Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith

  I tried not to think much of the disaster, of the crash of our dreams of defeating Bolshevism and liberating Russia. A vague hope that something might befall to save the situation, some foreign interference, some new upsurge of energy of the defeated army, the change of the Commander-in-Chief—a miracle in short. In such an epoch as this, one becomes a fatalist and one begins to hope, that the strokes of fate are not always merciless.41

  The next day caught them in a blizzard. They trudged on to the east, but the wind and snow made it hard going. Desperately cold in the open sleighs, the men climbed down to walk for stretches in an attempt to warm themselves. They journeyed through the bitter cold for a week, usually sleeping outside in the open around a fire. At times they had trouble finding enough forage for the horses. Finally, after three weeks, they reached Novo-Nikolaevsk (now Novosibirsk), more than halfway on the rail line from Omsk to Tomsk, only to find the town being evacuated as the Red advance across Siberia marched on. (It fell to the Red Fifth Army on December 14, 1919, along with as many as 31,000 White troops, 190 echelons of military supplies, and 30,000 corpses, dead from typhus.)42 Alexander boarded a train with many of the others, but for days the train sat barely moving, and so, fearing capture, they got off and joined the men fleeing on foot. By now all discipline had broken down; the army had devolved into a band of wild, desperate men. Soldiers and Cossacks began to rob the villages they passed through, and the officers could do little to stop them. One night in the town of Mariinsk the soldiers took over a distillery and drank it dry. There was shouting and shooting all night, and the next morning many soldiers lay frozen to death in the streets.43

  Lyubov and the rest of the family had moved from Kansk to Krasnoyarsk in the early autumn so the older children could return to school. As winter came on, the situation grew worse, and people had begun to leave the city by the beginning of December. Lyubov did not know what to do. Alexander had promised to meet up with them by December 24, yet the date had come and gone, and they had no word from him. Nikolai and his family had already left Krasnoyarsk. They were joined by Yevgenia Pisarev and the others who had left Moscow with them two years earlier; also joining them was Pierre Gilliard, a former French-language tutor to the tsar’s children.

  It pained them all to leave Lyubov and her children behind, but she refused to go, even after a note from Alexander arrived, begging her to take the children and leave without him.44 Finally, as the situation became perilous and their chances of avoiding the Red Army were nearly exhausted, Lyubov decided they too would have to make their escape. They barely got away in time. In the first days of January 1920, the city fell to anti-Kolchak forces; the escape route to the east was blocked. On the eighth, the Red Fifth Army marched into Krasnoyarsk and took more than sixty thousand prisoners.45 By now all civilian rail traffic had stopped in Siberia, and only military trains were moving. Lyubov was taken in by a Czech officer, who promised to take them as soon as the army evacuated.46 Some of the White Army waited too long to make their escape by train and were forced to escape across the snow in sledges. For five weeks they trekked through the frozen wastes before reaching Lake Baikal.47

  Home for many Russians caught up in the war in Siberia was a boxcar. By the time they left Krasnoyarsk in late 1919 the Golitsyns and Lopukhins had been living in such a car for many months. The boxcars were preferred over the few remaining passenger cars since these were infected by lice that carried the danger of typhus. Each car could hold up to sixty people, thirty with luggage. The occupants created their own intimate world in these rustic surroundings, with special rules and a distinctive order and even its own kind of beauty. They would fashion cozy little “nests” of rugs or shawls on the bunks and shelves that ran along both sides of the car. Refugees who had more space created whole living rooms with upholstered furniture, heavy felt and rugs on the floor, shawls decorating the walls, and kerosene lamps with shades.

  The cars were so cramped that people began to learn a whole new way of inhabiting space. One made certain to keep one’s arms and hands down, close to the body, to make small, contained movements so as not to get into others’ personal space. The Golitsyns’ servant Liza fashioned curtains out of sheets so they could have privacy to change and wash in a small basin. Since the cars were not heated, a wood-burning stove was installed in the middle with a stovepipe running up through the roof or a window. It was intensely hot near the stove, but ice cold in the corners and on the upper bunks, where the children slept. The coldest place was near the windows, which were frozen over. Fur coats were put up against the walls to try to keep out the cold, and the children would awaken in the morning under frozen blankets. One person would be in charge of tending the fire, and God forbid he let it go out, for this would bring the wrath of the entire car down upon him. Everything happened around the heat of the stove: food was cleaned, prepared, and cooked; dishes were scrubbed, clothes and bodies washed (as well as possible); firewood was chopped and coal broken up into smaller pieces. Smoke invariably hung in the air, and the faces of the passengers were dirty with soot.

  The doors often had to be locked while the train was in a station to keep people from climbing in. Occasionally, the doors would be opened so the travelers could go barter for food. The diet was typically rusk with tea and a bit of milk, if it could be acquired from the peasants. Eggs and, even more rarely, boiled meat or potatoes were a luxury. Lyubov once traded clothes with villagers for a dozen geese and frozen cranberries, which they found especially delicious. The Lopukhins managed to get hold of an entire ox carcass, which they hauled up to the top of the boxcar; the Siberian winter made for the perfect freezer. At stops, they would open the door and one of them would clamber up on top and hack off some pieces of frozen meat for boiling on the stove. The Siberian winter was so bitterly cold that if the train sat too long, it would freeze to the tracks and it would take a long time to get it going again. From their car the Golitsyns often saw sleighs of refugees, all bundled up, nothing visible but their faces, blackened from frostbite, passing across the snow.48

  Stops were also opportunities to hunt for firewood, usually acquired by ripping apart nearby fences. Fear set in whenever the fuel supply ran low; at times, the bunks had to be taken from the walls and chopped up to feed the stove. Sometimes the locomotives ran out of fuel, and then everyone had to climb out of the cars and head to the nearest stand of trees to gather wood. If there was none to be had, the train would sit motionless until another came up from behind to push it to the next village or until they were set upon by an enemy or band of partisans.49

  Alexander Golitsyn found the communal life in the boxcars depressing.50 Often the trains stopped for long stretches because of lack of fuel or a breakdown on the line. Alexander remembered:

  The train is stopped in the steppe; a snowstorm is howling; it is warm in the box car, a kerosene lamp burns, or if there isn’t one—candles; while outside a line of sleds full of soldiers of the retreating army passes. One wants to join them, even in the bitter cold. Anything not to be standing still. In the end, that was what I did (near Novo-Nikolaevsk) when during one period of ten days we travelled only 100 versts8 and were almost captured by the Reds.51

  Lyubov, on the other hand, recalled her months in the boxcars as a period of rare beauty. “Everything had a special aura of love,” she remembered, “and somehow torn away from reality as if it was not of this life.” Although they had very little, everyone was happy to share with others and to make sacrifices, even for strangers. They could often hear the soldiers singing, and they gazed with wonderment at Lake Baikal as they rode along its frozen shores. “Sometimes in the evening, when the sun was setting, the mood was quite evocatively poetic. [. . .] It was a time of love and helpfulness to each other. And living close to nature, all around.” Soon after leaving Krasnoyarsk, they stopped alongside a railcar carrying YMCA aid workers. Among them was a young American, who gave them a small Christmas tree decorated with chocolate bars and cigarettes and canned meat that a
llowed the Golitsyns to enjoy an unexpected Christmas feast.52

  Kolchak fled Omsk on November 14 just hours before the Red Army, carrying with him the remains of the large imperial gold reserves (more than four hundred million gold rubles’ worth of bullion and coinage) seized the previous year in Kazan by the Komuch government. The thirty-six heavily laden cars slowed his movement to a dangerously slow pace. He set out to meet the rest of his ministers, who had left earlier for Irkutsk, but the Czechs and rebellious railroad workers repeatedly stopped and diverted his train onto sidings. From behind, Red forces chased after, at times even capturing some of the trains fleeing Omsk together with Kolchak. Kolchak’s train traveled for a month yet had still not reached Irkutsk, some 1,534 miles east of Omsk, where the remains of his government were awaiting him. His men began to desert his train to join the Bolsheviks.53

  The Lopukhins and Yevgenia Pisarev managed to attach their boxcar to a train following directly behind that of Kolchak. At first it seemed like a good idea since being part of Kolchak’s convoy led by his armor-plated engine bristling with cannons would provide them excellent protection. But Kolchak was also the primary target of the hostile forces all around them. The train moved slowly and stopped for long periods as Kolchak tried to determine whether it was safe to move forward. There was no good information on what was happening up ahead, though there were rumors of battles with the Reds in Irkutsk. Gunfire could be heard close by. Apprehension and then fear spread throughout the train.

  They had traveled only a few days before Kolchak’s trains stopped in Nizhneudinsk, not quite halfway between Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk. The Czechs had blocked Kolchak from moving, in part to ingratiate themselves with the new anti-Kolchak leaders in Irkutsk, whose permission the Czechs needed to continue their trek to the coast. From her car Yevgenia could see Kolchak’s men leaving the train and drifting away; his personal band marched off into the nearby Bolshevik-controlled town playing the “Marseillaise.” She and the others realized that if they were to keep moving east, they had to uncouple their car and try to join a different train convoy. Eventually, they convinced the Americans to attach their boxcar to their train, and after several tense days they finally left Nizhneudinsk and Kolchak behind. In the first week of 1920, Kolchak’s government collapsed and the former “Supreme Leader” was taken to Irkutsk and handed over to the new Soviet government. He had had opportunities to attempt an escape but, determined to accept what fate awaited him, had refused to take them. Kolchak was interrogated and then taken out into the bitter cold morning of February 7, 1920, and shot by members of the newly established Irkutsk Military Revolutionary Committee. One of Kolchak’s executioners recalled how he had bravely refused a blindfold and stood erectly, calmly waiting to be shot, “like an Englishman.” They tossed his body into a hole in the ice of the Ushakovka River.54

  At Irkutsk Yevgenia and the Lopukhins were forced to stop and once again find a new train to attach their car to. Thanks to the efforts of Pierre Gilliard, General Maurice Janin, the French commander in Siberia, agreed to take them, though only the women; Nikolai managed to talk his way onto a Red Cross train, narrowly escaping arrest as they resumed their journey. On the last day of 1919, Yevgenia wrote in her diary: “The farther we ride, the more hopeless, the murkier the future presents itself to us. Kolya9 dreams of America. If we encounter SRs in Vladivostok, he won’t be able to stay there and would like to try to reach America. [. . .] We’ve all decided to go to bed earlier than usual so we won’t have to meet the new year.”55

  Passing Lake Baikal, they entered the territory of Ataman Semenov, appointed head of the White forces in Siberia by Kolchak before his arrest. The stories told of Semenov’s savagery were bloodcurdling. “They rob, they burn villages to pacify the inhabitants, and they turn everyone against them,” Yevgenia wrote. “Semenov’s savage division consists of Buryats and officers no less savage than the savage Buryats themselves. [. . .] I’ve heard soul-chilling stories of the deeds of the Semyonovtsy. They are tales straight out of the Middle Ages, with torture-chambers and not only individuals but entire groups disappearing without a trace.”56

  The stories were not exaggerations. Such was the ferocity of the civil war that victims were frequently tortured in the most grisly fashion. Mutilation of the still living was not rare. Heads and limbs were hacked off; faces bashed in, the sexual organs of men and women violated and cut off. Some people were scalped; some burned alive.57 One witness to Semenov’s atrocities claimed the ataman liked to brag that he could sleep peacefully at night only if he had killed someone that day.58 Paul Rodzianko, a former tsarist officer, witnessed the horrors in Siberia. In his memoirs, he wrote, “The spirit of personal revenge is so deep in human nature that even military discipline cannot curb it. When our soldiers found comrades or relations mutilated they could not resist the desire to inflict suffering back. Red hate and White hate raged side by side through the beautiful wild country.”59 After the White forces entered Yekaterinburg in July 1919, they carried out a pogrom that left more than two thousand dead, most of them Jews. That same year Whites in Yalta hanged a seventeen-year-old boy for the sole reason that his surname, Bronstein, was the same as Trotsky’s.60

  Appalled and frightened by the barbarism of Semenov, Yevgenia was also saddened by the news from Russia. In early January, she learned that Denikin and his army had abandoned southern Russia and were retreating to the Crimea and Caucasus. “Our last hope has died!” she cried. “Oh, Lord, can it be that our loved ones in the Caucasus will once more fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks?” Given the confusion around them, they could not decide whether to make for Vladivostok or the city of Harbin, in Manchuria.61 For several days they stopped in Petrovsky Zavod, a picturesque town that had been the home of the Decembrists, the first Russian revolutionaries exiled to Siberia by Tsar Nicholas I a century earlier. Being in this place filled with memories of these aristocratic exiles gave Yevgenia and Nikolai hope and strength. “One feels that their spirit is alive,” Yevgenia wrote, “and thus we exiles feel better here, we find it easier to bear our cross, having such an example before our eyes.”62

  By the middle of January they had left behind the heavy forests of Siberia and come out into the barren steppe of Manchuria. Camels dotted the landscape. The local people, in long blue and black gowns and braids, came to look at the trains filled with bedraggled Russian refuges and sell them food.63 On February 1, after six weeks’ travel, Yevgenia, Nikolai, and the others finally reached Harbin.64 Two months later, to the great surprise and delight of their friends, Lyubov and the children arrived as well.65

  Harbin had been a small village until the turn of the twentieth century, when the Chinese granted the Russians a concession to construct a rail line to connect the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok via Manchuria, thus drastically reducing the distance of the original route. Harbin grew rapidly, and by the outbreak of the First World War it was home to more Russians than Chinese. Well into the twentieth century, it was one of the major centers of Russian émigré life, thanks largely to the stream of refugees fleeing the chaos and fighting of the civil war in Siberia.66

  After years of deprivation, Harbin appeared like an oasis of calm, orderliness, and abundance. The Golitsyns and Lopukhins were amazed by the goods and food available in the stores and shops. “I have never in my life seen such a quantity of bread,” gasped Yevgenia. But prices were high, they all were running out of money, and many did not know how they might earn a living. For some like Yevgenia, after having lived for so long in the world of the boxcars, the transition back to normal life was not easy. “In the end, despite the dark, the damp, and the cold of our boxcar,” Yevgenia admitted, “nonetheless I had grown accustomed to it. In the last days our Tyumen family had lived in it so happily, so pleasantly. The walls of our boxcar did indeed protect us against all difficulties and life’s hopelessness, and now we must plunge back into life.”67

  Plunging back into life meant in large part deciding whether one
intended to stay in Harbin, travel on to America or Europe, or consider making peace with the revolution and returning to Russia. It was this last option that with a heavy heart Yevgenia assumed would eventually be their fate. But Yevgenia never did return to Russia. Instead, she joined Georgy Lvov in Paris, to share his final few years with him in a house near the Bois de Boulogne.68

  Unable to catch up with his family in December 1919, Alexander and his small party arrived at the town of Achinsk, some one hundred miles west of Krasnoyarsk, at the beginning of January. They were urged to leave immediately since the Reds were not far off, but their horses were exhausted, and so they had no choice but to stay. That night they heard shooting and several loud explosions. When they awoke the next morning, Red soldiers were entering the town. For a minute, Alexander thought of trying to run, but it was too late. They were trapped. They immediately burned all compromising papers, unharnessed the horses, unpacked their medical supplies, and hung out the Red Cross flag. Several soldiers showed up and marched them off to the commandant to register. “Prince Golitsyn?” the commandant asked Alexander. “No, Dr. Golitsyn,” he replied. The commandant informed Alexander that they would be using him to help fight the new enemy, typhus, now that the Whites had been defeated, and so they were sending him to Krasnoyarsk. At the rail station he came upon a ghastly sight: a car loaded with dynamite had exploded next to a train packed with refugees days earlier. Hundreds of people had been blown to pieces, and their bodies still lay about the tracks.