Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith

  Count Boris Sheremetev was Peter the Great’s much-decorated field marshal, and his grandson Count Nikolai Sheremetev was one of the richest grandees in the reign of Catherine the Great. Something of an eccentric, Nikolai devoted his life and fortune to building the finest opera company in all Russia, composed of his personal serfs. He scandalized society by falling in love with his brilliant leading soprano, a serf named Praskovya Kovalyova, who performed as “The Pearl.” They wed, secretly, in 1801, but only after Nikolai had concocted a fanciful genealogy for Praskovya that claimed she was the long-lost descendant of a Polish nobleman. She died two years later, soon after giving birth to their son, Dmitry. Praskovya’s death left Nikolai heartbroken.2 Although famous for his charity, which became one of the family’s finest traits and the source of the popular expression “to live on the Sheremetev account,” Dmitry achieved little of note, other than to amass even more wealth and serfs, creating what may well have been the largest fortune in nineteenth-century Russia, consisting of some three hundred thousand serfs and more than 1.9 million acres (763,000 hectares) of land.3 When he died in 1871, Dmitry’s fortune was divided between his two sons and his half brothers Sergei, born in 1844, and Alexander, born in 1859.

  As befitted a Sheremetev, Alexander attended the Corps des Pages before joining a guards regiment and then being named aide-de-camp to Nicholas II in 1902. Like his grandfather Count Nikolai Sheremetev, Alexander had a passionate love of music. In the 1880s, he established his own symphony orchestra and enjoyed giving free concerts in St. Petersburg. He was himself a fine pianist and head of the Imperial Court Choir, where he worked alongside the composer Mily Balakirev.4 Alexander’s other love was firefighting. At his Ulyanka estate he organized the Peter the Great Firefighting Brigade, six hundred men strong and outfitted with the latest firefighting technology. Tsar Nicholas granted Alexander special permission to quit receptions at the Winter Palace when there was a fire in the city so he could don his firefighter’s uniform and ride off with his brigade to battle the flames.5

  Alexander inherited from his father more than five hundred thousand acres in thirteen provinces, one home in St. Petersburg, and ten houses in Moscow, including the extraordinary palace-estate of Ostankino. He lived with his wife, Countess Maria Geiden, and their four children (Yelizaveta, Dmitry, Alexandra, and Georgy) in a sumptuous St. Petersburg mansion on the fashionable French Embankment. The family lived grandly. Alexander never traveled without a large retinue of servants and domestics, his musicians and choristers, and even cows from his villages to assure a ready supply of fresh milk.6

  Like his younger half brother, Count Sergei Sheremetev grew up in luxury and privilege. Educated at the Corps des Pages, he joined the Chevaliers Gardes and was then named an adjutant to Grand Duke Alexander in 1868. When the grand duke ascended the throne in 1881 as Alexander III, he named Sergei his aide-de-camp; other posts, distinctions, medals, and honorific titles followed. Alexander and Sergei were as near to friends as the gulf between autocrat and subject might allow, and for the rest of Alexander’s reign, Sergei remained one of the closest men to him, with whom the emperor spoke regularly and whose opinions he valued.7

  Sergei’s passions were Russian history and culture, to which he devoted his time, energy, and enormous fortune. He was a diligent amateur historian and a patron of a number of scholarly societies and organizations; he established libraries across Russia open to the public, funded the dying art of icon painting, and patronized artists. His great love was the Russian country estate. Although he had inherited vast property from his father and three houses in St. Petersburg and two in Moscow, Sergei purchased a number of estates as a way of preserving them for future generations. Among them were Mikhailovskoe and Ostafievo.8 Ostafievo had been a favored meeting place for the poet Pushkin, who dubbed it “the Russian Parnassus,” Vasily Zhukovsky, and Adam Mickiewicz, and it was here that the great nineteenth-century historian Nikolai Karamzin wrote his monumental history of Russia. Sergei lavished money and attention on these estates.9 As part of his daughters’ dowries, Sergei purchased for Anna the estate of Voronovo with a manor house of sixty rooms and for Maria the estate of Vvedenskoe, where in the second half of the nineteenth century artists like Mikhail Vrubel, Isaac Levitan, and Valentin Serov often gathered.10

  Conservative, devout, and patriotic, Sergei followed in the path of the Slavophiles, who believed that Russia was neither European nor Asian, but something unique, a land and people apart with their own traditions, culture, and history. He stood firmly opposed to those Russians who argued for the need to adopt Western European political and legal institutions and remained an unbending believer in autocracy as the only true form of government for Russia. Samobýtnyi—original, native, distinct—was the word he used to describe Russia’s church, its monarchy, its nobility, and its history. His love of Russia came with a darker side. He was an anti-Semite who bemoaned the “Jew-Masonry” spreading over Russia, destroying “our age-old foundations.” He was a foe of cosmopolitanism, Art Moderne, and the decadents.11 Minister of Finance Count Sergei Witte, a Westernizer who clashed with him on several occasions, described Count Sergei as “an honorable but odd man [. . .] a pillar of mindless Russian conservatism.”12

  Sergei was a true patriarch, and his interests dominated the life of the Sheremetev family. Everyone and everything revolved around him, his projects, whims, and travels. His wife, born Princess Yekaterina Vyazemsky, was the granddaughter of Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky, a poet and friend of Pushkin’s. Gentle, warm, and endearing, with large blue eyes and blond hair, Yekaterina was loved by all in the family. Her interests tended toward botany and natural history, which she studied and published on, and she was happiest at home among her family, never caring much for society or the court. Yekaterina and Sergei lived with their seven children (Dmitry, Pavel, Boris, Anna, Pyotr, Sergei, and Maria) and their spouses, nearly two dozen grandchildren, and countless relatives and hangers-on, all grateful for the Sheremetevs’ unimpeachable generosity. Winters were spent in the Fountain House in St. Petersburg, summers at Mikhailovskoe, with stopovers at their Moscow home, the Corner House, what the family called “the Sheremetevs’ refuge.”13 There were visits as well to other Sheremetev properties like Kuskovo, Ostafievo, Pokrovskoe, and Balanda.

  Count Vladimir Musin-Pushkin, a nephew of Sergei’s, recalled how entering the Sheremetev household was like stepping back into the past. The spirit of Catherine the Great’s Russia seemed to still be alive at Kuskovo and Mikhailovskoe. Sergei rarely dressed before noon, preferring to remain in his sumptuous brown silk dressing gown and Louis XVI frilled nightshirt. Getting dressed required the help of three valets, the chief among them having the honor of washing the count’s face with a sponge.14 The Sheremetevs, like other aristocrats, lived with scores of domestics, servants, governesses, and tutors. Life without them was unimaginable. The Sheremetev children grew up with the children of the emperor and empress. Dmitry and Anna were especially close to Tsarevich Nicholas (the future last tsar) and his sister Grand Duchess Xenia, while Pyotr, Sergei, and Maria spent much time with the young children, Grand Duke Mikhail and Grand Duchess Olga. In 1892, Dmitry married Countess Irina “Ira” Vorontsov-Dashkov, daughter of the governor-general of the Caucasus Count Illarion Vorontsov-Dashkov, in the social event of the season attended by more than six hundred guests, including the entire royal family. It took a whole train car just to ship in the fresh flowers for the ceremony.15

  Dmitry served in the Chevaliers Gardes, and in March 1896, after Nicholas had ascended the throne, Dmitry became one of his aides-de-camp. He began a public, official life and spent much of his time near the tsar at court or attending to all manner of official ceremonies. Dmitry loved to hunt, and he made frequent hunting trips with Nicholas to the emperor’s estate of Spala or to the Sheremetev estate of Balanda, famous for its wolf hunting. Unlike his father, who could not help negatively comparing Nicholas with Alexander III, Dmitry had a strong personal attraction to and respect
for the last tsar, although he too recognized Nicholas’s weakness of character.16

  Dmitry’s younger brother Pyotr was also one of Nicholas’s aides-de-camp. Pyotr died of tuberculosis at a sanatorium in Yalta in the spring of 1914. His daughter, Yelena Sheremetev, then a little girl, wrote in her memoirs of those sad days. The royal family was then in Yalta, and Yelena recalled seeing the grand duchesses “all dressed alike, with long white dresses, black velvet ribbons about their necks, and large straw hats.” Another time she spied Tsarevich Alexei walking on the other side of the Livadia palace gates.17 Nicholas and Alexandra visited Pyotr as he lay dying in Yalta. When Yelena turned to leave the church after her father’s funeral, Nicholas and Alexandra stood before her. Stunned, she did not know what to do: Should she curtsy, as she had always been instructed? As she stood there frozen in place, they approached and kissed her on the forehead.18 In her memoir, Yelena also recalled Easter parties at the Anichkov Palace hosted by Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna, the widow of Alexander III. With her cousins, Yelena, wearing her white and blue silk dress and black stockings, would ride over from the Fountain House in a carriage. Maria Fyodorovna would greet the children and invite them to hunt for Easter eggs hidden throughout the palace. The hunt was followed by a magic show and hot chocolate. All the children left with big baskets full of eggs and presents.19 At Christmas, a large wooden slide was erected in the Fountain House’s ballroom for the children and their many friends, who would slide down on small carpets and then sail across the slick parquet floor, screaming with delight the whole way.20

  Of all the sons, Pavel, born in 1871, was the closest to his father. He shared his father’s love of Russian history and culture, graduating from the University of St. Petersburg’s Historical-Philological Department and then going on to research and publish on the history of the Romanov and Sheremetev families, noble country estates, and Russian monasteries. He belonged to various scholarly societies, wrote poetry and painted, and his works were shown at numerous exhibitions.21 After university Pavel served in the Semenovsky Life Guards Regiment and was with his regiment at the coronation of Nicholas II in 1896. Pavel was deeply affected by the tragedy at Khodynka Field, where thousands of people waiting to collect souvenirs were trampled to death. The tsar refused to let the tragedy stop the coronation celebrations, a decision Pavel found abhorrent, and not long thereafter he quit the military.22

  Pavel was a complicated man, full of contradictions and with a character given to anguishing over Russia’s so-called cursed questions: What has happened? Who is to blame? What is to be done? His notebooks from the 1890s show a young man deeply concerned about the state of Russia. On a trip to Zurich in June 1898, he jotted down his thoughts on where the current workers’ movement was heading and whether it might be possible to influence “the class struggle, to direct it and to avert the bloody conflicts that inevitably threaten us in the future.” “What are we to do,” he wondered, writing about the nobility, “where is our union, our organization in the political struggle against the autocracy? Is it the zemstvo? But what is it doing? [. . .] Autocracy cannot last much longer at home. Thanks to ‘Khodynka’ its significance has been undermined; it has been undermined both in the eyes of society and in the eyes of the common people.”23

  For Pavel the answer lay in trying to expand the zemstvo movement to the lowest levels of society, thereby creating greater freedom of expression and involvement in Russia’s problems for as many of its subjects as possible. In 1899, he moved to the Zvenigorod district and joined the Moscow provincial zemstvo, in which he served until 1911. Pavel threw himself into zemstvo work, devoting himself to the spread of public education and writing and giving speeches. Pavel was convinced of the need to let society, in the broadest sense, be heard and to grant it greater autonomy in its affairs. The state’s distrust of the people had to be overcome. Echoing his father’s Slavophilism, Pavel rejected the idea that the answer lay in adopting Western parliamentary forms and institutions. Pavel equated such notions with the intelligentsia, whom he considered too deracinated and too taken with foreign forms and ideas to be effective; the intelligentsia, in his mind, was cut off from Russian reality and ignorant of how the Russian masses lived and so had no idea what they wanted and needed. He saw no contradiction between traditional Russian autocracy and allowing greater opportunity for all Russians at the local level to take part in running their own lives. The greatest danger lay in bureaucratic proizvol, arbitrariness, which was undermining the people’s faith in autocracy. By refusing to listen to the voices of the people, the state was exhibiting “a distrust that will be fatal for Russia.” He wrote, “By showing contempt for society, the government is teaching society how to disdain political authority.” Russia, Pavel warned, cannot be held together “merely by external force,” but only with all the sources of the country working in consort. “There is unrest in the air,” he wrote in 1902. “There is no calm.”24

  Pavel’s concern over the crisis facing Russia led him to help found a group called Beséda, the Symposium, in Moscow in 1899. Made up of about forty aristocrats active in the zemstvos, Beseda brought together men united by a common question: How to avoid revolution? The group was unique for its diversity of political views, which extended from Slavophile monarchists like Dmitry Shipov, on the right, to Marxist radicals like Prince Vladimir Obolensky, on the left, with room for liberals like Prince Mikhail Golitsyn in the middle. All its members were committed to an honest, open discussion of Russia’s ills, especially the state’s attempts to curtail the influence of the zemstvos, and of the need to secure local self-government. At its first meeting the group declared its main goal to be “the awakening of social activity and public opinion, which are so weak in Russia and have been so artificially repressed, to such an extent that it will have greater authority for Petersburg.”25 Political organizations like Beseda were illegal, and Pavel and his fellow sobesédniki knew th is, yet given the lofty status of its members, the state was willing to turn a blind eye. For Pavel, autocracy could coexist with a law-based state that allowed society to organize itself and express its own interests. One of the speeches he gave in 1905 bore the oxymoronic title “Autocracy and Self-Government.”26 The Englishman Bernard Pares met Pavel during this period and heard him speak of Beseda and his ideas for Russia. Pares was greatly impressed, calling him “a brilliant and fascinating young noble [. . .] who must have been one of the cleverest and most convincing spokesmen of conservatism.”27

  Count Sergei recognized Pavel as his spiritual heir. In February 1907, he composed a testament to be read by Pavel upon his death. “I turn to you, knowing your love and your feelings for our native past, knowing your special care and sympathy for our familial history. Preserve these feelings together with your attachment to our holy Orthodox church and our beloved motherland.”28 For the rest of his life Pavel felt the responsibility to Russia and to the family that his father had placed upon him. It later influenced greatly the difficult decision he would have to make about whether to leave Russia.

  Anna was the elder of the two Sheremetev daughters. Born at Mikhailovskoe in 1873 and named after Sergei’s much adored mother, she received an excellent education and was gifted with a beautiful voice. Her parents sent Anna to study singing in Italy, and after her return Sergei loved to have Anna sing for guests of the Fountain House. She was a maid of honor at the court of Empress Maria Fyodorovna in the reign of Alexander III, and as a teenager she danced with the tsarevich Nicholas at balls at the Winter Palace.29

  One contemporary described Anna as refined and charming and the kind of woman who moved men to spill blood and compose love songs. Aware of her power over men, she enjoyed using it and watching its effect.30 Profoundly religious, she was drawn to mysticism and the spiritual world and believed she possessed the power of prophecy.31 Politically, she agreed with her family’s ideas about Russia’s unique character and considered autocracy the only true system for Russia, although she too complained of Tsar Nicholas
’s weakness and lack of courage.32 Still, she was a young woman of her day. She read the monthly The Women’s Cause, followed the educational ideas of Montessori, and wondered in her diary whether she was a feminístka. She often found society life in St. Petersburg suffocating and longed for a quieter, simpler life in the countryside. When the society hostess Countess Betsy Shuvalov asked Anna to join a new women’s club, she wondered what benefit to society there was in a bunch of aristocratic ladies gathering to drink tea and gossip.33 At the family estates of Mikhailovskoe and Voronovo she taught peasant orphans in the village schools how to read and write.34

  In 1894, Anna married twenty-four-year-old Alexander “Alik” Saburov. The young groom did not impress his father-in-law. “Your taste, not mine,” he informed his daughter, his words in part motivated by his belief that the Saburovs did not measure up to the Sheremetevs, even though the Saburovs were an ancient Muscovite boyar family. Aristocratic society seemed to agree. Anna had been one of the most sought-after young ladies of her day, and most seemed to think she could have made a better match.35 Alik’s father had been a prominent diplomat, and one of Saburov’s grandfathers, Alexander Ivanovich Saburov, had taken part in the Decembrist movement. Alik served in the Chevaliers Gardes, which he found empty and pointless, before being made deputy governor of Moscow in 1902 and then, in 1916, civil governor of Petrograd, as well as master of ceremonies at the imperial court. He spoke German and Italian, played the piano, and was a noted dancer, a particularly popular partner of Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna.36