View of the Kremlin: What is the House on the Embankment thinking about

One house - many names

Initially, the building was named the House of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, but after the release of Yuri Trifonov's novel "The House on the Embankment" this name was assigned to it. This is how Trifonov described the house: “It looked like a ship, heavy and awkward, without masts, without a rudder and without pipes, a bulky box, an ark filled with people, ready to sail. Where? Nobody knew, no one guessed about it.” The house was also called “Stalin’s smile” and “pre-trial detention house” because almost a third of its residents (about 800 people) were repressed.

What hides the most mysterious place in Moscow

Sobesednik.ru found out what is hidden behind the façade of the “House on the Embankment” - the most famous and mysterious building in Moscow.

Story

No other house in the world can boast of its own museum. The Moscow house on Serafimovicha Street, 2 has it. This is not surprising - no other residential building has so many legends, myths, mystical and real stories.

“Both young people and the older generation come to us, foreigners who believe that the history of this house is the history of the whole country,” the director of the Museum in the House on the Embankment (a branch of the Museum Association “Museum of Moscow”), which is located in one of the entrances of the building, Olga Trifonova. The owner of the museum is the widow of the writer Yuri Trifonov, who lived in this house. The museum is no larger than an average apartment with furnishings in the style of the 30s, when the house was built specifically for the party and bohemian elite.

3 hectares of land in the very center of the capital - on Bersenevskaya embankment, 25 entrances, 12 floors, 505 apartments - the house-ship is still considered the largest residential building in Europe.

– At that time it was a real palace! – says Olga Trifonova. – Huge areas of apartments - up to 150 meters, oak parquet, artistic painting on the ceiling, luxurious furniture, all the services you can imagine: a cinema with one and a half thousand seats, a gym, a department store, a laundry, a clinic, a savings bank, a kindergarten and a nursery, which were located on the roof of the building. In the canteen, residents of the house received ready-made meals and dry rations for free using coupons.

The museum in the house appeared on a voluntary basis back in 1989 / Andrey Strunin / “Interlocutor”

In fact, it was the first luxury residential complex. Back then they didn’t know such words and called the building “paradise island.” But paradise quickly slammed shut and became a golden cage. In the 1930s, out of 2 thousand residents, 700 were arrested, convicted or shot.

Legends

Almost every exhibit in the museum is a finished novel.

– Academician Tsitsin, founder of the Botanical Garden, once saw boys carrying a baby around the yard. It turned out that the mother who came to arrest hid the child in a closet so that he would not be taken to an orphanage and given someone else’s name, under which he would be lost forever. This is how, by the way, Blucher’s children disappeared - perhaps they grew up without knowing who their parents were. Tsitsin took that child for himself, which was a real feat at that time,” says Olga Trifonova. – The wives of “enemies of the people” were arrested for allegedly failing to inform. The camp they were in was nicknamed “Beauty Camp.” We have on display a collection of dolls that one of the prisoners in this house learned to make in order to survive. One of Stalin's distant relatives was sentenced to 7 years in solitary confinement. When she returned, her speech apparatus muscles had atrophied - she only mumbled. After some time, everything was restored, and she even managed to regain her apartment in this house! This was very lucky, since most often its residents disappeared forever.

The main secret is the 11th entrance, which does not exist. After the 10th came the 12th, and between them there was a small door. They say that the 11th entrance was used by security officers to listen to residents, as well as to hide someone. It is reliably known that at one time the Soviet agent in South Africa, Dieter Gerhardt, was hidden in the house during his secret visits to the USSR. There is still a legend that there are underground passages from the house leading to the Lubyanka and the Kremlin.

The tours are conducted by Olga Trifonova, the writer’s widow / Andrey Strunin / “Interlocutor”

Modernity

The house was built back in 1931, and it still looks the same as it did then - an attempt to repaint it half a tone lighter in the 2000s ended in a huge scandal. This house has always received increased attention. Otherwise, this is an ordinary residential building. With very high prices for apartments - from 65 million rubles.

– Many foreigners rent apartments in the building. The director of the representative office of the Knauf concern, the head of the Moscow office of Mitsubishi, and employees of the Spanish embassy live here,” Olga Trifonova shared.

From the courtyard of one of the entrances, on the site of the former nomenklatura canteen, there is now the establishment “Special buffet No. 7”. A basement stylized in the Soviet era - residents come here for soup or for negotiations away from prying eyes.

– You know how much Rosenbaum respects our hodgepodge! - the waiters advertise.

Mystic

The gloomy aura and difficult history of the house are associated with the site on which it was built. Initially, there was a swamp where people died, then state criminals were executed at this place, and the path of convicts to places of imprisonment passed here. Nobles who tried to build houses in an attractive location near the river quickly died. And the House on the Embankment was allegedly built on old tombstones.

There weren’t enough memorial plaques for all the residents / Andrey Strunin / “Interlocutor”

They say that sometimes mystical things happen in the house - ancient music, conversations, crying are heard. According to one of the legends, the ghost of the daughter of an arrested military man lives in the entrances, who barricaded herself in the apartment and either died there from hunger or shot herself. Now her silhouette sometimes appears in the dark, not letting us forget the true history of the House on the Embankment.

How to get there

Address: Moscow, st. Serafimovicha, 2.

Metro stations "Kropotkinskaya", "Oktyabrskaya", "Polyanka". The landmark is the Udarnik cinema or the Variety Theater.

What is the price

A visit to the museum costs 100 rubles.

There are discounted and free tickets, including for students (the full list of discounters can be found on the museum’s website).

Excursion – 300 rubles.

The most famous residents

Demyan Bedny, poet
Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka
Georgy Zhukov, Marshal
Olga Lepeshinskaya, ballerina
Yulian Semenov, writer
Vasily Stalin, son of Stalin
Alexey Stakhanov, miner
Yuri Trifonov, writer
Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Marshal
Nikita Khrushchev, Secretary General

Who lives in the house now

Gennady Khazanov, satirist
Alexander Domogarov, actor
Natalya Andreichenko, actress
Patriarch Kirill (the apartment is occupied by his cousins)
Yuri Shevchenko, former Minister of Health
Glucose, singer
Natalya Sindeeva, general director of the Dozhd TV channel

/Quote

“It looked like a ship, ponderous and awkward, without masts, without a rudder and without pipes, a bulky box, an ark filled with people, ready to sail. Where? Nobody knew, no one guessed about it.”

Yu. Trifonov. Novel "Disappearance"

"The house has moved"

The house on the embankment was built on a small island connected to mainland Moscow by the Bolshoi and Maly Kamenny bridges. Previously, this place was occupied by salt warehouses and small mansions. For the construction of a new building, they were dismantled into bricks, but one house was not demolished, but moved - it still stands nearby. This event made such an impression on the poetess Agnia Barto that she dedicated the poem “The House Moved” to him:

If we want, we will swim in the blue sea, in the blue sky! We want to - And we’ll move the house, If the house bothers us!

History of the house

The twelve-story house number two on Serafimovicha Street, occupying an area of about three hectares, received the name “House on the Embankment” from the light hand of the writer Yuri Trifonov, whose family lived here in the 30s of the last century. And officially this building was called the Government House or the House of the Central Executive Committee and Council of People's Commissars of the USSR.

It was built in 1931 specifically for the party elite of that time according to the design of the famous architect Boris Iofan. Famous scientists, heroes of the civil war, heroes of Labor, famous writers and cultural figures lived here. The great ballerina Ulanova lived here, and her memorial apartment still exists in the house.

One of the first residents of the house was Kuibyshev. Zhukov and Tukhachevsky lived here. And apartment number 37 was occupied by Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter.

The Udarnik cinema was built in the house, which at that time was the largest cinema hall in Moscow. A gym, a department store, and a club, which later became the Variety Theater, were opened in this house. We can say that the House on the Embankment became one of the first elite residential complexes in the capital.

Originally it was a hotel-type building. One of the oldest residents of this building, Tamara Ter-Yeghiazaryan, who died in 2009, said that residents moved into apartments that were fully furnished. Everything was here, including dishes. You could even get bed linen. Residents did not need to cook, because there was a dining room and laundry on the ground floor of the building. This is why the kitchens in this house are surprisingly small.

The ceilings in the apartments were covered with artistic paintings, and the floors were oak parquet. Hot water flowed from the taps, which was something incredible at that time. The entire furnishings were thought out to the smallest detail, and the items had inventory numbers; upon entry, residents signed for the receipt of furniture and utensils.

The house on the embankment was a symbol of luxury and power. Many envied the happy new settlers who received housing with a view of the Kremlin, not suspecting what a terrible future awaited many of them. Unfortunately, out of two thousand residents of this house, 700 people became victims of repression during the Great Terror in the 30s of the last century. The tragic fate of people who disappeared from their apartments in their entire families at night left an imprint on the attitude of subsequent generations towards the entire house.

Mini-city opposite the Kremlin

The house on the embankment was designed in such a way that, if desired, its residents could not go beyond its boundaries at all: the complex had everything necessary for a full life. In Soviet times, there was a recreation center named after Rykov (the modern Variety Theater), a cinema "Udarnik", a gym, a department store, a laundry, a canteen, a kindergarten and other institutions. Courtyards with manicured lawns and graceful fountains were wonderful places to stroll.

In fear and luxury: how the legend of “House on the Embankment” was created

Photo: ITAR-TASS

By order of the Moscow City Heritage Service, unauthorized renovation work on the “House on the Embankment”, located on Serafimovicha Street in Moscow, was suspended. Illegal development of the territory of the historical building was discovered in May last year. The owner was then given an order to suspend construction work. Increasing cases of damage to cultural heritage monuments in the capital have caused an increase in fines for causing damage to architectural monuments. M24.ru talks about the history of “House on the Embankment”.

A residential complex for major Soviet figures began to be built on Serafimovich Street in 1931. The author of the project was the architect Boris Iofan. The progress of construction was personally monitored by the head of the USSR government, Alexei Rykov. It was originally planned that the house would be red, like the Kremlin, however, due to a lack of money, the outer walls of the building became gray. The twelve-story building with 505 apartments has become one of the largest residential buildings in Europe. Located on Bolotny Island, the building covers an area of three hectares. The island is connected to the other bank of the Moscow River by the Bolshoi Kamenny and Maly Kamenny bridges. Twenty-five entrances of the House open onto two streets - Serafimovicha and Bersenevskaya embankment.

There are two apartments on each floor of the house. Initially, the apartments had oak parquet, and the artistic paintings on the ceilings - landscapes of different seasons, flowers and fruits - were done by restoration painters specially invited from the Hermitage. The apartments had hot water, gas and telephones, which was considered a luxury in Moscow in the 1930s. In the kitchen there was a hole in the wall intended for a samovar pipe and the exit of a freight elevator on which garbage was taken out. The elevator was in charge of a watchman. According to recollections, the passenger went upstairs accompanied by him, and in order to go down, he had to knock on the metal door of the shaft so that the watchman would hear and send an elevator.

A cafe was added to the “House on the Embankment”

The house included a club (in the premises of which the Variety Theater is now located), a cinema with fifteen hundred seats (in the Udarnik, jazz played before the show and sometimes Utesov and Shulzhenko sang), a gym, a department store, a laundry and an outpatient clinic, a savings bank and a post office , kindergarten and nursery. In the dining room, residents of the house received ready-made meals and dry rations using coupons. Lawns with fountains were laid out in the courtyards of the house. The furniture in the house was unified: chairs, tables, sideboards, etc. had inventory number tags. When residents moved in, they signed an acceptance certificate, which took into account everything - right down to the latches and the oak toilet lid.

The eleventh entrance of the building is non-residential; there are no apartments or elevators. The fact is that during construction in 1930 there was a fire here. The project did not meet the deadlines, and then it was decided to divide the area of the apartments of this entrance between the tenth and twelfth entrances adjacent to it. It is not entirely clear where the space of stairs, staircases and passages remaining after the “redistribution” of apartment square meters went. It is assumed that secret corridors stretched between the walls of the apartments, where Lubyanka employees entered every evening to listen to what the residents were talking about. In addition, the house housed secret apartments for security officers. NKVD officers worked in the house under the guise of commandants, concierges, elevator operators and met here with their informants or hid mysterious residents, such as Soviet intelligence agent in South Africa Dieter Gerhardt.

During the Great Terror of the second half of the 1930s, almost a third of the house’s residents—about 800 people—were repressed. Some apartments had five tenants between 1937 and 1941. In particular, this is discussed in Yuri Trifonov’s story “The House on the Embankment,” the name of which has become a household name for the building on Serafimovich Street. The writer himself also lived in this house as a child. His father Valentin Trifonov was the chairman of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. He also became a victim of Stalin's purges - in 1938 he was shot.

Photo: ITAR-TASS

There is a legend that state security agents entered the stairwells of the house not through the entrances, but through the garbage chute system. Those arrested were taken down by elevator to the basement on the minus third floor, where the trolley was already waiting. From there they were taken through an underground tunnel directly to the Lubyanka. During these years, dark jokers nicknamed the house “Trap for the Bolsheviks” and “House of Pretrial Detention.” And Yuri Trifonov himself called it a “Bad Place,” also meaning that Bolotnaya Square, where it was located, was a place of executions in medieval Moscow.

There is another belief that there is a ghost next to the “House on the Embankment” - the so-called Army Commander’s Daughter. It is believed that the girl’s parents were arrested during the repression during the day at work, and in the evening the voronok came for their daughter. But the girl said that she would not let anyone in, and the first one who entered would be shot with her father’s pistol. This incident was reported to the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Nikolai Yezhov. He ordered to block all the entrances and exits in the apartment, turn off the water, electricity and telephone. The girl called for help for a week, but then the screams died down. It is not known whether she died of hunger or shot herself, but they say that since then at night she can be found on the embankment next to the Variety Theater.

In addition, the name of another unusual resident, Lev Fedotov, is associated with the history of the House on the Embankment. This Moscow schoolboy kept a diary from 1935 to 1941, in which he accurately predicted many historical events, including the beginning of the Great Patriotic War and its course, as well as the American flight to the Moon. At the same time, he wrote that he was not a prophet, but only relied on information about the international situation and his logical reasoning. Unfortunately, this gifted teenager was not destined to live long; in 1941, he died along with other cadets in the Tula region, where the truck they were riding in was bombed by a German plane.

Pink, yellow... grey!

Initially, they planned to paint the building pink so that it would harmonize with the Kremlin standing opposite, and use marble chips for decoration. But the cost of materials and labor was very high, so this idea was abandoned. Another option was a yellow-sand color, but that was also rejected. The final solution was gray - it was chosen for the reason that black smoke was constantly coming from the boiler room located next door, which would quickly render the yellow walls unusable.

Gray bulk

Click to enlarge

— I’ll start compiling a map of writers’ Moscow with the Government House (Serafimovicha St., 2). Yuri Trifonov wrote in his novel “The House on the Embankment”: “A gray bulk hung over the alley, in the mornings it blocked out the sun, and in the evenings radio voices and gramophone music flew from above. There, on the celestial floors, life seemed to be going on completely different from the one below...” Actually, this place has a bad reputation. Architect Boris Iofan wanted to demolish the Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker on Bersenevka for the sake of building a house. This did not happen, but the churchyard nearby was destroyed. Slabs from there were used for the foundation. That is, the building actually stands on gravestones...

A cinema, a kindergarten, a savings bank, and a clinic were set up in the Government House. They wanted to create a paradise for the elite, but it turned out to be hell... A third of the residents disappeared before the start of the war - in prisons, camps, or committed suicide... Yuri Valentinovich’s father was arrested in 1937 and then shot. His mother was also arrested in 1938 and sentenced to 8 years in the camps. But in this house lived people who, so to speak, made the country: world-class scientists, engineers, famous polar pilots - Mazuruk , Vodopyanov (during the war they ferryed American planes from Alaska across Siberia for our front. They practically flew no navigation, no beacons...).

Another very important place for us is the building of the Union of Writers of the USSR with a monument to Leo Tolstoy in front of it at 52 Povarskaya Street. The magnificent architectural monument of the estate of the Dolgoruky princes is the Rostov house, described by Lev Nikolaevich in “War and Peace”. Once upon a time, writers met in this courtyard: they loved to sit on the benches at the entrance to the editorial office of the magazine “Friendship of Peoples”. It was there that the main works of Yuri Trifonov were published.

The estate of the princes Dolgoruky is the house of the Rostovs from War and Peace and the place where writers gathered in our time. Photo: AiF/Eduard Kudryavitsky

Censorship in those days was very cruel... But, apparently, the main censors liked his prose so much that they even let through completely “unsuitable” works. For example, “The Old Man” in 1978 is about decossackization, about the destruction of an entire class of Cossacks. The censor told the editor-in-chief of Friendship of Peoples, Sergei Baruzdin : “This cannot be printed, but it is very well written.” I only asked that there be no clear allusion to Budyonny - in the novel he is one of the most unpleasant characters...

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There was also internal censorship: literary officials themselves suggested to the authorities that “it is undesirable to publish this.” This was the case with “House on the Embankment.” One literary boss went to the then all-powerful “gray eminence” Suslov , who was in charge of ideology: “There is a nasty story about the famous Government House.” To which Suslov unexpectedly said: “Well, we all walked on the edge of a knife back then.” He probably remembered how he trembled before Stalin ...

And Trifonov’s last work, the novel “Time and Place,” was refused to be published in “Friendship of Peoples” in 1980. I believe this was one of the reasons for Yuri Valentinovich’s illness. There was a wall in front of him...

Behind-the-scenes participants in construction

Construction under the leadership of Boris Iofan was actively controlled not only by the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars Alexey Rykov, but also by the head of the OGPU (future NKVD) Genrikh Yagoda. Researchers believe that this is why one of the entrances (No. 11) was made non-residential: so that service employees could wiretap other apartments from it. In addition, the security officers actually lived in the house, hiding behind the work of commandants, concierges and elevator operators.

However, there is another explanation for the mystery of the empty entrance: in 1930, during the construction stage, there was a severe fire in the house, and in order to complete the project on time, the areas of the 11th entrance were divided between two neighboring ones.

"Government House. The Saga of the Russian Revolution"

Since 1931, representatives of the Soviet elite began to live in a residential complex on the Moscow River embankment. The residential building, now better known as the House on the Embankment, became the epicenter of life in the socialist empire. In the book “Government House. The Saga of the Russian Revolution" (AST publishing house), historian Yuri Slezkin, having collected a huge array of details about the life of the inhabitants of this house, creates a complete portrait of the Russian revolution. The organizing committee of the Enlightenment Prize included Slezkine’s book in a “long list” of 25 books, from which finalists and prize winners will be selected. N+1

invites its readers to read a passage explaining why the murder of Sergei Kirov marked the beginning of a moral panic in Soviet society.

"Phone call"

On the evening of December 1, 1934, Khrushchev was called to the telephone.

Kaganovich called: “I’m speaking from the Politburo, I ask you to come here urgently.” I arrive at the Kremlin and enter the hall. Kaganovich met me. He looked kind of scary and alarming, very excited, there were tears in his eyes. I hear: “An accident has occurred. Kirov was killed in Leningrad.”

The deputy manager of the Military Chemical Trust and the former representative of the Polish Communist Party at the executive committee of the Comintern, Vaclav Bogutsky, found the call at home. With him (in apartment 342) were his wife, a librarian from the Lenin Institute, Mikhalina Iosifovna, and their nine-year-old son Vladimir, who many years later wrote his memoirs.

One evening my father was called to the telephone. He came up as usual. But suddenly, during the conversation, his face began to change dramatically. With deep emotion, he asked separate fragmentary questions. We didn’t hear any answers, but the tone of the conversation and the expression on his face alarmed my mother and me. When he hung up the phone, tears welled up in his eyes. Mom worriedly asked who called, what happened? He gave the name of the caller (it was someone he knew from the apparatus of the Comintern or the Central Committee, I don’t remember now) and said quietly: “Kirov was killed.” I have never seen such an expression of grief on my father’s face...

The parents of Inna Gaister, who was also nine years old at the time, noticed that their neighbors on the landing, the construction manager of the Agricultural Exhibition Isaac Korostyshevsky and his wife, grieved less than they did. “Mom said,” Inna said, “that they don’t worry so much because they don’t have children.” Kirov's death became a personal tragedy, which different Soviet families experienced according to their emotional experience and political consciousness. But everyone understood that, as Khrushchev said, “everything has changed.”

Agnes Argyropulo and Sergei Mironov were in Dnepropetrovsk, where Mironov headed the regional department of the NKVD. On December 1, Agnessa came home and saw Mironov’s cap in the hallway.

I was surprised that he was already at home, and quickly went into the office. I see him sitting in his overcoat, he hasn’t even undressed, his face is alien, his thoughts are far away. I already understood: something happened. - What happened to you? — excitedly. He said briefly: “Kirov was killed.” - Which Kirov? - Well, remember, I showed you at the station in Leningrad. I have remembered. I have a very good visual memory. True, in Leningrad I saw Kirov briefly. Once Seryozha had a few free days, and we decided to “shake off” to Leningrad: from Moscow on the “Red Arrow” back and forth, there we’ll have a day of “partying”. At the station Seryozha showed me and said in a whisper: “Kirov is the secretary of the regional committee.” Of average height, with an inviting face, he greeted us warmly and said: “What, did you decide to visit our Leningrad?” The head of the NKVD Directorate of the Leningrad Region was Medved, then Zaporozhets also appeared there. We knew them both well from the sanatorium in Sochi. Philip the bear is big and dense. Zaporozhets - tall, slender, became famous in the civil war, was wounded in the leg, and limped. Zaporozhets's wife Rose was a beauty. They didn’t have children for a long time, there was a rumor that now she was finally in her fourth month. Every day she went for a long walk in different parts - seven or eight kilometers there, seven or eight kilometers back - she trained, strengthened herself for childbirth... - Killed? - I was surprised. - By whom? — The killer was detained, surname Nikolaev. “And he added with a sharp smile: “Comrade Leningrad security officers are doing a bad job!” This would not have happened to him! But there was also relief that it didn't happen in his area.

Stalin's adopted son Artem Sergeev (who turned thirteen in 1934) said literally the same thing as Khrushchev: “After that, everything changed.” Sergeev’s close friend Anatoly Granovsky (son of the director of the Berezniki chemical plant, Mikhail Granovsky) wrote approximately the same thing:

This news made a subtle change in everything. People acted as if the doctor had told them that they had a tumor and were waiting to find out whether it was cancerous. They stopped discussing their condition and speculating - they just waited. However, it soon turned out that the Trotskyists were to blame. I had little idea what this word meant, but I knew that we were talking about something monstrous. I believed everything and could not imagine what this one shot would lead to.

<..>

***

Scapegoats are sacrificed always and everywhere - symbolically (in myths, films, temples) and in the flesh (while Satanists were hunted in the USA, sorcerers and traitors were burned alive in South Africa, and in the former Yugoslavia the union republics were “ethnically cleansed”). Some societies manage to limit sacrifice to special circumstances; others have to improvise acts of cleansing during sudden disasters. Sects (groups of fellow believers opposing the corrupt world) are, by definition, besieged fortresses. Millenarian sects (sects preparing for the apocalypse) are in a state of permanent moral panic. The more feverish the expectation, the more implacable the enemy; the more implacable the enemy, the more important internal cohesion; The more important internal cohesion is, the more necessary scapegoats are.

The Münster Anabaptists expelled Catholics and Lutherans, introduced compulsory adult baptism (compulsory sect membership for all citizens) and concluded that none of the faithful were “perfect as their heavenly Father is perfect.” Taiping warriors had lost the ability to distinguish between the “Manchu barbarians” at the gates of the heavenly capital and the hidden enemies within. Robespierre argued that the true “enemies of the people” are not the aristocrats and foreigners crowded at the border, but the citizens “corrupting morality and insulting the civic conscience.” Armageddon requires a witch hunt.

Egypt could have been punished with many plagues, but when the infection spread to the chosen people, Moses stood at the gate of the camp and said:

Who is the Lord's, come to me! And all the sons of Levi gathered to him. And he said to them, Thus says the Lord God of Israel: Put every man his sword on his thigh, go through the camp from gate to gate and back, and kill every man his brother, every man his friend, every man his neighbor. And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: and about three thousand of the people fell that day. For Moses said: Today consecrate your hands to the Lord, every one of you in his son and in his brother, that He may bestow upon you a blessing today.

Renegades not only ally themselves with an external enemy; they are worse than external enemies because they have learned the way of righteousness. As Peter wrote in the Second Epistle: “It would be better for them not to know the way of righteousness, than, having known it, to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them. But what happens to them is according to the true proverb: the dog returns to his vomit, and the washed pig goes to wallow in the mud.”

On the eve of the End, all enemies are connected with each other and with unrighteous thoughts. Those who make a conscious choice are worse than those who did not hear the holy commandment. Hidden enemies are worse than villains with a seal on their forehead. In millenarian sects (and unitary states with sectarian expectations, like Aragon and Castile under the “Catholic Monarchs”) all enemies are malicious and hidden, and there are no enemies more dangerous than false prophets.

Satan is a fallen angel; Antichrist is a false Christ; Judas is an apostle invested with special trust. Korah, who asked Moses why he “put himself above the people of the Lord,” is a Levite placed by the Lord above his people (chosen from all nations). Aaron, who departed from God by making the golden calf, is the brother of Moses and the first priest. Miriam, who joined Aaron in asking “whether the Lord spoke to Moses alone,” is their elder sister and the savior of the baby Moses. The Jewish god did not disdain nepotism (Korea was swallowed up by the earth, Miriam returned after a seven-day exile, and Aaron was forgiven). His incorruptible heirs could not afford this. In a sermon on the massacre of the Levites, Calvin told the Genevans: “By mercilessly killing your brothers, you demonstrate devotion to God, for you transgress the laws of nature in the name of the supremacy of God.”

All sectarians practice introspection and mutual observation with the aim of exposing dissent. Millenarians are more suspicious and optimistic than others because today's enemies are the last. As Peter wrote (contrary to his own logic):

For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but, having bound them in the bonds of hellish darkness, handed them over to be judged for punishment; and if he did not spare the first world, but in eight souls he preserved the family of Noah, the preacher of righteousness, when he brought the flood upon the world of the wicked; and if, having condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to destruction, he turned them into ashes, setting an example for future wicked people, and delivered righteous Lot, tired of the treatment between furiously depraved people (for this righteous man, living among them, was tormented daily in his righteous soul, seeing and hearing lawless deeds) - then, of course, the Lord knows how to deliver the pious from temptation, and to preserve the wicked for the day of judgment, for punishment.

The fact that it has happened before is the best guarantee that it will not happen again. Or rather, it will happen only once. The wicked are born like animals, “to be caught and destroyed,” and like animals they will die. This time it's forever.

***

The Bolsheviks lived in a besieged fortress. The Revolution and Civil War were accompanied by “concentrated violence” against easily identifiable enemies at the top of Bukharin’s list (“parasitic strata,” “unproductive administrative aristocracy,” “bourgeois entrepreneur-organizers,” and “administrative bureaucracy”). The exhortations of the 1920s were an attempt to overcome the great disappointment, similar to 2 Peter (whose main theme was the apparent failure of prophecy). The third and decisive battle was the Stalinist revolution against the rest of the list, including the “technical intelligentsia,” the “wealthy peasantry,” the “middle and partly the petty urban bourgeoisie,” and the “clergy, even unskilled.” The 17th Party Congress declared victory, conditionally forgave those who doubted, and ushered in the kingdom of the saints.

There are no open enemies left. The majority of Soviet citizens turned into “non-party communists.” The state did not insist on collective baptism and expulsion of nominal infidels (as in the case of the Münster Anabaptists and “reconquered” Spain), but the result was the same: all subjects became by definition believers, and any dissent was a manifestation of apostasy (rather than enemy resistance). Maintaining internal unity required not concentrated violence, but “a cross-section of the soul” (as the administrative director of the New Theater put it when discussing “the other side of the heart”). Bukharin called this discipline, “the compulsory nature of which is felt the more strongly, the less voluntary, internal discipline, that is, the less revolutionary a given stratum or a given group of the proletariat is. Even the proletarian vanguard, which is united in the revolution party, in the communist party, establishes such compulsory self-discipline in its ranks; it is felt here by many components of this avant-garde, little since it coincides with internal motives, but nevertheless it exists.” Bukharin experienced this himself more than once. After the victory celebration, which he joined from the convoy, all Soviet citizens found themselves in his position.

How effective were self-discipline and coercive discipline? On the one hand, the apartments were filled with sons-in-law and tablecloths, Don Quixotes were replaced by Sancho Pansami, and Israel Weitzer married Natalia Sats and bought a suit. On the other hand, school, radio and “work on oneself” successfully educated such “non-party Bolsheviks” as Volodya Ivanov and Leva Fedotov. Socialism was a matter of time, and time was elusive but predictable. As Peter wrote: “One thing must not be hidden from you, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack in fulfilling his promise, as some consider slackness; but he is patient with us, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” The same is true of history, which waited patiently while the economic preconditions lined up and Volodya Ivanov and Leva Fedotov worked on themselves. Enemies stood at the gates, hens and roosters got in the way, but in 1934 it seemed that the Bolsheviks would follow Peter’s advice, keep the faith and not succumb to the admonitions of arrogant scolders. And suddenly, on the first day of the last month of the magical year, the phone rang.

***

Why did the murder of a prominent but unremarkable official lead to a moral panic that “changed everything”?

The first reason is internal. The Soviet Union was a besieged fortress surrounded by capitalism, and the Government House was in the Soviet Union. The theory that all Soviet people converted overnight to the communist faith meant that open enemies became hidden, forced discipline ceased to be effective, and Kaverin’s interpretation of the “other side of the heart” (according to which friend and enemy are twin brothers) turned out to be correct. The Government House was under siege in the Soviet Union, and the Old Bolsheviks were in the Government House. While Volodya Ivanov and Leva Fedotov were working on themselves, the hens and roosters were doing their job (at a pace that the builders of eternal houses could not even dream of). The saints ruled the swamp.

The second reason is external. The Soviet Union had always been a besieged fortress, but by the time the 17th Congress declared victory, the productive metaphor had become a geopolitical reality. In the east, Japan occupied Manchuria and approached the borders of the USSR. In the West, the birthplace of Marxism (and the traditional antipode and partly the teacher of everything Russian) was captured by a hostile millenarian sect. Fascism, which the Bolsheviks considered the bestial grin of capitalism, was a manifestation of tribal resentment of the Old Testament type. The fallen nations of Europe rose up against Babylon in an attempt to restore their lost dignity. Different parties acted with varying degrees of determination, but only in Germany did the revolutionary movement reach apocalyptic proportions, seize power in the state, proclaim the third and final Reich and begin to fulfill its own prophecy. The Jews of Europe became for the German Fuhrer what Idumea and the “tall Saveans” were for the ancient Jews, and the white people were for the “Israelites” of Enoch Mgijima and the Tafari race. Speaking in the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, Hitler said: “If international financial Jewry succeeds, in Europe and beyond, in plunging humanity into another world war, the consequence will not be the Bolshevization of humanity and the victory of Jewry, but the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe.”

Like the Bolsheviks (and unlike most other millenarians), Hitler was able to fulfill his prophecy. Like the Bolsheviks (and most other millenarians), he rebelled against the secret sources of unjust power. The enemy was the same, but the Bolsheviks considered it a class, and the Nazis considered it a tribe. Both considered their main competitor to be a tool of Babylon. Both followed Marx, but Hitler did not know this, and the Bolsheviks did not know this about Hitler and rarely read the introduction to the "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" and the article on the "Jewish Question". The last and decisive battle (Endkampf) was to find out who is the beast and who is trampling the winepress of rage and anger. To win, it was necessary to drain the swamp.

Read more:
Slezkine, Yuri Lvovich
. Government House. The Saga of the Russian Revolution / Yuri Slezkin. - Moscow: AST Publishing House: CORPUS, 2021. - 976 p.

Inhabitants of the House on the Embankment

The most influential people of that time lived in the House of the Council of People's Commissars: scientists, party leaders, writers, composers, artists, directors. According to rumors, each candidate for a new tenant was personally approved by Joseph Stalin. Among the most famous inhabitants of the house were marshals Georgy Zhukov and Mikhail Tukhachevsky, director Grigory Alexandrov, writer Mikhail Koltsov, choreographer Igor Moiseev and Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva.

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Tuesday, October 30, 2021 09:09 + to the Galyshenka

all posts by the author One of the most famous buildings in Moscow - in fact, it is a city within a city - with its completely autonomous infrastructure, with its unique contingent of high-ranking residents, with a dramatic interweaving of destinies and life stories during times of repression and regime change. The house on the embankment, located on Bolotny Island (formal address, Serafimovicha Street, building 2), opposite the Kremlin, was built in 1931 specifically for the elite of the new, Soviet society. The first residents moved in in the middle of the decade. And soon the Great Terror broke out - and many apartments were empty. In place of the disappeared citizens, new ones were settled, but their fate was often sad. Since then, the monument of constructivism has been surrounded by an aura of unkind rumors. Someone talks about the ghosts of old residents appearing in the apartments. Some - about a secret passage that went straight into the kitchens so that it would be easier to arrest eminent residents without unnecessary noise. One way or another, the House on the Embankment really preserves the memory of many tragedies of those years. The list of residents who perished in the Gulag far exceeds the list of those killed in the Great Patriotic War... The house on the embankment is not only “a symbol of the terrible years of Russia,” but also a symbol of the creation of a new country; people who created the industry of the Soviet Union, and heroic polar pilots lived here. Do not forget that in that short pre-war period the country's GDP was increased 70 times! But of course you also need to remember the price. The house was called differently: the House of Government, the First House of Soviets, the House of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars... In 1976, Yuri Trifonov's story “The House on the Embankment” was published, in which the writer described the life and morals of the residents of the government house, many of whom lived in the 1930s were arrested and left their comfortable apartments for Stalin's camps or were shot. Thanks to the efforts of Yuri Trifonov’s daughter, a museum was opened in the house itself in memory of the repressed residents of the “House on the Embankment.” The need to build a house for the families of government members and high-ranking leaders arose in 1918, when hundreds of employees moved from Petrograd to Moscow after the state capital was moved there, the housing problem had to be solved. On June 24, 1927, a decision was made to begin construction of a house for senior employees designed by architect Boris Iofan. The construction site occupied a block on the artificial Bolotny Island, or rather an incompletely drained swamp that formed back in the 18th century after the construction of the Vodootvodny Canal; in addition, the ancient All Saints Cemetery remained here. One of the legends is connected with the location of the house - supposedly this predetermined the death of its residents. But the main thing was functionality. The house is located on an island, it was relatively isolated from the common people, but was in close proximity to the Kremlin. building a house on the embankment Construction. 1928:. From the collection of the Museum of Moscow. At the time construction began, the banks were still earthen, but soon the embankment was dressed in granite and became a place for walks for the residents of the house; a pier for ships and even a swimming pool were equipped right there. A pier existed here before; stone and sand were delivered on barges, and peasants in bast shoes dragged building materials to the shore. The permanent exhibition of the museum presents the history of the construction of the house (drawings, models, apartment plans, documentary photographs). The house was designed by Boris Iofan and his architectural bureau in the style of late constructivism. For Moscow at that time it was a grandiose building. The building was high-rise - in those years in Moscow they did not build higher than 6-7 floors, and the House on the Embankment had, depending on the roof configuration, up to 12 floors, 505 apartments, when the apartments were compacted into “communal apartments”, more than 6,000 people lived in the building - the population small town. This is not exactly a house; in the usual view, it is a whole complex of closed buildings with courtyards and passages. The area of the territory is about three hectares, and the building complex has 25 entrances. The building of the house was supposed to be made ultra-modern in order to solve all the everyday issues of the intellectual elite of the Soviet nation, which was supposed to direct all its energy to solving much more important state problems. Indeed, in the early 30s, the majority of Muscovites did not have access to sewerage and central water supply. The House on the Embankment had not only all these benefits of civilization. Even the ready-made furnishings of the rooms were luxurious - oak furniture, according to designer sketches by Boris Iofanatipova, but the residents could not change or change anything at their own discretion. The rich property was state property, with inventory numbers, and new residents signed an acceptance certificate for the entire contents of the apartment. One day, the wife of historian Alexander Svanidze got rid of the provided headset and ran into trouble because an inspection took place once a year. I had to pay a huge amount. There was also a kindergarten on the roof, a cinema, a dry cleaner, a canteen, where initially the residents of the house were fed for free, several shops, a dry cleaner, a tennis court and even a club (now the Variety Theater under the direction of Gennady Khazanov). Lawns with fountains were laid out in the courtyards (after the war, the fountains were dismantled and flower beds were installed). But the biggest miracle for Muscovites in the 1930s was... elevators. The guys living in the house invited the girls on a date - to ride in the elevator! One of the legends of the House on the Embankment was also associated with elevators. Allegedly, there was a portal in the house to another dimension, where people entered, but from where there was no return exit. But of course, many knew what kind of portal this was... At the height of Stalin’s repressions, no one asked unnecessary questions if, in a couple of nights, all the people suddenly disappeared from the apartment opposite. The less you know, the better you sleep, and there is a chance that they won’t come to you in the middle of the night on a freight elevator - the House, of course, was wiretapped. Yes, Stalin’s repressions affected many, but they naturally affected the highest party and government officials very strongly. The Museum of the House on the Embankment has two lists: those killed in the Great Patriotic War and those repressed. So, the list of those repressed is much longer. The construction was supervised by People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Genrikh Yagoda, who did not fail to use the new house in the interests of his department. On the ground floor there were safe apartments for security officers, and in entrance No. 11 there was only a staircase and windows - no apartments, no elevator. According to the conspiracy theory, the apartments of high-ranking officials who had barely celebrated their housewarming and immediately found themselves under the surveillance of the “competent authorities” were bugged from this entrance. One of the secrets of the House on the Embankment is connected with the absence of the 11th entrance, whether there was a direct passage to the Kremlin and straight to the Lubyanka, or an exit to the basements where residents were shot, and there was even a berth for a submarine... A small light submarine without a massive periscope, in order to swim in the shallow Moscow River it could well take a VIP person on board and save his life in the event of a palace coup or repression.

In the house, which until 1991 was on the special balance of the KGB, only employees of various departments and services, “responsible workers”, heroes of the Civil War, old Bolsheviks, outstanding scientists and writers, employees of the Comintern, heroes of the war in Spain, as well as service workers could live in the house. personnel with an impeccable worker-peasant biography and willingness to serve in the Cheka. The most prestigious were considered to be the entrances with windows overlooking the Kremlin. There were six- and seven-room apartments, and of course there were also one-room apartments, overlooking the service premises. Apartments were given according to rank, and not according to money, as now. By the standards of those times, the residents were very lucky - separate comfortable and fully furnished apartments, decorated with frescoes and stucco. There are elevators, hot and cold water, full provision. No worries or hassle - others could only dream of such luxury. Live, as they say, and be happy. But this joy was poisoned every day by the poison of fear - “chekists” in black-black jackets and black-black crispy boots, coming at night. They took the accused and took him to an unknown direction. Then they came for his wife. She was exiled to ALZHIR (Akmola camp for wives of traitors to the motherland in Kazakhstan), and her children were sent to an orphanage. In orphanages, children were renamed, and it was incredibly difficult to find them later. The children of Stalin himself lived in the House for some time - Svetlana and Vasily, the son of Felix Dzerzhinsky - Yan, the architect of the House on the embankment Boris Iofan (he designed it himself - and lived there); Among the first residents are Kuibyshev, Marshal Zhukov, Marshal Tukhachevsky (shot in 1937); Marshal Bagramyan, General Kamanin, future Secretary General Nikita Khrushchev, scientists and technical specialists, rocket and space technology designer Glushko, pilot and participant in Arctic expeditions Mikhail Vodopyanov, oncologist surgeon academician Nikolai Blokhin, poet Demyan Bedny, and also Artem Mikoyan, Alexey Kosygin, writer Alexander Serafimovich, in whose honor the street on which the House is located is named. Choreographer Igor Moiseev. The apartment of the famous ballerina Ulanova has been preserved in all its details - a huge number of people who influenced History. /fotki.yandex.ru/next/users/evge-chesnokov/album/173001/view/962819?page=1″ target=”_blank”>

vge-chesnokov/album/173001/view/962817?page=1″ target=”_blank”> Separately among the celebrities who lived in the House on the Embankment is the name of the writer Yuri Trifonov - the author of the story “The House on the Embankment”, which later replaced the original "Government House". Yuri Trifonov’s family lived in this house and his parents found themselves in the millstone of Stalin’s repressions in 1937-1938. The story is based on real events that happened to the residents of the House.

November 2, 1989 is considered the birthday of the local history museum “House on the Embankment”, the director of which is Olga Romanovna Trifonova: “We are in the former apartment, to put it roughly, a guardhouse, and to put it politely, the guard of the first entrance, the most prestigious entrance of the House on the embankment. After the redevelopment, the museum received another room where the interiors of the living room were recreated. The museum was organized by a resident of the house, a woman of fantastic energy, Tamara Andreevna Ter-Eghiazaryan (1908-2005). Over time, the folk museum was transformed into a municipal one, and then into a state one.

Visitors are greeted by a stuffed penguin, once brought from a northern expedition by pilot Ilya Mazuruk (either the penguin climbed onto the plane itself, or the pilots took the animal as a souvenir.

the habitat of party workers and the Soviet intelligentsia of the 1930s was recreated (personal belongings, photographs, original furniture made according to the sketches of the chief architect of the house B.M. Iofan)

All exhibits were donated to the museum by the residents of the house, some were even found by chance. The previous generation dies or sells apartments, new residents move in, they take priceless evidence of history and cultural values to the trash near the house: old photographs of famous people, household items and clothing. For example, they may take out a general's uniform of a major Soviet military leader or glass photographic plates of a famous photographer. And how many interesting things were told by the old residents of the House on the Embankment! excursions are conducted with a gramophone on. Personal belongings of the residents of the house. A fragment of the Museum’s exhibition “House on the Embankment” The archives are of particular value and pride to the museum staff. The correspondence of the repressed residents of the building, numerous documents, even personal notes and diaries have been preserved here. The NKVDEShnik's cap is not real. Both victims and executioners lived in the House on the Embankment: the bloody G. Yagoda, the People's Commissar-murderer Yezhov, Vyshinsky, Kaganovich, or the man who participated in the execution of the royal family (later Philip Goloshchekin was arrested on charges of Trotskyism and shot). Here everything is mixed up, as in the entire Russian history of the twentieth century. A portrait of Stalin, drawn by one of the residents, Yuri Trifonov in the novel “Time and Place” wrote a great phrase: “These were the times of greatness of small deeds.” For example, the creator of the Botanical Garden, Nikolai Tsitsin, once saw boys with a baby in the yard. It turned out that the guys heard crying, secretly climbed into the neighbors’ sealed apartment and found a baby in the closet. The academician, favored by the authorities, did not pass by, took the child of the “enemies of the people” and ordered his housekeeper to take him to the village. So he saved one life. Now it is already difficult to separate legends from facts... Among the most “famous” ghosts of the house is the nameless daughter of the army commander. Allegedly, her father and mother were arrested during the day at work, and when they came for her in the evening, the girl refused to open the door, threatening the security officers with her father’s revolver. According to legend, they did not take risks and simply boarded up the windows and doors to the apartment, turning off the water, electricity and telephone. The girl asked for help for a long time, then the screams from the walled-up apartment died down. Since then, the ghost of the army commander's daughter allegedly sometimes appears at night on the embankment in front of the Variety Theater. In the house with which so many tragically cut short destinies are connected, a real story happened with one of the modern residents of the house, who was pursued by a poltergeist. When they looked up the archives of her apartment, it turned out that during the years of repression, all the residents were shot. But were there many such apartments in the House on the Embankment? In those years, entire families were shot and exiled, and the vacated areas were quickly repopulated. Another legend of the House on the Embankment, the boy prophet Leva Fedotov, who in his diaries allegedly predicted the Second World War and that the USSR would initially suffer heavy losses, and the war would become protracted.

In the center of the hall there is an installation dedicated to the people who died in 1937, and nice people from some factory in Ostankino helped find pieces of old-style barbed wire. The House on the Embankment Museum is not only a museum of the history of all the inhabitants of the house of the 1930s-50s, but also the history of the country. A concentrate of history, culture, and politics has been preserved here. Material evidence of past life has been preserved here: household items, photographs. Surprisingly, people of that era continue to live here, some have passed their 100th anniversary. A large number of centenarians lived and continue to live in the House on the Embankment. Since 1997, every year in March, exhibitions and “Centennial” meetings have been held, dedicated to the memory of those residents of the House who would have turned 100 years old in the past year. One of the halls is given over to temporary exhibitions dedicated to the destinies of the residents of the house: an exhibition of books written by the residents of the house, and books about its residents: T.I. Schmidt "House on the embankment. People and Destinies" (M., 2009); book by T. A. Ter-Eghiazaryan (co-author) “Windows on the Kremlin” and others. Photographs by Igor and Larisa Shiryaev; from the archive of Artem Zadikyan. Official website: https://museum-dom.ru https://www.gulagmuseum.org/showObject.do?language=1&object=57926 https://evgechesnokov.livejournal.com/78191.html https://happy- galla.ru/kuda-poyti/dom-na-naberezhnoy https://voxxter.ru/exposition/1371/?city_id=313#prettyPhoto https://fasolki.ru/2014/08/review-of-the-excursion-house -on-the-embankment/ https://www.interesmir.ru/fotograf-artem-zadikyan-rasskazyivaet-dom-na-naberezhnoy/ https://iz.ru/657346/evgeniia-priemskaia/moskva-prizrachnaia

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House with the ghosts

The house on the embankment occupies a special place in the city's folklore. A legend has been known since the 1930s that says that there is an underground passage from it to the Lubyanka. Residents of the house also say that you can see the ghost of the army commander’s daughter in it. Allegedly, the parents of one girl were arrested at the service, and when the security officers came for their daughter, she, armed with her father’s revolver, promised to shoot anyone who tried to enter. Then the head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov, gave the order to turn off all communications and wall up the girl in the apartment.

Heart attack saved a life

Art critic, sociologist Anatoly Golubovsky: In general, my family has been living here since 1935, the apartment was given to my grandfather Boris Volin. He was a professional revolutionary; during the October revolution, together with the astronomer Shtenberg, he fired at the Kremlin, knocking out the cadets from there. Grandfather was in charge, and the rest were calculating trajectories so that the strikes would not damage the Kremlin. In 1933-35 he was the head of Glavlit, then deputy people's commissar of education of the RSFSR Bubnov. They quarreled constantly, and once during a quarrel, according to family legend, Bubnov threw a paperweight at his grandfather. He went home and wrote a letter to the Central Committee saying that he could not work with Bubnov. It was the terrible year 1937.

Photo: Vladimir Yarotsky, m24.ru

As a result of this quarrel, my grandfather suffered a heart attack, and for almost a year he spent time in hospitals and sanatoriums. At this time, the entire People's Commissariat of Education was destroyed, so his heart attack essentially saved him. Grandfather died in 1956.

Photo: Vladimir Yarotsky, m24.ru

The atmosphere in the house in the 1930s was truly difficult. My mother said that when she returned home from school, she always took the elevator to the floor above. She made sure that there was no NKVD officer standing in the passage - otherwise it would have been clear that a search or arrest was underway - and only after that did she go down to her floor and go home. But she couldn't imagine her life without a home. And in the 1980s, she became an active participant in the initiative group to create the House on the Embankment museum.

Photo: Vladimir Yarotsky, m24.ru

Expert opinion

The museum was created in 1989 on the initiative of local residents. There was still a red corner in the house, a propaganda wall at the party committees, where wall newspapers, party decisions and other important and unimportant things hang. And the residents, under the leadership of a very active woman, Tamara Andreevna Ter-Eghiazaryan, set up a people's museum in this corner: photographs, newspaper clippings, plus they began to collect an archive. They called me and invited me to look, and in 1998 they offered me to become the director of the museum. I did not intend to take this position, since it seemed to me that being a director was not for me. But Tamara Andreevna persuaded me.

Photo: Vladimir Yarotsky, m24.ru

The museum has a unique collection of habitats from the 1930s, the true realities of the era. And a large archive, which is replenished by residents. There are touching stories. So, one day an elderly man came to us and said that he was raised in an orphanage, where he was given a name, but it seemed to him that he lived in this house. We began to question him, and indeed, based on fragments of memories, we established who he was and what his real name was. After all, children of repressed parents often ended up in orphanages.

What is my relationship with home? Yuri Valentinovich avoided this house, did not like to remember it, avoided it. And this was passed on to me. The house evoked a kind of cautious and anxious attitude in me, and the shadow of this has remained to this day.”

Olga Trifonova

Director of the Museum “House on the Embankment”