Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith

  Situations like this suggested the world was changing, though great effort went into denying it. Life was lived according to a set pattern of rituals and traditions that seemed to exist outside time, to have the appearance of being eternal. Life was thoroughly structured and ordered, and there was a familiar, comforting rhythm to the days, months, seasons of the year. The evening meal at the Golitsyns, for example, never varied from the routine. At three in the afternoon, tea was served from the samovar. At six-thirty, Gleb, the mayor’s white-liveried servant, summoned all to dinner with a bell. Around this time, Mikhail Golitsyn, Sergei’s father, returned from work and joined the other men at a small table for a little vodka (always Pyotr Smirnov, No. 21) and fish or mushrooms before taking their seats at the main table. Grandmother Sofia occupied one end; the mayor, the other. The men sat near him; the women, near her. The guest of honor always sat at the first place to Sofia’s right. A bottle of French Beaujolais stood in front of the mayor; a German Riesling, in front of Sofia. The bread was always black and always sliced into perfect rectangles. Gleb would appear with a large china soup tureen and place it before Sofia, followed by Anton, Sergei’s father’s lackey, bringing the bowls. Sofia would fill each bowl and instruct the servants whom to give it to. The children were served last. Just serving the soup took fifteen minutes. After three courses, Sergei’s father typically got up and returned to work, and the rest remained at the table while Mikhail Mironovich, the cook, stood alongside Sofia in his white cap and wrote down her wishes for the next day’s dinner menu. Finally, everyone got up and retired to the drawing room for coffee, candy, and cookies.25

  So great was the respect for tradition at Petrovskoe that nothing in the house could be moved or altered. Even the furniture stayed exactly where it had been placed decades earlier.26

  4

  THE LAST DANCE

  Over two nights in February 1903, the Winter Palace hosted the grandest costume ball in the reign of Nicholas II. The first night featured a concert in the Hermitage Theater with scenes from Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov featuring Fyodor Chaliapin and dances from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake with Anna Pavlova, followed by a lavish buffet. The second and main night of the ball highlighted the dancing of sixty-five officers of the guards regiments specially selected by the empress, a dinner service, and then more dancing until the early hours of the morning. All of aristocratic society was there: the political elite, the diplomatic corps, and the foreign ambassadors.

  The Ball of 1903 was to be imperial Russia’s last great ball. What made it so spectacular and unusual was in large part its special theme. Although held on the two-hundredth-year anniversary of the capital’s founding by Peter the Great, Nicholas chose as the theme for the ball the reign of Peter’s father, Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, and all the guests were instructed to come in costumes from the seventeenth century. Such was the excitement that vast sums of money were spent on designers and the finest tailors to create exquisite outfits of fancy brocades, silks, and satin decorated with gold, pearls, and diamonds. The men came attired as boyars, gunners, falconers, and Cossack hetmans; the ladies, as boyarinas, peasants (elaborately costumed ones anyway), and Muscovite ladies of the court. Some dressed as concrete historical figures. Count Sergei Sheremetev, for example, came as Field Marshal Count Boris Sheremetev, his great-great-grandfather. The emperor came as Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, and Empress Alexandra, wearing a costume estimated at a million rubles, as Tsaritsa Maria Ilinichna.1 So enormous was its effect that the ball was repeated shortly thereafter at the home of Count Alexander Sheremetev.

  Nicholas’s fascination with the early Romanovs was due in no small measure to his desire to flee the troubles of the twentieth century for what Grand Duke Alexander called “the glorious past of our family.” The entertainment left the grand duke with a bad feeling. He recalled an evening like it some twenty-five years earlier under Alexander II, but the times had changed. “A new and hostile Russia glared through the large windows of the palace,” he wrote. “This magnificent pageant of the seventeenth-century must have made a strange impression on the foreign ambassadors: while we danced, the workers were striking and the clouds in the Far East were hanging dangerously low.”2

  The Russian Empire was being rocked by disturbances in 1902–03. National resistance movements rose up in Armenia and Finland; pogroms shook Kishinev and Gomel; noble estates were attacked and burned when peasant unrest erupted in the provinces of Kharkov and Poltava following several years of famine; workers went out on strike, and their numbers grew to nearly ninety thousand, making for the largest wave of industrial protest the country had ever seen; students marched for greater autonomy of the universities; and doctors, teachers, and zemstvo leaders increased their demands for democratic reforms.3 In early 1904, against his own better judgment, Tsar Nicholas allowed Russia to be dragged into a war against Japan. Exaggerating popular expressions of patriotic favor for the conflict and minimizing early Russian defeats, Nicholas badly misjudged the war in the Far East, which soon lost public support and exposed the many weaknesses of both Russian military and political institutions. Defeat at the hands of the “inferior” Asians served to exacerbate domestic unrest, unrest that became so serious the tsar was forced to end the Russo-Japanese War with the Treaty of Portsmouth on September 5 (N.S.), 1905.4

  On January 9, 1905, a peaceful demonstration of workers had marched to the Winter Palace to petition the tsar for protection against their factory owners. The police opened fire on the marchers, killing at least 150 men, women, and children and leaving several hundred more wounded on the palace square. “Bloody Sunday,” as the massacre came to be known, outraged society, severely damaged the image of the tsar, and added fuel to the revolutionary movement. In October, the entire country was paralyzed by a massive general strike, organized in part by newly formed Soviets of Workers’ Deputies in cities across Russia; in December, workers and radicals in Moscow took to the streets and engaged in armed struggle with soldiers and the police; and the sailors of the battleship Potemkin mutinied at the Black Sea port of Odessa. Forced into a corner, Nicholas had no choice but to make concessions, and on October 17, 1905, he issued the October Manifesto, guaranteeing civil liberties, the creation of a legislative parliament (the Duma), and promising future reforms.5

  The Revolution of 1905 did not end there, however. The October Manifesto satisfied few people, especially when it became clear that Nicholas had every intention of undermining it and retaining as much power as possible. By the summer of 1906 the violence had spread to the countryside. “Russia was on fire,” wrote Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, as the peasants tried to burn the landlords out once and for all.6

  Vladimir Korostowetz was at his family’s estate of Peresash in the province of Chernigov that summer when two neighboring landlords were murdered, prompting most of the others to flee their estates for the towns of Chernigov or Kiev. The Korostowetz family chose to stay, even though by the autumn of 1906 they were utterly isolated after the telegraph and postal service stopped operating because of the upheavals. Estates in the area were being torched almost nightly. Soon a pattern developed. A sign naming the next estate to be pillaged would appear in the villages; the peasants would then gather to descend on it in the dark. Sometimes entire villages would turn out for the looting, though according to Korostowetz, this was not how they saw it. “Sharing” is what they called it, as in the peasants went to the Burovka estate “ ‘in order to share Sakharovitch,’ or ‘the people of Petriki have gone forty versts to-day to share Komarovsky and Svetchin.’ ” From Peresash, Korostowetz could see the glow of fires on the night horizon and hear “the cries of the savage mob.” It was not just the nobles who got shared. Jews, for centuries frequent victims of peasant rage, were targeted as well. Yegor, the family’s head watchman, joined the plunder of a local Jew and returned with pride over his fine haul of jewelry. The revolution brought with it a wave of anti-Jewish violence that left thousands injured and dead. The pogrom
s were largely provoked by right-wing elements like the notorious Black Hundreds, which unjustly blamed the empire’s Jewish population for the crisis facing the tsarist regime. It is not clear, however, the extent to which men like Yegor were motivated by anti-Semitism or greed or some combination thereof.7

  In the spring and summer of 1906, peasant unrest broke out at the Golitsyns’ Buchalki estate. The family heard talk that the peasants were planning a raid, and so in early June with loaded guns they left in the middle of the night for the town of Epifan, where government troops had just arrived. Two dozen dragoons and officers were then sent to Buchalki to keep the peace. That summer small pogroms broke out at a few other Golitsyn estates, including Livny. A year later the Golitsyns had still not returned to Buchalki, so hostile was the mood of the peasants.8

  Some of the Sheremetev estates witnessed pogroms and uprisings during the Revolution of 1905 as well. To Count Sergei this reflected nothing more than the degradation of the Russian peasant.9 As appalled as he was by the peasants, however, he was even more outraged by the actions of the tsar. To a conservative like Count Sergei there was no excuse for the trouble Russia and Nicholas found themselves in. Years earlier he had written of his concerns about the new tsar and how far he had diverted from the path of his late father:

  Something is going to happen, and thinking about the current situation weighs upon me. A decisive turning point is approaching. Where does Russia’s future lie, where are the current masters directing her? This is all so “artificial,” and yet there will be future historians who will claim that this was all “inevitable.” No, no, a thousand times, no! For after such a reign a legacy had been handed down . . . All that had to be done was to follow straight along this path.

  And after the October Manifesto he wrote of more disappointment in Nicholas: “Dear God, how far we have departed from 1894, and in what direction! But then I never did have any hopes for the successor. Russia in 1894 and Russia today! I don’t know whether anyone will ever read this diary, but what we are now experiencing with him, I had premonitions of long ago.”10

  Having already begun to drift to the right a few years earlier, Pavel Sheremetev was pushed even further by the revolutionary events. In March 1905, together with his brother Pyotr, he founded the Union of Russian Men (Soiúz Rússkikh Liudeí—not to be confused with the archreactionary Union of Russian People), which became one of the largest monarchist organizations of the time. Proclaiming that “Russia and Autocracy are Indivisible,” the union tried to unite men of all classes in defense of the existing order. Pavel organized meetings with workers and was part of a small delegation that met with Nicholas on June 21, 1905, urging him to resist the demands of the zemstvo leaders, men he had once found common cause with. (“We have nothing to worry about,” Nicholas assured Pavel that day. “Everything will be as in the days of old.”) Dominated by aristocrats and landowners, the union espoused Slavophile nationalism and blamed the unrest on the radical intelligentsia and, to a lesser extent, the Jews, positions that became more shrill over time and that appear to have made Pavel uncomfortable, prompting him to leave the union the following year.11

  Pavel’s accommodation with the tsarist state during the revolutionary upheaval of 1905–06 reflected a larger trend within the nobility, as many former critics of autocracy, terrified by the violence they had seen directed against them and, indeed, against all of privileged Russia, now sensed that it was the regime alone that was protecting them from a boundless sea of hostility. The rapprochement, however, would never be universal, much of the nobility having lost all faith in Nicholas by now, nor would it be lasting, as the next major crisis would reveal.12

  For those few who dared to look honestly and unflinchingly upon the revolutionary violence, it was clear that the nobility was facing a future infinitely more terrifying than what Chekhov had sketched in The Cherry Orchard. Ivan Bunin was one of them. Bunin has been called “the last of the great gentry writers,” and even though he was the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature, he remains little known, much less read, in the West today. The Bunins were an old and once wealthy aristocratic family that was in steep decline by the time of Ivan’s birth in 1870. Bunin’s father, a veteran of the Crimean War, had squandered his inheritance and that of his wife on cards, wine, and hunting. Bunin’s brother, Yuly, was a noted journalist with connections to The People’s Will; he had been arrested in 1884 and spent a year in prison before being released to live under police supervision on the family estate. Ivan followed his brother’s career, becoming a struggling journalist and writer.13

  Bunin welcomed the October Manifesto (“I was so excited my hands were shaking . . . Such tremendous joy.”), but his hopes for Russia’s future were dimmed after witnessing anti-Jewish pogroms in Odessa that autumn that left him sickened. In 1906, he saw peasant revolts near Tula and Orel, and his family had to flee their own estate, part of which was destroyed, after being threatened by the locals.14 Any illusions he may have had about the native goodness of the common people—the naród—evaporated; he spoke out against what he saw as the educated classes’ fantasies about the peasantry, fantasies he believed were based on complete ignorance. “In no other country is there such a striking gap between the cultured and uncultured classes as in ours,” Bunin told the Moscow News in 1912.15 He held the country’s elite in equal disdain, referring to the “pillars of society” as “garbage,” and had no time for Slavophile dreams of Russia’s uniqueness or its special mission in the world.16

  Bunin laid out his dark prophetic vision in the 1911 novella Sukhodol (The Dry Valley). It tells the story of the Khrushchevs, an ancient noble family that, not unlike Bunin’s own, has come down in the world. Sukhodol presents the world of the Russian gentry and the peasants as one of cruel suffering and doom, in which both groups are imprisoned in a circle of inescapable misery. The once grand manor house has long since fallen into disrepair; the gold spoons are “worn as thin as maple leaves.” The older generation has come unhinged. A tragic love affair has driven Aunt Tonya mad, and she has left to live in a serf hut out back, banging away all night on an old piano; no one sits down to dinner without a whip, just in case the barely suppressed hatreds erupt. The deranged patriarch, Pyotr Khrushchev, has two boys, Arkady, his legitimate son and heir, and Gervaska, an illegitimate son by a peasant woman. Knowing the day will come when Arkady will assert his birthright and beat him as his master, Gervaska strikes first, killing his father, stripping him of his gold wedding band, and then fleeing. Freed from the master’s authority, the peasant Yushka rapes the servant girl. By the end of the story, every last trace of the Khrushchevs and their lives in Sukhodol has been wiped from the earth. The family portraits, the letters, and finally the manor house itself vanish from neglect, theft, and fire. Weeds overtake the family graveyard; the headstones, worn smooth and illegible from wind and rain, topple and are lost.17

  Works, such as Sukhodol, that cast the peasants in such unflattering light earned Bunin condemnation from the left. Critics dubbed him “a child of The Cherry Orchard” and a frightened nobleman. Time, however, was to prove the basic truth of his vision.18

  The 1906 revolts in the countryside were put down with brutal force. Yet even though order was reestablished, the problems that had sparked the violence remained; what is more, the harsh tactics fueled the peasants’ desire for revenge and convinced them that the next time they would have to fight even harder to drive the masters off the land for good. The tense atmosphere that now gripped the countryside did not escape the landowners. When one nobleman returned to his estate in Samara Province, he noticed the peasants’ previous “courtesy, friendliness, bows” had been replaced by “animosity” and “rudeness.”19 “The manor and the village face each other like two warring camps,” a group of anxious nobles informed Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin.20 The trauma of 1905 haunted the Russian nobility. Countess Katia von Carlow, then a young girl, could not escape the fear. She loved the family home at
Oranienbaum, but she no longer felt safe there. Once she had “a sort of terrifying vision—she saw the hall and familiar corridors full of an angry and menacing crowd with sticks and weapons, forcing their way along.”21 The vision was about to become reality.

  In response to the regime’s crackdown, the revolutionary terror that had plagued Russia for decades now exploded. Between January 1908 and May 1910, 19,957 terrorist attacks and revolutionary robberies were recorded; 732 government officials and 3,051 private citizens were killed, and nearly another 4,000 wounded. Shadowy groups with names like Death for Death and the Group of Terrorist-Expropriators spread fear throughout society.22 In April 1902, a Socialist Revolutionary posing as an officer fired five shots at close range into Minister of the Interior Dmitry Sipyagin, the husband of Count Sergei Sheremetev’s sister-in-law23; in July 1904, Minister of the Interior Vyacheslav Plehve was blown up by a terrorist bomb tossed into his carriage24; the following year another bomb was lobbed into the carriage of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, reducing him to nothing but bloody scraps25; and in 1911, a double agent shot and killed Prime Minister Stolypin in the Kiev Opera House. The tsar was so near to Stolypin that night he heard the shots himself.26

  A sense of doom settled over Russia. The apocalypse seemed to be approaching, and no one and nothing could stop it.27 One May night in Paris in 1914, while sharing a drink on the terrace of the Café de Rohan, a reflective Baron Nikolai Wrangel turned and announced to Count Valentin Zubov: “We are on the verge of events, the likes of which the world has not seen since the time of the barbarian invasions. [. . .] Soon everything that constitutes our lives will strike the world as useless. A period of barbarism is about to begin and it shall last for decades.”28