ONE

Romanov

'I need some corner . In my memory, I go through the apartments abandoned by the bourgeoisie.'

ISAAC BABEL, 'An Evening at the Tsarina's', 1922

The luxury of this house makes a false promise.

Its windows are set deep among ornate columns, projecting cornices, scrolled and floriate mouldings. From the upper storeys, between wrought-iron balconies and overhanging chambers raised on tendril-wound columns, tiers of sculpted faces wearing Phrygian helmets and animal skins look out over the street, hinting at higher mysteries of domestic comfort contained within. The façade is designed to emphasise the extreme thickness of the outer walls, and the shadowed warmth of their recesses, as though, in the inmost part of this city, in this street of many names, a house could offer a refuge from history.

Ulochki-shkatulochki, ulochki moskovskie: the streets are little caskets, go the words of a love song to old Moscow. Before I lived here, I knew that Romanov Lane was not a little casket but a great chest of secret treasure. The men who lived in No. 3 had metro stations, institutes, cities, battle cruisers, tractors, auto-plants, warhorses, lunar craters and stars named after them. On my walks down to the Lenin Library from our first Moscow apartment on Tverskaya Street, I would choose to come this way, to get closer, I liked to think, to the hidden lives of those men. I was one of those passers-by who walk haltingly along the front of No. 3, pausing to look at the memorial plaques in granite or dark marble fixed at eye level on the earth-pink wall, then gaze up past the wilted carnations laid on top of the plaques to the plaster hammers and sickles that crest the pediments over the doorways, wondering quite what it meant for all those Stalin-era field marshals and Party apparatchiks to 'live here', as the inscriptions say they did.

Who is in the nomenklatura of No. 3, the building that old Muscovites still refer to as 'the House of the Generals' or, less reverently, as 'the Party Archive' or 'the Mausoleum'? What intricate conspiracies of fate and human intention in the bloody political drama of the twentieth century worked to keep these particular names in view? The hidden logic and direction of the 'struggle', as the Party piously called it, are impossible to follow in the series of names and faces on the wall of this house. Among them are heroes of the Civil War who moved into its apartments in the first years of Soviet power, fighting men who defeated the White armies in Siberia and the Russian south, and pressed the Revolution deep into Central Asia: Mikhail Frunze, briefly Trotsky's successor as Commissar of War, who moved here in 1924 and died the following year after a simple operation for a stomach ulcer, leaving the suspicion that he had been assassinated by his physicians on Stalin's orders; Semyon Budyonny, Kliment Voroshilov and Semyon Timoshenko, cavalry generals who survived and flourished as their comrades-in-arms were purged in the years before the Second World War; General Alexander Vasilevsky, who moved into the building in the first winter of the war, and reassured a concerned Stalin that he had been 'provided with an excellent apartment'. Further along the wall is a sparse remnant of Old Bolsheviks: Pyotr Smidovich, who staffed the legendary 'special train' from which Trotsky and his leather-wearing entourage administered the Red Army throughout the Civil War; Dmitri Manuilsky, a good storyteller and joker, as Molotov later remembered, but 'confused' and 'mixed up with Trotskyists'; and Emilian Yaroslavsky in his porthole spectacles, Siberian-born son of a Jewish political exile, long-standing head of the League of the Militant Godless, graphomaniac Party historian, and one of the very few of his kind to die a natural death.

Not far from Yaroslavsky on the wall is Andrei Andreev, a former waiter and (that rarity in the higher reaches of the Party) genuine proletarian, who served Stalin with implacable loyalty through the forced collectivisation of agriculture and the Great Terror. As you walk down Romanov from Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street, just beyond the wide gateway to the courtyard with its tall trees and its gaudy painted fountain, you come face to face with Alexei Kosygin, the small-eyed puffiness of his countenance caught for ever in the granite. Kosygin rose in the Party under Stalin. He replaced Nikita Khrushchev as Soviet Premier in 1964, and Khrushchev, fallen from grace, immediately moved back to his apartment in No. 3. Later Kosygin assisted in the quiet abandonment of the utopian dream that the state would one day wither away under communism. With future General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev he worked to contrive that outwardly static but secretly moribund phenomenon known as 'actually existing socialism', for which so many still pine. Last of all, at the Vozdvizhenka end of the building, under our bedroom window, is a plaque to Marshal Ivan Konev, the son of a poor peasant from the Vologda region. His chiselled gaze, straining out over some imagined battlefield, meets the blank side wall of the Kremlin Hospital. 'So who is going to take Berlin, we or the Allies?' Stalin asked Konev and Marshal Zhukov at the beginning of April 1945. 'We will take Berlin,' Konev replied. Eight years later, in the months after Stalin's death, though he had never been anything but a soldier, Konev acted as head of the Special Judicial Panel at the brief and vicious trial of Lavrenty Beria, at the end of which the reviled former chief of secret police and sadistic sexual predator was sentenced for 'treason against the Motherland' and 'secret links with foreign intelligence' and shot the same night in a cell fitted for that single purpose.

There are many more names in the invisible nomenklatura of No. 3, names without plaques, erased by state murder or sullen disgrace from the charmed list during every decade of Soviet power: Trotsky, Beloborodov, Sokolnikov, Frumkin, Furtseva, Malenkov, Rokossovsky, Togliatti, Zhukov, Vyshinsky, Kosior, Tevosyan, Khrushchev, Molotov . And before them, playing a cameo part in the history of this house, which has always been so uniquely intimate with the destiny of the nation, a group of young actresses from the Moscow Art Theatre who shared an apartment high above the courtyard. In the hot summer of 1918, they gave aid, shelter and love to the British agent Sidney Reilly, 'ace of spies', as he plotted to overthrow Lenin and Trotsky. Elizaveta Otten, 'Reilly's chief girl', may have been the first of the many inhabitants of this house to be arrested at night by the secret police.

In that year, in which the Bolsheviks moved the capital to Moscow and took over the major buildings of the city under the Marxist slogan 'expropriate the expropriators', the actresses were still living la vie de bohème among the families of advocates, physicians and university professors for whom No. 3 had been built twenty years earlier. Some of those members of the small and high-minded professional class of the late tsarist era remained in their now 'communalised' apartments after the Bolsheviks took over No. 3 as the most prestigious residence for the Party elite outside the Kremlin. The street was renamed Granovsky after a politically liberal Moscow University historian, 'the ideal professor' of the nineteenth century (and prototype for the ridiculous Stepan Verkhovensky in Dostoevsky's novel Demons), and the building became known as the 'Fifth House of the Soviets'. (The first four 'Houses of the Soviets' - grand Moscow buildings appropriated by the Bolsheviks - were the National Hotel, the Metropol, an Orthodox seminary and the Peterhof Hotel on the corner of Vozdvizhenka and Mokhovaya Streets opposite the Lenin Library.) Many of the lawyers, doctors and academics in No. 3 were dubbed 'people of the past', and sent to labour camps or shot in the 1930s, leaving no trace of their lives except in private memory, old issues of the All Moscow telephone directory and the scattered annals of their professions. To my knowledge, none of their descendants is among the well-to-do heirs of Red Army generals and Communist Party magnates who now own the apartments, though I have come across several people from the old Moscow intelligentsia who recall with pride that long ago, before Stalin's purges, this great house was their family home.

In the Soviet period, this one-way street was closed to ordinary traffic. Militiamen would check documents. The most privileged members of the nomenklatura came to Granovsky to visit the Kremlin Hospital polyclinic and its pharmacy, and to use their state-issued coupons in the Kremlin stolovaya: worth a purely symbolic two roubles ten for lunch, and two fifty for an evening meal, or the equivalent in take-out or groceries from the well-stocked food store. The stolovaya was reserved for the highest ranks of the state apparatus; the coupons were a mark of the highest social prestige. Before big public holidays cars would draw up and sleek men would load them with parcels of meat, caviar, fruit and vegetables, delicacies unavailable to the mass of the population. Under Stalin, the nomenklatura was driven around the city in American cars - Packards and Cadillacs, Buicks and Lincoln town cars. Later the elite turned to Soviet-produced ZILs and Volgas.

Now, Hummers, stately Maybachs and Bentleys with curtains that concertina electronically shut when you look into their windows, and even a few last Russian-made Zhigulis, are parked up on the...