Moscow Under the Terror

In ancient days, whenever I was in Richmond-upon-Thames, I would walk up the hill to the Baldur Bookshop where, if you succeeded in running the gauntlet of its cantankerous owner, John Barton, there was nearly always something that was worth the hike. That said, I can’t imagine why I bought a tourist’s guide to the city of Moscow, published in 1937. Was it because its previous owner was a Mrs C. J. Webb, suggesting some connection with those ‘useful idiots’, Beatrice and Sydney? (‘We are ikons in the Soviet Union,’ boasted Beatrice.) Whatever the reason it certainly wasn’t because I immediately grasped the baleful significance of such a guide to such a place at such a time.

Written by the Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR, the guide describes Moscow as ‘the city of emancipated and joyful labour’. In fact it was a huge building site over which hovered the angel of death. The architect of this apocalyptic landscape was Josef Stalin, who had promised Muscovites that in future life would become ‘merrier’. In 1935 he approved a ten-year plan that would do for Moscow what Haussmann had done for nineteenth- century Paris. But unlike Haussmann, Stalin could knock down any building he liked (conservationists protested at their peril). He could also call upon an inexhaustible supply of forced labour, described in the guide as ‘criminals undergoing rehabilitation’ –thousands of whom had already died in the construction of such projects as the White Sea‒Baltic Canal and the Moscow–Volga Canal. That Moscow was in need of a makeover was indisputable. In 1934, on his first visit there, Guy Burgess described it as ‘just a Balkan town – you know, pigs in the trams’. The streets teemed with peasants who had been driven off the land by collectivization and ensuing famine. They found jobs – unemployment did not exist in the Soviet Union – but so ramshackle was the infrastructure that for most of the city’s 5 million inhabitants everyday life was a constant struggle. While acknowledging that there could be no new social order without a modern infrastructure, Stalin’s blueprint gave pride of place to the Palace of the Soviets, a monolithic ‘wedding cake’ over 400 metres high and surmounted by a 100-metre high statue of Lenin. Work on this enormous folly was halted by the Nazi invasion and the site eventually became an open-air swimming pool. Today the huge cathedral that Stalin demolished to make way for the Palace has been rebuilt. A year after the plan was approved Moscow became the epicentre of an even more cataclysmic event, the great purge of Party members that would result in 700,000 deaths and imprisonment in the Gulag for 2 million more. The purge was known as the Yezhovshchina, a reference to Stalin’s hated police chief Nikolai Yezhov, who, like his predecessor Yagoda, was later shot. The Yezhovshchina reached its climax in 1937. It is recalled in Vasily Grossman’s epic novel, Life and Fate (see SF no. 16), by one of the protagonists: ‘It had been especially terrible to walk down Komsomolsky Alley and Lubyanka Street during the summer nights of 1937 . . . The whole city seemed to be pinned down, fascinated by the glassy stare of the Lubyanka.’ In the guide the Lubyanka is disguised by its bland official title, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Naturally no mention is made of how busy it has suddenly become, but on p. 79 we learn that a nearby street has been renamed in memory of S. M. Kirov, ‘one of the most beloved leaders of the working class who was treacherously murdered by counter-revolutionary terrorists in 1934 in Leningrad’. It’s now accepted that Stalin connived at the murder of Kirov, whom he saw as a potential rival, and then used it as a pretext to launch the purge. Nikita Khrushchev, later to denounce Stalin but in the 1930s his zealous subordinate, is supposed to have overheard his boss mutter, ‘I trust no one, not even myself.’ There was no antidote to his toxic mixture of paranoia and megalomania. After weeks of softening up followed by a cleverly stage-managed show trial at which they confessed to extraordinary crimes, his victims were summarily dispatched by a single shot to the back of the head. The overworked executioners were supplied with unlimited vodka and buckets of eau de cologne – to mask the reek of gunpowder and blood. Even dogs, it was said, shrank from them in terror. The ‘counter-revolutionary terrorists’ who supposedly murdered Kirov are identified in the guide as Trotskyites, a term that was also synonymous with ‘spies’, ‘saboteurs’, ‘double-dealers’ and ‘wreckers’. Although in exile, Trotsky was regarded as Public Enemy Number One, the villain responsible for just about everything that went wrong in the world’s first socialist state. And yet that state would never have existed without Trotsky, the creator and motivator of the Red Army, which probably explains why so many of the top brass were eliminated in the purge. For readers of the guide, he is the elephant in the room. The civil war was won without him, and it is Lenin and Stalin who sit above the salt in the Red Army Museum. When I first looked through the guide I assumed only fellow travellers would have had a use for it. Who but a Soviet sympathizer would traipse round such spectacles as the Museum of Bolsheviks in Tsarist Penal Servitude and Exile? Then I learnt that the writer Anthony Powell, a staunch Tory, had gone to Moscow in 1936. What drew him was the Museum of Modern Western Art, which housed, he thought, the finest collection of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art in the world. Powell had Lenin to thank for this. Instead of selling off the paintings, acquired by two canny Tsarist collectors, in 1918 he nationalized them, ‘having regard for their usefulness in educating the people’. Powell was lucky he went when he did. In 1939 Stalin shut down the museum and later dispersed its contents on the grounds that they were ‘devoid of any progressive civilizing worth’. Had you taken Walk 14 in the guide you would have passed the House on the Embankment, a huge apartment block reminiscent of London’s Dolphin Square, which faced the Kremlin across the Moscow River. Reserved for the party élite, this address had a rapid turnover of tenants during the purge. Whole families disappeared overnight, their absence referred to obliquely: ‘They’ve gone on a journey. We don’t know when they’ll be back.’ But high-profile arrests sometimes took place in public, and this was the fate of those responsible for overseeing the construction of the Moscow‒Volga Canal, described by the guide as ‘the greatest undertaking of its kind in the world’. On the day of its official opening, 15 July 1937, witnesses saw several of these unlucky men being hauled off a boat and driven away under guard. The guide reminds tourists that they enjoy ‘special privileges’ in the Soviet Union, including access to shops selling luxuries no ordinary Soviet citizen could afford (this, of course, is left unsaid). By way of a little light reading it recommends some classics of Marxism-Leninism, including a recently published work of Stalin’s called Defects in Party Work and Measures for Liquidating Trotskyite and Other Double-Dealers. Paradoxically, this pamphlet probably saved the lives of George Orwell and his wife. As he recounts in Homage to Catalonia, the Spanish government’s secret police, conducting their own purge of heretics who included the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification militia in which Orwell had served, were ‘reassured’ to discover a copy of the pamphlet when searching the Orwells’ hotel bedroom in Barcelona. The Spanish Civil War came at an opportune moment for Stalin, whose excesses had alienated prominent Popular Front supporters like André Gide and Edmund Wilson. In return for most of the Spanish government’s gold reserves, he sent just enough men and matériel to ensure that Madrid held out against Franco and his Fascist allies. This steadied the ship. As Arthur Koestler put it: ‘When the first Russian fighters appeared in the skies of battered Madrid, all of us who had lived through the agony of the defenceless town felt that they were the saviours of civilization.’ But Koestler soon became disillusioned. Like Orwell he realized that Stalin’s henchmen in Spain were more concerned to purge deviationists than prosecute the war. In 1940 he wrote Darkness at Noon, in which an old Bolshevik is persuaded to confess to crimes he didn’t commit ‘for the sake of the Party’. It remains the definitive fictional indictment of Stalinism. But as Stalin had predicted, most Western liberals, mesmerized by the threat of Fascism, did swallow his version of events, however implausible. Hence, presumably, this flippant line from the Hollywood comedy romance Ninotchka, starring Greta Garbo, which was released in October 1939. Playing a poker-faced Soviet trade official on a mission to Paris, Garbo is met at the station by some of her colleagues. ‘How is Moscow?’ they ask. ‘Very good,’ she answers. ‘The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer – but better – Russians.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 59 © Michael Barber 2018