Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith

  They were taken to Tula and interned in a concentration camp. Anna said goodbye to the family and left to be near her husband. Mikhail wrote their children from the camp on November 12:

  My dear ones, I write from the concentration camp, where I have been held for three days now. The camp consists of a row of wooden barracks, with all 280 of us occupying two of them and two more being readied for some new hostages. We sleep on wooden cots, and it is warm and dry inside, and the appearance is not bad. The camp is circled with barbed wire and surrounded by guards. The camp is run by a commandant [. . .], who used to work in the Bogoroditsk Cheka and questioned me about Grandfather and knows you, Vladimir.6 The commandant has a rather difficult assistant, a lawyer by training, but he’s not so bad. They feed us little. Some soup during the day and mashed potatoes in the evening—sometimes they give us a bit more, sometimes very little at all. Twice daily they give us boiling water, sugar, and some bread. One cannot survive on this, and they do allow the prisoners to receive food from the outside [. . .] The last three days here I’ve had to do physical labor. The first day I tried to screw up my courage and walked to the Kursk railway station on the other side of town and spent the entire day loading wood and came home utterly exhausted. The next day I was deemed fit only for light work, but even this work proved to be rather difficult, and I have spent the last two days hauling around bricks, boards, and garbage. Of course, my work at an office will be arranged soon. Kalinin7 will be here today to inspect the camp. After that, so they say, a commission on hostage taking will be established, and then maybe we’ll be freed. I will be seeing Mama this evening [. . .] It seems to me our case is being dragged out and it’s hard to count on being freed. Still, it appears the danger to our lives has passed. Nonetheless, it’s boring here with nothing to do and I miss you all. I think of you often. [. . .] I hope you are all well, settled, and getting well with each other; I trust you older children are being nice to your younger siblings, and you younger ones are not misbehaving. Do remember me and Mama and pray for us [. . .] Your Papa.30

  A few weeks later he wrote again:

  My dear parents and children, I received today Grandmother and Grandfather’s letters and we are all glad to hear that you are all well and healthy. We, too, here are all safe and well and can’t wait for the amnesty process to begin. It still isn’t clear whether the amnesty will apply to me and Uncle Vladimir, since we are considered titled persons, and for this reason the Cheka harbors all sorts of suspicions about us, all of which are utterly baseless. [. . .] We are indeed worried, and all this amidst the usual horrific filth. There are insects everywhere and the sinks have frozen, they feed us poorly and we survive only thanks to the food parcels from our loved ones, which they secretly give us every day or give to some good people to hand over to us, which is forbidden. [. . .] Our spirits are good, and we are well. It has been very good for me to be out in the open air so much, although it is sometimes cold at night, and I would very much like to have my felt boots or my feet get wet. It’s terribly cold for so early in the season. We worked harvesting cabbage again today, which has become my specialty! We occasionally read the newspapers, though there’s little in them.31

  From Tula Anna wrote to Pyotr Smidovich, telling him what had happened and begging for help. She insisted that Mikhail represented no threat to the Bolsheviks and that he had been taken hostage only because he was “a former prince.” All her efforts in Tula to gain his release had come to naught because everyone “was afraid to raise a finger ‘for a former prince.’” Anna reminded Smidovich of her brother Mikhail’s horrible fate the previous year and wrote that unless someone from Moscow would help, then Mikhail “will be among the first to perish.”32

  Anna and Mikhail’s children suffered without their parents. Little Sergei sent his father drawings and kept asking when he would be coming home.33 “Dear Mama, when will our torments finally end!” his sister Sonya wrote.

  I simply have no more strength! How I want to see you both, to unburden my heart. It seems as though I’m losing my mind. I can’t understand a thing and will soon be a complete fool. Now when I begin to say something, all of a sudden my head fills with a strange fog. It is terribly difficult for me to concentrate during my lessons, or to hear and understand the teachers. What am I to do? I really do think I shall lose my mind! [. . .] Oh God, if only this would all soon be over! I don’t know what to do [. . .] Oh, mama, dearest mama, how hard this is for me! Help me, save me, pray for me.34

  Lina Golitsyn went to Tula to be with her mother. She and Anna took turns delivering a bowl of cabbage soup every morning and evening to Mikhail and Vladimir, who were spending long days hauling bricks and digging up cabbage in the icy fields with their bare hands. The conditions at the camp were horrible, and soon all the men were infected with fleas, lice, and bedbugs; many of the hostages died from cold and hunger. Mikhail fell ill with typhus, and Vladimir began to show signs of tuberculosis. They were lucky, however, and were sent to the prison hospital to get better and were spared further outdoor work that most likely would have killed them. After three months in the camp, Mikhail was freed on January 15, 1920. An appeal to Kamenev by Mikhail’s brother appears to have played a crucial role in his release.35

  Vladimir Trubetskoy was also freed from the camp at the end of January. He returned to his family for a visit but soon had to leave. A decorated hero of the First World War, Trubetskoy was instructed to return to Moscow, where the leaders of the Red Army tried to convince him to join their ranks.

  The Bolshevik coup and subsequent civil war split the Russian officer corps. Many former tsarist officers, like Vladimir, chose to sit out the war; more than forty-eight thousand officers joined the Red Army, and about double that number fought on the side of the Whites.36 Those who fought for the Reds did so for a number of reasons. Some believed in the ideas of the Bolsheviks; some were motivated by a sense of patriotism; some were desperate for the food and money that service provided; some were coerced; some were afraid to refuse. The Bolsheviks began to call up former officers in the summer of 1918 out of dire need. To ensure officers’ loyalty, family members were sometimes taken hostage or threatened with arrest.37 Prince Vasily Golitsyn, director of Moscow’s Rumiantsev Museum, had one son serving on the Red Army general staff, while another son was off fighting for the Whites. During the civil war, Prince Vasily lived with his daughter Maria and her husband, Alexei Derevitsky, a soldier in the Red Army. Such cases of divided loyalties were not unheard of.38

  The two best-known noblemen to join the Red Army were Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Alexei Brusilov. Tukhachevsky’s motives have been the subject of considerable speculation, though it seems they were neither simple nor straightforward. Part pure ambition, part ideology, part desire to join in the forward march of history, part snobbish pleasure of being a nobleman among peasants and proletarians, Tukhachevsky, the “Red Bonaparte,” joined the Bolsheviks in 1917 and was a brilliant and ruthless commander in the civil war. From 1925 to 1928, he was the chief of staff of the Red Army, and in 1935 he was named marshal of the Soviet Union. Together with eight other high-ranking military commanders, Tukhachevsky was executed on fabricated charges of treason in 1937 during Stalin’s Great Terror.39

  Born in 1853 into a noble family with a long tradition of military service, Brusilov had fought in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 and, after serving as the commander in chief of the southwestern front in 1916, was made the supreme commander in chief of the Russian army in May 1917 under the Provisional Government. Brusilov was Russia’s greatest living war hero, yet he refused to take sides in the civil war. In 1918, he was arrested by the Cheka and held briefly. Four of his family members were also arrested and held hostage; they were threatened with death if Brusilov joined the Whites. Brusilov’s only son from his first marriage, Alexei, had also fought in World War I and was arrested by the Bolsheviks. Later freed, he joined the Red Army cavalry and was captured by the White Army and executed in the autumn of 1919. Hi
s son’s death at the hands of the Whites was important in shaping Brusilov’s decision to join the Reds. But perhaps just as important was his belief that whatever his own personal feelings, the Russian people had sided with the Reds and as a patriot he had to respect their wishes. In 1920, after extreme inner struggle and anguish, Brusilov joined the Red Army, an act that earned him the hatred of much of the old Russian nobility.40

  Vladimir Trubetskoy was part of a group of officers ordered to report to Moscow for a meeting with Brusilov. The two former cavalry officers had known each other for years, and Brusilov had held Vladimir in high regard ever since his valiant exploits in the last war. After joining the Reds, Brusilov had helped free hundreds of imprisoned officers, and it is possible his efforts helped Vladimir.41 Brusilov is purported to have played to Vladimir’s patriotism, saying, “Prince, the cart has gotten stuck, and there is no one but us to pull it out. Without the army, Russia cannot be saved.” Vladimir was a monarchist, and Brusilov’s siding with the Bolsheviks disturbed him, yet in the end he acquiesced to his former commander’s call. Vladimir was given his orders and left to join the Red Army in the south. He decided, however, to take a detour to Bogoroditsk on the way to visit his wife and children and share with them his food ration. Vladimir had only just arrived when he was denounced to the Cheka by someone suspicious of his “aristocratic appearance.” Once more, Vladimir was back behind bars. Just as had happened in Tula, Vladimir soon showed the early signs of tuberculosis. As the illness grew worse, Vladimir was freed to return to his family, his military career over. In all, Vladimir was arrested three times during the five years he lived in Bogoroditsk.42

  Mikhail Golitsyn returned to his family from Tula and found a secretarial job. Money and food were scarce. Anna took some lessons from a local cobbler and began making shoes out of the green felt carpet that had been pulled up from the floor of the mayor’s study in his Moscow home. Mikhail helped in the evenings making shoe strings. Anna did not sell the shoes for money but traded them for food. They also stripped the brown suede off the old ledger books from the Bogoroditsk estate and sewed it into attractive coin purses and billfolds that they either sold or traded for necessary items back in Moscow. Their clothes they bartered at local markets for salt or sugar. The children gathered nettles and sorrel to make soup or dug potatoes. The family was too poor by now to buy horsemeat; they could afford only the head and hooves, which Anna boiled for days to create a light brown aspic. Sergei found it repugnant, but hunger was stronger than revulsion.43

  Even though the Golitsyn children worked to help support the family, their education was not overlooked. Grandmother Sofia taught them French, Lev Bobrinsky’s sister gave them English lessons, and Anna found the children a German tutor.44 This preoccupation with education was not unique to the Golitsyns, but generally characteristic of the nobility as a whole.45

  Impoverished, hungry, and anxious over what future troubles lay ahead, the Golitsyns still took pleasure in life. Sonya joined the local theater and thrilled in her career as a thespian. The former princess now just played the part of nobility, acting the role of Countess Olivia in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.46 In October 1920, they finally got electricity in their home, which everyone in the family greeted as nothing short of a miracle. Instead of sitting in the dark with nothing but a few candles to break the gloom, they now had light in the evenings. One of their favorite things to do was gather around Mikhail, as he read aloud to them bathed in an electric glow.47

  There was an empty place in the home, however. Anna and Mikhail’s son Vladimir had left the family that year to join a scientific exploration of the Far North. It was a fabulous adventure for Vladimir, a budding artist who captured the icy wilds of Novaya Zemlya in his vivid watercolors and had a chance to meet fellow explorers from Norway and England, contacts that later became a factor in his arrest. Nevertheless, the family missed the humorous and creative Vladimir and pined for his return. Anna wrote her son in September, asking him to write them more often since “every letter from you is an event, a true holiday for us in our ‘little peasant hut.’ ”48

  12

  DR . GOLITSYN

  After leaving Moscow, the family of Alexander Golitsyn and their accompanying friends rode the Northern Railway for five days before arriving in Tyumen in the middle of December 1917. Along the way the train was besieged by deserting soldiers, but they managed to protect themselves by closing all the curtains, locking the doors, and stationing outside two women from the group disguised in nurses’ uniforms, who frightened off any intruders with stories of patients ill with dangerous infectious diseases. Life in the Siberian town was a marked improvement over Moscow. Most of the major urban centers in Siberia, Tyumen among them, had sided with the Bolsheviks within the first months of the coup. Nonetheless, the local Bolshevik leaders were quite tame, things were quiet and comfortable, and there was plenty of food. They all found lodgings, and Alexander set up his own medical practice. He made sure to drop the title of prince from all his papers, however, and presented himself simply as Dr. Golitsyn. Prince Georgy Lvov and Nikolai Lopukhin went a step further, adopting assumed names to avoid notice.1

  All was well until a detachment of Red Guards arrived in late January 1918. They overthrew the existing soviet and began suppressing any opposition and harassing the bourgeoisie. The new bosses forbade all gatherings, seized the homes and bank accounts of the well-to-do, and arrested potential enemies. After seeing some of their friends arrested and robbed and others flee Tyumen, the Golitsyns began to debate whether they too ought to leave. In the end they chose to remain since it appeared to them all Siberia had been lost to the Reds. They put their fate in the hands of “Providence.” In March, soldiers came and arrested Georgy, Nikolai, and Alexander. When Alexander asked one of the men why he was being arrested, he was told, “Because you are a prince, a bourgeois and counterrevolutionary. We know all about you and your gang here, you are plotting something. You are not a doctor, you are a disguised officer of Kornilov’s army.”2 After they had taken Alexander away, his children and the servants got down on their knees to pray.3

  Alexander was taken to a train car at the Tyumen rail station that served as the soldiers’ local headquarters. Georgy and Nikolai were held in an adjacent car; when Alexander inquired about his friends, he was informed they were due to be shot the next day, a threat that was never carried out. No charges against the men, other than the vague comments directed to Alexander upon his arrest, were ever made, and they were held prisoner for almost two weeks. Alexander was put to work treating wounded Red soldiers, which he was happy to do since he abhorred inactivity. A Red orderly with a bit of medical training was attached to Alexander to make sure this “class enemy” did not try to harm any of his patients, and Alexander quickly won over many of the men with his knowledge and care.

  Alexander found most of the men to be rough and uneducated, chiefly motivated by a love of plunder and the promise of money and adventure. A few were doctrinaire Communists who truly believed they were going to build a new society in which all men would be equal. Yet even these men, Alexander noted, saw the need for blood. One young soldier told Alexander that he was ready to “unload my revolver” into the head of anyone who opposed them. When Alexander replied this would certainly require a great many bullets, he retorted: “Oh, not so many as you think, one million or so . . . Most of the people are with us.” Alexander overheard the soldiers brag of their killings. He learned of soldiers going out to requisition gold and jewelry, most of which they turned over to the commissar, although some of the finest pieces they saved for themselves, which they would show to Alexander and regale him with their tales of thieving and pillaging.4 All the while, Lyubov had been pleading, unsuccessfully, with the commissar to free her husband.

  In the first week of March, the train left Tyumen. None of them knew where they were heading. Every time the train came to a stop the soldiers would pull out Georgy and parade him before the angry crowds. Lvov w
as certain he would never get out alive.5 Around March 6, they arrived in Yekaterinburg on the eastern edge of the Ural Mountains. Having received word that the train was carrying several princes and ministers of the tsarist government, a mob of workmen converged on it and demanded the prisoners be handed over. “Why are you keeping those princes in safety?” they shouted at the Red soldiers. “If you can’t get rid of them, we’ll do it. Perish the bourgeoisie! Long live the proletariat!” Terrified the mob would get him, Alexander cowered in a dark corner of his compartment. His guard, an anarchist named Orlov, assured Alexander they would not give him up and that they would fire on the crowd if necessary. Alexander found this of little comfort, sensing that either way—sooner or later—he would be killed. The next morning he learned that the Yekaterinburg Soviet had refused to let the train leave without first handing him and his two companions over to the local revolutionary tribunal for trial. The news left Alexander distraught. He sensed his chances of surviving were slim.6

  Revolver-wielding Chekists took the three men from the train, placed them in a truck, and drove off to the city prison. Alexander noted in his memoirs the relief he felt upon hearing the heavy prison door close behind him. “It meant complete isolation from the world, from my family and friends; but at the same time it meant a certain safety behind these thick white walls, safety from a hostile crowd or a sudden fancy of a Commissar.”7 He was placed in a solitary cell and fed some tea and dark bread. To keep his spirits up, Alexander paced back and forth from wall to wall, trying to walk what he estimated was about four miles a day; he also took comfort in the Bible and a few books by William James that he had managed to take with him. Later Georgy and Nikolai were moved in to share his cell.