Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith

  Mikhail and Vladimir had been struck by how much the secret police knew about them and their family’s private life. The family assumed someone close to them had to be an informant. Their suspicions landed on Mikhail’s nephew Alexei Bobrinsky. Alexei had been arrested along with Georgy Osorgin and then released almost immediately. Everyone in the family now made certain to be careful what they said around Alexei, although no one confronted him with their suspicions. His cousin Sergei Golitsyn, who had so looked up to him during their years in Bogoroditsk after the revolution, now fantasized about killing him as a traitor to his family and to the nobility.27

  On the night of April 2, 1926, almost exactly a year to the day from his first arrest, Vladimir was arrested a second time and charged with espionage. Again, the agents spent an entire night searching the Golitsyn apartment for foreign literature and papers and letters from abroad. His grandfather was crushed. Yelena wrote to Peshkov, insisting Vladimir was loyal to the Soviet government and had nothing to do with any counterrevolutionary activities.

  As before, the case against Vladimir was dropped, and after a few weeks he was home from the Butyrki.28 There would be more incarcerations in the years ahead, however, from which Vladimir drew an important moral:

  When they put you in prison, at first it seems to you that you’re having a terrible nightmare and that real life is the one they took you out of. Then (after 2–3 months) you get used to it and it seems to you that your cell is the real life, a nightmarish one, and freedom is a beautiful dream in which even life’s difficulties and annoyances are pleasant. Don’t take daily life’s petty unpleasantries too close to heart—remember prison.29

  In late July, two months after Vladimir’s release, a prison guard opened the door of Cell 8 and called out Nikolai Golitsyn’s name, bellowing, “With your things!” These three words brought joy to a prisoner’s ears, for they meant he was being freed.30 Kirill, Nikolai’s son, had to wait two more years to hear the same.

  Kirill spent fifteen years of his life behind bars, yet he refused to consider this time simply lost, unlike many people in his situation.

  I, for one, am not so generous that I might easily cross off fifteen years. This was no fifteen minutes. During these years I acquired many different skills and considerable diverse knowledge; I lived with interesting people; I observed the enormous variety of human characters and types; experienced both good and bad minutes and, of course, found like-minded people and made friends, whom I remember to this very day. No, simply cross out so many years, I cannot agree to this!31

  17

  VIRTUE IN RAGS

  In 1921, Countess Yekaterina Sheremetev turned seventy-two. Like must Russians, she had lost much during the past four years. The world she had lived in for more than six decades had vanished nearly overnight. Her husband was dead, two of her sons-in-law had been executed, and three of her four sons, including her eldest, Dmitry, and his entire family, had fled the country. More family members had been killed during the carnage of the civil war or succumbed to hunger and disease or simply disappeared. Nevertheless, despite such hardship, Countess Yekaterina was feeling well, cheerful even, as Christmas approached.

  She was living now at the old family estate of Ostafievo in an apartment in one of the manor’s wings with her son Pavel and his wife. The year before, Pavel, the old bachelor whose heart had been broken in such dramatic fashion three years earlier, surprised his family by marrying Praskovya Obolensky. The daughter of Prince Vasily and Princess Maria Obolensky (née Dolgoruky), Pashenka, as she was called, sprang from the same lofty aristocratic background as her groom. Pavel’s aunt described Praskovya as the perfect match for Pavel, being “very simple and serious” and “pretty,” and everyone agreed they were a happy couple.1 Pavel had been living at Ostafievo since 1918, when he was made custodian, and subsequently director, of the Museum of Everyday Life at the estate; he was kept busy making inventories of all the art and antiques, writing short guides to the collections, and leading tour groups.2 Praskovya did not have permission to live at Ostafievo, even as Pavel’s wife, so he successfully petitioned to have her added to the museum staff.3

  In comparison with the plight of so many former nobles, life for the three Sheremetevs at Ostafievo was pleasant. They remained on at their beloved estate, enjoyed meaningful work, and were left in peace. Russian history and culture had always been Pavel’s great passion, and he derived immense fulfillment from living at and caring for Ostafievo.4

  The serenity of Ostafievo, and the inescapable history of the place personified by the aged countess Yekaterina, touched everyone who visited. In the spring of 1921, the young folk from the Corner House came out for the day. “It was a beautiful May day,” Yuri Samarin wrote, “and there in the park, seated in a chair beneath a blossoming lilac, grandmother, in a violet dress, her hair a beautiful silver, received us in all her old world, majestic beauty.”5 On August 7, the family held what would be its final celebration at Ostafievo with the wedding of Varvara Gudovich and Vladimir Obolensky, Pavel’s brother-in-law. A photograph from the event has survived; it shows all the family gathered around the table—Sheremetevs, Saburovs, Gudoviches, Obolenskys—as well as more distant relations, friends, and members of the local clergy. It was a happy occasion, and everyone was glad for the young couple, but the strains of recent years show on their faces. They stare out at the camera, trying, somehow, to smile. The reception table is almost devoid of food and drink.6

  In a letter dated December 20, 1921, to his niece Lili, now living in Paris, Pavel wrote of life at home. Things at Ostafievo were “not so bad,” and he was finding special joy in watching the small winter birds pecking at breadcrumbs on his windowsill. Grandmother was doing well; she was up and walking about with the help of a cane. When two former Sheremetev peasants heard she was living at Ostafievo, they starting bringing fresh milk and bread. Their unsolicited kindness touched them and reaffirmed Pavel’s faith in his countrymen. “When people curse the Russian people, one mustn’t forget there are good people and that such abuse is an exaggeration.” The trains had improved, and one no longer had to travel in boxcars packed in “like cattle.” Pavel had been making trips back to Moscow to check on things at the Corner House. He told Lili how little space they had and how messy and disordered the home had become (particularly the Saburovs’ rooms). Still, he was pleased to see the young people so full of life and in such good spirits. Material life had also improved. Pavel had been elected a member of the All-Russian Union of Writers that year, an honor that came with increased food rations, and they had plenty of firewood. Many stores had opened up in recent months, and meat and white flour had reappeared, although everything was extremely expensive and the stores were always crowded. Clothing, however, was still a problem. “We are not always smartly dressed, but, as they say, ‘virtue can be recognized even when clothed in rags.’ ” Overall, Pavel had to admit that the government’s new economic policies signaled “a change for the better.”

  The improvement in their lives set Pavel to thinking about Russia and Europe and where one lived best.

  I have long been intrigued by the question of whether life for those who must work themselves in order to survive is better there where you are or here. Based on your letters, life is not so easy there either. I have always considered that the more correct approach is to try to build a life here at home, and I think that I have not been mistaken. It is difficult to write about all this. Regardless, we two have no desire to leave, but how we wish to return as soon as possible to a normal life. Things are improving slowly, but they are improving.7

  Pavel’s words attest to the divide within the nobility, indeed within individual families, that the revolution and civil war had opened up. The division tore many families apart and created a gulf that has never been fully bridged to this very day. Olga Sheremetev touched on the division in her diary around this time: “Sofia Vasilevna received a letter today from a Russian woman living abroad. She writes that if she returns
to Russia she will not shake the hand of any Russian who remained there. What did those emigrants who fled save—Russia or their own lives? We who have remained here have unquestionably suffered more. Was I not right in saying that we now speak different languages?”8

  The nobles who stayed behind and those who had departed did indeed begin to speak different languages, not at all surprising as their lives moved in different directions, in different worlds. How could the noble exiles ever fully understand the lives of their family members struggling to survive in Soviet Russia? Indeed, how could the exiles understand the Russia in which their families lived? Just as the early departed loved one never ages, remaining forever young in fading photographs, so too did the Russia in the minds of the exiles remain frozen in time, lost but unchanging, growing more beautiful with each passing year of its absence.

  The nostalgia for a lost Russia that existed now only in memory filled the letters Dmitry Sheremetev wrote to his mother from Europe.

  We are living on memories, on old Russian books and magazines (which, thank God, there is an abundance of here), and I have given myself the goal of completing my hunting reminiscences and have already written most of it. This has been terribly absorbing. I have relived my entire life for a second time. [. . .] I wrote about our trips with Papa across Russia, the Volga, the Caucasus, and Crimea. Village life, mushroom gathering, songbirds and flowers, all of this, as well as your museum and library, filled my heart with joyful trembling and I wanted to pour it all into the most captivating picture. All of these years just flowed from my pen [. . .] So far I have 19 large notebooks and it is still far from complete [. . .] I have also put together a Russian calendar for each day with notes, proverbs, and the like.

  Dmitry wrote his mother that he so desperately wished she could read his reminiscences since “they have been written with the blood of my heart, and I have poured my entire soul into them.”

  Like Proust’s madeleine, the taste of homemade borscht sent Dmitry back in time to his old life in Russia, unleashing the ache of loss. “We recall our dear Gavrontsy.11 What a dream that was! And when you recall the Volga with her broad expanse, it simply makes you want to cry. [. . .] Even the nightingales here are not the same, they make a sort of hoarse, smacking sound without any song or melody.”9

  The difficulty of their lives as émigrés made the memory of Russia sweeter. Dmitry, Ira, and their children arrived in Europe with little and from the beginning had to scramble to make ends meet.10 Dmitry wrote his mother that the entire family was spending most of their time working in the small garden growing vegetables—cucumbers, dill, radishes, and beets for their borscht. Dmitry and Ira’s daughter Irina lived with her husband, Georgy Mengden, and their little daughter at his parents’ in the first years of emigration. Irina wrote Grandmother Sheremetev that “at first life was very hard and, to tell the truth, simply terrible.” They managed to get by raising a few chickens and rabbits and tending the garden; Georgy took up beekeeping. Money was always short— at times there was not even enough for a pack of cigarettes—but Irina was grateful to at least have a roof over their heads.11

  Hard as émigré life was, some Russians were willing to accept its challenges. Baba Ara, Countess Sheremetev’s sister, was one of them. “Life here has become intolerable in every possible way,” she wrote Lili from Moscow in February 1921. By June she had had enough and was preparing to leave and trying to convince her sister to come with her. “Let’s go! Make up your mind, think of the bliss you’ll feel being in Cannes,12 God grant you make up your mind to come. The journey won’t be hard, only the trip from Moscow to Reval will be uncomfortable, but from there it will be smooth sailing [. . .] Do think it over well.” Countess Yekaterina did make up her mind—to stay, that is—and Baba Ara left without her, eventually settling in Berlin, where she continued to write to “my sweet Katya.” His mother’s decision not to leave Russia left Dmitry “in terrible grief.”12 Countess Yekaterina could not imagine leaving Russia. For one thing, her family still needed her. She earned a bit of money to help support her daughters Anna and Maria, and she assisted Pavel in his work at the museum.13

  In 1923, Pavel was promoted from custodian to manager of the museum, which he ran with the help of Praskovya and his mother. The previous year Praskovya had given birth to their first, and only, child, a boy they named Vasily. Pavel instilled in Vasily a love of art and culture and taught him the history of the Sheremetevs. He liked to tell Vasily, “To spit on the past is the same thing as to spit into the well we drink from,” and he always counseled his little boy: “Remember, you are Count Sheremetev.”14 Vasily never did forget, even when it would have been better to. Throughout the 1920s various Soviet bosses came out to Ostafievo to visit Lunacharsky and his wife, who used the manor as their personal summer home. In the summer of 1925, Lunacharsky, Maxim Litvinov, a Soviet diplomat and future commissar for foreign affairs, and Pavel were strolling in the park when Vasily came running up. Litvinov gently stroked the boy’s head and asked, “What’s your name?” “Count Vasily Sheremetev!” he proudly announced to the men’s astonishment.15

  Pavel cooperated with the Soviet establishment since he had little choice. Nonetheless, he harbored no illusions about the sort of people he was dealing with. Russia’s new rulers, Pavel knew, had nothing but contempt for the Russia of old, the Russia he loved and whose legacy he committed himself to preserving. That same year of Litvinov’s visit he wrote of his anguish:

  Why should anyone care for

  The shadows that have hurried off afar?

  Penury and trouble loom over us all,

  The days full of despicable malice;

  And who has come to the throne,

  Strengthening from on high their grip on power,

  They care for nothing,

  And strive to eradicate every trace

  Of Russia’s former glory . . .16

  Museums, libraries, and archives became a refuge for many nobles. These outposts of culture were safe places where former people gathered out of the glare of the more politicized state offices and agencies. No one had to explain himself, for they all typically came from the same social milieu and had shared similar fates since the revolution. Surrounding themselves with books, manuscripts, and art from old Russia allowed them to escape, if only for a while, the hostile world of the present for the comforting familiarity of the past. Moreover, with so much of the country’s cultural patrimony destroyed—palaces and estates looted and burned, entire libraries torn to pieces for cigarette paper, paintings slashed, statues pulled down and smashed to pieces, graves robbed, churches stripped of their holy relics—former people felt a profound sense of mission in their work as the keepers of Russia’s cultural heritage.

  They were the logical ones to undertake this. First of all, they knew intimately many of the items being gathered in the new state museums and libraries since they had once owned them or known well those who had, and second, not many other Russians had the requisite education and training. If, to paraphrase Lenin, the government administration was to become so orderly and well organized that even a cook could run the state, this did not necessarily mean she could work with old Slavic manuscripts. Nikolai Ilin of Moscow’s Rumiantsev Museum made this very point: “While a cook, if necessary, could run the state, she was as yet not able to catalog books in every European language.”17

  Olga Sheremetev, on the other hand, was able, and she did. She bound books, worked as a translator, compiled bibliographic information for a number of Moscow libraries, gave lectures, and taught foreign languages. In the 1930s, she also worked at the Literary Museum in Moscow, which became a nest of former people. There, laboring together with the former noble Dmitry Shakhovskoy, she reconstructed the personal library of the nineteenth-century writer-philosopher Pyotr Chaadaev and wrote commentary on his marginalia. The literary scholar Emma Gershtein frequented the museum at the time to consult with Olga, who was helping Gershtein in her work on a biography of Mikhail Lermontov.
As a Jew, Gershtein was an outsider in this gentry nest, which she found fascinating, if strange. She was surprised by the number of nobles working there, including members of the Turgenev, Bakunin, and Davydov families. The elderly Davydov, who she thought “personified the culture of the country estate,” liked to sing Gypsy romances, and Kirill Pigaryov, curator of the Muranovo estate museum (another nest of former people) and the great-grandson of the poet Fyodor Tyutchev, would stop by for friendly contests with the staff on noble genealogies.

  Olga loved the museum and the people there. “It is pleasant to see the people I work with,” she wrote in her diary. “The air with its smell of books and archival dust is pleasant. The conversations are pleasant. It must be this is something I was born with.” Gershtein held Olga Sheremetev in the highest regard: “Modest, poor and educated,” she wrote in her memoirs, “with a profound glowing gaze and abundant grey hair, she was a true pioneer.” As for the others, Gershtein was less impressed. “Oh, those gentry types! They were themselves particularly scared and always cautious.” Gershtein might have been correct in her assessment, though her inability to see the reasons for their behavior is difficult to understand.18