Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith

  Identity was problematic in the early years of the Soviet Union. Just who was who? And how could one tell since the old markers of status, rank, and wealth had been destroyed? In the summer of 1922, Nikolai Sheremetev visited Vladimir Golitsyn near the northern city of Arkhangelsk. One evening they were invited to the home of an Estonian man and his family. They drank and sang and played music, enjoying themselves immensely. Over tea Vladimir asked his host how long he had been in the area. He told them he had arrived in 1914 from the Estonian village of Pebalg. With this, Nikolai sat up. “Really?” he asked. “That’s our family’s estate.”

  “Excuse me,” the man said, offended, “but that estate belongs to the Counts Sheremetev.”

  “Yes, of course!” exclaimed Nikolai.

  “So, you’re saying that you’re Count Sheremetev?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmm, and then who’s this with you?”

  “This is Golitsyn.”

  “There are princes by that name,” the man said.

  “He is a prince,” said Nikolai.

  “Ah, come on now, don’t take me for a fool!” the man hollered.

  An awkward silence followed. Nikolai and Vladimir wanted to show the man their documents to prove they were telling the truth but then thought better of it. Would he believe them, and did it really matter anyway? The atmosphere had been ruined. The two men stood up, thanked their host, and left.32

  Of course, people who had known one another since before the revolution could tell who was who. In the early 1920s, Yelizaveta Fen visited her former school friend Katya Kozlovsky, an orphan who had been left the large estate of Dedlovo at the age of fourteen. After many years apart, Yelizaveta was stunned by her friend’s transformation. The former wealthy noble girl had shed her past life and gone native. She dressed and talked like a peasant and was making house with a scruffy villager by the name of Vanya. Katya told Yelizaveta that despite her poor appearance, she had never been happier, thanks largely to Vanya. It was true, she confessed, he could be rough, but the sex with him was better than anything she had ever experienced and for the first time in her life she felt fully alive. The villagers, however, did not care much for their sex lives and were particularly upset to see their former mistress acting the peasant. Soon after Yelizaveta’s visit they ran Katya and Vanya out of the village.33

  Katya’s story highlights an important paradox concerning notions of class in the Soviet Union. If, following Marx, class was a function of one’s relationship to the means of production and a person’s social being determined his consciousness, how was one to make sense of the class system in 1920s Soviet Russia? In light of the radical transformation of the past several years that witnessed the wholesale dismantling of the old order, and its social classes as well, were there any classes left, and if so, what were they? Part of the problem was that the class the Bolsheviks had claimed to represent, the proletariat, had largely disappeared during the fighting and industrial collapse of the civil war years. The workers who manned the factories in 1917 had vanished, for either the countryside or the Red Army, and the country’s urban centers had emptied out. It would be several years before a working class of any size developed again in Russia. As for the political and economic elite, it had been destroyed as a distinct social group. And so the Communists, who had made a revolution and established a state based on the idea of class warfare, faced an awkward situation: classes in Russia had disappeared.

  The state’s response to this was to manufacture new classes to meet its needs. Throughout the 1920s legislation was put into place to continue the older notion of a proletarian class, which now included the poor peasantry, and a bourgeoisie, fashioned out of former nobles and aristocrats, tsarist officials, clergy, nepmen, and kulaks. (Kulaks were in theory well-to-do peasants, though the term was so vague and used so indiscriminately as to mean little more than one’s enemy.) “Former people” was another manufactured class or caste made by lumping together groups that had had little or no shared identity before 1917. A related group, whose ranks overlapped with that of the former people, were the so-called outcasts or disenfranchised (lishéntsy), persons who had been stripped by the Soviet state of their voting rights. Of course, losing the right to vote in the Soviet Union was no great loss. Nevertheless, what made this designation so damning was the fact that with the loss of voting rights (indeed of all civil rights) came a whole series of restrictions, all crucial for survival: the denial of access to housing, ration cards, employment, higher education, and medical care.

  Outcasts were denied access to public cafeterias or institutional dining halls where most average Soviets took their meals. What services outcasts were still entitled to, they had to pay higher rates for than the rest of the populace. In effect, outcasts were expelled from society and turned into pariahs, the Soviet Union’s own untouchables. The names of outcasts were often posted on signs or published in newspapers as a form of public humiliation. The first outcasts had been created by the Soviet Constitution of 1918 as a way to create a class of enemies within the new order. As the 1920s progressed, restrictions against the outcasts expanded, and their numbers swelled to as many as four million. Although a great many outcasts were from the former elite, the majority had never belonged to Russia’s wealthy or privileged. In predominantly Jewish towns of Ukraine, for example, nearly 40 percent of the population were outcasts in the late 1920s.34

  The ambiguity of social class was made worse by the confusion over how one’s class was to be determined. Standard questionnaires required of anyone seeking housing, education, or employment capture this confusion. In an attempt to define class, respondents were asked to give either their “social origin” or “social position.” The two were obviously not the same thing, and not surprisingly, members of repressed social groups tended to ignore the former in favor of the latter. They did not write “former prince” or “son of a count” but gave their current positions. In a sense, they were trying to “pass” not unlike the way some fair-skinned American blacks tried to pass for white before the 1960s to escape the United States’ system of racial apartheid. In the 1920s such deception was not usually dangerous, but it became so during the Stalin years. Efforts to hide one’s past, to create what became known as a good biography, placed one in the dangerous position of being outed or discovered as an impostor. According to the logic of the time, hiding one’s past in this way was proof of being a class enemy hostile to Soviet power.35

  The Soviet Union was a country founded on the idea of struggle against internal enemies, and it is fair to say that regardless of how former people responded to questions about their social origin or position, they would have continued to face persecution. History, so the Marxists claimed, moved forward by class struggle, and the Soviet Union would be no exception. Once its rulers had invented new classes, it logically followed that there would be struggle between them. Unlike during the revolution and civil war, however, the struggle had changed. The class enemy had gone underground, and so the need for vigilance, for an ever-watchful eye, became a pervasive aspect of Soviet life. This despite the fact that the OGPU (the acronym for the Unified State Political Administration, successor to the Cheka from late 1922) in its top secret internal reports for the party leadership in the 1920s reported that the monarchists had been utterly destroyed and represented no threat.36 The sense of being watched by others strengthened the process of masking and internal vigilance that had begun after the revolution. Galina von Meck described this as “the years when all of us in Russia lived a double life, wearing a mask when outside our homes, taking it off only when we knew it was safe to do so.”37

  Humiliation of former people figured in the class struggle and became a conscious policy of the state. The policy was motivated in part by the leadership’s anxiety about its degree of control over society. Although their enemies had been defeated, still the party leaders obsessed over what they saw as the precariousness of their authority, a feeling that far from diminishing ac
tually grew throughout the decade. The sense of vulnerability was exacerbated by the continuing reliance on the old “bourgeois specialists.” Approximately 20 percent of all Soviet bureaucrats and technical experts were from the old elite; 35 percent of the leadership of the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture, for example, were former nobles, and many more nobles filled the lower rungs of the ministry.38 Even as late as 1938, former people could not be replaced. That year Mikhail Shreider, an assistant NKVD commissar and head of the Kazakhstan police, carried out an aggressive campaign to expel “socially harmful elements” from Alma Ata but had to take many of the former people off the list because the city simply could not function without their skills as doctors, engineers, and educators.

  The dependence on “class enemies” not only fed a sense of insecurity among the authorities, but also fostered disillusionment among the working and lower classes, in whose name the revolution had been made. Periodic campaigns against former people, harsh critiques, and calls to “unmask the enemy” functioned as safety valves to let off social tension. Encouraging denunciations of former people that led to their firing and loss of living space allowed for upward social mobility without the state’s having to actually improve living standards. The hostility of the poorer, less educated classes toward the old elite was real, however, and not a manufactured phenomenon. Even a decade after the revolution, the ability to destroy members of the old elite filled a great many with fervid pleasure. The “promotees” from the lower rungs, often made painfully aware of their lack of education, training, and sophistication when moved up to work alongside former people, delighted in seeing them brought down.39

  The same people also felt anger toward the new political and social elites. As the twenties progressed, Russia’s workers were forced to make ever more concessions and to improve their productivity for the same pay. They lost much of their autonomy and control over their labor. At the same time, the new bosses were wrapping themselves in privilege that dredged up memories of the old elite. Strikes broke out, as did demonstrations by the unemployed, anti-Communist rallies, and even attacks on officials. An OGPU agent secretly monitoring a rally of unemployed metalists in late 1926 recorded the words of one speaker: “There are two classes today: the working class and Communists who have replaced the nobles and dukes.”40 To deflect this anger, the party channeled it against the old bourgeoisie, former people, and outcasts, pinning the blame for any problems on them and other hidden enemies. The ever-increasing preoccupation with these groups paralleled a shift in the notion of class itself.

  No longer a social construction, malleable and dependent upon specific economic and political relationships, class came to be understood in quasi-biological terms. It became almost a racial category, a mark of inheritance that a person was born with and was powerless to change. What mattered most was not one’s life at the moment (read “social position”) but one’s family’s status before 1917 (read “social origin”). The stain of one’s ancestors could never be washed clean. It ought to be noted, however, that this biological notion of class was not unique to the Soviets but was (and still is) embraced by some nobles themselves. Consider the tale of Vladimir Vladimirovich Trubetskoy, who while on a visit to Paris in the 1960s introduced himself to Count Musin-Pushkin as “a former prince from Moscow.” “Come now, you can’t be serious,” retorted a disbelieving Musin-Pushkin. “Has one ever heard of ‘a former poodle’?”41

  16

  THE FOX-TROT AFFAIR

  With the end of the civil war and the advent of NEP, a certain normalcy returned to Russia. Life seemed easier, unremarkable, although only in contrast with the barbarism that had preceded it and, though no one knew it at the time, the barbarism to follow. NEP was a contradictory period. There was relative openness in cultural and artistic life, considerable debate within the Communist Party itself, concessions to private property, and a market economy. Yet at the same time the Cheka remained vigilant, ideological control over society increased, and centralized state planning of industry and the economy expanded. What is more, no truce was ever declared with the revolution’s enemies, real or imagined. The struggle went on against former people, but to quote one historian, the 1920s constituted not a frontal assault like the civil war but “low-intensity warfare.”1 The new stage of the war was fought on several fronts. Restrictive legislation was enacted. New laws aimed at so-called socially dangerous elements (SDE) were passed throughout the early 1920s. The criminal code of the RSFSR for 1922 fixed the notion of SDE in its Article 7, which established punishment for those whose activity showed them to be dangerous or harmful to society. The Central Executive Committee of the USSR further solidified the class principle in law in 1924 by stipulating greater legal protection for persons from formerly exploited groups and less for those from formerly exploiting groups. Former people and other SDE received harsher treatment by the courts, in both conviction rates and sentencing.2

  The political police continued to hound and arrest supposed enemies, and they also resorted to more elaborate schemes to entrap their prey. Kirill Golitsyn fell into just such a trap in 1923. The bizarre episode happened in this way. In 1922, Kirill and his family, then living in Petrograd, were introduced to Mikhail Burkhanovsky, purportedly the adopted son of a former tsarist general, and his recently deceased wife. Over the course of the year, Burkhanovsky visited the family often and slowly won their trust. After many months and then only with great hesitance, he let them in on his secret life. He told the Golitsyns that he was part of a large and powerful underground monarchist organization with connections to people in high places. They were putting together a major operation against the Soviet Union and at any minute were preparing to set it in motion. Burkhanovsky confessed he was in danger of being uncovered by the OGPU. One day he arrived at the Golitsyns with a stack of monarchist proclamations and asked Kirill to hold on to them until he returned.

  But Burkhanovsky never did return, and the Golitsyns never saw him again, for he was not a monarchist spy, but an agent provocateur of the OGPU. Burkhanovsky was not even his real name; the real Mikhail Burkhanovsky had been captured and killed by the Cheka before this impostor even appeared on the Golitsyns’ doorstep. Burkhanovsky figured in a large deception operation code-named Operation Trust (as in “corporation”), directed against foreign and domestic monarchists potentially plotting against the Soviet Union. Active from 1921 to 1925, Operation Trust has been called the most successful Soviet intelligence operation of the 1920s, and a great many Russian exiles were lured back to the USSR and to their deaths by its agents. At the heart of Operation Trust was the Monarchist Union of Central Russia, a phony organization created by the Soviet secret police to smoke out and entrap anti-Bolsheviks, closet monarchists, and White Russian émigré groups in Berlin and Paris. Another operation known as the Syndicate, like Operation Trust the brainchild of Felix Dzerzhinsky, was created to capture Boris Savinkov, the erstwhile SR terrorist turned ardent anti-Bolshevik, then living abroad. Savinkov was lured back into the Soviet Union in 1924 by OGPU agents posing as members of the counterrevolutionary underground. He was arrested and later died under mysterious circumstances.3

  Burkhanovsky’s main target had been Kirill’s mother, Maria, a former lady-in-waiting to Empress Alexandra. Maria maintained friendships with members of old St. Petersburg’s high society, many of whom continued to visit her at the Golitsyn apartment, thus making it, in the eyes of the OGPU, a monarchist cell. Maria’s death in June 1923 saved her from arrest. On October 23, the OGPU picked up Kirill and charged him with membership in a counterrevolutionary organization by the name of Young Russia. As proof, they pointed to the monarchist pamphlets and $150 found during a search of the family apartment. In an admirable, if naive, attempt to pass along to his son information on the case against him, Nikolai Golitsyn inserted a handwritten note into a small pie and sent it to Kirill, who was imprisoned at the Home of Preliminary Detention, the notorious Shpalerka Prison, which had once held Lenin. The ja
ilers, not surprisingly, discovered the note. On November 14, Nikolai was arrested (for the third time since the revolution) as a member of Young Russia. Fifteen persons in all were arrested in the case. The investigation dragged on until the spring of 1924. On the first day of March, a sentence of death was recommended for Kirill and eight of the others. Miraculously, Kirill’s name was taken off the list for execution, and his life was spared; later that month the OGPU sentenced him to five years’ confinement in a labor camp. His father was given a sentence of three years, which he would serve in a cell together with Kirill in Moscow’s Butyrki Prison.4

  Upon learning of his son’s and grandson’s arrests, the mayor sent a letter in their defense to Commissar of Justice Dmitry Kursky, telling him that if Kirill was guilty of anything, it could be “only of frivolity and stupidity.” As for Nikolai, he had been “apolitical” his whole life, so there was no way the charges against him could be true. Others in the extended family sprang into action. Sonya Bobrinsky paid a visit to Abel Yenukidze, Anna Golitsyn went to see Pyotr Smidovich, and her husband, Mikhail, called on Yekaterina Peshkov.