Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith

  Marta was part of a wave of former nobles who left Petrograd for Moscow in the early 1920s. The movement out of the old capital had begun during the revolution and picked up pace during NEP. If early on many nobles had left to try to escape the street violence and then the attention of the Cheka, by the early 1920s they were coming back since life in Moscow, grim as it was, was more vibrant and exciting and offered more opportunities for work and education, even if it placed them directly in the shadow of the central authorities. Kirill Golitsyn was one of the former nobles who departed Petrograd for Moscow with the introduction of NEP. Moscow struck Kirill as the center of everything. Everyone seemed to be out having fun, in cafés, restaurants, and theaters, at dances and house parties, and Kirill wanted to be part of the action.10

  Like the rest of his family, Kirill considered NEP the first intelligent act of the new Soviet state, and he arrived in Moscow in late 1922 as a nineteen-year-old eager to take advantage of the new conditions. His first order of business was to make some money. After years of drab necessity, Kirill, as was true for many young Russians in those days, wanted to discard his old clothes for something new and stylish. Education, though important, was a secondary concern.11 Two of Kirill’s cousins, Lina Golitsyn and Alka Bobrinsky, were by then back in Moscow, having left Bogoroditsk in 1920 to enroll at the university. They were soon joined by other young members of their extended family—Lina’s sister Sonya, her brothers Vladimir and Sergei, Alka’s sister Sonya, Yuri and Misha Samarin, Mikhail Olsufev, and Artemy Raevsky. They all were young, most still teenagers, and excited to be making their own way in the world, out from under the supervision of their parents. They settled in the old Samarin mansion on Spiridonovka Street in the city center. The house had long since been taken over and consolidated, but they crowded into three empty rooms on the mezzanine, creating a sort of commune of jeunesse déclassée.12

  Yuri Samarin later recalled of this time:

  Thus began the era that became known as “Spiridonovki.” It was a collection of carefree youth whose lives until then had been nothing more than digging up potatoes and cutting firewood. A happy and, I would say, talented life began, although it was, thanks to our young age, rather wild. In the evenings until late into the night we played all sorts of games, including charades, and would sleep till midday, when the next trader in old clothes and things would knock on the door. Then we would head for the café by Nikitsky Gates and tuck into buns and liver sausage, not seen for a long time. Taking care of business, tending to our studies, that is, preoccupied us little. [. . .] Our life was disorganized, but friendly and harmonious, and our pranks were generally in this same spirit.13

  They were desperately poor. Lina once wrote her mother that she could not go out since the sole had come off one of her shoes and she did not have another pair or the money to repair it.14 They sold the Samarins’ remaining possessions to get by.15 The 1920s saw a brisk trade in art, jewelry, and antiques as the old nobility unloaded for money the last of its treasures on the new rich of Soviet Russia. A key role in this trade was played by the mákler, or broker acting as middleman for a commission. The brokers were often people with good connections among the former nobles, individuals such as Georgy Osorgin. The Osorgins were an old provincial noble family from Kaluga, driven off their estate of Sergievskoe by the Bolsheviks in 1918. Georgy was respected for his honesty and integrity, and so he was entrusted to arrange many of these sales.16 It was a shady business, and the sellers, including the Golitsyns, were often taken advantage of. In the early 1920s, the Golitsyns disposed of books, jewelry, tsarist medals, paintings, and silver champagne buckets. They sold the mayor’s old fur coat, though they did not get as much for it as hoped because it was rather worn and dreadfully out of fashion.17 Of course, families like the Golitsyns were among the fortunate. Some young women of the old elite had nothing to sell but their bodies. It has been estimated that more than 40 percent of the prostitutes in Moscow in the early 1920s were from the gentry or once well-off families. The American Frank Golder was appalled at the pathetic condition of young women of the old elite in Moscow, noting that even prostitution did not pay enough to save them. As another American Golder knew at the time put it, “You can get any girl for a square meal.” 18

  Although poor, this young gang on Spiridonovka was happy and overflowing with enthusiasm for life’s simple pleasures. The parties, games, and dancing went on almost every night, often till dawn. They were forever playing jokes and pulling pranks, gossiping, and flirting. Georgy Osorgin fell in love with Lina Golitsyn, and they married in the autumn of 1923. Their marriage ended tragically six years later.19

  Although it needed no help, the young Russians’ social life was given a boost in the late summer of 1921 with the arrival of the Americans. In response to an appeal by the Soviet Union, the United States agreed to take on a massive famine relief program in Russia. Known as the American Relief Administration (ARA), the program was led by Herbert Hoover, the future U.S. president and the country’s leading figure in organizing help for Europe’s starving population after World War I. The ARA, operated in Russia by three hundred American men from August 1921 to June 1923, fed eleven million people a day at its high point at a cost of sixty million dollars. The work of the ARA saved countless lives and eased the suffering of an entire nation, making its designation as the “beau geste of the twentieth century” justly deserved.20

  About fifty of the American men were stationed in Moscow. They were set up in the large houses of former nobles, each given a nickname based on its colored facade: the Pink, Blue, Brown, Green, or White House. The main administration was housed at 30 Spiridonovka Street, a large gray mansion down the street from the Samarin house. The ARA hired as local guides, interpreters, translators, and secretaries many Russians, mostly women, a great number of them from the former nobility who had the requisite education and knowledge of English. No one could have imagined then that working for the ARA could have harmful consequences. Yet later, after the Americans had left, many of these Russian employees were arrested or exiled as spies.21

  Lina and Sonya Golitsyn and Alka Bobrinsky all got jobs with the ARA. Lina wrote her mother in Bogoroditsk how excited she was to be working for the Americans since they paid “huge wages.” The Russian employees also received food parcels, and the Americans helped process aid from relatives abroad: family members could send the ARA ten dollars, and their relations in Russia would receive the equivalent in foodstuffs.22 Although modest by American standards, the parcels evoked awe among the Russians; “the food of the gods,” was how Irina Skariatina described her ARA rations.23 The first crate of food to reach the Golitsyns in Bogoroditsk caused a sensation. The entire family gathered around the wooden crate emblazoned with an American flag, opened the lid, and then stood back in wonder at its contents of canned condensed milk, American bacon (something no one had ever seen before), macaroni, rice, and sugar, all of it wrapped up in bright, decorative packaging.24 Such food was not available in Moscow stores, for any price.

  The Russians found the work fun and exciting and drew satisfaction from knowing they were doing something important. Kirill Golitsyn wrote of the immense impression the “elegant and independent” Americans made on them, how they behaved so freely and spent their money without the slightest care. They were unlike any people the Russians had ever known.25 Irina Tatishchev was hired as a bookkeeper for the ARA and then promoted to secretary. She liked working with the Americans: “They were so merry, not like all those gloomy Soviet officials who were dominated by fear.”26 Sonya Bobrinsky worked as the secretary to the American William Reswick. His interpreter was a “Princess Irina,” whom he described as “a girl of rare beauty from one of Russia’s great aristocratic clans whose entire family had apparently been murdered by the peasants during the revolution.” Reswick was amazed by Irina’s energy and boundless compassion for the poor and suffering.27

  Not all the former nobles were so enamored of their American employers,
however. Yelizaveta Fen worked in Moscow for the ARA and then for the Quakers, one of the other Western groups involved in the aid program. Like her peers, she got the job because of her knowledge of English and general education, and she too was happy to be receiving the food rations in addition to free medical care and imported medicines. But Yelizaveta did not like most of the Americans and Englishmen she met. She was especially upset with one American woman she met while working for the Quakers. The woman came in wearing an evening dress with a fine fur and rings and started to talk like a Red commissar. When Yelizaveta tried to open the woman’s eyes to the famine and despotic violence around them, the American woman looked at her with pity, Yelizaveta later recalled, as if to say: “Poor girl! Her family must have lost all their privileges in the Revolution; no wonder she’s against the Soviet government!”28

  Fen believed the Westerners then visiting Russia came with ideological blinders. No one cared to hear about the plight of people like her. She later recalled how she used to love to visit the museums at the former Yusupov estate of Arkhangelskoe and the Sheremetevs’ Ostankino. She would stroll about under the stare of dour attendants and admire the art, paintings, photographs, and antiques that made it seem as if the owners had just stepped out for a moment. At Ostankino she was transfixed by the story of forbidden love between Count Nikolai Sheremetev and his serf-mistress and secret wife, Praskovya “The Pearl” Kovalyova. When she came across foreign visitors, Fen tried to tell them this remarkable story, but no one wanted to listen to her, preferring the guides’ officially sanctioned explanations of the former gentry as “tyrants” and “retrogrades.”29

  Fen’s reaction was not the norm, however, and it was not long before the Russians and Americans at the ARA were not just working together but socializing. The Americans threw big parties at their rented mansions, and the Russians reciprocated in their dim, cramped apartments. There were also parties at the home of John Speed Elliott, an ARA man and the chief representative of Averell Harriman’s interests in Russia. His secretary, Alexandra Meiendorff, a former noble related to the Sheremetevs, was a frequent guest at his place, as were Vladimir Golitsyn and Yelena and Nikolai Sheremetev.30 The American reporter Hullinger attended many of these parties, including one thrown by the Bobrinskys. He remarked on the contrast between the grim living conditions and lack of food and the infectious happiness of his Russian hosts. Everyone was laughing, flirting, and dancing. It made him wonder if the revolution had freed these young people to a lifestyle unknown and impossible to their parents. “Over it all hung an atmosphere of free camaraderie which would not have been possible under the gilded chandeliers and in the stately drawing-rooms of their ancestors. There was an unaffected, frank jolliness that reminded me of our own American Far West.” The young women in their “pre-war dress” looked “as charming and pretty as if just home from college.” One of these noble daughters told Hullinger, “I am trying to live on the surface of life. I have been in the depths for five years. Now I am going to be superficial. It hurts less.”31

  The Americans offered an escape from life’s dark depths, and the Russians were grateful. They were fascinated by the Americans and their culture, especially jazz and the fox-trot. Young Russians, and not just the former nobles working for the ARA, wanted to have fun, to be frivolous and silly; they rejected the dour puritanism of official Communist culture that deemed fun to be bourgeois. The Russians and Americans danced through the night, the latest records from America spinning on their gramophones, and then raced through the empty streets in the ARA’s automobiles as the sun rose over Moscow.32 The American men were besotted by these exotic “Madame Butterflies,” and their advances were frequently returned.33 In 1923, Alka Bobrinsky married her ARA boss, Philip Baldwin, and not long thereafter left Russia for Italy to live with his mother. Her younger sister Sonya married the Englishman Reginald Witter the following year, and they left for his homeland. Not all these unions ended happily. Irina Tatishchev heard of one Russian girl from the ARA who had left Russia with an Englishman, only to learn that he had no intention of marrying her but set her up as his mistress. Devastated at his betrayal, she committed suicide.34

  From the start, Lenin and the Communist leadership had been suspicious of the ARA and had accepted it into the country with great reluctance. It seemed to represent a beachhead of bourgeois influence. The Cheka closely monitored the ARA as well as the Russians who worked for it.35 Many of these Russians were later singled out for repression. The Communist leadership saw the West not just as a political threat but as a more insidious source of cultural contamination. Both Maxim Gorky and Anatoly Lunacharsky were shrill critics of the fox-trot, which they considered decadent and lacking in class consciousness, a dance that was too individualistic and improvisational. The Communists wanted dancing that was only collective and planned. Gorky was convinced the fox-trot fostered moral degeneracy and led inexorably to homosexuality; Lunacharsky wanted to ban all syncopated music in the entire country. Even Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Futurist poet turned Soviet propagandist, denounced the fox-trot as “bourgeois masturbation.” Foreign jazz was eventually outlawed, and playing American jazz records was punishable by a fine of one hundred rubles and six months’ jail time. No one would be getting hot in the Workers’ Paradise.36

  Back in Bogoroditsk, Anna Golitsyn worried about her children living on their own in Moscow. She sent Lev Bobrinsky’s sister to check on them at Spiridonovka. After going around and visiting, she wrote back to Anna that they were doing fine and she was not to worry since this was proving to be a good “school of life for our young folk.” This did not put Anna at ease, and later she had Lilya Sheremetev check in on the young people as well. Her report to Anna was equally positive.37

  Heartsick at their lengthy separation, Anna wrote a letter in the winter of 1922:

  My dear, sweet older children, if only you could know, feel, or understand how much I think of you and how my soul aches for each of you, how I pray for you, and how I pine for you.

  You used to say about me: Mama always says—“Pray,” and all of her conversations always lead back to this. You still do not understand this. You are young, you think you are strong, and you have not yet felt just how weak we are. How difficult it is, impossible in fact, to perfect ourselves without help from on high, to live well without help from on high. Prayer strengthens one’s desire to live a new life, it is what animates and inspires us. God cannot but answer if you ask Him to help you live a good life. Remember this always, believe this, and then the impossible will become possible.

  Maybe someday, perhaps, you will recall my words and they will help you.38

  They all would need a strong faith in the years ahead.

  15

  NOBLE REMAINS

  Several blocks from the old Samarin mansion on Spiridonovka in the direction of the Kremlin, the remaining members of the Sheremetev family continued to hold out at the Corner House. In August 1921, the Socialist Academy, in control of the building since 1918, gave the family one week to move out of the third floor to make way for fifty students from the Institute of Marx and Engels. The family packed up their things and moved to the top floor, where twenty-eight people now had to share ten rooms. Other family members were scattered about other parts of the house, making for a chaotic situation. The house was stuffed and overcrowded. Bookcases, old portraits in large gilt frames, all manner of trunks, chests, and boxes with the Sheremetevs’ possessions crammed the Corner House’s many corridors, staircases, and storerooms; despite the previous requisitioning by the Cheka, the walls were still covered with Gobelins, and the floors with heavy old rugs; dark mahogany furniture filled the rooms.1

  The Corner House was home to three branches of the family, those of the widows Lilya Sheremetev, Anna Saburov, and Maria Gudovich and their fourteen children, as well as a number of other relations. Lilya, aged forty, had become the mistress of the house. She made a strong impression on young Sergei Golitsyn when he saw her for the first time
since returning to Moscow from Bogoroditsk. This was no regular woman, he thought, but “a Lady.” “Her entire appearance and proud carriage were so regal and so beautiful that in my mind I called her a queen.” Lilya held out her hand to Sergei, not for him to shake but to kiss. Born too late to have learned the etiquette of his parents’ generation, a nervous Sergei was not sure quite how to proceed, but he somehow managed to awkwardly put his lips to the ends of her fingers.2

  Anna and Maria shared a room on the house’s top floor. Astral specters, they were almost never seen, leaving their room mostly to go to church to pray for their missing husbands, whose deaths they refused to accept. Sergei Golitsyn had been visiting the house for two years before seeing them for the first time. He found the two sisters “majestic” yet “pale, their skin like porcelain. They were silent, sad, and having left the vanities of the world behind them, they rarely ventured out into the corridors, and when they did, everyone stepped aside to make way for them.”3 Olga Sheremetev found herself drawn to Maria. “It’s strange,” she wrote in her diary, “but whenever I see Maria I want to write. She is an unusual person, an unusually good person, who believes like a child and without any doubts. [. . .] Still, she is not a fanatic or pedant, and whenever I see her, my soul is warmed.”4 The presence of these widows, as well as the sad recent history of the house, created an atmosphere markedly different from that which reigned on Spiridonovka. The Corner House was not a lively place; rather, “a certain etiquette was followed here combined with a premonition of the fragility and ephemerality of the merriment that recalled ‘the feast during the plague.’ ”510

  This was not to say that no fun was had there, however, for the many younger Sheremetevs, Saburovs, and Gudoviches liked to have a good time. Yelena Sheremetev, who turned seventeen in 1921, was now living in the room where her grandfather Count Sergei had died three years earlier. Like her cousins, she studied rather haphazardly when she had the time and money and inclination, though it seems her main goal was keeping up an active social life. She loved going to the cinema with her friends to see the reigning stars—especially the beautiful Vera Kholodnaya (“The Queen of the Screen”)—or to marvel at the latest silent film featuring the suave thief Arsène Lupin.6 Yelena’s young cousin Grisha Trubetskoy shared her passion and collected photographs of his favorite actors—Buster Keaton, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin.7 Yelena and her cousins also liked to go hear Fyodor Chaliapin at the Moscow Conservatory and to Boris Godunov and Demon at the Bolshoi.8 Yelena, her sister Natalya (then fifteen), and their cousin Merinka Gudovich (sixteen) were never apart and made up their own “merry young pack,” to quote one admiring male visitor. They all were pretty and just on the threshold of womanhood, ready to trade their girlish braids for the latest stylish cuts. They made a bit of money by selling pies in the coffeehouses then springing up around Moscow.9