The Books: “Children of the Arbat” (Anatoli Rybakov)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

The Children of the Arbat, by Anatoli Rybakov

To a Stalin addict like myself, this book was a pile of crack. A PILE!!

Written over the course of almost 20 years, and repressed in Russia, because of its honesty about the Stalin terror – it finally was published in 1988 in Russia – and quickly sold out (so much for the Marxist brand of economics). The book was such a hot commodity that people were paying exorbitant amounts for it on the black market. The entire country was coming out of a haze of state-sponsored information, and The Children of the Arbat, the story of a group of people who lived in the Arbat section of Moscow (an artistic neighborhood), tells the story of the early years of the Five Year Plan – as the noose begins to tighten around the country. There are various characters we follow – Sasha, Yuri – many of them enthusiastic members of the Komsomol, but as we now know – loyalty was not a simple thing. In a paranoid atmosphere, a paranoid top-down atmosphere – things like differences of opinion, or even humor – are misconstrued. Not just misconstrued, but seen as a direct threat to the State, as Sasha discovers to his chagrin. Sasha is sent into exile, he’s in big trouble – so we follow his journey out into Siberia. The rest of the characters back in the Arbat struggle along, and the book really gives the sense of that time – the denial, the fanaticism of some, the struggle to still have personal relationships … Because of course the State had a vested interest in making ITSELF the primary relationship in the country – it was quite conscious … The child who denounced his parents as saboteurs became a hero in the country, statues erected to him (some still standing) … It was the ultimate test of loyalty: to stand on the side of the State, and not your personal life. Obviously, this destroys people. It’s a horror. I cannot even imagine being forced to make such a choice, and millions of people went through it. Alongside the detailed intricate plot lines of all of the “children of the Arbat”, the book also has Stalin as a character. It’s a BIG book. Stalin emerges as an anomaly, a weirdo, an outsider (he wasn’t even Russian!) – but it is all of those things that made him so “successful” as a terrifying leader who died, basically, of old age. This was not a man who was in a hurry. Most dictators have a sense of urgency – and also a need for glory – both of which end up sinking them, 9 times out of 10. They get careless. They grab for too much too soon. Not Stalin. He had the patience of a tree sloth. He sat back, watching, waiting, sometimes for YEARS … he never forgot a slight. Ever. But he had the ability to wait for a decade, at times, to get his revenge. This quality is so rare in a leader as to be almost freakish. The “Stalin sections” in the book are chilling.

Children of the Arbat tells the story on the ground-level of the “children of the Arbat” but it also tells the story of the insane Five Year Plan, and Stalin’s insistence on modernization at any cost, and also his growing suspicion that Kirov, the CP leader in St. Petersburg was a threat to his power. Kirov and he were old friends (if Stalin could be said to have friends). Kirov was pretty much autonomous in his position and it began to gnaw at Stalin. That’s Stalin’s journey through the book. A growing obsession with Kirov … and what should be done about Kirov. Well, as we all know (and if we don’t, then we should), Kirov was murdered on December 1, 1934 (my post about it here) – and the question of who did it is still up for grabs to this day (a book called Who Killed Kirov?: The Kremlin’s Greatest Mystery just came out a couple of years ago.) It is now generally agreed that while Stalin obviously did not pull the trigger, he was the one behind the murder. And the murder of Kirov, so early on in the Soviet “experiment”, became the reason given for the decades of terror following. Stalin used the murder of Kirov as an excuse to terrorize the entire population, all of whom ended up being somehow indicted as involved in the killing. Vast circles of saboteurs, their families, no one – NO ONE – in Russia was untouched by the murder of Kirov. Robert Conquest, in his book Stalin and the Kirov Murder writes:

This century has seen horrible crimes on a mass scale, culminating in the Jewish Holocaust. No comparison with these can be sustained. But as an individual murder, there is, for various reasons, none to match the Kirov murder.

Single events – even accidental ones – have often turned the path of history. The assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, just over twenty years previously, brought on a perhaps otherwise avoidable Great War. At any rate, that is the only individual crime (or dual crime, since the Archduke’s morganatic wife was also killed) with which the Kirov murder can remotely be compared. But even the assassination of the Archduke had no further intrinsic result beyond the crisis leading to war. There was no mystery about the responsibility. No long-lasting politicies were based on any theoretical view of it.

The Kirov murder, however, was made the central justification for the whole theory of Stalinism and the necessity for endless terror.

Conquest referred to the Kirov murder “the crime of the [twentieth] century”, because millions perished because of it. Stalin was at the funeral of Kirov, of course he was – and he vowed to find out who did this, who murdered this man – and so began the Terror.

I guess you could say I’m kind of obsessed with the Kirov murder and now is the time!! Robert Conquest was obsessed with it back in the 60s and 70s when Russia was behind an Iron Curtain, with no archives opened – and nobody even admitted that Stalin was involved at all, despite the evidence. Despite Kruschev’s famous “secret speech” in 1956, when the sins of Stalin were finally admitted (at least amongst the Party), the murder of Kirov is still a grand mystery. But to be obsessed with the Kirov murder now, in the early 21st century, is NOT such a challenging thing – because now we have more information, now books are written about it, with theories put forth, etc. – you can dig into it, hear all the sides, the archives are opened – and while much was wiped out, it is generally agreed that the assassin was hired by Stalin. The whole thing was a huge piece of theatre, and Stalin was the director.

Anyway, back to Children of the Arbat. Kirov is also a character in the book – not just out in the world, but as a spectre, a threat, in Stalin’s mind. Stalin understands from the beginning that he is playing a zero-sum game. Nobody else did. They all seemed to think that after the upheavals of the Five Year Plan, a necessary thing to go through in order to achieve their goals, the terror could be relaxed … they could get back to the dialogue and conversation set forth by Lenin and Trotsky … they could actually argue about what Marxism meant, and how the Communist Party should operate. Stalin had other things in mind. He was the only one who really understood. He actually understood “the secret black book” in 1984 (excerpt here) which reveals the true nature of the whole thing. It was never about bringing forth a glorious new Communist society. It was always about creating a situation where one man could rule supreme. And that’s IT. Everything else was just chatter.

Fascinating. Awful.

Children of the Arbat takes place over 1932, 1933 – a time of great upheaval, and a famine in the Ukraine – Stalin gathering his forces, and realizing that one man stood in his way. To echo Lenin’s question: What is to be done? Stalin knew what was to be done. But how? He had to make it seem like an opposition killed Kirov. He needed to create the illusion that a group of saboteurs killed Kirov – not him. He knew it was what he needed in order to completely terrorize and atomize the population.

If you want to know something about Stalin (and it’s difficult – so much of what we know about him is lies, obfuscation – he was very gifted at erasing his past) I would suggest Children of the Arbat. Yes, there are biographies – many of which are really worthwhile (Edvard Radsinksy’s Stalin is fantastic – excerpt here) – Children of the Arbat is a psychological portrait of a man whom nobody really knew. He stood over the grave of his first wife, at her funeral, and said the words, “With her dies any warmth I might feel for another human being.” He meant what he said. It is difficult to imagine our way into such a person – but Rybakov comes the closest. It’s chilling.

A grand sweeping book, one of the most important publishing events in the 20th century in Russia – The Children of the Arbat deserves to stand alongside Master and Margarita, although it doesn’t have the transcendent genius of the latter (excerpt here). But Children of the Arbat, in its simple homespun language (at least the translation I have is simple and homespun), its evocation of Moscow in the early 1930s, its psychological portrait of what it was like back then – the pressures, the escapism, the social mores … and, also, the spectacular glimpse into the psychology of Stalin, the architect of all of it … is a vastly important book.

Here’s an excerpt from one of the many “Stalin” sections of the book. What is so amazing here is that Stalin knows all of the grand “ideas” were naive and ridiculous. But he utilized them for his own end. A massively cynical man. Unbelievable.

The excerpt below really explains, in detail, why Robert Conquest – in all of his great books about Stalin – continuously says about Stalin’s fellow revolutionaries and bureaucrats: “They did not understand Stalin yet.”

And of course, once you understood Stalin, once you realized the true nature of the man you were dealing with – it would be far too late.

EXCERPT FROM The Children of the Arbat, by Anatoli Rybakov

Stalin put aside his book, got up, and paced around the room clutching his pipe. He stopped at the window and gazed out at the familiar sight of the yellow and white Arsenal building and the bronze cannons lined up along its facade.

The diplomat from Motovilikha! It wasn’t an unarmed Germany that posed a threat, it was Japanese troops in Manchuria, in our rear in the Far East. Budyagin knew that perfectly well, however limited his outlook. He hadn’t come to talk about Hitler.

He’d come to make it known that there were people in the Party who had their own point of view, and that they were defending their right to their point of view, and that at the proper time they would advance it against his point of view. Budyagin hadn’t come on his own initiative, he was too unimportant. He’d come on instructions from the same people who had allegedly helped him, Stalin, to rout his enemies, the same people he was supposed to rely on, and was relying on, because he had to, otherwise they’d get rid of him the way they’d got rid of the others. They thought he was indebted to them for everything.

They were profoundly misguided. The true leader emerges by himself, he owes his power to himself alone. Otherwise he is not a leader, but a puppet. They hadn’t chosen him, he had chosen them. They hadn’t pushed him to the front, he had pulled them along behind him. It wasn’t they who had helped him to consolidate himself, it was he who had raised them to the pinnacles of state power. They had become what they were solely because they had taken their places alongside him.

To whom had Lenin been indebted? Some emigres in London and Geneva? And Peter the Great? To Menshikov and Lefort? The fact that his power had been inherited didn’t change the essence of the point. To reach the pinnacle of power, the monarch had to destroy the entourage that had become accustomed to seeing him as a puppet. That’s how it had been with Peter, and the same was true of Ivan the Terrible.

Stalin hadn’t become leader because he had managed to wipe out his opponents. He had wiped out his opponents because he was leader. It was he who had been destined to run the country. His enemies hadn’t understood that and therefore they were defeated. They still didn’t understand it, and so they had to be destroyed. The failed pretender is always a potential enemy.

History’s choice had fallen on him because he was the only one who understood the secret of supreme power in this country, the only one who knew how to rule this nation, the only one who knew its every virtue and shortcoming. Especially its shortcomings.

The Russians were a nation of the collective. The commune had been their way of life since time immemorial; equality was at the root of their national character. This provided the right conditions for the sort of society the people were building now in Russia. Tactically, Lenin’s NEP had been the right maneuver, but the idea that it should be applied “seriously and for a long time” had been mistaken. The move had been a temporary deal with the peasants in order to get more food. “Seriously and for a long time” implied a policy based on the wealthy land-owning farmer, the kulaks. Farmers implied the path of inequality, and that was contrary to the psychological makeup of the people.

Stalin went to the bookshelf and took down a volume of Lenin and reread the passage where Lenin had said: “To get every member of the population to take part in the cooperative venture by way of the NEP would take an entire historical epoch. Without universal literacy and adequate know-how, and without teaching the population how to use books, without the material basis and some measure of assurance against, say, crop failure or famine and so on, without all this we will not attain our goal.” He closed the book and put it back.

This was the reasoning of an emigre who did not know Russia or the Russian village or the peasant. What had happened to the famous electric plow that Lenin had gazed on with such naive hope in 1922? Where was it now? It wasn’t that Lenin didn’t understand technology, just that he didn’t understand the Russian village and the Russian peasant. In order to make the peasant literate and cultured and in order to safeguard the village from famine and so on, we needed not decades but centuries.

That approach, the approach that tried to inculcate the psychology of the farmer, was alien to the peasant. The farmer didn’t need the dictatorship of the proletariat. The farmer, the private farmer and the individualist, has to be stifled at birth in the Russian peasant. As for cooperatives, by all means, but the kind in which the peasant will be a simple worker. That’s what he had accomplished: the second Russian revolution, and it was no less important than the first one.

In the October Revolution we had the peasants on our side, and in the collectivization we had them against us. Yes, of course we need books and science and protection against crop failure, but we need all that, not as preliminaries of collectivization, but on the basis of it. Lenin had said: first culture, then collectivization. Stalin’s way was: first collectivization, then culture.

What Lenin had called bureaucratic perversion was in fact the only possible way to run the country. It had its dangers: the bureaucracy tries to stand between the people and the leadership, it tries to supplant the leadership. That has to be stamped out without mercy. The apparatus must be the unquestioning executor of the supreme will, it has to be kept in a state of fear, which it will in turn pass on to the people.

Did he have such an apparatus? No, he did not! The present apparatus had been formed in the struggle for power and was not yet an instrument of the leader; it regarded itself as a partner in the victory. Budyagin’s visit had been a reminder of this.

The apparatus of the true leader is the one he creates for himself after he has come to power. Such an apparatus must not be eternal or permanent, otherwise ties become cemented and the apparatus acquires a monolithic quality and strength of its own. One must keep shuffling it, renewing and replacing it.

The creation of such an apparatus is more complicated than just getting rid of rivals. The apparatus consists of hundreds of thousands of people who have been concentrated into a single organism, linked and welded together from top to bottom. The present members of the Politburo were no longer those who had returned with Lenin from abroad. The Politburo members now had their own connections within the apparatus, their own links, which stretched from the top to the bottom. You only had to touch one link for the whole chain to rattle.

Did he trust his own entourage?

In politics you trust nobody.