of them were found to be healthy.
65% of the rest were
diagnosed with various forms
of emotional distress
described as neurasthenia,
psycho-neurasthenia, psychosis
or nervous exhaustion.
One public prosecutor
who couldn't stop weeping
and it had been three years,
couldn't stop weeping
following Lenin's death
was treated for traumatic neurosis,
which he, in his countless
pleas for help, called nervosus.
The surviving old Bolsheviks,
now top government officials,
moved into the Kremlin and
several downtown Moscow hotels
that had been converted into dormitories
known as Houses of Soviets.
And settled into a busy,
boisterous and promiscuous,
but also a self-conscious, self-doubting
and self-loathing communal domesticity.
Visiting each other's
rooms, drinking strong tea,
smoking cheap tobacco, having sex,
arguing about historical necessity,
running the world revolution
and weeping and weeping.
The Bolshevik literature
of the 1920s consisted,
among other kinds of
things, of gothic tales
and the main discoverer
and interpreter of those
is among us today, gothic
tales of communist maidens
being pursued by vampires in dorms
that looked like medieval castles.
And more often I would say,
of stories of communist men
being held captive by fleshy females
in a suffocating world of lace
curtains, orange lampshades,
soft pillows, furry
slippers, rubber plants,
porcelain cats, shiny meat grinders
and other signposts to hell.
(audience laughs)
The unredeemed and
ultimately irredeemable world
of the millennium postponed.
Prophecy unfulfilled, perhaps
and revolution betrayed
as Trotsky would put it.
It was at this point, when
they were in their 30s and 40s,
that many top Bolsheviks left
their old female comrades
for younger women.
Most of them recent recruits
to the proliferating
secretariats and commissariats
of the ever expanding Soviet state.
The great Party theoretician,
Nikolai Bukharin,
married the daughter of
one of his oldest friends
after taking her away from
the son of another old friend.
The Chairman of the
Committee for the Settlement
of Toiling Jews on the
Land, Semen Dimanshtein,
married his adopted daughter.
And the Chairman of the Military Board
of the Soviet Supreme
Court, Valentin Trifonov,
married the daughter of his own wife
who had been once married
to his best friend
before becoming Stalin's lover
before getting together with him.
So one day, he simply moved
out of the mother's room
and into the daughter's.
They all continued to
share the same apartment.
One of the offspring of the new union
was the great Soviet writer Yury Trifonov,
whose novella, terrific novella I think,
"The House on the Embankment"
gave me the idea for this project.
He was born in 1925 the
lowest point in the history
of the Soviet Great Disappointment
and the highest in number of births
among Bolshevik officials.
Now some Bolshevik officials
married younger women
without leaving their old female comrades.
The number one Soviet
cartoonist, Boris Yefimov,
lived openly with two wives
and so did his brother,
the number one Soviet
journalist, Mikhail Koltsov.
Those who remained nominally monogamous,
some of those I should say who
remained nominally monogamous
started longterm love affairs.
Maybe all of them did, but
I only found some evidence
of that in the archives.
Started longterm love affairs
and produced a great many documents
in the apparently quite common,
but understudied genre of
secret letters to secret lovers.
Which because of their
assumption of utmost secrecy,
intimacy, mediacy and
unmediated emotional...
immediacy were similar to diaries
and prison confessions to
other popular Bolshevik genres.
Many of the same people also kept diaries
which they used as instruments
for self-examination,
self-improvement and self-disciplining.
As well as, outlets for
weeping and weeping.
And, of course, most of them would end up
writing their prison confessions
for more or the less the same reasons.
Now, one obvious reason for weeping was
that a band of brothers had
become a society of strangers.
As Aaron Soltz, known as
the Party conscience put it,
there are many more of us now
and it's very difficult
to have the same feeling
of closeness toward each
individual Bolshevik.
But the biggest problem as always,
as always in the history of sects,
certainly, was not that
there was not enough love
for countless remote neighbors,
it's that there was too much
love for a few close ones.
Sects by definition transcend
the bonds of kinship,
friendship and sexual
love by dissolving them
in the common devotion to a
particular path of salvation
and when available to the prophet
who indicate and represent it.
The sect's greatest enemy,
along with Babylon, is marriage
because of its centrality
to all nonsectarian life
and its traditional
claim to primary loyalty.
But marriage is not just a powerful source
of alternative devotion.
The reason it is central
to all nonsectarian life
is that it regulates
reproduction and reproduction is,
by definition, at odds with sectarian life
which is based on a voluntary union
of conscience adult converts.
Sects are about brotherhood
and, as an afterthought,
sisterhood, not about
parents and children.
This is why most end
of the world scenarios
promise fulfillment in this generation.
Most radical Protestants
objected to infant baptism
and all millenarian sectarians
in their militant phase
attempt to reform marriage
or abolish it altogether
by decreeing celibacy or promiscuity.
Jesus' claim that his family
was not his true family
and his demand that his disciples hate
their erstwhile fathers, mothers,
wives, children, brethren
and sisters was as central to his ministry
as it was impossible for his
later followers to imitate.
Fanatics being the rule proving exception.
Now, of the three
fundamental kinds of loyalty
debated by the Bolsheviks
friendship was seen
as a fully rational alliance
based on shared convictions.
Communists were not supposed
to have non-communist friends
and most of them did not.
Jesus didn't have to mention friends
among the loved ones to be hated either.
Committed sectarians can be
trusted usually not to form
close personal attachments,
nonsexual attachments, to
unrelated non-sectarians.
The Bolsheviks did not have
friends, they had comrades.
Erotic love on the other
hand was a different story
in so far as it was widely acknowledged
to be based on the feeling
that according to Soltz,
the Bolshevik spokesman of these matters,
comparable to revolutionary enthusiasm
in its power, clarity and purity.
One was, of course, free
to resist and overcome
that feeling if it interfered
with revolutionary enthusiasm
but even Soltz recognized that
it was a serious challenge.
The revolution was commonly
referred to as a leap
from the realm of necessity
to the realm of freedom.
Love and marriage were a problem
because of their sect defying,
sect destroying reproductive function.
But they were also a problem,
because they combined
the realm of necessity
and the realm of freedom in
ways that seemed compelling
and mysterious in equal measure.
Love is the law of life wrote Soltz,
but a random encounter
that leads to a particular
attachment is not.
Especially if one considers
the unpredictability of reciprocity.
The third basic form of loyalty
debated by the Bolsheviks
blood relationship lay entirely
in the realm of necessity.
One did not choose one's
father, mother, children,
brothers or sisters.
One, of course, could leave them behind
as all sects prescribe and most
underground Bolsheviks did.
But the Party did not make
it a formal requirement
and after the revolution seemed uncertain
about how to proceed.
And then the day dawned.
between 1928 and about 1934
the Bolsheviks forced
the prophecy to come true
by staging what is known
as the Stalin Revolution
or the Revolution From Above
or the era of first Five-Year Plans.
They built what they called
the economic foundations of Socialism,
known as the House of Socialism.
And they built a new house for themselves,
known as the House of Government.
The chronicles of those years
are known as production novels
but none of them actually are,
because no production of
any kind ever takes place.
They are rather construction stories or,
since human souls are
also under construction,
construction cum conversion stories.
What matters is the act of building.
A new world, new man, new
Jerusalem, a new tower
that will reach the heavens.
As one character from one
of those novels puts it,
it's the Tower of Babel only reverse
from dispersion to unity.
These novels were also by
extension creation myths.
The epigraph to Ilya
Ehrenburg's, "The Second Day"
which was published in 1933
is an epigraph to them all.
And God said, "Let there be
a firmament amidst the waters
"and it was so.
"And the evening and the
morning were the second day."
The main model besides Genesis
for countless of those novels
was Pushkin's "The Bronze Horseman"
about the building of St.
Petersburg on the swamp.
Now, the House of Government
was built in an area
known at the time and
still today as The Swamp
on the low, frequently flooded
bank of the Moscow River
diagonally across from the Kremlin
and directly across from
Russia's largest church,
the Cathedral of Christ the
Savior which was blown up
to make way for what was
to become the ultimate
pubic building of all time
the Palace of Soviets.
The architect of both
buildings, Boris Iofan,
was given the penthouse apartment
in the House of Government
overlooking the site of his next
and the world's best building project.
The architect of the entire
Soviet building project
continued to live in the Kremlin
supervising both structures
along with everything else.
The House of Government
belonged to the so-called
transitional type.
Halfway between fully communal housing
based exclusively on monasteries
and bourgeois residential
buildings organized
around family apartments.
Early Soviet communalism was about
interchangeable individuals
living transparent lives
in elastic, pubic spaces.
The question was whether individual cells
would be attached to long corridors
in multi-story communal houses
or to endless roads traversing the newly,
decentered landscape or not
attached to anything at all.
Bukharin's father-in-law,
Yuri Larin, envisioned flying,
floating, crawling and
rolling individual dwellings
with each human being
behaving, as he put it,
like a snail carrying it's own shell.
In the meantime, the House of Government
was a compromise combining 505,
was the largest residential building
at the time in the world.
505 family apartments with a
vast network of public spaces
including a theater, cafeteria,
library, grocery store,
department store, walk-in
clinic, hairdressing salon,
post office, bank, telegraph,
laundry, tennis courts,
two gyms, two daycare centers.
Several dozen rooms for various purposes
from pool playing and target shooting
to symphony orchestra rehearsals.
And the shock-worker movie theater,
the first sound movie theater
in the Soviet Union for 1,500 spectators
with a cafe, a reading
room and a band stage.
Some critics argued that
the House of Government
was functionally analogous to the Dakota
on Central Park West between 72nd
and 73rd Street in New York City.
But they realized their mistake,
somebody lived not far from there.
Realized that their mistake soon
after the House of
Socialism was completed.
There was going to be no
second Great Disappointment
and no pointless criticism.
The Soviet mid 1930s were a time
of the confident expectation
of the inevitable,
the dignified domesticity
of public officials,
the knowing smile of a pregnant woman,
the Bolshevik post St. Augustine age.
As Issac Babel put it in his speech
at the First Congress of
Soviet Writers in 1934,
the first layer of
scaffolding has come down
from the House of Socialism
and even the most near-sighted people
can see that building's
shape and its beauty.
We're all witnesses to
the fact that our country
has been gripped by a powerful
feeling of pure physical joy.
That feeling was to be expressed
in the literature of socialist realism
which Bukharin in his
speech at the Congress
described as and I quote,
"The kind of poetic work
"that depicts the most
general and universal features
"of a particular epoch
representing them through
"unique characters that are
both specific and abstract.
"Characters that combine
the greatest possible
"generalizability with
enormous inner richness."
Such for example is Goethe's "Faust"
and such, according to the
Congress, were "Don Quixote",
"Hamlet" and "Robinson Crusoe"
among others, many others.
What all those names had
in common was that they
represented golden ages.
No longer the miracle of
birth or early development
and certainly not, the skepticism
and rigidity of old age,
but the strength, self-confidence,
dignity of mature adulthood
on the verge of immortality.
Socialist Realism was to socialism
and therefore, to the
whole of human existence
what Goethe's "Faust" had
been to the bourgeois age.
It was an age without old age
and possibly without death.
No Soviet writer was seen
as being remotely comparable to Goethe,
but of the two most admired
and widely discussed
Soviet novels of the mid
1930s, one, Nikolai Ostrovsky's
"How Steel Was Tempered" was about a blind
and paralyzed Bolshevik hero
who attains immortality
through a woman's love
and the act of autobiographical writing.
And the other, Leonid
Leonov's "The Road to Ocean"
was about a Bolshevik Faust who ascends
to the heaven of his own making.
So to quote from the central
text of the Soviet 1930s
translated from the original German
and this time I'm not going
to try the original German.
Everything transitory is only an allegory.
What could not be achieved,
here comes to pass.
What no one could describe
is here accomplished.
The eternal feminine draws us aloft.
When the top Bolsheviks
and their new families
moved into their new
house, most of the men
were in their 40s and early 50s.
Most of the women were in
their early to mid 30s.
Most of the children
were between five and 10
and most of the maids and
each family had at least one,
were peasant girls in their early 20s,
refugees from famine gripped farms
their masters had recently collectivized.
Apartment geography reflected
the family hierarchy.
The apartment's sacred center
and largest room was father's study
with walls covered from wall to ceiling
with dark, old bookcases.
The most frequently mentioned
books were the massive,
gold-lettered, multi-volume additions
of "The Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedia",
Alfred Brehm's "Lives of Animals",
the "Treasures of World Literature" series
from academia publishers
and the collected works of great classics
from various previous golden ages.
Mothers might or might not
have rooms of their own.
Children almost always did.
Maids usually lived in small nooks
by the entrance to the kitchen,
usually behind a curtain.
And the rest of the rooms were
occupied by grown children,
elderly parents and other
relatives and dependents.
The elderly parents and other
relatives and dependents
included; former priests, rabbis,
shopkeepers and illiterate grandmothers.
Many of the men and some of the women
worried about the swamp coming back,
but no one seemed to know
how to stem the tide.
Now as a building of
the transitional type,
the House of Government
was part neoclassical,
particularly the the theater facade facing
the future Palace of Soviets
and part constructivist,
especially the apartments themselves.
Many house residents
found the large windows
and straight lines bare and dry.
And most did something about it,
brought in old beds, chests and desks.
Hung up swords, pictures and photographs
and they laid down carpets,
rugs and bearskins.
Most drew the line at curtains,
which was seen as an irredeemable symbol
of bourgeois domesticity.
Men switched from leather coats to suits
and most women in the
words of one of them,
suddenly discovered that
they were beautiful.
Many had new dresses made
by government seamstresses.
Manicures were popular, lipstick was seen
as an irredeemable symbol
of bourgeois eroticism.
Men only slept at home,
usually between four a.m.
and 11 a.m. or noon.
Most women had professional
jobs as editors,
accountants, statisticians, economists,
doctors, pharmacists,
engineers and came home late.
And so the House of Government,
the apartments, chess and
music rooms, movie theaters
and especially, the
courtyards, the basement
and the embankment along
with the nearby Gorky Park
belonged to the children.
Their lives as recorded
in their diaries, letters
and memoirs were a more
or less faithful replica
of aristocratic family life
from before the revolution.
The remote, slightly feared
and much admired father
who only came home on his days off.
The Bolsheviks had
abandoned a seven day week
and the word Sunday, which is
in Russian is resurrection.
Every sixth day was a day off.
The much less remote, less
feared and less admired mother,
permanently overshadowed
by her heroic husband.
The much disliked German governess
who would take small children
on daily supervised walks.
The more or less dreaded
dance and piano teachers
and the beloved peasant nanny
who did most of the child rearing
until the time would come for
the children to start reading
the books that their fathers
would select for them.
The books that their fathers
would select for them
came mostly from the 19th
century literary canon
and so did their lives.
Complete with the
Christmas midnight magic,
now called New Year's Eve.
Swimming and berry
picking at country states
now called dachas.
Annual trips to Black Sea
palaces now called rest homes.
And an intense cult of pure
love, fierce friendship
and spiritual self-improvement
through reading
of the same books, letter
writing and diary keeping.
Every girl was Natasha
Rostova from "War and Peace"
and every boy was Prince Andrei.
And then night came and
the knock on the door.
So in the 1937, '38 most of
the men and some of the women
were arrested and accused
of degeneracy, duplicity,
corruption and treason.
They were all guilty and
some of them knew it.
Most men were executed and most men,
including the great Party theoretician,
Nikolai Bukharin, the
Chairman of the Committee
for Settlement of
Toiling Jews on the Land,
Semen Dimanshtein
and the former member of
the Soviet Supreme Court,
Valentin Trifonov.
Most of the men were executed
within weeks or months.
And most of the women,
including Bukharin's
and even as young wives
were sent to special camps
for the family members of
traitors to the motherland
where they would spend eight years,
plus another 10 or so in
exile before returning
to their children's new homes, old, sick,
destroyed, unwanted and unloved.
Children were adopted by
their nannies, grandparents,
aunts and uncles or family friends
or sent to special
secret police orphanages.
A common, common story
frequently reproduced in reminiscences
and memoirs is of a small child.
Let's say a 12 to 14-year-old girl,
who having been awakened
by the bright light,
the noise of the search, the
sound of her mother's crying,
watching her parents being taken away
and running to her aunt's
or grandmother's apartment.
She would ring the bell,
apartment very often within
the same House of Government.
She would ring the bell.
What happened next
would later be described
as a test of humanity.
If the aunt did not open the door
or open the door only to
disappear into the kitchen,
reemerge with a sandwich
and tell the girl to
never come back again,
she would be classified
as an orthodox sectarian
for whom the only family was the Party.
Or as a bad person defined as someone
who would protect herself
and her immediate family,
at the expense of all other
loyalties and commitments.
The orthodox sectarian would
soon become a bad person
by definition.
A good person was someone who would risk
her immediate family's safety
for the sake of extended
family and close friends.
Those who could be
called surrogate family.
And a saint was somebody
who destroyed her family
by welcoming strangers, herself
a stranger to moral nuance
whose goodness lay beyond
everyday moral geography.
Now within a decade, about
half of the surviving boys
and some of the girls would be killed
in the Great Patriotic War.
The world's ultimate public building,
the House of Soviets,
would never be built.
In the 1940s during the war,
metal piles from the world's
largest foundation pit
would be used to make anti-tank barriers.
In the early 1960s under Khrushchev,
the world's largest foundation pit
would become the world's
largest outdoor swimming pool.
In the 1980s under Gorbachev,
many of the remaining
children of the revolution
would become the leading
ideologues of Perestroika
or the radical restructure.
And in the 1990s after the
fall of the Soviet Union,
the world's largest outdoor swimming pool
would once again become
Russia's largest church,
the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.
So as I wrote in that blurb,
revolutions do not devour their children.
Revolutions are devoured
by the children of the revolutionaries.
The same is true, I believe, of all,
of all millenarian sects most of which
don't survive beyond one generation.
And now to conclude, I have
interviewed for this project
about 60 people who grew up
in the House of Government.
One woman born in 1924 was 14
when her parents were arrested.
She remembered returning home one evening
from a friend's place
looking up at her windows,
as usual, being surprised by the fact
that they were all brightly lit up,
not being greeted by the guard
at the entrance, running in
and seeing the mess left
by the secret police.
Being told by her nanny that
her parents had been taken away
and running to her aunt's
apartment and ringing the bell.
And being taken in, as
it turned out, for good.
So her aunt, as it turned
out, was a good person.
About a week later the telephone rang.
The young man at the
other end asked for her
and when she answered the phone
said that he was her
mother's interrogator,
I mean father's, I'm sorry,
father's interrogator.
That her father was fine and
that he would soon be out,
but that in the meantime he
had asked for some garlic,
onion and warm socks and would
she please bring those things
to, let's say, the
intersection across the square
from the secret police headquarters.
She did, the young man
according to her was pleasant,
if a little shy.
She handed him her little package.
He said why don't you walk me back
to the building while we talk?
She did, they talked and
said goodbye at the door.
She never heard from that
man or her father again.
But she remembered, claimed to remember,
that day April 15, 1938
for the rest of her life.
Something else she retained
for the rest of her life
was her intense love and
admiration for her father
the People's Commissar
of Naval Construction.
Now 60 years later toward
the end of her life,
she was allowed to see her
father's interrogation file.
It was huge, hundreds
and hundreds of pages.
At first he rejected all the accusations,
but eventually he confessed to everything
and started supplying eerily detailed,
hair-raising, belief defying,
information about foreign
spies, secret cells,
poisoned wells, invisible
messages, clandestine meetings,
elaborate assassination attempts,
all of them failed and so on.
Then she took a closer look.
The day he broke down was April 15, 1938,
then she understood or thought she did.
Her father must have been
up in the interrogation room
overlooking the square that day
with one of his interrogators,
probably the one playing the good guy,
when he was shown his 14-year-old daughter
accompanied by his other interrogator,
probably the bad guy,
walking across the square
toward the house of torture
in which he was being held.
And so he told them whatever
they wanted to hear.
So she gave me the file to look at
and it was indeed, huge
and it did indeed, consist of two parts.
A short one that didn't contain much
and a long one that
began on April 15, 1938.
And then I noticed another
file attached to the first one
that the woman had never mentioned.
It was her mother's interrogation file.
It was tiny, three pages long.
It said the accused
rejects all accusations
and refuses to participate
in what she calls
a travesty of justice.
She maintains her husband's
innocence, as well as her own.
After several initial exchanges,
she has consistently refused to cooperate
with the investigators.
Sentence, death by a firing squad
to be carried out immediately.
So, thank you very much.
(audience applauds)
- [Man] So they're all sitting
in the House of Government
waiting to be picked off one by one.
Is there anywhere for them
to go or does anyone get out?
Or are they all just sitting
there being completely
worrisome and paranoid about
what's going to happen?
And how long does it take
for the whole process
of going through all 500 rooms?
- It wasn't all the 500
rooms or most of them.
And, of course, the
so-called Great Terror,
affected many more buildings
in many more cities.
But yes, they were sitting there waiting,
hoping against hope, not to be picked up.
Thinking of themselves as being innocent
and being picked up one at a time.
The process lasted for
about a year and a half,
a little longer than that.
And so, people would be,
usually men would be the
first ones to be arrested.
Then there was a special
decree on family members
a few months after the
beginning of the large campaign.
And so then the women began
to be picked up, as well.
And toward the middle of 1938
most apartments had been affected.
Most of the rooms were sealed
to preserve the evidence.
Oh, there are stories
about some boys actually
sneaking in to get some things.
The remnants of the families
of the arrested tenants
would be moved into apartments
that would become communal apartments.
So say one apartment would
be completely sealed.
Another one next to it
would be completely sealed
and both sets of wives and children
would be moved into a third apartment,
usually one family per room,
where they would live for a little while
until being kicked out
of the House of Government altogether.
Because the House of Government
was still meant for government members.
And so they would be then shipped out
and to eventually find other
abodes in other places.
- [Man] Who took their place?
- [Woman] Ask it again.
- [Man] Was there a special
type of person or class
that took their place
as government officials?
- Surviving government officials did
and there are lots of stories
of a family being arrested,
a new family moving in,
that family being arrested
and third family moving in and so on.
So that as I say, continued
for about a year and a half.
Then eventually it slowed
down and almost stopped.
But there were only two and a
half years left until the war.
At which point, most residents moved out
to be replaced after the war by second
and third echelon of government officials.
Post-war government officials
preferred other buildings,
other fashions, other interiors
and, indeed, other areas
within the city of Moscow.
So it stopped being, practically speaking,
the House of Government.
And, indeed, it stopped being referred to
as the House of Government
and since the 1970s
when Yuri Trifonov's novella
"The House on the Embankment"
came out it's been known primarily
as the House on the Embankment.
- [Man] Do you have a
guess as to what explained
this whole thing that
you've been describing
and how it relates to the
millennial view of the Bolsheviks?
- You mean the Terror?
- [Man] Yes.
- Well, I think it is directly
related to the Bolsheviks
millenarian expectation.
Most of them expected for
the world as they knew it,
to end within their lifetimes.
The key word in their
correspondence was faith,
faith in communism.
They also expected and certainly,
Stalin did, an apocalyptic war.
And that starts certainly in
1936, increasingly in 1937
that's when the so-called Reign of Terror
or Great Terror begins.
And it's mostly in the
expectation of that war
that the hunt for possible traitors began.
And I think it is fairly typical,
I mean it is indeed typical
of those millenarian sects
that succeed in occupying
at least parts of Babylon.
And the Bolsheviks were
unusually successful
in that they actually
occupied the whole empire.
But if you think about
the Mennonites and Muntzer
or, indeed, Jim Jones and
his Peoples Temple in Guyana,
you'll see the same thing.
You see basically the
same reign of terror.
The same expectation which is
as paranoid as it is justified
of an attack from the outside,
a search for traitors within
and, of course, the closer
to the sacred center
the more of them there are
or rather, they're more dangerous
and potentially, potentially
contagious they are.
Jim Jones he had his
own version of Trotsky
for those of you who remember that story.
So, yes, I think there
is a direct connection.
- [Woman] My question
concerns Leon Trotsky.
As you know, in the '20s
he become the leader
of the left opposition
to Stalin and Stalinism
and in the '30s and onward become reviled
and exiled and chased
across various countries
ending in Mexico where
eventually he was assassinated.
And I wonder in your view,
if whether Trotsky's political
opposition to Stalinism
and what became of the Russian Revolution
became matched in any
way or accompanied by
a personal ideology or practice
that differed in any significant ways
from what you've described?
- Yes, Trotsky's views
differed from those of the,
of the members of the Party's
leadership in the 1920s
in that he was much more consistent
and radical in his millenarianism.
I think there are essentially three ways
of dealing with the
postponement of the fulfillment
of the prophecy with the
nonarrival of the end of the world
or the messiah, whatever
the prophecy may be.
One is to die while
trying to bring it about
and that was Trotsky's position.
That was Jim Jones' position.
Arguably, David Koresh's and
there are many other examples.
And the other two, I think, are one,
if the messiah doesn't come to claim
that he has in fact arrived.
This is the official view
of the Jehovah's Witnesses
and those, I think, are the
sources of Christianity.
And the third one is to reconcile oneself
to the imperfections of human existence
and learn how to live in a
state of permanent expectation
when the prophecy becomes an allegory
and the expression waiting
until, how does it go?
I'm thinking of the Russian version.
Waiting til, what is it?
Not second coming.
What is it when you wait,
basically waiting until--
Hm?
(woman speaking faintly)
Becomes a synonym of waiting
until cows come home.
- [Man] Yuri, this is...
I'm not gonna go to
sleep very easily tonight
after your talk.
What's extraordinary about it is the way
you've taken a story that we
know normally through textbooks
and so on as emanating
from the level of Stalin
or from Lenin, the Great Terror and so on
and brought it down to an
extraordinarily personal level.
And I think this is wonderful.
It suggests, though, that
you're interested beyond
the House of Government
in the many manifestations
of this which we're seeing right now.
This a new age of millennialism
and I wonder if you wanna
comment at all on the possible comparisons
or interests that you might
have and expanding on this?
- Well, I'm not sure
if today, well perhaps,
but there is, I mean
millenarianism is or millennialism,
if you prefer, and I remember the saying
it's til kingdom come.
Right that becomes, pretty much the same
as til the cows come home.
(audience laughs)
It's, it's extremely common.
It's I think more common for reasons
that can be discussed in
some prophetic traditions
than in others.
Certainly within Christianity, Islam.
In China there is a long and
Herb and I talked about this,
a very long and very rich
history of millenarian uprisings,
accompanied by some of the same phenomena.
Some of the same developments,
same expectations and
same great disappointment.
They proliferate particularly
at when times, I mean,
predictably not, so-called moral panics
when, you know, happen when
times seem out of joint.
That's the way the time of
Jesus is usually described.
He was, of course, one of
an extremely large number
of doomsday prophets, at the time.
What is interesting to me also is that
the Soviet Union ended, if you will,
the Russian Revolution
did, the way it began
in the midst of one of those periods.
'Cause the collapse of the Soviet Union
was accompanied and this is
just something that most of us,
those of us who go to Russia regularly
and used to go there in
those years in the late '80s
and '90s there was a time of
a remarkable proliferation
of doomsday cults of various kinds.
So, of course, it's very much alive.
I think the Christian tradition
and, of course, the Marxist
tradition, post-Soviet
produced a whole series
of those of various kinds.
And today we, I think,
witness a resurgence
within the Islamic tradition.
Which to my mind, is
nothing peculiar to Islam,
although, I think there are
some very interesting
differences between those,
between various millenarian traditions.
But, ultimately, you know
in some very important ways,
very similar to the Christian one.
Indeed, the Buddhist one as well.
And another very fruitful encounter
that leads to millenarian upheavals
is one between European newcomers
and traditional societies.
This is from Polynesia to South America
there's a long story of those.
And this is again, almost invariably
when the world you think you
understand comes to an end
and is transformed into a
world you no longer understand.
And I think, I think
the early 20th century
was such a period throughout Europe,
but especially in Russia.
And we, some of us have discussed this
that this was true not
just of the Bolsheviks.
Those preachers of Bolshevism in that area
that is still called The Swamp today
mingled in various ways
with preachers of the end of the world
who came from a variety of traditions,
many of them Christians, but not only.
- [Man] You portray the
residents of the home
as true believers in their, you know,
out of their correspondence and diaries.
But sitting very close to
the surface in your narrative
is a kind of story about hypocrisy, right?
And a sort of, the
coexistence of millenarianism
and luxury.
People moving in to the
building probably expected
they would be there for awhile.
They furnished their apartments as if,
not as if they were leaving the next day.
And the 14-year-old girl and
the children don't expect
to be leaving soon.
It's kind of a bourgeois home.
So do you see that as something existing
in kind of the psyche of everyone there?
Or were there true
believers and hypocrites?
- I think that most of
them were true believers.
I do not think they were hypocrites.
If a hypocrite is someone who
is aware of the discrepancy.
I think some of them wondered.
Some of them were bothered
by what was going on.
As you wrote, among others,
you know many of them
were particularly bothered in the 1920s
before they moved into
the House of Government.
By the time they moved into
the House of Government in 1931
they were moving not just
into the House of Government,
but also into a different age.
And so their sense of what they were about
was different in the mid 1930s.
But they were still occasionally,
they would still
occasionally wonder and worry
and there are various
traces of it, indeed,
in the Soviet literature of the mid 1930s,
there are lots of traces of it.
It's all about immortality
and all about the circumstances
of the imminent death.
And they worried about
their families being there.
They had no idea how
to, what to do about it.
And what's interesting is that the Party,
you know, we're now talking
about them as individuals.
But since they were top Party officials,
they also represented it
and it was their job to
formulate Party policies.
And this is where, I think,
the peculiarity of Marxism comes in.
I mean there are many.
But one has to do with the
fact that with the very,
very flat sort of narrow
socioeconomic conception
of human nature and the
assumption that all those things
would take care of themselves.
The total lack of guidance.
A lot of these people
were eager for guidance.
Basically, what to do
when children are born?
Or when their parents die?
Or when they would get married?
And they would turn to
various figures of authority,
various texts, but the classics of Marxism
and Leninism including
the latter day ones,
had nothing to say about
every day human morality.
And they without explicitly
reflecting on this,
were acutely aware of a problem.
That was reflected in the
way the Party functioned.
The Party reached into
the lowest reaches of Soviet
societies, Soviet society.
But only at work and in school.
You join the Party at work or in school,
you would go through so-called purges.
You would engage in
confessional monologues
and all those other things we
know about Party membership.
All of that you would
do at work or in school.
Not at home.
These people who presided
over the Soviet Union
who would subject themselves to the things
that we all find familiar
particularly from Protestant practice,
constant mutual observation,
constant confessional
disquisitions and so on.
They lived in that House of Government,
as if it were still a swamp.
That was as if they would come home
and they would be
surrounded by some old man,
murmuring something in Hebrew
or someone whose priestly
past is barely concealed
and there they would be.
And Party commissions,
whose job it was to
check on Party members,
would come to the House of
Government in their capacity,
not just as tenants,
but as Party inspectors.
But they would stay in the basement,
because they would only check on people
working in the House of
Government as painters,
elevator technicians and so on.
And they would be supervising those people
in that huge, elaborate basement.
They would never venture
upstairs into those apartments,
where of course contagion kept spreading.
And if you read and there
are not many of those,
but some of the texts produced
by people actually under investigation,
you read some of the things that Bukharin
has to say in his so-called
"Prison Manuscripts".
You see the agony.
Not just of the kind
that Gessler described
but having to do with what I
have just described, as well.
- [Man] The beloved father
of your concluding story.
Was he a murderer, too?
And if not, by choice or by pure accident?
- It's like, you know, Clinton
saying depends on what is is.
(audience laughs)
It really depends on
how you define murder.
They were, most not all,
but they were many of them had
killed during the civil war.
Most of them had one way
or another participated
in the elaboration,
preparation, justification
and often, implementation
of collectivization
which resulted in hundreds
of thousands of deaths.
And was indeed designed to
produce thousands of deaths.
Some of them were
professional executioners.
Some of my most dearly beloved characters
in the story I'm telling
were executioners,
were professional mass murderers.
In other words, secret police officials
whose job it was to kill.
But most believed in the
necessity of violence.
Bols were unabashedly
devoted to the notation
that violence was important.
That it was needed.
That is was an integral
part of the project.
And they were not apologetic about it.
Nor would they consider it a problem,
those who managed to produce
something while in captivity.
That was not something
they would apologize for.
Bolshevism was about Armageddon
and Armageddon is about mass murder.
And so, I believe is the last
book of the New Testament.
So, in that sense at least
when it comes to theory,
they were not original.
Not any more violent than any
other millenarian sectarian.
They, unlike many,
actually got to, you know,
got their prophecy fulfilled.
Got to see it unfold and
then contributed to it.
Sort of the way Thomas
Muntzer speaking of those
millenarians who actually
managed to do some killing did.
So this is not to justify them,
but perhaps to suggest
that this is, A, not unique
and B, fairly complex.
So if the question is
whether we should feel sorry
for that father?
Well, I think it would be
up to the reader to decide.
Perhaps, I could finish
with one very short story
about the worst or one
of the worst executioners
who lived in that building.
Who actually was the initiator
of the implementation
of the so-called Order 00447
which was the order for
mass arrest and executions.
So he was in some ways
the most prolific murderer
in the Soviet Union at the time.
And his wife wrote a memoir,
rather she told the story of
her life in an oral interview.
And she talks about
their love for each other
and their life together and so on.
The story ends, or at least
the way I read the story,
it ends with his last day at large.
They were over at someone's
place at the party
and the telephone rang and someone said
that you are needed at the Ministry.
He was at that point
working at the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs.
And he says strange, I
already signed everything.
Anyway, they called again
and he went over there.
And then someone called again
and asked where is he?
Say, well he left, he's on his way.
And they called three
hours later, where is he?
Then his wife understood
what had happened.
Then she went home, she saw the search.
The secret police officers were there
turning everything upside down.
And they were still
asking her where he was.
And then, finally she was told
that he had been arrested.
That he had arrived wherever
he was supposed to arrive.
So it took him, I think, about six hours
to get to that house of torture.
He knew it was a house of torture.
He had subjected countless
people to torture.
He had sentenced many more to death
and then his time came.
And she, who didn't really
know about what he did at work.
She had some suspicions
but she convinced herself
that he wasn't involved
in anything really.
It was in the middle of January in Moscow,
it was very cold.
There was snow everywhere
and so she spent,
according to her, the rest of her life
wondering about what he
did during those six hours
that separated the moment of his departure
and the moment of his surrender.
She imagined him wondering around Moscow
thinking of suicide.
Perhaps trying to go home
and seeing secret police
guards at the door
who were waiting there
in case he returned.
Six hours of walking around
and then he arrived at his destination
and then after a year of torture
and interrogations he was shot.
So, anyway, I think I should stop here.
(audience applauds)
(energetic music)
