Seregin lived in the general’s house for seven years. Once caught in the vortex of the revolution, he simply could not return to a tranquil life. His revolutionary consciousness and increased consumption of cocaine pushed him toward actions and words (and words are also actions, as Lev B. Umansky, a member of the Joint State Political Directorate troika, said) that were unacceptable to the young Soviet system of political power. Seregin’s very own firing squad executed the troika’s verdict for Seregin. According to his comrades’ recollections, that was Seregin’s only consolation.
Umansky, whom the general recognized as the person who commanded the Red Armymen during Seregin’s arrest, moved into Seregin’s room. As the Red Armymen tied up the resistant tenant, Umansky checked the condition of the window frames and doors, and confirmed the exact measurements of the vacated room with Varvara Petrovna. It later emerged that Umansky, who did not yet have housing in Yalta, did this whenever he conducted an arrest. Seregin was shot on very short notice, so there is no reason to doubt that the accommodations suited him.
Umansky differed, favorably, from Seregin because he did not engage in nighttime debauchery. If he brought ladies home now and then, he made them take off their shoes and handed out slippers he had readied specially. The women were initially from the Komsomol, spirited away from the cell on the first floor. Those who slept with him thought that (as an honest person) Umansky should marry them. Without involving himself in discussion of his own honesty, he rationally announced that he simply could not marry everyone at once, despite his desire to do so.
Regular scandalous scenes on the second floor caught the attention of the cell’s leadership and they began investigating the issue of amoral behavior. Umansky, who had thoroughly chickened out, was forced to go to the cell and explain, in the presence of the Komsomol’s core membership, why marriage should be considered an obsolete phenomenon. His speech made a fairly good impression on the core membership, which was largely composed of males. The female portion of the group regarded it with more restraint but could not resolve itself to object openly.
From that day forward, the Komsomol women did not set foot in Umansky’s room. On the one hand, the young women in the cell were too offended to go up to the second floor again. On the other, upon reflection, Umansky himself decided to get by with ladies from the embankment: they may have been more distant ideologically, but they were preferable in terms of their mastery of sexual techniques. Unlike the Komsomol women, whose inflexibility thoroughly irritated Umansky, Marxist worldviews did not prevent them from kneeling when necessary.
In fact, out of everyone the general had occasion to see in a communal living situation, Umansky was not the worst neighbor. During the years Umansky was a flatmate, the potent smell of urine (which had appeared when Seregin settled into the apartment) disappeared from the bathroom. Umansky (usually in the person of one of the ladies who visited him) invariably took his turn washing the floors in the kitchen and other common areas. From the general’s point of view, Umansky’s striving for outer cleanliness and orderliness compensated, to some degree, for his inner impurity.
The general considered Umansky a scoundrel and did not particularly hide that. At the same time, there was also a sort of sentimental shading in his attitude toward Umansky. This manifested itself in full measure later, when the general expressed regret that the room next door had been freed up prematurely. As far as Umansky went, it was flattering for him to live in the same apartment as someone so famous. Although he was once tempted to expand his living space by arresting the general and his wife, to the Political Directorate employee’s credit, his taste for good company prevailed in his soul over strictly mercenary interests.
It emerged years later, though, that before Umansky’s best feelings triumphed over his worst feelings, he had, in fact, made a move to free up the apartment. A certain mysterious power, however, had hindered an arrest of the general that time, too. Moreover, during the course of his attempt, Umansky also determined that Larionov, whom he had thought to be unemployed, was on the books at the Museum of City History as a consultant and was even receiving a salary.
Knowing better than anyone that the general hardly left the apartment (his strolls along the jetty were the exception), Umansky made quick work of sending an inquiry to the Museum of City History regarding the former general’s employment activities and the nature of his consultations. Unexpectedly, the answer came from Umansky’s own department and, judging from the tone, it assumed no further questions. Umansky stopped there: he was a pragmatist and essentially it was not his calling to be a spiteful person. He decided that in the long run he could find another apartment elsewhere but would not be able to find another general.
Motivated by those considerations, he even attempted to gain the general’s favor. It is interesting that the general, who had narrowed his social circle to an absolute minimum, also conversed with Umansky from time to time. Being people of polar opposite temperaments and convictions, there is no doubt they interested one another. They discussed tactics for close combat and the admissibility of the Brest peace, the expediency of women serving in the army and the work of field kitchens during the autumn-winter period, and, in moments when the general was in a philosophical mood, the moral problematics of Dead Souls, which Nikolai Gogol called a poem.
Life close to the general seemed so edifying for Umansky that it distracted him from the apartment question for a while. The Political Directorate employee even initially had doubts when the opportunity came up, by chance, to move into his own well-appointed apartment. After his superior, Grigory G. Piskun, announced to him that everyone housed on an entire floor had been shot to improve conditions for his subordinate, Umansky thought it awkward not to move into the vacated apartment. After receiving the housing assignment, he arranged a farewell banquet at his former place of residence and did not begrudge the Political Directorate’s stupendous special supplies.
The banquet exceeded all expectations, both in terms of the quantity of refreshments and, so to say, its degree of farewellness. There was an unexpected ring at the door as the event was coming to a close, and the apartment filled with operatives in their leather jackets. Recognizing the arrivals as his co-workers, the man of the hour felt touched, thinking this was an ingenious form of congratulations that befitted the department; he offered drinks to the arrivals. When he was knocked to the floor and held face down, he remarked to those in attendance that the joke had gone too far, but nobody laughed in response. Contrary to Umansky’s expectations, his removal from the apartment was not accompanied by merriment, nor was his shooting, which was carried out in a most serious manner a week after his arrest.
It later became known that the direct reason for Umansky’s arrest turned out to be the ladies he brought home from the embankment. The vigilant Komsomol women—who had been rejected by the person under investigation—sent signals regarding those visits. After the very first face-to-face questioning with some of the ladies (as well as with the Komsomol women), Umansky admitted that his sexual liaisons were indiscriminate and repented sincerely. His statement that—despite an abundance of casual relations—the Political Directorate was the only organ that he, Umansky, was genuinely dedicated to, was also entered into the record of his interrogation.