Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith

  The threat posed by former people seemed to be mounting. Internal secret OGPU documents from the early 1930s claimed that “the anti-Soviet activity of former people at the present time has grown in strength.” There was concern that former people were coming together and plotting to mix counterrevolutionary actions with terrorism. Komsomolskaia Pravda talked of saboteurs with “grenades in their pockets” and the remnants of the old elite harboring “dreams of avenging the revolution.”6

  Around this time, former people became linked with a broader notion of “socially harmful elements,” which included the unemployed, orphans, beggars, and petty criminals (both real and imagined). The Soviet leadership saw these elements as one of the most serious threats to the state, and it tried to address the threat through the introduction of internal, domestic passports in 1932. The chaos of collectivization and industrialization unleashed a modern-day Völkerwanderung, during which more than twenty million people flooded into Soviet cities and towns in the first years of the 1930s. By making passports obligatory for all citizens, the OGPU hoped to flush out all former people and other undesirables trying to hide and then either arrest or exile them from the major urban centers. Although there were no formal restrictions on denying former people passports, verbal instructions were given to deny passports to all “class enemies” and “former people.”7

  Eugene Lyons was a radical American journalist and political activist who went to the Soviet Union in 1928 as the chief correspondent for the United Press just as the Great Break was getting under way. He arrived a radical, but what he saw over the next six years destroyed his illusions about the Workers’ Paradise. Among the many things that shook his beliefs was the treatment of former people. He was stunned at the intensity with which they were being “pried out into the open and stepped on without pity.” He could not conceive of how these people being thrown out of work and denied any means to make a living were to survive; what made it even worse was that to show any concern for these unfortunate souls was denounced as “bourgeois sentimentality.” When he asked officials about the plight of the former people and what was to become of them, no one could give him an answer, except to comment on the “amazing tenacity of the human animal in clinging somehow to life.” Lyons, however, was convinced many did not survive; the rest “hung on to existence somehow with bleeding fingers.”8

  “The living dead,” Walter Duranty called former people in 1931, “phantoms of the past in the Soviet present.”9

  With the beginning of the Great Break, former people found there was almost nowhere now left to hide. Not only were they being hounded in the cities, but the few who had managed to survive in the countryside were being driven off the land for good. By the mid-1920s, about 11 percent of prerevolutionary landowners (some 10,756 landlords, not including their families) were still living in the countryside. Most of these had never been great landlords like the Sheremetevs, but much smaller landowners. Some had managed to hold out by setting up communes or model farms and working alongside their former peasants. Regardless, all had seen their landholdings whittled away over time and by now had only meager plots. Nonetheless, their very presence represented a problem for the Soviet state, and throughout the decade efforts had been made to remove them, not without success. In March 1925, the Soviet government issued a decree evicting all former landlords from their properties by the beginning of 1926. (The order was later amended from January 1 to August 1, 1926.) In early 1927, Tula Province, to cite one region, was still home to 371 former landlords; by the end of the year, only 138 remained. With the arrival of collectivization, they all were pushed off the land, along with every other landlord all across Russia prior to 1930. Most of these people made their way to the cities and joined the ranks of outcasts in desperate search for lodging, work, and food.10

  Alexandra Tolstoy was among the landowners then chased off the land. In November 1917, Alexandra had left the front where she had been running a field hospital to return to her parents’ famous estate of Yasnaya Polyana. Despite its connection to Leo Tolstoy, Yasnaya Polyana was in danger of the same threats of angry peasants, rebellious deserting troops, hunger, and anarchy that were besieging all of noble Russia in the countryside. Alexandra had long been a sympathizer of revolutionary ideas. Years earlier she had bought part of the estate and given it over to the local peasant community; before the war she established a dairy farm and agricultural cooperative to benefit the peasants at her own estate of Novaya Polyana.

  Soon after the revolution Alexandra was run off Novaya Polyana and went to live with her mother at Yasnaya Polyana, where, in 1918, the family established the Yasnaya Polyana Society and turned the estate into a Tolstoyan commune. For protection Alexandra turned to Lunacharsky, who conferred upon her the title commissar of Yasnaya Polyana and promised his support. Despite her title and famous father, Alexandra was arrested six times, once in connection with the anti-Bolshevik underground organization known as the Tactical Center. A born organizer, Alexandra put together in prison a morning calisthenics program and a school for illiterate inmates. Although Alexandra seems to have earned the respect of many of the prisoners, she was not the most powerful. This honor belonged to “a clever swindler and thief” who went by the name “Baroness von Stein,” aka “Sonka of the Golden Hand.” Noble titles, it seems, had not completely disappeared in the new Russia, though they were now largely limited to the criminal world.

  Throughout the twenties Alexandra waged a struggle to maintain the estate’s independence and to run it along Tolstoyan lines of her late father’s teachings. She established a model commune and farm, a museum, and a school. For a time the estate ran a cooperative and hospital for the peasants. All these undertakings were at odds with official Communist ideology, but Alexandra defended them by quoting Lenin: “Soviet power can permit itself the luxury of having a Tolstoy nook in the USSR.” As early as 1924, the local authorities in Tula began attacking Yasnaya Polyana. The fact that the Tolstoys were still living in the manor house seven years after the revolution raised the ire of many. Moreover, Alexandra continued to teach the children religion at her school and refused to permit the state’s atheist propaganda. A local newspaper denounced her school as “one of these bourgeois schools that must be destroyed without the slightest pity. All the teachers in the school are bourgeois and counterrevolutionaries. “Comrades!” it asked. “When will this damned aristocracy be choked? When shall we clear the way for building up our socialist country?”

  Alexandra used her ties to powerful men in Moscow—Lunacharsky, Kalinin, Yenukidze, and even Lenin—to protect Yasnaya Polyana from the local authorities. But slowly, she began to lose control. First, she was forced to submit to inspections; then, in 1925–26, the Komsomol (Communist Youth League) established a cell in her school, and in 1928 a Communist Party cell was set up at Yasnaya Polyana, and soon the party began to take over the village institutions, the school, the cooperative, and even the social club. Eventually, Moscow also turned against Alexandra. “Secluding themselves on the estate,” ran an article in Pravda, “these bourgeois are holding to their old practices. They have orgies, they make the museum janitors serve them and keep the samovars lit all night long; and as a reward for a night’s work, they throw them crumbs from their table.”

  To mark the centenary of Tolstoy’s birth in 1928, Alexandra asked Stalin to fund a celebration. Stalin approved her request, though he gave her only a fraction of the money she had requested. As the tensions between Alexandra and the authorities grew, she realized she would never be allowed to maintain her independence and decided the only thing for her to do was leave. In 1929, Alexandra left the Soviet Union. She never returned.11

  19

  THE DEATH OF PARNASSUS

  At the end of January 1929, several hundred of the Sheremetevs’ family and friends made their way to Ostafievo. They had come to bury Countess Yekaterina Sheremetev, who had died of tuberculosis at the age of seventy-eight. She had been in declining health for several
months, and the end came peacefully. The family had been expecting it. On the first day of the year, Olga Sheremetev wrote in her diary that although it was sad the countess was dying, this was perhaps for the best since “life now is hard and meaningless.”1

  Pavel wrote his brother Dmitry that their mother “looked indescribably beautiful in her coffin.” The family carried her coffin to the church cemetery and buried the countess near a lilac bush where generations of Vyazemskys lay. Many local men and women came out to pay their respects. The family returned to the manor house. Nearly everyone was there: Pavel, Praskovya, Vasily, Anna Saburov, Maria Gudovich, her children Dmitry, Andrei, and Merinka, Nikolai Sheremetev, his sister Yelena and her husband, Vladimir Golitsyn, and others.2 For centuries Sheremetevs had gathered to commemorate important family occasions. This was to be the last time. In the coming years, marriages, births, and deaths would be small, quiet affairs, marked so as to attract as little notice as possible. For this large gathering of former people to celebrate and bury the old countess Sheremetev did not go unnoticed by the authorities, and they were prepared to take decisive action and finally destroy this noble nest.

  Since 1925, there had been talk of closing the museum and turning it into a rest home for workers. Serious pressure began two years later, when Pavel and Praskovya were stripped of their rights and declared outcasts; at the same time, Pavel lost his position as director of the museum, although he was permitted to remain as a docent. The new director was a fierce Communist by the name of Kereshi. He hated Pavel and immediately began to complain to the local authorities in Podolsk that Pavel had been wasting money and lording over everyone at the museum as its former owner. On June 16, 1928, Kereshi ordered Pavel and his family out of the museum by the first of the month and then fired him for good measure. Pavel immediately wrote to TsEKUBU and Yenukidze for help, and the latter did urge the authorities in Podolsk to ignore Kereshi’s order.3 Kereshi was sacked, and for a time things quieted down.

  Then, on March 10, 1929, an article titled “The Count and ‘His Servants’ ” appeared in Komsomolskaia Pravda.4 It was an all-out attack on Pavel, apparently motivated by the recent funeral of his mother.

  The workers of the Ryazan Spinning Mill can no longer put up with their neighbor—the Ostafievo Museum. They speak about it with an anger, a hatred, and feeling of offense that cannot be hidden. Do not try to tell them of the estate’s literary and artistic significance, do not arm yourself with the names of Pushkin, Zhukovsky, or Gogol in your efforts. They will interrupt your lengthy speech at the most convincing point and, suspiciously screwing up their eyes, will unexpectedly ask:

  “Do you think that these treasures belong to the state? Nothing of the sort! They belong to the Sheremetevs!”

  And nodding in the direction of the English park, through whose trees sparkles a white house built in an old architectural style, they will add:

  “There, do you see the house’s right wing? Sheremetev is living there even now this very day.”

  Dmitry Ankudinov, the museum’s new director, reinvigorated the campaign against Pavel. He seized Pavel’s personal library and notified the Podolsk authorities that Pavel owed the museum several hundred rubles for room and board. In July, Pavel was brought before the Podolsk People’s Court and asked to explain how it was, exactly, he had been managing to feed and clothe himself and his family for a year without being legally employed. Pavel told them that he had been earning a bit of money translating articles from American scientific journals and selling some of his watercolors; he told the court he had also tried to register for work with the Moscow Labor Board, but had had no luck because he was an outcast. Pavel’s case eventually made it all the way to the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, which decided to reinstate his legal rights (and to have his library returned) but on October 22, 1929, also ordered him and his family evicted. One week later, on the twenty-ninth, Pavel, Praskovya, and Vasily left Ostafievo for good.5

  Difficult as it must have been for Pavel to leave, at least this saved him from having to witness what happened to his beloved Ostafievo.

  There is more than one story about how the Russian Parnassus met its end. According to one account, the final act in Ostafievo’s destruction began in the summer of 1929. Nikolai Ilin, an employee of the Lenin Library, recalled how the library’s director summoned him unexpectedly back from vacation and ordered him to go to Ostafievo and remove all the books (roughly fifty thousand) as quickly as possible. Ilin noted that several agencies had had their eyes set on Ostafievo for quite some time and had been working to have the museum evicted. He was told that the estate was needed for putting up about three thousand Pioneers (the Communist Party’s children’s organization). Time was of the essence. Within days Ilin was to remove the books, regardless of how or in what condition, even just throwing them into sacks if necessary, and see that they made it back to the Lenin Library. When Ilin and his small team arrived at Ostafievo, they were received like gravediggers. “We had a big job to do,” he remembered.

  We worked from seven in the morning until dusk. At the same time a much larger and louder group from another organization was working to liquidate the museum. They hurriedly packed the smaller museum items in crates and stripped all the candelabra, mirrors, paintings, panels, Gobelin tapestries, and other decorations from the walls. In front of my very eyes an eighty-two kg. bronze chandelier was dropped from the ceiling onto a billiard table on which Pushkin perhaps once played, an exquisite marble statue depicting a satyr chasing a nymph was knocked off its pedestal, crashing to the floor and shattering to pieces, and other such things. [. . .]

  Our packing was almost done, so I went back to Moscow the evening before we had finished to find people to accompany the carts the next day. In the meantime, during my absence from Ostafievo, major events were about to happen. The organization charged with preparing the building for the Pioneers was led by a powerful, fat woman, a former laundress, it seems to me, who despite all her efforts was unable to get the job done on time with her crew. So the decision was made to call for the help of the local militia, who were stationed in the area. A group of ten to twelve militia men was put together, each of whom was given what was good pay for the times, and charged with cleaning out the building in just one night so that the next morning cots for the Pioneers could be set up.

  I returned to Ostafievo the next morning [. . .] and upon opening the door onto the veranda I froze from shock. There, spread out over the entire veranda under the open sky, lay in one large formless mass all the remaining furniture and property from the museum. The militia men had completed their task, and on time, but to do this they had acted as if they were unloading firewood, simply throwing things on top of each other in careless fashion. About a third of the contents of the museum were lost and destroyed: part of the period furniture and fragile objects were broken in two, the paintings were ripped, smudged and stained, and what remained was left to the whim of the elements [. . .]

  It was going on four in the afternoon, after the book-laden carts had barely managed to disappear around the bend in the road behind the trees and I was preparing to make my way to the train station, when the museum director, just returned from one last trip to Moscow the day before to save the museum, came panting up to the side of the building. “Tell everyone right now that the order to liquidate the museum has been rescinded!” she joyously informed us. But it was too late—the museum no longer existed.6

  According to a different account of events, Ostafievo was closed by order of the Moscow Soviet with the intention of turning it into a rest home for members of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. What both versions agree on is that by the end of 1929 nothing of the old estate and its collection remained. Its entire history had been erased. Much of Ostafievo’s riches, including a priceless collection of the Decembrists’ correspondence, were apparently stolen and never reached the libraries and archives where they were to be sent.7

  The will
ful destruction of Ostafievo was but one minor skirmish on the cultural front of the Great Break. There were many more like it, and most of the other palace and estate museums in Soviet Russia met a similarly tragic fate during these years. Throughout the 1920s pressure had been mounting against the Museum of Everyday Life in the Fountain House, the former Sheremetev palace in Leningrad. City authorities argued that showing off the fabulous lifestyle of aristocrats like the Sheremetevs did not fit the requirements of the new proletarian society. The museum staff tried to skirt the issue by staging more ideologically appropriate exhibitions, such as “The Labor and Lifestyle of the Serfs” in 1927. In April 1929, however, the Sovnarkóm voted to close the museum and turn the building into a student dormitory or an Atheists’ House, a center for antireligious propaganda sponsored by the Union of Militant Atheists. The vast collection was packed and then dispersed among a number of museums across the Soviet Union. Objects deemed not museum-worthy ended up furnishing the offices of Soviet officials and filling hotel lobbies. Subsequently, the interiors would be disfigured beyond recognition to make room for a string of organizations, including the House of Diverting Science (a popular children’s museum), the Astronomical Institute, and the Arctic and Antarctic Scientific Research Institute, which dug up the entire ground floor to build a large pool for testing models of the first Soviet nuclear icebreakers.8