Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith

  By August, the mayor could see a dictatorship in Russia’s future. “Revolution, in its extreme development, always leads to dictatorship,” he commented in his diary, “that is, to the despotism of one man and the proizvol of his stooges, and despotism and proizvol, once introduced into a system and knowing neither limits nor responsibilities, as was the case under our autocracy, inevitably lead to revolution. We know this, and we shall see this ourselves here in the future.” It was an excruciating time for him. Like his fellow liberals, he looked with despair on the chaos around him and found it hard to understand how fast the profound joy over the collapse of the old order had been replaced by disgust and shame over what had followed. Regardless, he continued to believe that they had been right in their struggle to create a law-based society. “This had been the only path to save ourselves from the reckless proizvol of the first regime as well as its indivisible product—the destructive carelessness of the subsequent anarchy.”

  As the political polarization grew, such voices of moderation were drowned out. Even the mayor began to wonder whether he and his fellow liberals had been naive to think Russia was ready for a constitution and representative government. Maybe the Russians were only fit to be “Forever under the yoke and kept in the condition of slavery. First there was the yoke of the tsarist regime and its dark forces, and now the yoke of the mob and groups of proletarians, these fortuitous people, and then either the yoke of a dictator or a foreign people.”55

  From August 8–10, several hundred industrialists, landowners, politicians, clergy, and generals met in Moscow at the first Congress of Public Figures to unite the country’s nonsocialist forces and discuss the possible role of the military in the government. The participants agreed that national goals were being sacrificed for narrow class and personal interests. Civil war threatened Russia, and something had to be done, although they did not go so far as to endorse a military dictatorship. To rally support for the government, Kerensky responded with the State Conference, also in Moscow that same month. His attempt to unite left and right proved a public failure, highlighting the collapse of any political center at the expense of growing extremism. The conference did, however, greatly enhance the profile of General Lavr Kornilov, commander in chief of the Russian armed forces, a development that many welcomed, while others interpreted as a threat to the revolution.56

  Protests against perceived counterrevolution broke out across Russia just as Kornilov, in response to talk of a planned Bolshevik coup, began making preparations to suppress any such uprising and move against the soviet. In what became known as the Kornilov Affair, one of the most debated moments in the history of the revolution, Kerensky turned on Kornilov, convinced that Kornilov was planning to topple him and not the soviet. Kerensky had Kornilov and several other generals arrested. The sole victors in the Kornilov affair were the Bolsheviks. Kerensky had enlisted their aid in, as he saw it, “saving” the revolution from Kornilov. He freed their leaders from prison and had forty thousand guns distributed to workers in the capital. The Bolsheviks found their fortunes revived after the fiasco of the July Days, while Kerensky lost all the support of the conservatives and liberals, the military leadership, and even much of the left. As summer gave way to autumn, Russia found itself adrift with no national government to assert authority across its enormous territory.57

  On April 11, the day the Sheremetevs arrived in Moscow from Petrograd, Boris and Lili Vyazemsky left for their estate of Lotarevo in Tambov Province. Count Sergei was relieved to see them go. He could not make peace with their liberal views, and the unending conversations about politics left him exhausted. The situation at Lotarevo was tense. That spring the Vyazemskys had buried Boris’s brother Dmitry (accidentally killed by a stray bullet while riding in an automobile in Petrograd) in the family crypt against the wishes of the peasants, who hated Dmitry for the harsh methods he had used to subdue the violence in the area during the Revolution of 1905. Boris began to worry. Outside agitators arrived, and acts of vandalism against the estate grew over the summer. Boris sent appeals to the capital for help, but none came. As it became clear that their lives were in danger, Vyazemsky decided he and Lili would have to leave Lotarevo before the end of August. Tragedy struck, however, before they could make their escape.58

  In July, a peasant committee demanded Vyazemsky hand over his land. In turn, the peasants would agree to leave him twenty-seven acres and a small number of livestock. Vyazemsky refused, telling them they would have to wait for the Constituent Assembly. The peasants repeated their demands again in August, and this time Boris did not bother to reply.

  One morning in late August hundreds of peasants from the area, led by the main Bolshevik agitator in the area, a man named Moyeseev, descended on Lotarevo. Lili and the servants urged Boris to get in the wagon out back and ride off for a few hours until they had gone, but he refused. Vyazemsky had dealt with angry mobs before and had always managed to cool tempers and keep the peace, and he went out of the house that day to meet the peasants and talk to them as always. This time, however, under the goading of Moyeseev, they refused to be talked down. For a time it was not clear which side the peasants would take: some argued Vyazemsky should be killed, some that he should be arrested, and others that he should be sent off to the front. When a group of women placed a rope around Lili’s neck, the menfolk shouted at them to stop, and they took it off.

  As the mood shifted back and forth, Moyeseev continued to insist that the time had come for the peasants to show the Vyazemskys who was in charge. According to one peasant, Vyazemsky finally said, “My friends, just let me go unharmed and whatever you like, you may take—be it money, land, or the estate, only leave me in peace.”59 Instead, the peasants seized Boris and Lili and locked them up in the local school. Hours passed as the peasants debated what to do next. Lili’s maid brought them their raincoats and cigarettes as they waited. The village women kept staring at them through the windows, so Boris covered them up with their raincoats.60 The next day the villagers decided to take Boris to the train station and send him to Petrograd with orders he be sent straight to the front. A local peasant, Ivan Talitsky, said the villagers assumed the trenches would be Boris’s grave.61 Lili was left to the mercy of the peasants, who by now had gotten hold of the Lotarevo wine cellar. Boris was taken to the local station, but he never made it to Petrograd. When the villagers and Boris arrived, the station was overrun with deserters and glum recruits being shipped out. Soon word spread that Prince Vyazemsky was being held at the station. The deserters found Boris, dragged him out of the station master’s quarters, and beat him to death with metal rods.62

  With the help of a maid, Lili disguised herself as a peasant and escaped to the neighbors’ house. She told them what had happened, and they took her to the station to look for Boris. She found his mutilated body lying in an empty freight car off on a side track. She crawled in, sat beside him, and remained there for a long time. A young girl happened by and handed Lili some flowers. Lili then took Boris’s coffin on the train back to Moscow.

  The Sheremetevs learned of the killing on August 25 while at Mikhailovskoe. The following day they received further details of what had happened to Boris, including the fact that his body had been defiled as it lay dead in the dirt. Count Sergei was deeply shaken. “This is staggering. Signs of a Pugachyovshchina, requiring we be extremely cautious.” His wife, Yekaterina, suffered a mild heart attack upon hearing the news.63 Alexander Gudovich met Lili when the train reached Moscow. A requiem was held for Boris on the twenty-ninth. Lilya Sheremetev noted that Lili “continues to be brave, supported by her strong faith. She cried today after the night service.”64

  After Boris’s murder, the peasants in the area waited for some sort of government response. But as the days and then weeks passed and nothing happened, they became emboldened. Four months after the murder, Lotarevo was pillaged and then razed. Boris’s brother Dmitry’s grave was dug up, and his corpse tossed out onto the ground. Lili later met thei
r old estate steward in the Crimea, and he told her how the peasants had torn the estate apart. One of the peasants said to him, “We wanted to destroy everything so that the old owners could never come back.”65 The events at Lotarevo spread fear to the surrounding estates. The landowners demanded protection from the government and punishment of the Vyazemsky peasants, but still nothing happened. Violence erupted at several estates, and manor houses were set ablaze. By the end of October, 154 estates had been plundered and destroyed in Tambov Province.66

  Despite the tragedy at Lotarevo, not everyone in the family lost hope. Princess Cantacuzène met Boris’s mother in the Crimea not long after his murder. The princess was moved by his mother’s forgiveness and by the fact that like most of the nobles the princess met there, she remained optimistic about Russia’s future.67

  As autumn arrived, the terror in the countryside exploded. Newspapers no longer wrote about “disturbances” and “unrest” sweeping the land but about “anarchy.” Day reported in late September that the peasants in Tula Province were spreading word of “the total destruction of all landowners” and seizing all their land and manors without waiting for the Constituent Assembly.68 In October, signs began appearing in the Kozlovsky district informing the peasants on which estates nobles had fled for safety and urging them to “burn these estates as well” and so drive all the landlords out of the area for good.69 In Kursk Province in mid-October, a mysterious organization called the Black Hand came to life, urging the peasants on to violence against the landlords.70 In some places the violence was not limited to nobles but was directed at Jews as well.71 The greatest explosion of peasant violence was in the traditionally volatile region of the Volga River, especially the provinces of Saratov, Samara, Penza, and Simbirsk. The peasants in this region played a crucial role in determining the fate of the revolution and spelling the end of the old order in the Russian countryside.72

  In September, the mayor, Sofia, and the rest of the Golitsyn family returned to Moscow for the beginning of the new school year. Their son Alexander was particularly upset about recent events. Since the February Revolution he had worked diligently to help reorganize the local government in Zvenigorod until he was forced out by the Bolsheviks, who were gaining support in the area. He had now lost all his earlier optimism for the revolution and was convinced that only a strong man like Kornilov could have saved the country.73 With chaos swirling about them, their hopes for the future dying, the mayor nonetheless looked upon his family gathered around him and was filled with joy. “At the present, tragic time, it is not just our private lives, filled with their small concerns and work, that are our refuge as well as our salvation, but even more so it is the life of our family, the feeling of complete happiness that we find in our family, so beloved and so beautiful.”74

  Few nobles were able to find such happiness. That same month Princess Catherine Sayn-Wittgenstein could think of little else but the civil war she saw gathering on the horizon. Life in Russia was a tragedy, and everyone was responsible: the Bolsheviks, the soldiers, the peasants, politicians, merchants, and the nobility as well.

  Can we say that everyone but us was guilty, that we suffer innocently? Of course not. We, the noble estate, that is, have been guilty before all the other estates for centuries. We do not care to recall this, however, it is only natural that this hatred for us, for our estate, hatred based on envy, would have to explode sooner or later. Now they hate us with unyielding malice, not differentiating individuals among us, and seeing only a class of “lords,” “burzhui,” “landowners,” and “masters,” a class that so many obliging people have been encouraging them to hate more than anything. It is understandable and it is forgivable that they hate us, for we in fact hate them, we hate them with the same unyielding malice and, what is more, we despise them. [. . .] We accuse them of stupidity, of cupidity, of brutish rudeness and filthiness, we accuse them of a lack of patriotism and of all humanity, save selfishness. That they are dark and backward, this is true, but are they to blame for this? [. . .] Who taught them to love the Motherland? Cupidity, rudeness, impudence, and stupidity—these are their noted traits, but can one really expect better of a people who only recently were slaves? [. . .] Both sides have always thought in terms of “us” and “them,” and we now see that therein lay our ancestral error. Both sides desire not to understand each other, not to come together, not to forgive, rather to vanquish the other.

  If Russia were indeed on the verge of civil war, Catherine remarked, and one day she were to find her own head under the guillotine, she would feel no self-pity or anger and would understand, for no one was blameless.75

  7

  THE BOLSHEVIK COUP

  One constantly feels oppressed by worry of a German attack and Bolshevik supremacy. If they seize power that will be the final step into the abyss. [. . .] My soul is full of sorrow. I grieve for the Motherland.”1

  Count Sergei’s grief, recorded in his diary in the first days of October, was shared by many Russians at the time. In their eyes, the country was being destroyed from without by the Germans and from within by the Bolsheviks. Popular support for the Bolsheviks was growing that autumn together with the persistent rumors of an impending Bolshevik coup. While some of the Bolshevik leadership continued to resist Lenin’s insistence on an immediate seizure of power, in the end Lenin managed to impose his will at a secret meeting of the Central Committee in Petrograd on October 10, when it was agreed to prepare for an armed coup d’état against the Provisional Government. Lenin refused to consider any cooperation with the other socialist parties, and even though the attack against Kerensky’s government would be carried out under the banner of “All Power to the Soviets,” this would be nothing but a smoke screen to hide the Bolsheviks’ real plans for a complete monopoly of power.2

  On the evening of October 25, Princess Meshchersky went to the opera in Petrograd. She noticed some trouble with the lights and a strange atmosphere in the theater, but nothing out of the ordinary. Her experiences accord with most others in the city that night, for whom life, though chaotic and unpredictable, was uneventful.3 But as the city’s residents went about their business, the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC) of the Petrograd Soviet, together with Red Guards and Bolshevik soldiers and sailors, were at work overthrowing the government. That day the MRC took control of the electric power station, the main post office, the State Bank, and the central telegraph exchange, as well as key bridges and railway stations. So weak had the government become that no one seemed to notice what was happening. There was almost no one left to defend the government, and so it collapsed with a whimper when faced by no more than several thousand armed men. In the early-morning hours of the twenty-sixth, a group of soldiers marched into the Winter Palace to arrest the government ministers, and there was no one to stop them. The few hundred loyal troops had all but left, either for home or for one of the city’s restaurants. Kerensky himself had already abandoned the capital.

  The number of soldiers who captured the Winter Palace was quickly dwarfed by those that followed, as news spread that the massive wine cellar of the tsars—tens of thousands of bottles—was being handed out and sold off. A bacchanalia of unseen proportions erupted. Crowds of drunken workers, soldiers, and sailors, including the men responsible for the attack on the palace, rioted and looted. They vandalized the Winter Palace, broke into liquor stores and shops, attacked, robbed, and killed the burzhui in the streets and in their homes. Moisei Uritsky, the head of the Petrograd Cheka from 1918, dressed every bit the Jewish intelligént, barely escaped the mob with his life. The Bolsheviks tried to pump the wine from the palace cellar out into the gutter to end the chaos, but the crowds simply lowered themselves onto the street to drink it up. Martial law was declared, and the prisons were soon filled beyond capacity. Even machine guns and threats to blow up the cellar with dynamite proved ineffective in stopping the rioting. The disorder lasted for several weeks and did not end until every bottle had been drunk. Maxim Gorky moaned
that what they were witnessing was not a revolution but “a pogrom of greed, hatred, and vengeance.”4

  Count Sergei spent much of October 27 overseeing the hanging of paintings brought to Moscow from the Fountain House. Looking at the large canvases depicting scenes from Russia’s past amid the present crisis brought only anguish, and he went to bed early. Around four in the morning of the twenty-eighth he was awoken by the sound of heavy gunfire from the direction of the Kremlin, only a few blocks away from the Sheremetevs’ Corner House on Vozdvizhenka Street. He looked out his window and saw in the light of the streetlamps young cadets at their posts across the street guarding the state revenue building. Then the shooting stopped, all was quiet once more, and Count Sergei went back to sleep. At breakfast the shooting began again, accompanied now by heavy machine-gun fire. Soon the shooting intensified and surrounded the house. No one had any idea what was going on. There were no newspapers, nothing but rumors, including one that Generals Mikhail Alexeev and Alexei Brusilov had arrived in Moscow to set up a new government separate from Petrograd.5