Dan Snow's History Hit - Moscow's Communist Dorm

Episode Date: April 29, 2020

In 1931, an enormous apartment building was completed in Moscow. Challenging the Kremlin for architectural supremacy on the Moskva River, it was the largest residential building in Europe, combining 505 furnished apartments with every modern luxury - a cinema, library, tennis court and shooting range. But the residents of this monstrous tower block were no ordinary Russians. They were the top Communist officials - many of whom were taken from this building and destroyed in Stalin’s purges. Yuri Slezkine, a professor from the University of California, has trawled through the letters, diaries and interviews of these residents. He joins me on the pod to offer a fascinating glimpse into the heart of Soviet terror tactics. For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about some of the greatest speeches ever made in the House of Commons, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV We have got a flash sale on at the moment for the next few days: Use code 'pod3' at checkout for your first month free and the following THREE months for just £/$1 per month.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're talking Russia. We're talking the Russian Revolution. Well, actually, we're talking the Russian Revolution's aftermath and the rule of Lenin and Stalin right up to the Second World War and beyond. It's through the lens of one particular building. It's called the House of Government. Yuri Slezkin is the professor of Russian history at the University of California in Berkeley. He has just written a book about a fascinating building that sits on the banks of the river that runs through the centre of Moscow, opposite the Kremlin. Basically, it was built as a unique

experiment, trying to house all the senior Soviet officials, policy makers, and a few Soviet heroes, all under one roof. you'll be surprised to learn that it was an experiment that didn't last that long it makes for a fascinating lens for which to view the russian revolution as aftermath for those of you want to listen to back episodes of this podcast without the ads and watch hundreds of hours of history documentaries we of course you go to history hit tv now we've had a deal on to get people through the lockdown. It looks like it might be extended. So an even better deal now, if you use the code POD3, P-O-D-3, this offer will be available for the next few days. You'll get a

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We are trying to raise as much money as possible to give to heritage sites all over the world, wherever people listen to this podcast. We've got a little challenge, of course, we have to have a challenge these days. If you want to go onto your social media and read your favourite historical source, I read out a bit of a 14th century monk's chronicle, but you could do letters, diaries, poems, anything you want, and then post it and then hashtag it, save our heritage, and then donate the address where to donate, which is historyhit.com slash heritage, and then nominate five people. You've all done them before for lots

of other causes. Let's do one for the heritage sector as well. appreciate you getting involved in this i know it's times are tough but anything you can spare will be enormously enormously useful to this struggling sector right now so if you want to donate please go to history.com slash heritage thank you very much for coming on the podcast. You're welcome. Why did you decide to tell the story of these tumultuous years, the Russian Revolution and beyond, through the portrait of this house? It's a huge house. It's a very well-known building. And it happened to contain most top members of the Soviet elite, political, cultural, military, and so on. It was in some important ways representative. It was the largest residential building in Europe at the time.

It was built in the early 1930s. And it had about 505 apartments. It was unique anywhere in the world in rather containing a whole government, indeed the government of the largest country in the world, under the same roof. Ministers known in the Soviet Union as people's commissars lived as neighbors right next to each other. And they eventually, mostly six or so years after moving in, were taken away to be interrogated and executed together. Or rather separately put from the same building down the same elevator. So it was a very compelling place. And of course, one other advantage for a historian is that it had lots of documents that I could find,

you know, private archives, institutional archives, heirs to the people who lived there, who kept photo albums, and so on. So I knew I would find enough material to write a book. So start me at the beginning. The Soviet government decided to build a gigantic accommodation block for its key workers. Yes. Was it an existing Tsarist palace or anything? Or did they just start afresh? No, they started afresh. They actually gave it a lot of thought. They wanted to create a lot of public spaces, and they did. And so the building had a cafeteria, a grocery store, a walk-in clinic, child care center, beauty salon, post office, telegraph, movie theater, theater, laundry, library, tennis court,

and so on and so forth. The idea was that the residents would spend their entire lives inside that building. So they thought about it. They thought about what communism actually meant in terms of space. And they did it. They weren't happy with it, and no one really was. No one thought it looked good, but it worked for a while, and it's still a monument. Why did they want to do it? Did they want to do it because they were worried about the effect of the luxurious accommodation on the mines of the higher echelons of the revolution?

Or was it managerial or was it ideological? Well, it was first of all practical because most members of the Soviet government, having moved to Moscow after the Civil War, moved into old hotels, which had been converted into so-called houses of Soviets, where these people lived in hotel rooms, more or less communally, visiting each other, drinking strong tea, smoking cheap tobacco, having love affairs, and so on. And it was felt that they needed a more permanent place to stay that in some ways coincided with the history of the Russian Revolution in general. So the sort of transitional period was followed by a period of permanence.

The revolution was there to stay. Those people were mature adults. They started out as very young revolutionaries. They had families. They started having children. And so they needed a place to stay. And so some people started thinking about what it could be, what it should look like, what it should consist of, and so on and so forth. So it was practical, and then given the practical need, it was also ideological and aesthetic. You know, if these people are the leaders of the world revolution,

how should they actually live as neighbors, live as fathers, as brothers, and so on? And so they gave it some thought, there were some discussions, and they ended up building what many people in Moscow today, and indeed at the time, considered one of the ugliest buildings in the city. Inside the building, the conflict that arose, because conflict always does when you put us humans in one place, was it ideological and political, or was it disagreements over who

was using too much hot water and who had the nicest balconies? Well, most of the men, the actual party functionaries who received apartments in the building spent very little time there. So whatever conflicts they were having, and they were having a lot, they were having at work in various people's commissariats in the Kremlin or elsewhere. They would only come home mostly at about 3 or 4 a.m. home mostly at about 3 or 4 a.m. They would sleep until noon and then they would be driven by their drivers back to their people's commissariats. So the people who were actually using all those facilities were the children. So the building really belonged to the children and whatever conflict took place inside the building, you know, was quarrels among the children and occasionally among maids, because most of the mothers were at work also, and the people actually staying there

during the day, particularly when the children were in school, were maids. Very few grown-ups used the many facilities that were built there for sort of collective living. And when the troubles of the 1930s occurred and the purges started, how was that enacted against the backdrop of this huge building? Well, you could hear cars pulling up pretty much every night. In the mid-30s, there were about 2,600 people living in that building. About 800 of them were arrested, evicted one way or another. About 350 ended up being executed, mostly the men. You're looking at the terror from that building. executed, mostly the men. Looking at the terror from that building, what you could hear were the cars pulling up, the heavy footsteps of secret police agents on the stairway, the doorbells

ringing, sometimes the screams of the people being taken away or their wives and children crying. of the people being taken away or their wives and children crying. And what you could see were brown seals on the doors outside, because after the search and after the family was evicted, secret police agents would seal those apartments or would seal individual rooms within some of those apartments. But then after a while, new people would move in. It was people moving in, moving out, or being taken out, new people moving in. It was constant movement. And you could hear it, you could see it, you worried about it, you waited for them to come, and then they would come, and in some cases they wouldn't.

them to come and then they would come and in some cases they wouldn't. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there

are new episodes every week were the residents active participants as well as passive recipients were there people trying to get ahead of it were there people denouncing other people in the building was there an attempt to you know identify your neighbors as people worthy of being purged? Not really that I know of. Since the residents, at least the male residents, the so-called responsible leaseholders, were top party and state officials, in some cases secret police officials, they obviously participated in the terror directly, one way or another, by writing those decrees or by purging their employees and their commissariats, in some cases by presiding over the whole campaign, because the head of the Gulag, the labor camp

administration, lived in that building. So, obviously obviously these people were involved as both the organizers, administrators, and victims. And it could be the same people being one and then the other. But most of the arrests resulted from decrees describing general groups of targets. They weren't based on particular individual denunciations within that building or indeed at work. It was the job of the secret police to decide basically whom to arrest after a certain decree was issued. And the higher up you were in the hierarchy, the greater the danger. And since that building contained some of the top officials, the proportion of those arrested and executed

was probably greater than in any other house in the Soviet Union. And what would happen to the families? Were families taken as well, or were the women and children just simply thrown out of the families? Were families taken as well or were the women and children just simply thrown out of the house? Was provision made for them? Some women were arrested as targets in their own right, but most were sent mostly for eight years to special camps for family members of traitors to the motherland, they were called, where they would spend eight years plus another 10 or so in exile before coming back old, sick, broken, disoriented, unwanted, really,

and unloved to their children's new apartments. Small children could be adopted by their grandparents, other relatives, or sometimes nannies. All of them had nannies, virtually every family had maids. So they were adopted by family members, or if there were none willing to do so, they were sent to orphanages. willing to do so, they were sent to orphanages. So quite a few children were sent to orphanages throughout the Soviet Union. Can you rehearse the reasons why Stalin declared war on senior officials, and more frankly on many officials and state and non-state actors in the 1930s? What was the cause of the severity and the extent of these purges? Well, the immediate cause was the assassination of a central committee member named Kirov, who was the head of the Leningrad party organization. So that was the immediate cause. But generally, it was done in the expectation

of a great war. The party and Stalin in particular were expecting a war. And after the Kirov assassination, they panicked. And so there was what is sometimes referred to as a moral panic, or if you will, a witch hunt that started slowly and then kept accelerating, snowballing. It was basically the Bolsheviks as a party. I describe them as a sect, as a millenarian apocalyptic sect, which is to say a faith-based community in conflict with the world. They were, to begin with, a besieged fortress. They thought of themselves as being besieged by enemies. They described their country as a besieged fortress.

And then in the mid-1930s, you didn't really have to be a Bolshevik to see the Soviet Union as a besieged fortress with, you know, Germany rising in the west, Japan in the east. And so what happened was a kind of moral panic and the desperate desire to purify the ranks, to get rid of potential traitors or real traitors or whatnot. It didn't really matter whether those people accused of committing various heinous crimes had committed them. What mattered is whether they were trustworthy. And of course, a lot of them were not. A lot of them, actually, a lot of the victims didn't think of themselves as entirely innocent because they had sinned against the party in their

hearts or in their thoughts. We're all sinners. Can I ask, was Kirov's assassination a sort of one-off crazy moment or was it part of a deeper conspiracy? No, it was a crazy moment. It was believed for a while that it was an assassination ordered by Stalin. But from what we know today, it wasn't. It was done by a lone disgruntled individual. And that added to this sense of being surrounded by enemies. Again, that is very common in such apocalyptic communities that keep purifying their ranks. It certainly is.

Now, what happened to this gigantic apartment block through the war and then through Stalin's later period in office and his successors? It's still there. It is no longer called the House of Government, which was one of its official names in the 1930s. It is now known throughout Russia and certainly to most Muscovites, as the House on the Embankment,

because of a novel written in the 1970s by Yuri Trifonov about it, by a writer who actually grew up there in the 1930s. It's still there. It's as ugly as ever. It's huge. It's gray. It's centrally located diagonally across the river, Moscow River from the Kremlin and directly across the river from Russia's largest church, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. So that building has remained, but what changed is that it is no longer the house of government in name, and it's really most government members moved elsewhere after the terror. So it lost its status, its position, its symbolic importance after the terror, and certainly after the war. During the war, all the residents were

evacuated and then those who returned were not the same top officials. They were officials for the most part, but not the same kind, not the same status. Then after the fall of the Soviet Union, since it's again, as I say, not the prettiest building in the world, but you do get great views from the windows. Since it's across the river from the Kremlin, you can see the Kremlin. You have commanding views of Moscow from the top floor. So it became popular among the nouveau riche, among some foreign executives who moved to Russia in the 1990s. So it got a new lease on life. But what changed again is the view from that building. So it's not only the residents who changed, but also what those residents could see, because the largest church in Russia, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, was blown up by Stalin to give way to the ultimate

public building of all time, the Palace of Soviets. Symbolically enough, that palace was never built. It was just a huge foundation pit for a number of years. And then they filled that pit with water and it became the largest outdoor swimming pool in the Soviet Union, perhaps in the world. And then after the fall of the Soviet Union, the cathedral was rebuilt. So you could see the sort of historic change from the windows of that building that was meant to be the first building quote unquote of communist domesticity, but really never was. So the building never worked in the function that was hoped, I suppose. But is it possible to draw any conclusions? Did the experiment yield any results in terms of the

unprecedented, well, not unprecedented, I suppose, Louis XIV stuffed all his senior ministers into Versailles. But in terms of this experiment of putting senior officials and their families into the same building, is it possible to draw any conclusions from that experiment? No, I don't think so. Because as I said, the actual government officials did not really interact as neighbors. They did live under the same roof and their children did interact as neighbors and friends, but their children belong to a different generation and a different world. I mean, that experiment can be seen, the experiment of the revolution itself, the fate of those people can be witnessed

inside that building. But only if you look at different apartments really one at a time. But there was not much significance politically to having most members of the government live in the same apartment building. If anything, it perhaps created some sense of bitterness outside the building, because there they were, you know, you could see the cars, you could see better dressed children and women and so on. So there was a sense that the elite was living in a special location something that wasn't supposed to happen under communism so generally speaking it repeated the old story of better off people or more successful people moving closer to each other as you can see

in various places various cities in the world here was just the extreme case of them actually moving into the same building well it's a fascinating metaphor if that's the right word for the revolution and the terror and what followed thank you very much the book is called

The House of Government A Saga of the Russian Revolution go and buy it everybody it's fascinating stuff thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go,

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very grateful. Thank you.