House on the Embankment

Early in the spring of 1918, fledgling Soviet Russia hastily moved its capital to the southeast.

Petrograd may have been the cradle of the Revolution, but those newly vested in power did not like it there, what with hunger raging and strikes spreading in the megalopolis, threatening a serious counterrevolution.

Yet scarier still for the Bolsheviks, who had only just started to get comfortable in their Smolny offices, were the Germans. Their troops had marched almost to the gates of Petrograd. Indeed, the front line was just 150 kilometers from the Russian capital, ensuring that it was deluged with deserters, marauders and refugees.

And so the Bolsheviks decided to move their center of operations deeper into the Russian heartland – to Moscow. The ancient capital was further from the front lines, and it was smaller, calmer, and far less interested in politics than Petrograd.

The first order of business was to evacuate the gold reserves and embassies (the US embassy evacuated to the northern provincial city of Vologda). Then the most senior bureaucrats packed up their suitcases and families. And then the security organs transferred their files, leaving behind in Petrograd prisons those who had been arrested and convicted.

Officially, it was announced that the government had no intention of going anywhere. And later, when it became impossible to hide the mass departures, a rumor was spread that the new capital would be in Nizhny Novgorod. This was for the simple reason that the Bolsheviks feared acts of terrorism along tracks used by government trains.

Lenin left Petrograd in absolute secrecy on March 10, 1918; all the lights of his entourage were extinguished in order to assure secrecy. A week later, the capital’s transfer was publicly declared and then made the law of the land.

The government apparat moved into the Kremlin, in the most literal sense. Bureaucrats and their households were billeted in ancient buildings with vaulted ceilings and narrow doorways, in boyar palaces, in modest rooms in outbuildings, or in roomy apartments in more recently erected service quarters. In short order the Kremlin had several thousand permanent residents.

Meanwhile, the government apparat continued to grow. When there was nowhere left inside the Kremlin’s red walls to house them and their families, Moscow’s main, centrally-located hotels were emptied and transformed into premium-class dormitories.

The bureaucratic ecosystem stabilized, and little changed over the next decade, yet it was clear this situation could not go on indefinitely. For one thing, if the National, Metropol, and other fine hotels were filled to bursting with the government’s own people, there was nowhere to house international delegations or important guests.

So it was decided that a fantastic new apartment complex would be built for the nomenklatura^*: the House of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People Commissars of the USSR. Not surprisingly, its second official name became far more popular for its comparative brevity: the House of Government. The building had a mythical aura about it since both its façade and the modern conveniences contained inside symbolized communism’s bright future.

An architect for the project was discovered in Rome. He was the young, yet masterful and experienced, Boris Iofan. Born in Odessa, he had left Russia on the eve of the revolution to study at Rome’s Academy of Fine Arts. He succeeded in completing his studies and in bringing a few of his designs to fruition in Italy, and then became acquainted with the famous Russian revolutionary Alexei Rykov.^* Rykov traveled to Italy on vacation and became a close friend of Iofan’s, then succeeded in convincing him to move to the USSR to build a new world.

In 1924, Iofan and his family arrived in the USSR, and within three years he was given the task of building the house of the future in the center of Moscow. He was allowed three months to design the building, and 18 months and 6.5 million rubles to construct it.

Preparation for the capital’s biggest ever construction project was shrouded in the strictest secrecy. As a result, reporters, who at that time still enjoyed a measure of free speech, reproached Iofan and his colleagues for the fact that such a grandiose project was not subjected to public discussion. But Iofan replied that the House had been approved by a special government commission and that the design had been approved by no fewer than fourteen experts, and by the Moscow Regional Engineering Bureau.

While the location finally chosen for the House of Government was opportune from a logistical and city-planning viewpoint, it was less fortuitous geologically and historically: it had awful soil and a horrible reputation.

The large, flat plot is almost directly across from the Kremlin, on the opposite side of the Moscow River. For more than a century, the place was known as the Swamp (Boloto), because the low-lying area was regularly inundated and subsumed during spring floods. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries public executions were carried out in the Swamp. It was here that the famous rebel, self-appointed tsar, and commander of the bloody peasant uprising, Yemelyan Pugachev, ended his mortal journey with a trip to the gallows. Later, the Royal Wine and Salt Yard were constructed here (and the Smirnov Vodka Factory was built across the canal).

All this was quickly razed when it came time to build the House of Government, and planners also decided to level the extraordinary monument of seventeenth-century Russian architecture, Duma clerk Averky Kirillov’s Residence and the Church of St. Nicholas. But, thankfully, the latter decision was reconsidered at the last minute, and only the church’s bell tower was demolished.

The result was an oddly-shaped construction site that had as its backdrop the capital’s Zamoskvorechye District – the ancient Moscow region home to single- and two-story residential buildings and the Tretyakov Gallery.

Iofan was mindful of the city’s architectural legacy and to old Moscow’s accreted historical appearance. This was not the typical approach of his colleagues in the young Soviet government, who had no compunctions about tossing overboard historical “rubbish” in the interest of progress. As a result, even though Iofan inserted his gigantic, cliff-like House into the existing, somewhat elegant, landscape, he did not impose it with brute force. Instead, he sought to carefully distribute the building’s mass with an eye toward how it would look from various angles.

As regards the building’s color, however, Iofan made a misstep. He decided that the façades should be finished with bits of red granite, in the same tones as the Kremlin walls and the ruby stars that soared above their towers. In the worst case, he said he would agree to a shade of yellow. But then a decision came down from on high: make it grey. This was likely to save on finishing costs. But there is an alternative interpretation: at the time, a coal heating plant stood nearby, and since its smoke would sooner or later blacken the building’s siding, it might as well be grey at the outset.

It was actually rather dangerous to build a structure of 9-11 stories, with 25 entrances, on the Swamp. For the soggy ground to support the massive stone edifice, an entire forest (3000+) of piles was pounded into the ground, which had to be raised as much as 10 meters in places and reinforced all along the riverbank. And atop all of that a wide cement foundation was poured.

Heavy construction equipment was purchased from abroad; thousands of workers and the best construction and finishing materials were acquired from all over the world. The project was overseen at the highest levels of power, and thus, as one might expect, it well exceeded both the projected budget and deadline (Iofan blamed this on “heightened quality requirements” demanded by a project of “governmental importance”). Instead of 18 months, it took three years to build; and instead of R6.5 million, it cost R30 million.^*

Nevertheless, it was completed in record time for its era, and residents started to move into their apartments in 1931 (there were 505 in all); by 1935 the House had 2,655 residents. Iofan was given a studio on the tenth floor with a luxurious view of the river and Christ the Savior Cathedral. And then he dug into his even grander project: a 420-meter-high House of Soviets topped with a 70-meter statue of Lenin. This was to be the tallest building in the world. Space was cleared for the building by demolishing Christ the Savior, and construction began. Of course, this is a long and fascinating saga all on its own. But suffice it to summarize that the House of Soviets was started in 1937 but never completed, due to geologic and engineering impossibilities, as well as the Nazi invasion. In 1958 its foundation pit became the site of the world’s largest outdoor swimming pool. And between 1995 and 2000, Christ the Savior Cathedral was resurrected there.

Permits to live in the House of Government were bestowed upon the most un-ordinary of people: members of the government and the Central Committee of the Communist Party, diplomats, and top-ranking military leaders. And their housing was in keeping with their positions. The apartments were, on the whole, rather large: 4-5 rooms, 100-200 square meters (1,100-2,200 ft²), with high ceilings, wide doorways, a spacious entry hall, and huge windows, including in the bathroom.

The House was connected to a gas main: it had central heating and hot water – luxuries that the overwhelming majority of the country’s population could not even dream of in 1931. There was a radio and telephone in every apartment (connected to the capital’s first automatic telephone station), and clocks were installed in the courtyards and entrances. Along with luxurious elevators for the residents, there were also ones for freight. And the large apartments had a small room for servants, or, in the kitchen, a fold-down board where a domestic servant might sleep.

The apartments were turnkey, in the sense that they were furnished, with interior design by Iofan himself. Heavy, dark, and boxy, the furnishings were consistent with the design of the House of Government as a whole; their weightiness was in keeping with the onerous responsibilities the building’s residents bore.

In fact, the apartments were so well and richly outfitted that they would be considered comfortable even by today’s standards. But there was one exception: the kitchens were extremely small. They contained merely a stove, a sink, a refrigerator cabinet beneath the window, and a table and chairs. In the House of the Future, there would be no need to cook or eat at home. But for making tea, there was a special opening in the wall for fumes from a samovar, which would have been heated with coal or pinecones. But, as it turned out, no one put samovars in their apartment. Instead, people would sit by the opening when they smoked.

House of Government’s residents were very well fed. There was a cafeteria where senior officials and their families could sit down to a filling lunch or dinner, for which they received special meal tickets. In fact, there was no need to go to the cafeteria; residents could send their domestics to pick up food to reheat and serve in the comfort of their apartment. It is said that a single cafeteria portion was sufficient to feed three people.

There was also a department store with a “special distribution” grocery that sold items the average Soviet never saw in normal stores. And residents could also request that grocery orders be delivered directly to their apartments.

A barber and hairdresser were housed in the building and would even make house calls. There were also a post office, bank, outpatient clinic, library, and dry cleaners – all within the bounds of the housing complex. A shooting range was set up in a basement; part of a top floor contained an indoor tennis court and sport hall; and in one section’s upper floor there was a kindergarten.

One section of the House was given over to a club, which had programs for children, and there was a stage and auditorium for theatrical productions. And of course there was Udarnik, the first movie theater in the USSR built especially for films with sound. Udarnik (which means “shock worker”) was where the biggest Soviet box office films were premiered, and it was the site, in 1935, of the first Moscow International Film Festival (where, incidentally, the Walt Disney Studio received a third-place prize).

In general, if the House’s residents had not had to go out to work for the good of the country, they would never have had to leave the confines of their 11-story, self-contained housing complex and would have enjoyed a perfectly comfortable life. They could even get a breath of fresh air in one of three internal courtyards, where there were trees, flowers and fountains.

Needless to say, all of this comfort came at considerable cost.

One did not have unplanned visitors at Government House, which was very much like an impregnable fortress. And any outsiders were easy to spot: they would be wandering around the complex as if trapped in a labyrinth. The entrances to the buildings various sections were numbered in a seemingly random way, and to find the section you wanted, you often had to walk the massive edifice’s entire circumference. Bewildered individuals roaming about rapidly evoked the interest and unsettling queries of the resident security force.

You could of course walk into any section, even if you did not live in the House, but getting any further was difficult. A watchman was always on duty, dressed in a black, military-style uniform, and visitors had to indicate which apartment they sought. The watchman would place a call to said apartment and verify that the visitor was expected. And if visitors stayed late into the night, the watchman might remind them that it was time to leave. If a guest left with something from an apartment (say, a book), the watchman would demand a properly filled out permission form, signed by the resident.

Indeed, it was the watchman’s duty to ensure that peace and quiet reigned day and night for the building’s highly-placed residents. Well, in a manner of speaking, that is. For he had a duplicate of all apartment keys and would supply them upon request to state security when its members showed up to take people away.

The arrests started almost as soon as the building’s first residents arrived. Most likely, they began in 1932, when two twenty-something young men were taken away. They were let go with a warning, but five years later one of them was again taken away, and, in that instance, shot. The peak of the repressions was of course 1937. In all, during the 1930s and 1940s, an estimated 800 residents were arrested, and 344 are known to have been shot.^*

The NKVD would arrive at night, sometimes knocking on the door and waiting, other times obtaining a key from the watchman and simply entering the apartment unannounced. Occasionally they came up on the freight elevator, which had a direct entrance to the apartment of the condemned. The Chekists worked all but soundlessly, and the only way to know that a search and arrest was taking place in an apartment was by the fact that all the lights had been turned on in all the rooms. Or, the next day, neighbors would see a wax seal hanging on the door and guess what had occurred.

The head of family would be taken off to a lockup where, after a few weeks or months of interrogations and torture, he would be executed without trial. His wife would often be shipped off to the camps for 8-10 years (for a start) – the Soviet Union had an entire network of special camps filled with the wives of traitors.

In some instances, however, spouses were not arrested and simply lost their housing rights and job, being “merely” transformed into a social outcast. If a wife helped in the unmasking of a traitor (informing on her husband, in other words), then the Chekists had no right to retaliate against her (at least in theory).

Other adult family members were expelled from the apartment the same night as an arrest took place and were not even allowed to collect their things. As regards the personal property of the arrestees and anything of value they might have owned, these were transferred to special stores, and the earnings from their sale were transferred to the House of Government’s bank account. After all, the watchmen had to be paid. Thus, when Chekists were carrying out their careful searches of arrestees’ property, they were not only looking for compromising material, but also cash and valuables.

There were times when young adult children of the arrested, or their friends, dared to slip back into a sealed apartment from a neighboring balcony. The goal was to gather up some clothing or other necessary items to help the newly destitute.

As to the children of those arrested, they could be handled in different ways. If they were deemed to be socially dangerous, then they would be sent to a penal colony or an “extraordinary regimen” orphanage. Those deemed harmless were sent to detention centers or ordinary orphanages. Often children were given a new first name, patronymic and family name, as a result of which their family lost all contact with them. Infants would be sent to the camps with their mothers.

There is the story of a young boy who was raised in an orphanage, but who remembered his mother’s name, that he had at one time lived in a large building, and that he had been taken to kindergarten in an elevator. He grew up, and after the war decided to look for his parents. He went on the radio and told his story, and, through a miracle, his mother heard the broadcast, recognized her son, and they were reunited. Thus did the grown man learn the name he had been given at birth.

When the machine of repression “malfunctioned,” children were left alone, without adult guardians, and were not sent to an orphanage. When they went to school the next morning, everyone immediately understood – from the child’s panicked gaze and tentative demeanor – what had happened. And a social vacuum would surround him – few dared risk social interaction with an outcast.

Yet there were some adults who risked social ostracism and acted bravely to save such children. Relatives arrived and took the children into their family. Neighbors hid the children and raised them as their own. There were even some nannies and domestics who, after they lost their employers to arrest, refused to turn their backs on the orphaned children and adopted them.

Eventually, a new family would move into the vacated apartment, and, after a certain amount of time, they too might disappear in a single night. Particularly unlucky apartments saw their residents turn over every year, or even more frequently. Interestingly, Nikita Khrushchev, a future General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, first moved into the House of Government by taking over the apartment (#206) of a repressed family.

People watched their neighbors and friends disappear, somehow believing that such misfortune would not touch them. Many thought that, if a person were arrested, some sin against the state must have been committed. And if they were certain of someone’s innocence, they had no doubt that the security apparatus would quickly sort it out and set the arrestee free. But the cruel reality was that very few arrestees returned from NKVD dungeons.

Residents meanwhile suspected that all apartments were under observation: that the hole in the wall intended for samovar fumes contained a surveillance system specially created by the Chekists. It seemed likely that the special union meetings domestics attended in fact had to do with their duty to inform  on their employers. And it was a secret to no one that the watchmen and guards throughout the complex were in fact working for the NKVD.

There was also the interesting fact that one of the building’s sections – number 11 – had no apartments. It had a staircase from the ground floor all the way to the roof, but there were no doors to apartments. One theory was that, up and down the stairway, Chekists were listening through the walls to the adjoining apartments.

Yet there is actually a more banal explanation for the apartment-less section No. 11. It turns out that when construction was almost complete on the House of Government, it was decided to enlarge several apartments. The only way this could be done at that point in the process was to combine two smaller apartments into a single larger one. That is how No. 11 lost its apartments to Nos. 10 and 12.

Needless to say, it was surely difficult to maintain a healthy psyche in the sort of atmosphere that reigned at the House of Government. And so it is not surprising that the complex saw a higher than average rate of suicide: learning of their impending arrest, people would shoot themselves, and their wives and children might throw themselves out of windows or poison themselves with gas or pills.

Apparently, however, there was at least one instance during the Stalinist Terror when the family of a repressed resident was more or less left in peace. When Valentin Trifonov, an important military and political personage, was shot in 1938 (after being arrested the previous June), his wife was sent off to the camps. Surprisingly, his daughter, son, and mother-in-law, Tatyana Lurye, were not touched. They were in fact allowed to remain in the apartment for two years, then were given a more modest apartment elsewhere in the city. It is possible that Stalin was in some strange way thanking the old revolutionary Lurye. During the tsarist era, she had sent Stalin money and warm clothing when he was in Siberian exile. And when he fled his exile, she hid him in her home.

Trifonov’s son Yuri went on to become a talented and important writer. Stalinist repression and the loss of his parents were major themes in his works. His memoir about his childhood and life in the House of Government, The House on the Embankment, became his most famous work. And, thanks to Trifonov’s deft prose, this unofficial name for the House of Government became firmly fixed as the name by which the complex is best known to this day.

The House of Government’s ghastly history was interrupted by the Second World War. The residents were evacuated and the building was mined. After victory in 1945, repression more or less halted, and the selection process for residents of the House became less discerning. Many apartments were made into communal habitations, and others were renovated and redecorated to suit the tastes of their new residents. Yet there was not enough money for the proper upkeep of the building and its courtyards, and it began to fall into disrepair. The ceiling frescoes created by Hermitage Museum restorers were painted over; desiccated oaken floors were pulled up; carpets were removed from stairwells; fountains were torn up.

Over the ensuing decades, the inhabitants of the House of Government have turned over many times. Today, communal apartments have long since been renovated into elite apartments, and rooms with a view of the Kremlin don’t come cheap. Yet it is not a sure thing that the building’s newest residents know the dark histories that they have purchased along with their choice real estate.

But there is a single apartment that does remember. It has been preserved – frozen in the dismal era of the House of Government’s early years. It is one of the complex’s smallest accommodations, it is on the first floor, and it is a museum restored by the building’s residents, by enthusiasts for whom it was important that the House’s history (and, more importantly, the fate of its former residents) not be forgotten. RL