Intro
Intro to the channel
[[0:00]] - [Announcer] This program is presented by University of California Television. Like what you learn? [[0:06]] Help others discover UCTV podcasts by leaving a comment or rating for us in iTunes. [[0:20]] (energetic music)
Intro to the lecture
[[0:45]] - Hi everybody. I’m Margaret Chowning. I’m the Chair of the Moses Lectureship Committee. [[0:54]] We and the Graduate Division are pleased to present Yuri Slezkine the fall speaker [[0:59]] in the Bernard Moses Memorial Lecture series. In 1937, University of California President, [[1:06]] Robert Gordon Sproul and the UC Board of Regents established the Bernard Moses Memorial Lectureship [[1:12]] in the Social Sciences. The lectureship honors the memory of the late Bernard Moses, a professor of history [[1:19]] and political science at the University of California from 1875 to 1911 and an emeritus professor [[1:26]] from 1911 until his death in 1930. Professor Moses earned a worldwide reputation [[1:32]] as a pioneer scholar, especially for his contributions to understanding the historical origins of the problems [[1:38]] of the Latin American republics. Professor Moses was also an expert on Philippine history [[1:44]] and he served as a member of the United States Philippine Commission from 1900 to 1904. [[1:51]] Past lecturers have included Herma Hill Kay, Nicholas Riasanovsky, George Lakoff, Kenneth Stampp, [[1:58]] Ken Jowitt, Reinhard Bendix, Robert Scalapino, John Rowe, Woodrow Borah, Carolyn Merchant, [[2:06]] Jean Lave, Emmanuel Saez, Mary Ann Mason and Aihwa Ong. [[2:13]] And now, I’d like to say a few words about our lecturer today, Yuri Slezkine. [[2:18]] Appointed the Jane K. Sather Professor of History in 2009, Professor Slezkine has been a member of the UC Berkeley [[2:25]] Department of History since 1992. His numerous and wide-ranging publications [[2:31]] have focused on ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union as well as, Soviet historiography, ethnography [[2:37]] and ethnogenetics. Winner of the 2005 National Jewish Book Award, [[2:43]] among several other prizes, Slezkine’s groundbreaking book “The Jewish Century” [[2:48]] has been translated into seven languages and remains both widely respected and controversial. [[2:55]] Earlier publications include; “Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small People of the North”, [[3:00]] “Between Heaven and Hell: the Myth of Siberia in Russian Culture” as a co-editor, the article “The USSR as a Communal Apartment [[3:09]] or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism” and a co-edited volume with Sheila Fitzpatrick [[3:15]] called “In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women From 1917 to the Second World War”. [[3:22]] Professor Slezkine earned his Master’s degree in Russian Language and Literature from the University of Moscow in 1978. [[3:29]] Departing the USSR in the late 1970s, he worked as a translator in Mozambique and Portugal [[3:35]] before moving to the United States where he was awarded his doctoral degree in History at the University of Texas at Austin in 1989. [[3:43]] Slezkine has been awarded fellowships from Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, [[3:50]] the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Hoover Institution and the Guggenheim Foundation. [[3:55]] He’s also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. All these honors are testament to the innovation [[4:01]] and creativity of his scholarship. Professor Slezkine’s lecture today to quote from the enticing blurb that drew you all here, [[4:09]] explores the private lives of Bolshevik government officials along with their wives, maids, [[4:16]] lovers, children and comrades. Revolutions, Slezkine tells us, devour their parents. [[4:24]] They begin as tragedy and end at home. By framing the Bolshevik Revolution as a family drama, [[4:30]] Slezkine reimagines the story of the Bolsheviks rise. Please join me in welcoming my friend, [[4:37]] Professor Yuri Slezkine. (audience applauds)
Lecture
Overview
[[4:47]] - Thank you very much, Margaret. Thank you you all for coming here. [[4:53]] Just a sec. [[5:01]] And thank you the Moses Committee for inviting me. It’s a great honor for me to be here [[5:09]] and it feels great to be Moses if only for a short period of time. [[5:14]] (audience laughs) So follow me and I’ll get you there [[5:20]] and I promise not to take too long. [[5:26]] So my presentation is based on a book I’m writing on the history of the so-called House of Government [[5:32]] in Central Moscow where most top Bolshevik officials [[5:40]] lived in the 1930s as tenants. Husbands, fathers and neighbors [[5:49]] before being escorted one by one to their deaths. So it is a story of vanguard’s backyard. [[6:00]] Whereas Margaret said, of a revolution [[6:05]] that began as a tragedy and ended at home.
The apocalyptic cult
[[6:12]] Before the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks were a millenarian, apocalyptic sect. [[6:20]] Which is to say to use a standard definition, a faith-based group in conflict with the world [[6:29]] with voluntary membership contingent on personal conversion and a strong sense of chosenness, exclusiveness [[6:37]] and ethical austerity. The main condition for joining was unconditional faith [[6:48]] in the imminent and total destruction of the existing order of things, to be accompanied by the bloody revenge [[6:58]] of the weak on the strong, with the weak inheriting the world. [[7:03]] And to quote from “The Internationale”, those who have been not becoming all. [[7:10]] And followed in short order by a collective this world is salvation leading to [[7:18]] a vaguely described state of absolute perfection, at least for the chosen. [[7:25]] As in most such sects, the core members were young men [[7:33]] who had abandoned their fathers, mothers, wives, children, brethren, sisters and, yes, their own lives [[7:42]] in order to join the charismatic leader who served as the sect’s sacred center. [[7:50]] Lenin’s nickname was the Old Man. Women made up a very small proportion of the membership [[8:00]] and played crucial, but auxiliary roles as poets, muses, debate audiences, prison liaisons, [[8:13]] model martyrs and so-called technical workers. [[8:20]]
Comparison with Christianity
Socialist millenarians were competing for souls with the Christian ones. [[8:26]] But whereas most preachers of a Christian apocalypse [[8:32]] were workers and peasants, most theorists of the workers [[8:37]] and peasants revolution were students and so-called eternal students. [[8:45]] Both kinds of students tended to be the children of clerks, clergymen, doctors, teachers, Jews [[8:55]] and other so-called proletarians of mental labor. [[9:02]] Or rather professional intellectuals as metaphoric Jews; [[9:10]] chosen, learned and alienated. Or Jews as honor intellectuals [[9:18]] irrespective of what they did for a living.
Now, the main difference in the nature of missionary work [[9:27]] was that if the Christian message was in theory for everyone, [[9:34]] the Socialist one was aimed exclusively at the elect - [[9:40]] Peasants in the case of the Socialist revolutionaries and industrial workers in the case of the Bolsheviks.
[[9:52]] Another difference was a much greater intellectualism of Socialist sectarians. [[9:58]] A conversion to socialism was a conversion to the intelligentsia - To a sacred fusion of millenarian faith [[10:06]] and lifelong learning. Every text that one read [[10:12]] confirmed the truth of the Communist revelation. And no text confirmed it more decisively [[10:23]] than those from the Russian and European literary canons [[10:28]] associated with intelligentsia membership. [[10:33]] Among the leading Bolsheviks on the eve of the revolution there were a few proletarian converts, [[10:39]] all of them in secondary roles. Among the leading Bolshevik women, there were none. [[10:46]]
Family
Like all millenarian sectarians, the Bolsheviks did not believe in the family. [[10:52]] The only true family was the sect as a whole. [[10:59]] He looked at those seated in the circle around him and said these are my mother and my brothers. [[11:07]] Or whatever arrangements would prevail in the post-apocalyptic world. [[11:13]]
But they did mate and procreate. [[11:20]] Since, women were scarce and sex with outsiders was a source [[11:28]] of contagion, most women had more than one partner, sometimes at the same time, [[11:34]] but mostly in more or less quick succession. [[11:41]] Children were raised in prisons, exile settlements, [[11:48]] communal apartments and so on by their mothers and their partners, old and new. [[11:58]]
The revolution and armageddons
The prophecy came true on Easter Monday 1917 [[12:03]] when Lenin entered Petrograd on a train and proclaimed that the time had come. [[12:11]] The prophecy had come true. And this generation would not pass away [[12:17]] until all these things had happened. [[12:23]] As for those socialists who had ears, but did not hear - he knew that they were neither hot nor cold. [[12:30]] And so, since they were lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, he was going to spit them out of his mouth. [[12:38]] The welcoming reception and the eventual storming of the Winter Palace [[12:45]] were organized by a man named Nikolai Podvoisky a priest’s son and a former seminarian. [[12:53]] At the time of the revolution most top Bolsheviks were in their 20s and 30s. [[13:00]] The Old Man was 47. [[13:06]] During the next three years, students and eternal students would become warriors [[13:16]] and boys would become men.
One of the most common plots [[13:22]] of Bolshevik civil war literature is a story of an apocalyptic slaughter; [[13:28]] the storming of Babylon, the Battle of Armageddon or some combination of the two. [[13:36]] The central theme as in the original model was merciless retribution through total violence [[13:44]] against feminized evil, uh, evil - [[13:49]] Give her as much grief and torture as the glory and luxury she gave herself.
[[13:57]] The other one and by far the most popular was Exodus. Or the story of an escape from slavery [[14:05]] and the transformation of a stiff-necked people into a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. [[14:15]] Moses, speaking of the devil, could be represented as two different characters -
- [[14:22]] The commissar who spoke directly to history and the inarticulate folk hero who led the march [[14:29]] through the desert and presided over the extermination of the Hittites and the Amorites [[14:37]]
- or as one great leader. Leather bound on the outside and merciful on the inside.
[[14:48]] The man who pioneered the other uniform was Yakov Sverdlov the first head of the Soviet state [[14:57]] and an eternal student from the family of a Jewish engraver. [[15:03]] His favorite poet was Heine. And his favorite stanza [[15:08]] according to his young female secretary was [[15:13]] - and this is for Yoheim Klein in particular. [[15:19]]
(speaking in foreign language) [[15:28]]
Or in T. J. Reed’s translation, A different song, a better song [[15:34]] will get the subject straighter.
Let’s make heaven on earth, my friends,
[[15:40]] instead of waiting till later.
His best friend and fellow Heine admirer [[15:47]] was Philip Goloshchekin an eternal student from the family of a Jewish contractor [[15:54]] who presided over the killing of the czar’s family. When the Whites entered the basement [[16:01]] where the execution took place, they found on the blood-stained wall an inscription [[16:09]] from Heine’s poem about the writing on the wall.
(speaking in foreign language) [[16:20]]
Or again in T. J. Reed’s translation -
before the sun could rise again,
Belshazzar by his men was slain. [[16:28]]
Again, I should have said. All through the war the top Bolsheviks [[16:33]] moved around continuously from one front of Armageddon to another, [[16:41]] one assignment to the next. Sverdlov died of the Spanish flu he contracted in Oryol [[16:50]] while supervising the election of the Ukrainian Communist Party Central Committee. [[16:56]] And Goloshchekin would go on to preside over the extermination of one half of the Kazakh rural population. [[17:04]]
Most, rather I should say some, some of the top Bolsheviks [[17:11]] were accompanied by their permanent female comrades. But most had short-term affairs with nurses, [[17:21]] secretaries, cryptographers and propaganda department typists, among others.
The great disappointment
[[17:32]] The revolution and civil war were followed by the so-called New Economic Policy [[17:39]] proclaimed as a temporary retreat and analogous to what in American History [[17:46]] is known as the Great Disappointment - When the world failed to come to an end on October 22, 1844 [[17:58]] and thousands of New Englanders, in the words of one of them, wept and wept until the day dawned. [[18:06]] The postponement of the millennium or the failure of the prophecy [[18:11]] depending on which faction you belonged to, coincided with the death of the prophet. [[18:20]] Trotsky couldn’t attend Lenin’s funeral because of a mysterious nervous illness. [[18:28]] In 1927, 1,300 top government officials [[18:35]] stayed at the Lenin Rest Home Number One outside of Moscow. [[18:42]] Six of them were found to be healthy. 65% of the rest were diagnosed with various forms [[18:50]] of emotional distress described as neurasthenia, psycho-neurasthenia, psychosis or nervous exhaustion. [[19:01]] One public prosecutor who couldn’t stop weeping [[19:07]] and it had been three years, couldn’t stop weeping following Lenin’s death was treated for traumatic neurosis, [[19:14]] which he, in his countless pleas for help, called nervosus.
Survivors’ life
[[19:22]] The surviving old Bolsheviks, now top government officials, [[19:29]] moved into the Kremlin and several downtown Moscow hotels [[19:34]] that had been converted into dormitories known as Houses of Soviets. [[19:42]] And settled into a busy, boisterous and promiscuous, [[19:48]] but also a self-conscious, self-doubting and self-loathing communal domesticity. [[19:59]] Visiting each other’s rooms, drinking strong tea, [[20:04]] smoking cheap tobacco, having sex, arguing about historical necessity, [[20:11]] running the world revolution and weeping and weeping.
[[20:18]] The Bolshevik literature of the 1920s consisted, among other kinds of things, of gothic tales [[20:29]] and the main discoverer and interpreter of those is among us today, gothic tales of communist maidens [[20:37]] being pursued by vampires in dorms that looked like medieval castles. And more often I would say, of stories of communist men [[20:50]] being held captive by fleshy females in a suffocating world of lace curtains, orange lampshades, [[21:07]] soft pillows, furry slippers, rubber plants, [[21:12]] porcelain cats, shiny meat grinders and other signposts to hell. [[21:17]] (audience laughs) The unredeemed and ultimately irredeemable world of the millennium postponed. [[21:31]] Prophecy unfulfilled, perhaps and revolution betrayed as Trotsky would put it.
Lechery
[[21:43]] It was at this point, when they were in their 30s and 40s, that many top Bolsheviks left their old female comrades [[21:55]] for younger women. Most of them recent recruits to the proliferating secretariats and commissariats [[22:02]] of the ever expanding Soviet state. The great Party theoretician, Nikolai Bukharin, [[22:11]] married the daughter of one of his oldest friends after taking her away from the son of another old friend. [[22:20]] The Chairman of the Committee for the Settlement of Toiling Jews on the Land, Semen Dimanshtein, [[22:28]] married his adopted daughter.+++(4)+++ And the Chairman of the Military Board [[22:35]] of the Soviet Supreme Court, Valentin Trifonov, married the daughter of his own wife [[22:42]] who had been once married to his best friend, before becoming Stalin’s lover, before getting together with him. +++(5)+++ [[22:49]] 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. [[22:59]] One of the offspring of the new union was the great Soviet writer Yury Trifonov, [[23:06]] whose novella, terrific novella I think, “The House on the Embankment” [[23:12]] gave me the idea for this project. He was born in 1925 the lowest point in the history [[23:22]] of the Soviet Great Disappointment and the highest in number of births [[23:28]] among Bolshevik officials.
Now some Bolshevik officials married younger women [[23:36]] without leaving their old female comrades. The number one Soviet cartoonist, Boris Yefimov, [[23:41]] lived openly with two wives and so did his brother, the number one Soviet journalist, Mikhail Koltsov. [[23:48]] Those who remained nominally monogamous, [[23:57]] some of those I should say who remained nominally monogamous started longterm love affairs. [[24:05]] Maybe all of them did, but I only found some evidence of that in the archives. [[24:10]] Started longterm love affairs and produced a great many documents [[24:16]] in the apparently quite common, but understudied genre of secret letters to secret lovers. [[24:28]] Which because of their assumption of utmost secrecy, intimacy, mediacy and unmediated emotional… [[24:40]] immediacy were similar to diaries [[24:48]] and prison confessions to other popular Bolshevik genres.
A society of strangers
Many of the same people also kept diaries [[24:54]] which they used as instruments for self-examination, [[25:00]] self-improvement and self-disciplining. As well as, outlets for weeping and weeping. [[25:07]] And, of course, most of them would end up writing their prison confessions [[25:13]] for more or the less the same reasons. [[25:19]] Now, one obvious reason for weeping was that a band of brothers had become a society of strangers. [[25:28]] As Aaron Soltz, known as the Party conscience put it, [[25:37]] “there are many more of us now and it’s very difficult to have the same feeling [[25:44]] of closeness toward each individual Bolshevik.”
Marriage
[[25:50]] But the biggest problem as always, as always in the history of sects, [[25:57]] certainly, was not that there was not enough love for countless remote neighbors, [[26:03]] it’s that there was too much love for a few close ones. [[26:10]] Sects by definition transcend the bonds of kinship, [[26:16]] friendship and sexual love by dissolving them in the common devotion to a particular path of salvation [[26:27]] and when available to the prophet who indicate and represent it. [[26:35]] The sect’s greatest enemy, along with Babylon, is marriage [[26:45]] because of its centrality to all nonsectarian life and its traditional claim to primary loyalty. [[26:53]] But marriage is not just a powerful source of alternative devotion. [[27:01]] The reason it is central to all nonsectarian life is that it regulates reproduction and reproduction is, [[27:09]] by definition, at odds with sectarian life which is based on a voluntary union [[27:18]] of conscience adult converts. Sects are about brotherhood and, as an afterthought, [[27:27]] sisterhood, not about parents and children. This is why most end of the world scenarios [[27:35]] promise fulfillment in this generation.+++(5)+++ Most radical Protestants objected to infant baptism [[27:46]] and all millenarian sectarians in their militant phase [[27:52]] attempt to reform marriage or abolish it altogether [[27:58]] by decreeing celibacy or promiscuity. [[28:06]] Jesus’ claim that his family was not his true family [[28:11]] and his demand that his disciples hate [[28:17]] their erstwhile fathers, mothers, wives, children, brethren and sisters was as central to his ministry [[28:25]] as it was impossible for his later followers to imitate. [[28:32]] Fanatics being the rule proving exception. [[28:39]]
Friends vs comrades
Now, of the three fundamental kinds of loyalty debated by the Bolsheviks friendship was seen [[28:51]] as a fully rational alliance based on shared convictions. [[28:59]] Communists were not supposed to have non-communist friends and most of them did not.+++(4)+++ [[29:06]] Jesus didn’t have to mention friends among the loved ones to be hated either. Committed sectarians can be trusted usually not to form [[29:15]] close personal attachments, nonsexual attachments, to unrelated non-sectarians. [[29:22]] The Bolsheviks did not have friends, they had comrades.
Erotic love
[[29:29]] Erotic love on the other hand was a different story [[29:34]] in so far as it was widely acknowledged to be based on the feeling that according to Soltz, [[29:43]] the Bolshevik spokesman of these matters, [[29:49]] comparable to revolutionary enthusiasm in its power, clarity and purity. [[29:56]] One was, of course, free to resist and overcome that feeling if it interfered with revolutionary enthusiasm [[30:02]] but even Soltz recognized that it was a serious challenge. [[30:09]] The revolution was commonly referred to as a leap [[30:15]] from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. [[30:21]]
Love and marriage were a problem because of their sect defying, [[30:27]] sect destroying reproductive function. But they were also a problem, [[30:33]] because they combined the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom in ways that seemed compelling [[30:43]] and mysterious in equal measure. [[30:50]] Love is the law of life wrote Soltz, but a random encounter [[30:56]] that leads to a particular attachment is not. Especially if one considers the unpredictability of reciprocity. [[31:05]] The third basic form of loyalty debated by the Bolsheviks [[31:11]] blood relationship lay entirely in the realm of necessity. [[31:19]] One did not choose one’s father, mother, children, [[31:25]] brothers or sisters. One, of course, could leave them behind as all sects prescribe and most underground Bolsheviks did. [[31:33]] But the Party did not make it a formal requirement and after the revolution seemed uncertain [[31:39]] about how to proceed.
House of Government
[[31:45]] And then the day dawned - between 1928 and about 1934 - [[31:53]] the Bolsheviks forced the prophecy to come true by staging what is known as the Stalin Revolution [[32:01]] or the Revolution From Above or the era of first Five-Year Plans. [[32:09]] They built what they called the economic foundations of Socialism, [[32:15]] known as the House of Socialism. And they built a new house for themselves, [[32:22]] known as the House of Government. The chronicles of those years are known as production novels [[32:30]] but none of them actually are, because no production of any kind ever takes place. [[32:36]] They are rather construction stories or, since human souls are also under construction, [[32:42]] construction cum conversion stories.+++(5)+++
What matters is the act of building. [[32:49]] A new world, new man, new Jerusalem, a new tower that will reach the heavens. [[32:56]] As one character from one of those novels puts it, it’s the Tower of Babel only reverse [[33:04]] from dispersion to unity. [[33:12]] These novels were also by extension creation myths. [[33:21]] The epigraph to Ilya Ehrenburg’s, “The Second Day” which was published in 1933 is an epigraph to them all. [[33:32]] And God said, “Let there be a firmament amidst the waters [[33:37]] “and it was so. “And the evening and the morning were the second day.” [[33:43]] The main model besides Genesis for countless of those novels [[33:49]] was Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman” about the building of St. Petersburg on the swamp. [[33:59]] Now, the House of Government was built in an area known at the time and still today as The Swamp [[34:07]] on the low, frequently flooded bank of the Moscow River [[34:13]] diagonally across from the Kremlin and directly across from Russia’s largest church, [[34:21]] the Cathedral of Christ the Savior which was blown up to make way for what was to become the ultimate [[34:29]] pubic building of all time the “Palace of Soviets”.
[[34:35]] The architect of both buildings, Boris Iofan, was given the penthouse apartment [[34:41]] in the House of Government overlooking the site of his next [[34:46]] and the world’s best building project. [[34:52]] The architect of the entire Soviet building project continued to live in the Kremlin supervising both structures along with everything else. [[35:03]] The “House of Government” belonged to the so-called transitional type. [[35:09]] Halfway between fully communal housing based exclusively on monasteries [[35:16]] and bourgeois residential buildings organized around family apartments. [[35:26]] Early Soviet communalism was about [[35:33]] interchangeable individuals living transparent lives in elastic, pubic spaces. [[35:46]] The question was whether individual cells would be attached to long corridors [[35:53]] in multi-story communal houses or to endless roads traversing the newly, [[36:01]] decentered landscape or not attached to anything at all. [[36:06]] Bukharin’s father-in-law, Yuri Larin, envisioned flying, floating, crawling and rolling individual dwellings [[36:19]] with each human being behaving, as he put it, like a snail carrying it’s own shell. [[36:29]]
In the meantime, the House of Government was a compromise combining 505, [[36:39]] was the largest residential building at the time in the world. 505 family apartments with a vast network of public spaces [[36:51]] including a theater, cafeteria, library, grocery store, [[36:58]] department store, walk-in clinic, hairdressing salon, [[37:05]] post office, bank, telegraph, laundry, tennis courts, [[37:15]] two gyms, two daycare centers. Several dozen rooms for various purposes [[37:21]] from pool playing and target shooting to symphony orchestra rehearsals. [[37:27]] And the shock-worker movie theater, the first sound movie theater [[37:32]] in the Soviet Union for 1,500 spectators [[37:38]] with a cafe, a reading room and a band stage. [[37:43]] Some critics argued that the House of Government was functionally analogous to the Dakota [[37:51]] on Central Park West between 72nd and 73rd Street in New York City. [[37:57]] But they realized their mistake, somebody lived not far from there. [[38:03]] Realized that their mistake soon after the House of Socialism was completed.
Dignified domesticity
[[38:14]] There was going to be no second Great Disappointment [[38:21]] and no pointless criticism. The Soviet mid 1930s were a time [[38:28]] of the confident expectation of the inevitable, the dignified domesticity of public officials, [[38:37]] the knowing smile of a pregnant woman, the Bolshevik post St. Augustine age. [[38:45]] As Issac Babel put it in his speech at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934,
[[38:50]] the first layer of scaffolding has come down from the House of Socialism [[38:57]] and even the most near-sighted people can see that building’s shape and its beauty. [[39:03]] We’re all witnesses to the fact that our country has been gripped by a powerful feeling of pure physical joy. [[39:13]]
That feeling was to be expressed in the literature of socialist realism [[39:20]] which Bukharin in his speech at the Congress described as and I quote,
The kind of poetic work [[39:27]] that depicts the most general and universal features of a particular epoch representing them through [[39:33]] unique characters that are both specific and abstract - Characters that combine the greatest possible [[39:40]] generalizability with enormous inner richness.
Such for example is Goethe’s “Faust” [[39:48]] and such, according to the Congress, were “Don Quixote”, [[39:54]] “Hamlet” and “Robinson Crusoe” among others, many others. [[40:01]] What all those names had in common was that they represented golden ages. [[40:07]] No longer the miracle of birth or early development and certainly not, the skepticism and rigidity of old age, [[40:13]] but the strength, self-confidence, dignity of mature adulthood on the verge of immortality. [[40:26]] Socialist Realism was to socialism and therefore, to the whole of human existence [[40:35]] what Goethe’s “Faust” had been to the bourgeois age. It was an age without old age and possibly without death. [[40:44]] No Soviet writer was seen as being remotely comparable to Goethe, but of the two most admired and widely discussed [[40:53]] Soviet novels of the mid 1930s, one, Nikolai Ostrovsky’s “How Steel Was Tempered” was about a blind [[41:02]] and paralyzed Bolshevik hero who attains immortality through a woman’s love [[41:07]] and the act of autobiographical writing. And the other, Leonid Leonov’s “The Road to Ocean” [[41:14]] was about a Bolshevik Faust who ascends to the heaven of his own making. [[41:23]] So to quote from the central text of the Soviet 1930s [[41:29]] translated from the original German and this time I’m not going to try the original German. [[41:36]]
Everything transitory is only an allegory. What could not be achieved, here comes to pass. [[41:44]] What no one could describe is here accomplished. The eternal feminine draws us aloft. [[41:55]]
Life in the new house
When the top Bolsheviks and their new families moved into their new house, most of the men [[42:04]] 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 [[42:13]] and most of the maids and each family had at least one, [[42:18]] were peasant girls in their early 20s, refugees from famine gripped farms [[42:26]] their masters had recently collectivized. [[42:34]] Apartment geography reflected the family hierarchy. [[42:39]] The apartment’s sacred center and largest room was father’s study [[42:45]] with walls covered from wall to ceiling with dark, old bookcases. [[42:52]] The most frequently mentioned books were the massive, gold-lettered, multi-volume additions [[42:59]] of “The Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedia”, [[43:05]] Alfred Brehm’s “Lives of Animals”, [[43:12]] the “Treasures of World Literature” series from academia publishers [[43:18]] and the collected works of great classics from various previous golden ages. [[43:24]] Mothers might or might not have rooms of their own. Children almost always did. [[43:32]] Maids usually lived in small nooks by the entrance to the kitchen, usually behind a curtain. [[43:39]] And the rest of the rooms were occupied by grown children, elderly parents and other relatives and dependents. [[43:49]] The elderly parents and other relatives and dependents [[43:54]] included; former priests, rabbis, shopkeepers and illiterate grandmothers. [[44:04]] Many of the men and some of the women worried about the swamp coming back, [[44:09]] but no one seemed to know how to stem the tide. [[44:16]] Now as a building of the transitional type, the House of Government was part neoclassical, [[44:25]] particularly the the theater facade facing the future Palace of Soviets and part constructivist, [[44:33]] especially the apartments themselves.
Many house residents found the large windows [[44:39]] and straight lines bare and dry. And most did something about it, [[44:45]] brought in old beds, chests and desks. Hung up swords, pictures and photographs [[44:53]] and they laid down carpets, rugs and bearskins. [[44:58]] Most drew the line at curtains, which was seen as an irredeemable symbol of bourgeois domesticity. [[45:07]] Men switched from leather coats to suits and most women in the words of one of them, [[45:13]] suddenly discovered that they were beautiful. Many had new dresses made by government seamstresses. [[45:22]] Manicures were popular, lipstick was seen as an irredeemable symbol of bourgeois eroticism. [[45:30]] Men only slept at home, usually between four a.m. [[45:35]] and 11 a.m. or noon. Most women had professional jobs as editors, [[45:43]] accountants, statisticians, economists, doctors, pharmacists, engineers and came home late. [[45:53]] And so the House of Government, the apartments, chess and music rooms, movie theaters [[46:02]] and especially, the courtyards, the basement and the embankment along with the nearby Gorky Park [[46:09]] belonged to the children. [[46:14]]
Their lives as recorded in their diaries, letters [[46:20]] and memoirs were a more or less faithful replica [[46:26]] of aristocratic family life from before the revolution. The remote, slightly feared and much admired father [[46:37]] who only came home on his days off. The Bolsheviks had abandoned a seven day week [[46:43]] and the word Sunday, which is in Russian is resurrection. Every sixth day was a day off. [[46:52]] The much less remote, less feared and less admired mother, [[47:03]] permanently overshadowed by her heroic husband. [[47:08]] The much disliked German governess who would take small children on daily supervised walks. [[47:16]] The more or less dreaded dance and piano teachers and the beloved peasant nanny [[47:23]] who did most of the child rearing until the time would come for the children to start reading [[47:28]] the books that their fathers would select for them. [[47:36]] The books that their fathers would select for them came mostly from the 19th century literary canon [[47:43]] and so did their lives. Complete with the Christmas midnight magic, [[47:50]] now called New Year’s Eve. Swimming and berry picking at country states [[47:55]] now called dachas. Annual trips to Black Sea palaces now called rest homes. [[48:02]] And an intense cult of pure love, fierce friendship [[48:09]] and spiritual self-improvement through reading of the same books, letter writing and diary keeping. [[48:19]] Every girl was Natasha Rostova from “War and Peace” and every boy was Prince Andrei.
Reign of Terror
[[48:31]] And then night came and the knock on the door. So in the 1937, ‘38 most of the men and some of the women [[48:43]] were arrested and accused of degeneracy, duplicity, [[48:48]] corruption and treason. They were all guilty and some of them knew it. [[48:56]] Most men were executed and most men, [[49:03]] including the great Party theoretician, Nikolai Bukharin, the Chairman of the Committee [[49:09]] for Settlement of Toiling Jews on the Land, Semen Dimanshtein and the former member of the Soviet Supreme Court, [[49:17]] Valentin Trifonov. Most of the men were executed within weeks or months.
[[49:24]] And most of the women, including Bukharin’s and even as young wives were sent to special camps [[49:36]] for the family members of traitors to the motherland [[49:41]] where they would spend eight years, plus another 10 or so in exile before returning [[49:48]] to their children’s new homes, old, sick, [[49:57]] destroyed, unwanted and unloved.
[[50:03]] Children were adopted by their nannies, grandparents, [[50:10]] aunts and uncles or family friends or sent to special secret police orphanages. [[50:21]] A common, common story frequently reproduced in reminiscences [[50:28]] and memoirs is of a small child. Let’s say a 12 to 14-year-old girl, [[50:36]] who having been awakened by the bright light, the noise of the search, the sound of her mother’s crying, [[50:47]] watching her parents being taken away and running to her aunt’s or grandmother’s apartment. [[50:57]] She would ring the bell, apartment very often within the same House of Government. [[51:02]] She would ring the bell. What happened next would later be described [[51:10]] as a test of humanity.
If the aunt did not open the door [[51:16]] or open the door only to disappear into the kitchen, reemerge with a sandwich [[51:22]] and tell the girl to never come back again, she would be classified as an orthodox sectarian [[51:30]] for whom the only family was the Party. Or as a bad person defined as someone [[51:39]] who would protect herself and her immediate family, at the expense of all other loyalties and commitments. [[51:49]] The orthodox sectarian would soon become a bad person by definition. [[51:56]]
A good person was someone who would risk her immediate family’s safety [[52:04]] for the sake of extended family and close friends. Those who could be called surrogate family. [[52:12]] And a saint was somebody who destroyed her family by welcoming strangers, herself a stranger to moral nuance [[52:22]] whose goodness lay beyond everyday moral geography. [[52:32]] Now within a decade, about half of the surviving boys [[52:38]] and some of the girls would be killed in the Great Patriotic War.
House of soviets
[[52:43]] The world’s ultimate public building, the House of Soviets, would never be built. [[52:50]] In the 1940s during the war, metal piles from the world’s largest foundation pit [[52:59]] would be used to make anti-tank barriers. In the early 1960s under Khrushchev, [[53:09]] the world’s largest foundation pit would become the world’s largest outdoor swimming pool. [[53:16]] In the 1980s under Gorbachev, [[53:23]] many of the remaining children of the revolution would become the leading ideologues of Perestroika [[53:31]] or the radical restructure. And in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, [[53:40]] the world’s largest outdoor swimming pool would once again become Russia’s largest church, [[53:46]] the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.
End of revolution
So as I wrote in that blurb, [[53:55]] revolutions do not devour their children. Revolutions are devoured [[54:00]] by the children of the revolutionaries.+++(4)+++ [[54:08]] The same is true, I believe, of all, of all millenarian sects most of which [[54:16]] don’t survive beyond one generation.
An example
[[54:22]] And now to conclude, I have interviewed for this project about 60 people who grew up in the House of Government. [[54:34]] One woman born in 1924 was 14 [[54:40]] when her parents were arrested. She remembered returning home one evening [[54:47]] from a friend’s place looking up at her windows, as usual, being surprised by the fact [[54:53]] that they were all brightly lit up, not being greeted by the guard at the entrance, running in [[55:04]] and seeing the mess left by the secret police. Being told by her nanny that her parents had been taken away [[55:11]] and running to her aunt’s apartment and ringing the bell. [[55:20]] And being taken in, as it turned out, for good. [[55:26]] So her aunt, as it turned out, was a good person. [[55:32]]
About a week later the telephone rang. The young man at the other end asked for her [[55:39]] and when she answered the phone said that he was her mother’s interrogator, [[55:45]] I mean father’s, I’m sorry, father’s interrogator. That her father was fine and that he would soon be out, [[55:54]] but that in the meantime he had asked for some garlic, onion and warm socks and would she please bring those things [[56:02]] to, let’s say, the intersection across the square from the secret police headquarters. [[56:10]] She did, the young man according to her was pleasant, if a little shy. [[56:17]] She handed him her little package. He said why don’t you walk me back [[56:25]] to the building while we talk? She did, they talked and said goodbye at the door. [[56:36]] She never heard from that man or her father again. [[56:42]] But she remembered, claimed to remember, that day April 15, 1938 for the rest of her life. [[56:52]] Something else she retained for the rest of her life was her intense love and admiration for her father [[57:01]] the People’s Commissar of Naval Construction.
[[57:08]] Now 60 years later toward the end of her life, [[57:13]] she was allowed to see her father’s interrogation file. It was huge, hundreds and hundreds of pages. [[57:21]] At first he rejected all the accusations, [[57:27]] but eventually he confessed to everything and started supplying eerily detailed, [[57:38]] hair-raising, belief defying, information about foreign spies, secret cells, [[57:49]] poisoned wells, invisible messages, clandestine meetings, [[57:56]] elaborate assassination attempts, all of them failed and so on. [[58:06]] Then she took a closer look. The day he broke down was April 15, 1938, [[58:15]] then she understood or thought she did. Her father must have been up in the interrogation room [[58:23]] overlooking the square that day [[58:28]] with one of his interrogators, probably the one playing the good guy, when he was shown his 14-year-old daughter [[58:35]] accompanied by his other interrogator, probably the bad guy, walking across the square [[58:41]] toward the house of torture in which he was being held. And so he told them whatever they wanted to hear. [[58:52]] So she gave me the file to look at and it was indeed, huge and it did indeed, consist of two parts - [[58:58]] A short one that didn’t contain much and a long one that began on April 15, 1938.
[[59:09]] And then I noticed another file attached to the first one that the woman had never mentioned. [[59:15]] It was her mother’s interrogation file. It was tiny, three pages long. [[59:20]] It said the accused rejects all accusations [[59:25]] and refuses to participate in what she calls a travesty of justice. She maintains her husband’s innocence, as well as her own. [[59:37]] After several initial exchanges, she has consistently refused to cooperate [[59:45]] with the investigators. Sentence, death by a firing squad [[59:51]] to be carried out immediately.
So, thank you very much. [[59:57]] (audience applauds)
Q&A
[1:00:03]] - [Man] So they’re all sitting in the House of Government waiting to be picked off one by one. [[1:00:08]] Is there anywhere for them to go or does anyone get out? Or are they all just sitting there being completely [[1:00:16]] worrisome and paranoid about what’s going to happen? And how long does it take for the whole process [[1:00:25]] of going through all 500 rooms?
[[1:00:31]] - It wasn’t all the 500 rooms or most of them. And, of course, the so-called Great Terror, [[1:00:37]] affected many more buildings in many more cities. But yes, they were sitting there waiting, [[1:00:45]] hoping against hope, not to be picked up. Thinking of themselves as being innocent [[1:00:55]] and being picked up one at a time. The process lasted for about a year and a half, [[1:01:04]] a little longer than that. And so, people would be, [[1:01:10]] usually men would be the first ones to be arrested.
Then there was a special decree on family members [[1:01:17]] a few months after the beginning of the large campaign. [[1:01:24]] And so then the women began to be picked up, as well. [[1:01:32]] And toward the middle of 1938 [[1:01:39]] most apartments had been affected. Most of the rooms were sealed to preserve the evidence. [[1:01:49]] Oh, there are stories about some boys actually sneaking in to get some things. [[1:01:56]] The remnants of the families of the arrested tenants [[1:02:05]] would be moved into apartments [[1:02:10]] that would become communal apartments. So say one apartment would be completely sealed. [[1:02:17]] Another one next to it would be completely sealed and both sets of wives and children would be moved into a third apartment, [[1:02:24]] usually one family per room, where they would live for a little while until being kicked out [[1:02:30]] of the House of Government altogether - Because the House of Government was still meant for government members. [[1:02:41]] And so they would be then shipped out and to eventually find other abodes in other places.
[[1:02:53]] - [Man] Who took their place?
[Woman] Ask it again. [Man] Was there a special type of person or class [[1:02:59]] that took their place as government officials?
Surviving government officials did [[1:03:07]] and there are lots of stories of a family being arrested, [[1:03:13]] a new family moving in, that family being arrested and third family moving in and so on. [[1:03:19]] So that as I say, continued for about a year and a half. [[1:03:25]] Then eventually it slowed down and almost stopped. [[1:03:30]] But there were only two and a half years left until the war. [[1:03:36]] At which point, most residents moved out [[1:03:41]] to be replaced after the war by second and third echelon of government officials. [[1:03:48]] Post-war government officials preferred other buildings, [[1:03:55]] other fashions, other interiors and, indeed, other areas within the city of Moscow. [[1:04:02]] So it stopped being, practically speaking, [[1:04:08]] the House of Government. And, indeed, it stopped being referred to as the House of Government and since the 1970s [[1:04:17]] when Yuri Trifonov’s novella “The House on the Embankment” came out it’s been known primarily [[1:04:24]] as the House on the Embankment.
[[1:04:30]] - [Man] Do you have a guess as to what explained this whole thing that you’ve been describing [[1:04:37]] and how it relates to the millennial view of the Bolsheviks? [[1:04:44]] - You mean the Terror? - [Man] Yes.
Well, I think it is directly related to the Bolsheviks [[1:04:54]] millenarian expectation. [[1:05:01]] Most of them expected for the world as they knew it, [[1:05:06]] to end within their lifetimes. The key word in their correspondence was faith, [[1:05:15]] faith in communism. They also expected and certainly, [[1:05:20]] Stalin did, an apocalyptic war. [[1:05:29]] And that starts certainly in 1936, increasingly in 1937 [[1:05:34]] that’s when the so-called Reign of Terror or Great Terror begins. [[1:05:40]] And it’s mostly in the expectation of that war that the hunt for possible traitors began. [[1:05:50]]
And I think it is fairly typical, I mean it is indeed typical of those millenarian sects [[1:05:59]] that succeed in occupying at least parts of Babylon. [[1:06:04]] And the Bolsheviks were unusually successful in that they actually occupied the whole empire. [[1:06:12]] But if you think about the Mennonites and Muntzer [[1:06:21]] or, indeed, Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple in Guyana, [[1:06:28]] 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 [[1:06:38]] - of an attack from the outside, a search for traitors within [[1:06:45]] and, of course, the closer to the sacred center the more of them there are or rather, they’re more dangerous [[1:06:52]] and potentially, potentially contagious they are. Jim Jones - he had his own version of Trotsky [[1:07:01]] - for those of you who remember that story. So, yes, I think there is a direct connection.
[[1:07:10]] - [Woman] My question concerns Leon Trotsky. [[1:07:15]] As you know, in the ’20s he become the leader of the left opposition to Stalin and Stalinism [[1:07:23]] and in the ’30s and onward become reviled and exiled and chased across various countries [[1:07:31]] ending in Mexico where eventually he was assassinated. And I wonder in your view, [[1:07:39]] if whether Trotsky’s political opposition to Stalinism [[1:07:44]] and what became of the Russian Revolution became matched in any way or accompanied by [[1:07:52]] a personal ideology or practice that differed in any significant ways [[1:07:58]] from what you’ve described?
Yes, Trotsky’s views differed from those of the, [[1:08:09]] of the members of the Party’s leadership in the 1920s [[1:08:16]] in that he was much more consistent and radical in his millenarianism. [[1:08:26]] I think there are essentially three ways of dealing with the postponement of the fulfillment [[1:08:33]] of the prophecy with the nonarrival of the end of the world or the messiah, whatever the prophecy may be.
- [[1:08:43]] One is to die while trying to bring it about [[1:08:49]] and that was Trotsky’s position. That was Jim Jones’ position. [[1:08:55]] Arguably, David Koresh’s and there are many other examples.
- [[1:09:04]] And the other two, I think, are one, [[1:09:11]] if the messiah doesn’t come to claim that he has in fact arrived. [[1:09:18]] This is the official view of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and those, I think, are the sources of Christianity.
- [[1:09:26]] And the third one is to reconcile oneself [[1:09:33]] to the imperfections of human existence and learn how to live in a state of permanent expectation [[1:09:43]] when the prophecy becomes an allegory [[1:09:51]] and the expression waiting until, how does it go? [[1:10:00]] I’m thinking of the Russian version. Waiting til, what is it? [[1:10:07]] Not second coming. What is it when you wait, basically waiting until– Hm? (woman speaking faintly) [[1:10:13]] Becomes a synonym of waiting until cows come home. [[1:10:19]]
[Man] Yuri, this is… I’m not gonna go to sleep very easily tonight [[1:10:25]] after your talk. What’s extraordinary about it is the way you’ve taken a story that we know normally through textbooks [[1:10:34]] and so on as emanating from the level of Stalin [[1:10:40]] or from Lenin, the Great Terror and so on and brought it down to an extraordinarily personal level. [[1:10:49]] And I think this is wonderful. It suggests, though, that you’re interested beyond [[1:10:56]] the House of Government in the many manifestations of this which we’re seeing right now. [[1:11:03]] This a new age of millennialism and I wonder if you wanna comment at all on the possible comparisons [[1:11:14]] or interests that you might have and expanding on this? [[1:11:21]]
Well, I’m not sure if today, well perhaps, [[1:11:27]] but there is, I mean millenarianism is or millennialism, if you prefer, and I remember the saying [[1:11:33]] it’s till kingdom come. Right that becomes, pretty much the same as til the cows come home. [[1:11:39]] (audience laughs) It’s, it’s extremely common. [[1:11:47]] It’s I think more common for reasons that can be discussed in some prophetic traditions [[1:11:54]] than in others. Certainly within Christianity, Islam. [[1:12:02]] In China there is a long - and Herb and I talked about this - a very long and very rich history of millenarian uprisings, [[1:12:12]] accompanied by some of the same phenomena. Some of the same developments, [[1:12:18]] same expectations and same great disappointment. [[1:12:26]] They proliferate particularly at when times, (I mean, predictably not so-called) moral panics [[1:12:32]] - when, you know, happen when times seem out of joint. That’s the way the time of Jesus is usually described. [[1:12:40]] He was, of course, one of an extremely large number of doomsday prophets, at the time. [[1:12:51]]
What is interesting to me also is that the Soviet Union ended, if you will, [[1:12:59]] the Russian Revolution did, the way it began - in the midst of one of those periods. [[1:13:06]] ‘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 [[1:13:15]] and used to go there in those years in the late ’80s and ’90s - there was a time of a remarkable proliferation [[1:13:26]] of doomsday cults of various kinds.
So, of course, it’s very much alive. [[1:13:34]] I think the Christian tradition and, of course, the Marxist tradition, post-Soviet [[1:13:39]] produced a whole series of those of various kinds. [[1:13:49]] And today we, I think, witness a resurgence [[1:13:56]] within the Islamic tradition - Which to my mind, is nothing peculiar to Islam, [[1:14:02]] although, I think there are some very interesting differences between those, between various millenarian traditions. [[1:14:12]] But, ultimately, you know in some very important ways, very similar to the Christian one; [[1:14:19]] Indeed, the Buddhist one as well.
And another very fruitful encounter [[1:14:31]] that leads to millenarian upheavals is one between European newcomers [[1:14:43]] and traditional societies. This is from Polynesia to South America [[1:14:50]] there’s a long story of those. And this is again, almost invariably when the world you think you understand comes to an end [[1:14:59]] and is transformed into a world you no longer understand.
[[1:15:06]] And I think, I think the early 20th century [[1:15:15]] was such a period throughout Europe, but especially in Russia. And we, some of us have discussed this [[1:15:21]] that this was true not just of the Bolsheviks. Those preachers of Bolshevism in that area [[1:15:27]] that is still called The Swamp today mingled in various ways [[1:15:34]] with preachers of the end of the world who came from a variety of traditions, many of them Christians, but not only. [[1:15:46]] -
[Man] You portray the residents of the home as true believers in their, you know, [[1:15:53]] out of their correspondence and diaries. But sitting very close to the surface in your narrative is a kind of story about hypocrisy, right? [[1:16:01]] And a sort of, the coexistence of millenarianism and luxury. People moving in to the building probably expected [[1:16:09]] they would be there for awhile. They furnished their apartments as if, not as if they were leaving the next day. [[1:16:15]] And the 14-year-old girl and the children don’t expect to be leaving soon. [[1:16:20]] It’s kind of a bourgeois home. So do you see that as something existing [[1:16:26]] in kind of the psyche of everyone there? Or were there true believers and hypocrites? [[1:16:32]]
I think that most of them were true believers. I do not think they were hypocrites. [[1:16:39]] If a hypocrite is someone who is aware of the discrepancy. [[1:16:48]] I think some of them wondered. Some of them were bothered by what was going on. [[1:16:54]] As you wrote, among others, you know many of them were particularly bothered in the 1920s before they moved into the House of Government. [[1:17:02]] By the time they moved into the House of Government in 1931 they were moving not just into the House of Government, [[1:17:09]] but also into a different age. And so their sense of what they were about [[1:17:15]] was different in the mid 1930s. But they were still occasionally, [[1:17:20]] they would still occasionally wonder and worry and there are various traces of it. Indeed, [[1:17:26]] in the Soviet literature of the mid 1930s, there are lots of traces of it. [[1:17:31]] It’s all about immortality and all about the circumstances of the imminent death. [[1:17:40]] And they worried about their families being there. They had no idea how to, what to do about it. [[1:17:51]] And what’s interesting is that the Party, you know, we’re now talking about them as individuals - [[1:17:57]] But since they were top Party officials, they also represented it and it was their job to formulate Party policies.
[[1:18:07]] And this is where, I think, the peculiarity of Marxism comes in. [[1:18:13]] I mean there are many. But one has to do with the fact that with the very, [[1:18:24]] very flat sort of narrow socioeconomic conception [[1:18:29]] of human nature and the assumption that all those things would take care of themselves. [[1:18:37]] The total lack of guidance. A lot of these people were eager for guidance. [[1:18:44]] Basically, what to do when children are born? Or when their parents die? Or when they would get married? [[1:18:51]] And they would turn to various figures of authority, [[1:18:57]] various texts, but the classics of Marxism and Leninism including the latter day ones, [[1:19:07]] had nothing to say about every day human morality. And they without explicitly reflecting on this, [[1:19:16]] were acutely aware of a problem.
That was reflected in the way the Party functioned. [[1:19:26]] The Party reached into the lowest reaches of Soviet societies, Soviet society. [[1:19:32]] But only at work and in school. You join the Party at work or in school, [[1:19:41]] you would go through so-called purges. You would engage in confessional monologues [[1:19:47]] and all those other things we know about Party membership. All of that you would do at work or in school. [[1:19:55]] Not at home. These people who presided over the Soviet Union [[1:20:00]] who would subject themselves to the things that we all find familiar particularly from Protestant practice, [[1:20:09]] constant mutual observation, constant confessional disquisitions and so on. [[1:20:18]] They lived in that House of Government, as if it were still a swamp. [[1:20:25]] That was as if they would come home and they would be surrounded by some old man, [[1:20:33]] murmuring something in Hebrew or someone whose priestly past is barely concealed [[1:20:41]] and there they would be. And Party commissions, whose job it was to check on Party members, [[1:20:49]] would come to the House of Government in their capacity, not just as tenants, but as Party inspectors. [[1:20:57]] But they would stay in the basement, because they would only check on people working in the House of Government as painters, [[1:21:06]] elevator technicians and so on. And they would be supervising those people [[1:21:11]] in that huge, elaborate basement. They would never venture upstairs into those apartments, [[1:21:18]] where of course contagion kept spreading. And if you read and there are not many of those, [[1:21:25]] but some of the texts produced by people actually under investigation, you read some of the things that Bukharin [[1:21:32]] has to say in his so-called “Prison Manuscripts”, You see the agony - [[1:21:38]] Not just of the kind that Gessler described but having to do with what I have just described, as well. [[1:21:44]]
- [Man] The beloved father of your concluding story. Was he a murderer, too? And if not, by choice or by pure accident? [[1:21:56]]
It’s like, you know, Clinton saying depends on what is is. (audience laughs) [[1:22:01]] It really depends on how you define murder. [[1:22:06]] They were, most not all, but they were many of them had killed during the civil war. [[1:22:14]] Most of them had one way or another participated in the elaboration, preparation, justification [[1:22:25]] and often, implementation of collectivization which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths - [[1:22:35]] And was indeed designed to produce thousands of deaths. [[1:22:43]] Some of them were professional executioners. Some of my most dearly beloved characters [[1:22:52]] in the story I’m telling were executioners, were professional mass murderers. [[1:23:01]] In other words, secret police officials whose job it was to kill.
[[1:23:08]] But most believed in the necessity of violence. [[1:23:13]] Bols were unabashedly devoted to the notation that violence was important. [[1:23:19]] That it was needed. That is was an integral part of the project. [[1:23:25]] And they were not apologetic about it. [[1:23:33]] Nor would they consider it a problem, those who managed to produce something while in captivity. [[1:23:41]] That was not something they would apologize for. Bolshevism was about Armageddon [[1:23:48]] and Armageddon is about mass murder - And so, I believe is the last book of the New Testament. [[1:23:59]] So, in that sense at least when it comes to theory, they were not original. Not any more violent than any other millenarian sectarian. [[1:24:08]] They, unlike many, actually got to, you know, got their prophecy fulfilled, [[1:24:14]] Got to see it unfold and then contributed to it. Sort of the way Thomas Muntzer speaking of those [[1:24:20]] millenarians who actually managed to do some killing did.
[[1:24:26]] So this is not to justify them, but perhaps to suggest that this is, A, not unique and B, fairly complex. [[1:24:32]] So if the question is whether we should feel sorry for that father? [[1:24:38]] Well, I think it would be up to the reader to decide.
Final story
[[1:24:46]] Perhaps, I could finish with one very short story about the worst or one of the worst executioners [[1:24:55]] who lived in that building. Who actually was the initiator of the implementation [[1:25:05]] of the so-called Order 00447 which was the order for mass arrest and executions. [[1:25:13]] So he was in some ways the most prolific murderer [[1:25:22]] in the Soviet Union at the time. [[1:25:28]] And his wife wrote a memoir, rather she told the story of her life in an oral interview. [[1:25:39]] 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, [[1:25:47]] it ends with his last day at large. [[1:25:55]] They were over at someone’s place at the party and the telephone rang and someone said [[1:26:01]] that you are needed at the Ministry. He was at that point working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. [[1:26:06]] And he says- “strange, I already signed everything”. Anyway, they called again and he went over there. [[1:26:16]] 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?” [[1:26:25]] Then his wife understood what had happened. Then she went home, she saw the search. [[1:26:30]] The secret police officers were there turning everything upside down. [[1:26:39]] And they were still asking her where he was. And then, finally she was told that he had been arrested. [[1:26:51]] That he had arrived wherever he was supposed to arrive. So it took him, I think, about six hours [[1:26:59]] to get to that house of torture. [[1:27:05]] He knew it was a house of torture. He had subjected countless people to torture. [[1:27:10]] He had sentenced many more to death and then his time came. [[1:27:15]] And she, who didn’t really know about what he did at work. She had some suspicions but she convinced herself [[1:27:22]] that he wasn’t involved in anything really.
[[1:27:29]] It was in the middle of January in Moscow, it was very cold. There was snow everywhere and so she spent, [[1:27:36]] according to her, the rest of her life wondering about what he did during those six hours [[1:27:43]] that separated the moment of his departure and the moment of his surrender. [[1:27:49]] She imagined him wondering around Moscow thinking of suicide. Perhaps trying to go home [[1:27:55]] and seeing secret police guards at the door who were waiting there in case he returned. [[1:28:02]] Six hours of walking around and then he arrived at his destination [[1:28:09]] and then after a year of torture and interrogations he was shot. [[1:28:15]] So, anyway, I think I should stop here.
[[1:28:21]] (audience applauds) (energetic music)