I finished Slezkine's House of Government over the weekend, hereafter called HoG. Some of this post is taken from my original thoughts about it in July, but I've tried to add more context here. I tape-flagged many passages, particularly in book one (his nearly thousand page tome is divided into several books, each with several chapters, organized by theme and chronology).
As I wrote previously, Slezkine is at
pains to tell the story of Bolshevism as a story of a sectarian
religion that overcame the secular authority to establish its own
theocracy. By Slezkine's reckoning, the Bolsheviks were the first revolutionary force to succeed in taking over the State to do so.
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Slezkine's epigraph
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Slezkine spends the entirety of chapter three on a long discussion of apocalyptic millenarianism both
in the West and elsewhere, from the time of the earliest Christians
right up to the present, across different religions and contexts, before
tying it all off in a neat bow that places the Bolshevik/Marxist
movement of the 19th century into that larger cultural impulse that
emerges every so often in the face of major economic or societal
change.
The urge is to find something better in the face of something
terrible or unknown. Since the Reformation, that urge has manifested itself in a
search for a positive form of utopia, which until that point, had a
nihilistic connotation. After the Reformers (rightly called
revolutionaries by Slezkine), the concept of utopia acquired the hopeful
patina of achieving heaven on earth. It is not a coincidence that the
experience and understanding of time ceases to be a vertical spiral and
turns into the hard horizontal line of progress as we understand it
today.
This dovetailed nicely with my re-reading of Laurus in May for a
book group, and the subsequent articles by Vodolazkhin the group also
read. The (newly positive) idea of
achieving utopia is part of the apocalyptic impulse, and the people who
get caught up in these millenarian movements stand ready to use violence
and coercion to achieve it. The violence is a feature, not a bug, and
every religious reformer and secular revolutionary have used it to try
to achieve a purified state on earth.
This point was driven home to me after I read
an article by Gary Saul Morson on Leninthink,
which examines the language Lenin utilized in service of the Bolshevik
revolution, and the violence and terror that he openly pursued and
engaged as part of the new order. The thing that struck me about it,
was that not only was violence and terror a feature, not a regrettable
bug, but Lenin saw its continuance as necessary to the continuance of
the Bolshevik state, not just as a means of establishment. To wit,
State-sponsored terror was actually written into the 1936 Soviet
constitution because of Lenin's thought on the matter. It helped me to
understand Stalin as the fullness of Lenin's thought rather than someone
who took it off the rails.
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Building socialism and marching into a rational future.
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Slezkine goes on to detail how the Bolsheviks transitioned from a small exiled sect of true believers in Marxist orthodoxy, to their evangelization campaign (otherwise known as the suppression of the kulaks and forced collectivization), settling into power and feeling the disillusionment that utopia (Slezkine calls this "the real day") had not yet appeared. It is a reckoning that happens with all apocalyptic millenarian movements: the failure of the end days to arrive. Each movement deals with this failure differently; for some it is the end of the movement, and mass suicide follows. Many cults of the 19th and 20th centuries went this way. Some decide that the end of days should be understood allegorically, and adjust their teaching accordingly, particularly as they become institutionalized (but separate from the ruling apparatus, notably). Christianity goes this way after Augustine.
The original Bolsheviks, the "Old Bolsheviks," as they came to be called, found themselves plagued with ennui and psychological illness after the conclusion of the Civil War. Revolution had not gone beyond Russia's borders, as confidently predicted, and indeed, was not succeeding in Russia in the way Marx and Lenin had written. Famine was everywhere due to brutal collectivization in the grain-growing regions of Ukraine and Kazakhstan, plus grain requisitions by the State to fund the massive industrialization effort, and attempts to rationalize architecture of the medieval cities in legible ways (described well by James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State) were stalled or incomplete. It was The Great Disappointment.
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The House of Government. It is difficult to convey the scale of the place, but it is massive.
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The House of Government itself was part of this re-imaginging of the urban space, and took a staggeringly long time to build. It was a huge complex on the river across from the Kremlin, with multiple entryways and doors, plazas, and amenities. It housed thousands of people, plus a laundry, cinemaplex, theatre, gym, hair salon, post office, day care, primary school, medical clinic, social club, grocery store, laundry, cafeteria (to release the women from the drudgery of cooking family meals) and a radio station. There were 505 apartments housing more than 2600 people. The House was to provide a launchpad into the future of socialism, where life would be a seamless movement of work and home, a gathering of comrads transcending the homely bounds of filial piety.
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The imagined Palace of Soviets. The scale is also difficult to render here, especially if you haven't been in Moscow and cannot conceive of the size of this. The Cathedral of Christ the Savior is a massive, massive structure. People are ants in comparison. The Palace was meant to dwarf the Cathedral by some good bit. This sketch won the design competition. Slezkine has the other finalists' drawings in the book, but this one was designed by the architect of the House of Government and fit the vision best.
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Rebuilt
Cathedral of Christ the Savior (on the original plan and to original
scale). The people in the foreground give some sense of size, and there
are two complete worship spaces inside the building, the grand upper
and the slightly more modest lower church.
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The House was to be part of the larger Palace of Soviets plaza, planned on the site of the Christ the Savior Cathedral, situated on the opposite side of the river behind the Kremlin. The Palace would be a place of pilgrimage, a new symbol of the Soviet Union, a holy site suitable for thousands of worshipers to commune with Lenin's greatness, and contemplate their place in the universe. Or more to the point: how they were participating in the building of socialism. Shortly after the completion of the House, the cathedral was blown up to make way for the Palace, but a supreme act of irony, the ground proved too marshy to support the gargantuan structure, and so the foundation pit yawned open for more than two decades before being converted into a public swimming pool. (The Cathedral was rebuilt on the site in the 1990s).
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The Palace of Soviets complex, as imagined with a rationally redesigned street plan. Moscow is a medieval city with few straight streets (it looks rather like a wagon wheel that radiates out from the river and Kremlin). The Bolshevik architects aimed to tame it, rationalize it. They did not succeed.
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The Bolsheviks were in a great hurry, with the weight of history upon them, feeling the urgency of the Revolution, for many of them had not really imagined it in their lifetimes. The Real Day was exceedingly slow in coming. The world-wide revolution had not only failed to arrive, the Old Bolsheviks had
somehow failed to carry out their own vision. The New Economic Plan put forth by Lenin after the Civil War was a semi-capitalist concession to the famine and economic catastrophe of forced collectivization, but it was to become the foundation for all the Five-Year Plans that followed. The Bolsheviks understood that
their generation was flawed, having been raised under the monarchy--the
original sin that could never be overcome--but they hoped they could
build a socialist utopia for their pure Soviet children.
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Lenin's Mausoleum. It is surprisingly a small and intimate space. The man responsible for Lenin's preservation, Boris Zbarsky, survived the Purges of the 1930s, only to be arrested shortly before Stalin's death. He died in 1954. His son, Ilya, carried on his work until his retirement in the late 1980s.
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Lenin's death in 1924 hit the core of them very hard, as there was no clear way forward. Lenin himself was somewhat adrift after
Sverdlov's premature death of Spanish flu sometime in 1919; Sverdlov had been the architect of the Soviet State, and oversaw most of the administrative details in the first years, serving as Lenin's right-hand man, confidante, and enforcer. (It was he who ordered the execution of the royal family). Sverdlov had been a leader of the inner circle of Bolsheviks from the earliest days of exile.
Stalin, by contrast, had lingered at the outer edges of the Bolshevik core from the beginning, being hard to get along with and less well-read than the others, but managed to elbow aside Trotsky and claw his way to the top upon Lenin's death. The Old Bolsheviks were disillusioned enough by the failure of the Real Day to arrive that the (often contradictory) changes to the socialist dream that Stalin put forth (including the Five Year Plans) were barely challenged. Those tasked with writing the first socialist works of literature were on constantly shifting ground, as Stalin consolidated his power and his vision became the only vision possible.
By the 1931, however, things seemed more settled. Huge industrial projects like the Dnepr Hydroelectric Dam were nearly complete, and factories were being built in the thousands. The House of Government was complete and inhabited by the most senior members of the government (except those who lived in the Kremlin, like Stalin and Bukharin, although Stalin's family had apartments in the House). Situated across the river from the Kremlin, the House residents had easy access via the Stone Bridge.
The planners of the House acknowledged that its design was not in keeping with the ideals of socialism, which sought to overcome individualism and family ties with State partisanship and comradely ties, but they also realized that some intermediate measures must be taken on the way to that ideal. The concession of private apartments instead of universal communal barracks was to provide the first cracks in their theocratic foundation, as people formed families and brought their possessions into the House and generally took on the habits of the bourgeois they were meant to replace.
In the early 1930s, it seemed that most of the Soviet Union had made its conversion, rid itself of its internal enemies, and what was needful was evangelists of the Revolution to take the mission beyond its borders as well as the active building of a rational socialist society within the USSR.
The assassination of Kirov in December 1934 changed everything. The sudden and violent loss of Kirov proved that socialism wasn't as stable as everyone believed, that there were still enemies hiding in plain sight.
Slezkine points out that throughout history, when societies experience wide scale or rapid change or unrest, there comes the need for a scapegoat. Someone must be to blame for the ills of society, and the pressures build up until a suitable target (or targets) can be found. (
Rene Girard has written at length about scapegoating as a sociological phenomenon). The act of scapegoating, until recently done by interrogation and execution, usually apart from the formal legal apparatus, is a way of releasing tension and bringing things back to center. Scapegoating is the driving force behind the witch trials of the late Elizabethan era and beyond, lynch mobs of the 19th century, and so forth. In the USSR, following Kirov's death, a great questioning arose amongst those in power:
how had this happened? Were there really saboteurs everywhere? There must be more enemies hidden from view, who must be exposed and thrown out or the Revolution will fail.
Thus began the Great Terror. Stalin started with the inner circle first. Anyone with even a loose association with Trotsky or the Socialist Revolutionaries was arrested, interrogated at length, and then imprisoned indefinitely or exiled to a gulag in the Far East, usually without a formal trial. The circle expanded far beyond that, and quickly, to the mass arrests of 1937 and 1938, with mass executions.
It is unclear to me why the scapegoating in this instance was so large in scale, but the method follows a well-worn track. As with all instances of scapegoating in ages past, for no discernible reason, it died down after 1938. There were still arrests, interrogations, exile and executions, but the mass scale of them was over.
After Stalin's death, there were whispers about what had happened, but no one dared talk of it openly until Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" to the Politburo in 1957, in which he acknowledged the mass executions and exile and so-called excesses of the 1930s, but it was still up to the victims to pursue formal rehabilitation, a process that required an Old Bolshevik to vouch for you or your relative in writing. By 1957, there were almost none left alive to do so. Those who survived exile returned broken and old beyond their years. Many were left in limbo, dependent on relatives with no access to pensions or any other State support, and their children cut off from education and opportunities to advance (for the sins of the father shall be visited upon his children and his children's children). Only the rehabilitated (even after death, rehabilitation was possible) could consider entering the Soviet Kingdom of Heaven.
The true believers were mostly ascetic hard workers--the
Revolutionary monastics, the original disciples, tasked with the
conversion of the country. They kept long hours, leaving the care of their children to peasant-nannies and babushkas. Even though they formed families (and
reformed them frequently, changing partners and apartments with ease),
they sought to form their children in the tenets of their faith, so
their children could inherit the earth. (Tellingly, the women of the Revolution had to choose between having a family or participating in the Revolution; they mostly chose Revolution). The Old Bolsheviks were the intelligentsia who had no place or role in Tsarist society and great readers of classical
literature. They undertook to educate their children similarly give their children a place in the new Soviet order.
It
was this reading education that ensured their children would never
become true
believers, their moral imaginations formed not by socialist texts, but
rather by the literature that had excited their parents: Cervantes,
Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Swift, Dickens, Goethe, Heine, and many
others. The children of the true believers would go on
to control the levers of power after Stalin as members of the
nomenklatura, but they were never truly
invested in building socialism in the way that their parents were.
Raised by grandaparents or in orphanages after their parents were swept
away by the Terror, the children carried out the motions of faith with
little or no belief. By the 1980s, the USSR's spiritual core was
completely hollow. The
Old Bolsheviks' zealous faith passed away after a single generation.
