Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith

  Back in Russia, aristocratic society was basking in the afterglow of a spectacular year. Nineteen fourteen would prove to be society’s last season and, even if only in retrospect, its brightest. Baroness Meiendorff later recalled that she had seen many sparkling social seasons, but “the last one, in 1914,” was by far the most “brilliant.”29 Princess Marie Gagarin remembered that last season as one of wild partying, “As if foreseeing the approach of catastrophe and striving to stifle a growing apprehension, all Petersburg nervously indulged in amusement and merrymaking.” It was a time of “unprecedented luxury and eloquence”; everywhere were champagne and fresh roses, lilacs, and mimosas imported from the south of France. The highlight of the season was the black and white ball at the home of Countess Betsy Shuvalov, with the officers of the Chevaliers Gardes resplendent in their uniforms. Six months later, nearly all these young men lay dead, killed in the first battles of the First World War.30 Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich cast these days in florid tones: “The gypsies cried, the glasses clinked, and the Rumanian violinists, clad in red, hypnotized inebriated men and women into a daring attempt to explore the depths of vice. Hysteria reigned supreme.”31

  On June 28 (N.S.), 1914, Gavrilo Princip assassinated the archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo, setting in motion the events leading to the outbreak of World War I a month later. News of the war was greeted in Russia with an eruption of patriotic fervor, and for a moment the entire country seemed to unite behind the Russian throne. Prince Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky witnessed drunken workers in St. Petersburg grab a passing officer and smother him with kisses as a crowd in the street looked on and cheered.32 It would not be long, however, before workers and soldiers would be smothering officers with deadly blows. Indeed, the danger the war posed for the regime, and for all society, had not gone unnoticed. As early as February 1914, a member of the Council of State, certain that if the war did not go well, it would lead to anarchy and revolution, had urged Nicholas to avoid war with Germany at any cost. The reactionary Minister of the Interior Nikolai Maklakov accurately sensed that the masses would rather fight Russia’s own privileged classes than German soldiers. (He himself was executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918.)33 In July, Count Sergei Witte told Boris Tatishchev that should Russia be foolish enough to go to war, it would mean “her immediate bankruptcy.”34 And in August, the mayor wrote prophetically in his diary: “Regardless how the war ends, this is the end of our vile regime.”35

  Lenin sensed the war spelled the end of tsarism as well, and for this very reason he welcomed it. He later adopted the so-called defeatist position, hoping that the war would lead to the collapse of tsarist Russia and serve as a prelude to a new war—namely, a pan-European civil war of the proletariat against the ruling classes. Social democrats, he argued, had a duty to turn the war into a larger conflict along class lines.36 Even after the fall of the Romanovs in 1917, Lenin continued to urge a “revolutionary war” at home, throughout Europe, and even among the subjugated peoples of India, China, and Persia.37

  In the summer of 1914 Russia entered a period of unprecedented savagery and bloodshed from which it would not exit until 1921, following four years of world war, two revolutions, and three more years of civil war and famine that claimed the lives of more than ten million people.38 No other country paid near the price for the folly of 1914 that Russia did. The losses were staggering. By the end of the autumn campaign, more than a million and a half men had been killed, injured, or taken prisoner. The officer corps, over half of which in 1912 were noblemen, suffered exceptional losses in the first battles against Germany.39 Fifteen million men served in the Russian armed forces during the Great War. More than four and a half million of them were killed or wounded.40

  In the early months of the war, the Golitsyn family followed the action closely. They hung a large map in the study at the Buchalki estate and marked the shifting front lines with little red-flagged pins. Prince Vladimir Trubetskoy, Eli’s husband, was off fighting with his Blue Cuirassier Life Guards Cavalry Regiment. He received the St. George’s Cross for wounds suffered at the battle of Gumbinnen in August 1914. In 1915, Trubetskoy joined the staff of General Alexei Brusilov, who was so impressed with the prince that he made him commander of the first-ever Russian Army automobile unit. A man of impeachable bravery, Vladimir was left with not just physical but emotional scars as well. Once he and his men came across a young and handsome German officer covered in blood and hopelessly entangled in barbed wire; one of Trubetskoy’s comrades set upon the man and beat him to death. The killing horrified Vladimir and haunted him for the rest of his life.41 Mikhail Golitsyn spent the war years establishing and overseeing army hospitals in Moscow; his brother Alexander, a medical doctor, inspected hospitals at the various fronts and brought the latest medical techniques for treating the wounded back from visits to London and Paris. The family set up hospitals for wounded soldiers at Buchalki and the Zubalovo estate as well as at their Moscow home.42

  Caring for sick and wounded soldiers was a popular way for nobles behind the lines, particularly women, to do their part for the war effort. The Sheremetevs too opened hospitals at a few of their properties. Countess Yekaterina Sheremetev organized shipments of relief packages to Russian prisoners of war, and her daughter Anna Saburov became the local head of an organization called the Family Hearth, dedicated to helping war orphans.43 Yelena Sheremetev, who turned eleven in 1915, organized a bazaar with the other Sheremetev grandchildren to sell items in order to raise money for wounded soldiers, and she also helped bandage the injured at a private infirmary.44 Of course, the most famous nurse of the war was the empress Alexandra, and her example encouraged others to get involved. While for most of these women their motives were honest and sincere, there was some element of what Countess Kleinmichel called “vanity and rivalry” to see who could house and feed and care for the men more splendidly than the rest.45 Vladimir Nabokov’s mother, who also set up a hospital, could not help seeing all these works as little more than “the ineffectiveness of part-time compassion.”46

  Almost from the beginning of the war, Russia’s lack of arms and ammunition was apparent. The shortages became so severe that soldiers were sent to the front with no guns and ordered to look for them among the dead. A full quarter of the troops did not even have boots.47 The average Russian soldier fought bravely, but what was asked of him became more than anyone could withstand. By the summer of 1915, officers had found themselves wasting scarce artillery shells on their own troops in a desperate attempt to get them to fight. So dreadful were the conditions at the front that tens of thousands shot off their own fingers to escape the carnage; even more began to desert and head back to their villages, which had been drained of millions of men. Food shortages and the rapid increase in the price of goods fueled ever larger and more frequent strikes in the cities.48

  In September 1915, Tsar Nicholas made the disastrous decision to replace Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich and assume supreme command of Russia’s armed forces. From this point on, the army’s mounting failures were blamed squarely on the tsar. The expression used to describe the condition of the army under Nicholas was “order, counterorder, and disorder.”49 Count Dmitry Sheremetev was at Nicholas’s side for almost the entire war. Despite their long history together, Nicholas had no interest in hearing Dmitry’s honest opinion on the conduct of the war. Dmitry found the post burdensome and retreated to the capital or to his estate in Finland to fish at every opportunity.50 With the tsar off at headquarters, Empress Alexandra, along with the mysterious holy man Grigory Rasputin, took over the government. Rasputin’s murky influence and the widespread perception of the German-born empress as an enemy spy fed talk of dark forces at work behind the throne and destroyed society’s waning trust in the Romanovs. Count Sergei Sheremetev was among those most vexed by Alexandra and Rasputin, and their actions, together with Nicholas’s inexplicable reluctance to address this widely perceived cancer on his reign, further destroyed his faith in the throne.51


  Society’s lack of trust in the government was matched by the government’s lack of trust in society. Convinced that they represented the gravest threat to the crown, the Okhrana kept up surveillance on numerous aristocratic families. Among them was Count Dmitry Sheremetev’s wife, Ira. In the autumn of 1914, the forty-two-year-old countess left her children for the front to set up a mobile medical unit with her own funds. Ira often found herself close to the fighting, and Dmitry worried constantly about her. So too did Alexander Protopopov, the last minister of the interior, although for different reasons. Protopopov sent his agents to spy on this “liberal lady and opponent of the ‘Old Regime.’ ” Countess Sheremetev was not the only aristocratic lady being spied on. Countess Ignatiev and her salon were also being monitored for subversive activity. The government feared these and other ladies were gathering officers in their salons and encouraging seditious talk that might lead to a modern-day Decembrists’ revolt.52 What the agents learned led them to see in the elite’s alienation from the throne a more serious threat than the one posed by the poor and disenfranchised.53

  Nabokov père opined: “To be for the tsar meant to be against Russia.”54 And in the final year of its life, the tsarist regime found itself in the strange position of being attacked even by self-professed monarchists, who abandoned Nicholas as weak and incapable of turning around the ship of state heading for the shoals.55 In the autumn of 1916, at the twelfth congress of the United Nobility, deputies publicly criticized the emperor for the first time ever.56 Even members of the Romanov family were pleading with Nicholas for change and reforms to give society a greater voice and role in governing, although it was most likely too late by then to halt the drift toward revolution.57 During the winter of 1915–16, Prince Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky wrote from the front to his mother in Nice, advising her not to return to Russia. “The age of debility has passed,” he told her. “Cosmic events are approaching.” That same winter he took leave in Petrograd (the new name given to St. Petersburg during the war), staying at the Hotel Astoria and spending his nights out at the opera, going to parties, dancing the tango, and downing champagne in fancy restaurants. “I noticed in Petrograd an undercurrent of nervousness, a feverish desire to have a good time,” he wrote, “and I had the impression that people were spending money as quickly as they could because they did not know what was going to happen next.”58

  The summer of 1916 found Ivan Bunin in the countryside at a cousin’s estate. “This is our Rus’,” he wrote then in his diary. “The thirst for self-destruction, atavism.” Being close to the narod, he sensed danger:

  The rye’s on fire, the seed’s all dead,

  But who will save it and risk his head?

  The smoke wafts high,

  The alarm bell shames,

  But who will put out the flames?

  An army of madmen has broken loose,

  And like Mamai, they’ll scourge all Rus’ . . .59

  With millions of peasants off at the front instead of working the fields, the threat of food shortages loomed in late 1916. In cities across Russia, labor unrest grew. Unlike in years past, the police were becoming reluctant to use violence against the protesters. Instead of firing on them, soldiers now began to join the strikers in the streets, to fall in behind banners crying “Down with the War,” and to add their voices to the “Marseillaise.”60 On a dark afternoon in that last winter of the Romanov dynasty a group of boys chased the automobile of the tsar’s sister Grand Duchess Xenia through the streets of Petrograd, pelting it with snowballs and yelling, “Down with the dirty bourgeoisie!”61 When Prince Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky returned to Petrograd at the end of 1916, the city struck him as a “lunatic asylum,” filled with a “poisonous” atmosphere and “profound despondency and fear.”62

  On the night of December 16, a small group of men led by Prince Felix Yusupov murdered Rasputin in Petrograd in a desperate attempt to free Russia from his harmful influence.63 Profoundly shaken by the murder, Nicholas and Alexandra retreated into seclusion and sought consolation in reading, music, and card games. Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich could not believe what he was seeing. “This cannot go on for long,” he warned Nicholas. “Discontent is mounting rapidly and, the further it goes, the more the abyss deepens between you and your people.” The British ambassador George Buchanan encouraged Nicholas to do whatever possible to regain the people’s trust before it was too late. The emperor found the idea preposterous. “Do you mean that I am to regain the confidence of my people, or that they are to regain my confidence?” One of the grand dukes warned that Russia was living through the most dangerous moment in its history, to which Empress Alexandra replied, “You are exaggerating the danger. When you are less excited, you will admit that I knew better.”64 To nearly everyone else, however, the danger of revolution seemed real and growing.

  On December 29, 1916, the overseer at Kuskovo wrote to wish Count Sergei Sheremetev and his wife in Petrograd a merry Christmas. It was cold and snowy, he noted, and all was quiet now that the soldiers billeted there for much of the year had left for the front. Everything would be “just fine,” the overseer added, if only there were enough food. They all were waiting for the government in Petrograd to come together and solve this problem for good.65 Elements within the state apparatus, however, were raising the alarm that it might already be too late. A report of the Petrograd Okhrana to the department of police that autumn marked “top secret” painted a frightening picture of Russia on the brink of catastrophe. The dire shortage of food and daily necessities combined with inflation of 300 percent made imminent a dangerous rebellion on the part of the lower classes. Talk throughout the city that “Russia is on the verge of a revolution” could no longer be discounted as the product of German agents. The country stood on the brink of a “hungry revolt,” after which would follow “the most savage excesses.”66

  PART II

  1917

  Arise, lift yourselves up, Russian people,

  Arise for battle, hungry brother,

  Let the cry of the people’s vengeance ring out—

  Onward, onward, onward!

  We’ve suffered insult long enough,

  And submitted too long to the nobles!

  Let us straighten our powerful backs

  And show the enemy our strength . . .

  Altogether now, mighty army,

  Let’s plunder the palaces of the rich!

  Let’s take back Mother Russia,

  And be done with paying rent.

  So arise, brothers, arise and be bold,

  And then shall the land be ours once more,

  And from the bitter aspens shall we hang

  Every last lackey of that Vampire-Tsar.

  —“The Peasant Song” (1917)

  5

  THE FALL OF THE ROMANOVS

  On the morning of Thursday, February 23, 1917, more than seven thousand women workers from the textile plants in Petrograd’s Vyborg District put down their work and walked out into the streets. The fact that it was International Women’s Day had little to do with their decision. Rather, their motivation to act was summed up by the single word they cried as they marched: “Bread!” The food shortages and ever-rising prices in early 1917 had devastated the city’s workers and left them hungry, cold, and desperate. The first two months of the year had seen a surge of strikes and protests in the capital and cities across the empire in response to the mounting crisis. As they marched through the streets, the women were joined by workers flooding out of the factories. By ten in the morning, twenty thousand more had fallen in; by noon more than fifty thousand were marching, and before the day was over, as many as ninety thousand had taken to the streets.

  As the day wore on, the calls for bread were joined with chants and banners proclaiming “Down with the War!” and “Down with the Tsar!” Marchers started smashing the windows of bakeries and breaking into food shops. Nonetheless, the authorities managed to restore order by the end of the day, and no one seemed
to take special note of this latest episode of unrest. Minister of the Interior Protopopov noted in his diary, “In general, nothing very terrible has happened,” and none of Nicholas’s ministers bothered to report the disturbances to him at headquarters in Mogilev. The revolution, however, had begun.1

  Throughout the night workers planned further strikes and a march to the city center. On the morning of the twenty-fourth, tens of thousands made their way from the outlying workers’ districts. They were met by several hundred Cossacks and soldiers at the Alexandrovsky Bridge. At first it seemed there might be a confrontation, but the Cossacks held back and allowed the workers to cross the Neva River and make for Nevsky Prospect and the heart of Petrograd. Along the way they encountered mounted police detachments, but the size of the crowds (as many as two hundred thousand) and the multiple directions from which they converged on the center overwhelmed the police. The numbers flooding Petrograd’s fine inner-city neighborhoods doubled that of the previous day and presented a sight that had not been seen since the Revolution of 1905. As the authorities in the city met to come up with an appropriate response, strike organizers stoked the momentum building in the factories and streets. Some of the soldiers sent out from the garrison to restore order joined the protesters. By Saturday, February 25, the workers’ numbers had climbed to as many as three hundred thousand, and their cries had progressed from “Down with the War!” to “Long Live the Revolution!”2

  That evening Nicholas was finally informed of the disorder in the capital. Unaware of the severity of the crisis, he drafted a terse message to General Sergei Khabalov, commander of the Petrograd military district, ordering him to end the disturbances the following day. The order stunned Khabalov. The only possible way to settle the matter in a single day was through violent confrontation, an act of war against the Russian people itself that he was loath to carry out and that he feared might well only incite further unrest or push his forces over to the side of the protesters. If he had been granted more time, Khabalov believed the tense situation might possibly be diffused. Left with no choice, however, Khabalov issued the order to fire on large demonstrations after three warnings.