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CHAPTER 1
Romanov
I need some corner ... In my memory, I go through the apartments abandoned by the bourgeoisie.
ISAAC BABEL, 'An Evening at the Tsarina's', 1922
The luxury of this house makes a false promise.
Its windows are set deep among ornate columns, projecting cornices, scrolled and floriate mouldings. From the upper storeys, between wrought-iron balconies and overhanging chambers raised on tendril-wound columns, tiers of sculpted faces wearing Phrygian helmets and animal skins look out over the street, hinting at higher mysteries of domestic comfort contained within. The façade is designed to emphasise the extreme thickness of the outer walls, and the shadowed warmth of their recesses, as though, in the inmost part of this city, in this street of many names, a house could offer a refuge from history.
Ulochki-shkatulochki, ulochki moskovskie: 'The streets are little caskets', go the words of a love song to old Moscow. Before I lived here, I knew that Romanov Lane was not a little casket but a great chest of secret treasure. The men who lived in No. 3 had metro stations, institutes, cities, battle cruisers, tractors, auto-plants, warhorses, lunar craters and stars named after them. On my walks down to the Lenin Library from our first Moscow apartment on Tverskaya Street, I would choose to come this way, to get closer, I liked to think, to the hidden lives of those men. I was one of those passers-by who walk haltingly along the front of No. 3, pausing to look at the memorial plaques in granite or dark marble fixed at eye level on the earth-pink wall, then gaze up past the wilted carnations laid on top of the plaques to the plaster hammers and sickles that crest the pediments over the doorways, wondering quite what it meant for all those Stalin-era field marshals and Party apparatchiks to 'live here', as the inscriptions say they did.
Who is in the nomenklatura of No. 3, the building that old Muscovites still refer to as 'the House of the Generals' or, less reverently, as 'the Party Archive' or 'the Mausoleum'? What intricate conspiracies of fate and human intention in the bloody political drama of the twentieth century worked to keep these particular names in view? The hidden logic and direction of the 'struggle', as the Party piously called it, are impossible to follow in the series of names and faces on the wall of this house. Among them are heroes of the Civil War who moved into its apartments in the first years of Soviet power, fighting men who defeated the White armies in Siberia and the Russian south, and pressed the Revolution deep into Central Asia: Mikhail Frunze, briefly Trotsky's successor as Commissar of War, who moved here in 1924 and died the following year after a simple operation for a stomach ulcer, leaving the suspicion that he had been assassinated by his physicians on Stalin's orders; Semyon Budyonny, Kliment Voroshilov and Semyon Timoshenko, cavalry generals who survived and flourished as their comrades-in-arms were purged in the years before the Second World War; General Alexander Vasilevsky, who moved into the building in the first winter of the war and reassured a concerned Stalin that he had been 'provided with an excellent apartment'. Further along the wall is a sparse remnant of Old Bolsheviks: Pyotr Smidovich, who staffed the legendary 'special train' from which Trotsky and his leather-wearing entourage administered the Red Army throughout the Civil War; Dmitri Manuilsky, a good storyteller and joker, as Molotov later remembered, but 'confused' and 'mixed up with Trotskyists' and Emilian Yaroslavsky in his porthole spectacles, Siberian-born son of a Jewish political exile, long-standing head of the League of the Militant Godless, graphomaniac Party historian, and one of the very few of his kind to die a natural death.
Not far from Yaroslavsky on the wall is Andrei Andreev, a former waiter and (that rarity in the higher reaches of the Party) genuine proletarian, who served Stalin with implacable loyalty through the forced collectivisation of agriculture and the Great Terror. As you walk down Romanov from Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street, just beyond the wide gateway to the courtyard with its tall trees and its gaudy painted fountain, you come face to face with Alexei Kosygin, the small-eyed puffiness of his countenance caught for ever in the granite. Kosygin rose in the Party under Stalin. He replaced Nikita Khrushchev as Soviet Premier in 1964, and Khrushchev, fallen from grace, immediately moved back to his apartment in No. 3. Later Kosygin assisted in the quiet abandonment of the utopian dream that the state would one day wither away under communism. With future General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev he worked to contrive that outwardly static but secretly moribund phenomenon known as 'actually existing socialism', for which so many still pine. Last of all, at the Vozdvizhenka end of the building, under our bedroom window, is a plaque to Marshal Ivan Konev, the son of a poor peasant from the Vologda region. His chiselled gaze, straining out over some imagined battlefield, meets the blank side wall of the Kremlin Hospital. 'So who is going to take Berlin, we or the Allies?' Stalin asked Konev and Marshal Zhukov at the beginning of April 1945. 'We will take Berlin,' Konev replied. Eight years later, in the months after Stalin's death, though he had never been anything but a soldier, Konev acted as head of the Special Judicial Panel at the brief and vicious trial of Lavrenty Beria, at the end of which the reviled former chief of secret police and sadistic sexual predator was sentenced for 'treason against the Motherland' and 'secret links with foreign intelligence' and shot the same night in a cell fitted for that single purpose.
There are many more names in the invisible nomenklatura of No. 3, names without plaques, erased by state murder or sullen disgrace from the charmed list during every decade of Soviet power: Trotsky, Beloborodov, Sokolnikov, Frumkin, Furtseva, Malenkov, Rokossovsky, Togliatti, Zhukov, Vyshinsky, Kosior, Tevosyan, Khrushchev, Molotov ... And before them, playing a cameo part in the history of this house, which has always been so uniquely intimate with the destiny of the nation, a group of young actresses from the Moscow Art Theatre who shared an apartment high above the courtyard. In the hot summer of 1918, they gave aid, shelter and love to the British agent Sidney Reilly, 'ace of spies', as he plotted to overthrow Lenin and Trotsky. Elizaveta Otten, 'Reilly's chief girl', may have been the first of the many inhabitants of this house to be arrested at night by the secret police.
In that year, in which the Bolsheviks moved the capital to Moscow and took over the major buildings of the city under the Marxist slogan 'expropriate the expropriators', the actresses were still living la vie de bohème among the families of advocates, physicians and university professors for whom No. 3 had been built twenty years earlier. Some of those members of the small and high-minded professional class of the late tsarist era remained in their now 'communalised' apartments after the Bolsheviks took over No. 3 as the most prestigious residence for the Party elite outside the Kremlin. The street was renamed Granovsky after a politically liberal Moscow University historian, 'the ideal professor' of the nineteenth century (and prototype for the ridiculous Stepan Verkhovensky in Dostoevsky's novel Demons), and the building became known as the 'Fifth House of the Soviets'. (The first four 'Houses of the Soviets' – grand Moscow buildings appropriated by the Bolsheviks – were the National Hotel, the Metropol, an Orthodox seminary and the Peterhof Hotel on the corner of Vozdvizhenka and Mokhovaya Streets opposite the Lenin Library.) Many of the lawyers, doctors and academics in No. 3 were dubbed 'people of the past', and sent to labour camps or shot in the 1930s, leaving no trace of their lives except in private memory, old issues of the All Moscow telephone directory and the scattered annals of their professions. To my knowledge, none of their descendants is among the well-to-do heirs of Red Army generals and Communist Party magnates who now own the apartments, though I have come across several people from the old Moscow intelligentsia who recall with pride that long ago, before Stalin's purges, this great house was their family home.
*
In the Soviet period, this one-way street was closed to ordinary traffic. Militiamen would check documents. The most privileged members of the nomenklatura came to Granovsky to visit the Kremlin Hospital polyclinic and its pharmacy, and to use their state-issued coupons in the Kremlin stolovaya: worth a purely symbolic two roubles ten for lunch, and two fifty for an evening meal, or the equivalent in take-out or groceries from the well-stocked food store. The stolovaya was reserved for the highest ranks of the state apparatus; the coupons were a mark of the highest social prestige. Before big public holidays cars would draw up and sleek men would load them with parcels of meat, caviar, fruit and vegetables, delicacies unavailable to the mass of the population. Under Stalin, the nomenklatura was driven around the city in American cars – Packards and Cadillacs, Buicks and Lincoln Town Cars. Later the elite turned to Soviet-produced ZILs and Volgas.
Now, Hummers, stately Maybachs and Bentleys with curtains that concertina electronically shut when you look into their windows, and even a few last Russian-made Zhigulis are parked up on the pavements all day, and the flow of traffic is rarely broken. The economy, financiers say, is afloat on a sea of liquidity. The 'automobile-and-harem' culture of the elite that Trotsky so despised now displays itself with libertine flagrance on Romanov. To walk down the street is to weave back and forth between bumpers and the walls of buildings, except on those stretches, outside office buildings, where the pavement and the kerb have been unofficially privatised and security guards patrol, the ubiquitous shaven-headed sentinels of central Moscow, in pointed shoes and bulky black jackets half-concealing guns. Yet Romanov retains an air of cloistral seclusion. This is a feature of the relationship among its narrowness, the height of the buildings and its cradling bend. From the courtyard of No. 3, halfway along, a tall oak, an aspen and a poplar rise to the height of the buildings and shadow the middle of the street. Elsewhere in Moscow the skies seem to extend endlessly: 'in no other metropolis do you have so much sky overhead', Walter Benjamin observed when he came to Moscow in 1926; 'in this city you always sense the vast horizon of the Russian steppes'. Here, the façades of two museums at either end enclose Romanov within the city's vast spaces like doors in a palatial enfilade.
At one end, on the turquoise-and-white face of the 1902 Zoological Museum on Bolshaya Nikitskaya, the plasterwork seems to have evolved into a rampage of shape and line. Stone monkeys, rams' heads, owls and hares writhe free of a cornucopia of looping and twisting lower lifeforms: reptiles, insects and plants. The interior of the building is a labyrinth of laboratories, offices, a library, auditoria and long back corridors lined with rooms of study for many professors. When he was living in the Herzen House of Writers on nearby Tverskoi Boulevard, Mandelstam liked to visit the museum. He was grateful to the great biologists Linnaeus, Buffon and Pallas for awakening his 'childish astonishment at science'. He loved the museum's dark-painted galleried halls crowded with stuffed animals staring from behind vitrines – night predators with glass eyes, Bubulcus ibis, Delphinus delphis – and cabinets stacked with bottled creatures from the sea. 'Lying around unsupervised in the dark vestibule of the zoological museum on Nikitsky Street is the jawbone of a whale, like a huge plough', Mandelstam wrote in Journey to Armenia, an exuberant piece of travel prose that thrills to the drama of evolution. The museum's curator Boris Kuzin ('anything but a bookworm, he studied science on the run') was a friend and inspiration to Mandelstam, and the poet would sit drinking Georgian wine in his vast office in the depths of the museum. Sometimes Mandelstam would rise and pace round the room, composing poems that came suddenly, like 'Cherry Brandy', datelined 'March 1931, Moscow, Zoolog. Museum', which Nadezhda wrote down right there in the museum as he spoke it: 'I will tell it to you straight ... everything is just brandy, cherry brandy, my angel'.
In a symmetry unusual for a contemporary Moscow street, low curving buildings stand on opposite corners at either end of Romanov: the University History Faculty building on Bolshaya Nikitskaya, and the Sheremetev Corner House on Vozdvizhenka, once the home of the serf opera singer Praskovia Kovalyova, 'the Pearl', secret wife of Count Nikolai Sheremetev, scion of one of Russia's greatest aristocratic dynasties. At the northern end, where Romanov meets Vozdvizhenka, the Schusev Museum of Architecture, once the 'State Chamber', seals the street with restrained classical grace.
Where to the Hellene shone Beauty, To me, from the black holes gaped Shame
Mandelstam writes in 'Cherry Brandy'. The city's finances were once administered from the State Chamber. When Vozdvizhenka became a street of government buildings in the first years after the Revolution, this three-storeyed palace was turned over for use as headquarters of the Central Committee. Every day, Stalin and Molotov would walk the few hundred yards to their offices in No. 5 Vozdvizhenka from their apartments in the Kremlin – without bodyguards, as Molotov remembered with nostalgia. In 1923 the Central Committee offices moved to Staraya Ploshchad', Old Square, on the other side of the Kremlin, closer to the Lubyanka. It was only at the end of 1930 that the Politburo, acting on a report from the secret police, resolved that 'Comrade Stalin be immediately required to cease travelling around the city by foot'.
This spread of land on the crest of the hill above the now-buried Neglinnaya River lay within the 'White City', an extensive region on the north side of the Kremlin, enclosed for two centuries by fortified walls of white stone and brick, built in the late sixteenth century, whose curving line is still traced by Moscow's ring of boulevards. The land on which Romanov Lane stands was once known as Romanov Court, and belonged to the seventeenth-century Moscow boyar Nikita Romanov, who had been given it by his cousin the Tsar. Over the centuries, the loosely arranged estates, stone palaces, courts and monasteries were rectified into streets. Before the revolutionary remaking of Russian culture, street names were anecdotal and popular. In former centuries this land was known variously as the 'Romanov Palaces', 'Nikitsky' (after the well-liked boyar) and also by the names of other landowners, Razumovsky and Khitrovo, whose demesnes were on this ground before Count Nikolai Sheremetev bought it, as an act of generosity, from his cash-strapped brother-in-law Count Alexei Razumovsky. After that, the street became Sheremetev Lane.
Perpendicular to it are Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street (known in ancient Moscow as Novgorod Street) and Vozdvizhenka, one of Moscow's oldest roads, which radiate out from the gates of the Kremlin in the direction of the ancient city of Novgorod three hundred miles to the north-west. In 1471, Tsar Ivan III was greeted ceremonially on Vozdvizhenka, on the Trinity Bridge, just beyond the Kremlin's Trinity Gates, which once crossed the wide Neglinnaya, on his return from a military campaign to subdue the republic of Novgorod. The names Vozdvizhenka and Bolshaya Nikitskaya were taken from local monasteries – the Krestodvizhensky Monastery (Monastery of the Elevation of the Cross) and the Nikitsky Convent – founded in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when Moscow had risen to power as the centre of the unified Russian state. The Elevation of the Cross is a Byzantine feast traditionally associated with the glory of Orthodox Christian empire, which commemorates the recovery from the Persians by Heraclius of the 'true cross', unearthed in Jerusalem by Emperor Constantine's mother, Helena, while her son was building the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia. On the mid-September feast day of the Elevation, which is once again celebrated in the surviving churches of the neighbourhood, 'Lord have mercy' is sung again and again, as the Cross is raised high. In 1934, the Church of the Elevation (all that remained of the monastery after the great fire that greeted Napoleon's army in 1812) was demolished during Stalin's massive reconstruction of Moscow; its parish priest, Father Alexander Sidorov, had been murdered in a labour camp three years earlier. The Nikitsky Monastery had been demolished the previous year. Before its demolition, the Bolsheviks who lived on this street could see the nuns from the back rooms of their apartments, heads bowed over their quilting. In 1935, an electricity station for the new metro system was erected in the place of the convent, a windowless temple of power in heavily massed dark grey stone, with friezes of hero workers, their giant muscled bodies hewing, welding, drilling.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Molotov's Magic Lantern"
by .
Copyright © 2010 Rachel Polonsky.
Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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