Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith

  At the Kastchenkos’ estate of Vesyolaya in Ukraine life seemed the same as always, at least outwardly. But then things began to change in small ways. “The change was indefinable, hard to pin down, yet grimly unmistakable,” Marie Kastchenko remembered. The two old coachmen “kissed our hands with the usual respectful cordiality, but seemed uneasy and looked around, as though they were afraid somebody was watching them.” In the house, things began to disappear—a scarf, a blouse, a bottle of eau de Cologne; the servants began to whisper in groups and would “then lapse into sullen silence if any of us appeared.” On her walks, the peasants no longer stepped off the path to let Marie pass as before; now she had to give way to them.18

  Alexei Tatishchev noticed that at the family estate of Tashan in the Poltava province the servants that summer “seemed reticent and at times surly” and reluctant to do their work. One day a peasant delegation came to the house to speak to his aunt. They waited on the marble terrace outside, some spitting on it in defiance. Later, one peasant, when asked to stop herding her cows in the yard, walked onto the terrace, hiked up her skirt, and then defecated in front of Tatishchev’s aunt. When the woman had finished, she told the mistress to herd them herself if she was not happy. Not long thereafter, the family packed up and left for Kiev.19

  Bunin had left Petrograd for the family estate of Glotovo in May 1917. One night soon after his arrival, the barn was torched, and then the peasants burned down the neighbor’s barn. They blamed the fire on the landowner, beat him mercilessly, and hauled him off to the local town hall. Bunin went to intercede on his behalf. The crowed yelled at Bunin as speaking “for the ‘old regime’ ” and refused to listen; one woman called Bunin and his ilk “sons of bitches” who “should be thrown into the fire. “It is disgusting to live in the country now,” Bunin complained. “The village men are true children, just vile. There is ‘anarchy’ here and throughout the district, willfulness, confusion, and the most idiotic misunderstanding of all these ‘slogans’ as well as the most basic human words—it’s astounding.”20 In June, Bunin was forced to submit to a humiliating inspection at the local rail station. “There are no laws,” he cried. “Everyone has power except us of course. In ‘free’ Russia only soldiers, peasants, and workers have a voice.”21 Yet despite the horrors, Bunin, like most of the gentry, could not help feeling a deep connection to the family estate; its sense of history and simplicity and seeming timelessness was a balm amid all the upheavals. But by the middle of October, the situation had become too dangerous for the Bunins to remain in the country. During the last week of the month, they loaded up their things and left in the dark. On the way a group of women tried to block their path; Bunin pulled out his Browning and threatened to shoot, and the women stepped aside.22

  The Golitsyns spent the summer at their Buchalki estate. In the papers they read with horror about the violence sweeping the countryside. Their servant Anton, who had never dared speak while working, now began to talk. He told them about rumors in the village that deserters had begun to arrive and were stirring up the people and inciting them to seize the land.23

  One day Anna Golitsyn went out with her children to gather mushrooms in the woods, where they came across a fresh dugout and fire pit. They saw no one but assumed there must be brigands or deserters in the area. Anna signaled the children to be quiet and join hands, and they turned and hurried back to the manor. They never again ventured out into the woods.24 One day a group of twenty peasants came to talk to Mikhail about their desire for some of the estate lands. He informed the men that the land was not his but his uncle’s, though he promised to write to him and present their request. He urged them to be patient, however, and to wait for the Constituent Assembly that autumn, when the land question would be addressed. A soldier in the group tried to stir them up against Mikhail, but they resisted, saying as they left that they trusted their “masters” to do the right thing by them. The Golitsyns were among the fortunate landowners who managed to spend the entire summer at their estate before heading back to Moscow in the autumn. Like so many nobles, they had spent their last summer at the family estate. Buchalki was later destroyed by the waves of violence that swept over it beginning with the revolution and ending with the German invasion in 1941.25

  That summer the nobility learned to live with the upheaval of revolution as if it were as normal and uncontrollable as the weather. During the abortive Bolshevik coup in Petrograd in July, the nighttime shooting in the streets woke up the young children of Princess Cantacuzène. She stroked them, reassuring her little ones it was nothing to worry about. “It’s just the revolution,” she whispered, and they turned over and “went blissfully back to sleep.”26 This attitude became widespread. That summer in Odessa Yelena Lakier started to carry a revolver and was often awoken at night by gunshots, though they stopped causing her to lose any sleep. She and her family came to think little of it. “Man has a pleasant characteristic,” she observed. “He can get used to anything very fast.”27 At the height of the chaos in late November performances at Petrograd’s theaters were typically sold out.28

  Upon arriving in Moscow from Petrograd on April 11, 1917, Count and Countess Sheremetev settled at their Kuskovo estate on the edge of the city. They were joined there by several of their children, including Dmitry and Ira and their children, the Saburovs (Alik had been removed from office in early April), and other members of the extended family. They all had initially hoped to go to their estate of Mikhailovskoe, but reports from their overseer suggested they not come because the situation there was too uncertain. Before heading to Kuskovo, the Saburovs had wanted to leave for their Voronovo estate, but a local teacher had warned them not to come because of rioting in nearby villages.29 Maria Gudovich and her children left Kutaisi in April to join her husband, Alexander, in Tiflis, and from there they set out for Russia in May to be with the rest of the family.30

  As summer approached and the general disorder penetrated deeper into the Russian countryside, nobles started to pack up and head south to the Crimea and Caucasus.31 In early May, Ira’s mother left Moscow for the spa towns of the northern Caucasus. Dmitry and Ira stayed behind, but by the end of the month they too had had enough. One night a local man was murdered outside their house next to Kuskovo’s pleasure garden; the body lay there unclaimed for several days as the authorities slowly investigated. The murder terrified Ira; her sister-in-law Lilya Sheremetev was convinced she was having a nervous breakdown.32 In June, Dmitry and Ira left for Kislovodsk, a popular resort in the northern Caucasus. Life there went on as if nothing had happened. The weather was delightful, there was plenty of food, Ira took the cure, and the local Cossacks showed no signs of aggression. They decided to spend the winter there and rented a dacha for the family. The town was full of friends and acquaintances from up north, and more were arriving daily, so Dmitry wrote his mother that if things looked as if they were getting worse in Russia, she and the rest of the family should come join them soon before all the good houses had been taken.33

  Among the aristocrats in Kislovodsk were several of Dmitry’s Sheremetev cousins: Georgy, Yelizaveta, Alexandra, and Dmitry.34 Their parents (Alexander and Maria Sheremetev) had chosen to stay in Petrograd, although as life in the capital became increasingly unsettled, they left for their estate in Russian Finland. Alexander invited his half brother Sergei to join them, but he refused to leave Russia. They were there when Finland declared its independence from Russia on December 6 (N.S.), 1917, and thus quite suddenly found themselves exiles. They lived well for a time, but then the money ran out. Alexander and Maria sold their Finnish lands and moved to Belgium and then to France; they lived in poverty in Paris before being taken in by a charity set up to help Russian émigrés in Ste.-Geneviève-des-Bois. Both Alexander and Maria died there and were buried in the Russian cemetery in the 1930s. Neither ever returned to Russia. All their property was nationalized, including their magnificent Petrograd home; its contents were dispersed among various museums, and its archive was
pulped. In the 1930s, their home became the House of Writers, and decades later, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a luxury hotel.35

  Alexander and Maria’s four children had all left Russia by the end of the civil war, settling in Western Europe. Georgy fought with the Whites and then fled southern Russia for Europe with his wife and their young children. He later worked as a secretary for Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the last tsar’s uncle, and oversaw a farm in Normandy. A fellow Russian émigré by the name of Alexandrov met Georgy in the 1920s at Choigny, the home of the grand duke outside Paris. Alexandrov was amazed at Georgy’s attitude toward the revolution, which he saw as rare among the Russian aristocracy. He noted that Georgy bore no ill will for his fate and interpreted the revolution and his family’s terrible loss as “God’s proper punishment for all the sins, injustices, and lawlessness that his privileged class had committed against their ‘lesser brethren’ and that Christianity obliged him to devote the rest of his life atoning for these sins.”36 This obligation led Georgy to become a Russian Orthodox priest in London, where he lived out his last years.

  The Sheremetevs’ financial situation began to unravel within two months of the February Revolution. In late April, the controller of the family’s main office in Petrograd warned Count Sergei that income from the estates had stopped coming in and he had no idea where they would find adequate funds to maintain the family’s monthly expenses of seventy-five thousand rubles. Count Sergei ordered their remaining liquid capital transferred from Petrograd to Moscow, which seemed a safer haven at the time, but this was only a stopgap measure that would not help them in the long term.37 The question of income and investments is an interesting one. Most Russian nobles were patriots, and they tended to invest their money at home. With the outbreak of the First World War, many pulled their money out of Western Europe and brought it back to Russia as a sign of their commitment to the war effort and support for the country. During the war, it was considered disloyal to transfer capital abroad. This meant that when the revolution erupted, few nobles had any funds outside Russia they could fall back on. Their wealth, like their lives, was bound up with the fate of the country.

  In the spring, peasants, unwilling to wait for the promised Constituent Assembly to address the land question, began taking matters into their own hands and seizing the Sheremetevs’ estates. In April, the Sheremetevs were forced to hand over almost two thousand acres to the peasants in Volsky District.38 In May, poor peasants in Novo-Pebalg in the Baltics seized a large Sheremetev estate.39 In July, riotous crowds attacked and severely damaged their extensive properties in Ivanovo-Voznesensk.40 By October, Sheremetev estates were being plundered and destroyed in Tambov Province.41 In December, the peasants of the village of Ozerki in Saratov Province met to approve the immediate confiscation of the lands of the “former Count Sheremetev.”42 These disturbances, while important, were at least far away. Problems nearer to home made inescapable the economic troubles they were facing. By late June the head of the Sheremetevs’ Moscow family office reported increasing difficulty in buying food. Yessentuki mineral water had disappeared, as had all chocolate; Dutch cheese was available, but only one pound per person, and Count Sergei’s favorite French wine was nowhere to be had.43 Count Sergei’s French chef quit and left Russia for home. In May, members of his Moscow domestic staff went out on strike.44

  Back in Petrograd, figures from the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies came by the Fountain House looking for additional offices and meeting space. Count Sergei had already handed over part of the house to the Red Cross (its flags had been hung at every entrance in an attempt to safeguard the property), and the overseer lied to the men, telling them the organization had taken over the entire premises and so there were no available rooms. The Fountain House and neighboring Sheremetev properties were still under special guard, but this did not stop frequent break-ins and burglaries.45 During the July Days in Petrograd, their large rental property on Liteiny Street was shot up, and its apartments were looted.46

  After some trouble acquiring gasoline for their automobiles, the Sheremetevs finally left Kuskovo for Mikhailovskoe at the end of May. For decades the family had spent their summers at this beloved estate, and despite all the challenges, Count Sergei was determined not to break with tradition. Pavel, now recovered from his mental breakdown, joined the family there. They had not been there a week when they learned of an entire family of neighboring landowners murdered in their home and of a group of four persons killed by a band of soldiers in the area. The Sheremetev men got out their guns and set up a night watch around the house.47 Yelena Sheremetev had to learn how to milk the cows and bake bread; a local peasant took Yelena and her mother out into the fields to teach them how to use the scythe, but they cut their fingers so badly they had to return home. The peasant took pity on them and started supplying the family with his own buckwheat, a generous act that he carried on even during the hungry years of 1918 and 1919. Later that year, after a raid on the manor’s wine cellar, a peasant woman came to say they would be smart to leave before they were driven out. The family packed up some things and quietly left.48 No one knew at the time that it was forever.

  Russia’s landowners were not just victims, however, and in late 1916, a group of them revived the All-Russian Union of Landowners, created in 1905, to protect themselves and their properties against peasant violence and expropriation. By the middle of 1917 the union, whose membership had been expanded to include wealthy peasants, had established a network of local organizations across the country and was continuing to grow despite a lack of support from the government. Prince Sergei Volkonsky described their work as “the hysterical cry of a helpless impulse against elemental forces,” a characterization that, while accurate about the ultimate failure of Russia’s landowners, is too harsh in its judgment of their motives and efforts.49 The challenges they confronted were enormous, and the members themselves could not always agree on how bad the situation was or just what needed to be done. While some shared the pessimistic sentiments of the speaker to a congress of landowners in Saratov in May who welcomed the delegates with “Greetings to you, the disinherited ones,” others not only refused to see the situation as lost, but did not even see the need for drastic and immediate action. At the union’s first national congress in Moscow in July, one delegate insisted that although land must be given to the peasants, more time was needed for this “lengthy process.”50

  To think that settling the land question would take a long time was to miss the fact that the social revolution was rapidly overtaking the political revolution. The vast majority of Russians was not content to overthrow the monarchy and then wait patiently for their concerns about land and hunger and war to be debated and voted on by a Constituent Assembly, a body that the masses had little faith in. They wanted their demands met now. The landowners and the rest of the elite were not the only ones to overlook the need for speedy action; the Provisional Government too insisted on putting off land reform until the establishment of a Constituent Assembly.

  On July 3, an uprising of soldiers broke out in Petrograd that nearly toppled the Provisional Government. For three days mutinous soldiers and armed workers traded gunfire with forces loyal to the government. As during the February Revolution, much of the violence during the July Days was directed against the burzhui. Hundreds of people were killed and wounded in the streets of the capital. Historians continue to debate the Bolsheviks’ role in planning and organizing the insurrection, but most agree that had they so chosen, they could have overthrown the government. Lenin, however, hesitated, allowing the government to prevail. The leaders of the Bolsheviks were arrested on charges of treason, while Lenin managed to escape in disguise to Finland.51

  A correspondent who had just experienced the revolt wrote Count Sergei a letter from Petrograd in which she described life in the capital and the strange, unbelievable changes taking place there. With admirable humor and pluck, she informed him how “the breadth of my
political horizons is expanding not by the day, but by the minute, and all thanks to our country’s democratic system.”

  When, during those July Days, the bullets were freely whistling along the streets, flying through the windows and thus proving all the delights of freedom in a law-based state and causing me to save myself by crawling into my bathtub, I realized that my previous understanding of a bathtub had been nothing but a narrow cliché, but now my knowledge has grown and I realize a bathtub can also serve as a fortress.

  “Permit me to wish you good health and rest at your historic estates,” she added, “created in that happy time when people understood the meaning of the word ‘Motherland’ and when they still had the right to be called Russians, and not ‘former people.’ ”52 The term, “former people,” sounded odd at the time, although it soon became all too familiar.

  Exhausted after four grueling months in office, Prince Georgy Lvov resigned as prime minister and left the government. He was replaced by Kerensky, who moved into the former rooms of Tsar Alexander III in the Winter Palace and began to present himself as a Russian Napoleon sent to save the country and the revolution. By now, many in Russia were in search of just such a figure. Since May Count Sergei had been counting on a strongman’s stepping forward as their only hope. “But where is he, amidst this universal collapse?” he wondered.53 The outlines of a conservative movement began to take shape that summer. Small groups sprang up with names like the Union of National Defense, the Union of Officers, and the Republican Center, all calling for order, discipline, and the curbing of the Petrograd Soviet’s power. Increasingly, members of the broad Russian elite were coming to the opinion that Russia needed an authoritarian government, if only to create the necessary conditions for the successful meeting of the Constituent Assembly. Some groups went even further, arguing that only a military dictator could save Russia from destruction. If to some this smelled of counterrevolution, to conservatives, moderates, and even some liberals, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were the real counterrevolutionaries. By fomenting class conflict, undermining the authority of the Provisional Government, and generally pushing Russia deeper into chaos, the Bolsheviks, many believed, were trying to undo the February Revolution in order to seize power.54