“Here lived Vladimir Naumovich Nagly, theater director. Born 1903. Arrested 21 October 1938. Died 6 October 1940 in a prison camp in Kolyma. Exonerated in 1956.” Last Address memorial plaque at 38 Kolomenskaya Street in Petersburg’s Central District. Photo by the Russian Reader
House No. 38 on Kolomenskaya Street in St. Petersburg was erected in 1880 during the heyday of historicism in architecture. The building’s architect, Alexander Ivanov, was inspired by the French and Italian Renaissance.
The Tver Charitable Society was housed in the building in the early twentieth century. It provided social support and financial assistance to needy people from Tver who lived in St. Petersburg.
Vladimir Naumovich Nagly lived in the building in the 1930s.
Vladimir Nagly was born in 1903 in Petersburg to the family of a watchmaker. He was a supporter of the October Revolution, joining the the Red Army in 1919, and the Bolshevik Party in 1921. However, he devoted all of his short life to the theater.
In his indictment, dated 26 July 1939, Vladimir Nagly, former director of the Theater of Comedy and Satire (1930–1933), former director of the First Five-Year Plan Park of Culture and Rest (summer 1931), former director of the Central Park of Culture and Rest (summer 1932), former director of the Philarmonic (1932), former deputy director of the Pushkin Academic Drama Theater (1933–1936), former deputy director of Lenfilm Studios (1936–1938) and, at the time of his arrest on 20 October 1938, director of the Theater of Drama and Comedy (now the Theater on Liteiny), was identified as a “guerillla” in a group that was, allegedly, planning to murder Andrei Zhdanov, who at the time was First Secretary of the Leningrad Regional Party Committee and the Municipal Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks).
“It was agreed to invite ZHDANOV to view the pictures during the October Days. This time SMIRNOV [director of Lenfilm] had positioned the guerillas in advance: NAGLY was in a narrow corridor that lead from Smirnov’s office to the screening room. […] The plan was that, after the shooting, the lights would be shut off, panic would ensue in the dark, and [the conspirators] would escape.”
The main point in the indictments ends with praise for the NKVD officers who prevented the “terrorist attack.”
“Turning off the lights after the shooting was envisaged [in all the alleged plans to murder Zhdanov]. On this occasion, however, NKVD officers set up heightened surveillance […] and NAGLY was asked to withdraw from the positions they had taken up. When ZHDANOV arrived at the factory [i.e., Lenfilm] for the film screening, he went through the main entrance. NKVD officers had been positioned from there to the screening room. So, in this case [the conspirators] were unable to commit the heinous deed.”
Vladimir Nagly, who was thirty-six years old, was sentenced to eight years in the camps for involvement in a “right-wing counterrevolutionary Trotskyist-Zinovievist organization.” Although he suffered from a stomach ulcer and had undergone a ten-month-long investigation, prison doctors concluded he was fit for manual labor and the long, gruelling transport to the camps. In his memoirs, Georgy Zzhonov, who would go on to become a famous actor of screen and stage, accidentally recognized Nagly during his own transport to the camps in Kolyma. He described Nagly as “unhealthy.”
Nagly’s death certificate, dated 6 October 1940, and drawn up by officials at the Sevvostlag, listed the cause of death: “He froze to death on the way [to the camp]. There are no other indications.”
The regime admitted the case was a complete frame-up only in 1956, when Nagly was posthumously exonerated.
Vladimir Nagly’s son Mikhail (1926–2012), who was himself a well-known theater director, recalled that, before his father was arrested, the actors Nikolay Cherkasov, Vasili Merkuryev, Yuri Lavrov, and Yekaterina Karchagina-Alexandrovskaya were frequent guests in their spacious flat, and that his father had taken him to a see a rehearsal by the world-famous avant-garde theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold. The family avoided talking about Vladimir Nagly’s plight, and his relatives only recently learned the circumstances of his criminal case and his death.
A plaque in memory of Vladimir Nagly was mounted on the building at 38 Kolomenskaya Street on 28 February 2016.
Thanks to Jenya Kulakova of Last Address for the information about Vladimir Nagly. Translated by the Russian Reader
“Here lived Rudolf Rudolfovich Furman, purchasing agent. Born 1906. Arrested 11 February 1942. Died in prison 16 March 1942. Rehabilitated 1989.” The Last Address website reveals more details about Furman’s life and plight. A native of St. Petersburg and an ethnic German, Furman worked as an assistant master chemist at the Moscow District’s Osoaviakhim (Society for the Promotion of Aviation and Chemical Defense) Techno-Chemical Workshops. He lived in flat no. 17 at 4 Marat Street. Arrested by the OGPU on 7 October 1931 under Article 58-11 of the RSFSR Penal Code, Furman was exiled for three years to Kazakhstan, where he lived in Alma-Ata before returning to Leningrad. Arrested during the Nazi siege of the city in late February 1942, Furman died in prison a week later. He was rehabilitated on 11 April 1989. Photo by the Russian Reader
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Dear Last Address Supporters:
We will be remembering the victims of Soviet state terror on December 17 in St. Petersburg.
At 12 p.m., a Last Address memorial plaque bearing the name of Rear Admiral Pyotr Nikolayevich Leskov will be placed on the residential building at 26 Mokhovaya Street. Commander of the cruiser Aurora and head of the Central Naval Museum, Leskov was arrested on 2 November 1937, and shot for “espionage” and “terrorism” in December 1937. He was 73 years old.
At 1 p.m., a plaque inscribed with the name of Kirill Petrovich Peterson, an ethnic German and engineer at the André Marty Shipyards, will appear on the house at 9 Mitninskaya Embankment. Peterson was arrested on 2 January 2 1937 and shot for “espionage” on 29 January 1938. He was 22 years old.
At 2 p.m., a plaque bearing the name of Johanna Gedartovna Preiman, an ethnic Latvian and food service worker, will be attached to the house at 30 Labutin Street. A canteen worker who was employed on long-distance sailing vessels, Preiman was shot for “espionage” on 3 January 1938. She was 49 years old.
Subsequently, the cases of these three victims of state terror were reexamined and found to have been fabricated. All three victims were fully rehabilitated.
By the end of 2017, Last Address will have placed 234 memorial plaques on 140 houses.
I’d like to offer you an odd little musical and visual artifact from late Putinism 3.0 to while away a slightly gloomy autumn evening, just as the song and video, below, attempts to conjure away the mounting troubles of the present by returning musically to the allegedly untroubled years immediately after Stalin’s death.
I came upon the song and video through a post sponsored by the Facebook page “Petersburg: Only For Love,” as pictured above.
The Facebook post quotes dialogue from the end of the video, featuring the members of the Petersburg band Proletarian Tango performing Mikhail Matusovsky and Tikhon Khrenikov’s famous 1956 song “Windows of Moscow.”
“Will you go with me to Petersburg?”
“What is there to do in that Petersburg of yours? Drink?”
“Live… Create… Love…”
“Thanks to the band Proletarian Tango for reminding us that the curb capable of dividing Muscovites and Petersburg still hasn’t been laid!” the post concludes. This is a reference to one of few shibboleths that distinguish Moscow Russian from Petersburg Russian—the two cities have different words for “curb” (bordyur and porebrik, respectively).
The still image shows a band member’s hand caressing a poster featuring a photograph of Petersburg singer and actor Mikhail Boyarsky, a vocal supporter of the Putin regime.
Up high the sky darkens again,
And windows have lit up in the dusk.
It is here that my friends live,
And with bated breath
I gaze at the windows at night.
I love to dream under the windows.
I love to read them like books.
And, holding on to the precious light,
Exciting me and enticing me,
Like people, they look at me.
As in years gone by, once again I
Am ready to stand beneath your window.
And to the light of its rays
I alway hurry faster,
As on a date with my youth.
I admire you at night.
I wish you, windows, good luck.
It has been dear to me for many years,
And there is nothing brighter than
The unquenchable light of Moscow’s windows.
This tellingly depressing passage from Wikipedia’s article about the song’s composer, Tikhon Khrennikov, restores everything to the period that Proletarian Tango’s video tries so hard to airbrush out. TRR
By the 1930s, Khrennikov was already treated as a leading official Soviet composer. Typical was his speech during a discussion in February 1936 concerning the Pravda articles “Chaos instead of Music” and “Ballet Falseness”:
“The resolution of April 23, 1932, appealed to the consciousness of the Soviet artist. Soviet artists had not withstood scrutiny. After April 23, young people were inspired to study. The problem was, we had to master the skills and techniques of composition. We developed an enthusiasm for modern western composers. The names of Hindemith and Krenek came to be symbols of advanced modern artists. […] After the enthusiasm for western tendencies came an attraction to simplicity, influenced by composing for the theater, where simple, expressive music was required. We grew, our consciousness also grew, as well as the aspiration to be genuine Soviet composers, representatives of our epoch. Compositions by Hindemith satisfied us no more. Soon after that, Prokofiev arrived, declaring Soviet music to be provincial and naming Shostakovich as the most up-to-date composer. Young composers were confused: on the one hand, they wanted to create simpler music that would be easier for the masses to understand; on the other hand, they were confronted with the statements of such musical authorities as Prokofiev. Critics wrote laudatory odes to Shostakovich. […] How did young composers react to Lady Macbeth [of Mtsensk]? This opera contains several large melodic fragments which opened some creative perspectives to us. But the entr’actes and other things aroused complete hostility.”
Together with other official representatives of Soviet culture […], Khrennikov signed the statement welcoming the “sentence of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union passed on traitors against the Motherland, fascist hirelings such as Tukhachevsky, Yakir, and others.”
[…]
In 1948, Joseph Stalin appointed Khrennikov Secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers, a job he would keep until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 when the Union of Soviet Composers was disbanded.
The controversial Shostakovich memoir Testimony claims that Khrennikov was so intimidated at a meeting with Stalin that the composer soiled his pants and suffered a nervous breakdown.
For a long time, it was held that no Soviet composers were arrested or prosecuted thanks to Khrennikov’s efforts.
In an interview with pianist Jascha Nemtsov on November 8, 2004, in Moscow, Khrennikov claimed that composer Mieczysław Weinberg, when arrested, had been discharged immediately because of Khrennikov’s protection; according to Khrennikov, the same had happened to Alexander Veprik. The facts are that Veprik spent four years in a prison camp, and Mieczysław Weinberg, who was released in June 1953, had been saved from prosecution, and probably from execution, only because of Stalin’s death. In recent years, information that had been suppressed since 1948 has been published, and documents and facts, now known, confirm that there were extensive prosecutions.
In 1949, Khrennikov officially attacked the young composer Alexander Lokshin, using the rhetoric of one of Stalin’s most notorious ideologists, Paul Apostolov. In his speech, Khrennikov contrasted Lokshin’s “modernist” style with Stepan Razin’s Dream by Galina Ustvolskaya, which he considered an ideal example of true national art.
Khrennikov’s speech aroused great indignation in Mikhail Gnessin, who accused him of duplicity. Not daring to criticize Lokshin in the professional milieu, Khrennikov attacked him ideologically from his position as a leading Soviet official. After this ideological campaign, Lokshin was excluded from academic circles.
Khrennikov did not prevent Prokofiev’s first wife, Lina Ivanovna, being charged as a “spy” following her arrest by the NKVD on February 20, 1948. As head of the Composers Union, Khrennikov made no attempt to have the sentence against Lina Prokofieva quashed or even to mitigate her plight in the Gulag. The Composers Union did not help Prokofiev’s sons, who were forcibly evicted from their apartment. After Lina Prokofieva returned from the Gulag, the Composers Union did nothing to improve the extremely bad living conditions of her family. It was the prominent singers Irina Arkhipova and Zurab Sotkilava who protected Prokofiev’s first family. Afterward, the family was exposed to regular official humiliations. According to Prokofiev’s first son, Sviatoslav, the Composers Union officially refused Lina Prokofieva permission to go to Paris, after she had been personally invited by the French culture minister to the unveiling of a Prokofiev memorial plaque. Instead, Khrennikov took part in that ceremony with his whole family. The Composers Union also refused Lina Prokofieva permission to go to the opening of the Sydney Opera House. At the same time, Sviatoslav Prokofiev noted the typical rationale of the Soviet functionary: sometimes Khrennikov would help if it was not dangerous for his own position and career.
The ideological campaigns of 1948-49 against the so-called formalists in music were directly connected with the offensive against the so-called rootless cosmopolitans, which formed part of the official anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, which flourished after the Second World War in various shapes: ideological resolutions, declarations by official writers and critics, and offensive caricatures and vulgar anti-Semitic abuse in the satirical magazine Krokodil (Crocodile). Historians of official anti-Semitism in the USSR name Khrennikov among the most active fighters for the “purity of Russian culture.” In Soviet official policy both before and after Stalin’s death, a clear distinction was drawn between “good Soviet Jews” and “Nazi Zionists.” True to this party line, the leadership of the Soviet Composers Union branded composers as “Zionist aggressors” or “agents of world imperialism,” and made accusations against “ideologically vicious” and “hostile” phenomena in Soviet musical culture. The accusation of Zionism was often used as a weapon against people of different nationalities, faiths, and opinions, such as Nikolai Roslavets. The “struggle against the formalists” was pursued in other countries, too. According to György Ligeti, after Khrennikov’s official visit to Budapest in 1948, The Miraculous Mandarin by Béla Bartók was removed from the repertoire, and paintings by French impressionists and others were removed from display in museums. In 1952, Ligeti was almost forbidden to teach after he had shown the score of the proscribed Symphony of Psalms by Igor Stravinsky to his students. Ligeti was saved only because of the personal protection of Zoltán Kodály.
Khrennikov and other functionaries of the Composers Union constantly attacked the heritage of the Russian avant-garde as well as its researchers. For example, the German musicologist Detlef Gojowy (1934–2008) was persecuted because of his promotion in the West of modern Soviet music of the 1920s. Gojowy was proclaimed to be an “anti-Soviet writer.” Until 1989, he was forbidden to visit the Soviet Union, and some of the publications he sent to Soviet colleagues were intercepted by Soviet customs. At the same time, Soviet musicologists engaged in developing the Russian avant-garde tradition were officially prohibited from going abroad. Once again, Nikolai Roslavets was an example.
[…]
In his last years, Khrennikov made extremely negative statements about perestroika, its leaders, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the liquidation of corresponding organizations:
“It was a betrayal by our leaders. I consider Gorbachev and his henchmen, who deliberately organized the persecution of Soviet art, to be traitors to the party and the people […].”
In another interview given to the same newspaper Zavtra […] he described Stalin as a “genius,” an “absolutely normal person,” tolerant of criticism:
“Stalin, in my opinion, knew music better than any of us. […] As in classical Ancient Greece, so too in the Soviet Union music was of the greatest importance to the state. The spiritual influence of the greatest composers and artists in the formation of intelligent and strong-willed people, first of all through the radio, was huge.”
Source: Wikipedia. The above article was lightly edited to make it more readable.
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By way of cleansing your palate, I’d like to sign off with a recording by the wonderful Soviet jazz singer and actor Leonid Utyosov performing “Windows of Moscow” with real feeling and dignity.
Who Is Behind the Trotskyist Conspiracy?
Ilya Budraitskis
November 21, 2014 OpenLeft.ru
Speaking at a meeting of his All-Russia People’s Front a couple days ago, Vladimir Putin said, “Trotsky had this [saying]: the movement is everything, the ultimate aim is nothing. We need an ultimate aim.” Eduard Bernstein’s proposition, misquoted and attributed for some reason to Leon Trotsky, is probably the Russian president’s most common rhetorical standby. He has repeated it for many years to audiences of journalists and functionaries while discussing social policy, construction delays at Olympics sites or the dissatisfaction of the so-called creative class. “Democracy is not anarchism and not Trotskyism,” Putin warned almost two years ago.
Putin’s anti-Trotskyist invectives do not depend on the context nor are they influenced by his audience, and much less are they veiled threats to the small political groups in Russia today who claim to be heirs of the Fourth International. Putin’s Trotskyism is of a different kind. Its causes are found not in the present but in the past, buried deep in the political unconscious of the last generation of the Soviet nomenklatura.
The strange myth of the Trotskyist conspiracy, which emerged decades ago, in another age and a different country, has experienced a rebirth throughout Putin’s rule. Sensing, apparently, the president’s personal weakness for “Trotskyism,” obliging media and corrupted experts have turned this Trotskyism into an integral part of the grand propaganda style. Until he died, the indefatigable “Trotskyist” Boris Berezovsky spun his nasty web from London. Until he turned into a conservative patriot, the incendiary “Trotskyist” Eduard Limonov seduced young people with extremism. Camouflaged “Trotskyists” from the Bush and, later, the Obama administrations have continued to sow war and color revolutions. Unmasking “Trotskyists” has become such an important ritual that for good luck, as it were, the famous Dmitry Kiselyov decided to launch a new media resource by invoking it. So what is the history of this conspiracy? And what do Trotskyists have to do with it?
Conspiracy theories are always conservative by nature. They do not offer an alternative assessment of events but, constantly tardy, chase behind them, inscribing them after the fact into their own pessimistic reading of history. Thus, in his Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797), the Jesuit priest Augustin Barruel, a pioneer of modern conspiracy theory, situated the French Revolution, which had already taken place, in the catastrophic finale of a grand conspiracy of the Knights Templar against the Church and the Capetian dynasty. Masonic conspiracy theories became truly powerful in the late nineteenth century, when the peak of the Masons’ power had already passed. Finally, the idea of a Jewish conspiracy acquired its final shape in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, fabricated by the tsarist secret police at the turn of the twentieth century, when the power of Jewish finance capital had already been undermined by the rising power of industrial capital. Conspiracy theories have always drawn energy from this distorted link with reality, because the fewer conspirators one could observe in the real world, the more boldly one could endow them with incredible magical powers in the imaginary world.
In keeping with the reactive, belated nature of conspiracy theories, the myth of the Trotskyist conspiracy emerged in the Soviet Union when the Left Opposition, Trotsky’s actual supporters, had long ago been destroyed. Unlike, however, the conspiracies of the past, generated by secret agents and mad men of letters, the foundations of the Trotskyist conspiracy were tidily laid by NKVD investigators. The distorting mirror logic of the Great Terror dictated that, although the “Trotskyists” skillfully concealed themselves, and any person could prove to be one, the conspiracy must necessarily be exposed. An unwritten law of Stalinist socialism was that the truth will out, and this, of course, deprived the conspiracy theory of its telltale aura of mystery.
After Stalin’s death, when the Purges were a thing of the past, and Soviet society had begun to become inhibited and conservative, the conspiracy myth took on more familiar features. The stagnation period, with its general apathy, distrust, and societal depression, was an ideal breeding ground for the conspiracy theory. No one had seen any live Trotskyists long ago, and it was seemingly silly to denounce them, but everyone was well informed about the dangers of Trotskyism.
During meaningless classes on “Party history,” millions of Soviet university students learned about the enemies of socialism, the Trotskyists, who had been vanquished long ago in a showdown. Millions of copies of anti-Trotskyist books were published; by the 1970s, this literature had become a distinct genre with its own canon. Its distinguishing feature was a free-form Trotskyism completely emancipated from any connection with actual, historical Trotskyism.
In fact, the Trotskyism of Soviet propaganda was structurelessness incarnate, a misunderstanding. It was “lifeless schema, sophistry and metaphysics, unprincipled eclecticism, […] crude subjectivism, exaggerated individualism and voluntarism.” Unlike the classic monsters of conspiracy theory, the Masons and the Elders of Zion, the Trotskyists did not run the world. They were failed conspirators: they were always exposed, unless, through their own haste and impulsiveness, they managed to expose themselves. In keeping with Stalinist socialist realism, their inept evil deeds caused seizures of Homeric laughter among the people and the Party. And yet, recovering from each shameful defeat, they kept on trying. The Trotskyists had no clear plan for establishing global domination, but without a clear purpose, they were dangerous in their passionate desire to instill chaos in places where harmony, predictability, and order reigned.
In their work, these Trotskyists were guided by the crazed “theory of permanent revolution” (which had nothing in common, substantially, with Trotsky’s theory except the name). Its essence is that the revolution should not have any geographical or time constraints. It has no aims, no end, and no meaning. It raises questions where all questions have long been solved. It instills doubt where all doubts have been resolved long ago. A normal person would never be able to understand anything about this theory except one thing: it was invented to ruin his life.
Mikhail Basmanov, author of the cult book In the Train of Reaction: Trotskyism from the 1930s to the 1970s, quoted above, noted, “Unlike many other political movements that had the opportunity to confirm their ideological and political doctrines through the practice of state-building, Trotskyism has not put forward a positive program of action in any country in all the years of its existence.” It is so destructive, that “with its cosmopolitanism, carried to the point of absurdity, which excludes the possibility of developing national programs, Trotskyism undermines the stances even of its own ‘parties’ in certain countries. […] Trotskyism is entangled in the nets of its own theories.”
It is important that the idea of the Trotskyist conspiracy against practical reason, reality, and stability was never popular in late-Soviet society: it did not grow, like the “blood libel,” from the dark superstitions of the mob. It remained a nightmare for only one segment, the ruling bureaucracy, which transmitted the myth of the senseless and merciless “permanent revolution” to future generations in Party training courses and KGB schools.
The Soviet theory of the Trotskyist conspiracy reflected the subconscious fear of ungovernability on the part of the governing class. Devoid of any personalities, the legend of Trotskyism was something like the “black swan” of “actually existing socialism.”
This, by the way, is its fundamental difference from the version of the Trotskyist conspiracy popular among some American conservatives. In America, it is merely one of many varieties of the “minority conspiracy,” a small group of people who have, allegedly, seized power and are implementing their anti-Christian, globalist ideas from the top down. The fact that the anti-Trotskyist conspiracy theory of the so-called paleoconservatives has become popular in recent years among Kremlin experts and political scientists only goes to show that the old Soviet “Trotskyist conspiracy” has suffered a deficit in terms of its reproduction.
When he confuses Bernstein and Bronstein, Vladimir Putin, however, is not unfaithful to the Soviet anti-Trotskyist legend. Yes, “the goal is nothing, the movement is everything.” The chaos generated by the movement is inevitable, as inevitable as time itself. It moves inexorably toward “permanent revolution,” which cannot be completed and with which one cannot negotiate.
In a recent interview, former Kremlin spinmeister Gleb Pavlovsky, while skillfully avoiding the issue of “Trotskyism,” nevertheless had this to say about Putin:
“He has frightened himself. Where should he go next? What next? This is a terrible problem in politics, the problem of the second step. He stepped beyond what he was ready for and got lost: where to go now? […] The gap between [the annexation of] Crimea and subsequent actions is quite noticeable. It is obvious that everything afterwards was an improvisation or reaction to other people’s actions. People who are afraid of the future forbid themselves from thinking about which path to choose. When you have not set achievable goals, you begin to oscillate between two poles: either you do nothing or you get sucked into a colossal conflict.”
The worst thing is that the specter of Trotskyism, as has happened with many other specters in history, is quite capable of materializing. The post-Soviet system has entered a period of crisis, in which the ruling elite has fewer and fewer chances to manage processes “manually.” For the Trotskyist nightmare of the elites to become a reality, there is no need for live Trotskyists. The need for them arises only when hitherto silent and long-suffering forces come to their senses and raise the question of their own aims. But that is a different story.
Ilya Budraitskis is a historian, researcher, and writer.
“Here lived Vladimir Naumovich Nagly, theater director. Born 1903. Arrested 21 October 1938. Died 6 October 1940 in a prison camp in Kolyma. Exonerated in 1956.” Last Address memorial plaque at 38 Kolomenskaya Street in Petersburg’s Central District. Photo by the Russian Reader
Vladimir Naumovich Nagly lived in the building in the 1930s.
“Here lived Rudolf Rudolfovich Furman, purchasing agent. Born 1906. Arrested 11 February 1942. Died in prison 16 March 1942. Rehabilitated 1989.” The 
The Russian Reader 