Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith

  Few, if any, of the Russian exiles left happily, and many abhorred the thought of quitting their homeland; leaving was a last resort. Prince Vladimir Obolensky, a longtime radical who had been arrested and exiled under the tsar, found himself in the Crimea as the Reds approached. He had never wanted to leave Russia, calling it “degrading to flee across the border just to save one’s own skin.” He had even refused a passport and a chance to leave earlier. But when his two sons suddenly appeared, having fought for the Whites, been captured by the Red Army, and then escaped to their father for protection, he felt it was his duty to help them out to safety. And so, reluctantly, he left Russia in November 1920. Like most of those sailing away across the Black Sea, Obolensky could not imagine that he was leaving for good.27

  Some did sense they were parting with Russia forever. Yelizaveta Rodzianko sailed from the Crimea on the steamer Hamburg on February 16, 1920. As the sun faded in the cold sky, she watched the coast slip away. She found it beautiful. “I understood that I was seeing this beauty in all likelihood for the last time, that I would probably never return to Russia, that it was as if we were sailing off into space . . . I even tried to summon from within myself a feeling of grief at parting with my Motherland . . . But I could only feel one thing: happiness that we had escaped, that we were leaving, and taking our children with us.”28

  As he saw the Crimean coast shrinking away Prince Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky listened to the men on deck around him talking about how they would be returning to Russia in triumph before two months were out. The prince disagreed. He knew then they were leaving for good.

  I had saved my life, but it was dreadful to feel at twenty-eight that one was a living dead man. The fate of belonging to a class which, to use the picturesque expression of Trotsky, was headed for the dustbin of history was too overwhelming. In my dreams I had only wanted to serve my people, however small my place might be; instead I had fought them and had been cast out. In a gale only oaks and reeds can think of resisting; leaves are blown away and go where the wind wills, I said to myself.29

  Leaving was especially hard for those exiles with family still in Russia. As they passed Constantinople, Dmitry Sheremetev could not help thinking of his mother. She had been born in the Turkish capital, and Dmitry wondered how she was faring back in Moscow and if he would ever see her again. Prince Vladimir Emanuelovich Golitsyn left the Crimea with his wife and children the day after the Marlborough had sailed. A few nights before leaving, he dreamed of his brother back in Russia.

  I saw Niki in my dream: as if he was in prison, and when I came to him he was making his toilet as usual, i.e., washing his torso, hauling down his night shirt. His cheeks were hollow, and he was absolutely pathetic and indifferent to everything around him. [. . .] I cried at his sight and was suggested to share his fate if I felt so sorry for him. But I saw dear Niki so clearly although I have not seen him in truth for almost three years now!30

  (Niki—Prince Nikolai Emanuelovich Golitsyn—was indeed imprisoned in 1919 and then again repeatedly throughout the 1920s. His brother eventually managed to help Nikolai and his family escape the Soviet Union in 1932, thanks to a personal appeal to Stalin by German President Hindenburg.31)

  The final evacuation of the Crimea took place in mid-November 1920 under General Wrangel. As they prepared to leave, Wrangel invited to join them all those who would be in danger were they to fall into the enemy’s hands. In the span of a few days, 146,000 people—twice the expected number—were placed on boats and sent out over the waters of the Black Sea toward Constantinople. Wrangel embarked from Sevastopol on the cruiser General Kornilov on the fourteenth. “We cannot foretell our future fate,” he told his fellow exiles. “May God grant us strength and wisdom to endure this period of Russian misery, and to survive it.”32

  The Russians who fled the approaching Red Army were not exaggerating the danger. Although Mikhail Frunze, the Red commander, had issued generous surrender terms, approximately fifty thousand people—most members of the former privileged classes—were shot or hanged during the final weeks of 1920. As the Red Army moved into the Crimea, the Cheka began registering the cities’ inhabitants and dividing them into three categories: those to be shot; those to be sent to concentration camps; those to be spared.33 All former White officers were ordered to appear for registration and promised safety. The several thousand who complied were arrested and then taken out over the course of several nights and murdered.34 No one was safe. In Yalta in December 1920, the Bolsheviks even shot eighty-four-year-old Princess Nadezhda Baryatinsky, along with her daughter and son-in-law.35

  The killing of former White officers across Russia continued until 1922, despite an amnesty of June 1920 extended to all White officers and soldiers. In Yekaterinodar, about three thousand officers were shot; in Odessa as many as two thousand; in Yekaterinburg, twenty-eight hundred. The worst, however, was in the Crimea, where as many as fifty thousand officers and officials were executed.36 Justification, after a fashion, for the executions was made with a November 1921 modification to the June 1920 amnesty, according to which all those who had voluntarily fought with the White armies for “the goal of defending their class interests and the bourgeois order” were no longer covered by the amnesty and were henceforth to be deemed “outcasts.”37

  Around the time the White Army under Wrangel was abandoning the fight, the White forces collapsed in Siberia. Ataman Semenov was run out of his capital in Chita on October 22, 1920, and what remained of his forces fled to Manchuria. In one of the most bizarre chapters of the civil war, Baron Ungern-Sternberg, a Baltic nobleman and former lieutenant of Semenov’s, set up a murderous, occultic base in Outer Mongolia for attacking Soviet Russia. He was overthrown in 1921, captured, and executed. The last White outpost was in Vladivostok, ruled by one of Kolchak’s generals until his defeat by the Red Army in late October 1922. With that, the White forces had been crushed, and the civil war was truly over.38

  No accurate figures exist for how many people had abandoned Russia by the end of the war. The estimates range from five hundred thousand to three million. The exodus included Russians from all social strata; most of them were not noble, but peasants and members of the middle class.39 Nonetheless, the majority of the Russian nobility had left the country. According to one source, by 1921 no more than 12 percent of the prerevolutionary nobility, about ten thousand families or some fifty thousand individuals, was still in Russia.40 The revolution and civil war had torn the nobility in two; from now on the lives of mothers and sons, brothers and sisters would move in different directions under different circumstances. A chasm began to open between the nobles who had stayed and those who had departed that grew wider in the coming decades and left family members strangers to one another.

  By January 1921, Felix Dzerzhinsky could at last boast that the exploiters of the old regime had been vanquished: “The landowners as a class have disappeared, the bourgeoisie has been declassed, the political masters are now nonentities.”41 The Red Newspaper expounded on the victory over the nobility in an article titled “Syphilis.”

  The Russian nobility has died of syphilis. Yes, yes, don’t be surprised, of syphilis. There have been such cases before in history when entire classes, entire social groups, have become ill with syphilis, of course, in the metaphorical sense—mental syphilis, moral syphilis, ethical syphilis—and they died slow, tragic, harrowing, terrible deaths. [. . .]

  In the Crimea an entire class has died an insane death from syphilis. The Russian aristocracy, that very class upon which this syphilitic and mad power had been based, is dead, as is the “White Movement.” [. . .] There is no more “White Movement,” for it has died its final death.42

  But not everyone of this class had died or fled. Galina von Meck was among those who remained. She observed:

  The world we knew had died, tomorrow did not exist; there was only today. The future was dim and the present a chaos. Yet throughout it all we developed a toughness, an inner resistance, which strength
ened with the passage of time. Although many people fled the country, others, the brave ones, accepted the challenge of a ravaged homeland. We had nothing in our purses, nothing in our stoves and nothing in our bellies, but we were very much alive.43

  Some in the Soviet government agreed with von Meck’s final assertion, and they were convinced that the war against the old ruling class was not over. Rather, only the first battle of the war had been won, and a new one was beginning, one in which the enemy would be better hidden and harder to spot but no less dangerous. In 1921, Lenin observed that even though the noble landlords and the capitalists had been fully expropriated and destroyed as a political class, remnants of the enemy remained. Forced to hide their identities and driven underground, some had taken up positions within the institutions of “Soviet power.”44 For Lenin, the former people left behind after the defeat of the White armies constituted a fifth column collaborating in secret with the Communists’ enemies abroad. The threat of the old order entered a new phase.45

  PART IV

  NEP

  We’ll drink, we’ll carouse, and when death comes, we’ll die.

  —Dmitry Gudovich, Kaluga, 1927

  14

  SCHOOL OF LIFE

  After two revolutions and seven years of war, Russia in 1921 lay in ruins. The cost in human lives was staggering. Since the autumn of 1917, approximately ten million people had perished of disease, starvation, execution, and battle wounds. Millions more, many of them Russia’s best educated and most skilled, had abandoned the country. The economy and industrial infrastructure were in shambles. The total value of finished products produced in 1921 amounted to a mere 16 percent of that in 1912. According to one estimate, the national income in 1920 was only 40 percent of that of 1913. The American dollar, which had traded for two rubles in 1914, was worth twelve hundred rubles in 1920. Russia’s cities and towns had been emptied out; Moscow and Petrograd had lost more than half their residents. Years of fighting, followed by back-to-back droughts in 1920 and 1921, unleashed famine along the Volga River that spread to much of central and northern Russia. Such was the extent of the hunger that some Russians were driven to cannibalism. Millions died. The entire social fabric had been shredded. Families had been torn apart, and an estimated seven million orphaned children were living on the streets, begging, stealing, and selling their bodies to survive.1

  Although they had defeated the Whites, the Communists (the Bolsheviks’ new official name from 1918) faced a restive populace. In the winter of 1920–21, labor unrest erupted in several Russian cities, including Moscow and Petrograd, the cradle of the revolution. Workers went out on strike, demanding larger food rations, greater control over the workplace, and the reintroduction of civil rights. The authorities responded with violence. In Saratov, for example, 219 workers were arrested and sentenced to death, and others were sent to prison.2 In March 1921, sailors at the Kronstadt naval base rebelled, demanding an end to state control of the economy and one-party rule. This uprising too was brutally crushed. Hundreds of captured sailors, the Communists’ allies during the revolutionary days of 1917, were shot, and thousands sent off to concentration camps in the Russian Far North.

  The greatest threat to Soviet power, however, came from the peasants. Angered over grain requisitioning and other harsh treatment, peasants rose up in armed rebellion that stretched from Ukraine to Siberia. Such was the extent of the anger toward the Communists that in certain areas they could no longer be confident of the loyalty of their own troops. In 1920 and early 1921, some of the uprisings reached massive scale. In Tambov, Alexander Antonov led an army of fifty thousand peasants, the Greens, that overthrew Communist authority throughout a sizable portion of the province. Like the workers, Russia’s peasants resented not only the state’s interference in their economic lives but the repression of their political rights, and some peasants even called for the reconvening of the Constituent Assembly. The authorities trembled with the gravity of the threat. “This counter-revolution is without doubt more dangerous than Denikin, Yudenich, and Kolchak taken together,” Lenin warned. At a terrible cost in human lives, Red Army troops defeated the insurgents through a brutal campaign of terror, poison gas, and mass internment in concentration camps. Their ruthless methods exacerbated the famine, thus contributing to the tremendous scale of suffering and death.3

  By the spring of 1921, it was clear to Lenin that the groups in whose name the Communists had seized power had turned against them. Concessions would have to be made were the Soviet state to survive. Beginning with the Tenth Party Congress that spring, Lenin introduced a series of reforms that came to be known as the New Economic Policy, or NEP. Never intended as a permanent program, NEP was conceived as a temporary retreat to allow the country to recover and the government to maintain control before returning to the full-scale construction of a socialist society. Forced grain requisitions were replaced by a tax, and the peasants were permitted to keep their surpluses and sell them for a profit on the open market. The so-called commanding heights of the economy (large- and medium-scale industry, finance, foreign trade, wholesale commerce) were retained by the state, but retail trade and small manufacturing (fewer than twenty workers) were legalized. Reform of the financial system and the introduction of the gold-backed chervónets as the new monetary unit brought stability and tamed the wild inflation of the civil war years. NEP proved to be immensely successful at reviving Russia’s ravaged economy. Within a few years, agriculture, industry, and trade had rebounded, and the cities came back to life. Yet with economic recovery there arose a new bourgeoisie of rich traders and entrepreneurs, the Nepmen, whose wealth and ostentatious lifestyles echoed the inequities of the old regime and caused many Russians to wonder whether the promise of the revolution had been betrayed.4

  The British reporter Walter Duranty arrived in Moscow in 1921. Among his earliest impressions of the Soviet capital was the dreadful condition of the old aristocracy. “The countesses work as servant girls and the ex-servant girls ride in government automobiles as heads of important offices,” he observed.

  Most pitiable is the lot of those aristocrats, male or female, who are devoid of any qualifications of practical value. One sees them stand patiently for hours in the open-air markets holding coats, furs, small pieces of silver, or last scraps of jewelry by sale of which they can eke out existence for a few weeks longer. The New Economic Policy has given a chance to the younger ones to open restaurants, hat stores, etc. but the position of the older ones is hopeless. However pathetic may be the sight of fortune’s favorites “fallen from their high estate,” there is no escape from the law of the Russian hive: “The drones must die.”5

  To another Western reporter, Edwin Hullinger, the same scene testified to the revolution’s great achievement. Having stripped away the institutional foundations upon which class and caste had been built, the revolution had exposed people’s true essence:

  This process has resulted in many startling revelations, where every man and woman, regardless of their former social caste, has been measured up in accordance with his inherent qualities and strength. [. . .] Real nobility in the primal elements of life has been brought out and enriched, made nobler than ever, whether in prince or peasant. Feebleness and smallness, formally screened by breeding or etiquette, have been exposed. [. . .] Like a giant X-ray, the Revolution has gone through the social structure, revealing the human fiber of which it was made.6

  As proof, Hullinger quoted the words of a former countess. “Yes, many of us can see that the Revolution was for the best,” she told him. “It made us into living, real people. Many were only existing before. We have gained confidence in ourselves because we know we can do things. I like it better. I would not go back to the old. And there are many young people of our class who think as I do. But we paid a terrible price. I presume it was necessary, however.” Hullinger visited the apartment of an old lady-in-waiting to the empress, her daughter, and their former servant. Below the harsh glare of the single electri
c lightbulb illuminating their one room, the daughter told him: “We have learned to draw happiness from the littlest of things. Before a diamond piece seldom held my delight for more than a moment. Now I am made happy—so happy—by a new pair of knitted gloves, a glimpse into a foreign newspaper, or a chance smile which fate throws my way on some kind face.” Struck by her words, he told them: “You have simply grown nobler.”7

  “People who had never been near a stove learned to cook,” wrote Alexandra Tolstoy. “They learned to do washing, to sweep streets; they had to hunt for food, sell, exchange, travel on the roofs of trains, on the couplings. They even learned to steal. But what was to be done?”8 As for Alexandra, she was among the down-and-out aristocrats selling her few belongings (some old shoes and dresses, a clock, teapot, and lace) on the Moscow sidewalks.

  Marta Almedingen shared Alexandra’s somber assessment after arriving in Moscow from Petrograd that same year.

  In Moscow the vanished aristocracy in Russia went on living out their squalid existence. In Petrograd you never heard much about them, at least not in the world I lived in. But in Moscow they seemed everywhere, crushed, piteous, and almost forsaken. It looked as though the same city which had once surrounded them with Oriental splendor was now determined to hug them closer and closer to her own thin and hungry breast, sucking their mind and blood.9