Not everyone idolized the Russian people too much, however. Rather, it was mostly Russian liberals, especially zemstvo men like Alexander, his brother Mikhail, and their father, who did. It was the conservatives among the nobility, people like Alexander’s mother, less susceptible to myths of the innate goodness of the narod, who intuitively sensed the danger the fall of the old regime posed and could see most clearly the dark future before them.
The family was a bit nervous about going out to Buchalki as usual that spring but decided to go anyway in early May. Life seemed to go on as before, although there were signs of change. The no trespassing signs outside the estate garden lost their power, and young local boys and girls freely came in to play and stroll and sit on the benches. On the first visit to church the Golitsyns found villagers filling the Princes’ Spot, something unthinkable only a few months earlier. There were instances of peasants cutting down their trees and hay; the overseer wanted to take action, but Anna Golitsyn decided to let it go, saying she did not want trouble with the peasants. Soon the peasants began to demand that the land be turned over to the “toilers,” although their demands were placated with the promise that the question of land reform would later be taken up by the Constituent Assembly.60
Meanwhile, in Petrograd, the Sheremetevs welcomed back Prince Boris and Princess Lili Vyazemsky. Lili, the daughter of Dmitry and Ira, had married Boris in 1912, after which they had spent much of their time at his estate of Lotarevo in Tambov Province. Lotarevo was a model estate, well known for its stud farm, and the Vyazemskys took great pride in it. Boris had served as marshal of the nobility for Usman district and president of the Tambov zemstvo and was later elected to the national Duma as a Kadet. Boris and Lili arrived at the Fountain House excited by the recent events and optimistic about the prospect of a Russian republic, all of which greatly upset Count Sergei.61
Throughout March Sergei had been receiving disturbing reports from his estate managers. On the sixth, a crowd of armed peasants at Mikhailovskoe had marched to the main house and demanded that all the pictures of the tsar’s family inside be destroyed. They found only one, a large portrait of Nicholas II in the dining room, which the overseer was forced to remove. Next, the crowd went to the school, pulled down portraits of Nicholas II, Alexander III, and even Alexander II—the Great Liberator—and destroyed them. That of Nicholas they tore from the frame and ripped to pieces before smashing the frame into splinters. The workers and employees at Mikhailovskoe held a meeting at which they drafted a petition demanding a ten-hour work day, “polite treatment” by their employers, and two weeks’ notice before being let go.62
Nikolai Shtegman, the overseer at Ostafievo, described what had transpired there that same day in a letter to Count Sergei:
The days of the revolution were much more alarming here than they were in 1905 or May 1915. On the morning of March 6 a large crowd of people appeared at the estate: two workers’ delegates and four guards with rifles and revolvers and a great many local peasants. They came into my apartment and immediately demanded I hand over all weapons, threatening me with their revolvers and with arrest. They rummaged through everything—the cupboards, commodes, trunks, etc. They looked everywhere for weapons, but I didn’t have any. I had given my gun to the watchman to keep the rabbits away from the apples. Then they demanded I open the main house so they could have a large meeting. I had to take out all the furnishings and close the side doors. They wanted to take all the weapons out of the dining room, but after several lengthy discussions and explanations to the effect that they were nothing but old flintlocks, and rusty ones at that, they left them in place. They searched the entire estate from eight o’clock in the morning until six o’clock in the evening, during which a great many people took part.
The crowd was all agitated because the day before at a factory meeting an orator named Baskakov misled them about the meaning of the revolution, telling them that now everything is ours, that if the vegetables are ripe—go on and take them, if the oats are ripe—go on and take them, if the apples are ripe—go on and take them, firewood, brushwood—you can now take everything you want and you won’t have to answer for it. Down with the teachers, don’t take your children to church, and a lot of other absurd nonsense. The same sorts of things were preached here too at the meeting on the estate. [. . .]
I have presented to the police a thorough report and have requested that the police be sent to guard the estate. I have been told a guard will be sent. Things are now, thank God, quiet.63
At the Sheremetev estate of Serebryanye Prudy (Silver Ponds), news of the abdication arrived along with “leaders of extreme left parties,” who organized meetings and gave speeches to the peasants aimed at turning them against the landowners and urging them to take all the land and not to wait for the Constituent Assembly. Peasants at the Podkhozhee estate began to seize some of the Sheremetevs’ land and tried to stop a shipment of oats headed for Mikhailovskoe from being taken away, claiming that it was theirs now. Disturbances like this went on for a week before matters settled down. The overseer from the Sheremetev lands in the Baltic province of Livonia wrote: “After surviving the recent events we, too, have started to worry and are nervous—indeed, who at present isn’t anxious?”64
French Ambassador Paléologue noted the growing anxiety in Petrograd during these months. Dining one evening with several of his aristocratic friends, he encountered a mood of “the darkest pessimism.” One fear terrified them most: the partition of the land. “We shall not get out of it this time!” one landowner said. “What will become of us without our rent-rolls?” Those gathered were not just afraid of losing their land by legal means, but of “confiscation by the high hand, wholesale looting and jacquerie.” Paléologue wrote after dinner: “I am certain that the same sort of conversation can be heard in every corner of Russia at the present time.” Countess Lamoyska returned from the family estate in Podolia to tell her friends that “a dangerous agitation” had reached the peasants there too; she said they were acting as if they were preparing to divide up the land for themselves and now no one in the family dared return.65 To Paléologue, this talk came as no surprise. In the first days of the February Revolution he had witnessed the looting and occupation by a mob of the Petrograd mansion of Mathilde Kschessinska, the ballerina and former mistress of Nicholas II. For him, this seemingly trivial event masked a deeper significance. “The revolution was pursuing its logical and inevitable course,” he observed.66
Count Alexander Sheremetev, Count Sergei’s half brother, was among those aristocrats most deeply affected by the revolution. On a visit in early April to the Fountain House, Sergei was shocked by Alexander’s changed manner and appearance and barely recognized him. He had shaved his mustache, lost a good deal of weight, and looked old and broken; gone were all his vaunted lively spirit and endless aplomb. He was now seeing the same specialist in nervous disorders who had treated Pavel following his breakdown in February; Sergei wryly commented in a letter to Maria that “the number of such sick persons has greatly increased.” Upon his wife’s insistence, Alexander had bought several acres of land in Finland should the situation in Russia get any worse.67
Once a resolute defender of the old order, Alexander had suddenly been transformed into a democrat and now claimed, amazingly, to have been one of the victims of tsarism. In April, he wrote to Alexander Guchkov, the Provisional Government’s minister of war:
Being in my soul a republican, I have suffered morally so much, especially during the war years, that my health has been utterly shattered. The great and important events of late February, which struck me like a blinding light after a long dark nightmare, have happily ended forever that repugnant despotism that nearly destroyed our beloved Fatherland. With this powerful and great revolution, the Provisional Government, which thanks to its moral strength is equally great, has created a miraculous and glorious monument to itself.
Alexander went on to offer the government the use of his private airplane squad
ron for the war effort and regretted that given his age (fifty-eight) and poor health, he was not able to do more for the new regime. No longer a “count,” Alexander had become, he proudly announced, “a Russian citizen.”68
Revolutions produce counterrevolutions. Yet it is one of the remarkable things about the February Revolution that it produced no counterrevolution seeking to restore the Romanovs. The nobility, and indeed the entire Russian elite, exactly those who stood to lose the most with the fall of tsarism, either embraced the revolution or at least begrudgingly accepted it. Despite a few isolated voices, there were no calls for a return to the past. Rather, the nobility immediately pledged itself to the new Provisional Government. The permanent council of the United Nobility and local noble associations met in early March to discuss how they might help the new government and encouraged all nobles to work with it. At the same time members of the State Council, including Count Sergei, swore an oath to the Provisional Government.69 As a whole, the nobility rallied around the new government as the best way to restore order and to unite the country against what most considered Russia’s greatest challenge—namely, the war against Germany. In their eyes, the revolution had been accomplished with the downfall of the autocratic system, and the duty of every Russian was to come together in defense of the motherland against its enemy abroad and against chaos at home. For some nobles, like the mayor and his sons Mikhail, Alexander, and Vladimir Vladimirovich, the long-held dream of building a constitutional order based on law and full civil and political rights led them to support the Provisional Government; for others, support of the new order was chiefly motivated by a sense that this was the only hope for holding back the forces of disorder threatening to engulf the country. As Count Sergei expressed in a letter to the historian Sergei Platonov, “My wish for the new government is that it grows stronger and so becomes less provisional, for so far its life has meant nothing but anarchy.”70
For more than half a century Count Sergei and his family had celebrated Easter at the Fountain House. That year relatives in Moscow had been urging them to leave Petrograd early and join them in Moscow, where life was calmer and more settled. Count Sergei, although he too wished to leave the capital, refused to break with tradition, and so on the night of April 1 the Sheremetevs once again marked the Orthodox Church’s main holy day as they had every year before.71 Finally, on the evening of April 10, Count and Countess Sheremetev and the rest of the family left the Fountain House for the Nikolaevsky Station. Everywhere were crowds, bands of soldiers, and red flags. At half past eight, the train pulled out for the overnight trip to Moscow. “Thanks be to God,” Count Sergei wrote in his diary. “We are leaving stinking, criminal Petrograd.”72
One week before this train took the Sheremetevs from Petrograd, another had arrived at the city’s Finland Station from Stockholm. After sixteen years in exile, Lenin had returned to Russia.
6
A COUNTRY OF MUTINOUS SLAVES
Lenin was given a hero’s welcome by the members of the Bolshevik Party when his train pulled into the Finland Station shortly after 11:00 p.m. on April 3. After a few short remarks delivered from atop an armored car, Lenin left for the Bolshevik headquarters in the former Kschessinska mansion. His speech to his fellow Bolsheviks there in the early hours of April 4 struck them like a thunderbolt and threw the gathering into frenzied confusion. Lenin attacked any support of the Provisional Government, insisting that the overthrow of the Romanovs was but the first phase of the revolution, not its end. Rejecting the view of fellow Marxists that Russia had just entered the bourgeois-capitalist stage of development that was to last for some indefinite time, Lenin insisted on the idea that had preoccupied him since the outbreak of World War I—namely, that the only path to peace lay in transforming the “bourgeois” war of nation against nation into a “class” war of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, and the time for such a civil war was now.
Lenin laid out his ideas in the so-called April Theses. He advocated an immediate end to the “imperialist” war; no collaboration with the new government; a move to the next “socialist” phase of the revolution; the transfer of all power to the Soviets; the confiscation of landlords’ estates and the nationalization of all land; the abolition of the police and army, the latter to be replaced by a people’s militia; and the creation of a single national bank under Soviet control as well as Soviet control over the means of production and distribution. His fellow Bolsheviks, and indeed the entire left, found his ideas absurd. The Bolshevik newspaper Pravda called Lenin’s plan “unacceptable,” and it was denounced in various left-wing circles as “claptrap” and “the ravings of a madman.” Lenin’s program was rejected by the Petrograd Bolsheviks, as well as their branches in other cities. The general consensus was that after so many years in exile, Lenin was out of touch with the realities of Russia.1
Prime Minister Prince Georgy Lvov, the blind optimist of 1917, would have agreed. “The great Russian revolution is truly miraculous in its majestic, quiet progress,” he stated early that spring; “every day that passes renews the belief in the inexhaustible creative power of the Russian people.” Others drew different conclusions from what they saw happening around them. Ambassador Paléologue saw “anarchy spreading through all of Russia,” and his British counterpart, George Buchanan, opined that “Russia is not ripe for a purely democratic form of government” and predicted “a series of revolutions and counterrevolutions.”2
The Provisional Government was proving helpless in stopping the country’s descent into disorder as the lawlessness and contempt for established authority that had brought down the autocracy continued to grow and spread. In the first days of May, Kerensky replaced Minister of War Guchkov, who had become convinced that Russia was ungovernable. “Is it really possible that Free Russia is only a country of mutinous slaves?” Kerensky asked as he launched his campaign to reinvigorate Russia’s army. “Our army under the monarchy accomplished heroic deeds. Will it be a flock of sheep under the republic?”3 Russia’s soldiers had no desire to be sheep, but neither did they desire to go on fighting and dying for a cause they did not believe in. According to General Alexei Brusilov, “The soldiers wanted only one thing—peace, so that they could go home, rob the landowners, and live freely without paying any taxes or recognizing any authority.”4
Given the vastness of the Russian Empire and the isolation of the village, it was not until mid-April that news of the fall of the Romanovs had reached all of the peasant masses. The news rarely produced sudden changes, and for a time life in the countryside largely went on as before. Gradually, however, as the significance of the events sank in, many peasants began to believe that the local nobles had purposely tried to keep them ignorant of what had happened and to distort the meaning of the revolution for their own benefit.5 Even before the end of March, voices of concern about the situation in the countryside could be heard. On March 26, New Times quoted Prince Yevgeny Trubetskoy from Kaluga: “The danger in the countryside is quite real. The villages now have no courts, no government administration, mercy be to St. Nicholas. It is being said that the deep snows and the muddy season will save us. But for how long? Soon evil elements will realize the advantages to be had out of this disorder.”6
Evil elements, however, had already begun to realize the advantages. On March 17, the newspaper Day reported peasants near Bezhetsk had locked the local landlord inside his manor and then burned it down with him inside.7 Before the end of April, reports of pogroms and violence were coming in from a number of provinces.8 On May 3, New Times printed a story on the terror that had gripped the town of Mtsensk in Orlovsk Province. For three days straight as many as five thousand peasants and soldiers went on a drunken rampage, torching several nearby estates. The rampage had erupted when a group of soldiers, looking for weapons at an estate of the Sheremetevs, came across a large wine cellar. After getting drunk, they ransacked the manor, and when word got out what was going on, the local peasants and garrison joined in. Troops, even
some of the officers, sent in to restore order went over to the side of the looters. Mysterious individuals appeared in officers’ uniforms and began handing out liquor and inciting the masses to further destruction. The town’s residents did not dare go out at night as the crowds, armed with rifles and knives, shouted and sang and caroused.9
“It was during the summer of 1917,” Ivan Bunin later wrote, “that the Satan of Cain’s anger, of bloodlust, and of the most savage cruelty wafted over Russia while its people were extolling brotherhood, equality, and freedom.”10 Freedom for the peasants meant vólia, license. Anton Kazakov, a peasant from Chernigov, said freedom was “Doing whatever you want.” And what the peasants, together with the returning army deserters, wanted was to destroy the landlords and take their property.11 It was not enough to plunder them; they had to be physically annihilated and driven off the land for good. In June, a landowner near the village of Buerak in Saratov Province was shot at his estate and his servants were strangled. The entire contents of the manor were carted off.12 The next month, the eighty-year-old son of Ivan Kireevsky, one of the founders of Slavophilism, was murdered together with his wife at his estate in Moscow Province by a group of deserters looking to steal their collection of rare books and antiques.13 At the Kamenka estate of Countess Edith Sollohub, mutinous soldiers turned a large library into rolling papers.14
At the estate of Popelyova, where Tatiana Aksakov-Sivers went to join her mother in the spring, things at first seemed normal. Yet as the months wore on, outside agitators appeared and warned the local peasants to be wary of “wolves in sheep’s clothing,” meaning the local masters.15 At the Rodzianko estate of Otrada in the southern province of Yekaterinoslav, Yelizaveta Rodzianko noticed that well into the summer the peasants seemed unusually quiet. “The people are silent,” she thought, recalling the famous line from Pushkin’s historical drama Boris Godunov. This was the quiet before the storm. At a church holiday the Rodziankos were joined by all the villagers for an outdoor feast. A handsome young stranger appeared and began to speak to the crowd of the achievements of the revolution, eventually coming to the subject of the landlords. “Don’t touch your landowner. This land will be yours regardless. All this,” he said with a grand gesture sweeping the entire horizon, “will be yours!” Yelizaveta rode home with a strange feeling. Within months the family were forced to flee Otrada for good.16 The countryside that spring and summer was full of “strolling players,” outside agitators, often deserting soldiers and sailors. They, according not just to the accounts of dispossessed nobles but to Soviet authorities as well, played a pivotal role in getting the peasants to act against the landlords.17
Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy Page 11
