Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith

  On the trip to Krasnoyarsk they passed the remains of Kolchak’s army and more corpses and dead horses. They heard stories of coachmen frozen stiff still gripping the reins of horses coated in ice and of a carriage with a frozen young woman clutching her dead baby in her arms. Upon reaching Krasnoyarsk, Alexander was given permission to go look for his family, but when he found the place, the people living there told him they had left two weeks earlier. He asked where they had gone, but all they could tell him was that Lyubov had spoken about going to Vladivostok. Distressed at having missed them, Alexander was glad they were at least safe.69

  Alexander was next taken to Irkutsk and put to work in a Red Army military hospital. All the while, he plotted his escape. He fell ill with typhus after several months and could no longer work; that, paradoxically, helped save his life. He managed to obtain false documents in the name of Serebriakov and secure a place on a train carrying former German prisoners of war and Russian nonmilitary invalids bound for Vladivostok. Emaciated, ill, and dirty, Alexander convinced the Cheka agents screening the passengers that he was indeed at death’s door and of no use or danger to the Bolsheviks. He traveled for fifteen days, and past several more Cheka inspections, before arriving in Vladivostok, then under the control of Ataman Semenov. From there Alexander was able to make his way to Harbin, where he arrived in September 1920. It had been more than a year since he had last seen his wife and children.70

  There had been another Prince Golitsyn in Irkutsk who was not so fortunate. Prince Lev Golitsyn, the last tsarist governor of Samara, had fled to Siberia with his family in the autumn of 1918. Like Alexander’s family, their distant relations, Prince Lev and his family tried to stay a step ahead of the Reds in Siberia, traveling by rail, sledge, and even horseback. Lev served in Kolchak’s army as a representative of the Red Cross. After Kolchak’s collapse, the family ended up in Krasnoyarsk, where Lev found work in the Veterinary Department of the Red Fifth Army, charged with procuring horses for the army. The whole time Lev was under the surveillance of the Cheka and spied on by secret informers. He was arrested on May 14, 1920, as a “White Guard” and “Kolchak’s Hangman,” the latter a result of mistaken identity. The family saw him off to the rail station in early June 1920, when he was sent to Irkutsk. “God be with you,” were his last words to them. He died that same month of typhus in the prison infirmary.71

  Reunited with his family, Alexander set up a medical practice caring for the city’s large number of refugees. Life was difficult, but nothing like what the villagers faced back at their former estate of Petrovskoe. Three years since the last Golitsyn had been forced off the estate, the overseer continued to write to Alexander and Lyubov of the dreadful conditions. All the art and furnishings had been stolen long ago and now decorated the homes of the villagers and the former estate employees. What remained in the house had been smashed and destroyed. The pages from the books in the library had been torn out to roll cigarettes, and the large archive, including maps from Napoleon’s marshals, had been burned to feed the ovens and stoves. The glass had been broken out of all the windows; the woods cut down, loaded on wagons, and hauled off to Moscow for firewood.

  After a year and a half fighting with the Red Army, the former butler, Ivan Kuznetsov, wrote the Golitsyns in July 1922 upon his return to Petrovskoe. He was motivated to write after so many years, he said, after attending a service in the church on St. Peter’s Day. Seeing the church “lit by candles,” he wrote, “reminded me of old times and of you.” He went on: “The house is very spoiled and I even shed a few tears when I saw for the first time what had become of the place. In many rooms there are stoves which are heated in the winter and everything is black with soot. Outside the plaster has fallen off in places and the windows are broken and boarded up. The door handles have been pulled off and they are closed with string.” He noted the people were still hungry and tea and white bread were prohibitively expensive. He asked Alexander and Lyubov to recall his former service and to find it in their hearts to send him whatever clothes they could spare, for his had been reduced to rags and he had no money to buy any new ones. “I don’t know how we are going to survive,” he cried.72

  Alexander and Lyubov settled into life in Harbin. He began teaching anatomy at the Harbin Medical School and was also hired to work as a medical officer at the British consulate. Times were still hard, however. Lyubov wrote her brother-in-law Mikhail Golitsyn back in Moscow in November 1922 to tell him things had taken a turn for the worse. Once more they were facing “troubling and difficult times,” and she doubted whether they would be able to remain in Harbin. They wanted to return to the family in Moscow, but none of them could imagine trying to make the trip back across Siberia after what they had been through.73 Their salvation came in the form of the Red Cross, which engaged Alexander to find a home in Canada or the United States for the many refugees in Harbin and Manchuria. It was as a Red Cross representative that he left Manchuria for the United States, arriving in Seattle on the President Madison on October 7, 1923, with three hundred dollars in his pocket. A week later Alexander renounced his Russian citizenship. Lyubov and the children joined him in America the following year.74

  13

  EXODUS

  In June 1918, Ivan Bunin and his wife, Vera, arrived in Odessa from Moscow. They found a nice apartment, furnished it with antiques, and hired a maid as if nothing had changed. Their home became a meeting place for politicians and intellectuals like General Baron Peter Wrangel, the writers Count Alexei Tolstoy and Konstantin Paustovsky, and Olga Knipper, the actress widow of Chekhov.1 Despite his own material comfort and safety, Bunin was pained to be so far from his family, living under the Bolsheviks: “I send my soul over thousands of miles, into the night, the darkness, and the unknown so that I will be with my family and loved ones, and so that I can express my fear for them, my love for them, my agony for them, and my hope that God will save and protect them.”2

  Bunin would have reason to fear for himself too. In the spring of 1919, the Red Army took Odessa. His friends had urged Bunin to escape before it was too late, yet he had refused. Even though he was in danger as a nobleman and fierce critic of the new regime, Bunin would not consider going into hiding. After intervention from a friend, Lunacharsky telegraphed a protection order for posting on the Bunins’ apartment door. The order did little good, and the Bunins were subjected to humiliating searches. Bunin and his wife had experienced life under the Reds before in Moscow, and they now recalled that same sense of “airlessness” they had felt earlier.3

  The Bunins remained in Odessa for a year and a half. Bunin watched intently what was happening around them, committing his thoughts and observations to his diary. He noted the signs and banners that appeared in the city streets: “Death to the Bourgeois,” for example, and “One of Ours, Ten of Theirs.” He recorded how the day before Easter decrees requiring all bourgeois under the age of forty to come out the next day to clean the streets were posted throughout the city.4 He saw a large poster on Cathedral Square that contrasted “1918,” represented by a fat bourgeois holding a worker by the collar, with “1919,” that showed the same bourgeois now sweeping the street as the worker looked on; the statue of Catherine the Great was draped in a “great overcoat” with a large poster behind it reading, “The thrones are covered with the people’s blood. We will cover our enemies with blood.” A banner atop the London Hotel proclaimed: “Peace to the huts, War on the palaces.” Bunin found it ironic that many of the posters and banners were the work of “children of the rich bourgeois,” the only ones with the requisite art training and now desperate to earn some money.5

  That spring the Military Revolutionary Tribunal ordered eighteen “counterrevolutionaries” shot; soon after, an order requiring the registration of all “bourgeois” was published. Panic struck the city, and no one was quite sure what to make of these orders. Bunin’s doorman told him that the following day was to “truly be the end of the world: it will be the ‘Day of Peaceful Insurrec
tion’ when every last bourgeois will be stripped of his things.” The next day Bunin’s friend David Shpitalnikov, a literary critic, showed up. He too had heard about the Day of Peaceful Insurrection and had furtively put on his last two pairs of trousers in case a search was made of his apartment. Later in the afternoon, the insurrection was called off after some workers had apparently revolted upon learning that they were about to be dispossessed of some goods they had just stolen themselves.6

  Bunin reveled in pointing out the hypocrisy of Red leaders who preached “war on the palaces” and then moved into them as soon as the owners had been evicted.7 He was revolted by this “new aristocracy”: “Sailors with huge revolvers on their belts, pickpockets, criminal villains, and shaved dandies in service jackets, depraved-looking riding britches, and dandy-like shoes with the inevitable spurs. All have gold teeth and big, dark, cocaine-like eyes.”8 The Bolsheviks played to the mob’s basest instincts and understood the Russians’ psychology.“Three-quarters of the people are like that: for crumbs or the right to pillage and rob, they’ll give-up their conscience, soul, and God.”9 Such a way of thinking was a social, and moral, disease; moreover, as Bunin saw, it would not lift the country out of its misery: “Bolshevism is a revolution, all right, the very same revolution which forever gladdens those who do not have a present, who have a past that is always ‘cursed’ and a future that is always ‘bright’ . . . ‘Seven lean cows will devour seven fat ones—but they themselves will not become fat.’ ”10

  At the same time Bunin criticized the Bolsheviks and their supporters, he felt estranged from their enemies and refused to place himself in their camp. After the Whites reclaimed Odessa in the late summer of 1919, several people came to seek Bunin’s support in the struggle against bolshevism. When he asked what they stood for, they told him their party had two planks: constitutional monarchy and opposition to the Jews. Bunin had long spoken out against anti-Semitism and pogroms, and he refused to join any of the White political organizations since he deemed them tainted with anti-Semitism and since he wished to remain a poet, not a party person. For Bunin, the enemies of the Bolsheviks were still blind to the narod, refusing to recognize what the people were capable of, wishing instead to blame the Jews for Russia’s woe. Princess Zenaida Yusupov was a good example of this way of thinking. Her diary from 1919 is littered with references to “Jew-Masons” destroying Russia; she even called U.S. President Woodrow Wilson a Jew-Mason for being against the restoration of the Romanovs. The princess was incapable of seeing how the nobility had played any part in Russia’s tragedy, which she blamed solely on the people. “Cannons alone will not help in this uneven battle!” she wrote in February 1919. “What is needed is spiritual strength, the awakening faith and the repentance of the masses. Only then can we be saved!” Bunin was repulsed by such ideas, and he denounced them publicly. In November 1919 in the newspaper the Southern Word, for example, Bunin strongly condemned the White anti-Jewish pogroms that had swept across Ukraine that year.11

  The plight of Russia’s Jews in the twentieth century cannot be overstated. Even before the Second World War they had been subjected to successive waves of violence that left many thousands dead and even more homeless. Pogroms erupted in the villages of Ukraine and Bessarabia (where most of the empire’s Jews lived) in 1903 and again during the Revolution of 1905. To the authorities, the Jews were themselves to blame. Tsar Nicholas told his minister of war after a particularly repugnant pogrom in Kishinev in 1903 that the attacks had been warranted, for “the Jews needed to be taught a lesson because they had been putting on airs and leading the revolutionary movement.” But as bad as anti-Jewish violence had been under the tsars, it exploded with the collapse of any central authority. In the cauldron of the civil war, the Jews became defenseless scapegoats. The atrocities reached their height in 1919. Homes were destroyed, women and girls were raped and mutilated; entire families were brutally murdered. Much of the barbarity was carried out by the Whites who believed bolshevism to be a Jewish plot against Christian Russia. Nevertheless, Jews were attacked from all sides and by all social classes; neither the Whites nor the old Russian elite ever had a monopoly on anti-Semitism. Indeed, almost three hundred years earlier Cossack and peasant rebels fighting for control of Ukraine under Bogdan Khmelnitsky had massacred untold numbers of Jews, perhaps well over one hundred thousand.12

  To Bunin, such a bloody history proved that the revolutions of 1917 and the subsequent violence did not represent a departure for Russia, rather a continuation of ancient cycles. “Russian history,” he insisted, “has always been a terrible tragedy.”13 In “The Great Narcotic,” published on December 7, 1919, Bunin described what he saw as an age-old Russian pattern of lurching from one extreme to another, one day carousing, robbing, and murdering and then the next being overcome with “terrible hangovers,” “frenzied sentimentality,” and “repentant tears.”14 No one was blameless for this tragic cycle. Everyone, including Bunin himself, had been, in his estimation, blind to the troubles in Russia, blind out of inertia and fear and self-interest. They, especially the elite, the nobility, had lived frivolously and failed to put in the hard work that might have saved the country.15

  On February 7, 1920, as the Red Army was entering Odessa for the second and final time, Bunin and his wife boarded a ship and sailed off into exile. “This is the last time I will see the Russian shore. I burst out crying. We are on the open sea. How this trip differs from earlier ones. Before us are darkness and terror. Behind us—horror and hopelessness. I continue to worry about those who have been left behind. Did they manage to save themselves?”16 Nevertheless, Bunin never lost faith in Russia: “I will never accept that Russia has been destroyed.”17

  By the beginning of 1920 it was increasingly clear that the Red Army was winning the war. The reasons for the Red victory were many, but perhaps most important was the fact that the Communists spoke more directly to the basic needs of the people, especially that of land, and offered a vision of the future that was more compelling than the murky promise of the Whites.18 Prince Pavel Shcherbatov put it succinctly in early 1920 when he said, “The White army will lose since it is fighting behind an empty banner.”19 Baron Wrangel echoed this sentiment years later when he attributed the main cause for the Whites’ failure to their lack of regard for “the state of feeling among the masses of the people.”20

  As the Red Army pushed back the forces of first Denikin and then Wrangel, a mass exodus from southern Russia and the Crimea began in the spring of 1919. It lasted for more than a year. After their frightening escape from the northern Caucasus, the family of Dmitry Sheremetev managed to reach the Crimea in early 1919. Dmitry and Ira and Ira’s mother settled in the Vorontsov palace at Alupka; their daughter Lili Vyazemsky and her mother-in-law, Princess Maria Vyazemsky, were put up in a house on the grounds of the Yusupov estate of Koreiz, near Yalta. They told their friends of their harrowing experiences in the northern Caucasus and how they were glad to have escaped with their lives.21 The Crimea was then home to many aristocrats and members of the Romanov family, including Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna, her daughter Grand Duchess Xenia, and Grand Dukes Nikolai and Pyotr Nikolaevich, who had settled at the estates of Ai Todor and Dulber. With the sound of gunfire approaching the coast on the night of April 6, the decision was made to evacuate the imperial family. The Romanovs and a few others embarked on the British battleship HMS Marlborough on the seventh and motored a short way to Yalta. It was from here, on the morning of April 11, that the Romanovs finally sailed into exile.22

  The Sheremetevs left Yalta that same day. Dmitry and the boys sailed on the British destroyer Speedy, and Ira and the girls, on the Princess Inna. The family reunited in Constantinople before continuing on together to the Princes’ Islands in the Sea of Marmara. (Ten years later another Russian political exile, Leon Trotsky, landed on one of the islands and spent the next four years of his life there.) Along the way they passed the Marlborough, and the passengers of the Speedy sent Dmitry t
o personally thank the dowager empress for her reluctance to depart Yalta until everyone wishing to leave had been evacuated.23

  Easter 1919 found the Sheremetevs along with several hundred other Russian exiles on the SS Bermudian anchored in the Golden Horn off Constantinople. A candlelight vesper service was conducted on the ship’s deck underneath the minarets of Hagia Sophia. A service was also held that day in the dining room of the dowager empress aboard the Marlborough. Princess Zenaida Yusupov recorded how they all, including Maria Fyodorovna, had tears in their eyes. “It is impossible for all of us not to cry for our dear past, which will never return,” she wrote in her diary. (And it was not just her past that the princess regretted having left behind. Upon disembarking the next day at Malta, she was amazed to see how much baggage the imperial family had managed to take with them. “If I had known that they had so many trunks,” the princess huffed, “I wouldn’t have left so many of our own possessions behind for the Bolsheviks!”)24

  The Sheremetevs reached Malta toward the end of April and from there sailed on to the Continent. Thanks to some shares in a Baku oil company they had taken with them, Dmitry and Ira had enough money to buy a house in Cap d’Antibes. They remained there for several years until the money ran out and then moved to Rome, where their daughter Praskovya was engaged to Grand Duke Roman Petrovich of Russia, the son of Grand Duke Pyotr Nikolaevich and Grand Duchess Milica Nikolaevna (née princess of Montenegro). In 1926, Dmitry became the first chairman of the Union of the Russian Nobility in Emigration.25 He died and was buried in Rome in 1943; Ira followed in 1959. Their son Sergei fought in the civil war before settling in Italy with his parents. Another son, Nikolai, married Princess Irina Yusupov, the only daughter of Prince Felix Yusupov, Rasputin’s murderer, and went to work as a captain’s assistant for a number of cruise lines. Vasily, their youngest child, found work as a chauffeur. Later he and his wife, Daria Tatishchev, purchased a farm and vineyard and ran a small inn in the Savoy region of France before moving to Paris around 1941.26