The czar is man and God — in this dual nature of Russia’s Highest Authority lay its stability, longevity, and strength. This authority is omnipotent, since it is sanctioned by the heavens. The czar is the messenger and the anointed of the Almighty — more than that, he is his personification, his earthly reflection. Only he who maintains (and has somehow proven) that his authority has a human and divine nature can rule here, can lead the people and count on their obedience and devotion. Hence the preponderance in Russian history of pretender czars, false prophets, haunted and fanatical holy men — they claim the power to rule souls and that they are touched by the hand of God. The hand of God is in this case the sole legitimation of power.
The Bolsheviks attempt to fit into this tradition, to draw from its proven life-giving springs. Bolshevism is of course yet another pretender, but a pretender that goes a step further: it is not only the earthly reflection of God, it is God. To achieve this status, to transform oneself into the new God, one must demolish the Houses of the former God (demolish them or strip them of their holiness, converting them into fuel dumps or furniture warehouses) and on their foundations raise new temples, new objects of admiration and worship — Houses of the Party, Palaces of the Soviets, Committees. In this transformation — or, more precisely, in this revolution — one effects a simple but radical exchange of symbols. In this place (a church stood here) where, consumed with burning faith, you paid homage to the Almighty (who is in heaven), you will now (the House of the Party stands here) pay homage to the Almighty (who is on earth). In short, the background scenery changes, but the main principle of history, which continues to operate in the foreground, remains unchanged — the principle of the cult. Thus it is no coincidence that after Stalin’s death the critics of his rule reached for terminology from the theological dictionary — the cult of personality.
The author of a critical biography of Stalin — Roy Medvedev — writes:
In the first decades of the twentieth century there existed even among the Marxists a current of “god-creators,” then represented by Anatoly Lunacherski, Vadim Bazarov, and even Maxim Gorky. They considered it their task to create on the foundation of Marxism-Leninism some sort of “proletarian religion without God.” In point of fact Stalin took over and even accomplished this assignment, but with significant improvements. He helped create on the foundation of Marxism something akin to religion, but with a God, and the almighty, all-knowing, and dangerous God of the new religion was proclaimed to be Stalin himself.
STALIN’S PLANS for the construction of the Palace of the Soviets were complicated by an uneasy and unfavorable turn of events. For just at the time when the secretary-general thinks he will be able to concentrate on the building of the palace, the remains of a shy and weak, yet nevertheless anti-Stalinist, opposition come to life (for completely unrelated reasons). Even the slightest opposition is, under the conditions of that system, extremely dangerous, and Stalin must occupy himself fully with the struggle against this nightmare that sleep banishes. Several months after the approval of the Yofon-Shchusev design, the chief of the GPU, Mienzhinsky, dies, and Stalin nominates as his successor a bloodthirsty hangman and, incidentally, a pharmacist from Lódź—Henryk Jagoda. Before long, and at Stalin’s inspiration, his principal competitor, Kirov, dies, and this death moves the secretary-general to undertake his first great massacre, which goes down in history under the gentler term of “purge.” Then there are the so-called great Moscow trials in which Stalin disposes of his closest collaborators; then comes the next massacre, in 1937; and then he occupies himself with the annexation of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, with the war in Finland, and, finally, the Second World War. Immediately after the war he must uproot and transplant the various nations that he suspects of treason (the Crimean Tatars, the Chechen, the Ingush, and so on), he must oversee the deportation to Siberia and to Kazakhstan of entire conveyances of Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, Ukrainians; he must organize new trials and massacres, and then by that time he is old, has a stroke, and dies.
In the face of such an overwhelming press of duties, it is too much to expect that he could calmly attend to the construction of the palace. And because he rarely left the Kremlin during the last years, it is almost certain that he did not even look in on the future construction site to see what was happening.
And nothing good was happening.
Water accumulated in the deep excavation, and neighborhood boys tried to catch fish in it. Whether or not there were any fish there, I do not know. In time a multitude of frogs propagated there. The water became covered with green duckweed. In the summer the site was overgrown with a thick carpet of weeds — burdock, origan, nettles. Here and there clumps of bushes grew. The bushes gave shelter to local drunks and prostitutes. What was happening on the building site was increasingly visible from the street, because people were dismantling the fence, stealing the wood for fuel, until finally nothing concealed the sorry-looking garbage dump right near the Kremlin.
In the end it was Khrushchev who ordered that an outdoor swimming pool be built there, utilizing the foundations of the Temple of Christ the Savior — thus giving so much pleasure to those proud-looking hulks, who in temperatures of minus thirty degrees Celsius strut along the edge of the pool, thrusting out their naked chests. Sometimes they disappear in clouds of thick steam, which in the winter rises high above this extraordinary place.
THE CHAIRMAN of the committee formed by Stalin for the purpose of demolishing and erasing from the map of Moscow and of Russia the Temple of Christ the Savior was Vyacheslav Molotov. The same one who several years later signed (with Ribbentrop) the pact to erase Poland from the map of the world.
* The facts for this text come from various sources, mainly from the article by Irina Ilovanska-Alberti included in the book Razrushenie chrama christa spasitiela (London, 1988).
† One of the pseudonyms of Iosif Dzhugashvili (Stalin).
WE LOOK, WE CRY
I AM FLYING SOUTH, to Transcaucasia, into familiar territory although I haven’t seen it for a long time (more than twenty years). At first I thought that I would go the old route, Tbilisi-Yerevan-Baku, but times have changed; there is no travel between Yerevan and Baku, and so I choose another option: first Yerevan, then Tbilisi, and from there Baku.
ON THE PLANE, my neighbor to the right is Leonid P., a Moscow democrat. Moscow democrats are a new breed of people — products of perestroika. They are not dissidents. Dissidents (there were never many of them; in 1968 six people protested in Moscow’s Red Square against the armed intervention in Czechoslovakia) either emigrated or — like Marchenko — are sitting in prisons. The democrats come from the intelligentsia, most frequently from academic or literary circles, and they struggle against the ruling nomenclatura and communism.
The Western democrat and the Moscow democrat are possessed of two entirely different mindsets. The mind of the Western democrat roams freely among the problems of the contemporary world, reflects upon how to live well and happily, how modern technology might serve man better, and how to ensure that each one of us produces more and more material goods and attains greater and greater spiritual well-being. Yet these are all matters beyond the Moscow democrat’s field of vision. Only one thing interests him: how to defeat communism. On this subject he can discourse with energy and passion for hours, concoct schemes, present proposals and plans, unaware that as he does so he becomes for a second time communism’s victim: the first time he was a victim by force, imprisoned by the system, and now he has become a victim voluntarily, for he has allowed himself to be imprisoned in the web of communism’s problems. For such is the demonic nature of great evil — that without our knowledge and consent, it manages to blind us and force us into its straitjacket.