Only someone in a position to advise the tsar could have resolved the matter. Whatever were the circumstances, the question of his father’s identity remains uncertain—in some of his writings he calls him Alexei Alexandrovich, while in his official Soviet documents, he always put a dash where his father’s name should have been entered.5 But it is important that Dmitri himself believed that he was a Tolstoy. Since he was embarrassed by the circumstances of his birth, it made him feel better about himself, although he never put an official claim on it.6
Little Dmitri spent the first few years of his life with his mother at Akchora, the place of his birth, at Skirmunt’s estate. But at the age of three, he was separated from his mother, an event that left a lifelong scar on his psyche. It’s not quite clear how it happened. According to his memoirs, it was because his father’s family, the Tolstoys, paid the bills and insisted on bringing up one of their own as an aristocrat. Apparently trusting his mother’s story, he reconstructs a conversation between her and his putative aunt (his father’s sister), Varvara Nikolaevna Kokorina, which goes as follows:
When Klavdiya Bystrolyotova got pregnant, Kokorina invited her for a talk and laid down the following conditions: If Klavdiya gave birth to a healthy baby, she would get child support and the baby would be raised in an aristocratic family that she, Kokorina, would choose. The child’s continued support would depend on his merits. A mediocre youth would be returned to his mother, but an able offspring would be officially adopted and given all the privileges of a highborn aristocrat. Under these conditions, Bystrolyotov writes, when he was three, Kokorina arrived in the Crimea and took him to St. Petersburg to live with a foster family, the de Courvals.
Bystrolyotov’s recollections of his aristocratic upbringing sound quite authentic. When Artuzov talked to him, he had no doubt that he had been raised according to the highest cultural standards. However, some elements of his story are dubious. Most notably, his mother’s meeting with Kokorina and the latter’s subsequent visit to the Crimea could not have taken place for the simple reason that Kokorina died a few years before Dmitri’s birth.7
Although the details remain unclear, the fact remains that the baby boy Dmitri was brought to St. Petersburg and placed under the foster protection of a widow, Elizaveta Robertovna de Courval, who had two small daughters of her own. There was no man in the household. After losing his fortune in a game of cards, Elizaveta’s husband, an officer of the guards, had shot himself. Thus whoever made the arrangement for little Dmitri evidently tried to do two things at once: to help the impoverished widow and to give a fatherless boy an aristocratic up-bringing. (Such a practice was not unheard of in Russian high society. For example, the famous Russian poet Vasily Zhukovsky [1783–1852], born of a captive Turkish girl and given to his father as a birthday present, was raised in the family of an impoverished nobleman.)
Despite leading a materially secure life as a child, Dmitri was anything but happy. In his early teens he began receiving books from his father on high cultural subjects: ancient Greece and Rome, medieval art and the Renaissance, the history of Russian art, the history of French art. But he never received from him even a short note, much less a letter. And he never heard that his father wanted to see him. The two never met. In his memoirs, Bystrolyotov assigns no importance to this situation: “My father is nothing for me; he’s a myth. I don’t have any feelings for him.” Yet it’s hard to imagine that a sensitive and intelligent boy would not feel hurt by his father’s distance and disaffection.
His mother also was lost to sight, so he was doubly abandoned. In her case he could not hide his feelings. “I lived far from her and was out of her way,” he bitterly remarks in his memoirs. With her son off her hands, she threw herself back into her prime interest—fighting for social causes. No sooner was he gone than the war with Japan broke out in 1904, and she volunteered to serve as a nurse at the front in Manchuria. When World War I broke out in 1914, she volunteered again. “She couldn’t miss such a rare opportunity,” Bystrolyotov remarks sarcastically. Since she hadn’t bothered to adopt him officially, and since his father did not adopt him, it seems he was documented as an orphan.
This life of “privilege and prison,” like that of “a bird in a gilded cage,” as he characterizes it, was interrupted only by rare visits from his mother, who would take him on short trips to the Caucasus. For him these occasions were as comforting as “the whistle of a whip.” His radically minded mother resented her son’s life of luxury and used every opportunity to give him painful (in the direct meaning of the word) lessons in social justice, lessons he would remember for the rest of his life.
One such occasion occurred when he was about five. His mother had taken him out for a picnic, and curious peasant children came up to look. Seeing the barefoot boys and girls walk awkwardly across a field of wheat stubble, he laughed unwittingly. Klavdiya exploded. “Don’t you ever dare laugh at them!” she shouted. “You live on their money.” And she ordered him to remove his shoes and socks, grabbed him by the hand, and forced him to walk over the prickly stubble. “Here you go, you little master. Now you know how poor people walk on earth!”
Again, when he was about twelve, he and his mother were vacationing in the Caucasus, and they saw an old Cossack woman, who was trying to cross, fall into a turbulent mountain river. Immediately Klavdiya ordered Dmitri to jump in and save the woman at the risk of his life. When he hesitated, she scolded him, threatened to slap his face, and called him a coward. “Your Cossack ancestors would be ashamed of you!”
Prodded by his mother, he jumped into the water. After much struggling, finally he managed to grab the old woman by the hand; his mother pulled them both out. When the old woman bowed to young Dmitri and thanked him for saving her life, Klavdiya told her, “Get up, little mother, don’t degrade yourself. It was his duty to do it.” Dmitri forever remembered the way his mother “threw these words over her shoulder” and went to change her clothes with “a very haughty look,” all the while laughing at him. His heroism had been turned to humiliation.
In 1914, with Russia entering World War I, inflation made life difficult for the de Courval family in St. Petersburg. Elizaveta Robertovna moved the household to Anapa, a small resort town on the Black Sea, where life was easier and the family still owned a villa. Young Dmitri, now thirteen, was enrolled as a cadet in the Sevastopol Naval Academy. This was a prestigious institution that prepared young men of the aristocracy for careers as naval officers. In 1916, as part of the Second Fleet Crew of the Russian Black Sea Navy, he took part in landing operations at Rize, Turkey.
After the February 1917 revolution, by decree of the newly formed Council of Sailors and Soldiers Deputies, all privileged schools in the country were closed. Dmitri could continue his maritime training in a nautical school (morekhodnoe uchilishche), which prepared skippers and navigators for trade expeditions. Schools of this kind functioned in Odessa, Kherson, and Anapa. He chose the latter because his mother lived there and taught at the local gymnasium. In September 1917, he began attending classes at both the gymnasium and the Anapa Nautical School.8
In the summers, deeply involved in social causes, his mother ran a local sanatorium for wounded officers. As always, duty bound to save the sick and unfortunate, she gave her son one more lesson in egalitarianism. One day, while cooking, she saw through the kitchen window how one of her officer patients, discharged from the sanatorium, slapped around an old coachman who mishandled his suitcase. She ran to this officer and threatened him with a ladle. “Don’t you dare!” she shouted. “Don’t you dare! No one here gets by without common decency.”
All these episodes of his mother’s behavior made deep impressions on Dmitri.
During his ten years with the de Courvals, young Dmitri received an education proper to Russian aristocratic society of the time. Instructors taught him European languages (French, German, and English) and the arts (dancing, fencing, and drawing). His aptitude for the latter skill was evident quite early in l
ife.9 A German instructor took charge of his physical education and ensured that the boy developed and controlled every muscle of his body. A Swiss teacher specialized in strengthening his will, a skill that would prove crucial during his future life as an intelligence officer—and as a Gulag inmate. In fact, quite early, Dmitri became fascinated with the very concept of will and what could be accomplished using its power, which may explain his future interest in Nietzsche. Among the books that arrived by mail from his father was Professor Chelpanov’s Introduction to Philosophy. In the book, Chelpanov sides with those philosophers who assert complete freedom and autonomy of the will. One day, fascinated by this concept, young Dmitri decided to test the strength of his own will. He gathered a matchbox full of all kinds of insects and, shutting his eyes, swallowed them. For about a month, he felt nauseated at the very memory of the experiment. But he was quite proud of proving his resolve to himself.10
As he was growing up, his theoretical fascinations with willpower grew in sophistication. While reading Dostoevsky, young Dmitri was especially drawn to conversations between Ivan Karamazov and the Devil in The Brothers Karamazov. In his memoirs, Dmitri does not specify what aspects of these conversations he found so captivating in his boyhood, but certain elements of them seem obvious. In the novel, Ivan Karamazov tells his brother Alyosha a story about a certain Richard. Born out of wedlock, Richard was abandoned by his parents, who got rid of him by giving him away to some Swiss shepherds, who mistreated and exploited him. When the boy grew up, he became a vagabond and a drunkard. He ended up robbing and murdering an old man and was guillotined.11
Dmitri could easily identify with Richard. Like him, he was born out of wedlock, abandoned by both of his parents at a young age (he was actually half Richard’s age when he experienced that trauma), and given away to live in a foster family of total strangers.12 Physically, Dmitri closely resembled Raskolnikov, the hero of another Dostoevsky novel, Crime and Punishment; he was also “exceptionally handsome, above the average in height, slim, well built, with beautiful . . . eyes and dark brown hair.” Preoccupied with the idea of the predominant role of the will in human behavior, young Dmitri thought of Raskolnikov as a weakling destined for failure, since, as he writes, “by asking himself whether he was a Napoléon or a louse, he proved that he was a louse.”
One summer night in 1917, to further test his willpower, Dmitri, now age sixteen, staged another “scientific experiment.” This time, the test of his will took a much more dramatic form than swallowing some insects. Saying to himself, “I’ll show those fools, Raskolnikov and Dostoevsky, what a true man is,” he decided to repeat Raskolnikov’s act—that is, to commit a robbery. It looks as if Dmitri wished even to surpass Raskolnikov, because he set out to rob not a stranger but one of his own kin. He chose none other than his own aunt, Anna Bystrolyotova, his mother’s sister. Whereas Raskolnikov’s target was a “worthless old woman,” despised by everybody as a loan shark, Dmitri was fond of his aunt; he called her milaia Nyusenka (my dear little Nyusya).
Anna worked as a cashier at a local officers’ club. Late in the evening, Dmitri followed her. Dressed in a sailor’s striped T-shirt, he put on his face a mask cut out of the black oilcloth cover of his gymnasium notebook and slipped a Finnish knife into his pocket. As his aunt approached her home, he quickly ran up to his auntie, grabbed her from behind, and hissed, “Money or death!” To his surprise, instead of being easy prey, his aunt put up a fight, and as people approached, the young robber ran into the bushes.
Bent on proving his resolve, Dmitri made another attempt at robbery. This time, he did it pursuing social justice, which he absorbed with his mother’s milk, now Bolshevist-style—by “robbing the robber.” His new target was a member of the officers’ club where his aunt worked, a rich merchant.
Dmitri again failed miserably: the victim managed to get away, and his companion, an army lieutenant, shot at Dmitri at close range several times. To Dmitri’s luck, he missed, but the events of that night overwhelmed him. In the coming days, he felt like vomiting every time he recalled his near-death experience. He decided to cut short his budding career as a robber.
Decades later, laughing at himself when describing these episodes to his second wife, Dmitri would attribute these youthful escapades to his inherited impulsiveness and restlessness. But it is easy to see that they were much more than that. Most likely and quite unconsciously, they were expressions of his bottled-up, suppressed hostility, resulting from his parents’ abandonment of him as a young child. The first time, he chose to attack his abusive and neglectful mother’s mirror image—her sister. And in his second attack, any rich male stranger could serve as a stand-in for his father, whom he never saw. After all, the very fact that he indulged in robbery twice in a row reveals the lack of a sense of conscience in his mental makeup, a known result of the absence of a consistent value-conveying figure. His decision to stop making further attempts along the same line of physical attack had hardly anything to do with a guilty conscience. As an abandoned child, he developed the elements of a sociopathic personality free of guilt. In fact, in his memoirs, he reports only that his failures at robbery left him with “the mocking feeling of a bruised ego.”13
If not for the failing Russian economy of the time, Dmitri’s life might have taken a different course, and he might never have joined the Communist camp. Due to World War I inflation, the allowance sent by his father’s family became worthless. His mother’s salary as a teacher at the Anapa gymnasium was hardly enough to support them both. Young Dmitri was forced to fend for himself. As a result, at the age of sixteen he was forced to begin a life of hard labor for a piece of bread. This brought him close to the lives of the unfortunate and downtrodden, whom he otherwise would never have known.
In fact, he became one of them. First, he worked at the local vineyard, where he quickly discovered that his physical training at home was insufficient for real-life work. The young peasant girls turned out to be more adept at picking grapes than he was. His pride suffered, and he found a job as a sailor on a motor launch. His social adjustment did not go smoothly, however. He was often beaten up; and his ego suffered greatly. But he had to endure it all, his teeth clenched. Here, trying to keep up with other sailors of working-class backgrounds, he went through a painful overhaul in his life values. This was the time of his personality change. “A presumptuous weak little intellectual,” he writes about himself with remarkable introspection, “slowly but inescapably began turning into a rough, strong, adroit, suspicious, and internally tense and aggressive working lad.”
As irony has it, a week before the October 1917 Bolshevik takeover, ostensibly as a result of the decision of his father’s family finally to include Dmitri in their aristocratic clan, a letter from Petrograd arrived congratulating him and confirming his right to the title of Count of the Russian Empire. He asked himself how he would find work in the nearby Novorossiisk port next summer with the “idiotic burden” of an aristocratic lineage in his identity papers. Who would take him now? How would the sailors perceive it? Even if he found a job as a loader at the local cement foundries, it would not be any better. As a result, he never showed his identity papers to anyone. But his worries turned out to be short lived. Soon after the October 1917 Bolshevik takeover of power in the country, by special decree of the Council of People’s Commissars, all aristocratic titles were abolished.14
A year later, in the summer of 1918, he landed a job as a helmsman on the cargo ship Fortuna, cruising along the Caucasus shoreline. As a sailor, he became used not only to the roaring of the waves, sleepless nights, and lugging heavy sacks but, on his own admission, “to foul language, to drinking, and to prostitutes.” Now he became even more aware that his upbringing and the circumstances of his new life contradicted each other.
Meanwhile, after the October 1917 Bolshevik takeover, the new regime spread from St. Petersburg and Moscow to the country’s provinces and finally reached Anapa. Dmitri landed a job as a sailor on an armed patr
ol boat. With the ensuing civil war already under way, he was often forced to choose sides and act against his will. Two events of that period foreshadowed his future choices in life. The first was related to the experience of shooting a human being. When one day Protapov, head of the local Soviet government, was murdered, a quick revolutionary trial took place, and all five suspects, also World War I veterans still in uniform, were condemned to death by firing squad. Now a member of the town’s sentry, Dmitri was ordered to take part in their execution. Since his attempt to rob a rich merchant had ended in his being shot at, he notes in his memoirs: “Right then, spotting a discolored soldier’s tunic in my gun sight, I discovered that here too life was quite unlike that described in books. Aiming at others I felt more at ease and calmer than when I had seen others aiming at me.”
He was also greatly impressed at the sight of people who were proud to die for their ideals. As the civil war continued, the violence claimed new victims. One day a motor launch under a black banner carrying the words “Anarchy Is the Mother of Order” broke into the Anapa port. After pillaging the town’s wine cellars and treasury, the anarchists arrested the local commissar of justice, a former Moscow lawyer, and his wife, a schoolteacher. They brought the couple aboard a cutter and tied their feet together with rope. The couple chose to commit suicide rather than be killed by their enemies. They embraced each other, kissed, and threw themselves into the water.
Then it was the White Guard army’s turn to capture the town. Their first priority was to hang the local Red commissar of finance. After that, they arrested a young man who took an active part in all Bolshevik town meetings, though most of his talk had been without much point. The commander of the White Guard regiment, General Pokrovsky, offered to spare the young man if he would ask forgiveness for spreading revolutionary ideas. The young man spat at the general, and he was hanged at once.
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