Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith

  Anna and Alik were happy together. They had four children—Alexei (who died young), Boris, Xenia, and Georgy (called Yuri)—with whom they spent summers at Mikhailovskoe and winters on the French Riviera. Shortly before the revolution, Anna and Alik were making plans to betroth Xenia to Grand Duke Fyodor Alexandrovich, the son of Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich and Grand Duchess Xenia, the younger sister of Nicholas II.37

  Anna’s younger sister, Maria, born in 1880, was her father’s favorite. Shy, delicate, and religious, Maria was given a fine education at home and showed artistic talent as a painter. Like her sister Anna, she was a maid of honor at court. In 1900, Maria married Count Alexander Gudovich, a former cavalry officer and gentleman of the bedchamber. Among those attending the wedding was Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, governor-general of Moscow and younger brother of Alexander III.38 The grand duke would be blown up by a terrorist bomb outside the Kremlin five years later.

  3

  THE GOLITSYNS

  Tracing their family back to Grand Prince Gedymin, the fourteenth-century founder of Lithuania, the Golitsyns were among Russia’s oldest and most esteemed noble clans. They were also its largest. Under the Muscovite grand princes, the Golitsyns counted twenty-two boyars, more than any other family, and by the end of the nineteenth century the massive family tree had grown to sixteen distinct branches.1 For centuries the Golitsyns had distinguished themselves on the battlefield, at court, in the diplomatic service, and in the arts and sciences. Prince Nikolai Borisovich Golitsyn, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, was a patron of Beethoven’s and the dedicatee of the so-called Golitsyn String Quartets (Opus 127, 130, 132); Prince Boris Golitsyn was one of the founders of modern seismology and the creator of the first electromagnetic seismograph; Prince Dmitry Golitsyn was the first Catholic priest ordained in the United States, in 1795, and for forty years he spread the gospel in western Pennsylvania as the “Apostle of the Alleghenies”; and Prince Nikolai Dmitrievich Golitsyn was the last prime minister of tsarist Russia in 1917.2

  Prince Vladimir Mikhailovich Golitsyn was born in 1847 in Paris. Much of his early years were spent in France, and for the rest of his life he professed a profound love for everything French. French was his first language, and he learned to speak Russian fluently only after returning to his homeland for good in the 1860s. Growing up in France, Prince Vladimir attended the imperial balls of Napoleon III, where he once met Baron d’Anthès, notorious as the duelist who felled Alexander Pushkin in 1837. In Nice, he met Pushkin’s aging widow, Natalya Goncharova (he found her still quite beautiful), and in Berlin he was introduced to Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck. As a boy he had been presented to Emperor Nicholas I, and on visits to Moscow he shared meals with ancient courtiers from the reign of Catherine the Great and the heroes of Borodino and Austerlitz.3

  In 1865, Prince Vladimir enrolled in the faculty of natural history at Moscow University. He was swept up by the optimism during this era of the Great Reforms under Tsar Alexander II. “We all had one cherished wish, one dream,” he wrote in his memoirs, “the continuation and expansion of the recently given freedom.”4 After serving several years in the Moscow City Duma, Prince Vladimir was appointed deputy governor of Moscow in 1883 and then governor of Moscow Province four years later. In 1891, however, he was suddenly and unexpectedly removed from his position by the new governor-general of Moscow, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. Although this was never publicly acknowledged, Prince Vladimir had been fired as punishment for his increasingly liberal views.5

  His work in the provincial government had proved to him what he called “the complete vileness” of the autocracy and especially the abuse of power by its officials and the “criminal blindness of the ruling circles.”6 Completely disillusioned with the tsarist political system, Prince Vladimir railed against Russians’ “civil and political ignorance,” which he traced back to the reign of Tsar Paul I (1796–1801), who, in his opinion, began “to teach us to see tsarist power as a form of despotism, personal caprice and proizvol and to consider this the law of power, order, and prosperity.”7 A pacifist who abhorred violence of any kind (he would not hunt, fish, or even pick flowers), Prince Vladimir refused to equate patriotism with blind loyalty and love of the Romanovs; revolted by notions of Russians as God’s chosen people, he called himself a follower of “Pantheism in the spirit of Spinoza and Goethe, whom I idolize.”8 He was ambivalent toward his own social class, preferring what he called “an aristocracy of culture and intelligence, an aristocracy of lofty souls and sensitive hearts.”9

  Prince Vladimir returned to public life in 1897, when he was elected mayor of Moscow, a post to which he was to be reelected three times and that established him as a prominent voice for liberal reform and the defense of the rule of law. As mayor he built schools and hospitals, improved the city’s water supply, began the plans for a city subway system, and helped negotiate the establishment of the Tretyakov Art Gallery. In late 1904, the mayor (as Prince Vladimir will be called in this book) appealed to the government to undo its long-standing repressive measures and to introduce freedom of conscience, the press, and assembly. His appeal was seen in many conservative circles as a direct challenge to the authority of the tsar; progressives hailed him as “the bright Champion of honor and truth.” Minister of the Interior Alexander Bulygin threatened the mayor with legal action, and the right-wing extremist Black Hundreds later blamed him for the revolutionary violence in Moscow that followed in 1905. The government forced the mayor from office by the end of the year. As a show of support, the city Duma voted unanimously to bestow upon him the title of honorary citizen, making him only the twelfth person ever to be accorded the distinction.10

  Vladimir married Sofia Delianov in 1871. Sofia spoke five languages, played the piano, and patronized artists such as Isaac Levitan, Leonid Pasternak (father of the writer Boris), and Valentin Serov, as well as the more experimental World of Art and Knave of Diamonds groups. At their Moscow home the Golitsyns hosted a salon for many of the day’s leading creative figures.11 Between 1872 and 1892 Sofia bore ten children, eight of whom survived to adulthood. All the sons attended Moscow University. Mikhail, the eldest, studied law; Nikolai studied philology and later became the director of the State Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Alexander studied medicine and became a doctor; and Vladimir Vladimirovich studied physics. The elder two daughters, Sofia and Vera, were maids of honor at court. By the outbreak of war in 1914, all the children had married and started their own families.12

  Growing up in Moscow, Prince Mikhail Golitsyn and his younger brother Vladimir Vladimirovich were frequent guests at the Sheremetevs’ Corner House, where they took dancing lessons with the children of Count Sergei and Countess Yekaterina. Under the direction of a former dancer of the Bolshoi Theater, the boys and girls learned the classical ballet poses and were taught to waltz, polka, and dance the mazurka. Each lesson ended with a large quadrille. Young Maria Sheremetev was Vladimir Vladimirovich’s favorite partner. All the grown-ups came to watch them with approving smiles. After the lessons tea and cakes were served and the children were released to play on the grand main staircase or organize games of hide-and-seek throughout the expansive house.13

  In 1896, Mikhail left Moscow for the Golitsyn estate of Buchalki in Tula Province, where he was elected chairman of the district nobility and became active in the work of the local Epifanovsky District zemstvo. The following year in Tula Mikhail crossed paths with Count Pavel Sheremetev. The two young men shared many views about the need to expand the power of the zemstvos and to resist the encroachment of the central government in its affairs. Whereas others placed Pavel within the conservative camp, Mikhail found him to be liberal, even leftist, in his political opinions and noticed he was associating with “so-called Reds.” Count Sergei Sheremetev became so upset with his son that he threatened to cut off his allowance; for a time Pavel barely had enough money to get by. In 1900, Mikhail became a member of Beseda and attended its meetings along with Pa
vel at the Sheremetev homes in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Mikhail remained active in Beseda for several years.14

  Whereas Pavel was moving further to the right after 1900, Mikhail was moving further to the left. He took part in secret underground meetings with other liberal nobles to discuss the sorrowful condition of rural Russia and ways to bring equal rights to the peasants. At his Buchalki home, he and his wife hosted weekly gatherings with local teachers at which they read political literature and talked ideas. Mikhail’s activities and political opinions became known to the Tula governor, who pressured him to stop the meetings and placed the Golitsyns under surveillance. By 1905, Mikhail had become convinced of the need for a constitutional order. He was once nearly arrested for meeting with a group of peasants, and the pressure of the government authorities, plus the disapproval of many of his conservative noble neighbors, who by now had come to view him as almost a revolutionary, led Mikhail to quit the zemstvo and to leave Buchalki with Anna and their children for Moscow in 1912.15

  Mikhail’s brother Vladimir Vladimirovich was considered the “Reddest” of all the Golitsyn sons. After university he left Moscow to run the family estate of Livny in Orel Province. He too served in the zemstvo, acting as the chairman of the zemstvo board, and in the local town Duma. As a young man one summer in the countryside he happened to catch sight of a peasant girl, “with big sad eyes and a charming face,” tending a flock of geese. He fell in love with this “rare treasure” and knew someday they had to be married. Tatiana Govorov was a dozen years his junior, uneducated, and ignorant of Vladimir’s world, but regardless they married secretly in 1907. Only after he had helped educate her did Vladimir introduce Tatiana to his family, and they all took to her at once. They settled at Livny and were still there with their three young children (Alexander, Yelena, and Olga) when the revolution broke out in 1917.16

  Most in the family could overlook a Golitsyn’s marrying a peasant, but the liberal notions of the mayor and his sons were another matter. Even the mayor’s own wife found their liberalism distasteful and misguided. An unbending supporter of autocracy, she blamed her son Mikhail’s politics on the pernicious influence of the other nobles in the Epifanovsky district, strangely overlooking the influence of his father. Reflecting on these years in 1918, Sofia wrote that such liberal views had been common in their circles: “In those days many liked to act the liberal and so they led us to this current terrible time when everything has been ruined.” The Golitsyn household in the years leading up to 1917 was filled with heated political rows between Sofia and the mayor and their children; no one would back down or even admit that the other side had a valid point. Nevertheless, none of them, she wrote, could have imagined the coming horrors: “We hardly suspected the kind of disaster that was approaching our beloved Motherland.”17 The liberalism of Mikhail and Vladimir Vladimirovich so upset their uncle Prince Alexander Mikhailovich Golitsyn, the mayor’s older, unmarried brother, that he passed them over in his will and left his large estate of Petrovskoe to their brother Alexander. Alexander and his new wife, Lyubov, settled there in 1901. He set up a small free hospital for the peasants and also began work as a surgeon in the hospital at Zvenigorod.18

  Sofia and the mayor’s daughters dutifully married into respectable noble families: Sofia (Sonya), their eldest, to Konstantin Lvov, an officer in one of the guards regiments; Vera to Count Lev Bobrinsky, a wealthy landowner; Tatiana to Pyotr Lopukhin, the brother of Anna Lopukhin, Mikhail Golitsyn’s wife; and Yelizaveta (“Eli”) to Prince Vladimir Sergeevich Trubetskoy. The Trubetskoys were, like the Sheremetevs and Golitsyns, another of Russia’s great aristocratic clans with a distinguished, ancient lineage. Vladimir’s father, Prince Sergei Nikolaevich Trubetskoy, was a noted philosopher, the rector of Moscow University, and a prominent liberal of national reputation. He was chosen by the zemstvos in 1905 to present their appeal for representative assembly and major reforms to the tsar. He spoke before Nicholas on June 6, and the tsar, moved by what he heard, seemed to agree with Trubetskoy’s appeal, though in the end he failed to act. Trubetskoy died a few months later at the age of forty-three in the middle of a fight to ensure the autonomy of Moscow University from the authorities. His funeral attracted large crowds and occasioned violence in the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg. A student speaking at his funeral captured the mood of many: “The death of Trubetskoy proves again that in Russia, great, free men can only die.” Sergei Trubetskoy’s family was talented and well educated. His brother Yevgeny was a religious thinker, writer, and founding member of the liberal Kadet Party, and his son Nikolai became one of the great linguists of the twentieth century.19

  Vladimir, however, shared neither his family’s intellectual interests nor its political views. From a young age, Vladimir cared little for his studies, much to his parents’ displeasure. His passion was the military, and after originally flirting with the idea of a career in the navy, he enrolled in the Blue Cuirassier Life Guards Cavalry Regiment. Tall, lithe, handsome, and fearless, Vladimir excelled in the guards, becoming a model officer. He loved what he called the regiment’s “primitive romance”—its tradition and discipline, its fabled history, its standard, its handsome chestnut chargers, its esprit de corps. The highlight of the year were the maneuvers and parades before Nicholas II. The first time Vladimir saw the tsar, he was overwhelmed: “My first, large parade in the summer of 1912 evoked in me a hitherto unknown feeling and ushered in a decisive change in my thinking. I felt, suddenly, that I loved the Emperor with a profound passion, although I did not really consider why. The thought struck me what a great fortune it would be for me to be taken into his brilliant suite.”20

  That same summer Vladimir, aged twenty, married Eli, two years his senior. The subject of his marrying was a concern to the other men in the Blue Cuirassiers, for none of them could choose a bride without the approval of his fellow officers. Any acceptable young lady had to be of noble background; no guards officer was permitted to marry a peasant, a merchant’s daughter, or any other commoner, regardless of her wealth or education. The officers also had to be convinced of her good reputation and virtue as well as the quality of her relations.21 For someone of Eli’s background, this was not difficult, and their marriage marked the union of two illustrious families. The mayor had to admit, however, that his cherished liberalism and pacifism were utterly foreign to his new son-in-law. Vladimir and Eli went on to have nine children in their twenty-five years of marriage before dying many miles apart from each other in Stalin’s dark prisons.

  The Golitsyns wintered in Moscow and summered at Petrovskoe or Buchalki. Sergei Golitsyn, the younger of Mikhail and Anna’s two sons, born in 1909, recalled his early years at Buchalki in his richly detailed memoir. Although his family did not have the wealth of the Sheremetevs or Yusupovs, still, Sergei grew up surrounded by servants, who were seemingly everywhere in the manor house and on the grounds. As early as the age of four Sergei knew that he was different from other children. He was a prince, a descendant of Gedymin, and so had to be brave like his ancestors. He knew this in part from what his nanny and his grandmother Golitsyn told him; Sergei secretly liked thinking he was better than the other children his age. His father, on the other hand, was chiefly concerned with his work and was rarely at home, much less tending to the children. From his rather liberal mother, little Sergei learned that the society they lived in was not perfect, that there were good and bad tsars, that resisting the bad ones, as the Decembrists had, was a good thing, and that the reigning tsar was surrounded by some wicked men, especially “Grishka” Rasputin. His mother believed in hard work and made sure her children were each assigned a small plot of the garden at Buchalki that they were responsible for tending. With regard to religion, there was no disagreement in the family: Orthodox faith and belief in God were at the foundation of life and beyond question.22

  We belonged to the class of masters, and this order seemed natural [Sergei wrote], in accordance with centuries’ old traditions. True attachment c
ould exist between masters and their people, but at the same time there was always a high invisible glass barrier between them. Some masters were known as liberals, they tried to help the peasants, yet they would never, for example, make their own bed or empty their own chamber pot; and their children were brought up in the same spirit. Once a peasant woman came to see my mother together with her son. I took him by the hand and led him to my sandbox, hoping to play with him, but just then Auntie Sasha [Sergei’s nanny] grabbed me by the arm and took me away with a hiss. Yes, the life of the masters was completely different from that of the peasants.23

  This glass barrier was everywhere. The linden tree walk at Buchalki leading to the manor house was only for the masters; servants and others were to stick to the narrow path along the walk’s far left side. Although the villagers and the Golitsyns attended the same church, the masters had their own entrance, which led to a raised and enclosed section, the so-called Princes’ Spot, reserved for them. Distinguishing masters from the people was important, but not always easy. When Pyotr Raevsky appeared in Buchalki in the first automobile—a bright cherry red contraption that terrified the locals with its noise and smoke—the pressing question at lunch was where to seat his English driver. His background, attire (dark goggles, leather helmet and jacket), and obvious skill with this new device seemed to place him above the status of the servants who ate in the kitchen, yet it did not seem quite right to seat him at the table on the veranda with the family and their guests. In the end a compromise was found: the driver ate on the veranda, but by himself at his own table.24