Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith

  On October 8, the Cheka of the northern Caucasus issued an order condemning thirty-two hostages arrested in the spa towns to immediate execution for the next counterrevolutionary uprising or attempt on the lives of “the leaders of the proletariat.”12

  Countess Varvara Bobrinsky, her twenty-year-old son, Gavril, and more than eighty other families and their servants had arrived in Yessentuki in late 1917 on a train from Moscow. Like many other noble women, she had tended to wounded soldiers and served in charitable organizations during World War I; such was her good reputation that in May 1917 the Moscow Soviet had even hired her to do educational work with soldiers being sent to the front. Gavril was among those arrested by the Bolsheviks in Yessentuki in September 1918. He was taken to Pyatigorsk, the Bolshevik center for the northern Caucasus, and locked in the cellar of the Cheka headquarters. “The hole,” as the cellar was called, was filthy, rat-infested, and so crowded many slept sitting upright on the cement floor. It was overseen by a man named Skryabin, a former executioner under the tsarist regime and a sadist who liked to brag about the number of people he had tortured and executed over the years.

  Varvara and her daughter followed Gavril to Pyatigorsk to see what they could do to effect his release. At first they were given no information, but then in early October they were told Gavril would be executed unless they could come up with fifty thousand rubles. Gavril was being held with approximately eighty other noblemen from Yessentuki, including the brothers Prince Nikolai and Sergei Urusov.13 The Bolshevik bosses in Pyatigorsk tried to shake down other family members. One of them told Princess Bagration-Mukhransky that for two hundred thousand rubles she would free her father. Some did try to raise the money to free their loved ones. Varvara Bobrinsky’s daughter, who had also come south, left for Yessentuki to collect enough money to save Gavril. By the time she returned it would be too late.14

  After two weeks, thirty-two of the men, including Gavril, the Urusovs, and Prince Bagration-Mukhransky, were moved from the hole to the New Europe Hotel. The conditions there were better, and they were permitted to receive family and other visitors. Still, their future was unclear, and some of the guards delighted in tormenting them. One of them, a sailor, said in their presence, “These aren’t people here, but bears and wolves, who ought to be brought up to Mashuk Mountain and dealt with just like Nicholas II was.”15 In early October, a technician was brought to the hotel to repair an electrical cable. He whispered to Gavril that he was a Cossack and part of a group planning a secret operation to free the men. Gavril believed his story and helped him scout the hotel for the best escape route. The plot, however, was soon uncovered. Gavril was sent back to the hole, and the security tightened at the hotel.

  The fate of the hostages darkened. Acting upon a rumor that a local Red commander had died of wounds suffered in battle, the Cheka had several of the hostages executed early in the morning of October 6. Next, on October 13, Ivan Sorokin, a Left SR and commander of the eleventh Red Army, led a revolt against the Soviet government in the Caucasus. The revolt failed, although four high-ranking Bolsheviks were killed; Sorokin was captured in Stavropol and executed. To the local Bolshevik leaders, the revolt was an expression of counterrevolution requiring swift and harsh retribution.16

  On the night of October 18, fifty-two hostages at the New Europe Hotel were told to gather their things and come out into the hall. Most of them thought they were about to be freed or at least moved to better accommodations. They were taken outside into a cold, wet night and marched along with thirteen other prisoners from the Pyatigorsk jail to the Cheka’s headquarters. The hostages were instructed to strip down to their underwear, and their hands were tied behind their backs with thin wire. Twenty-five of them were then marched to the city cemetery. They were admitted by the cemetery’s watchmen, and fifteen of the men were conducted to the edge of a large, fresh grave. Everyone was silent. They were ordered to kneel and extend their necks. Then the executioners lifted their swords.

  They were inexperienced, and most of the victims were felled only after several blows. General Ruzsky was among the first killed. His executioner, the Chekist Georgy Atarbekov, later bragged of how he had finished him off. Atarbekov asked the old man as he knelt half naked in the night air whether he finally recognized the “Great Russian Revolution.” Ruzsky replied, “All I see is nothing but one great robbery.” With that Atarbekov plunged his Circassian dagger into Ruzsky’s neck; after the fifth stabbing, the general fell dead into the pit. The killing took more than an hour. There was little noise, save the sound of the swords sinking into flesh and the breaking of bones. So gruesome was the violence, two of the executioners could not carry out the assignment and left to wait for it to end at the cemetery gates. After the fifteen had been slaughtered, the ten other hostages were chopped to death at a second pit. Before leaving, the soldiers told the watchmen not to go to bed, for they would be back soon with more victims. Before sunrise, thirty more people, including one woman, had been executed. The following night more prisoners were taken to the cemetery and butchered. The executioners received ten rubles for each victim. When the watchmen went out on the morning of the twentieth to cover the graves with sand, they discovered some of the victims were still alive. Faint moans could be heard coming up from underneath the mutilated corpses.17

  Even though the Bolsheviks in Pyatigorsk spoke openly of the killings, and reports were published in newspapers across the northern Caucasus, many refused to believe it was true. A story began to take hold that the men had not been murdered but moved to another location. Commissar Gay himself, who likely knew the truth, tried to assure the distraught widows that their husbands were still alive. The victims’ families wanted to believe him, and it seems many did. They became easy prey for soldiers offering to free their loved ones for money.

  Varvara Bobrinsky, however, was not one of them. She apparently knew from the first that Gavril was dead. When she went to collect his belongings, the soldiers, who by now had come to know Gavril and his mother and sister, expressed their regret about what had happened; some, she noticed, even had tears in their eyes. “The vast majority of them were simple, goodhearted Russian men, who sympathized with us and our beloved prisoners,” she wrote in her diary. “They all said, ‘We sympathize with you. Today it was them, but soon they’ll arrest and then shoot us too.’ ” Varvara did not blame her son’s jailers for having joined the Bolsheviks, for she could see how they too had been caught up in a horrible situation beyond their control. As she saw it, they could either kill or be killed. Now every Russian knew tragedy, and Varvara was certain to note that those killed were not just nobles but common folk as well.18

  With the fighting between the Cossacks and Bolsheviks raging in the area, Varvara decided she and her daughter had to escape. They used the money they had collected to save Gavril to buy fake passports and arranged to be driven out of Kislovodsk and entrusted to guides willing to show them the path through the mountains to the Cossack village of Burgustan outside the Bolshevik zone. While on their way, a Bolshevik patrol on horseback intercepted Varvara and her daughter and forced them back to Kislovodsk. Yet just as the town was coming in to view, the patrol offered them a deal: for 4,000 rubles he would let them go. Varvara had only 3,750, which he accepted. By the light of the moon, mother and daughter retraced their steps back through the mountains. They walked all night and the next day and finally reached Burgustan on the second night. Exhausted and relieved to finally be safe, the two women were surprised to see the villagers in a panic, expecting a Bolshevik attack at any moment. Unable to stay and rest, they joined the flight from Burgustan out across the steppe in the direction of Baltapashinsk. As they walked, Varvara was struck by how empty the steppe was. Along the way they passed through a few Cossack villages, each with gallows heavy with the bodies of Red soldiers. In January 1919, Varvara and her daughter finally reached the White Army in Yekaterinodar.19

  Soldiers had also come to arrest Prince Vladimir Emanuelovich Golits
yn in Yessentuki in the autumn of 1918. They found him sick in bed and too large and heavy to carry with them to Pyatigorsk, so they left him, saying they would be back later. His illness saved his life.

  It was not the first time fate had been kind to Vladimir and his wife, Katia. Like so many other aristocrats, they had made their way to Kislovodsk after the revolution. They had not been there long when they got word Red soldiers were looking for him. As a prince, officer of the Chevaliers Gardes, and former aide-de-camp to Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, Vladimir was a prime target. Vladimir hid under the floorboards of a neighbor’s house until the immediate danger had passed. He knew that he had to go into hiding. Katia rubbed his head, neck, and hands with dirt from the garden as a form of disguise, and he went off to live in a poor part of town. Katia brought him food every day, always changing her route so as not to attract attention. The soldiers came to search the house again, this time for firearms. Katia told them they did not have any in the house, thinking they had been buried out in the garden. The men told her she had better not be lying, for if they found any, they would kill her young boys in front of her and then kill her and her servants. Katia thought she had nothing to fear. Her babies’ nanny, however, insisted on accompanying the men on the search. When they came to the bedroom, she quickly pulled back the bedclothes and snatched the pillow to her chest to show them there was nothing there. She managed to do it quickly enough that they did not notice the revolver that had been lying under the pillow and was now clutched against her breast. After this narrow escape, the family joined the noble exodus to Yessentuki.

  Vladimir was not at home the day a group of Red soldiers came to search their house in Yessentuki. Their middle son, George, aged two, lay in his little cot, looking up at them. Upon seeing the beautiful boy with the bright blue eyes, the leader of the group stopped in his tracks. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a fifteen-kopeck coin and handed it to George, saying gently, “This is for your blue eyes.” The chance encounter with the little boy threw the soldier into confusion; his demeanor changed, he called off the search and left abruptly with his men. This was the first money George had ever seen, and he was thrilled with the coin. But his mother refused to let him keep it. George broke down in tears. Katia, however, remained adamant that they could not keep the money. Instead, she took George and his brothers to the local church, where they bought a candle with the fifteen kopecks and lit it in recognition of the soldier’s kindness, saying a prayer to protect his soul.

  Shortly after Vladimir’s narrow escape from being taken to Pyatigorsk, a Jewish woman arrived at his doorstep. She had come from the family’s Ukrainian estate of Carlowka after experiencing a premonition that Vladimir’s life was in danger. She had ridden a long way in a cart to reach them, bringing with her a false passport and two pillows stuffed with sable and ermine. The woman insisted Vladimir must take the passport and flee with her across the border. Eventually, he agreed to go with her, and they managed to get away to a Cossack village beyond the Bolsheviks’ control. Vladimir took a small piece of paper and wrote one word on it—“Safe”—then rolled it to look like a cigarette, gave it to the woman to take back to Katia, and asked her to bring his family to him.

  The woman returned for Katia and the boys, but just as they were about to drive off at dawn, Katia realized she could not find her husband’s wedding ring. The woman said they had no time to look for it, that they had to be off before light or they were certain to be caught at the border by the Red soldiers. She pleaded, but Katia refused to go. “We must find the ring,” she insisted. “No, I cannot go until the ring is found. I must have it.” They went through their bundles, and then they went through them again, but the ring had vanished. Finally, there it was, amazingly, in one of the bundles they had already searched but somehow overlooked in their agitation. Now Katia was ready to go, but the woman said that it was too late. The sun was up, and they had missed their chance. Again, Katia insisted, and again she got her way.

  They drove and drove and finally reached the border near a remote Cossack village. The sight left them speechless: but for a shepherd and his dog, there was not a single sign of life. Everyone had been rounded up and taken away by the Red soldiers just hours before. Had they left at dawn as planned, they would have been captured along with everyone else. The lost wedding ring had saved them. They drove on to the next village, but this place had now fallen to the Reds. Unable to go farther, Katia stopped there with the boys. She claimed to be the wife of a priest who had left the family, and they stayed there for two weeks, not knowing where Vladimir had gone to or how they would ever find him. Then, as she sat one night in a restaurant, a Cossack man approached and told Katia to follow him. Then he turned and left. Desperate to get away and willing to take a chance, Katia grabbed the boys, loaded them on a small cart, and went in search of the man. They found him at the end of a street, waiting, and he took them to a small hut. Katia had expected to find Vladimir there, but it was empty. They were not there long, however, when he suddenly appeared in the early hours of the morning. After three weeks apart, the family was reunited.20

  At the end of October, the Bolsheviks in Yessentuki celebrated the first anniversary of the revolution. The entire town was bedecked in red, and no one dared not hang a red flag on his house or go out without a red ribbon on his chest. The Bolsheviks marched through the streets, bands played, and celebratory shooting into the air went on all night. Commissar Gay had moved to Kislovodsk, and there were rumors of a new round of hostage taking to begin before the end of the month. Typhus and the Spanish influenza epidemic, which was then ravaging much of the world, hit and killed many. The town’s remaining burzhui were going around without any undergarments, the Bolsheviks having expropriated them for the troops. Princess Maria Trubetskoy and the other women were selling their few remaining belongings in the street for food. The town was without electricity, and burglars took advantage of the night darkness. Families set up watches, but since all their weapons had been taken, they could do little but scream for help when attacked.

  Then, in January 1919, the Whites seized all of the northern Caucasus. In the spa towns, they hunted down and killed the Red soldiers and Bolsheviks who had not managed to escape; even people guilty of no more than fraternizing with the Reds were executed. Among the victims were Alexander and Xenia Gay. The Whites found Alexander bedridden with typhus in Kislovodsk and bayoneted him to death where he lay. Xenia was arrested and sentenced to death. A large crowd came out to watch her be hanged in the hills near Kislovodsk.21

  Varvara Bobrinsky and her daughter were on the train that brought the White Army back to Kislovodsk in January. They shared many emotional reunions with the friends they had left behind. Mother and daughter soon moved to Pyatigorsk, where the Special Commission of Inquiry into the Crimes of the Bolsheviks created by Denikin’s army had begun to unearth the graves from the October murders. The commission exhumed twenty-five bodies in the first grave and handed them over to a group of doctors for autopsies. None of the bodies showed any evidence of having been shot; all were covered with wounds typical of swords, sabers, and, in one case, a bayonet. Next, they excavated the second grave in the cemetery at the base of Mashuk Mountain, not far from the spot where the poet Mikhail Lermontov had been killed in a duel in 1841. Because of the cold, dry soil, the bodies in this grave had barely decomposed; the corpses betrayed signs of maiming: some had their noses cut off, their teeth bashed in, their bellies ripped open. Finally, a third grave containing the victims of October 6 was dug up. In total, eighty-three victims were exhumed from the three graves. Among the bodies identified were General Ruzsky, the Urusov brothers, Count Alexei Kapnist, the Shakhovskoy brothers, and Prince Alexander Bagration-Mukhransky.22

  In the second grave the investigators found the body of a tall young man with dark reddish hair dressed in a white undershirt bearing the monogram “G. B.” A gold chain holding a small icon of the Chernigov Mother of God and Sergei Radonezhsky hung arou
nd his neck. His hands were tied behind his back, and his chest was covered with minor wounds. Two long gashes across his neck and the base of his head penetrating to his spinal column, most likely inflicted by a large sword, offered evidence of the cause of death. Varvara identified her son. She took his body back to Kislovodsk to be buried a second time but kept his chain and icon for herself.23

  11

  BOGORODITSK

  My hopes and wishes for the beginning new year do not extend beyond the tight circle of our family,” wrote the mayor on the first day of 1918. “Long may it continue to be happy, and its life full, even if, perhaps, it moves along new paths. Of other more general matters, I withhold all hope and expectation.”1 As the weeks passed, the mayor saw ever less reason to be hopeful about the coming year, and he sank into depression. He found it increasingly hard to believe what was happening around him. It was as if Russia itself had vanished. “The tsar seemed to be the personification of Russia, and Russia belonged to him, it was his property. [. . .] Everything here is being destroyed, there is no more Russia! [. . .] And we all cast about for the culprits on whom we can place all the blame. We are all just as guilty, and we all turned out to be blind, unconscious instruments of fate.”2 There were, however, a few simple things that brought him pleasure. The mayor took great joy in walking through the Moscow streets holding the hand of his grandson Vladimir or in admiring the soft light of a beautiful morning.3