The Stalinist poet Felix Chuev, who, with a tape recorder hidden in his pocket, conducted 140 long conversations with Molotov in the last two decades of his life, remembers him on the threshold of No. 3 on a wet day in March 1977. Chuev had driven him into town from his dacha at Zhukovka outside Moscow. In the car Molotov sang an old Soviet fighting song: ‘in the struggle for the power of the Soviets, we will die as one! … Who knows why we should all die as one’, he mused at the end of the song. Chuev drew up at Molotov’s entrance and, observed by astonished passers-by, the old man stepped out over the puddles. Molotov hid behind the outer door of the house, then suddenly came out into the street again for a few seconds and waved his hand …
‘In a quarter-century we have not tracked anyone down’, Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago: ‘We have not brought anyone to trial. It is their wounds we are afraid to reopen. And as a symbol of them all, the smug and stupid Molotov lives on at Granovsky No. 3, a man who has learned nothing at all, even now, though he is saturated with our blood and nobly crosses the sidewalk to seat himself in his long, wide automobile.’
TWO
Apartment 61
‘You should not live in the Kremlin …’
ANNA AKHMATOVA
On the morning the banker gave me the keys to the Molotov apartment, I went upstairs. To avoid detection by the concierge who sits in her small room in the sous-sol listening for the sounds of doors, I took off my shoes and stayed close to the outer wall. For when she comes out and peers round the door jamb, wrapping her shawl about her, and calling out ‘Kto?’ (‘Who?’), she can see through the wrought iron of the banister that curls in leafy arabesques beneath the polished handrail, all the way up from the tiled entrance hall to the fifth-storey landing.
Of course, there was no serious reason to be wary of the natural curiosity of a warm-hearted babushka, but why oblige her to wonder why I was letting myself into a neighbour’s apartment? There was also something that invited furtive behaviour in the way the light was thickened by the dust scaled on the double panes of window glass, funnelling into long beams on the worn stone steps. ‘Security’ has traditionally been a term with wide application here. The concierge still has a duty to report on the residents of the building, particularly on the citizens of ‘imperialist’ foreign powers. Though the apartments were privatised at the end of the Soviet period and are now owned by the people who happened to be living in them at the time, the ‘freehold’ belongs to the apparat of the President. No. 3 is Kremlin property. The komendantka is proud of the fact that she still reports to the security services. As she declared loudly to the nannies of the foreign children in the courtyard one day: ‘This house is listened to. It always has been, and always will be.’ Stalin hired a Czech engineer to plant listening devices in the offices of his comrades in the early 1920s, and he and Molotov opened files on them, with their life stories and particular weaknesses carefully documented for future use. As Molotov himself remarked when reflecting on the fact that his own homes had been bugged, ‘as long as classes exist, that’s life’. Or as his enemy Trotsky put it, ‘the state is not pure spirit’. Eighty years ago, ‘organs’ of the young Soviet state stood at the door of apartment 62 and at this entrance to No. 3, watching Trotsky come and go, reporting every move to Stalin.
Apartment 62 is now the home of a well-known TV producer and his fourth wife, an arrogantly sexy blonde who spends much of the year in Tuscany. Their doorway is the grandest on the staircase, faced with bullet-proof glass and a fancy iron grille. But through it a distant past is still visible. As though in a magic lantern, or a diorama, in which nineteenth-century spectators looked at glowing images of exciting or macabre historical scenes set in the innermost rooms of the city, picture Trotsky being carried through it by the secret police on a frigid winter night in 1928.
Trotsky, who had made the Revolution with Lenin in 1917, had become an oppositional figure by the mid-1920s. In June 1926, Stalin wrote to Molotov that it was time to ‘smash Trotsky’s mug’, turn him into a renegade. At the XIVth Party Congress six months earlier, at which Molotov had been promoted to full membership of the Politburo and become one of the USSR’s most prominent politicians, he spoke against the opposition, advocating fanaticism and the liquidation of all genuine political argument among Bolsheviks. The outcome of the struggle, Molotov declared, will be decided by ‘a genuine conviction about the correctness of one’s line’. The ‘ideology of unbelief ’ undermines everything: ‘doubt makes a communist waver, makes his hands shake’. At a plenum that autumn, Molotov introduced a Politburo resolution stripping Trotsky of his full membership of the Central Committee.
Molotov’s hatred for the intellectually flamboyant Trotsky dated back to the early years of the Revolution, when Lenin had laughingly told him that Trotsky considered him a plodder. When Molotov was made a full member of the Central Committee of the Party at the Xth Party Congress in 1921, Lenin famously dubbed him the ‘best filing clerk in Russia’. Molotov remained faithful to Lenin despite these slights, fashioning himself as a standard-bearer of his ideological legacy after Lenin’s death in 1924, but he turned his hatred on Trotsky, calling him a ‘revolutionary narcissist’, an ‘individualist’, a ‘despiser of the masses’. Trotsky, for his part, sneered openly at Molotov at one Party meeting, calling him ‘mediocrity incarnate’, to which Molotov responded, ‘It is not given to everyone to be a genius. I only flatter myself that I have willpower and energy.’
In October 1927, as Trotsky made a final speech at a meeting of the Central Committee, warning about the violence behind Stalin’s growing power and the coming Thermidor, Emilian Yaroslavsky threw a heavy book of statistics at his head. ‘Behind the extreme organisation-men there is a resurgent internal bourgeoisie,’ Trotsky shouted over the catcalls of other Central Committee members at the October plenum, ‘and behind that is the world bourgeoisie.’ Stalin sat quietly drawing wolves on the margins of the speech he was about to deliver, which denounced Trotsky as a traitor to Lenin’s legacy. Was it at this meeting that one of Trotsky’s supporters drew the caricature recently discovered in a strange collection of sketches (some of them violently obscene) in the Party archives? Dated 1927, ‘artist unknown’, the cartoon depicts ‘Yaroslavka’ as the sleuth-dog of the ‘All-Party oppressor and gendarme Stalin’. Behind Stalin and Yaroslavsky is a prison labelled ‘party apparatus’ and a miserable prisoner labelled ‘Great Communist Party’. With the resolutions of the XVth Party Congress rolled up in the top of his boot, Stalin is trampling on ‘party democracy’.
Trotsky’s isolation from the Party was soon complete; he was expelled from the Central Committee and moved out of the Kremlin. ‘Until I find permanent accommodation, I shall be living temporarily at the apartment of Comrade Beloborodov (3 Granovsky Street, Apt. 62)’, he wrote to the titular head of the government. (He was destined to live as a nomad, in true revolutionary fashion, until Ramón Mercader’s ice pick opened his skull in Mexico thirteen years later.) Moving to No. 3 made Trotsky a neighbour of Semyon Budyonny, the moustachioed cavalry general from the Cossack steppes who had, by then, been living in the house for three years. Two weeks before Trotsky’s eviction, Budyonny had overseen the pogrom-like break-up of a street demonstration held by Trotsky and his supporters. Molotov, meanwhile, continued his attacks in print and on the streets, denouncing ‘Trotskyism’ in an article commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, and personally breaking up Trotsky’s speech to a meeting of Moscow workers at the Paveletsky Station, demanding in the name of the Central Committee that the ‘illegal gathering’ be disbanded. In a rage, Trotsky denounced Stalin and his henchmen as ‘grave-diggers’ of the Revolution. The following day, Pravda accused Trotsky of forming an illegal party.