These Walls Have Ears - Dropping in on neighbors was risky for residents of Stalin's skyscrapers

Moscow Times ^ | October 15, 2004 | Tim Wall

[Tailgunner Joe]

Neighbors: Can't live with them, can't shoot them. But you can always inform on them to the authorities.

Such were the conditions in which poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko found himself when he moved into the giant Taganka vysotka on Kotelnicheskaya Naberezhnaya, or Ironmonger's Quay, in the late 1960s. Over the years, the vysotka, one of the city's seven original Stalin-era skyscrapers, became home to a glittering list of writers, artists, actors, ballerinas and architects. But as Yevtushenko and other residents would learn, the building was riddled with telephone taps and listening devices tucked away in ventilation shafts, while many neighbors were, in fact, "cockroaches" spying for the KGB.

Like all of Stalin's "seven sisters," the Taganka vysotka was created to show off the accomplishments of the Soviet system and to rival skyscrapers in the capitalist West. Its "wedding cake" mishmash of architectural styles -- produced by three of Stalin's favorite architects together with gangs of zeks, or convicted prisoners -- has often been derided, yet today is back in vogue among upwardly mobile Muscovites.

That Anne Nivat, a French journalist with the left-wing paper Liberation, uses the vysotka as a prism for viewing Russia is an intriguing continuation of her earlier work. In her award-winning "Chienne de Guerre," from 2001, she transmitted an account of six months in Chechnya through conversations with women caught up in the conflict. This time, Nivat stays closer to home, as the main characters are her own neighbors. Like quite a few Moscow expatriates, she herself lived in the Taganka vysotka.

Nivat's approach is disarmingly simple: Knock on your neighbors' doors, ask them to tell you their life story and turn the tape on. The resulting first-person interviews -- at times verbatim and often overlong -- form the meat of the book, an English translation from Nivat's original French-language edition.

Despite the distortions that inevitably come with playing Chinese whispers from Russian to French to English, the result makes for compelling reading from a variety of perspectives. While some of Nivat's neighbors have lived in the vysotka since its completion in 1953, others -- such as former juggler and acrobat Felix Dzerzhinsky, great-grandnephew of the founder of Vladimir Lenin's secret police -- inherited apartments from their relatives.

The KGB was a constant presence in Soviet times, and Galya Yevtushenko, the poet's second wife, recalls how agents listened in on her 22nd-floor apartment from the basement. But her most scathing contempt is reserved for the neighbors: "Some of the residents of this monster are monsters themselves."

Chief "cockroach" on both Yevtushenkos' lists is well-known composer Nikolai Bogoslovsky, who, the poet's wife maintains, held the rank of KGB lieutenant colonel. He later provided evidence against her in the couple's messy divorce case, she says acidly. Bogoslovsky also merits special mention in Yevtushenko's poem, "The Cockroaches": "The composer Bogoslovsky / Strikes a chord / And onto the keyboard hops / A slippery little reddish devil."

Sixteen floors down, Nivat meets the man himself -- now in his 60s -- and his wife, Alla, 44 years his junior. But while Bogoslovsky, jovial in a jogging shellsuit, is happy to chew over his musical career and famous neighbors, inquiries about whether he ever sent anyone to the gulag draw a blank. "He tells a joke or a story to distract me from the subject," Nivat writes, leaving it to the reader to decide whether to believe the composer's tale. Against her better judgment, she admits, she hands over $70 to the Bogoslovskys for the interview -- the only time she pays for her neighbors' recollections.

Some of the fear that Galya Yevtushenko associates with the vysotka comes out through moments of black humor, as when Nivat describes U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy and his wife trying to shake their KGB tail after paying a visit to poet Andrei Voznesensky on the 8th floor. When the KGB agent jumps into the elevator with them as they leave the apartment, causing it to stall, Joan Kennedy turns to her hosts and pointedly says, "I think there is one too many of us." Without a word, the KGB man steps out of the elevator, catching up with the Americans in the lobby after racing down the stairs.

In another revealing anecdote, KGB "mourners" arrive uninvited year after year at memorial wakes for poet Konstantin Paustovsky. After seven years have gone by, relatives find an elegant solution -- setting up a table for their unwelcome guests in a separate room, then shutting the door on them.

Yet the darkest chapter in the vysotka's history comes at its very start, with the construction of the building by the slaves of Stalin's gulag. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, surviving residents have little to say on the subject, even though those who remember the prisoners working behind the barbed wire in the building's courtyard say it was no secret. Andrei Bulichyov, who moved into the vysotka in 1953, recalls how local shop workers sympathized with the prisoners. "The men sometimes threw love letters in bottles weighted with stones to the young shop girls who dared approach them," he tells Nivat.

Like many of Stalin's pet projects, the vysotki grew out of Soviet pride. "What will happen if [foreign visitors] walk around Moscow and find no skyscrapers?" Stalin is quoted as saying. "They will make unfavorable comparisons with capitalist cities."

Once the vysotki were built, the question of who should live in them took center stage. KGB chief Lavrenty Beria was of the opinion that loyalty should be rewarded, and drew up a list of well-connected sidekicks. But Stalin was furious at the very idea ("Tell me, then," he reportedly said, "besides these people, nobody else lives in Moscow?"), and the list was quickly revised to include a host of prominent intelligentsia, including Paustovsky and Bolshoi ballerina Galina Ulanova. Soviet screen idol Klara Luchko arrived a few years later. "Who doesn't live in this building!" she says to Nivat, recalling her joy at moving in.

During Nikita Khrushchev's thaw, the vysotka's demographics changed. Prominent intellectuals were shunned as dissidents, while the all-important propiska, or registration, changed hands after residents died, got divorced or just moved away. For those who remembered Stalin's purges, the vysotki, with their oppressive past, were less than fashionable. And for those who didn't, as Nivat discovers, many of the one-time chief tormenters had softened into harmless little old folks.

With the resurgence of interest in Stalinist real estate under Mayor Yury Luzhkov today, however, the vysotki are back in style and imitations springing up. As Nivat writes of Stalin: "He may have been a murderous tyrant, but he was good for property values." City authorities can claim credit for preserving much of the Taganka vysotka's original frontispiece, with its shops, restaurants and refurbished Soviet-era Illusion cinema. Inside, the building is undergoing changes too, as an influx of foreigners and New Russians brings along a new wave of apartment renovations, some traditional, some not.

Modernization comes at a price, of course, and it is important not to forget the building's past. As Nivat implies, an important piece of the puzzle has yet to be put into place -- the remembrance and understanding of what once took place within the vysotka's walls. After all, no matter how nice the makeover, nobody wants the cockroaches back.

[thegreatbeast]

Interesting. I hadn't heard anything about Yevtushenko for some 30 + years. They used to allow him over here , I think, and speak of him as some critical, new voice. My God, he would appear on Ed Sullivan!

[Erasmus]

[PAR35]

Appears to be a different building than the one which appears in the story.

[Nathan Jr.]

The Wrigley Building in Chicago, I believe.

[nw_arizona_granny]

Edward Kennedy in Russia -Ping.

[Velveeta]

Follow the vodka...and there he is.

[Donna Lee Nardo]

Thanks for the ping, Ruth.

[Donna Lee Nardo]

"Follow the vodka...and there he is."

LOL. Too funny (and true!)