The Bolshevik insurrection in Moscow did not go as smoothly as that in Petrograd. On October 26, the Moscow Military Revolutionary Committee, with as many as fifty thousand men, seized the Kremlin. They were opposed by the Committee for Public Safety, created upon the initiative of the city’s Socialist Revolutionary mayor and consisting of military cadets, a small number of elite assault troops, and volunteers. On the morning of the twenty-eighth, the troops of the committee retook the Kremlin, during which hundreds of soldiers, the majority of them Bolsheviks, were killed.6 That night Count Sergei wrote to a relative: “The Kremlin has been taken by the cadets. Moscow, it seems, is once again destined to play the decisive role in Russia’s fate.”7
For the next two days there was sporadic gunfire near the Corner House, with bullets landing in the courtyard. The street battles between the Bolsheviks and the cadets quickly became so intense that the Sheremetevs could not leave the house. The men and the remaining servants organized a night patrol. On the morning of the twenty-ninth, a car drove by and someone tossed a hand grenade into the intersection in front of the house, setting off a big blast but causing little damage. The same day the family managed to get a copy of the newspaper Labor, from which they learned that Moscow had been placed under martial law and that no one was permitted out in the streets without a pass. Late on the evening of the thirtieth all the lights went out. The family fumbled around in the dark with candles and fearing that the municipal workers had gone out on strike, began filling bathtubs and samovars with water. Next the telephones went dead. On the last day of October, the Sheremetev family office, the large bureaucracy that for centuries had managed their vast wealth and properties, ceased operations for good. That night the sky over the Corner House glowed from the fires burning across the city.8
The fighting grew on the first and second days of November. The committee controlled the center of Moscow, while the Bolsheviks dominated in the outlying workers’ districts. During the battle for Moscow, the Red Guards units slowly progressed from the suburbs into the city, making their way toward the Kremlin. On November 2, there were rumors of the Bolsheviks gaining the upper hand and of closing in on Vozdvizhenka Street. Panic overtook the household, and Countess Yekaterina alone remained calm. The family now felt as if they were trapped inside a besieged fortress. All they had left to eat was potatoes. The gunfire and explosions kept getting louder and closer. They covered the windows and moved to the interior rooms for safety.9 And then, when they arose on November 3, it was all over. The previous evening the Red Guards had blasted their way into the Kremlin and sent the remaining cadets running for safety. The Committee for Public Safety signed an act of surrender to the Revolutionary Committee and agreed to lay down its weapons.
Count Sergei wrote on the third:
We have learned that last evening a peace was agreed to and we all arose with a sense of relief, although conscious of the victory of the Bolsheviks thanks to the inaction of the government’s defenders and the unmistakably transparent treason against and betrayal of the cadets, who were supported by no one and have perished at the hands of the conspirators! We are relieved that the bloodletting and damage to the Kremlin have stopped and recognize that although power has now passed into the hands of Lenin and Company this is both unacceptable and bound to be short-lived. The changes are visible from the window. Rifles have been laid down in the street, and Vozdvizhenka has taken on that Bolshevik look of disorder. The gunfire has largely subsided. There are lots of people out walking in the streets, as if they had all just escaped, women and children . . . We’ll soon learn how many have been killed and the extent of the damage. Thank God it’s all quiet again, even if only for a while.10
As soon as the shooting stopped, Pavel Sheremetev left the house for the Kremlin, which had been terribly damaged during the fighting. He spent almost every day there for the next several weeks, gathering up the bones of the old Muscovite grand princes that had been scattered about the ground by grave robbers.11
The mayor and Sofia were also in Moscow. Throughout October he had been following the rumors that “extremists” were making plans to overthrow Kerensky’s government and seize power in Petrograd, none of which, given how thoroughly discredited the government had become, surprised the mayor. The rumors grew during the last week. There was word that the government had indeed been overthrown and civil war had broken out, but then on the twenty-sixth he heard that Kerensky had in fact crushed the coup against him. No one could be certain what in fact was taking place.12
By October, peasants at Petrovskoe were warning Alexander Golitsyn that he should leave for Moscow, for there was talk in the village of having him arrested. Fearful of the old home being pillaged, he first packed up the most valuable objects (paintings by Palma Vecchio, Canaletto, and Vigée-Lebrun) and sent them to his parents in Moscow.13 Later that month the family decided they all would be safer in Moscow with Alexander’s parents. “We are going to Moscow,” Alexander and Lyubov’s twelve-year-old daughter Marina observed. “It is getting dangerous to live in the country. The Bolsheviks come and talk to the peasants. Some are very unfriendly.”14 The family left Petrovskoe on October 26, the day of the Bolshevik coup. Marina’s older sister Olga wondered would they ever see the estate again. They arrived in Moscow in the midst of the heavy fighting. Dead bodies lay in the streets, frightening the children.15 By then, the revolution had already claimed the first life in the family. Four-year-old Tatiana, the daughter of Vladimir and Eli Trubetskoy, had fallen ill with scarlet fever in Moscow. Her uncle Alexander Golitsyn had been to tend to her in early October, but when the shooting began, he was unable to make his way back to the Trubetskoys for several days. By the time he finally reached her, Tatiana was dead. “Poor innocent victim of the revolution,” he remarked.16
The extended Golitsyn family now began to gather at the home of the mayor and Sofia on Georgievsky Lane. Mikhail and his family came to live, as did the families of his sisters Eli Trubetskoy and Tatiana Lopukhin. (The Lopukhins had been forced to flee their estate of Khilkovo after it had been burned to the ground.) The men set up a night watch. This did not prevent burglars from breaking in and getting away with the family’s silver. The youngest members of the family found all this most exciting. The mayor’s grandson and namesake, Vladimir Golitsyn, was thrilled when he was considered old enough to be given a small-caliber gun and added to the watch. The burglary and subsequent investigation were perfectly timed since Vladimir was then devouring the detective stories of Nat Pinkerton (“King of Detectives”) and Nick Carter (“Master Detective”). For Vladimir’s siblings Sergei and Masha the truth of the revolution’s destructive power came one morning when their governess took them to buy chocolate at their beloved Viktoria shop and found in its place a large smoking crater.17
To the mayor it seemed as if they were experiencing Chapter 18 of the Apocalypse. Some in the household blamed the revolution on international Zionism, some on the devil; some said it was punishment from God. Sofia was not so concerned about who was responsible, just that it all would go away somehow: “I want to wake up and everything will be as it was of old.” Her husband refused to hear such talk of “the good old days.” Rather, it was the old days that had produced their horrific present. “In our domestic strife one cannot but see retribution for the evil done to the people, for centuries of repression,” he observed.18 The cook, Mikhail, still came out after every dinner with his pad and pencil to take Sofia’s order for the next day, but now he usually had to tell her, “That is no longer possible to buy, madam.” By December, they had gone through their supply of firewood. Sergei awoke one morning to find the air in his room icy, his nanny standing over him holding his fur coat and heavy felt boots.19
Most Russians knew nothing of what had transpired in Petrograd, and it took several days and—for a good part of the population—weeks for the news of the Bolshevik insurrection to reach them. The general reaction, as best can be judged, was not one of astonishment or outrage. T
he conditions across the country had deteriorated so terribly and so swiftly since the fall of the Romanovs that most Russians were too preoccupied with their own immediate problems to worry about what might or might not be happening far away in the capital. The revolution was about events not in the capital but in their own villages or towns.
When the Kastchenko family received the news of the coup on their Ukraine estate, the first thing they decided to do was drink up all the wine in the cellar, for no doubt it would not be long before it was lost to the mob. The wine was wonderful, but it did nothing to lighten their mood. The Kastchenkos left the estate after hearing of the murder of a nearby noble family. Soon thereafter, peasants plundered the estate. The family managed to return in the summer of 1918, after troops from the Austro-Hungarian Army had moved into the area. The peasants went out to welcome the Kastchenkos back, carrying with them the things taken from the manor and the estate and explaining that they had been holding on to them “for safekeeping” until their return. When the Hungarians pulled out, so too did the Kastchenkos, afraid to remain alone amid the peasants. They made their way to Poland, certain they would someday return home, although they never did.20
The Sayn-Wittgensteins were at their Bronitsa estate near Mogilev when they learned of the coup on the last day of October. For weeks they had been hearing rumors that the Bolsheviks were plotting to seize power and that a plan was in the works to carry out a St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in their area against all the landowners.3 Catherine Sayn-Wittgenstein and her sister began wearing men’s clothing since they decided this would make it easier to get away unnoticed, and Catherine began to carry a small Clément revolver. There was talk of looting on nearby estates, so they barricaded the manor house until it looked like “a medieval castle” and waited to see what would happen next. In November, several hundred Cossacks arrived, and the Sayn-Wittgensteins received them, mistakenly, as their protectors. The Cossacks set themselves on the family and robbed them before riding off. Defenseless, the family was next attacked one night by a band of drunken men who cut the phone line, besieged the manor, and demanded money. The Sayn-Wittgensteins escaped the next morning to Mogilev, a few days before a mob descended on the manor and tore it to the ground, leaving nothing left standing but the walls.21
“Russia jumped off the rails on February 27,” Catherine wrote in her diary, “and will not stop until she has fallen to the very bottom of the slope.” This was not surprising, she noted, since the rails on which Russia had been riding “were so worn out, so unreliable, that she could not have failed but to have come off them.”22
The Second Congress of Soviets met in Petrograd on the evening of October 25. Dominated by the Bolsheviks and boycotted by peasant organizations and army committees as unauthorized, the congress erupted into violent debate almost as soon as it opened. On one side were Trotsky and the Bolsheviks (Lenin was still in hiding in the capital, awaiting word that the Winter Palace had been taken), the architects of the coup against the Provisional Government; on the other were the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries who opposed the coup and wanted to open negotiations with the government. The Mensheviks issued a declaration describing the events of the past day as a “military conspiracy [. . .] organized and carried out by the Bolshevik Party in the name of the soviets behind the backs of all the other parties and factions represented in the soviets.” The Bolsheviks’ opponents called their actions “insane and criminal” and certain to ignite a civil war. Trotsky stood up and denounced them as “pathetic bankrupts,” vainly instructing them to “Go where you belong from now on—into the garbage heap of history!” With that, Yuly Martov, the Menshevik leader, and his supporters rose and made for the exit amid wild, derisive cheering from the Bolsheviks and their backers among the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries. As he left, Martov turned and spoke: “One day, you will understand the crime in which you are taking part.” Trotsky, evincing a mind-set that was to come to dominate the Bolshevik Party, assured those who remained that this rupture would only make the soviets stronger “by purging them of counterrevolutionary elements” and then went on to read a resolution denouncing their opponents.23
Not long after word arrived that the ministers of the Provisional Government had been arrested at the Winter Palace in the early hours of the twenty-sixth, Anatoly Lunacharsky, the future Bolshevik commissar of enlightenment, read a statement from Lenin proclaiming that the congress, “backed by the will of the vast majority of the workers, soldiers, and peasants,” was taking power into its own hands and promising immediate peace to all nations, total democracy in the army, the right of self-determination for all peoples and nationalities, worker control of the factories, and the transfer of all lands held by the nobility, the bourgeoisie, the church, and the government into the hands of the peasants. “Long live the Revolution!” Lunacharsky shouted, and was met with a wave of joyous cries and wild applause. Lenin’s manifesto, adopted by the congress that day, became the key document in the creation myth of the Soviet Union, according to which the Bolsheviks were swept into power on a wave of massive popular support. In truth, thanks to the breakdown of all authority, which had begun in February of that year, they had been able to seize power without hardly anyone in the country knowing about it.24
It was one thing to claim power; it was quite another to possess it. Now that they had toppled the government, the Bolsheviks had to scramble to win over the country. The Decree on Land, adopted by the congress late on the twenty-sixth was a crucial first step. Lenin addressed the congress that day, saying that the new government’s first duty was to settle the land question. “Private ownership of land,” he told them, “shall be abolished forever,” adding that all privately held land “shall be confiscated without compensation and become the property of the whole people.” The only exception would be land worked by peasants, which they would be allowed to keep.
Lenin realized the importance of this decisive act. By giving the peasants the right to seize the nobles’ land, he correctly judged how this could help both destroy the old order in the countryside and win the support of the peasantry. Trotsky later assessed the decree as having played a vital role not only in “the foundation of the new regime, but also as a weapon of the revolution, which had still to conquer the country.” Lenin told Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, executive secretary of the new government known as the Council of People’s Commissars (or Sovnarkóm, the Russian acronym), “Now we have only to see to it that it is widely published and publicized. Then let . . . [the bourgeoisie] try to take it back.”25
The Decree on Land did not incite the peasants to seize the land; rather, it sanctioned and encouraged what was already taking place. The destruction of the old order had begun well before the Bolsheviks seized power and was not their making. But Lenin understood how they could use the forces of anarchy to sweep away the remaining institutions of tsarist Russia, a prerogative for the creation of the new state. In the bloody summer of 1905, Lenin had written: “Revolutions are festivals of the oppressed and exploited. [. . .] We shall be traitors to and betrayers of the revolution if we do not use this festive energy of the masses and their revolutionary ardor to wage a ruthless and self-sacrificing struggle.”26
This was just one aspect of the civil war that Lenin had been preaching for years. Along with this came attacks on political parties, on the press, on the institutions of self-government, indeed on anything that smacked of the old order or of the fragile democracy that began to take root after the fall of the Romanovs.27 On October 27, the government issued the Decree on the Press, banning the “counterrevolutionary press”—that is, all newspapers that did not endorse the coup. A Left Socialist Revolutionary described the decree as a “clear and determined expression of a system of political terror and incitement to civil war.” Outraged, Russian journalists fought back, and the Sovnarkóm, still too weak to enforce the decree, was not able to crush the independent press until August 1918.28 The following month the Sovnarkóm abol
ished all legal estates and their privileges, all court ranks, and all noble titles, creating instead one single designation for everyone: “Citizen.” All property belonging to noble institutions and societies was nationalized. Since March, the newspaper Izvestiia had been calling for “the complete abolition of all classes,” and where the Provisional Government had dragged its feet, the Sovnarkóm had acted.29 At the end of November, a law abolishing all private urban property was drafted (and finally approved in August 1918); special house committees were established as a tool for monitoring the urban populace.30
“The Bolshevik insurrection has ended,” Olga Sheremetev wrote at the Corner House in early November. “They have won, and we find ourselves under the dominion of the Bolsheviks. For long? Already rumors about various counterrevolutions are spreading.”31
Russia’s educated classes resisted the coup from the beginning. Almost immediately, the country’s civil servants went out on strike in protest, and a Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland and Revolution was established in Petrograd to coordinate the actions of the various groups committed to restoring the Provisional Government. It was a diverse alliance of city officials, postal workers, government officials, representatives of the All-Russian Congress of Peasant Soviets, and members of various socialist parties. The committee issued a proclamation to the “Citizens of the Russian Republic,” calling on all workers, peasants, soldiers, and the intelligentsia not to recognize the authority of the Bolsheviks, warning that “[a] civil war, begun by the Bolsheviks, threatens to plunge the country into the indescribable horrors of anarchy and counterrevolution.”32 (For the Bolsheviks, “counterrevolutionaries” were anyone opposed to the coup, while for their opponents, the Bolsheviks were the “counterrevolutionaries” for having overthrown the government and begun to repress their enemies.)
Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy Page 14
