Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy
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That autumn the Golitsyns were ordered to leave Moscow within two weeks. The order hit the mayor especially hard. Moscow had been his home for most of his life. His entire career had been devoted to Russia’s ancient capital, and he loved the city as if it were a member of his own family. It was a part of him, and exile at his age meant he was likely to die without ever seeing it again. He was beside himself with grief when the day to leave arrived. He told his family he would not go; he simply could not leave. They did their best to calm him down. Everyone was anxious and exhausted. The previous two weeks had been busy. They had given away most of their furniture and also a great deal of their remaining books. In the courtyard they burned several generations’ worth of family letters. There was only so much they could pack up and take with them. Finally, one Sunday morning in October several horse-drawn drays arrived, and they started to load up their belongings—a bit of furniture, a few cases, trunks, and boxes. Only after all the heavy things had been loaded did Vladimir bring out the family portraits, lay them on top, cover and then secure them for the journey. As they rode off, the neighbors watched in silence. Sergei wondered what they must have been thinking. The Golitsyns had lived on Yeropkinsky Lane for seven years. Here they had celebrated four weddings and three births. And here five family members had been arrested. As they were making their exit from Moscow, the wind kicked up, and it started to rain. Vladimir fussed with the tarps and ropes, trying to make certain the portraits were safe and dry. That evening they arrived at their new home, a small dacha in the village of Kotovo on the Savelovsky rail line.7
The mayor did not go with them to Kotovo, choosing instead to live with his daughter Eli’s family in Sergiev Posad. Things were not good there either for former people. In January 1926, Eli, her husband, Vladimir, and many other former people, including the Istomins, Shakhovskoys, and Olsufevs, were stripped of their rights and declared outcasts. In all, about three thousand individuals, or some 10 percent of the town’s population, lost their rights, and it was not just nobles, but clergymen, traders, small business owners, and even tailors, metalworkers, and craftsmen. According to official documents from the time, persons were singled out if they had hired labor to make a profit, if they lived off rents or any unearned income, if they engaged in trade, if they had served in the tsarist police force, or if they happened to be dependents of outcasts over the age of eighteen. A final category comprised all “lunatics.”8
In May 1928, Komsomolskaia Pravda and other newspapers began running articles complaining that Sergiev Posad was “sheltering an unbroken gang of nobles, Black Hundreds, and various other ‘Excellencies.’ ” The press demanded to know how a group of former people could live so openly and work without fear in a number of Soviet institutions. Vladimir Trubetskoy was personally singled out.9 “ALL THE BARONS AND PRINCES MUST BE FIRED IMMEDIATELY AND RUN OUT OF SOVIET PLACES OF WORK,” screamed one headline.10 The Workers’ Newspaper attacked the Museum of the Holy Trinity of St. Sergius Monastery for the large number of former people on its staff. The same month the newspaper Working Moscow described the museum’s former people as “two-legged rats.” That month eighty people were arrested, including fourteen monks who worked at the museum and many former people.11
The Trubetskoys were now living on the edge of starvation. Beginning in late 1928, bread was rationed, but as outcasts Vladimir and his family were not entitled to any ration cards. Then, in the spring of 1929, Vladimir lost his jobs in the restaurant orchestra and the movie theater. “We are threatened with hunger,” the mayor wrote; “there’s no more bread.” They tried to raise rabbits, but the animals died. Their few remaining personal things of value the family sold to Torgsin, a network of state stores where food and other rationed goods could be purchased for hard currency or gold, silver, jewelry, antiques, and art.12
In 1930, Anna Golitsyn sent a letter to her daughter:
The Trubetskoys’ situation is bad. Vladimir’s income is not nearly enough to support them. I went to see them, and found they had no firewood, and almost no potatoes, not to mention even the least bit of fat in their diet. They had just a simple soup—water with a few potatoes, followed by a few more potatoes sprinkled with salt. [. . .] I came with 20 rubles for grandfather from Vovik,15 but I gave it to the Trubetskoys instead. They bought a load of firewood, some more potatoes, and some horsemeat. When I left Vladimir was expecting to receive some sort of pay, which will be scattered here and there, for they are 300 rubles in debt. The children’s boots are all worn out, and they can’t be mended, and the children are freezing, especially Varya, whose feet have frozen and become all swollen and hurt terribly whenever she walks. We are now trying to sell a red bedspread with old needlework on it to raise some money for them.13
If such state-enforced poverty was not humiliation enough, Vladimir had to live with the defamation of his ancestors when in June 1929 the head of the St. Sergius Holy Trinity Museum dug up the grave of Vladimir’s great-grandfather. As soon as he heard of this, an outraged Vladimir went to complain, asking how he dared disturb someone’s final resting place. The director, however, was utterly unfazed by Vladimir’s complaint, insisting rather on sharing with him the marvelous things he had found there, such as the deceased’s epaulets (still in excellent condition, he noted) and his skull, which he was keeping in his office but was willing to part with if Vladimir really wanted it. The grave robbers had also pried the leather boots off the dead man’s feet. One of Vladimir’s sons later saw a man strutting the streets of Sergiev Posad in them, immensely proud of his fine footwear.14
“Given what’s happened to me this year, there’s a grievous thought I cannot get out of my head . . . We’ve all been crushed, utterly crushed,” Vladimir said to his friend Mikhail Prishvin one day returning from hunting in the woods. The destruction and brutality made Vladimir feel so despondent for Russia that at times he was physically ill.15 Prishvin shared Vladimir’s grief. “The Russian people have spoiled their light, they have thrown down their cross and pledged an oath to the prince of darkness,” he wrote.16
Amazingly, the Trubetskoy children found ways to have fun amid these struggles. With empty stomachs they would go out into the snow to slide and ski in the nearby woods. Every year there would be a Christmas tree and Easter eggs. In the summer they loved to play in the rain. When they had time, Eli and Vladimir were sure to take the children on outings to historical places. Through it all, Eli and Vladimir tried to give them a true childhood by hiding the stresses they were under and by distracting the children with games, music, and laughter from the growing danger outside the door.17
On April 14, 1928, the mayor’s son-in-law Georgy Osorgin was sent from Butyrki to the prison camp at Solovki. When his wife, Lina, learned that he was being transferred, she went with her sister Masha to search for him at the Nikolaev train station. They caught sight of his face, now covered by a long beard, sticking out a window. Lina and Masha got close enough to speak to him but were told to move off by a guard. Among the prisoners at Solovki was Dmitry Likhachev. Likhachev, who became a great literary scholar and one of the country’s most respected moral voices, was taken by Georgy. Osorgin, he recalled later, was “of average height, with blond hair and a beard and mustache, and always held himself erect in military fashion; he had a beautiful bearing. [. . .] He was always lively, happy, and witty.” Likhachev saw in Georgy a humanitarian nature, infused with a profound religious faith. He was the kind of man who looked out for others. As head clerk of the infirmary Georgy always tried to help the weaker prisoners, especially the intellectuals, by finagling to get them released from hard labor.
In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn singled out Georgy as one of the “genuine aristocrats” in the camps, together with the philosophers, career military men, artists, and scholars: “Because of their upbringing, their traditions, they were too proud to show depression or fear, to whine and complain about their fate even to friends. It was a sign of good manners to take everything with a
smile, even while being marched out to be shot. Just as if all this Arctic prison in a roaring sea were simply a minor misunderstanding at a picnic.” Solzhenitsyn writes how Osorgin and these other inmates would laugh and be witty and ready to make light of the absurdity of their situation, all of which was lost on the camp guards. “Georgi Mikhailovich Osorgin used to walk around and mock: ‘Comment vous portez-vouz on this island?’ ‘A lager comme a lager.’ (And these jokes, this stressed and emphasized independence of the aristocratic spirit—these more than anything else irritated the half-beast Solovetsky jailers.)”
With the help of Peshkov, Lina was able to visit Georgy that August, sharing a cabin on a boat anchored along the island shore. When she left, Lina was pregnant. She managed to make a second visit a little more than a year later in October 1929, around the time her family was being expelled from Moscow. Georgy’s situation was extremely tenuous at the time, and what transpired over the subsequent days remains unclear, although the end result is beyond doubt. According to Lina’s brother Sergei, shortly before Lina’s arrival Georgy had been confined to a small cell for the crime of giving a dying priest a bit of bread and wine for one final communion. The camp officials agreed to let Georgy out of the cell during Lina’s visit, but on one condition: that he not mention to her that he had just been sentenced to death. Sergei wrote that these few days together were among the happiest of Lina’s life. Fellow prisoner Dmitry Likhachev saw them walking arm in arm, she a beautiful, elegant brunette, he happy, with a mildly ironic expression. Georgy, according to Likhachev, kept his word and never did tell his wife. Lina left confident they would make it through his six-year sentence and then finally be together for good, even if that meant exile in some remote part of the country.
Here is how Solzhenitsyn recounts this final visit:
One time Osorgin was scheduled to be shot. And that very day his young wife (and he himself was not yet forty16) disembarked on the wharf there. And Osorgin begged the jailers not to spoil his wife’s visit for her. He promised that he would not let her stay more than three days and that they could shoot him as soon as she left. And here is the kind of self-control this meant, the sort of thing we have forgotten because of the anathema we have heaped on the aristocracy, we who whine at every petty misfortune and every petty pain. For three days he never left his wife’s side, and he had to keep her from guessing the situation! He must not hint at it even in one single phrase! He must not allow his spirits to quaver. He must not allow his eyes to darken. Just once (his wife is alive and she remembers it now), when they were walking along the Holy Lake, she turned and saw that her husband had clutched his head in torment. “What’s wrong?” “Nothing,” he answered instantly. She could have stayed still longer, but he begged her to leave. As the steamer pulled away from the wharf, he was already undressing to be shot.
This last part appears to be artistic embellishment, for we do not know for certain when Georgy was shot. The sources disagree on the exact date, ranging from October 16 to 29. We do know that on one of those nights, Georgy and some of the other prisoners were called out of their barracks and marched out to the local cemetery and shot. Some accounts cite forty prisoners killed; others, four hundred. The stated reason for the executions was the inmates’ failure to inform the camp bosses of a planned escape attempt. As he walked to his death, Georgy sang “Christ Is Risen” and prayed aloud with the other men alongside him. The bodies were dumped in a common grave; a few of the victims were still alive when the dirt was shoveled over them. The head of the execution squad, Dmitry Uspensky, was drunk at the time and had fired wildly at the men with his Nagant. Likhachev saw him the next morning washing the blood from his boots. In 1988, Likhachev returned to Solovki and found the site of the execution. A small house had been built upon it. Digging in the dirt around the foundation, he came across bone fragments. He met the residents, who told him that when they harvested the potatoes in their kitchen garden, they sometimes pulled up human skulls.18
Lina learned of Georgy’s murder soon after. She found a priest willing to conduct a secret service for Georgy in a Moscow church, but when they got there, they noticed a number of other people and turned back out of fear. The impossibility of properly mourning for her husband compounded Lina’s grief. About this time the Osorgin family received permission to leave the Soviet Union for France. Lina said goodbye to her family and went with them.19
21
THE MOUSE, THE KEROSENE, AND THE MATCH
In 1931, two years after being exiled from Moscow, the Golitsyns moved from Kotovo to Dmitrov, an ancient Russian town sixty-five kilometers north of the capital on River Yakhroma. Dmitrov was a pleasant place with old stone houses and several fine churches, and its proximity to Moscow made it convenient for families like the Golitsyns who needed to visit but could no longer legally reside there. The quiet life of the town was about to be swept away, however, when in a few years Dmitrov became the center of the largest slave labor project in the Soviet Union.
Two hundred years earlier, Peter the Great had envisioned constructing a canal to link the Moscow and Volga rivers. It was a hydrological scheme of pharaonic scale that, not surprisingly, was never realized. But such gargantuan projects captured the spirit of the First Five-Year Plan, and in June 1931 the Central Executive Committee approved the construction of the Moscow-Volga Canal. It was initially put under the direction of the People’s Commissariat of Water, but given the slow speed of the work, largely because of the lack of manpower, it was transferred to the OGPU the following year. In September 1932, Dmitlag was established to provide the necessary workforce for the Moscow-Volga Canal. Dmitlag, short for Dmitrov Corrective Labor Camp, became the largest branch of the entire gulag system over the next few years as prisoners from camps across the country were transferred there to meet the enormous demand for labor. Its size (covering a good portion of the entire Moscow region) and population grew so quickly that the camp administration lost control over its numbers. How many men and women labored at Dmitlag is still not known, although the writer, poet, and gulag survivor Varlam Shalamov estimated the camp was home to 1.2 million people in 1933. When it was finished in 1937, the Stalin Moscow-Volga Canal stretched almost eighty miles, connecting the capital to the mighty Volga and so providing the land-locked city access to five seas: the White and Baltic to the north, the Black, Caspian, and Azov to the south. Moscow, it was said, had become the “Port of the Five Seas.”1
For the first several years work on the canal was largely done without the use of heavy machinery. The canal and its many locks, reservoirs, and hydropower stations were almost entirely built with shovels, pickaxes, wheelbarrows, and human sweat. Like some vast ant colony, armies of prison laborers swarmed over the land, digging, drilling, hauling, and dumping. The best workers received six hundred grams of bread a day; most were given only four hundred, while those being punished had to survive on three hundred. Countless thousands died. Some starved to death; some drowned or were accidentally buried in concrete, their bodies never recovered. Some were taken out at night after their shifts and shot in the woods. One of the camp bosses liked to strip recalcitrant prisoners bare in the winter and leave them to freeze in the snow.2
The canal project was run by Lazar Kogan, head of Moscow-Volga Construction, and Semyon Firin, head of Dmitlag (from September 1933). Dmitlag’s offices were in a former monastery, which had been converted into a museum after the revolution. The staff had dared protest the closure of the museum, and so the OGPU arrested them. For Firin, previously the boss of Belbaltlag (the White Sea–Baltic Sea Camp), Dmitlag was not just about canal building but was part of a larger project of remaking Soviet man, what was known at the time as reforging. The canal was meant to change not only the country but also the people who built it: through the process of labor the prisoners would shed their flawed selves and be reborn—reforged—as new men worthy of their Soviet homeland. Firin saw himself as more than a jailer (even if on a mass scale): he was a maker of men, an
arbiter of culture. Like some minor potentate, he created his own court. In the evenings he hosted a salon at his dacha for poets, writers, and other talented prisoners. He set up a Cultural-Educational Division at the camp and a theater and an orchestra staffed with prisoners; he searched the entire gulag for the most accomplished singers, musicians, and performers and had them transferred to Dmitlag. Artists were kept busy making posters and banners, and Dmitlag published more than fifty newspapers with titles like Reforging and Moscow-Volga that carried articles with instructive headlines such as “Learn to Relax” and “Drown Your Past on the Bottom of the Canal.” Social and political leaders, artists, and journalists came from all over the USSR and abroad to behold the miracle taking place at Dmitlag and wonder at “Bolshevik power’s infinite ability to remake man.” Stalin himself visited Dmitlag three times.3
In the bizarre world of Dmitlag, freedom and captivity were not always distinct, however. Consider the case of Professor Nikolai Nekrasov, the last governor-general of Finland before the revolution and a former minister in the Provisional Government. An excellent engineer, he had been arrested several times, most recently in 1930, when he was sentenced to ten years. He was brought to Dmitlag as an inmate specialist, yet was given his own newly constructed house in the “the free sector” along with a car and driver. He was released in 1935 but chose to stay on and worked at Dmitlag until the project was finished. In 1940, he was arrested for a final time and then shot.