Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith

  Peshkov was one of Russia’s great, though little-known, heroes of the twentieth century. The daughter of an impoverished nobleman and a committed revolutionary herself, she met the writer Maxim Gorky while working as his proofreader in the 1890s and the two soon married. She bore him two children before they separated in 1903, although they remained close for the rest of their lives. During the First World War Peshkov worked in aid relief for the children of war victims, and after the February Revolution she founded the Moscow branch of the Society for the Aid of Freed Political Prisoners to assist the mass of tsarist political prisoners then being released. In May 1918, she helped found the Moscow branch of the Political Red Cross (MPRC) dedicated to easing the plight of political prisoners. Peshkov and the MPRC provided a range of support to political prisoners and their families, including free legal counsel, evidence collection, food, medicine, clothing, and books. Peshkov was a fearless and committed defender of political prisoners, and she used her connections to the new leadership, thanks to her marriage to Gorky, to free hundreds of them and to lighten the sentences of many more.5

  In August 1922, the police raided the offices of the MPRC. Following an investigation into its activities, the offices were sealed and the organization closed. Not one to be deterred, Peshkov managed to convince the police to let her establish a new organization in the same offices under the name Aid to Political Prisoners, which came to be known by its Russian acronym, POMPOLIT. The new organization was forbidden from defending people legally and now had to rely solely on Peshkov’s ability to plead their cases with the powerful. Its chief function became the material support of prisoners. To thousands of Russians in the 1920s and early 1930s, Peshkov was an angel in the darkness. She fought for everyone—socialists, anarchists, clergy, former nobles, and tsarist officers—regardless of his politics or past. Over the years she was inundated by an avalanche of appeals, nearly all of which she did her best to answer and investigate. She was granted access to prisons to check on inmates, offer moral support, and deliver letters and gifts from home. She could often find out the fate of imprisoned loved ones when their families could not get any information from the authorities. A note from POMPOLIT let a prisoner know he had not been forgotten and was often enough encouragement to give him the strength to go on living. In the mid-1930s ever-greater restrictions were placed on POMPOLIT’s operations. In 1937, Peshkov’s chief assistant was arrested and sent to the gulag; the following year, POMPOLIT was closed for good.6

  The POMPOLIT offices were located at 16 Kuznetsky Most in a nondescript building at the end of a long corridor next door to a Berlitz language school. In the front room sat two secretaries and usually a large crowd of visitors waiting their turn to see Peshkov. When Mikhail Golitsyn appeared at the POMPOLIT offices in 1923, he was shown directly in to see Peshkov. He had known Yekaterina since 1917, when they had worked together at the Society for the Protection of Mothers and Infants.7 Mikhail pleaded the case for his brother Nikolai and nephew Kirill. Peshkov was not able to get the men freed, but she did manage to keep them from being shipped north to the prison camps on the Solovetsky Islands, known as Solovkí. Thanks to her intervention, father and son were permitted to serve their sentences at Moscow’s Butyrki Prison; it possibly saved their lives.8

  On January 21, 1924, Lenin died. He had been ill since May 1922, when he suffered the first of several strokes, and he had not been involved in the running of the country for months. For four days his body lay in state in Moscow’s House of Unions, formerly the home of the Noble Assembly, and hundreds of thousands came out for one final look at the leader of October. One of them was Sergei Golitsyn. He did not notice a great outpouring of sadness with Lenin’s death; rather, the people had fallen silent. He went to the House of Unions with a friend and did not get home till late. Not knowing where he had disappeared to, his family was worried, and when he told them he had gone to see Lenin, they were surprised and angry. “What is it you wanted to see?” his brother-in-law Georgy Osorgin barked. “If your uncle Misha were alive he’d box your ears!”9

  One morning two months later Lilya Sheremetev showed up in tears at the Golitsyns’ apartment. She told them that the OGPU had been at the Corner House the night before and arrested her son Nikolai and her nephews Boris Saburov and Dmitry Gudovich. When Nikolai asked why they were being arrested, one of the agents snapped, “You ought to know.”10

  The arrests marked the beginning of what became known as the Fox-trot Affair. Many others, including nearly everyone who had danced the fox-trot at Spiridonovka or attended the balls at the Corner House, were soon to be arrested. Even the aged Vladimir Gadon, master of the ball, was arrested. The one family untouched by the affair were the Golitsyns, for reasons that cannot be explained and attest to the often random nature of Soviet repression. Kirill Golitsyn, already sitting in the Butyrki when the affair erupted, noted that “the régime had looked upon the parties of young people as part of some perfidious scheme” and thus “arrested all dancers of both sexes.”11 According to Galina von Meck, not only were the security organs monitoring many of these fox-trot parties, but they were even organizing some of them to set up people for arrest. Galina’s sister Lucy went with a young poet to a fox-trot party in Moscow that was raided by the OGPU; all the men were arrested, and many of them were sent to Solovki.12 The daughter of General Danilov was also arrested. Imprisoned in Tyumen, she committed her plight to light verse that belied the seriousness of her situation:

  Though legend it may be, there was a scandal on Ostozhenka, you see.

  An entire bunch, each but a child, to the Urals was exiled.

  The Kadets and SRs forgotten, so fox-trotters, some twelve dozen,

  Were arrested by the G-P-U . . . And why? No one knew!

  And we, careless and gay, danced to jail without a fuss.

  Yes, let’s admit with sad heart, the fox-trotters—that’s us!

  Two hundred we were, from ten years to twenty, such a sinister age.

  We loved and laughed, we sang and dance, ’twas all the rage.

  We hardly knew each other, to them this was no bother.

  Here we each came, and for each the charge was the same!

  Oh, fox-trot, fox-trot, everyone ought to curse you. For you

  Are the cause of our imprisonment. For you we danced

  Into a damp prison, fallen under the most terrifying suspicion.

  Oh, fox-trot, fox-trot, stronghold of dark forces, cover of fierce reaction!

  You’re the nest of the Counter Rev. in the Russian Soviet Socialist Fed.,

  You’re its hope, you’re its foundation!

  Let our sad fate be a lesson to all—if you’re invited to fox-trot, by chance,

  Be sure to say, “Pardonne, but I don’t dance!”13

  Nikolai Sheremetev was released within a few days and returned to the Corner House. Not long thereafter the OGPU returned yet again, though this time not to make any arrests but to inform the family that they had three days to vacate the house. With nowhere to go and no hope of moving all their possessions in so short a time, Nikolai, Yuri Saburov, and Andrei Gudovich hauled dozens of trunks, cases, boxes, and crates filled with art, antiques, and furnishings out into the street and sold them off to passersby for a pittance. Sheremetevs had lived at the Corner House for three centuries. Within three days they all were gone.14

  For Lilya this was more than she could take. She had been considering trying to leave Russia for some time and chose to escape through a fictitious marriage to a friend of her late husband, a Latvian diplomat by the name of Baron Budberg. Budberg, Lilya, and her four youngest children—Natalya, Pyotr, Maria, and Pavel—left Moscow’s Belorussian Station for Riga, seen off by fifty family members and friends and watched the entire time by two undercover agents. Upon reaching the Latvian capital, Budberg proposed a real marriage, but Lilya declined, and he returned to Moscow. Lilya took the children to her parents’ Baltic estate for a time, before the family packed up once more for P
aris and then finally Rome. Sergei Golitsyn was sad yet relieved to see his cousins go. He was certain that were they to stay, neither Pyotr nor Pavel would survive.15

  The family was now broken in two. It had been an agonizing decision for Lilya’s daughter Yelena, but in the end she chose not to leave with her mother and siblings. Her husband, Vladimir, would not consider leaving leave Russia and his family, and they were just starting a family of their own. Yelena saw her mother just once more, forty-two years later in Rome for a brief visit. A few weeks after Yelena returned to Moscow, her mother died at the age of eighty-five.16

  Nikolai too chose not to leave, also for reasons of the heart. Cecilia Mansurov was twenty-seven and beautiful, with penetrating brown eyes and lush hair. She was the new star of the Vakhtangov Theater, where Nikolai had just landed a job. Though she was already married and six years his senior, Nikolai could not resist her, and he began to woo Cecilia, quietly, determinedly. She did not hold out for long. A gifted musician, charming, and handsome, Nikolai won Cecilia over, and soon they were living together in a room in the former stables off the theater’s courtyard. They were there but a short time before moving to an apartment at the new Vakhtangov Cooperative House on Bolshoi Levshinsky Lane. Stealing Cecilia from her husband was no great scandal; her being a Jew, however, was. Sergei Golitsyn wrote: “Many found it incomprehensible—Count Sheremetev, married to a Jew!” It was Mansurov who was responsible for getting Nikolai out of prison so quickly. She herself pleaded his case before someone with the right connections, and her beauty and acting skills did the job. She would have to do it again on her lover’s behalf in the coming years, appearing before the likes of Lev Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin, and Mikhail Kalinin. According to one of Nikolai’s fellow musicians, when his mother and siblings were leaving on the train from Moscow, Nikolai took out his passport and ripped it up in front of Cecilia as proof of his commitment to her. They spent the rest of their lives together, bound by a profound, if tempestuous, love and a shared passion for music and the stage.17

  The arrests of the Fox-trot Affair continued. Anna Saburov, Maria Gudovich, and nearly all their children—Boris and Yuri Saburov, Dmitry, Andrei, Varvara, and Merinka Gudovich—were taken to the Butyrki in the spring of 1924. The OGPU began their interrogations by asking prisoners their political views. The correct answer, regardless what one really thought, was: “I am loyal to Soviet power.” During NEP such a response typically guaranteed one either a quick release from prison or internal exile. Many prisoners received the sentence known as Minus Six, banishment from the six largest cities in the USSR—Moscow, Petrograd, Kiev, Kharkov, Sverdlovsk, Tbilisi—as well as from any territories near the Soviet border. Prisoners who answered the loyalty question with “I am a monarchist” usually got sent to the camps for several years. Anna Saburov was exiled to the provincial city of Kaluga for three years, and her daughter Xenia followed her there; Boris and Yuri were given Minus Six and exiled for three years to the town of Irbit in the Urals. After serving their sentence, the brothers were sentenced to Minus Six again and moved to Kaluga in 1927. Maria Gudovich and her children Merinka, Andrei, and Dmitry were exiled from Moscow and also ended up in Kaluga and then Tsaritsyno.18 Having thrown the Sheremetevs out of the Corner House, the OGPU was now removing them from the capital as well.

  The Butyrskaya Prison, known as the Butyrki, had been built during the reign of Catherine the Great. The notorious Cossack rebel Yemelian Pugachev was held in the cellar of the original stockade before his execution in 1775, and his name was subsequently given to one of the prison’s four towers. Future rebels, revolutionaries, and assorted troublemakers under the tsars and then commissars, including Nestor Makhno, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Varlam Shalamov, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, were held there. Even Harry Houdini spent time inside its walls, performing a dramatic escape for the prisoners in 1908. After the revolution, Russia’s new leaders began locking up their enemies there. In 1924, the Butyrki became the home of a new wave of enemies, several of whom landed in Cell 8 together with Nikolai and Kirill Golitsyn in what the latter called “our noble collective farm.” Here Kirill had the opportunity that had never presented itself outside in the free world to make the acquaintance of a number of older noblemen and to become close friends with younger nobles like Dmitry Gudovich and Sergei Lvov. Vladimir Trubetskoy spent two months at the Butyrki following his arrest with a number of other former nobles in Sergiev Posad in December 1924.19

  Kirill recorded the varied fates of the inmates of Cell 8. One of the stranger and sadder stories belonged to Avenir Vadbolsky. A graduate of the Corps des Pages and a former officer, Vadbolsky had danced at the Sheremetev balls until the OGPU arrested him, thinking he was a certain Prince Vadbolsky from the White Army of General Baron Peter Wrangel. The OGPU interrogated Vadbolsky at the Butyrki, after which he migrated from prison to Solovki, then back to the Butyrki, then to exile in Berezov on the Ob River, and finally back to Moscow. In 1929, he was taken to the Lubyanka, where his life came to an end. In the Butyrki’s women’s section, Kirill met the young and fetching Varenka Turkestanov, another victim of the Fox-trot Affair. Varenka was later released from prison, but only after having been subjected to strange sleep experiments (more likely, sleep deprivation). She went back to her mother an utterly destroyed person: withdrawn, uncommunicative, cut off from everyone and everything around her. Eventually, she roused herself to one decisive and final act and threw herself out a window.20

  Georgy Osorgin landed in Cell 8 in March 1925. He had been arrested at the apartment of Sandra Meiendorff, Lilya Sheremetev’s sister, in a so-called mousetrap. A technique borrowed from the Okhrana, the tsarist secret police, the mousetrap (zasáda) involved placing agents in the apartment of a person under suspicion and then detaining everyone who bothered to knock on the door. The mousetraps could go on for days until either the main target or enough possible enemies had been gathered. Sometimes the hostages were released, though not always; guilt by association was a widespread mode of operation. That Meiendorff had worked for John Speed Elliott, a representative of Averell Harriman, had attracted the attention of the OGPU.

  Shortly before his arrest Osorgin wrote Grigory Trubetskoy in Paris of the worsening climate, stressing that “they have begun ‘cleansing Moscow of harmful elements.’ ” In one night, thirty of Osorgin’s friends had been arrested. So many people were being arrested a joke was born: “Question on a Soviet questionnaire: ‘Have you ever been arrested, and if not, then why?’ ”21 For former people like Osorgin, the humor might have been hard to find. “Yes, Uncle Grisha, life has become bleak,” he wrote to Trubetskoy, “not because of the constantly poised sword of Damocles, but because it seems there is no sign of any change.” Osorgin had been arrested for the first time in September 1921 in a raid of his aunt Olga Trubetskoy’s home. Before they took him away, he had managed to leave his wife, Lina, a short note: “So now your turn has come, my darling, to be tested. May God help you. Pray also for me, and be completely calm: I don’t worry about myself for a minute.”22

  The Golitsyns sprang into action to get Georgy released, appealing as in times past to Yenukidze, Smidovich, and Peshkov. When asked the standard question about his loyalty to the Soviet regime, Osorgin refused to lie, telling his interrogators that he was a monarchist. Genrikh Yagoda, then the de facto head of the OGPU, stated that Osorgin had acted “provocatively” during his interrogation. On October 12, 1925, Georgy was sentenced to be shot, but Peshkov intervened and won a reduced sentence of ten years in prison, saving his life for a time. Georgy remained at the Butyrki for three years. At times, he felt guilty at the suffering his arrest had caused Lina. “If it is my fate to die in prison,” he wrote on a handkerchief smuggled out of prison to his mother-in-law, Anna Golitsyn, “I would like that Lina and my family would know that I die peacefully, praying that Lina might still find happiness and that her life on earth will not be limited to that chain of suffering and grief that bound her on marrying me; poor, poor Lina, wh
y did you let her marry me?” Georgy was supported while in prison by an unshakable religious faith and memories of family and the life they had shared before the revolution at their estate of Sergievskoe, what he called “that spiritual cradle in which everything by which each of us lives and breathes was born and raised.”23

  A month after Georgy’s arrest, the OGPU arrived one night during Holy Week at the Golitsyns’ with arrest warrants for Mikhail and his son Vladimir. Led by a man named Chernyavy, the agents blocked the door so no one could get out and searched the apartment all night, going through their books, the children’s notebooks, their photographs and letters. The Golitsyns, who had been preparing for bed when the agents arrived, sat about in their nightclothes and watched. The samovar was lit, and they offered the uninvited guests some tea; Chernyavy refused, saying it was against regulations. In the early morning, the men finally found something: two large photographs of Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra inside a trunk left for safekeeping by a cousin now living abroad. The family told the men that the trunk was not theirs and that they knew nothing about its contents, but Chernyavy did not believe them. Mikhail and Vladimir were led downstairs. The rest of the family followed and pushed into their hands a bedroll, spoon, mug, and bowl, the necessities of prison life. A paddy wagon, the feared Black Raven, sat waiting. When the raven’s back doors opened, the Golitsyns could make out in the dark the faces of others arrested that night. Mikhail and Vladimir climbed in and took their places. Along with the two men, the OGPU agents confiscated all the family’s personal correspondence.24

  The family was devastated. “We, those who remained, suffered greatly the arrest of our loved ones,” Sergei wrote. “I went to school and told none of my friends of my woe. I was not the only one in this situation. Andrei Kiselev, making me promise not to tell, whispered to me that Alyosha Nesterov’s father had been arrested. It was horrifying just to look at Alyosha. His face had gone all black and his eyes nervously flittered about.”25 Peshkov and Smidovich immediately set to getting the men released. Peshkov met with Yagoda, who was considering letting them go had it not been for the portraits, which he was convinced the family knew about and were just waiting for the day when they could hang them again. In prison, Mikhail insisted he supported the Soviet government, particularly the efforts it was making on the behalf of the peasantry; Vladimir told them he was no monarchist, and in turn his interrogators told him to spend less time in the company of foreigners. Within three weeks, both men were freed.26