In a recent friendly telephone
conversation, Russian president Vladimir Putin may well have exclaimed to U.S.
President Donald Trump, "Darn that dream I dream each night, but it haunts
me and it won't come true." It would be a timely commentary on
present-day Russia. On this 100th anniversary of the October 1917 Russian
Revolution, it is useful to assess the existence and the failure of the
dreams of 20th-century Russian Bolsheviks with their aspirations for a new
society and a world communist revolution, and the consequent disillusionment of
the faithful, and their sad fate, resulting from the disastrous reality of the
Soviet regime led by Josef Stalin.
Compelling narratives have been related concerning the drama and
tragedy of the Old Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union in powerful and compelling
works by Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Victor
Kravchenko, among others. Now the narrative is recounted in a massive
1,100-page, brilliant, and extraordinary new book, The House of
Government, recently published by Princeton University Press, written by
Yuri Slezkine, a Russian-born American professor of history at Berkeley.
The House of Government (HoG) was the home for a decade,
1931-1941, of some members of the Russian Bolshevik elite, whose chronicle of
their life and interactions is told, partly in their own words, from their
youth through their conversion to communist radicalism to their fate.
Residents in the HoG experienced painful sacrifices; actions of loyalty and
betrayal; the turmoil as people were arrested and executed; carefully scripted
fake confessions of guilt; erasing of photos, documents, and letters of those
declared "enemies"; communication in countless shades of gray; inner
torments; ritual silence at times; the apostasy of the children of the
Revolution; and the end of Bolshevism as a millenarian faith.
The author had written a previous book, The Jewish
Century, making striking comparisons of different cultures by using
Greek mythology. Calling Jews a Mercurian people who created concepts and
artifacts, as opposed to an Apollonian people, he sees Jews as the embodiment
of modernity. They adhere to law and have a penchant for abstract thought.
Slezkine asked an interesting question: how to explain the puzzle
that Jews, people of ideas, trade, and movement, who were prominent in the
development of capitalism, were also prominent in anti-capitalist movements,
especially the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917?
Part of the explanation appears in the new book, which indicates
that Jewish poets, prophets, and propagandists dominated the cultural
contingent in the House of Government, and that Jews were disproportionally
prominent in delegates to the First All-Russian Congress, in members of the
Bolshevik Central Committee, and in officials in the Red Army.
The new book, subtitled "A Saga of the Russian
Revolution," a historical epic with hundreds of characters, emerges from
diaries; letters; books read; memoirs of the hopes, fears, and confessions of
the inhabitants of the House of Government, a unique apartment house built in a
low-lying area, what was a reclaimed swamp in the center of Moscow on the banks
of the Moskva river and opposite the Kremlin.
It housed some of the chief builders of the "new world,"
powerful members of the Soviet Union elite, people eminent in politics,
military, intelligentsia, and even officials of Gulags and the executioner
Lyova Fedotov. It tells the sad, poignant story of the personal life of
residents, often one of pathos, and provides detailed information on the
inhabitants and on the shifting personal relations among them.
But the story of the House also epitomizes the rise, decline, and
fall of optimistic expectations of a new ideal society, a better life, and
paradise on Earth, and depicts the venomous Stalinist terror in the decade from
1931 through the Great Purge beginning in 1936-7 until 1941, during which
680,000 were murdered by the regime. About a third of the residents of
the House disappeared or were killed by the rulers during the ongoing purges.
The House in its original form virtually came to the end with the German
invasion of Moscow in October 1941. The House was no longer a home for
Old Bolsheviks.
The 2,700 residents of the House lived in a privileged place,
which differed from the normal Russian life, in which families lived in
one-room apartments and shared bathroom, toilet, and kitchen. In
contrast, in the HoG, a family got a whole furnished apartment to itself.
The House, since renamed the House on the Embankment, contained 505
furnished apartments with facilities for the privileged families in what was
then the largest residential building in Europe.
Highly luxurious for its time, indeed, the complex is compared by
Slezkine to the Dakota in New York City. It had its own public spaces
including a library, tennis court, bank, laundry, gyms, department store,
clinic, shooting range, and theaters. It was a fortress and a dormitory.
It was a place where revolutionaries came home and the revolution came to
die.
Among the diverse group of inhabitants in the House were members
of the government – Red Army military leaders, writers, business executives,
Stakhanovites, film producers, and foreign communists. Among the more
well known personalities were Nikolai Bukharin, Nikita Khrushchev, Yuri
Trifonov, Karl Radek, and Mikhail Koltsov, who became a prototype for a
character in Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Among the intellectuals there, by far the largest group were Jews. Many
residents became victims of the terror, but some, such as Andrei Sverdlov, and
members of the secret police, the NKVD, were among the perpetrators of that
terror.
Slezkine is an erudite intellectual historian and points out that
for the Bolsheviks, reading the treasures of world literature was a crucial
part of their experience, and that of their children. Themes from that
literature, which he discusses, are part of the story of the House. In
particular, one work, Goethe's Faust, was repeatedly invoked.
Slezkine therefore draws on literature, especially that used by the
Bolsheviks themselves, to understand the behavior and thoughts of the residents
of the House.
The crux of the book is Slezkine's evaluation of the Bolshevik
faith in the context of a discussion of the nature of religion and the
religious groups and millenarian movements associated with them. Slezkine
asserts that Karl Marx, like Jesus, succeeded in translating a tribal prophecy
(meaning Judaism) into a language of universalism, one of anti-capitalism and
aspiration for the resurrection of humankind.
Slezkine sees Bolshevism as a religion that, like other religions,
experienced failed prophecies; disappointment; postponements; and, at the end,
sacrifices. In spite of the anticipated "reign of the saints,"
Bolsheviks could not transform the country; rather, their belief was transformed
by the rulers into a regime conspicuous by the great purges and high-profile
victims of Stalin as shown by the unhappy experience of many of the residents
of the House of Government.
It is interesting to compare Slezkine's view of Bolshevism and the
Soviet regime with that of President Putin, expressed in speeches and an
interview in April 2016. In June 2012, Putin said Bolshevism in 1917
betrayed Russian national interest and wished to see Russia defeated in World
War I, the war with Germany. In the interview, Putin confesses that he is
fond of communist ideas but is critical of Lenin and admits that the Soviet
Union began with repression. Putin is more a Russian nationalist,
celebrating patriotism, not ideology.
For Putin, once a believer, the official story of the Soviet Union
is little more than a beautiful and harmful fairy tale, the implementation of
which or the attempt to put it in practice caused great damage to his country.
Like Slezkine, Putin appears to believe that the basic views of communist
ideology were taken from major religious groups. Building the communism
codex is "the same as looking into the Bible or Quran."
Why did Bolshevism die? The House of Government never became
a Russian national home and Soviet communism became homeless, eventually
becoming a ghost. Ideological single-mindedness could not compete with
the humanism of postwar culture. The Bolshevik Reformation – confessions,
denunciations, excommunications, self-criticism – was not popular.
Moreover, it could not reproduce itself at home. Slezkine
argues that revolutions, like all millenarian experiments, are devoured by the
children. Bolshevism is not at all different. It failed to
transform the family or transmit the true faith. Russian children
venerated the memory of their dead parents, yet, though loyal to the country,
they had no millenarian faith, as had their parents.
Like other millenarian movements, Christianity and Islam,
Bolshevism started out as a men's movement. Women represented a small
proportion of the original sect members and of the House. But unlike
those other movements, Bolshevism was a one-generation phenomenon.
Children venerated the memory of their fathers but no longer shared their
faith.
The prophets vanished, the desired revolution never came, and life
in the Swamp resumed.
