Letter from Moscow October 16, 2017 Issue

Russia’s House
of Shadows
My apartment building was made to house
the first generation of Soviet élite. Instead, it
was where the revolution went to die.

By Joshua Yaffa
October 9, 2017

The House on the Embankment embodies

Soviet-era privilege—and
horror. Illustration by Cristiana Couceiro;
photograph courtesy Nikolay Semenov

(building)

few years ago, after looking at half a dozen apartments all over
A Moscow, I visited a rental in a vast building across the river
f h K li k h H h E b k I
from the Kremlin, known as the House on the Embankment. In
1931, when tenants began to move in, it was the largest residential
complex in Europe, a self-contained world the size of several city

blocks. The House of Government, as it was initially called, was a

mishmash of the blocky geometry of Constructivism and the soaring
pomposity of neoclassicism, and had five hundred and five apartments
that housed the Soviet Union’s governing élite—commissars and Red
Army generals and vaunted Marxist scholars.

On the day that I visited, the apartment’s owner, Marina, a cheerful

woman in her forties who works for a multinational oil-and-gas
company, met me in a courtyard. She took me up to the apartment,
which had been in her family for four generations. It was a two-
bedroom with a small balcony. Successive renovations had left the
place without much of the original architectural detail, but as a result
it was airy and open: less apparatchik, more ikea. Tall windows in the
living room looked out over the imperious spires of the Kremlin. I
decided to move in.

By that time, the House on the Embankment was popular with

expats, and was known for its proximity to a stretch of bars and night
clubs in a renovated industrial space that once belonged to the Red
October candy factory. A design-and-architecture institute had just
opened down the road; I often took my laptop and worked in its café,
which was decorated with vintage furniture. I quickly made friends in
the building: there was Olaf, a Dutch journalist, and his wife, Anya,
who worked at the design school; and Dasha, the owner of a popular
pétanque café in Gorky Park. With time, I also became close to
Anatoly Golubovsky, a historian and documentary filmmaker who
goes by Tolya. He is sixty years old, with a gray beard and wavy hair,
and is one of the most reliably fascinating storytellers I know. He and
his wife live in an apartment not far from mine that was originally
occupied by his grandfather, who was the Soviet Union’s chief literary
d St li
censor under Stalin.

The most striking thing about the building was, and is, its history. In
the nineteen-thirties, during Stalin’s purges, the House of
Government earned the ghoulish reputation of having the highest
per-capita number of arrests and executions of any apartment
building in Moscow. No other address in the city offers such a
compelling portal into the world of Soviet-era bureaucratic privilege,
and the horror and murder to which this privilege often led. The
popular mania about the building today holds it to be a kind of
phantasmagoric, haunted museum of Russia’s past century. I asked
Tolya what he made of our building’s notoriety. “Why does this house
have such a heavy, difficult aura?” he said. “This is why: on the one
hand, its residents lived like a new class of nobility, and on the other
they knew that at any second they could get their guts ripped out.”

hundred years ago, in the turbulent autumn of 1917, the

A Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, took advantage of a moment
of political chaos in Russia. The empire had grown weak and feckless,
and, the previous February, Tsar Nicholas II had left his throne,
bringing to a close the era of the Romanovs, a royal dynasty of more
than three hundred years. That October, Lenin and the Bolsheviks
overturned the interim government, seizing power and setting in
motion the dictatorship of the proletariat. At the time, the Bolsheviks
were not the country’s largest or most popular socialist party, but they
were the most fervently certain of their own prophecies. They were,
in essence, the first faith-based apocalyptic sect to take charge of a
country.

This is the opening argument of a magisterial new book by Yuri

Slezkine, a Soviet-born historian who immigrated to the United
States in 1983, and has been a professor at the University of
California, Berkeley, for many years. His book, “The House of
Government,” is a twelve-hundred-page epic that recounts the
multigenerational story of the famed building and its inhabitants—
and, at least as interesting, the rise and fall of Bolshevist faith. In
Slezkine’s telling, the Bolsheviks were essentially a millenarian cult, a

small tribe radically opposed to a corrupt world. With Lenin’s urging,

they sought to bring about the promised revolution, or revelation,
which would give rise to a more noble and just era. Of course, that
didn’t happen. Slezkine’s book is a tale of “failed prophecy,” and the
building itself—my home for the past several years—is “a place where
revolutionaries came home and the revolution went to die.”

In the years following the Great October Socialist Revolution, as it

would be called in Soviet literature, Bolshevik leaders found
themselves refashioned as Communist Party officials. They faced the
conundrum of how to turn their sect into a church—that is, how to
transcend the end-of-days rhetoric and create a stable system of
governance. Lenin died in 1924, and Stalin, after maneuvering into
power, proclaimed that global revolution was not necessary, and that
the socialist utopia could be established in one country, the U.S.S.R.
The “building” of socialism was the operative metaphor for what
became known as the Stalin Revolution, which was defined by rapid
urbanization and industrialization. The fury of construction was
meant as a kind of creation myth: on the first day, the Communist
Party built the Magnitogorsk steel mill; on the second, the Kharkiv
tractor factory. In Moscow, citizens were amazed by the metro, which
began operation in the mid-thirties; its cavernous stations, with their
chandeliers and marble, felt like palaces for the new Communist era.

Inevitably, the builders of this new state needed a home of their own.
After the revolution, top Party officials had taken rooms in the city’s
most storied addresses, occupying the Kremlin, the National and
Metropol Hotels, and a prominent Orthodox seminary. Such housing
was thought to be a temporary necessity that would quickly give way
to collective living arrangements. The early post-revolutionary years
ti f t i i t ti i hit t ll i
were a time of utopian experimentation, in architecture as well as in
social engineering; the Constructivist Konstantin Melnikov drew up
blueprints for giant “sleep laboratories,” in which hundreds of workers

could simultaneously drift off to mechanically produced scents and

calming sounds. By the late twenties, however, Stalin had dampened
the freewheeling spirit in the arts, and, anyway, top Party officials had
grown used to the comforts of their hotel suites and noble mansions.
Construction on the House of Government began in 1928, with a
design, by Boris Iofan, of the “transitional type”—that is, a building
with communal services but which, for the moment, allowed residents
to live in traditional family apartments. When it opened, in the
spring of 1931, Slezkine writes, it boasted

a cafeteria capable of serving all House residents, a theater

for 1300 spectators, a library, several dozen rooms for various
activities (from pool-playing to symphony orchestra
rehearsals), and above the theater, both tennis and basketball
courts, two gyms, and several shower rooms. There was also
a bank, laundry, telegraph, post office, daycare center, walk-
in clinic, hairdresser’s salon, grocery store, department store,
and movie theater for 1500 spectators . . . with cafe, reading
room, and band stage.

Apartments were distributed among those in charge of the nascent

Communist project. Nikolai Podvoisky, a former seminarian who led
the storming of the Tsar’s Winter Palace, in 1917, moved into
Apartment 280. Boris Zbarsky, a chemist who presided over the
embalming and maintenance of Lenin’s body inside its mausoleum,
on Red Square, was given Apartment 28. Nikita Khrushchev, then
the forty-year-old head of the Moscow Party Committee, moved into
No. 206. Iofan himself took a penthouse.

My apartment, in a less desirable wing of the building, was occupied

by the family of Mikhail Sergushev, who was born to a peasant family
in 1886 and became interested in socialist politics while working in a
 p g
porcelain factory in Riga. My landlady, Marina, Sergushev’s great-
granddaughter, told me that, in the years following the revolution,
Sergushev travelled around half a dozen regions, helping to establish
Communism across the Soviet domain. His word alone could decide
the fate of local officials, even of entire villages and farming
coöperatives. At first, Sergushev moved into a seven-room apartment
in a mansion that once belonged to a count, where his son would ride
a bike from room to room. Yet Sergushev’s health was poor, and in
1930 he died of tuberculosis. The next year, his wife and son moved
into the House of Government.

The “transition” that the building was

meant to bring about never came to
pass. Instead, its residents moved
further from collectivist ideals, and
adopted life styles that looked
suspiciously bourgeois. Residents had
their laundry pressed and their meals
prepared for them, so that they could
spend all day and much of the night at
work and their children could busy
themselves reading Shakespeare and
Goethe. There was a large staff, with
one employee for every four residents. Slezkine compares the House
of Government to the Dakota, in New York City—a palace of
capitalism along Central Park, where residents could eat at an on-site
restaurant and play tennis and croquet on private courts. A report
prepared for the Soviet Union’s Central Committee in 1935 showed
that the cost of running the House of Government exceeded the
Moscow norm by six hundred and seventy per cent. To the extent
that the House of Government facilitated a transition, it was the
metamorphosis of a sect of ascetics into a priesthood of pampered
élites.
Just as the building fell short of its promise, so, too, did the early
Soviet Union fail to deliver on its prophecies of a just, classless

society. Food shortages, cramped housing, and life’s many other

indignities continued. All millenarian movements face this moment
sooner or later: this is the “Great Disappointment,” a term Slezkine
borrows from the story of William Miller, a farmer in Massachusetts
who prophesied that the apocalypse would occur in 1843, and, when
it didn’t, shifted the date to October 22, 1844. The Soviet Union had
experienced two revolutions, Lenin’s and Stalin’s, and yet, in the lofty
imagery of Slezkine, the “world does not end, the blue bird does not
return, love does not reveal itself in all of its profound tenderness and
charity, and death and mourning and crying and pain do not
disappear.” What to do then?

The answer was human sacrifice, “one of history’s oldest locomotives,”

Slezkine writes. The “more intense the expectation, the more
implacable the enemies; the more implacable the enemies, the greater
the need for internal cohesion; the greater the need for internal
cohesion, the more urgent the search for scapegoats.” Soon, in Stalin’s
Soviet Union, the purges began. There would be no such thing as an
accident or an error—any deviation from virtue and promised
achievements was the result of deliberate sabotage. This is the logic of
black magic, of spirits and witches, and of the witch hunt. It was only
natural that the hunt’s victims be found among those who set the
original prophecy in motion.

t is hard to imagine now, with a children’s playground in one of its

I courtyards and a pan-Asian noodle bar on the ground floor, but
throughout 1937 and 1938 the House of Government was a vortex of
disappearances, arrests, and deaths. Arrest lists were prepared by the
N.K.V.D., the Soviet secret police, which later became the K.G.B.,
and were approved by Stalin and his close associates. Arrests occurred
in the middle of the night. A group of N.K.V.D. officers would pull
up to the building in a Black Raven, the standard-issue secret-police
automobile, which had the silhouette of a bird of prey. A story I have

heard many times, but which seems apocryphal, is that N.K.V.D.

agents would sometimes use the garbage chutes that ran like large
tubes through many apartments, popping out inside a suspect’s home
without having to knock on the door. After a perfunctory trial, which
could last all of three to five minutes, prisoners were taken to the left
or to the right: imprisonment or execution. “Most House of
Government leaseholders were taken to the right,” Slezkine writes.

No one publicly mentioned the accused or spoke of their plight to

surviving family members. On the whole, Slezkine writes, those who
lived in the House of Government “believed that enemies were in fact
everywhere,” and that any innocent victims were isolated mistakes in
an otherwise virtuous bloodletting. He quotes a diary entry of Yulia
Piatnitskaya, whose husband, a Comintern official, was arrested,
along with their seventeen-year-old son, at the House of Government
in 1937. Piatnitskaya is in anguish over her son, and torn between
two opposing images of her husband: an honest revolutionary and a
purported enemy of the people. When she thinks of the first, she
writes, “I feel so sorry for him and want to die or fight for him.” But
when she ponders the second: “I feel tainted and disgusted, and I
want to live in order to see them all caught and have no pity for
them.” In total, according to Slezkine, eight hundred residents of the
House of Government were arrested or evicted during the purges,
thirty per cent of the building’s population. Three hundred and forty-
four were shot.

Before long, the arrests spread from the tenants to their nannies,
guards, laundresses, and stairwell cleaners. The commandant of the
house was arrested as an enemy of the people, and so was the head of
the Communist Party’s housekeeping department. So many enemies
f th l b i d th t i di id l t t
of the people were being uncovered that individual apartments were
turning over with darkly absurd speed. In April, 1938, the director of
the Kuznetsk steel plant, Konstantin Butenko, moved into Apartment

141, which had become vacant after the arrest of its previous tenant, a
deputy commissar from the Health Ministry. Butenko occupied the
four rooms for six weeks before he himself was arrested, and his
family evicted. Matvei Berman, one of the founders of the Gulag,
took over the space. Berman was arrested six months later, and shot
the next year.

One afternoon not long ago, I visited a woman named Anna

Borisova, whose apartment is across a courtyard from mine. Borisova
is an amateur artist and poet, and her photographs cover the walls of
her living room, alongside faded family portraits. The space has the
feel of an airy salon. Borisova put out a pot of tea, and slices of salty
cheese and cake. She told me about her grandfather Sergey Malyshev,
who was a Soviet official in charge of food markets and trade.
Borisova explained that he spent 1937 in a fit of anxiety. “He felt a
premonition,” she said. “He was always waiting, never sleeping at
night.” One evening, Malyshev heard footsteps coming up the
corridor—and dropped dead of a heart attack. In a way, his death
saved the family: there was no arrest, and thus no reason to kick his
relatives out of the apartment. “Since he died his own death, it all
stayed with our family—the apartment, everything,” Borisova said.
“And after that no one ever touched us.”

My friend Tolya, the documentary filmmaker, told me how his

grandfather, born Iosif Fradkin, survived those years. Before the
revolution, he gave himself the nom de guerre of Boris Volin, a play
on the Russian word volya, which connotes both will power and
freedom. (Renaming was a popular Bolshevist fashion. Vladimir
Ulyanov called himself Vladimir Lenin; Iosif Dzhugashvili took the
name Joseph Stalin.) Volin could be a harsh, combative man. He took
t t Gl lit th S i t U i ’ hi i ti d
a post at Glavlit, the Soviet Union’s censorship organization, and
announced a “decisive turn toward extreme class vigilance.” By the
mid-thirties, Volin was a deputy head at the People’s Commissariat of

Enlightenment, an early Soviet propaganda and education body. One

day in the fall of 1937, after fighting with his boss, a mean-spirited
man named Andrei Bubnov, Volin had a heart attack. He spent the
next several months in and out of state hospitals and rest homes.
After his recovery, he found that Bubnov, along with all but one other
deputy from the ministry, had been arrested and shot.

I remarked to Tolya that it must have been terrifying to learn that

many of your colleagues and friends had been liquidated in your
absence. We were sitting in his apartment, surrounded by stacks of
antique books and family artifacts. The center of the apartment is his
grandfather’s old study, a stately room with a heavy desk and a
dramatic wall of floor-to-ceiling wood-and-glass shelves. “The thing
is,” Tolya said, “before this awful discovery were many others.” One
of Volin’s brothers was a Soviet intelligence officer who worked in the
United States under the cover of a military attaché. He was called
back, arrested, and shot. One of Volin’s sisters was married to an
N.K.V.D. officer, and they lived in the House of Government, in a
nearby apartment. When the husband’s colleagues came to arrest
him, he jumped out of the apartment window to his death.

Volin, I learned, kept a suitcase packed with warm clothes behind the
couch, ready in case of arrest and sentence to the Gulag. His wife
burned an archive of papers dating from his time as a Bolshevik
emissary in Paris, fearing that the work would brand him a foreign
spy. They gave their daughter, Tolya’s mother, a peculiar set of
instructions. Every day after school, she was to take the elevator to
the ninth floor—not the eighth, where the family lived—and look
down the stairwell. If she saw an N.K.V.D. agent outside the
apartment, she was supposed to get back on the elevator, go
d t i d t f i d’ h
downstairs, and run to a friend’s house.

We spoke about the atmosphere in the building back then, what

Tolya’s grandparents must have been thinking as the bright and just
world they thought they had built began to cannibalize itself. “They
could only think about one thing: how to survive. I am profoundly
certain of that,” he said. “They weren’t able to intervene, to control
things in the slightest. The forces they were up against were Biblical,
like fighting nature itself.”

ike the passing of a black and furious storm, the arrests ended.
L The last people killed were officers in the N.K.V.D. “Having
waked up after the orgy, Stalin and the surviving members of the
inner circle needed to get rid of those who had administered it,”
Slezkine writes. It was not long before a new tragedy befell the
residents of the building, and the country: the invasion by Nazi
Germany, in June, 1941. The House of Government was evacuated,
its residents scattered to towns across the Soviet Union. Slezkine
reports that around five hundred people from the building went off to
the war; a hundred and thirteen of them were killed. In the Soviet
consciousness, the war was an event as powerful as the revolution.
The conflict, Slezkine writes, “justified all the previous sacrifices, both
voluntary and involuntary, and offered the children of the original
revolutionaries the opportunity to prove, through one more sacrifice,
that their childhood had been happy, that their fathers had been pure,
that their country was their family, and that their life was indeed
beautiful even in death.”

After the war, residents of the House of Government trickled back,

but the early spirit of the building was gone. During the forties, as
new residents mingled with the old, and furniture moved in and out,
the place was, according to Slezkine, “busier, noisier, messier, less
exclusive.” New élite apartment blocks went up around town,
including the Stalin-era “wedding cake” skyscrapers, and the House
of Government ceased to be Moscow’s only prestigious address.

The cult of Stalin and, by extension, the myth of Soviet virtue and
exceptionalism—the “bond that had held the scattered survivors of
the House of Government together,” Slezkine writes—began to be
dismantled in 1956, when Khrushchev, once a resident of the
building, now the Soviet First Secretary, delivered a secret speech on
Stalin’s crimes to the twentieth Party Congress. This puncturing of
the U.S.S.R.’s infallibility was heartbreaking to the generation of
original Bolshevik revolutionaries. Tolya’s grandfather, by then a
lecturer at the Marxism-Leninism Institute, was devastated by the
speech. His wife had died not long before, and Tolya told me that
those two events “sent him to the grave.” He died within the year, at
the age of seventy-one.

Tolya’s parents were typical members of the next generation of Soviet

intelligentsia: successful and outwardly unquestioning of the
Communist system, but privately harboring doubts and frustrations.
Tolya, like many of his friends, grew up in the protective shadow of
the Soviet Union’s postwar might and good cheer. One of his earliest
memories is of Yuri Gagarin’s first spaceflight, in 1961, which his
family watched on a television—a device in extraordinarily short
supply in Moscow in those days. “Gagarin made his flight, and now
we, the U.S.S.R., were on top of the world,” Tolya said, describing
the mood at the time. “I felt at the very center of the universe.”

In those years, the House of Government residents were still de-facto

members of the Soviet élite, even if they were no longer all high-
ranking bureaucrats. A “special dispensary” was tucked into one of the
courtyards, a quasi-secret food shop and cafeteria that offered
otherwise impossible-to-find groceries and various delicacies at
subsidized prices. Tolya said that, as a matter of principle, no one in
hi f il t k d t f th h b t th t l i
his family took advantage of the shop, but that on several occasions a
group of young people would throw an impromptu party, send one of

his friends into the shop, and, suddenly, the “table would be set for
twenty people.”

In the apartment I now rent, Sergushev’s son, Vladimir, lived with his
mother and his wife, Nonna, a glamorous beauty. She had a tense
relationship with her mother-in-law, who found the younger woman’s
interest in lipstick and lace gloves and nights at the theatre to be
gauchely bourgeois. The Sergushev name helped Vladimir get a job at
the K.G.B. He was an intelligent and thoughtful man, but with weak
nerves. In the fifties, he lost an attaché case filled with top-secret
documents while on assignment in Germany, and was quietly
removed from the secret services. He got a job as a professor and
economist, with access to treats like sturgeon and bananas. He had a
son, who, in 1975, had a daughter—my landlady, Marina. She told
me that, when she was a child, the building’s history was largely
forgotten or purposefully ignored. Growing up, she knew that her
great-grandfather had his own entry in the Soviet encyclopedia, but
she didn’t think of him as someone who had helped shape history.

Perhaps the defining event in the building’s postwar life came in

1976, when Yuri Trifonov, a former resident, published his novella
“The House on the Embankment,” a loosely fictionalized account of
his boyhood there. Trifonov, who was six years old when his family
moved in, describes the building as a “huge grey block with its
thousand windows giving it a look of a whole town.” His father had a
high-ranking job at the Council of People’s Commissars; his mother
was an economist at the Commissariat of Agriculture.

Trifonov’s father was arrested as an enemy of the people in June,

1937, when Trifonov was eleven. The next April, N.K.V.D. agents
came for his mother. They took her out wearing thin canvas sneakers
came for his mother. They took her out wearing thin canvas sneakers
and a gray jacket—clothes she would wear all through the first winter
at a Gulag camp in the frozen steppes of Kazakhstan. She paused for
a moment on the landing, her arms held behind her, and looked up
toward her children. She did not offer the usual words of comfort
about her innocence or her imminent return, but instead a piece of
advice, which Trifonov remembered for the rest of his life: “Children,
no matter what happens, don’t ever lose your sense of humor.” What
Trifonov did not know then was that his father was already dead, and
he would not see his mother until eight years later, when she
returned, weakened and sick, from the camps. Trifonov wrote “The
House on the Embankment” when he was fifty-one years old, and the
book’s characters are children of his generation, but he alludes to the
trauma of the purges only through supporting characters who
suddenly vanish, and the narrator’s passing remark that “people who
leave the house cease to exist.”

The book was an immediate sensation among Soviet readers, and it

gave the building a new life: from then on, it was known as the House
on the Embankment. Trifonov died in 1981, but his widow, Olga,
who is seventy-eight, is a proud chronicler of her husband’s life and
work. We spoke this summer at the small museum dedicated to the
House on the Embankment, where Olga is the director. The
museum, an apartment on a courtyard of the building, is full of
original artifacts, like the custom wooden furniture that Iofan, the
building’s architect, designed for tenants. A stuffed penguin sits near
the entrance; it was brought back, alive, from the Antarctic by Ilya
Mazuruk, a famed polar explorer, who lived in the building in the
thirties and forties and, legend has it, took the penguin for evening
walks along the embankment. Trifonov and his siblings were evicted
from the building after his mother’s arrest, and he never returned. As
Olga told me, he rarely spoke of his years there. “He was not a man
who loved to talk about the past,” she said. “He saved that for his
literature.”
In the early eighties, Olga said, the couple lived in a run-down
apartment above a food store. Trifonov’s popularity was immense. His

name had been floated for a Nobel Prize nomination. One day, a
high-ranking Soviet official approached Olga and proposed that the
couple move to a four-bedroom apartment in the House on the
Embankment. It seemed a fantastic stroke of good fortune. “I came
back upstairs with this silly smile, and right in the hallway I told him,
‘We are being offered to move into the House on the Embankment!’ ”
Trifonov recoiled: “Do you really think that I want to move back
there?” Needless to say, they declined the offer. “For him,” Olga said,
“this building contained his most cheerful memories from childhood,
the bitterest, and the most tragic, all of that mixed up together.”

olya told me that as he grew older

T he became curious not just about
the story of his grandfather, whose
medals and Orders of Lenin were
displayed in the family bookcase, but
also about the many periods of Soviet
history that were never discussed.
When he was around ten, he read
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in
the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” a tale of
existence in Stalin’s camps. Later, he made his way through
Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago,” a three-volume opus that
appeared only in samizdat. By his university years, he, like many of
his peers, was an anti-Sovietchik—not fully a dissident, but
thoroughly disillusioned with official ideology. He developed a split
consciousness toward the house. “Of course, on a rational level, I
know this building’s history, who lived here, and all about the
repressions,” he said. “But there is also a more personal experience: I
was born here, grew up here, and have spent a large part of my
was born here, grew up here, and have spent a large part of my
conscious life here.”

In 1991, the fall of the Soviet Union was treated with excitement and
relief by many of those who lived in the House on the Embankment.
Its residents were no longer true believers in Communism; by then, it
seemed that there was hardly a true believer left in the empire. The
nineties in the building, as in Russia as a whole, were a time of
anarchic opportunity, exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure.
Pensioners moved out, their apartments snapped up by Russia’s
nouveau riche. Gangsters from across the former Soviet expanse
bought apartments at the city’s most central address, which, for many,
still carried a whiff of privilege and power. Underground casinos
popped up in some apartments; others were turned into cramped
hostels for migrant workers. My apartment was rented to an
American oilman, then to an investment banker, after which came a
professor from France, and finally, before me, a young socialite who
threw raucous parties that upset the neighbors.

The most visible symbol of the era was a Mercedes logo mounted on
the roof, an advertisement several stories tall that towered over the
building. The logo had been placed there in a murky deal that wasn’t
discussed with, let alone approved by, the building’s residents. A
rental fee of a million rubles a month was paid to the city-owned
company in charge of maintaining the building. When the sign finally
came down, after ten years, the company suddenly threatened
bankruptcy and said that the cash was gone.

If the nineties were defined by untrammelled commerce and the

collapse of authority, then the early Putin years, beginning with
Putin’s ascension to the Presidency, in 2000, were a time of
increasingly centralized state power. The Kremlin subsumed other
centers of authority, including the Orthodox Church, under its
t l I 2012 th f t th ith b li b dit
control. In 2012, these forces came together with symbolic absurdity
in a nasty and protracted lawsuit between neighbors in the House on
the Embankment. A woman living in an apartment that belonged to

Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Orthodox Church, sued her neighbor,
a high-profile surgeon named Yuri Shevchenko, for six million
dollars, to cover damage, she said, that was caused by construction
dust emanating from Shevchenko’s apartment, which was being
renovated. For his part, Kirill—who at the time was facing corruption
allegations tied to a luxury Breguet watch—said that the apartment
was a gift from Moscow’s former mayor, and that he used it only to
store his extensive collection of antique books. A Moscow court ruled
against Shevchenko, who, in order to come up with the money, sold
the apartment and left the building. In a final twist, the Patriarch’s
apartment looks out onto the Church of Christ the Savior, the city’s
main Orthodox cathedral, which, that same year, became the site of
Pussy Riot’s punk-art protest—a performance meant to satirize the
Church’s intimacy with politics under Kirill.

When I called Shevchenko, he didn’t want to talk about the details of

the case, but did offer thoughts on his former home. “The building
was dreamed up as a little piece of heaven for the chosen,” he told me.
“But this house stands on mournful ground, and its residents are
doomed to carry a very difficult sorrow.” Without a doubt, he added,
the building is “cursed.”

I, like many of my acquaintances in the building, don’t necessarily feel

the burden of such heavy symbolism. A friend of mine, Nina
Zavrieva, a consultant and tech entrepreneur, grew up in an
apartment that first belonged to her grandfather, a lawyer who
worked in the Politburo secretariat. Nina, who is thirty, told me that
from a young age she was familiar with the building’s rich history. “I
knew all this in theory, but I never really felt it,” she said. “I never
internalized it.” I asked her if anything about the building felt
diff t ft ll th Sh id th t h ’t th
different after all these years. She said that she wasn’t sure, then
remembered something: the color of the façade had changed. “At

some point, it was pink, then it became bright gray, but really I don’t
think I notice anymore.”

Another friend, Shakri Amirkhanova, a thirty-eight-year-old

magazine publisher, had a similar view of the building. Her
grandfather was a revered Soviet-era poet who secured an apartment
in the House on the Embankment for Shakri’s parents. Now Shakri
lives there with her boyfriend and five-year-old daughter. She told me
that she was wary of the scale and intensity of the building’s history
crowding out her own experience. “It’s my space, with my childhood
memories—playing cards with my sister at night, listening to Beatles
tapes, taking piano lessons in the living room,” she said. “And now it
will be home to my daughter’s memories.”

Tolya told me that he was not a “mystic” about the House on the
Embankment. Yet he saw a satisfying parallel in the fact that the
square across the road had become the central location for a series of
large-scale anti-Kremlin demonstrations in 2011 and 2012. Protesters
were angry about election fraud—observers had documented ballot
stuffing and other irregularities during the country’s recent elections
—but also about the cynicism and corruption that had come to define
the Putin state. Tolya and his wife participated in the marches and
protests. He said that, in a way, this political consciousness might be
the truest inheritance from his grandfather, even though his
grandfather’s prescription for change was wildly different from his
own. “It seems to me that this yearning, this energy, which ultimately
threw itself into revolution, is definitely passed along,” he said. “It’s a
natural process. The revolutionary furor softens and adapts, becomes
bourgeois, part of the system—and appears again in new forms.”

h P i h h d diffi l i i l i
 ver the years, Putin has had a difficult time articulating a
O coherent position on the events of 1917, and on the
revolutionaries who eventually occupied the House on the

Embankment. His logic, however contradictory, seems to be that

fomenting revolution is bad, but being a superpower is good. He sees
the Bolshevik revolutionaries as forerunners to those who might
challenge his power today. “Someone decided to shake Russia from
inside, and rocked things so much that the Russian state crumbled,”
he told a gathering of students and young teachers. “A complete
betrayal of national interests! We have such people today as well.”
Earlier this year, in a rare comment on the revolution’s upcoming
hundred-year anniversary, he said that Russians must study their
history to “fully understand and give purpose to the lessons of the
past,” but he didn’t say what those lessons might be.

Not long ago, I spoke to Gleb Pavlovsky, a member of underground

literary circles in the nineteen-eighties, who, in the two-thousands,
became one of the chief architects of Putin’s political messaging—the
dark art of packaging and spin known in Russia as “political
technology.” What attracted him to Putin, he told me, was that he
represented neither “revolution nor counterrevolution—all of that was
left in the past.” Instead, with Pavlovsky’s guidance, Putin cultivated
the image of a nonideological father figure, stern and decisive, but
pragmatic and without sweeping philosophical passions.

In 2004, Pavlovsky returned to Moscow from Kiev, where he had

overseen an unsuccessful Kremlin effort to install a Russia-friendly
candidate as President. He decided to buy an apartment in the House
on the Embankment. It was a large, sunny place on the ninth floor,
with a wall of windows and an expansive balcony, where he would
often sit in an armchair and work. Pavlovsky’s colleagues laughed at
his choice of address: by then, fashionable Kremlin apparatchiks lived
in walled-off mansions outside town. But Pavlovsky enjoyed the
it f hi h “I f lt lik ti i t i hi t dI
gravitas of his new home. “I felt like a participant in history, and I
must say I liked it.” The apartment was home to the “years of my
most fierce Putinism,” he said.

Eventually, Pavlovsky soured on the political machine he had helped

construct. In 2011, when Putin decided to return to the Presidency
for a third term, Pavlovsky disagreed with the decision. He left the
Kremlin, and became an outspoken critic of the Putin government.
Like Tolya, he attended the protests across the street. At a certain
point, he decided that he no longer liked living in the House on the
Embankment and the connotations that came with it. For a decade,
he had been part of the country’s political establishment, and, as he
put it, lived in a building that served as an “external confirmation” of
that status. But he began to think of that as something “unpleasant,
even embarrassing—that I was connected to the part of the
establishment in that building who were guilty, the ones who had
allowed, or at least not prevented, the evil of the past.” As Pavlovsky
told me, the Bolshevik revolutionaries who first inhabited the House
on the Embankment “thought that they were smarter, that they could
outwit the system they created. But they lost control, became
marionettes of something much bigger and more powerful than any
individual, and, by the time that system had started to devour people,
it was too late.” He sold his apartment in 2015, and now rents a place

♦
in a different part of town. On the whole, he said, he’s relieved to be
gone. “But I do miss the views.” 

An earlier version of this article misstated the provenance of the

penguin that Ilya Mazuruk brought back to Moscow.

Published in the print edition of the

October 16, 2017, issue, with the
headline “House of Shadows.”
 Joshua Yaffa is a
contributing writer
at The New Yorker
and the author of
“Between Two Fires:
Truth, Ambition,
and Compromise in
Putin’s Russia.”

More: The House on the Embankment

Moscow, Russia

“The House of Government”

Yuri Slezkine Houses

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