Many Soviet citizens viewed these museums and the people working there not as oddly curious but darkly sinister. Nikolai Ilin observed that the Rumiantsev Museum, where he worked, was considered a place where “the double-dyed vermin of the old regime had comfortably ensconced themselves and so had to be destroyed for the benefit of society.”19 Attitudes like this, encouraged by the state’s leaders, grew over the course of the 1920s and 1930s until finally action was taken against most centers of old Russian culture.
The director of the Rumiantsev Museum was Prince Vasily Dmitrievich Golitsyn. A former officer in the Cossack Guards Regiment, court equerry, painter, and wealthy landowner, Golitsyn had been the museum director since 1910. Following the revolution he continued in his post, laboring tirelessly to safeguard and add to the museum’s exquisite collections and to wring more money, food rations, and firewood out of the new government for the museum’s staff, winning him their loyalty and admiration. For years after the revolution the staff continued to call him Prince out of respect. His assistant, the historian and librarian Yuri Gotye, wrote in 1920:
Last Tuesday we quietly and modestly celebrated the tenth anniversary of Prince V. D. Golitsyn’s directorship of the Museum. [. . .] We had a warm and heartfelt talk after expressing our best wishes to the prince. Many of us in the museum still don’t understand his true significance: the fact is that this irreproachably decent lord and gentleman is truly the living conscience of the museum—for ten years he has prevented us from quarrelling, playing dirty tricks, and intriguing. That sort of thing could have especially flourished “in the revolution,” but this was impossible precisely because of his presence. God grant him strength and health for many years, until he carries us to some shore and we can rest from life’s storms.
Golitsyn, however, would not be able to carry them to the other shore. He was arrested on March 10, 1921, just as Lenin was announcing NEP, and removed from his position as director. Although no formal charges were made, there was talk of Golitsyn’s running a secret “bourgeois society” at the museum.20
Unlike Pavel Sheremetev, a historian by education, most of the nobles working as curators, translators, and archivists had no special training. After being freed from the Butyrki, Nikolai Golitsyn landed a job as a translator at the Institute of Marx and Engels in Moscow, and his brother Mikhail earned money translating the writings of Zola, work that brought him immense pleasure.21 Their father, the mayor, had received a commission to translate Balzac’s Droll Stories and Goethe’s Faust and was paid to give lectures for groups like the Friends of Old Moscow, the Society for Friends of the Book, and the Salon TsEKUBU.13 22 The work fed the mayor’s body and soul at an especially difficult time. On November 10, 1925, Sofia, his wife of fifty-four years, died in Sergiev Posad at the age of seventy-four. Her death left him disconsolate. “It was inexpressibly painful to find myself in our room,” he wrote in his diary upon returning to Moscow, “now so painfully empty for me. I got settled in my cell and wrote letters all morning. Oh, but how heavy is my soul . . . now that she is no longer. I keep hearing all around me her final words—‘Quel beau moment!’ ” The pain of losing Sofia never lessened, and for the rest of his life he wrote of his longing for the day when they would be together again forever, “THERE.”23
The mayor’s grandson Sergei dreamed of becoming a writer as a young man, but his parents pushed him to get a practical education, so he took courses in accounting and bookkeeping. Still, he refused to forsake his love of literature and hoped one day to be able to study it at university. By the mid-1920s, his chances of being admitted to a university were shrinking. Purges against the children of former people at institutes of higher learning had begun; Sergei’s sister Sonya was expelled from the university, and no intervention from noted scholars could get her reinstated.24
Sonya’s expulsion reflected a larger wave of increased repression beginning to sweep over former people. In February 1927, for example, a modification to the law on outcasts extended this status to the children of all former landowners. Official policy, however, was far from consistent. That same month, former gendarmes, police, and prison guards were removed from the ranks of the disenfranchised, and their rights reinstated.25 Sergei noticed the increased politicization as an eighth grader; the teachers began to single out for praise the children of workers and the children in the Pioneers and Komsomol, Communist youth organizations. A new subject called politgràmota, or political literacy, was introduced, and his entire school was forced to march about Red Square with Soviet flags on Revolution Day. Sergei’s parents were against his taking part and had him stay home; they sent a note to his teacher saying he was ill, and when he returned to school, there were no negative repercussions.26
In the autumn of 1927, Sergei took the entrance examination to the VGLK (Higher State Literary Courses or Higher School of Literature) in Moscow. The most nerve-racking question on the examination had nothing to do with literature, but with his class: “What is your social position?” Sergei gave the safest possible answer: “Father: office worker, Mother: homemaker.” It worked, and Sergei was accepted. The atmosphere at the VGLK deteriorated not long after Sergei’s matriculation. The school newspaper bemoaned the lack of students of peasant and worker origin and denounced the large presence of “socially alien elements.” CLEAN OUR RANKS OF THE ALIEN ELEMENT! urged one headline. At meetings, students spoke out against the “various princes and counts” at the school. Once Sergei stood up to one of these activists, insisting that his father had worked his entire life and that his family’s only crime was “the title of prince.”
There was a call to purge the school’s teaching staff, and a meeting was held at which everyone was instructed to be on the watch for “hidden enemies.” Each student had to submit to a special interview with the school director, the head of the student committee, and the chairman of the Communist Party’s district committee. Sergei awaited the meeting with apprehension that made him physically ill. The party chairman was the one to ask the question he knew was coming: “Are you related to Prince Golitsyn?” Sergei gave the answer he had prepared in advance. Yes, he admitted, his grandfather’s brother had been a rich man; but his great-grandfather had been a Decembrist, and his father had never owned any land and had worked every day of his life. Sergei’s sister Masha, also attending the VGLK, had to submit to a similar interview. For three days they awaited the committee’s decision. In the end, they both were allowed to stay.
Not all former nobles survived the interview. Princess Kira Zhukovsky was expelled from the school, and her father was arrested soon after; a Prince Gagarin was forced out as well. Sergei’s favorite teacher, the philosopher Gustav Shpet, was later arrested as a monarchist; he was shot in Tomsk in 1937. Regardless of his luck, Sergei did not have a chance to complete his education since the VGLK was closed as a den of idealists, former people, and fox-trotters in the upheavals of Stalin’s Cultural Revolution.27
In 1927, Yuri Saburov was released from his term of exile in Irbit and came to stay with the Golitsyns in Moscow. Unable to find work, Yuri was invited by Vladimir Golitsyn to contribute sketches and drawings to the various magazines at which he had connections. Sergei Golitsyn remembered him as a hard worker, shy and quiet, who gave what little money he earned to his mother. Sergei’s sister Masha was smitten with Yuri and flirted with him shamelessly. The family learned the depth of her feelings for Yuri only when years later she broke down in tears upon hearing of his arrest.28
Anna Saburov was then living with her daughter Xenia in Kaluga, southwest of Moscow, where many of the former people arrested in 1924 and given a sentence of Minus Six had gone. Yuri joined his mother and sister later that year, as did his brother, Boris. After completing his three-year sentence in the Butyrki, Dmitry Gudovich went to Kaluga as well to live with his mother and siblings.29 Tatiana Aksakov-Sivers was also there, and she spent much of her time with both families. She noticed that Anna was no longer “that gorgeous woman in the white lace dr
ess and black hat with feathers” that she remembered from years ago, although even at the age of fifty-four and after so many hardships she was still striking and capable of having a strong effect on people. The Saburovs lived in a small house on Gorshechny Street. Two gilded chairs salvaged from the Corner House highlighted the poverty into which they had fallen. Xenia had sold off the family’s few other pieces of their former wealth on her trips to Moscow to raise money for food. Boris earned a miserly income designing political posters. The once elegant Saburov had greatly changed: “He appeared worn out and went around in unusually tattered clothes.”30 The Gudoviches struggled to get by as well. Maria gave French and English lessons while Dmitry looked for work. In the meantime, his uncle Pavel Sheremetev sent him what money he could spare.31
Among the fox-trotters in Kaluga were Pyotr Istomin and the three Lvov brothers—Yuri, Vladimir, and Sergei. Yuri and Sergei had shared Cell 8 in the Butyrki with Dmitry Gudovich, while their brother Vladimir had escaped prison by jumping out a back window as the OGPU was coming in the front door of his apartment. They all were reunited in Kaluga. Istomin fell in love with Merinka, Dmitry’s sister, and the two married in 1926. It proved a short marriage; Pyotr was arrested only months later and sent to Solovki. His arrest reminded everyone, if anyone had ever forgotten, that danger remained and even though they had served their sentences, no one could be certain of tomorrow. It was with this terrible knowledge that these young men and women gathered in the evenings to dance and drink to the sounds of Yuri Lvov’s fine voice and guitar. As they laughed and sang, Tatiana Aksakov-Sivers could not help thinking of the what the future held. “At the height of the merrymaking I was at times seized by an aching sensation. I understood that all of these youths were doomed, that this was nothing more than a brief respite. I recall how sad I became when sweet Dmitry Gudovich suddenly jumped up from the table, singing the gypsy refrain: ‘We’ll drink, we’ll carouse, and when death comes, we’ll die.’”32
Within ten years nearly every one of them would be dead.
PART V
Stalin’s Russia
In our days tears and blood flow like two big rivers and apparently, for some unknown reason, this is as it must be. They must keep running until the end, and should the springs of tears and blood run dry, then a knee will be placed down hard into the living—much more can be squeezed out.
—Mikhail Prishvin,
diary entry, July 1930
18
THE GREAT BREAK
The struggle among the Communist leadership to replace Lenin began well before his death in 1924. Confined to a wheelchair, unable to speak, Lenin by late 1923 was little more than an empty shell, feeble, powerless, obsolete. A year earlier, he had begun dictating to a secretary his opinions on the state of the party and its chief personalities in what became known as his Testament. Here he addressed the rivalry between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin. Lenin never came out unequivocally in favor of either man, although in his final pronouncements he gave an increasingly negative assessment of Stalin. To many in the party, Trotsky, the man of supreme rhetorical skill, the brilliant, ruthless leader of the victorious Red Army in the civil war, seemed Lenin’s logical successor.
Stalin, however, skillfully managed to defeat his rivals for control of the party over the next several years—first Trotsky, who was eventually expelled from the country in 1929, then Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and finally Nikolai Bukharin. Throughout these clashes, Stalin was masterful at changing his position on the most pressing political questions when it suited him in the pursuit of power. Like Lenin, Stalin knew how to be fluid, open, to adjust one’s policies, or steal an opponent’s, to achieve one’s goals. Following Bukharin, he rejected the idea of world revolution in favor of “building socialism in one country”; following Trotsky, he embraced the need for a renewed, radical assault on Russian backwardness and an end to the gradualism of NEP. Socialism, Stalin declared, would be built in Soviet Russia with or without the rest of the world, and it would be built now.
Stalin’s beliefs were shared by many in the party who had been uncomfortable with NEP from the beginning. Even as early as 1922, the Eleventh Party Congress had affirmed that there would be no further “retreat” from the revolution than the concessions already made. Two years later laws restricting the activities of the Nepmen were adopted, and in 1927, measures against the kulaks were enacted as well. Parts of Soviet society, including workers and the young, together with much of the party membership had long been frustrated with NEP’s slow approach to achieving socialism and the persistence of the old order, signs of which they saw all around them. Had the sacrifices of the revolution and civil war been made, many Russians asked, so that a new generation of traders and petty bourgeoisie could get rich at their expense and dance to the sounds of American jazz in the night spots of Moscow while they remained mired in poverty?
The pervasive disquiet was captured in Cement, Fyodor Gladkov’s popular novel of 1925. In a section titled “The Nightmare,” the young Communist Polia Mekhova feels as if she has strayed into a “strange land” as she walks the city streets. All the women in the shops are now wearing smart clothes—“flower-trimmed hats, transparent muslin, fashionable French heels. The men had also changed: cuffs and ties and patent leather boots.” Cigarette smoke, tinged with ladies’ perfume, wafted from the cafés where men gambled, music played, and women laughed.
Later, at a meeting of party members, Polia breaks down under the strain of the contradiction between the new world they thought they had been fighting for and the one they ended up with. In a shaky voice she cries:
I can’t endure it, because I can neither understand nor justify it . . . We fought and we suffered . . . A sea of blood and hunger . . . And suddenly—the past arises again with joyful sound . . . And I don’t know which is the nightmare: those years of struggle, blood, misery, and sacrifice or this bacchanalia of rich shop windows and drunken cafés! What were the mountains of corpses for then? Were they to make the workers’ dens, their poverty and their death, more dreadful? So that scoundrels and vampires should again enjoy all the good things in life, and get fat by robbery? I cannot accept this, and I cannot live with it!
Leaving the meeting, Polia is approached by some of the rank-and-file: “Just so Comrade. [. . .] We always get the same, nothing . . . the bastards must be smashed . . . smashed . . .”1
The party was supposed to lead society, not just govern it, but as the twenties progressed, it increasingly seemed as though society were heading in its own direction with little regard for the party. The party leadership feared it was losing control; secret internal reports depicted a growing number of problems: worker anger, peasant resistance, alienated youth, drunkenness, and rampant corruption. By the end of the decade, the party was poised to strike back.2
Stalin’s “revolution from above,” begun in 1928, has come to be known as the Great Break. In October of that year the First Five-Year Plan was launched. Its chief goal was to turn what was still a largely rural, peasant society into a major industrial power virtually overnight. The audacity of the plan reflected Stalin’s gargantuan vision and the party’s belief in its own infinite powers: “There are no fortresses the Bolsheviks cannot storm,” a popular slogan of the day put it. Such was the frenzied tempo of the First Five-Year Plan that it was completed in just four years and three months. Entire industries, from chemicals to automobiles, from aviation to machine building, were created out of nothing, and new cities, home to sprawling industrial complexes, sprang up in Siberia and the Urals.
The capital to pay for industrialization came from the peasants. Tens of thousands of enthusiastic Communists and workers went out into the countryside during the First Five-Year Plan to force the collectivization of agriculture. Through a campaign of encouragement, propaganda, intimidation, and deadly violence, Russia’s peasants were forced to give up their land and move onto large, state-administered agricultural collectives. Their labor, and profits, would h
enceforth be under the direct control of the state, which would use them for its own ends. Everything was diverted to the plan, and every aspect of economic life was to be under the control of the state. All private trade, even, for a time, the sale of personal property between individuals, was banned; farmers’ markets were shut down. Food and other basics disappeared from the stores; rationing had to be reintroduced, first on bread and then on nearly all staple goods. Hunger became a widespread and permanent feature of Soviet life.
The achievements of Stalin’s revolution cannot be denied. In a few years the Soviet Union did indeed transform itself into one of the world’s industrial powers. But the costs, in human suffering and environmental devastation, render these achievements hollow. The figures on collectivization and its fallout alone beggar comprehension. Before the program of mass collectivization ended in 1933, likely more than two million people had been deported as class enemies to Siberia, the Urals, and Central Asia. Hundreds of thousand had been killed or died from starvation and exposure. The peasants not deported did not necessarily have it any better. Collectivization brought a massive famine across Ukraine, central Russia, and the northern Caucasus that left more than five million dead by 1934. Most of the deportees were placed in special settlements and put to work clearing forests and digging mines. Beginning in 1929, the existing system of prisons was replaced with a vast new network of self-supporting corrective labor camps—the gulag. Eighteen million inmates passed through the camps between 1929 and 1953, the year of Stalin’s death. These inmates formed a nation of slave laborers without whose work Stalin’s plans never could have been realized.3
Stalin’s revolution was conceived as a war. Industrialization and collectivization were two of its main fronts. Culture was the third. This front was to figure as the battle line against the Soviet Union’s class enemies, and it was fought to the death. Class warfare was not only renewed but whipped into a frenzy against the usual suspects: former people, outcasts, intellectuals, Nepmen, bourgeois specialists, and kulaks.4 In late 1926, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee had toyed with the idea of reinstating the rights of the country’s outcasts if they had engaged in socially useful work and been loyal to Soviet power over the past few years. The change, however, was never made. Now new laws were being passed against socially alien groups. In 1929, for example, a new crime was added to Article 31 of the criminal code of the USSR making it illegal to attempt to reestablish the power of the bourgeoisie. Widespread purges at offices, factories, and schools left many of these people without any clear means of survival.5
Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy Page 31
