Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith

  So, for instance, sheets and pillow-cases were changed daily. All were of very fine cool linen with the personal initial and crown (to indicate the title) embroidered on every item. Underclothes naturally would never be worn twice and towels were changed immediately after use. The tablecloths covering the long tables and the napkins intricately folded at each place would have the family coat of arms actually woven into the centre. Obviously each big house had its own laundry on the premises, together with a plethora of servants who, with their families, lived, feudal fashion, in two sides of the house round the courtyard, above the stables and garages. Thinking back to the Dolgorouky household it [sic] seems incredible that such a number of people were needed to care for the physical comfort of one family.

  In the large marble-floored front hall sat the svetzar whose only duty was to open the door and lay down the strip of red carpet to car or carriage, so that the shoes of those arriving or departing should not be sullied by contact with the pavement. To keep him company in the hall were the couple of liveried footmen on duty that day—or when my uncle was in residence—a couple of Cossacks in full uniform.20

  Below the aristocracy lay the great mass of nobles who filled the ranks of the officer corps and the civil administration or had gone into the so-called free professions as lawyers, doctors, teachers, or scientists. About half of all urban nobles were either in state service or in these professions around the turn of the century; the next largest category was rentiers.21 The nobility had traditionally been the landowning class, and this remained true right up to 1917. Until the emancipation in 1861, the nobility had for centuries lived off the labor of millions of serfs, labor that made some nobles fabulously rich. If there is one image of the prerevolutionary landed nobility that has stuck in the popular imagination, it is that of the Ranevskys in Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. Impecunious, trapped by tradition, doomed to oblivion by the forces of modernity, Lyubov Ranevskaya cannot bring herself to cut down the orchard and rent out the land for summer vacationers (“Summer cottages, summer residents—I’m sorry, it’s all too vulgar,” she says with a sigh) and loses her estate and everything she holds dear.22

  It is tempting to take Chekhov’s play for sociology and to see in the story of the Ranevskys the plight of the entire Russian nobility, an ancient class inescapably shuffling toward extinction. But the reality was never quite so bleak. The lower rungs of the rural nobility were indeed becoming more impoverished, and many were forced to sell their lands; between 1861 and 1905, the rural nobility lost an average of 1 percent of its land a year through either sale or foreclosure. Nonetheless, as late as 1915, the nobility still owned more land than any other group.23 Moreover, for wealthier nobles selling land was not a necessity but a smart economic move; nobles across Europe were then taking advantage of the steep rise in land values to sell off land at a great profit and invest in stocks and bonds. Indeed, by 1910, nearly one-half of the nobles in St. Petersburg were living on income from such investments. Count Sergei Sheremetev and his half brother Alexander owned more than forty-six commercial properties in St. Petersburg and Moscow from which they earned solid returns. Count Alexander also sold land to invest in banks and stock corporations that proved quite profitable. In 1914, Count Sergei Sheremetev built one of St. Petersburg’s first shopping centers, the so-called Sheremetev Passage. And in 1910, in contrast with Chekhov’s Madame Ranevskaya, Count Sergei saw nothing vulgar at all in leasing a good deal of the land at his ancestral home of Kuskovo to Muscovites looking for summer dacha plots.24

  For hundreds of years the Russian tsars had relied on the nobility to maintain order over the countryside. Even after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, the nobility continued to serve as the de facto rulers of rural Russia until 1917 as a result of the dearth of state administrators at the local level.25 The thirty thousand or so noble families that remained on their estates in the early years of the twentieth century represented small, isolated islands of privilege and authority amid a vast peasant sea of poverty and resentment, for even forty years after emancipation, the legacy of serfdom remained profound.26 The peasants were still angry that upon receiving their freedom they had not been given land, which they had traditionally considered theirs since they were the ones who worked it; rather, to compensate the nobility, the peasants had been forced to purchase land through redemption payments to the state. Landownership had become an increasing source of anger as the rural population exploded, creating a serious land shortage. Peasants were forced to rent noble lands, often at high rates, leaving them with little to show for their hard work at the end of the season. The peasantry sank deeper into poverty and eyed the local nobleman’s lands with ever-greater hunger. Most peasants in the black-soil Russian provinces subsisted on bread, pickled cabbage, and onion. So hard was life in the countryside that more than three-quarters of peasant army recruits called up in 1891 were declared unfit for service because of poor health.27

  Even after winning their freedom, Russia’s peasants had been kept in a servile status and lived in a separate world from that of their former masters and other privileged segments of society. Peasants alone lived according to the customary law of the village; they were not entitled to freely sell their land as individuals; they paid proportionally higher taxes than the nobles; and until 1889, just to leave their villages, they were required to obtain passports, which were granted only if they had paid all their redemption payments, taxes, and debts to the commune.28 Nobles and peasants were divided not just by an economic barrier but by an even more important cultural barrier. The nobles, by and large, were Europeanized; they were children of the reforms of Peter the Great. The peasants were not; they lived in a different cultural and psychological world of tradition, habit, and religion that had changed little since the days of early Muscovy and one in which the nobles were viewed wearily as fallen Christians and, at times, forces of evil.29

  Nobles and peasants continued to behave as masters and subjects well after 1861. As late as 1910, when Princess Barbara Dolgoruky rode out among the peasant women near her family estate, the peasants would drop to their knees in respect. The princess found the age-old habit distasteful and so strictly forbade them from doing it in the future. Henceforth, they remained standing, for the peasants were used to doing as their masters instructed, at least when they were present.30 Alexander Davydoff, born into a prominent noble family in 1881, was stunned by what he saw after leaving the city to return to run the family estate of Sably in 1905. Both the landowners and peasants seemed to be content to play hypocritical, dishonest roles with each other. The former typically adopted an aloof, superior, and sententious attitude (or, what he found even worse, one of treacly sentimentality), while the latter adopted a pose of false ignorance and “voluntary humiliation” and then tried to cheat the master behind his back. “It is evident that each side tried to cheat the other,” he wrote, “but whereas the peasants guessed perfectly well the thoughts of the landowners, the latter were incapable of piercing the stone wall of the dissembling character of the peasant.” This legacy of serfdom, in Davydoff’s estimation, pervaded all such relations. The peasants excelled at “trickery,” what he called “the usual weapon of the weak against the strong.”31

  Land hunger and the rise of industrialization forced many peasants to leave the countryside to seek work in the new factories, and by 1900, the working class numbered roughly 1.7 million, about 200,000 fewer than the number of Russia’s nobles. Working conditions in the factories were horrible, and workers had almost no way of protesting their condition. Not only were workers denied the right to organize, but they were even prohibited from assembling merely to discuss common problems.32 One female worker recalled later: “My family was technically free, but the spirit of serfdom and slavery still lived on.” Men, women, and children worked long days, sometimes as much as eighteen hours, and their small pay could rarely keep up with the rise in the price of goods. Many went hungry for long stretches; life was brutish and cru
shing and without hope.33 The influx of peasants to the cities created terrible housing shortages. Workers were housed in barracks, tenements, and dank cellars; some workers slept in the factories under their machines. There was massive overcrowding, filth, and disease. Typhus, cholera, and tuberculosis were rampant. By the 1870s, St. Petersburg had the highest mortality rate of any major city in Europe. There were no protective labor laws, but few dared complain out of fear of being fired. For as bad as being a worker was, it was better than the existence of the urban poor and unemployed. The slums that sprang up in Russia’s major cities were dark, hostile places rife with banditry, prostitution, murder, and lawlessness. Some slums were so bad the police did not dare enter. Girls and boys as young as ten sold themselves on the streets for a few kopecks. The people of this shadow world survived by theft or begging or they died of starvation.34

  Recalling the early years of his life in Russia, Vladimir Nabokov wrote: “The old and the new, the liberal touch and the patriarchal one, fatal poverty and fatalistic wealth got fantastically interwoven in that strange first decade of our century.”35

  Nabokov was born in the last year of the nineteenth century into a wealthy noble family. His grandfather Dmitry Nabokov had served as minister of justice under Alexander II and III, and his father, also Vladimir Dmitrievich, was a prominent liberal Westernizer and, after the Revolution of 1905, a leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party (the Kadets). Vladimir Dmitrievich’s political views confounded his mother, and she simply could not understand her son’s liberal notions and his commitment to fundamental change. How was it, Nabokov writes in Speak, Memory, that “my father, who, she knew, thoroughly appreciated all the pleasures of great wealth, could jeopardize its enjoyment by becoming a liberal, thus helping to bring a revolution that would in the long run, as she correctly foresaw, leave him a pauper.”36

  The Nabokovs’ great wealth included a fine home in St. Petersburg, the estate of Vyra, and a domestic staff of fifty-five. At Vyra the peasants looked to Nabokov’s father as the bárin, the master, and would come to the manor house for help settling their local disagreements or for special favors and subsidies. Inclined to be generous, Nabokov père typically acquiesced to their requests, at which point they would raise him up and toss him in the sky three times, higher and higher with each throw. The custom made the Nabokovs’ old governess uneasy. “One day they’ll let him fall,” she observed prophetically.37

  It is one of history’s tragic ironies that the origins of the revolution that would destroy the Russian nobility were in fact laid by the nobility itself. Throughout the late 1780s and early 1790s, as the revolution raged in France, Russia’s polite society followed with nervous agitation in the pages of the Moscow and St. Petersburg Gazette the news of the burning and looting of the châteaus and the executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.38 The tales of violence coming out of France brought to mind the attack on the nobility that had swept over Russia in the 1770s, when a Don Cossack army deserter named Yemelian Pugachev led a mass rebellion of the poor and dispossessed against the established order. Proclaiming the end of serfdom, taxation, and military service, Pugachev set out to exterminate all landlords and tsarist officials and unleashed a paroxysm of bloodshed and terror across an enormous swath of territory. By the time the Pugachyóvshchina was put down, tens of thousands of Russians had been killed and raped, and their homes looted and burned. There had been other peasant revolts before, but nothing of such magnitude, and the name of Pugachev seared itself into the memory of noble Russia, never to be forgotten.39 Alexander Pushkin immortalized the Pugachyovshchina in his novel The Captain’s Daughter, famous for its oft-quoted line “God save us from a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless.”

  The specter of another Pugachyovshchina forced Russia to consider reform from above or face revolt from below. In 1790, Alexander Radishchev published A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, a burning indictment of serfdom and the oppression of Russia’s poor at the hands of the rich and a thinly disguised call to overthrow the monarchy. Catherine the Great ordered all copies of the book confiscated and destroyed (it remained banned until 1868) and its author sentenced to death (she commuted the sentence to Siberian exile). A noble, Radishchev as a young man had studied in Europe, where he had fallen under the influence of the French philosophes and the ideas of the Enlightenment that instilled in him a profound hatred of tyranny. Radishchev is often considered the founding father of the Russian intelligentsia from whom descends a long line of men and women committed to reforming, or even destroying, the Russian political and social order.40

  That the first critic of Russian autocracy was a nobleman is not surprising considering that for most of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth century, the nobility formed the core of the small educated elite. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Peter the Great set out to modernize Russia, and to do so, he forced his noblemen to adopt the ways of their Western European peers. An unintended consequence of Peter’s embrace of Europe was that the nobility learned not only the latest technology and forms of polite behavior (shipbuilding from the Dutch, manners from the French) but also to think for themselves and to compare life at home with the more advanced and open societies of Western Europe. State service was obligatory for Russian noblemen until 1762. By then the ethos of service had become deeply ingrained in the nobleman’s self-identity, so much so that even after the emancipation from state service, most noblemen continued to serve. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, the nobleman’s understanding of service had begun to change, and increasingly the object of service shifted from that of the state to the Russian people or nation.41

  If by the time of Radishchev at least one nobleman dared call for radical change, thirty-five years later some even dared act. On December 14, 1825, a group of officers and members of the guards regiments, many of them from high aristocratic families, rebelled on St. Petersburg’s Senate Square. The Decembrists, as the rebels came to be called, advocated the end of serfdom, a constitution, and basic liberties. Their revolt was quickly put down and its leaders were executed or exiled to Siberia by order of Tsar Nicholas I. These noble sons became martyrs to future revolutionaries, who, though forced underground, nurtured their dream of radical change. “Our sorrowful task will not be for nothing,” the poet Prince Alexander Odoevsky averred following the revolt. “The spark will kindle a flame.”42

  The middle years of the nineteenth century produced a new generation of noble revolutionaries, such as radical populists Alexander Herzen, the “father of Russian socialism,” and Mikhail Bakunin, the anarchist and theorist of peasant revolution. This new generation of Russian revolutionaries went abroad to escape tsarist censorship and prisons. In London, Paris, and Geneva, Bakunin mingled with revolutionaries and communists and wrote on the Russian peasants’ propensity for violence as a tool for revolution and the overthrow of the tsarist state and the noble landlords. Bakunin’s ideas influenced the other great Russian anarchist, Prince Pyotr Kropotkin.43 Radical nobles did more than just theorize revolution. Nikolai Sablin was born into a hereditary noble family in the Vologda province in 1849. A poet, populist, and member of The People’s Will, he committed suicide just as police were about to arrest him in 1881 in connection with the assassination of Alexander II. Before putting the gun to his own head, he fired off three shots to warn his comrades.44

  By the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the revolutionary intelligentsia had become a much more socially diverse group and had largely shed its noble origins. Still, it should perhaps not be too surprising that Russia’s greatest revolutionary was himself a nobleman. Vladimir Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, was the son of a hereditary nobleman and actual state counselor, whose title brought with it the right to be addressed as “Your Excellency.” After his father’s death, Vladimir lived with his mother and siblings at their mother’s family estate near Kazan. Just like other young noble boys, he loved to hunt, swim, and sail. His mother’s fami
ly money allowed Lenin to spend his time reading and studying Marx; later the family money helped subsidize Lenin after he devoted himself full time to the revolution. Lenin was neither the family’s only nor its first revolutionary. In 1887, his older brother Alexander was arrested and hanged for taking part in a plot to kill Alexander III.

  Exiled to Siberia in 1897 for his political activity, Lenin claimed noble status in order to soften the harshness of his punishment. During his many years in Western Europe before the revolution, Lenin and his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, hired domestics to help with the cooking and cleaning. When it suited him, Lenin had no qualms about admitting his noble background. In 1904, in Geneva, he registered at a private library as “W. Oulianoff, gentilhomme russe.”45 Lenin never fully shed his noble origins. When Nicolas Nabokov, a cousin of the writer, went with his tutor in the spring of 1917 to hear Lenin speak from the balcony of the Kschessinska mansion, what he noticed first was that he spoke in “the manner of upper-class salon snobs.” How odd, young Nicolas found it, for someone whose manner of speech reflected Nicolas’s own class to stand up there and say such hateful, unpatriotic things about Russia.46

  2

  THE SHEREMETEVS

  Since the 1500s, the Sheremetevs occupied high positions at the court of the Muscovite grand princes and were members of the Boyar Duma. Several Sheremetevs displayed skill in Muscovy’s military campaigns against the Tatars and in the Livonian Wars of Ivan the Terrible. (According to one account, “Sheremet” once meant “a man with the courage of a lion.”) The powerful boyar Fyodor Sheremetev played a key role in the election of Mikhail Romanov to the throne in 1613, thus establishing the ruling dynasty for the next three hundred years. Fyodor, who was related to the Romanovs through marriage, reportedly endorsed Mikhail’s candidacy with the words “Let’s pick Misha Romanov, he’s young and stupid.” Foreigners claimed that the tsar’s wife was Fyodor Sheremetev’s maid.1