The nomadism of seething Moscow, the refusal of settled bourgeois life, was part of the lure of the Russian Revolution for foreign sympathisers. Walter Benjamin perceived something unsettled, provisional and wild about Moscow itself. It seemed an ‘improvised metropolis that had fallen into place overnight’. All this appealed to the American reporter Louise Bryant, lover of the communist John Reed. At Reed’s beckoning, she hurried to Petrograd by train from Finland to take her part in the events of October 1917, to absorb the philosophy of revolution into her sensory world. In Mirrors of Moscow, published six years later, she promised to show the real people behind the ‘screen of smoke and flame’, the revolutionaries – Vladimir Lenin, Lev Kamenev, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Anatoli Lunacharsky, Mikhail Kalinin, Alexandra Kollontai and Lev Trotsky – ‘as they really are, as I know them in their homes, where the red glare does not penetrate and they live as other men’. She did not see what Trotsky already saw. Even as the romance of revolution stirred Bryant’s Greenwich Village bohemian sensibility, its leaders were acquiring bourgeois tastes. ‘Here, then, they are,’ she reported to her American readers from Bolshevik Moscow, ‘the Russians of today. Close to the Tartar and the Cossack of the plain, children of serfs and Norsemen and Mongols – close to the earth and striving for the stars.’ She was photographed in a Russian peasant sarafan (a pinafore dress) with the sidelong gaze of a demure village girl, and again, in a contrasting pose, in Cossack boots and a fetching fur hat, smoking and smiling mischievously into the camera lens.
Ivy Litvinov, the English wife of the Soviet commissar (and future Commissar of Foreign Affairs) Maxim Litvinov, who came to Moscow in the early 1920s, wrote home that she had assumed that in revolutionary Russia ‘ideas’ would be everything and ‘things’ would matter little, ‘because everyone would have what they want without superfluities’, but when she walked about the city streets, ‘peering into ground-floor windows’, she saw ‘the things of Moscow huggermuggering in all the corners and realised that they had never been so important’.
‘War communism’ led to shortage, famine, the breakdown of civic life. In 1921 Lenin announced the New Economic Policy. Economic life was dramatically liberalised while factions and freedom of discussion within the Party were suppressed. The broken city quickly returned to life. Rubble and sewage were cleaned from the streets, public services reinstated and housing rationalised. A state bank was founded. Currency was reformed and a new partly gold-backed currency unit known as the chervonets was introduced. On his way out of Russia during the NEP, Walter Benjamin bribed an official with a chervonets to ensure safe passage for the trunkful of toys and children’s books he had haggled over in the street markets of Moscow. Smaller-scale private property was handed back to former owners and for a few years foreign concessions were allowed. A new Moscow directory was published in 1922, advertising innumerable ‘Trust’ companies, and giving the telephone numbers of the offices in the Kremlin and along Vozdvizhenka of Bolshevik commissars, including Lenin and Trotsky. ‘The Viy is reading the telephone directory in Red Square,’ Mandelstam wrote in his angry NEP prose-piece The Fourth Prose. ‘Lift up my eyelids … Connect me with the Central Committee’. (The Viy is an arch-goblin from Russian folklore with iron eyelids and a glance that kills.)
If settled dwelling was the ideal of the nineteenth-century bourgeois order, unsettled living was the condition of the 1920s. ‘The wretched city of Moscow, why does it not want to give me a place in its bosom?,’ the young Petersburg-born composer Dmitri Shostakovich complained when he came to Moscow in 1925, at the beginning of his career. He could find nowhere to stay in the destabilised city, though he strained towards it, he said, with all his soul. Shostakovich found refuge in No. 3, conveniently located just around the corner from the Moscow Conservatoire, as the guest of the writer Galina Serebryakova, ex-wife of the revolutionary Leonid Serebryakov; she had just married her second Old Bolshevik, Grigory Sokolnikov, Commissar of Finance, deviser of the chervonets that made the economic recovery of the NEP possible. Sokolnikov, whose true name was Hirsh Brilliant (‘diamond’), was a graduate in economics from the Sorbonne, an old-guard revolutionary who had returned to Russia with Lenin in the sealed train in April 1917, and signed the peace treaty with Germany at Brest-Litovsk. In Moscow, Shostakovich was befriended by Marshal Tukhachevsky, a connoisseur of music who made violins in his spare time, and who would act as his protector for the next decade. Arrested in 1936, Sokolnikov and Serebryakov were tried together as members of the ‘Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre’; Andrei Vyshinsky was prosecutor. Among the many crimes of which the ‘Centre’ was accused was a fictional attempt on the life of Molotov. Serebryakov, who had ‘confessed’ to everything he was accused of after his investigators told him they were bringing his daughter into the Lubyanka for a ‘meeting’, was shot. Sokolnikov, who had likewise ‘confessed’ to save Galina, was sentenced to ten years and murdered in a labour camp. Galina was arrested in 1937. She came back to Moscow from Siberia after almost twenty years, her Party loyalty unbroken. Mikhail Tukhachevsky was shot in 1937, without the honour of a ‘show trial’. Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, which was performed at the end of that year, is heard by many as a bitter requiem for lost friends, including the friends he stayed with in this house in 1925.
Like Shostakovich, Benjamin found himself searching for a refuge in Moscow at the height of the NEP. He came in the deep winter of 1926, a time of profound personal and intellectual strain. He was in love with a Latvian revolutionary, the theatre director Asja Lacis, who was recovering from a nervous breakdown in a sanatorium near Tverskaya. At the same time he was trying to decide whether to join the German Communist Party. He wanted to see the city of Marxist revolution, where the ‘continuum of history’ had been exploded, where, as he put it, ‘all factuality is already theory’. The revolution’s potential for success or failure was ‘brutally visible’ on the streets, among the people. (Benjamin could not see the brutal struggle that was taking place in the Kremlin that winter as Stalin moved against his rivals.) He told his editor Martin Buber that he would write a ‘physiognomy’ of Moscow for the journal The Creature, an essay which would allow ‘the creatural to speak for itself’, seizing and rendering the ‘very new and disorienting language that echoes loudly through the resounding mask of an environment’.
In my years here I have often returned to Benjamin’s Moscow Diary. Of all the European magi of what was known as ‘theory’ among the gatekeepers to the world of ideas who taught me in Cambridge twenty-five years ago, Benjamin is the only one I have read since with pleasure. His prose is febrile with curiosity about real places and real people; with his obsessive love for the beautiful and strange, his fascination with physical things and the complexities of human relationships with physical things, from rare books to handmade toys, fur coats and cream cakes.