Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy
Page 17
Beginning in late 1917, members of the former privileged classes were frequently arrested and held for ransom or threatened with death unless they paid extortion money. In one such example, the Cheka arrested 105 residents of Nizhny Novgorod and held them hostage until the city’s notables could come up with twenty-two million rubles. In the summer of 1918, Nicholas von Meck, the scion of a noble family that had made their fortune in the railway business, was arrested and held until his employees could raise a ransom of one hundred thousand rubles. Lenin not only knew of such practices but endorsed them.46 The elder anarchist prince Pyotr Kropotkin was so disgusted by the Bolsheviks’ policy of taking hostages that he wrote to Lenin himself to condemn it, describing it as a return to the Dark Ages.47
Several times during the civil war bourgeois hostages were shot en masse. In June 1919 in Kharkhov, between five hundred and one thousand men and women were shot; in August in Kiev, about eighteen hundred and some two thousand in Odessa.48 (Workers were not exempt. In March 1919, the Bolshevik government arrested and then shot about two hundred striking metalworkers.)49 The official policy of hostage taking soon spread to the criminal world. Bands of outlaws and Mafia-style gangs adopted the practice as their own, at times claiming to be acting as Soviet officials. The victims and their families could not always be certain who had taken away their loved ones or whether paying ransom would win them back.50
In urging the people to “expropriate the expropriators” and making it state policy, Lenin and the Bolsheviks unleashed a holdup of enormous proportions. Naked thievery engulfed the entire country and spread beyond anyone’s control. If the Bolsheviks could simply take whatever they wanted, what was to stop everyone else? Petrograd was plagued by a rash of carjackings.51 Even Lenin himself was a victim. Lenin had taken three luxury automobiles from the Alexander Palace’s imperial garage—two Rolls-Royces and Nicholas II’s Delaunay-Beleville for his personal use. He preferred to be chauffeured around in the Delaunay until his car was stopped by an armed gang in March 1918 and he was ordered out and left standing helpless on the street as the bandits got in and drove away. The expropriator in chief had been expropriated. (After that Lenin favored Grand Duke Mikhail’s 1915 Rolls-Royce.)52 An untold amount of the wealth expropriated following the revolution never reached the state but went directly into the pockets of the expropriators. So outrageous were the thefts during the work of the Safes Commission that Lenin ordered seven of the Gokhrán employees shot in November 1921 in order to send a message.53
Expropriating the expropriators, or looting the looters, fed a bizarre logic, for it was not always easy to tell, after all, who was who. One day a looter, the next, the looted, and so, according to the logic of the day, entitled to loot again. A joke from 1918 captures the topsy-turvy nature of life in this new world: “Question: ‘Who is the proletariat?’ Answer: ‘An ex-bourgeois.’ Question: ‘And who is the bourgeois?’ Answer: ‘The ex-proletariat.’ ”54 It was as if Russians had become trapped in a circular system of perpetual robbery. At times, however, the system did evince a strange way of distributing goods fairly. Take, for instance, the case of a man stopped at gunpoint and stripped bare on the streets of Petrograd. Moved by a sense of pity, the thieves gave their victim an old sheepskin coat so he would not freeze to death. When the man got home, he found in one of the coat pockets a collection of diamond rings and more money than he had been carrying when he was robbed.55
“Where are the wealthy, the fashionable ladies,” the newspaper Pravda asked with self-satisfaction in early 1919, “the expensive restaurants and private mansions, the beautiful entrances, the lying newspapers, all the corrupt ‘golden life’? All swept away. You can no longer see on the street a rich barin in a fur coat [. . .] He is exhausted and grown thin from living on a third-class ration; he no longer even has the appearance of a barin.”56
The Frenchman Louis de Robien, then living in Russia, shook his head in disbelief:
One wonders how the “bourgeois” can live at all. All property has been confiscated in actual fact, all bank deposits seized, and all pensions and salaries stopped. It means utter destitution. A few days ago near the Cinizelli Circus I saw an old general and a priest—the old Russia itself—clearing the streets of snow in order not to die of starvation. A gang of soldiers, in the prime of life, stood and mocked them. [. . .] It is the end of a world.57
9
THE CORNER HOUSE
On January 7, 1918, the Sheremetevs learned that the Bolsheviks had closed the Constituent Assembly in Petrograd. For Olga Sheremetev the news came as no surprise; days earlier she had predicted in her diary that the Bolsheviks would not permit the assembly to meet. According to Pavel, the Bolsheviks had done the right thing, for, he argued, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the largest bloc in the assembly, would be “more terrifying than the Bolsheviks.” The Bolsheviks, Pavel believed, would be able to introduce “firm authority,” unlike the SRs, and they would know how to deal with the Germans. Olga, however, was unconvinced.
To most at the Corner House the actions of the Bolsheviks were immaterial since the arrival of the Germans appeared imminent. By the middle of February the word was that the Germans would be in Moscow in a mere matter of days. Talk of an impending German advance into central Russia and the collapse of the Bolshevik government went on well into the summer. In late July, the Sheremetevs were discussing a rumor that a forward echelon of German soldiers had finally reached Moscow and were awaiting reinforcements before taking military action against the Bolsheviks. The German question split the Sheremetevs, just as it did the entire nobility. To some, patriotism and hatred of the Germans came first, and they preferred life—regardless of how bad—under the Bolsheviks, who were at least fellow Russians; to others, the greatest foe was internal, and the Germans represented the best hope for overthrowing the Bolsheviks, restoring order, and saving Russia. Such was the attitude of Olga. “Better the cultural yoke of the Germans than the socialist slavery of the Bolsheviks. [. . .] In the meantime, we socialize everything, we requisition, we municipalize, we—to put it in simple Russian—steal. Russia is dying now in worse fashion than it would from a German invasion.”1
The Sheremetevs were experiencing the socialization of everything firsthand. In January 1918, Pavel traveled to Petrograd to oversee the transfer of the Fountain House to the Ministry of Enlightenment. The family hated to lose their home, but it was decided this was the best way to protect it and its collections. The following year the Fountain House opened as the Sheremetev Palace Museum, one of a number of Museums of Everyday Life then established in the former palaces of the Yusupovs, Stroganovs, and Shuvalovs in Petrograd.2 Later that year the Sheremetev estates of Kuskovo and Ostankino were also nationalized and put in the service of the “interests of the working class.”3 Although it meant the loss of homes that had been in the family for centuries, at least these properties had a chance at survival, unlike the Voronovo estate Count Sergei had bought for his daughter Anna as a wedding present. The peasants burned Voronovo to the ground, but only after they had pulled Anna’s portrait down from the wall and hacked it to pieces.4
The family clung to the Corner House as their last refuge. In early 1918, a section of the house was taken over by the newly created Depository of Private Archives and then the entire property was appropriated by the Socialist Academy. The Sheremetevs were permitted to remain but were reduced to living in only part of the house.5 The idea for the Private Archives had been Pavel’s, and he was put in charge of the new depository. It pained him to see so much of Russia’s cultural heritage being destroyed, and so he set out to try to save whatever he could and store it in the family home.6 In the spring of 1918, Pavel, apparently on Lenin’s personal recommendation, was named custodian of the “historical and artistic treasures” at the family’s former estate of Ostafievo outside Moscow, which was also nationalized and turned into a museum along the lines of the Fountain House. As its custodian, Pavel was given an apartment in the left wing of the ho
use, where he was to remain for eleven years until being forced off the estate for good during Stalin’s Cultural Revolution.7
On August 30, 1918, an assassin killed Moisei Uritsky, head of the Petrograd Cheka. That same day in Moscow, three shots were fired at Lenin as he was leaving a gathering of workers; two of the bullets struck Lenin, nearly killing him. Fanya Kaplan, a former anarchist turned Socialist Revolutionary who had spent years in penal servitude under the old regime, was arrested. Under questioning she insisted that she had acted alone and was not part of any larger conspiracy. In the early morning of September 3, Kaplan was taken out and shot. “Red Terror is not an empty phrase,” her executioner said. “There can be no mercy for enemies of the Revolution!”
On September 1, the Red Newspaper called for blood: “We will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin and Uritsky [. . .] let there be floods of blood of the bourgeoisie—more blood, as much as possible.” The same day Pravda wrote: “The counter-revolution, this vicious mad dog, must be destroyed once and for all!”8
A resolution adopted by the Sovnarkóm on September 5 officially endorsed the Red Terror. Maxim Gorky observed that proizvol had become state policy.9
“We are living under Red Terror,” Olga Sheremetev wrote on September 12. “In recent days there’s been nothing but executions and more executions [. . .] They’re executing people because of Uritsky and Lenin, in Petrograd, in Moscow, and in the provinces [. . .] A great number of officers and former policemen and gendarmes have been killed. They say it’s worse in Petrograd than here, there’s famine and constant arrests [. . .] Unending Red Terror.”10 Within a week of Kaplan’s attack on Lenin the Petrograd Cheka shot 512 hostages, many of them former high-ranking tsarist officials. In Kronstadt, soldiers killed 400 hostages in one night. Soon the killings spread to the provinces. No regard was made to personal guilt or responsibility; the victims were selected on the basis of their class or profession. “Never had a modern society killed its people so readily,” the historian W. Bruce Lincoln observed of the Red Terror.11 To the Bolsheviks, believers in Marx’s notion that the death of the bourgeoisie was a historical inevitability, doing away with the ruling class was simply an act of euthanasia. “There is nothing immoral,” Trotsky coldly affirmed, “in the proletariat finishing off a class that is collapsing: that is its right.”12
It was amid this atmosphere of bloodlust that Yakov Peters and his men from the Cheka visited the Corner House on the night of November 23. It seems likely that when the Cheka took away six of the Sheremetev men in the early hours of the following day, many in the family feared they would never see them again. They were lucky, however, and none of them was harmed, at least immediately. The family tried to get the men released from prison. Countess Yekaterina called on Lev Kamenev, chairman of the Moscow Soviet. Although his anteroom was filled with waiting petitioners, she was ushered in directly to Kamenev, who got up, kissed her hand, and showed her to a chair. He asked what he could do for her, and the countess told him about the arrests and asked whether he might help get the men released. The matter was out of his control, Kamenev told her, but he did promise to find out what he could.13
On December 3, Pavel wrote his father from the Butyrki Prison:
Dear Papa,
How is your health? Life here for us is not as bad as one would think. Our cell is not cold and rather clean. We get up early, at 6:00 o’clock in the morning, and go to bed at 10:00. We are all getting along well. We sit in the corner and read the Gospels aloud. The windows open out onto the prison yard, where there is a very beautiful white church with an image of the Savior over the entrance. [. . .] The food here is much better than at the Lubyanka, where we spent the first two days. Twice a day they put out a large bowl of soup, and it’s not at all bad; sometimes it’s fish soup, sometimes meat with cabbage, potatoes, peas, or lentils. We sit around the bowl in a circle and eat from it with wooden spoons. There is enough bread too. Of course, we would be hungry if we didn’t receive food parcels from home, which almost everyone here does. There are those unfortunate ones who go for months without anything from their families. [. . .] I shall end here, for I am out of paper. I kiss you warmly and ask for your blessing.
Your son, Pavel14
Count Sergei died two weeks later. “I die with a profound faith in Russia,” he told the family gathered around his bed just hours before his death. “She will rise again.”15 Sergei had wanted to be buried next to his mother in the family crypt at Moscow’s Novospassky Monastery, but the Bolsheviks had driven off the monks and taken over the monastery, so he was laid to rest in an adjacent cemetery instead. In the 1930s, the cemetery was bulldozed to make way for an apartment block. The graves were dug up, and the remains scattered and lost.16
Pavel was the first of the group to be freed. According to his niece, money Pavel had given years before to a fellow university student and revolutionary by the name of Malinovsky played a role in his release.17 The others, except for Alik Saburov and Alexander Gudovich, were freed before the end of the year. “It was a difficult winter,” Yelena Sheremetev recalled.
We were cold and hungry, but at least we all lived together. We put in a little iron stove, and I would go for water over on Ostozhenka Street. I would freeze on the way back and duck into entranceways to try to warm up. We used whatever we could find, whatever we came across, to heat the stove. We would make tea in our communal kitchen [. . .] our chef boiled a thin potato soup or cooked up some runny millet and dished it out with one bowl for each of our three families: the Gudoviches, the Saburovs, and the Petrovichy.5 And that was all.18
Yelena and her brother Nikolai attended a new Soviet school at the time, though the constant hunger made it nearly impossible to focus on their lessons. The high point of the day was lunch, when the children were served a bowl of watery lentil soup. Every schoolchild competed for the job of server since he could take a bit extra for himself. Yelena had to drop out of school the following year so she could stand in the food line at the League to Save the Children.19 The famine gripping Russia in those years spared no one, except for the new elite; the Sheremetevs’ remaining chef left them around this time to cook for Lenin and his comrades in the Kremlin. The family was helped by a few former peasants who brought them food from the villages. Regardless, food was scarce, and the battle against hunger was inescapable.20
Yelena and her family earned a bit of money by selling women’s overshoes that they themselves made from old beaver-skin rugs. Like so many former nobles, they also sold their jewelry, antiques, and art for a pittance. Yelena’s mother, Lilya, sold the diamond diadem she had worn to receptions at the Winter Palace for a bag of flour. They had to be wary of any such transactions since prominent families were often targeted by con men and tricksters.21
By 1918, life had become so hard that some at the Corner House had begun to consider leaving Russia.22 Discussions about whether to stay or go were then taking place in noble families throughout the country. The decision was never an easy one and was shaped by a number of factors. Leaving required money, which by now many no longer had; leaving meant saying goodbye to one’s family and loved ones, which many could not bear; leaving meant having a place to go and an idea of how to cross Russia’s armed and dangerous borders; leaving meant giving up all hope for a life in Russia; leaving, to some, meant treason.23 After making his escape abroad, the beloved son of Princess Meshchersky wrote to let his family know he was safe. His mother replied just once, only to say that he was now dead to her and the rest of the family. “You have forgotten about love for the Motherland—you have left your native land, so now you can forget about the mother and sister you left there.”24 Leaving also meant you felt you were in danger. Marta Almedingen, from an impoverished and obscure noble family, chose to remain since, as her mother put it, “We are so unimportant that it does not matter whether we stay or not.”25
This was definitely not
the case for members of the great aristocratic clans with prominent surnames. They found themselves before an extremely difficult decision. If they chose to leave and managed to make it abroad, they had a better chance to establish themselves than the typical Russian nobleman given their education, knowledge of foreign languages, wealth (even if only some jewels and silver stuffed in a few suitcases), and personal connections to other European noble families. But leaving could only be an act of last resort. If they could have known at the time, however, what awaited them in Communist Russia, perhaps most would have chosen this path, for only a few individuals survived from these aristocratic families. The fate of the princes Obolensky is instructive. Prince Vladimir Obolensky was killed at his estate in early 1918; later that year his older brother Alexander was shot at the Fortress of Peter and Paul in Petrograd. Prince Mikhail Obolensky was beaten to death by a mob at a railroad station in February 1918. Prince Pavel Obolensky, a cornet in the Hussars, was shot by the Bolsheviks in June 1918 and left for dead, although he somehow survived and fled to the Crimea. Princess Yelena Obolensky was killed at her estate in November 1918; her dead body was burned along with her manor house. Many more Obolenskys suffered similar horrific fates; they included seven members of the family who perished in Stalin’s prisons years later.26
Of course, no one could foresee the future. What is more, no one had a clear idea of what was happening in Russia. A decision about whether to stay or leave could be made only on the basis of trustworthy information, and ever since the Bolshevik coup, this had become as scarce as food. Rumors became the currency of the day. “I was in no position to form any opinion as to what was happening in Petrograd, still less so in the rest of the country, let alone the outer world,” wrote Marta Almedingen. “There were no papers, and even the inland post functioned erratically. For human pebbles on the national beach (and I was one of them), the only channel of information was the interchange of rumors in the food queues. [. . .] Those were the only clubs left in the city.”27 In Yekaterinoslav, Princess Vera Urusov complained of “no mail, no telephone, no trains anymore, and the rare newspaper reveals nothing. We live only by On dit . . . On dit . . .”28 “We live under the power of rumors,” Olga Sheremetev wrote in early 1918. “If someone said Lenin had become a Muslim or I don’t know what nonsense, everyone would believe it.”29