Parisian Boys in Stalin's Moscow

Sergey Belyakov is a historian and writer, author of books “Gumilev’s Son of Gumilev,” “The Shadow of Mazepa. The Ukrainian Nation in the Age of Gogol,” and “Springtime of the Peoples. Russians and Ukrainians between Bulgakov and Petlyura.” He is a laureate of the “Big Book” award, a finalist of the “National Bestseller” and “Yasnaya Polyana” awards. His books have been translated into many languages.

Georgy Efron, the son of Marina Tsvetaeva, better known by the home name “Mur,” was born in the Czech lands, grew up in France, but considered himself Russian. Yet in pre-war Moscow, classmates, friends, and girls saw him as—an outsider, a Paris boy. A “Paris boy” was also Mur’s friend Dmitry Sezemán, who at the same time came with his parents to Moscow. The life of the friends in the USSR seems like a chain of misfortunes: arrests and the death of loved ones, homelessness, evacuation, hunger, the front—where one will be wounded and the other will die... But within their Moscow life there were also happy days.

Stalinist Moscow was a shining showcase of the Soviet Union. Down new broad streets raced Lincolns, Packards, and ZIS vehicles; at Eliseevsky they sold delicacies—from black caviar and crabs to Roquefort. Eisenstein staged “The Valkyrie” at the Bolshoi Theater, and in the Chamber Theater “Madame Bovary” played—while even Voroshilov with pleasure attended Taírov’s productions. For Muscovites, jazzmen like Eddie Rosner, Alexander Tsfasman, and Leonid Utyosov performed, and dance teachers earned more than engineers and doctors… A strange, cruel, but vivid world—where in the morning people went to an NKVD receiving office with packages for arrested relatives, and in the evening they sat in the National restaurant or listened to Sviatoslav Richter in Tchaikovsky Hall.