Moscow, 1937 Read online

  Moscow, 1937

  For Anya, our Muscovite, and for the indomitable members of Memorial

  Moscow, 1937

  Karl Schlögel

  Translated by

  Rodney Livingstone

  polity

  First published in German as Terror und Traum. Moskau 1937 © Carl Hanser Verlag Munich, 2008

  This English edition © Polity Press, 2012

  This edition is subsidized by Geisteswissenschaften International – translation funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany. A joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, and the German Publishers & Booksellers Association.

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  ISBN: 978-0-7456-8360-7

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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  Contents

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  Reproduction Acknowledgements

  Translator’s Note

  Introduction

  1 Navigation: Margarita’s Flight

  2 Moscow as a Construction Site: Stalin’s General Plan in Action

  3 A Topography of the Disappeared: The Moscow Directory of 1936

  4 The Creation of Enemies: The Criminal Prosecution of the Trotskyite–Zinovievite Terrorist Centre, 19–24 August 1936

  5 ‘Tired of the È ort of Observing and Understanding’: Lion Feuchtwanger’s Moscow 1937

  6 In the Glare of Battle: Spain and Other Fronts

  7 Blindness and Terror: The Suppressed Census of 1937

  8 A Stage for the Horrors of Industrialization: The Second Moscow Show Trial in January 1937

  9 ‘A Feast in the Time of Plague’: The Pushkin Jubilee of 10 February 1937

  10 Public Death: Ordzhonikidze’s Suicide and Death Rites

  11 The Engine Room of the Year 1937: The February–March Plenum of the Central Committee

  12 Moscow in Paris: The USSR Pavilion at the International Exhibition of 1937

  13 Red Square: Parade Ground and Place of Execution

  14 Chopin Concert and Killing Ritual: Radio and the Creation of the Great Community

  15 Soviet Art Deco: Time Preserved in Stone

  16 ‘Brown Bodies, Gaily Coloured Shorts’: Sports Parade

  17 Wealth and Destruction: The Seventeenth International Geology Congress in Moscow

  18 A City by the Sea: The Opening of the Moscow–Volga Canal

  19 Year of Adventures, 1937: A Soviet Icarus

  20 Moscow as Shop-Window: The Abundance of the World, Hungry for Goods and Dizzy with Hunger

  21 Open Spaces, Dream Landscapes: Cruising on the Volga, Holidaying on the Red Riviera, Conspiracies in the Dachas

  22 The National Bolshevik Nikolai Ustrialov: His Return Home and Death

  23 Celebrating the October Revolution on 7 November 1937

  24 A Miniature of High Society before the Massacre

  25 Soviet Hollywood: Miracles and Monsters

  26 Death in Exile

  27 Arcadia in Moscow: Stalin’s Luna Park

  28 ‘Avtozavodtsy’: The Workforce of the Stalin Car Factories

  29 Dzhaz: The Sound of the Thirties

  30 Changing Faces, Changing Times

  31 America, America: The Other New World

  32 ‘I Know of No Other Country …’: 1937 and the Production of Soviet Space

  33 The Butovo Shooting Range: Topography of the Great Terror

  34 Lonely White Sail …: Dreamtime, Children’s Worlds

  35 Yezhov at the Bolshoi Theatre: Celebrating Twenty Years of the Cheka

  36 Bukharin Takes his Leave

  37 ‘For Offcial Use Only’: Moscow as a City on the Enemy Map

  38 The Foundation Pit

  39 Instead of an Epilogue

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Preface

  Ever since my first encounter with the world of Soviet Russia, and indeed ever since I began to think politically, I have known that I would write this book. It is not possible to talk about Russia in the twentieth century, and even present-day post-Soviet Russia, without coming up against the caesura invoked by the term ‘1937’. All lines of inquiry in my previous writings – whether they focused on St Petersburg as a laboratory of modernity, the Russian experience of exile in Berlin between the wars, or the rebirth of Russia after the demise of the Soviet Union – somehow or other and at some point or other inevitably led back to the time and place of the radical and irreversible rupture in the third decade of the twentieth century.

  I was still at school, at the beginning of the 1960s, when I heard Yevgeny Yevtushenko recite his poem ‘The Heirs of Stalin’. Even for people unfamiliar with the whole history, the verses gave expression to something sinister, ominous and opaque that must never be allowed to recur, a catastrophe that had befallen a people and a nation. This was repeated over the years and developed into a leitmotif. In the circle of acquaintances to which I subsequently belonged in Moscow there was no one whose family did not contain a victim: relatives that had disappeared, children who did not know when and where their fathers had been shot, and families scattered throughout the Soviet Union during those years. The traces of violence, misfortune and arbitrary rule were everywhere to be seen. And yet, right to the very end of the Soviet Union, there were no memorials to commemorate the dead and to give the collective trauma a public face.

  In West Germany and West Berlin, where I began my studies, there could be no question of a lack of information or a general silence on the subject. Long before Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s monumental ‘attempt at an artistic depiction’ of the Gulag Archipelago, there were major accounts of it. We need think only of Alexander Weissberg-Cybulski’s report on his odyssey through Stalin’s prisons, of Arthur Koestler’s response to the shock produced by the Moscow show trials in his novel Darkness at Noon, of the shattering memoirs of Evgenia Ginzburg and Nadezhda Mandelstam. Robert Conquest’s account of the Great Terror had likewise appeared as early as 1969 and was soon followed by Roy Medvedev’s insider’s view of the history of Stalinism.

  Nevertheless, the historic catastrophe and the human tragedies of the Soviet Union never received the attention and interest that might have been expected from a public that had been exposed to the horror of the crimes of National Socialism. The asymmetry was very striking. A world that had taken to heart such names as Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz had trouble in memorizing names like Vorkuta, Kolyma or Magadan. People had read Primo Levi but not Varlam Shalamov. Thus Stalin’s victims died a second death, this time in people’s memories. They vanished in the
shadow of the crimes of the century committed by the Nazis; they were lost to view by the side of the countless victims in the Great Patriotic War. They fell by the wayside in the ideological skirmishes of the Cold War, in which a fact could not be accepted as true if the applause came from the wrong side, and where after 1945 the swiftly restored anti-totalitarian consensus against communism frequently blinded the public to the fact that education about their own totalitarian past was far from comprehensive. The victims of that other collapse of civilization disappeared finally behind the wall of silence that had fixed the division of Europe for half a century. In this way, no sooner was the question of the victims of Stalin’s dictatorship broached than complex rationalization processes led to a curious lack of interest and even indifference.

  However, Moscow in 1937 is one of the key settings of European history. It is not situated somewhere or other but on a fault line of European civilization. The dead of 1937 are the contemporaries of a ‘century of extremes’ that knows no frontiers. This is why Moscow in 1937 must form part of our mental processes when we inquire into the meaning of the twentieth century for European civilization.

  This became clear at the latest by the time of the demise of the Soviet Union, since that demise has been accompanied by a fundamental struggle to recapture our historical memory. The Soviet topography of terror was charted for the first time; for the first time the names and portraits of hitherto nameless victims were published and memorials were erected. This process is far from complete, and will only be completed if and when in the not too distant future Lubianka, that symbol of infinite contempt for human beings and murderous violence in the centre of Moscow, is transformed into a museum and a place of remembrance.

  It must be said that this book is a latecomer when you consider the vast stream of sourcebooks, memoirs and new research on this subject. But in fact it may actually have come too soon, if we remember that it involves disentangling one of the most perplexing knots of recent European history. If its publication has taken so long in my own case, this is not because of any intellectual inhibition on my part, but rather because of the helplessness I felt in the face of a historical event in which all simple distinctions and causal relationships seem to evaporate. Never before have I felt so strongly that language fails to do justice to the monstrous events of the age. Never before have I been as acutely conscious of the limits of historical discourse as in the present endeavour to bring together the extremes of the terror and the dream in a synchronous narrative. But one must perhaps have been rendered speechless in order to be at all able to start work on this labour of reimagining the past.

  Karl Schlögel

  Berlin, spring 2008

  Acknowledgements

  Many people have contributed their suggestions, criticism and support to the writing of this book. Since it was very long in gestation, I could almost express my gratitude under the title ‘Years, People, Life’. It is in the nature of the case that the people with whom I have discussed the subject of ‘Moscow in 1937’ have not just been other professional academics. A number of them had been affected by the events of that year, either personally or through their family. Many of them had been in thrall to the topic for the whole of their lives. It is to these people that I owe the most important debt.

  Mikhal Reiman introduced me to Yuri Bukharin and Anna Larina at the beginning of my stay in Moscow in 1981, and – as was commonly the case in Moscow – I was handed on from one person to the next. In that way I met Larissa Bogoras-Tan, Anton Antonov-Ovseenko and other dissidents and children of the ‘enemies of the people’. I came to know a large number of children who had lost their fathers in 1937 through the family of Iuri Aikhenwald, his wife Valeriia, and their acquaintances. Natalia Smirnova and Kostia Rytsarev have helped me to understand what it meant to live in exile in Kazakhstan. Later on, I met General Petr Grigorenko, whose military career began in 1937 but who was forced to pay for his contribution to de-Stalinization with imprisonment in a psychiatric institution and enforced exile. Conversations with Natalia Gorbanievskaia, Leonid Plyushch, Vladimir Maximov, Boris and Liudmila Vail, Lusya Bonner, Andrei Siniavskii and Petr Abovin-Egides in Paris and elsewhere in the Russian diaspora have convinced me that, without an understanding of what happened in 1937, Russia can never regain its intellectual and moral health. I met Lev Kopeliev and Raissa Orlova during their exile in Cologne, and the conversation almost always returned to those years, which also feature centrally in their memoirs. From a very different vantage point, but no less insistently, Aleksandr Zinoviev made a great impression on me at a time when he was living in Munich. Later, soon after the end of the Soviet Union, came journeys to the actual places where the horrors had taken place, and I met historians, clue-seekers, archivists and museum people belonging to the new Russia. I am thinking here above all of the Solovki prison camp, of Leningrad/ St Petersburg and the White Sea–Baltic Sea Canal, as well as my friends in Memorial, Venyamin Yoffe, Irina Flige and Yuri Brodsky, the archaeologist and archivist of the Solovyetsky camp. I feel the very greatest admiration for the achievements of Arsenii Roginskii and his Memorial colleagues in Moscow in the recent past. Their indefatigable labours are in my view the very essence of a strong, self-confident and self-critical Russia, and the future will belong to them. Ever since our first meetings in Yuri Levada’s seminars in the early 1980s, the never-ending dialogue with Lev Gudkov had become an inexhaustible source of learning and reflection on Russia’s destiny in the twentieth century.

  A completely different approach emerged via friends from the period of the Prague Spring and later Czechoslovak exile. I had met a number of the accused and witnesses from the Czech show trials – Arthur London and Eduard Goldstücker – and their first historian – Karel Kaplan – and I was able to benefit from long conversations with them. In addition, the topic of the 1930s – as mediated via Lukács – was constantly present in conversations with György Konrad, János Bak and István Rév. The first sketch of a histoire totale of Stalinism as civilization took place in a seminar in summer 1993 at the University of Konstanz. It must have been a stimulating experience, since it gave rise to two remarkable studies by Susanne Schattenberg and Katharina Kucher, to both of whom I am greatly indebted. A turning point came when I first read and then met Sheila Fitzpatrick. Her impressive life’s work has created a new foundation for research into Russian history. I admire her persistence and the courage with which she presented her pioneering studies in quick succession at a time when this was not done without risk. Our meeting in Konstanz and the workshops organized at Harvard and Chicago with Michal Geyer were a great experience for me and a happy one. I should like to express my thanks to Michael Hildermeier, whose major conference on Stalinism before the Second World War at the Historical Institute in Munich I was privileged to attend, and who followed my studies after that with benevolent scepticism. Wolfgang Hardtwig gave me the opportunity to present my talk on utopia as emergency thinking to his history seminar, also held at the Historical Institute.

  The most important studies on Stalinism in recent years have been presented by a new generation of historians. Their heads are free of the gun-smoke of the battles of the last years of the Cold War, now long since past; they have seized the historical opportunity and taken on the heavy labour of trawling through the archives. I have profited greatly from the work of Jörg Baberowski, Klaus Gestwa, Lorenz Erren, Malte Rolf and Jan Plamper and learned much from conversation with them. I would meet Gábor Rittersporn and Jochen Hellbeck wherever opportunity offered – in Berlin, New York and Solovki (on Solovetsky island in the White Sea). I wish to thank Nicolas Werth for conversations about problems of presentation whose solution concerned us both. I am grateful to Wladislav Hedeler, who was kind enough to respond to the many questions of a novice in this field. I am full of admiration for the persistence and thoroughness with which he completed his standard work, but equally for the earnestness with which he went about preserving the memory of Stalin’s forgotten victims.
With Gerd Koenen, with whom I share some of the experience and insights into Party communism gleaned during the Red Decade of 1967–77, I have discussed time and again the enigmas that have held us in thrall probably ever since the publication of Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror. It is scarcely a matter of surprise that my own views are close to those expressed in his fascinating study Purge as Utopia. In that book too, as also earlier on, Helmut Fleischer was intellectually present with his constant ceterum censeo with regard to the ‘historicizing of communism’.

  This book would not have been possible without my two year-long visits to two different institutions. My year spent in 2005–6 at the Historical Institute in Munich not only enabled me to be drawn once again into the magic circle of the Bavarian capital but also to grapple with the massive literature on the subject. The Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences (SCASSS) in Uppsala provided a tranquil and yet stimulating environment in which I discovered that the experience of Moscow in 1937 was by no means as alien and incomprehensible in the regions of the world from which the other fellows had come as I might have imagined to start with. I have had a number of opportunities to give papers on different aspects of my research: at the University of Toronto, at Bard College, New York, at universities in Stockholm and Uppsala, at the Free University of Berlin, in Göttingen, and at my old alma mater, Konstanz. In my year in Munich, there could have been no better people with whom to discuss narratological problems than Hans Magnus Enzensberger (on the ‘scandal of simultaneity’ or the persistence of the non-contemporary in the contemporary world) and Rüdiger Safranski (on ‘the adventures of the dialectic’). I am grateful to Bazon Brock not only for his unexpected encouragement to persevere with a particular line but also for pointing out the importance of the term ‘constellation’, which opened up new ideas for me.