It was conceived as a historic compromise and a structure “of the transitional type.” Halfway between revolutionary avant-garde and socialist realism, it combined clean, straight lines and a transparent design with massive bulk and a solemn neoclassical facade. Halfway between bourgeois individualism and communist collectivism, it combined 505 fully furnished family apartments with public spaces, including a cafeteria, grocery store, walk-in clinic, child-care center, hairdresser’s salon, post office, telegraph, bank, gym, laundry, library, tennis court, and several dozen rooms for various activities (from billiards and target shooting to painting and orchestra rehearsals). Anchoring the ensemble were the State New Theater for 1,300 spectators on the riverfront and the Shock Worker movie theater for 1,500 spectators near the Drainage Canal.
Sharing these facilities, raising their families, employing maids and governesses, and moving from apartment to apartment to keep up with promotions were people’s commissars, deputy commissars, Red Army commanders, Marxist scholars, Gulag officials, industrial managers, foreign communists, socialist-realist writers, record-breaking Stakhanovites (including Aleksei Stakhanov himself) and assorted worthies, including Lenin’s secretary and Stalin’s relatives. (Stalin himself remained across the river in the Kremlin.)
In 1935, the House of Government had 2,655 registered tenants. About 700 of them were state and Party officials assigned to particular apartments; most of the rest were their dependents, including 588 children. Serving the residents and maintaining the building were between six hundred and eight hundred waiters, painters, gardeners, plumbers, janitors, laundresses, floor polishers, and other House of Government employees (including fifty-seven administrators). It was the vanguard’s backyard; a fortress protected by metal gates and armed guards; a dormitory where state officials lived as husbands, wives, parents, and neighbors; a place where revolutionaries came home and the revolution came to die.
In the 1930s and 1940s, about eight hundred House residents and an unspecified number of employees were evicted from their apartments and accused of duplicity, degeneracy, counterrevolutionary activity, or general unreliability. They were all found guilty, one way or another. Three hundred forty-four residents are known to have been shot; the rest were sentenced to various forms of imprisonment. In October 1941, as the Nazis approached Moscow, the remaining residents were evacuated. When they returned, they found many new neighbors, but not many top officials. The House was still there, but it was no longer of Government.
It is still there today, repainted and repopulated. The theater, cinema, and grocery store are in their original locations. One of the apartments is now a museum; the rest are private residencies. Most private residencies contain family archives. The square in front of the building is once again called “Swamp Square.”
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This book consists of three strains. The first is a family saga involving numerous named and unnamed residents of the House of Government. Readers are urged to think of them as characters in an epic or people in their own lives: some we see and soon forget, some we may or may not recognize (or care to look up), some we are able to identify but do not know much about, and some we know fairly well and are pleased or annoyed to see again. Unlike characters in most epics or people in our own lives, however, no family or individual is indispensable to the story. Only the House of Government is.
The second strain is analytical. Early in the book, the Bolsheviks are identified as millenarian sectarians preparing for the apocalypse. In subsequent chapters, consecutive episodes in the Bolshevik family saga are related to stages in the history of a failed prophecy, from an apparent fulfillment to the great disappointment to a series of postponements to the desperate offer of a last sacrifice. Compared to other sects with similar commitments, the Bolsheviks were remarkable for both their success and their failure. They managed to take over Rome long before their faith could become an inherited habit, but they never figured out how to transform their certainty into a habit that their children or subordinates could inherit.
The third strain is literary. For the Old Bolsheviks, reading the “treasures of world literature” was a crucial part of conversion experiences, courtship rituals, prison “universities,” and House of Government domesticity. For their children, it was the single most important leisure activity and educational requirement. In the chapters that follow, each episode in the Bolshevik family saga and each stage in the history of the Bolshevik prophecy is accompanied by a discussion of the literary works that sought to interpret and mythologize them. Some themes from those works—the flood of revolution, the exodus from slavery, the terror of home life, the rebuilding of the Tower of Babel—are reincorporated into the story of the House of Government. Some literary characters helped to build it, some had apartments there, and one—Goethe’s Faust—was repeatedly invoked as an ideal tenant.
The story of the House of Government consists of three parts. Book 1, “En Route,” introduces the Old Bolsheviks as young men and women and follows them from one temporary shelter to another as they convert to radical socialism, survive in prison and exile, preach the coming revolution, prevail in the Civil War, build the dictatorship of the proletariat, debate the postponement of socialism, and wonder what to do in the meantime (and whether the dictatorship is, indeed, of the proletariat).
Book 2, “At Home,” describes the return of the revolution as a five-year plan; the building of the House of Government and the rest of the Soviet Union; the division of labor, space, and affection within family apartments; the pleasures and dangers of unsupervised domesticity; the problem of personal mortality before the coming of communism; and the magical world of “happy childhood.”
Book 3, “On Trial,” recounts the purge of the House of Government, the last sacrifice of the Old Bolsheviks, the “mass operations” against hidden heretics, the main differences between loyalty and betrayal, the home life of professional executioners, the long old age of the enemies’ widows, the redemption and apostasy of the Revolution’s children, and the end of Bolshevism as a millenarian faith.
The epilogue unites the book’s three strains by discussing the work of the writer Yuri Trifonov, who grew up in the House of Government and whose fiction transformed it into a setting for Bolshevik family history, a monument to a lost faith, and a treasure of world literature.
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In the House of Government, some residents were more important than others because of their position within the Party and state bureaucracy, length of service as Old Bolsheviks, or particular accomplishments on the battlefield and the “labor front.” In this book, some characters are more important than others because they made provisions for their own memorialization or because someone else did it in their behalf.
One of the leaders of the Bolshevik takeover in Moscow and chairman of the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries, Aleksandr Arosev (Apts. 103 and 104), kept a diary that his sister preserved and one of his daughters published. One of the ideologues of Left Communism and the first head of the Supreme Council of the National Economy, Valerian Osinsky (Apts. 18, 389), maintained a twenty-year correspondence with Anna Shaternikova, who kept his letters and handed them to his daughter, who deposited them in a state archive before writing a book of memoirs, which she posted on the Internet and her daughter later published. The most influential Bolshevik literary critic and Party supervisor of Soviet literature in the 1920s, Aleksandr Voronsky (Apt. 357), wrote several books of memoirs and had a great many essays written about him (including several by his daughter). The director of the Lenin Mausoleum Laboratory, Boris Zbarsky (Apt. 28), immortalized himself by embalming Lenin’s body. His son and colleague, Ilya Zbarsky, took professional care of Lenin’s body and wrote an autobiography memorializing himself and his father. “The Party’s Conscience” and deputy prosecutor general, Aron Solts (Apt. 393), wrote numerous articles about Communist ethics and sheltered his recently divorced niece, who wrote a book about him (and sent the manuscript to an archive). The prosecutor at the Filipp Mironov treason trial in 1919, Ivar Smilga (Apt. 230), was the subject of several interviews given by his daughter Tatiana, who had inherited his gift of eloquence and put a great deal of effort into preserving his memory. The chairman of the Flour Milling Industry Directorate, Boris Ivanov, “the Baker” (Apt. 372), was remembered by many of his House of Government neighbors for his extraordinary generosity.