Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith

  Nekrasov’s story was not unique. In the mid-1930s, after spending several years in the camps, Galina von Meck and her husband, Dmitry Orlovsky (she had remarried after her first husband, Nicholas, had been shot as an enemy of the people during the Great Break), found themselves unemployed, and unemployable. Desperate, Dmitry accepted a job working for the OGPU as a statistician on the canal works near Rybinsk. One of the perquisites of the job was personal servants drawn from the inmate population. Called slaves, they were assigned to families to do manual labor about the house. “We, who had been prisoners like these poor people a year or two before,” Galina observed, “enjoyed the privilege of being served by those who were our former comrades.” Despite their shared experiences, the two sides were not permitted to socialize or even be friendly with each other, and people watched to make certain this rule was followed. The comfortable life at Dmitlag did not last long, however. After being let go from his position in 1938, Dmitry was arrested again and disappeared. “Farewell and forgive me” were his last words to Galina.4

  Many former people came to work at Dmitlag, some voluntarily, some having been sent there from other camps. The need for specialists was so great that engineers and others with the required technical skills were purposely arrested, charged with Article 58, and then sent to Dmitlag to work. (Article 58, divided into fourteen separate sections, referred to part of the criminal code of 1926, and its subsequent iterations, that outlined all counterrevolutionary crimes against the state. Its widespread use in the repression of the Stalin years made it notorious.5)

  Vladimir Golitsyn was one of the artists who found work at Dmitlag. In the autumn of 1932, he was hired to decorate the hall in a local school for a ball marking the fifteenth anniversary of the OGPU. After he had finished, the former aristocrat who had witnessed the balls of tsarist Russia stayed to watch. The Gulag Ball kicked off with a number of long speeches in praise of the secret police and its “iron cohort,” filled with fond recollections of the early days of the Cheka in the bloody aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. These were followed by the “Artistic Portion” of the evening, featuring a choir of Ukrainian kulaks, balalaika music, and various soloists, all of them camp prisoners. And then it was time to dance. The OGPU Brass Band roared to life, and one of the camp commandants pranced to the center of the hall, clapped loudly for silence, and cried out, “The Ladies’ Waltz!” With that, he grabbed hold of a blond girl (a camp typist) and set about spinning her around the hall, stomping his spurs as he went. Vladimir watched for about an hour and then went home. “A rather wretched affair,” he wrote that night in his diary. “Sadness.”6

  Depressing as this entertainment was, Vladimir was nonetheless able to find humor in the absurdity of their lives, and his diaries and letters are filled with observations on the strange world they inhabited in Dmitrov. He recorded the story of a prisoner who had the good fortune to purchase a winning lottery ticket, only to discover he could not collect the prize: a trip around the world. Vladimir copied down the various signs and banners posted about Dmitlag: “A slogan emblazoned on the archway at the entrance to the camp: ‘The Moscow-Volga Canal—Creation of the Second Five-Year Plan and the Classless Society.’ ” He took special delight in a sign posted in one of the lavatories: “Red Army men! Learn to control your a[sses]! Make sure you sh[it] straight into the toilet!!” Once he was commissioned to create a poster titled “Socially Harmful Women in Freedom and in the Camps of the NKVD.” He drew a series of women getting drunk, stealing, killing, gambling, fighting, and the like. As he worked, his children gathered around to watch. Little Lariusha pointed to a streetwalker and asked what she was doing wrong. “Can’t you see?” his elder brother knowingly informed him. “She’s smoking.”7

  Dmitry and Andrei Gudovich also came to Dmitrov. Dmitry had spent the past three years as a prisoner in Karelia working on the Belbalt Canal; Andrei was returning from Siberian exile. Both found work at Dmitlag, Dmitry in one of the design bureaus. They visited the Golitsyns often, and Vladimir enjoyed their company. He remembered gathering one June day to celebrate Yelena’s name day. They pulled down two guitars from the wall and began singing the fox-trots they had danced to years ago in Moscow. To Vladimir’s surprise, they all also knew the words to the songs of the Red Army from the civil war. Dmitry sang these better than anyone. “You have to spend a good eight years in the camps as he has,” Vladimir observed, “in order to sing like that. Of course, his renditions are rather refined, but this gives them a special charm.”8

  The Golitsyn home was warm and welcoming. Vladimir and Yelena opened their doors to newcomers and helped them get settled. Though they had little money, they always treated their guests to black bread and a vegetable salad.9 Vladimir and Yelena lived in one house with their three children (Yelena, aged eight; Mishka, six; and Lariusha, four in 1932), his parents, and grandfather, the mayor. His sisters Masha and Katya lived next door.

  The family had not been in Dmitrov long when the mayor died of pneumonia on February 29, 1932, at the age of eighty-four. Mikhail and Anna read the prayers for the dying over him during the final hours of his life. He died peacefully, without pain. Mikhail noted how “the expression on his face became clear and amazingly calm . . . He lay there unusually handsome, graceful, or, rather, elegant—just as he always was.” He was buried in Dmitrov, and for years the family visited his gravesite, until one day when they arrived to find it gone; canal workers had bulldozed the entire cemetery the night before without warning.

  Among the mayor’s papers was found a short piece titled “Prediction,” completed a month before his death. In it he expressed his undying conviction in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union:

  This regime does not possess the ability to create—it knows how to destroy, to abolish, to cast off—but it is incapable of creating, and its celebrated “achievements” amount to nothing, if not even less than nothing. And for this reason its collapse will come about as a result of the power of inertia, and not under the blows of some external threat or the outburst of some storm; it will fall all by itself, under its own weight [. . .] But that sooner or later this will happen, I do not doubt for a single moment.10

  Mishka remembered his grandmother Anna as the “spiritual head of the Golitsyn clan.” She always seemed to be there for everyone, whatever his troubles. Lariusha said that his grandmother “radiated light.” She would gather her grandchildren around her after lunch and read to them—the Russian classics, Jonathan Swift, Sir Walter Scott, Jules Verne—and take them for long walks, teaching them about the local berries, mushrooms, the names of the flowers and butterflies. She gave Lariusha his first drawing lessons. Their grandfather Mikhail thought she spoiled them. He would get testy with his grandsons and had trouble coping with their pranks and boundless energy; their love of shooting spitballs especially tried his patience. Nonetheless, Mikhail took them out mushrooming and gave them French and English lessons. He loved his large, bustling family. “We now have fourteen grandchildren,” he wrote to his brother Alexander in California in the late 1930s, “all growing like mushrooms, and we love them all so much we can’t choose a favorite.”11

  Alexander was by then living in a world unimaginable to his family back in Dmitrov. After a few years in Seattle, he, Lyubov, and their children had moved in 1927 to Los Angeles where he set up a successful medical practice. Among his patients was Sergei Rachmaninov, whom Alexander cared for during the composer’s final illness. Three of the four Golitsyn children ended up in the movies. Daughter Natalya had a brief career in silent films and hobnobbed with the likes of Rudolph Valentino and Charlie Chaplin, and son George worked as a producer at Universal and Walt Disney Studios, receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture for Freud in 1960. Their brother, Alexander, had the most successful Hollywood career. As an art director at Universal Studios for three decades, Alexander designed many of Douglas Sirk’s Technicolor masterpieces and worked with such figures as Fritz Lang, Greta Garbo, Alfred Hit
chcock, and Clint Eastwood. Nominated for fourteen Oscars, Alexander won three for his work on The Phantom of the Opera (1943), Spartacus (1960), and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). He worked in every genre from noir to westerns, from action to horror, and among his long list of credits was the 1957 cult classic The Incredible Shrinking Man.12

  Back in Dmitrov, their Golitsyn cousins were being raised on very different films. With his pals, Mishka went to the October cinema to be entertained by movies like Lenin in October, We Are from Kronstadt, and Chapaev, classic Soviet films propagandizing the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war. Like his siblings, Mishka was growing up to be a Soviet person. He loved the large parades on May Day and November 7, when they marched to the town’s statues of Lenin and Stalin. He and his friends were big fans of the local soccer team and never missed an air show. Despite everything that had happened to their families, Mishka and his peers grew up Soviet patriots, proud of their country and its achievements and free of any nostalgia for the prerevolutionary past. Nonetheless, the family tried to keep the older traditions alive. Anna gave the little ones Bible lessons, and they continued to celebrate the Orthodox holidays. Every year they would go out late one December night and cut down a small tree for Christmas, even though the holiday was forbidden. They would sneak it back home and decorate it with the blinds drawn. Anna would help the children to light the candles.13

  Some of Mishka’s happiest times were visiting Nikolai Sheremetev and Cecilia Mansurov in Moscow. Mishka loved his “Uncle Kolya,” and for the childless couple he was like an adopted son. They did not have a spare bed in their apartment, so Nikolai would lash two chairs together with his belt, lay down a sheet and blanket, and put Mishka to sleep every night with a kiss. Their home was always filled with music. Nikolai spent long hours rehearsing on the violin or at his old piano composing for performances at the Vakhtangov Theater. To relax, Nikolai loved nothing more than to play something by Saint-Saëns or passages from Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major. Sometimes the great mezzo-soprano Nadezhda Obukhov came by to work on some tricky passages with Nikolai. When he was not playing, Nikolai took Mishka hunting along with his two Irish setters, Valta and Laska. Nothing made Nikolai happier, and he once told Mishka his dream was to die while out hunting. His wish came true, though not as he anticipated.

  Yuri Yelagin played alongside Nikolai at the Vakhtangov for eight years. He was amazed by Nikolai as both a man and a musician. His fine musicianship, as well as his rare sound and perfect pitch, struck Yelagin, who was impressed by the fact that Nikolai was always ready to help Yelagin with his playing. He thought Nikolai exceedingly handsome, the kind of man who would have fitted in among the dashing guards officers in the reign of Catherine the Great. Yelagin claimed never to have met someone so “changeable” and “many-sided.” Nikolai could be simple and even coarse, acting and dressing just like a worker, making him popular with all the stagehands. And then he could just as easily appear elegant and polished and every inch the aristocrat. Whenever foreigners from Germany, France, or England visited, Nikolai was put forward to meet with them as the face of the theater because no one else could speak their languages or interact so naturally with them. He talked little of his family’s past, and then only if he had been drinking vodka, as he did a great deal. Drink was Nikolai’s way of coping with the pain from a pancreatic disease. He refused to see a doctor and did his best to hide the illness from others.

  Nikolai experienced his share of insults and humiliation. When he went to collect his passport, the OGPU officer asked upon noticing his surname: “You wouldn’t happen to be a relation of the counts Sheremetev by chance?” “I am the very Count Sheremetev himself,” Nikolai answered provocatively. His retort caused an impromptu meeting among the officials about what to do with this “Count Sheremetev.” Apparently, they did not dare touch Nikolai given Cecilia’s connections to the top Soviet leadership. Disgusted, the officer flung the passport at Nikolai’s feet, spitting, “Go on, take it, take your passport, you spawn of the aristocracy.” Nikolai bent down, picked it up, and walked out under a chorus of abuse.

  At least once Nikolai’s identity made for some laughter. After an unusually long wait in a restaurant Nikolai asked the waiter if he could hurry up with their food. “You’re no count,” the waiter snapped, “you can wait,” leaving Nikolai and his friends agape, barely able to keep from laughing. Yelagin rightly saw Nikolai as one of the lucky ones. Here was a former person who lived as he wished. He had a job as a musician and composer in one of the best theaters in the country, and he had the woman he loved, a woman coveted by many. Yelagin, and most likely Nikolai too, did not realize just how lucky he was. In September 1937, during the Great Terror, former Prince Sergei Pavlovich Golitsyn was arrested on charges of sabotage. During his interrogation, the NKVD tried to force Golitsyn to implicate Nikolai and Cecilia, whom Sergei had worked alongside for years in the theater. Sergei, however, refused. He was shot on January 20, 1938. Nikolai and Cecilia survived.14

  On October 26, 1933, Vladimir Golitsyn took the train from Dmitrov to Moscow on business. Two days later he was arrested at the apartment of his cousin Alexei Bobrinsky. When he failed to return home after several days, Yelena went looking for him. She visited Vladimir’s friend Pavel Korin, the artist. Korin was then painting a portrait of Genrikh Yagoda, deputy chairman of the OGPU, and he promised to mention Vladimir’s case to Yagoda. While in Moscow Yelena learned that a few days after Vladimir’s arrest, his cousins Alexander Golitsyn, the son of Vladimir Vladimirovich, and Pyotr Urusov, Alexander’s brother-in-law, had also been arrested. All three were charged with being members of a secret cell plotting to kill Stalin.

  As evidence the OGPU pointed to a revolver, found in Bobrinsky’s apartment, which they claimed was the intended murder weapon. The existence of the gun led some in the Golitsyn family to believe that Vladimir and the others had been set up by none other than their cousin Alexei. Many in the family had long suspected that Alexei was a police informer. Their suspicions had been raised after previous arrests when the police seemed well informed on the family’s private life, and Alexei seemed the only probable source. Moreover, Alexei had access to a gun. In late 1929, a recent graduate of Stanford University by the name of Robin Kinkead arrived in Moscow, where he met and was then hired as an assistant by the journalist Walter Duranty. Alexei made the acquaintance of Kinkead and became his personal secretary. The gun found by the OGPU belonged to Kinkead, and the Golitsyns were certain Alexei had taken the gun and used it to frame his own family. If that had indeed been his plan, it blew up in his face, for Alexei was arrested as well.

  Vladimir was held for a short time in the Butyrki but soon freed, thanks to Yagoda’s intervention. Alexei was sentenced to ten years in a labor camp near Vorkuta, north of the Arctic Circle. Alexander Golitsyn received three years and was sent to a camp at Yaya station in western Siberia. Pyotr Urusov was sentenced to three years’ exile in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan. His wife, Olga, followed him there from Moscow.15

  The Golitsyns’ relatives in Sergiev Posad were also feeling the heat. In April 1933, Vladimir Trubetskoy was arrested after being denounced by a fellow musician. She had informed the OGPU that Trubetskoy had been infecting his wife and children with anti-Soviet attitudes. Vladimir was taken to Moscow and held in the Lubyanka, but then freed the following month.16

  Several months before, in the autumn of 1932, the OGPU arrested a man by the name of Mikhail Skachkov. A former White officer who had fled to Czechoslovakia after the civil war before returning to the Soviet Union in 1926, Skachkov worked in the foreign division of Glavlit, the central censorship directorate. During one of his interrogations in December, Skachkov named a number of people as members of an underground counterrevolutionary organization; they included Vladimir and Sergei Golitsyn and their uncle Vladimir Trubetskoy. The agents, however, passed over these names, focusing their attention on Nikolai Durnovo, a noted linguist, and his son, Andrei. On the twenty-eighth, the Durnov
os were arrested. Their arrests marked the beginning of what became known as the Affair of the Slavicists.

  Under questioning, Andrei Durnovo admitted to being part of a fascist organization called the Russian Nationalist Party (RNP). On New Year’s Eve, the police arrested Andrei’s fiancée, seventeen-year-old Varya Trubetskoy. Days later, they arrested her father, Vladimir. Eventually, some seventy people, nearly all of them academics and intellectuals, many of them linguists and literary scholars, were arrested. Brothers Vladimir and Sergei Golitsyn were for some unknown reason never arrested, nor was Pavel Sheremetev, whose name was included on a list of suspected RNP members. The purported masters of the RNP were a group of Russian émigrés in Western Europe, chief among them Vladimir Trubetskoy’s brother Nikolai, a professor at the University of Vienna and one of the twentieth century’s great linguists, and his friend and colleague and fellow linguist Roman Jakobson. Nikolai Trubetskoy was among the founders of Eurasianism, a political movement within the émigré community that viewed the Bolshevik Revolution as a necessary step in Russia’s unique historical path, a path that would eventually lead to the Communists’ shedding their Marxism for Russian Orthodoxy. The men and women arrested in the Affair of the Slavicists were charged with secretly working toward this end under the guidance of their superiors in the West. Vladimir Trubetskoy, who had been permitted in 1930 to take his sick son Grisha for medical treatment in Paris, where he saw his brother and many other émigrés, was believed to be the RNP’s go-between.

  The affair was intended as a warning to members of the old intelligentsia: get in line with the Stalin Revolution, or else. Most of those arrested received sentences of internal exile, although their involvement in this affair meant many of them, including the Durnovos, would be shot during the Great Terror. Varya Trubetskoy was sentenced to three years’ exile; her father, to five years in the gulag, a sentence that was then commuted to exile.17 In April 1934, Vladimir and Varya, accompanied by several OGPU agents, were put on a passenger train in Moscow and sent to the town of Andijan, in Uzbekistan.