Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith

  Yelena’s brother Nikolai was a gifted violinist, and in 1920 he started playing in the orchestra of the Herzen Club on Novinsky Boulevard. Over the next few years he played for a number of groups, including the Dmitrovsky Dramatic Theater and the Stanislavsky Studio. In 1924, Nikolai was hired as the concertmaster, as well as composer and violinist, at the Moscow Art Theater’s Third Studio, later renamed after its founder, Yevgeny Vakhtangov. He remained at the Vakhtangov Theater for the rest of his life.10

  Tatiana Aksakov-Sivers frequented the Corner House in those days, and she was impressed by this young generation, which she described as “talented and beautiful.” Of all of them, she was most impressed by Boris Saburov.11 Here is how Yuri Samarin remembered him years later:

  Boris Saburov was an attractive personality in many ways. At first glance he seemed dry and vain, but once he opened up, one saw in him a very unique nature. A gifted artist, and subtle poet, he brought art and culture to our lives in distinctive, special ways. On his own initiative, he began publishing a hand-made journal at Vozdvizhenka under the name “Pens for Dreams.” He was both its editor and the author of its contents, and in a real sense he did it all himself. [. . .]

  We would await with interest every Saturday when a new issue of “Pens” would appear. It would always have colorful illustrations in a vaguely abstract style, short novellas, verse, and caricatures poking fun at each of us. Boris was the first to introduce us to Esenin. It was his reading of Esenin that taught us to love this magnificent, unique lyric.12

  Another of the talented and beautiful young creatures was Alexander Golitsyn. Sergei Golitsyn described his cousin as a natural leader, “handsome, confident, brave.” Alexander’s family had been run off their estate of Livny in the summer of 1918. One day in July, a group of peasants came in secret to see Alexander’s father, Vladimir Vladimirovich. “Tomorrow your home is to be burned down,” they told him before slipping away. Their warning likely saved the lives of Vladimir, his wife, Tatiana, and their three young children, Alexander, Yelena, and Olga. They immediately sent the children to Tatiana’s parents in another village, and then Vladimir took off on horseback in the middle of the night to the rail station and caught the first train for Moscow. Tatiana and a servant packed up the house and with the help of friendly peasants carted off what they could take. The next morning a gang of peasants arrived to find the house deserted. They took everything that had been left and then burned it to the ground. Because of the fighting around Livny, the family was separated for two years, and it was not until the spring of 1920 that Vladimir finally managed to locate Tatiana and the children and bring them all back to Moscow.13 Alexander frequented the Corner House in those years as a teenager. He loved to organize amateur theatricals, The Inspector General, Woe from Wit, and Boris Godunov being his favorites. An excellent actor, he was always given the starring role.14

  The three widows of the Corner House personified old Russia and provided a link to the past for the younger generation, many of whom had been born too late to have known tsarist Russia as adults. They tried to inculcate in their children an appreciation for life before the revolution, for the traditions of the nobility, for the customs of their families and their vanished world. Although their children naturally had their own tastes in music, dance, and literature and lived according to a different code shaped by recent experience, still they did not reject the lost world of their parents. Rather, they remained open to the past, even curious, and sought to hold on to what could be salvaged and incorporated into this new, radically altered society.

  It was this spirit that made possible the surprising rebirth of one of the defining features of noble life: the ball. Sergei Golitsyn accompanied his mother to the first of these Soviet-era balls at the Corner House. It was held in a brightly lit hall on the top floor, with a piano, chairs, and couches placed along the walls. Around the room were tables with cheese and sausage sandwiches and apples; one of the young men would invariably spike the bowl of cranberry punch with some moonshine. All the ladies held lorgnettes and watched from the sides. Groups of young people told jokes and stories, laughed, and went out to smoke. When a young lady entered, the men would go over and kiss her hand; if she was an “old maid,” they would bow. Since none of the men had tailcoats or dinner jackets, they agreed in advance to come in their everyday wear, be it an old officer’s uniform, a velvet jacket, or tolstóvka, a type of long, belted blouse. Vladimir Golitsyn wore his sailor’s suit. The ladies were in long white dresses. Many had put in a great deal of time preparing: Lina Golitsyn and the other young ladies collected fabric and lace to make their dresses for the occasion. Everyone agreed that the “merry young pack” of Yelena, Natalya, and Merinka were the beauties of the ball. The pianist and master of ceremonies was Vladimir Gadon. A small, ruddy-faced old man with a white beard and tsarist officer’s jacket, the shoulders now marked with dark patches where his epaulets had once sat, Gadon had been an adjutant to Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich and the longtime director of the governor-general’s balls in Moscow. Everyone in prerevolutionary Moscow aristocratic society had danced under his direction. Gadon would wait for Lilya Sheremetev to make a sign with her handkerchief before beginning the festivities. Every ball began with a quadrille, followed by a waltz, and then another quadrille, and so on. Although then all the rage, the fox-trot was never danced at these balls since the older ladies found it corrupt and decadent.15

  All the dancers were former people. For many, their futures would be tragic. Sergei Golitsyn recalled decades later:

  And what of the fates of the participants of this ball? I started to compose a mournful list, read it over and stopped in horror: it was too terrifying to look at. The majority of those young gentlemen and ladies, especially the men, who so lightheartedly amused themselves at the ball later perished in the camps, others, having suffered the torments of Hell, returned, others emigrated, and others were arrested simply for their title.16

  It was at the Corner House balls that Vladimir Golitsyn and Yelena Sheremetev fell in love. They had first met in the summer of 1920. Yelena, her mother, and a young friend by the name of Vanka Spizharny were walking to the Corner House from the Kazan railway station when they came upon Vanka’s friend Vladimir. They all were introduced, and Vladimir joined them as they walked along, Yelena and Lilya in front, the two young men following behind. Vladimir made note of her red cap, her thick braids, and the long lashes framing her large gray eyes. Vladimir left for another Arctic expedition soon thereafter, however, and forgot the pretty young girl. On his visits to Moscow, Vladimir went to see Yelena’s brother Nikolai at the Corner House, where he saw Yelena again. He was soon smitten. It was a difficult position for Vladimir. Yelena had many suitors, and he was still committed to several more long trips exploring the Arctic and was not certain when he would be free to return to Moscow for good. The situation filled him with jealousy. What is more, having liv ed with sailors in the frozen wilderness for years now, far from newly fashionable Moscow, he felt awkward and out of place in his dingy clothes.17

  At the time his jealousy and insecurity got the better of him. None of the men was worthy of being in her very presence or that of the other young ladies. “So many new faces! But they’re all just animals!” he fumed in his diary.

  Some are trying to pass themselves off as real aristocrats, but they’re not succeeding. And the others, the aristocrats, have become animals themselves, just like the former, so degraded and so empty. [. . .] Can it be that even at Vozdvizhenka the strong spirit of the old family traditions is wavering, can it be that even here these vulgar provincial games are flourishing, the kissing, and the men with dirty thoughts reaching out to embrace these trusting, pure girls? My God! How did this happen? Did the revolution so utterly undermine the very root of the Russian aristocracy, forcing it to forget its old traditions!18

  To Vladimir, the balls at the Corner House offered hope that not all the old noble traditions had died and gave him a chance to be
close to Yelena.

  Oh, these balls are good, as are those quadrilles, one moment calmly majestic and then headlong the next, when you feel her there beside you and lovingly hold her trusting hand, which gently squeezes yours. How intoxicating are those fleeting moments during the dances, her timid hands in mine, or those conversations, brief, fragmentary, filled with hesitation and gazes during the pas de quatre, and you forget that you are dancing, your legs moving by themselves, like machines, in time with the music.19

  They went boating at the former Samarin estate of Izmalkovo one summer day. As Vladimir rowed, Yelena’s hand drifted in the water. She picked some water lilies and put them in her hair, making Vladimir love her even more.20 Vladimir’s love for Yelena was chivalrous, almost mystical. During an Easter church service she exuded a sublime, religious aura:

  And when I, looking directly into her eyes, quietly said: “Christ is risen!” she started to glow as if from some inner light! With such sincerity and confidence she said: “He is risen indeed!” which I understood to mean that Christ had arisen again in our souls . . . Conveying a sense of trust, she leaned toward me, but I felt so beneath her that I could not imagine myself worthy of even kissing her.

  In the spring of 1922, he exclaimed, “It’s as if we were born for one another! There’s no way I cannot love her!”21 By late summer, however, Vladimir was gone once more, this time on a three-month expedition aboard the icebreaker Malygin bound for Novaya Zemlya. While he was away, Lina wrote to tell him, “Yelena loves you madly.” Vladimir was back in Moscow for good before year’s end.22 By now they were engaged to be married. Both families were thrilled at the match. Vladimir’s mother told her son that they all found Yelena “beautiful and charming.” The fact that she was a Sheremetev added to the family’s joy; the union of these two great clans was, despite everything the nobility had been through, still an occasion for celebration.23

  Yelena and Vladimir married on April 30, 1923 in Moscow’s Great Ascension Church, where ninety-two years earlier Alexander Pushkin had wed Natalya Goncharova. Their families were there, as well as about a hundred guests. Afterward they dined on fish and cabbage pies back at the Corner House. Boris Saburov read a poem he had written for the occasion. The guests toasted the couple and then smashed their crystal glasses on the parquet. After the party, they conducted Vladimir and Yelena to the station and placed them on a train for their honeymoon in Petrograd.24

  On their return the newlyweds moved into the Golitsyn apartment at 16 Yeropkinsky Lane. The Golitsyns had left Bogoroditsk for Moscow the previous year and managed to buy the apartment thanks to an unexpected inheritance of jewelry from a recently deceased relation. The apartment was small and barely heated; baths were conducted in a porcelain basin filled with water from a pitcher. It was crowded. The mayor and Sofia were there; Mikhail and Anna, their children Sergei, Masha, and Katya; Lina and her husband, Georgy Osorgin; Vladimir Vladimirovich, Tatiana, and their three children; and for a time, the family of Eli and Vladimir Trubetskoy. Space was so limited that Sergei had to sleep in a wardrobe under the women’s dresses. With the money left over after the purchase of the apartment, Vladimir Vladimirovich was able to buy an apartment on Khlebny Lane, and his family moved out after a few months.25

  In September 1923, Vladimir and Eli Trubetskoy and their children left for the town of Sergiev Posad, some fifty miles northeast of Moscow. Home to the fourteenth-century Holy Trinity Monastery of St. Sergius, Sergiev Posad (known for most of the Soviet period as Zagorsk) was one of the most sacred places in Russia. Former nobles began moving to Sergiev Posad soon after the revolution. Among the first to come were Count Yuri Olsufev and his deeply religious wife, Sofia. St. Sergius is said to have appeared before Sofia in a dream, instructing her to move to Sergiev Posad and live close to his grave. They were joined by other noble families—the Istomins, Naryshkins, Meshcherskys, Lopukhins, as well as the polymath priest and philosopher Pavel Florensky and his family.26 The holiness of Sergiev Posad offered spiritual consolation after the trauma of the revolution and civil war and encouraged humble acceptance of an inscrutable and unpredictable future.

  Vladimir Trubetskoy managed to find work as a pianist accompanying silent movies in the local cinema during the day and playing the cello in the orchestra of the town’s main restaurant at night. Not only a fine musician, Vladimir had even composed an operetta based on one of the novellas in Boccaccio’s Decameron that was staged to considerable success in 1922. It was a relatively good time. The Trubetskoys rented the upper floor of a house with a kitchen garden out back and had enough money to hire a nanny and a cook. Vladimir enjoyed his work and approached it seriously, even watching the movies in advance so he could select the most appropriate numbers to play for each scene. Vladimir became friends with the writer Mikhail Prishvin, and the pair lost themselves for days hunting in the nearby forests.27

  Yelena and Vladimir Golitsyn were frequent visitors to Sergiev Posad, and they summered in the village of Glinkova with the extended Golitsyn family. For the first several years of their marriage they lived at the apartment on Yeropkinsky Lane. It was a happy, if busy, time. Their first child, Yelena, was born in 1924, followed by Mikhail (“Mishka”) two years later and then Illarion (“Lariusha”) in 1928. Vladimir worked hard to support his growing family. A jack-of-all-trades, he wore a number of hats over the course of his life: sailor, shipbuilder, writer, graphic designer, set constructer, and even creator of children’s board games. His greatest talent, however, was as an artist, and his submissions to an international exhibition of decorative arts in Paris in 1925 won him two gold and one silver medal. Most of his time was spent as an illustrator for books and popular magazines like Pioneer, Knowledge Is Power, World Pathfinder, and Around the World. He was forever hustling for commissions, and the work had to be turned around quickly on tight schedules, but it afforded the best opportunity for earning money from his craft. Vladimir Trubetskoy collaborated with Vladimir Golitsyn on these publications, contributing stories of comic misadventure and gentle satire featuring his alter ego, the déclassé nobleman Vladimir Sergeevich Khvoshch. After a while Vladimir Golitsyn was making enough money to hire a nanny for the children. Despite the exhausting demands of work, Vladimir loved to have fun, and friends were forever stopping by in the evening to drink, play charades, and dance the fox-trot. They had a small gramophone and two records, one an old recording of selections from the operas Faust and Aida and the other, a collection of 1920s dance music that they fox-trotted to so much it eventually wore out.28

  Vladimir took great pride in his family name and the role of the Golitsyns in Russia’s past. This pride took physical expression in the many portraits of generations of Golitsyns that Vladimir lovingly looked after his entire life. They had long hung in the Petrovskoe manor house but were taken for safe keeping to a storeroom in Moscow during the revolution. After moving to Yeropkinsky Lane, Vladimir retrieved the portraits and carefully hung them in the new Golitsyn home. These portraits remained with Vladimir through ten subsequent moves over the next two decades. Vladimir and the rest of the family seemed to derive a certain security and inner strength from the presence of their ancestors. Vladimir handled the portraits with an almost superstitious care, always making certain to hang them in the exact same arrangement each time they moved.29

  The mood at the Golitsyns was welcoming, friendly, relaxed. While the younger generation enjoyed themselves, the mayor, undisturbed by the noise, sat quietly over a game of solitaire. On Saturdays a dancer from the ballet came to give lessons to the Golitsyn children and their friends; on Sundays the whole family went to church. One frequent guest remembered:

  The Golitsyn family was special . . . and I cannot compare it with any other family. In a rather small apartment four generations of this family lived in complete harmony. Everyone was given a bit of space, no one bothered anyone else, and no one complained about his fate. The Golitsyns were true aristocrats in the very best sense of the word. They never made v
isitors to their home from other circles feel unwelcome, as long as they did not disturb the family’s established order. Anyone who happened to find himself in the Golitsyns’ home felt this atmosphere and easily adapted to it. I can only recall one instance when a young man who by mere chance found himself in their company went beyond the accepted bounds of behavior. They immediately let him know that his comportment was inappropriate. Embarrassed, he excused himself and never again visited Yeropkinsky Lane.30

  Despite the loss of their wealth and property, of their privileged legal and social status, and of so many family members from imprisonment, exile, emigration, and death, the Golitsyns remained “true aristocrats.” And curiously, despite the war that had been waged against it for years, the aristocracy still possessed considerable allure. There were some Russians in the early 1920s who sought to claim the identity for themselves even when they had no right to. Moscow had a number of sham aristocrats with fanciful and wholly made-up titles such as the princes of Tversky and Macedonia. A Baron Palmbach proudly went about sporting a monocle and earring until it was discovered he was actually the son of a carpenter. Merinka Gudovich’s brother Dmitry attended a ball at the home of one “Princess Zasetsky.” There he came across a large portrait of his hostess as a young woman. It struck him as odd that the clothes on the portrait were not of paint, but of silk, as if they had been cut from old drapes and then affixed to the canvas. Curious, he gently lifted a corner to get a better look. Suddenly, the fabric fell to the floor, and Dmitry was shocked to be standing before “Princess Zasetsky” utterly naked in the pose of a courtesan.31