Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith

  Before the dawn of the twenty-sixth, posters forbidding street gatherings and warning residents that the authorities were prepared to confront any unrest with force went up throughout the city. That morning Cossacks patrolled the city center, machine guns sat at the ready to defend key intersections, and special detachments had been positioned to keep protesters from reaching Nevsky Prospect. The capital was an armed camp. As in the previous days, the marchers poured into the city, but this time they were met with gunfire. Dozens of marchers were shot and killed. But the blood spilled in the streets caused some of the soldiers to pause, and as the day wore on, the troops’ resolve wavered. Men of the Pavlovsky Guards grabbed their guns and went to battle the police, and then on Monday the twenty-seventh members of the Volynsky Regiment, no longer willing to shoot unarmed civilians, turned their rifles on their commander and shot him dead. Mutiny spread among the soldiers, who spilled out into the streets to join the insurgents.3

  As their world dissolved around them, the Sheremetevs were preoccupied with a family crisis. In the middle of February Count Pavel Sheremetev returned to Petrograd after a visit to Grand Duchess Xenia’s Crimean estate at Ai Todor. The family noticed immediately that Pavel was not well and had suffered a severe emotional collapse. Doctors were called to the Fountain House to examine Pavel, and it was determined that he was suffering from “paranoia” and a nervous disorder of a “romantic” nature.

  The cause of Pavel’s suffering was a woman by the name of Irina Naryshkin. He had first met Irina at Mikhailovskoe in 1899 and fallen desperately in love with her, yet Irina had refused him for Count Illarion Vorontsov-Dashkov, the brother of Count Dmitry Sheremetev’s wife. They had five children before the marriage broke apart. Pavel believed he had a second chance to win Irina, and again she rejected him, this time for Prince Sergei Dolgoruky. This marriage too collapsed, and Pavel professed his love to Irina yet again at Ai Todor in early 1917. Rejected for a third time, Pavel fled for Petrograd by train together with Grand Duchess Xenia and suffered a mental breakdown along the way. Count Sergei found the entire affair humiliating (“It’s a rare thing to be a child at age forty-five,” he wrote his daughter Maria. “I’ve always found this embarrassing”), but he saw to it Pavel got help. As chaos spread in the streets of Petrograd, doctors came and went from the Fountain House, and plans were made to send Pavel to the Kryukov sanatorium for nervous disorders outside Moscow.4

  On February 27, Count Sergei wrote Grand Duchess Xenia to thank her for the concern she had shown for Pavel. He ended his letter with mention of the recent street disturbances, observing, “Something very murky is taking place.”5 That day he wrote in his diary: “There have been gunshots along Nevsky Prospect and in other places, the crowd is growing as are the red flags. [. . .] But no one knows where our government is at the moment or who is in charge of reestablishing order.”6 He also wrote to his daughter Maria, then living in Georgia, where her husband was serving as the governor of Kutaisi, “Things are very unsettled here in the city, the dissatisfaction is growing, at first people just wanted bread, but now other less clear demands are being made. [. . .] I cannot get to the Imperial Council since Nevsky Prospect is entirely filled with people and the streetcars have all stopped and there are no cabs to be had.” In closing, he expressed his fear that some sort of “provocation” could lead to even greater unrest.7

  What happened that day, February 27, has been called “the most stupendous military revolt in recorded history.”8 Following the example of the Pavlovsky Regiment, by nightfall half of the city’s 160,000-man garrison had gone over to the insurgents, while the rest chose not to take any side. Soldiers and workers marched to the city’s prisons and released the inmates. They raided police stations, courthouses, the Ministry of the Interior, and the headquarters of the Okhrana, where they burned its files. And they armed themselves with guns and ammunition taken from the city’s arsenals. Policemen were murdered in the streets; looters ransacked stores and private residences, mobs robbed and killed respectable-looking men in the streets. The red flag was raised over the Winter Palace.

  By the end of the day, Khabalov was down to no more than two thousand loyal troops. It was over. The capital was now in the control of the mob. That evening he telegraphed Nicholas at headquarters that the situation in the capital was out of control.9 Nicholas responded by ordering loyal troops sent to crush the rebellion; but the crisis had advanced too far, and in the end no forces were ever dispatched. Back in Petrograd, the police stripped off their uniforms, abandoned the streets, and fled for their lives. The tsar’s ministers met for the last time on the evening of the twenty-seventh at the Mariinsky Palace to tender their resignations. That done, the ministers too tried to run to safety under the cover of darkness.

  As the old order evaporated and anarchy spread, members of the Duma met at the Tauride Palace to consider how to address the chaos. On the afternoon of the twenty-seventh, reluctant to overstep their authority yet cognizant that something had to be done to reestablish order and resist the growing power of the revolutionary crowd, they created a Provisional Committee of Duma Members for the Restoration of Order and for Relations with Individuals and Institutions. The name perfectly captured the bland indecisiveness of what became known as the Provisional Government.10 Among its twelve members were Mikhail Rodzianko, the rotund Duma chairman; the Kadet leader Pavel Miliukov; the former head of the Union of Zemstvos and Towns Prince Georgy Lvov; and the lawyer and socialist Alexander Kerensky.

  At the same time that the Duma men were meeting in the right wing of the Tauride Palace, a rival political power was taking shape in its left wing. The Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which met for the first time on the twenty-eighth, expressed the power of the crowds in the streets, in opposition to the Provisional Government, which from the start was seen as representing Russia’s privileged classes. Soldiers outnumbered workers in the Petrograd Soviet, and its executive committee comprised socialist intellectuals—mostly Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, and Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs). The creation of the soviet marked a new state of affairs known as dvoevlástie, or dual power, and the Provisional Government and the soviet began a tense unofficial partnership in which each would understand the nature and ultimate goals of the revolution in fundamentally different ways.11 To gain the conditional support of the soviet, the Provisional Government had to agree to eight conditions, including amnesty for all political prisoners; freedom of speech, press, and assembly; and the abolition of all restrictions based on class, religion, and nationality. Not without reason did Lenin call Russia now “the freest country in the world.” The new government also agreed to immediately abolish the police, the Okhrana, and the Corps of Gendarmes. This step, together with the dissolution of the tsarist provincial bureaucracy, was to have fatal consequences, for without new institutions to take their place, the Provisional Government was left with no means to effectively govern the country at the very moment it was descending into ever-greater disorder.12

  On Tuesday the twenty-eighth, Count Sergei wrote in his diary:

  This morning a new revolutionary leaflet appeared informing us that a “coup” has taken place! So there now, we have lived long enough to witness this festive occasion! A festival of insanity! The abnormal power of that woman [Empress Alexandra] has led us precisely to that which many had foreseen. The government is powerless. A new power from within the Duma has been established, a new administration headed by Rodzianko that threatens the State itself. We have no news at all of what has become of the State. There are no newspapers, the mail is delayed, one cannot speak by telephone or write. Rasputin’s followers, all that scum, have been arrested. There has been shooting all day long; I cannot make out who is firing at whom or on whose orders. Revolution brings with it the danger of pogroms from house to house.13

  Earlier that day a group of soldiers came to the Fountain House demanding to see Count Sergei. He was upstairs at the time with Yekaterina and Dmitry and Ira.
He went to the top of the stairs and asked what they wanted. They asked whether he had any sons and, if so, how many and where they were, to which he gave vague answers, making certain not to mention any of them by name. Next they wanted to know whether there were any weapons or ammunition in the house. Police, the hated so-called pharaohs, had reportedly been seen on the roof of the Fountain House, shooting down at the insurgents. Yes, Count Sergei told them, he had a great many, though mostly seventeenth-century poleaxes and muskets, and he sent a servant to fetch a few, though this was obviously not what the soldiers had in mind. In the meantime, another group of soldiers had made their way through the house’s labyrinths to the apartments of Sergei’s granddaughter Lili Vyazemsky, where, hungry and exhausted, they set upon a table laden with food and then vanished. Late that afternoon, a second group of soldiers came. These men, Sergei observed, were rougher, ruder, spouting political phrases and informing the family they had been sent to search the house and instill order. After they left, the family gathered in an upstairs sitting room behind drawn curtains. Sergei noted that the blood had drained from Ira’s face, and she sat stricken with panicky fear.14

  To little Yelena Sheremetev the revolution meant there would be no more going out to play in the garden or visiting friends. Bored, she and her brothers spent the days reading Sherlock Holmes and the detective stories of Allan Pinkerton. Given the sporadic gunfire in the streets, the children were told to stay away from the windows; as the shooting increased, they all were sent to Dmitry’s rooms, which faced the inner courtyard.15 Dmitry’s last day of duty as Nicholas’s aide-de-camp was on February 8, after which he returned to the Fountain House and most likely never saw the tsar again.16 As the fighting in the streets got ever closer and the sound of gunfire kept the household awake at night, the level of fear rose within the Fountain House. On March 1, a third search party came to inspect the house. In the rooms of Yelena’s mother, Lilya Sheremetev, they came across a number of hunting rifles. One of them unexpectedly went off, just missing Lilya and leaving her almost deaf in one ear. The family, however, was fortunate, and the soldiers left them unharmed.17

  As the civil governor of Petrograd, Alik Saburov was a target of the insurgents. Concerned for the safety of Anna and their children, he tried to convince them to leave together with the servants for the Fountain House, but they all refused to abandon him. On March 1, a band of soldiers came to the governor’s mansion and tried to take Alik to the Tauride Palace. Noticing that all the men were drunk and fearful that he would be killed before ever reaching the palace, Alik tried to stall them by insisting that he would not go unless they had an automobile to conduct him safely. For several tense minutes the soldiers debated among themselves what to do, while Alik waited on the main stairs surrounded by his family and servants. He was rescued when one of the soldiers, a young man with a large white bandage over one eye, managed to convince the men that they had no authority to arrest Saburov without a written mandate. This soldier most likely saved Saburov’s life. The men turned and left.18

  There was a real threat to men like Saburov as mob violence and vigilantism ruled the streets of Petrograd. The idea of the February Revolution as a “bloodless revolution” was a myth created to justify the establishment of the Provisional Government and legitimize its authority.19 If the first blood of the revolution spilled on Petrograd’s streets was that of the marchers, then the rest was mostly that of the police, officers, and other persons affiliated with the old order. Paul Grabbe, the teenage son of General Count Alexander Grabbe, recalled looking out the window of the family apartment into the street below at a large pile of logs covered with freshly fallen snow. As he looked, the logs strangely grew arms and legs, and Grabbe realized he was staring at the frozen corpses of murdered policemen. A cook at the American Embassy arrived at work in hysterics after seeing a policeman beheaded in the street by someone wielding a saber. General Stackelberg fought back when soldiers came to search his house, shooting two of them before he himself was shot in front of his wife. The soldiers then proceeded to strip him and profane his body; according to one report, his head was cut off and stuck on a spike.20 The number killed and wounded is estimated to have been 1,443. Mutinous sailors killed hundreds of their officers in grisly fashion in Helsingfors and Kronstadt as well.21

  The violence of the February Revolution represented an attack of the masses on privileged Russia, those marked by the word burzhúi, bourgeois. In the Russian context, the word had nothing to do with the bourgeoisie in the Western European sense. Rather, it was a term of scorn used for all of privileged Russia. Extremely malleable and with a long history, the term “burzhui” could denote the cultured elite, the rich, the intelligentsia, Jews, Germans, or even the revolutionaries themselves. It had nothing to do with a specific social class but stood in the eyes of the downtrodden for “the enemy” and, particularly from 1917 on, the enemy of the revolution. The people stood in opposition to the burzhui in the sense of “us versus them” or “the masses versus the classes.” In the countryside, the peasants used the term to refer to all their enemies, especially the gentry and the monarchists. All it took to classify someone as a burzhui in 1917 was a starched white shirt, smooth hands, eyeglasses, or evidence of bathing. Even the color of a woman’s hair could mark her.22

  The burzhui and the other “enemies” of the revolution were demonized as animals and parasites, thus helping legitimize violence against them. The Bolsheviks and other revolutionary parties did not manufacture the term or the hatred that made it so powerful. It had true mass appeal and reflected the lower class’s hatred of their betters, the hatred that fueled the revolutionary violence not only of 1917 but on into the civil war years. Over the course of 1917 and later, Lenin and the Bolsheviks became masters at cultivating this hatred and directing it against the privileged classes for their own ends.23

  The war against the burzhui that erupted in February 1917 fitted with how Russia’s lower classes interpreted the freedom that came with the revolution. Freedom was understood as something the Russians call vólia, total license and the right to act as one sees fit, unrestrained from any larger authority. In the popular mind, freedom had been won not for all of Russia but for “the people,” the poor and the marginalized; it had been wrested from the hands of the tsar and all burzhui, and so any attempts to limit their “freedom” justified stopping and silencing the burzhui as the enemies of the revolution and the people. This tension grew over the course of the year as the Provisional Government failed to deliver on the promises of the revolution—on food, land, and an end to the war. If the freedom they had fought for still was not fully theirs, then enemies must be keeping it from them, and they had to be vanquished for the people’s freedom to rain down.24

  The response of the nobility to the February Revolution was not unified, even in Petrograd at the height of the violence. In the first days of the revolution Paul Grabbe remembered his mother coming home terribly upset. “ ‘Imagine!’ she said to me. ‘I just ran into Countess Sheremetev; and how do you suppose she greeted me? She said: ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ and I said, ‘What’s wonderful?’ and she said, ‘Why, the Revolution, of course!’ and I said, ‘Well, Countess, you’re hardly the one to rejoice. It is precisely people like us who stand to lose everything.’ ”25 These two feelings—joy and fear—marked the most common responses, and some nobles experienced both. For young Grabbe, the initial chaos in the streets meant a school holiday, all the more welcomed for its unexpectedness. The children of Count Pavel and Natalya Ignatiev saw the February Days as “a wild street carnival that they could not wait to get outside to see.”26

  Princess Catherine Sayn-Wittgenstein, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of an ancient German noble family in Russian service since the eighteenth century, had remained devoted to the monarchy up until the revolution (though chiefly out of “stubbornness,” she admitted), even though she had long since lost all faith in Nicholas. Her uncle Nikolai Zubov was a liberal Kadet, while her br
other Andrei was a committed monarchist. The family had long argued about politics and especially about Empress Alexandra. When the revolution broke out in Petrograd, Catherine was swept up in the excitement. She, like some in the family, saw a bright future for a “Russian Republic.” She wanted to be in the streets with the people to show her solidarity, so along with two friends from the lyceum Catherine went out to march with the crowds and their red banners and sing the “Marseillaise.” “I had a feeling of love for that unsightly crowd, and I wanted to merge with it so that it would recognize me as part of it.” But the young ladies quickly sensed that they were not welcome, and the looks the workers and soldiers gave Catherine told her to stand back. “I understood that we were not part of the crowd and that it didn’t need us.” The feeling of being foreign to the revolution grew in the coming months and distanced Catherine ever further from it. The ideological divide within the family deepened.27

  House searches were common in Petrograd as soldiers sought to arrest prominent officials and military officers and to take weapons out of the hands of anyone considered a foe of the revolution. Some apartments were searched as many as three times in one day.28 One night General Grigoriev was awoken by the sound of men pounding at his door. Realizing they had come to arrest him, Grigoriev, who happened to be alone at the time, put on his cook’s apron and white toque before opening the door. Acting the part of his cook, he then proceeded to take them from room to room in a futile search for General Grigoriev.29