Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith

  The idea that Lenin was a closet Muslim was not too farfetched. One popular rumor of the day held that the Bolsheviks were full of closet monarchists who planned to ride bolshevism back into power in order to restore the monarchy.30 In the spring of 1918, in some provincial cities, there was talk that the Bolsheviks had been overthrown and Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich installed in Petrograd as the new tsar; a different rumor had it that Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich had established a dictatorship in Moscow.31 There were rumors that Lenin and Trotsky had been killed and that Tsar Nicholas had escaped to England.32 The German Army was the subject of intense gossip. Nearly every day new rumors appeared on the whereabouts of the Germans, how they were soon to march into Petrograd and Moscow, overthrow the Bolsheviks, and save the country from ruin.33

  While Count Sergei was alive, any talk of leaving Russia was shunned in the Sheremetev family. A Russian noble, the count believed, should be ready to die on his native soil.34 Regardless, after his death, some in the family did leave. His sons Boris and Sergei left Moscow around 1919 and eventually settled in Western Europe. Yelena’s elder brother Boris also appears to have quit Russia for Europe around this time, possibly with his uncles Boris and Sergei.35 Life in exile was a struggle for most Russians. In France, Count Sergei’s son Boris held a number of jobs, trying to make ends meet. In Geneva in 1929, his daughter Tatiana married Theodore Carl Fabergé, a fellow émigré and the grandson of Carl Fabergé, the famous founder of the family jewelry firm. The only work Theodore was able to find was repairing radios.36 Alik Saburov and Alexander Gudovich, the count’s sons-in-law, contemplated leaving for Finland for a time but then received word that matters there were no less difficult than in Russia. Moreover, as officers they felt a sense of duty to remain in Russia.37

  For Pavel, there was never any thought of leaving Russia. First of all, he was not married and had no children to worry about. Second, unlike his brother Dmitry off in the northern Caucasus, he had never occupied any prominent official position under the old regime that put him at special risk. His mother had no intention of leaving, and it appears that Pavel felt an obligation to stay with her. Perhaps paramount in his decision to remain was his relationship to his father and their shared interest in Russian history and culture. Like his late father, Pavel believed it was his obligation to try to protect whatever he could of the family’s and the country’s cultural patrimony from the ravages of the revolution. Before he died, Count Sergei told his son: “You are not to sell a thing simply to fill your stomach. The Rembrandts, Raphaels, Van Dycks, Kiprenskys, and Greuzes—they all must belong to Russia, we did not collect them for ourselves, and so a museum must be established before the cold and upheavals destroy everything . . . We have no present,” Sergei said, “but we have a past and we must preserve it in the name of the future.”38

  For Count Sergei’s daughters Anna and Maria there could be no thought of leaving Russia or even Moscow since their husbands were still being held in the Butyrki Prison, even though no charges had ever been made against them. The Sheremetev family had been working hard to get the two men released throughout the winter of 1918–19. They even appealed to Abel Yenukidze, a longtime Bolshevik and member of the Central Executive Committee, considered a “tame Communist” with a reputation for helping nobles caught in the repressive machinery of the new Bolshevik state. Yenukidze was one of a handful of powerful Bolsheviks with such a reputation, and it was indeed earned, as some repressed nobles gladly acknowledged. But in this instance Yenukidze was unable to help.39 The prisoners were being held as hostages, handy targets for retribution in the event of any attacks on the Bolsheviks.

  Saburov and Gudovich remained at the Butyrki until July 1919, when they were moved to a concentration camp in the Andronievsky Monastery. Lenin had called for the creation of concentration camps in August 1918 (Trotsky had made a similar call two months earlier), and the idea was approved by the Sovnarkóm the following month. The official decree set out the rationale for the camps: “It is essential to safeguard the Soviet Republic from its class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps.” The Bolsheviks were not the first to establish such camps. In 1896, General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, the Spanish governor of Cuba, set up the first campos de concentración as part of his strategy to suppress the uprisings on the island against Spain. At their height, the camps on Cuba held approximately four hundred thousand peasants; the number of people who died in them is not known. In Russia, the Cheka ran the concentration camps, which by 1922 numbered fifty-six and held roughly twenty-four thousand people. In 1919, another system of camps—forced labor camps—were also set up by the Cheka; their inmates numbered some sixty thousand by 1922. There were camps for men and women too.40 Princess Tatiana Kurakin was arrested in Kiev and later moved to a women’s camp also set up at the Andronievsky Monastery.41

  Saburov and Gudovich joined many other nobles at the camp, including Prince Alexander Dolgoruky (the son of Countess Maria Benkendorff ). The prisoners were put to work. Dolgoruky and Gudovich were regularly sent out into the city together on work details and quickly became close. Xenia Saburov would visit her father and bring him food and clothing. In August, some of the men—including Gudovich, Saburov, and Dolgoruky—were moved to a camp in the Ivanovsky Monastery. On September 21, 1919, the men were returned to the Butyrki.42 Five days later Saburov, Gudovich, Dolgoruky, and twenty-six others were taken out and shot.43 The reason for their murders remains a mystery. According to one story, the men were shot as the easiest way to solve the problem of overcrowding at the Butyrki. Another account has it that the men were executed in response to the northern advance of General Denikin’s army, which by mid-September was approximately two hundred miles south of Moscow and appeared to be moving inexorably toward the Bolshevik capital. A third explanation posits the idea that they were shot in retaliation for an anarchist bomb attack on the Bolsheviks’ Moscow Committee headquarters that killed twelve and wounded fifty-one persons that month.44

  The family members learned of the murders only a good time later. First there were just rumors, which Yenukidze eventually confirmed. The widow of a former tsarist governor purportedly told Anna Saburov that she had seen Alik when the men were being led out to be shot. “Tell my wife that I go calmly to my death,” he said to her. Neither Anna Saburov nor her sister Maria would accept that their husbands were dead. For years they clung to the belief that they were alive and being held in a secret prison. Shattered by the loss of their husbands, the sisters cut themselves off from the life of the Corner House and retreated into prayer.45

  10

  SPA TOWN HELL

  Dimitry and Ira Sheremetev and their children spent the winter of 1917–18 in Kislovodsk in the northern Caucasus. The town, together with neighboring Yessentuki and Pyatigorsk, had long been a popular destination for wealthy Russians who came to escape the harsh Russian winters and enjoy the local hot springs, curative mineral waters, and mud baths. That winter Dmitry had spent much of his time in Kislovodsk’s two libraries, gathering material for a book he was writing titled “Russian Nature and Hunting in the Works of Our Classics.” His sons Nikolai and Vasily attended school, and his daughter Irina was being courted by a suitor, Georgy Mengden.

  Much of the aristocracy was there with them in the spa towns. Life was easy and quiet and enjoyable and seemed to go on as if the revolution had never happened. In Yessentuki, the Tolstoys, Lvovs, Uvarovs, Bobrinskys, Trubetskoys, and other prominent families relaxed, strolled the wide streets, fortified their health at Dr. Zernov’s sanatorium, and staged theatrical performances. The mystic George Gurdieff was there, Sergei Rachmaninov too. No one thought they would be away from Russia for long. Dr. Zernov and his family had left Moscow for Yessentuki in late November 1917 without their heavy winter clothes since they were certain they would be back home by Christmas. Dmitry was contemplating which Moscow publisher would be best for his book.1 Count Vladimir Kokovtsov, former tsarist prime minister, found life in Kislovods
k in early November “a perfect idyll” after Petrograd. His many old friends and acquaintances shared his view and were convinced that they were safe from the Bolsheviks thanks to the presence of the Cossacks in whose lands they now found themselves and who they were certain would never allow the Reds to gain a foothold.2

  The idyll did not last long, however, and soon the civil war reached the northern Caucasus. The formerly quiet spa towns were caught in the shifting battle lines of the Reds, Whites, Cossacks, and bands of marauders. Families like the Sheremetevs went from relaxing and looking forward to their return to Russia to worrying about their own safety and even survival. By the end of 1917, the fighting had begun to disrupt rail connections in the area; then the postal service stopped, cutting the towns off from all news of the outside world. In early 1918, the Reds took Pyatigorsk, after which they began to arrest the officers in the town and close the banks. Around this time they took Kislovodsk as well. They organized public meetings to whip up the poor against the officers and bourgeoisie. They carried out house searches for money, weapons, and valuables, and all former tsarist officers were forced to register with the local authorities. In the early spring, a group of Bolsheviks arrived from Vladikavkaz and published a list of the visiting nobles and wealthy burzhui required to appear at the Grand Hotel. Among those on the list were the ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska and, likely, Dmitry Sheremetev. The assembled group was informed it was to come up with five million rubles in two weeks as a “contribution.” Should it fail, everyone on the list would be taken away to Vladikavkaz.3 Terror swept over the town. Many talked of trying to escape to Yessentuki, some sixteen kilometers away. They had heard that it was safer there, but no one could be certain.4

  The Bolsheviks’ main opponent in the area was the forces under the command of the Cossack general Andrei Shkuro, a brave, if reckless, veteran of World War I and, to some, a mere bandit, who later joined the army of General Denikin. Shkuro’s Cossack fighters attacked several of the towns held by the Reds in the spring of 1918, including Kislovodsk. The Cossacks, usually anti-Bolshevik, were seen by the nobles as their defenders, although they could not necessarily assume the Cossacks’ protection or friendship. Shkuro and his men were excellent raiders, but they had trouble holding on to territory taken from the Reds. Moreover, they were at best temporary allies of the exiled nobles.5 After Shkuro’s men arrived in Kislovodsk that spring, Count Nicholas Ignatieff asked one of the fighters whether they intended to restore the monarchy once they had vanquished the Reds. “Monarchy, nothing!” the Cossack bellowed. “When we are through with these Bolshevik devils, we’ll cut all the aristocrats’ throats, the bloodsuckers!”6

  In May 1918 Dmitry and Ira used Shkuro’s raid to escape Kislovodsk for Yessentuki. Here they found a good many other nobles, some of them old friends and family, including Count Pyotr Vyazemsky (Dmitry’s uncle), Countess Maria Musin-Pushkin (Ira’s sister), and Princess Maria Trubetskoy (Anna Golitsyn’s sister). In late June, Dmitry wrote his mother to wish her the best on her golden wedding anniversary. He told her that all was well and that their daughter Irina was now engaged to Georgy Mengden and looking forward to setting a wedding date. The entire family was busy spending the days working in the vegetable garden across the street from their dacha. Although he did not mention this in his letter, their gardening was no innocent hobby to while away their idle time, but necessary to ensure an adequate food supply, especially for the coming winter. Unlike in his previous letters, Dmitry no longer urged his parents to come join them.7

  Yessentuki too had not avoided the disturbances in the area. As early as the autumn of 1917, nobles with well-known names had been subject to arrest.8 Then, in March 1918, an old truck waving a tattered red banner and filled with soldiers arrived from Pyatigorsk. The men stopped in the local park to announce to a small group of onlookers that Yessentuki was now part of the Soviet Socialist Republic. At first, little changed. The Sheremetevs and their friends played tennis and bridge, attended church, hiked the mountains, and picked berries and gathered mushrooms. Life went on as before, although things were not easy. The money people had brought with them was running out, and they had been reduced to raising vegetables like the Sheremetevs or opening bakeries, restaurants, cafés, laundries, and other “bourgeois enterprises” to get by.9 After a time, the Bolsheviks began to search people’s homes; then some of the men were taken hostage and held for ransom. One day proclamations announcing that all the hostages had been shot as a necessary part of the policy of class warfare being introduced by the authorities were posted throughout Yessentuki. It was soon learned, however, that the signs were nothing more than a provocation.

  Such confusion became the norm. No one could be certain what was happening or even who was in charge. For a time two competing Red factions fought for control of Yessentuki. Terrified, the Sheremetevs and other nobles hid what valuables they still had and tried their best to stay out of sight. In early summer a commissar by the name of Alexander Gay appeared. A leader of the Russian anarchists, Gay (born Golberg) had spent many years in exile in Switzerland before returning to Russia after the revolution. He sided with the Bolsheviks and left Moscow in May for Kislovodsk, where he became the head of the local Cheka. Joining him was his young wife, Xenia Gay, the daughter of a tsarist general and a committed Bolshevik. Alexander had something of a contradictory personality. Some sources describe him as one of the authors of the Red Terror in the northern Caucasus; others say that he could be kind and decent and did what he could to defend the nobles in the area from some of the more zealous Bolsheviks. As for Xenia, who joined her husband in the Cheka, most sources agree she was cruel and rapacious, responsible for the deaths of dozens of people. Among her schemes was a plan to socialize young bourgeois women in Kislovodsk and force them to become sex workers for the Red Army, a plan that was derailed by one of Shkuro’s raids during which the women were freed from prison.10

  One evening in late August, a car carrying a group of Bolsheviks arrived at the home of the Vorontsovs. They began to search for weapons and threatened to arrest all the men, including Dmitry Sheremetev. The men managed to send word to Gay, who came and spoke to the Bolsheviks alone. After two tense hours, the men were called before the Bolsheviks, who harangued and threatened to shoot anyone who dared set foot in the street but left without taking any of the men with them. Gay had managed to convince the Bolsheviks not to arrest the men and so in all likelihood saved their lives. Gay tried to assure them that they were in no great danger, especially with him in the area, but no one could be certain how long he could protect them, and so some of the men decided the only option was to flee Yessentuki. The plan was to escape into the mountains and to reach the Kabardin’, a Muslim people of the northern Caucasus, and, with their help, to make it to the White Army. Dmitry and his sons, as well as Nikita Tatishchev and members of the Vorontsov and Pushkin families, were likely among those who decided to make their escape.

  They decided to rise early in the morning and, disguised as peasants, walk to the weekly market at Pyatigorsk. There they would make contact with the Cossack women returning from market with their empty carts; for some money, they would hide on the carts under empty burlap sacks until they were safely away up in the mountains. Everything went as planned, and many of the men, including the Sheremetevs, managed to escape; only later did it become clear that their decision had saved their lives. Those who stayed behind in Yessentuki tried to make it appear as if nothing unusual were going on. If asked where their men were, the women simply said they had left for Moscow or to visit a neighboring town. At the end of August, the hostage taking began again and continued on into early September. Most of the victims were former tsarist officers, members of the government, or simply men with prominent names and titles, including the former general Nikolai Ruzsky, a sixty-four-year-old commander of the First World War; Prince Alexander Bagration-Mukhransky, another former general; and the brothers Prince Leonid and Vladimir Shakhovskoy. Hostages were also take
n in Pyatigorsk and Kislovodsk.

  The residents of Yessentuki placed their hopes in Shkuro and his men, and they did run the Reds out of town in mid-September, but only briefly before being forced to retreat. Shkuro’s raids heightened the Reds’ anger at the nobles and cemented their conviction that they were secretly fighting against them. And so, when the Reds returned, they redoubled the terror against the remaining nobles. A new round of house searches began. A group of soldiers came to the home of the Vorontsovs, searched it from top to bottom, and then looted and ransacked the place. Along with weapons, they had apparently also been searching for Dmitry Sheremetev. Ira was there, and the soldiers threatened to beat her with their rifle butts unless she told them where he was. They then marched all the women, children, and servants out of the house and had them line up as if they were about to be shot. Three of the servants were then led behind the house. The soldiers shot two of them dead and let the third go. Next, they set off with the women and children. After a ways, a maid caught up with them; she threw herself on her knees and begged them to let the prisoners go, and they did, thus likely sparing their lives. Ira and her children ran and hid in an abandoned hut, where they remained for more than a week, not even their family members knowing where they were. They were then taken in by the Lieven family and went into hiding. They dressed in simple peasant clothes, and Ira managed to acquire fake identity papers in the name of Fyodorov. The Bolsheviks carried on looking for Dmitry and Ira. During the two months Ira lived with the Lievens, the Bolsheviks captured and shot two more of the Sheremetevs’ servants, possibly for refusing to reveal the family’s whereabouts.11