Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith

  Once an important stop on the Silk Road before being destroyed by Genghis Khan, Andijan had for centuries been the capital of the Fergana Valley at the foot of the dramatic snowcapped Pamir Mountains, “the roof of the world.” It was a town of seventy thousand, with green parks, theaters, cinemas, a bazaar, a cotton mill, and a large beer brewery. Most of the local Uzbek women still wore burkas of dark blue or gold velvet. It was a multiethnic town, with Uzbeks, Bukharan Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars, and Armenians.18

  When she learned where Vladimir and Varya were being sent, Eli began making preparations to follow. She sold off most of the family’s few possessions, borrowed money from some relatives, packed, and then boarded a train for the long trek in May 1934. They were quite a sight: Eli, eight months pregnant, surrounded by six children between the ages of eight and nineteen and a motley assortment of bundles and beat-up old suitcases. They found lodging in Andijan with a local Uzbek man who agreed to rent them half of his house. A month after she arrived Eli gave birth to her eighth child, Georgy.

  Although still an outcast, Vladimir had little difficulty finding work in a restaurant orchestra and playing for the Uzbek State Theater. With some of his fellow musicians he set up a jazz band that played gigs in the towns around Andijan. He earned almost nothing and had to play every night until early in the morning, leaving him exhausted. Other than regular visits to the headquarters of the local NKVD (as the main administration of the secret or political police became known from mid-1934) to confirm he was still living in Andijan and to report on his travels with the jazz band, Vladimir was free to do as he pleased.

  Vladimir and Eli created a new life for the family in Central Asia far from their loved ones back in Russia. Vladimir embraced aspects of the local culture: he gave up chairs in favor of squatting and donned native costume—a richly embroidered skullcap and long gown that he wore over jodhpurs and puttees. He and Eli got to know their Uzbek neighbors and would meet them in the courtyard to talk and share cigarettes. The older children worked, while the younger ones went to school. In the holidays they went fishing and hiking or visited the local Park of Culture and Rest, with its fun house, beer hall, and swimming pool. Over time Vladimir managed to save just enough money to purchase a few luxuries: a sewing machine for Eli, a bicycle for the children, a radio.

  When he was not working, Vladimir wrote in the kitchen, the children running and playing around him. He wrote stories inspired by the beautiful, exotic world of Central Asia, none of which were ever published, being at odds with the dictates of Soviet literature at the time, and a memoir—“Notes of a Cuirassier”—of his life as an officer before the revolution. The lone copy of this memoir remarkably survived and was published for the first time in 1991. Vladimir also wrote often to his beloved nephew Vladimir Golitsyn about his adventures in Andijan. He regaled Vladimir with stories of life with the jazz band—about their wild pianist and his cocaine addiction, about the beautiful young women he flirted with on the road, and about the prostitutes trolling from table to table through the smoky café air.

  His letters and stories and the accounts of everyone who knew him reveal a man with an unbroken and unbreakable spirit. Vladimir was full of the joy of life: humorous, playful, witty, even silly, a happy family man and father, a provider, a musician, a writer, a hunter and outdoorsman, and always an optimist, even when he had no reason to be. Despite everything, he knew no bitterness or remorse. While in Andijan he began thinking about where they would go once his sentence was over. His dream was to settle on the shores of the Black Sea.19

  Before leaving the Butyrki in late 1933, Vladimir Golitsyn jotted down a few words carved into the wall of his cell: “Don’t be sad upon entering, don’t be joyful upon leaving. Everyone will spend time here, no one will ever forget it.”20

  The family rejoiced upon Vladimir’s return to Dmitrov. There was one among them, however, who could not believe what had happened to Vladimir: his brother Sergei’s fiancée, Klavdia Bavykin. Sergei had met her while working as a laborer draining swamps. She was a simple girl from a worker’s family that had done well under the Soviet government. They had successful careers, earned well, and lived comfortably. What is more, they had faith in the system and its rulers. They believed the official line about “saboteurs” and “enemies of the state” and trusted that only the truly guilty ended up in prison. And now here was Vladimir straight from prison. Klavdia did not know what to make of it all. Masha Golitsyn held up her brother’s coat to Klavdia’s nose. It reeked of the carbolic acid used to disinfect prisoners’ clothes. The smell had an almost magical effect on Klavdia, opening her eyes and waking her up to the truth about the government’s supposed enemies.

  Members of both families were against Sergei’s and Klavdia’s plan to marry. Sergei’s family found Klavdia “uncultured,” and they hoped he would find someone from “our circle” instead. Klavdia’s family worried that marrying into a family of former people and outcasts would put not only her but all of them in danger. One relative even threatened to denounce Sergei unless he stopped seeing Klavdia. He told Sergei that he could make him vanish with a single phone call. For a long time Sergei was tormented about what to do. Fearful for Klavdia’s safety, he had tried to talk her out of loving him, but she had refused to listen and insisted she was ready to share his fate. They wed in a small church off the Arbat Street in Moscow in the spring of 1934. Both agreed Klavdia should keep her surname, as this was safer; there was talk of Sergei’s taking her name too, but he refused. “No, I will not change my name! I was born a prince and will remain a prince, no matter what!” he insisted. Only a few family members came to the wedding and the small reception at Klavdia’s parents’ apartment.21

  The newlyweds settled near Sergei’s family in Dmitrov. It was a particularly difficult time for the family. Masha was arrested and held for a short time. She lost her job and was expelled from school.22 Money was short. Several of the Golitsyn children fell ill with scarlet fever. Vladimir was afflicted by a painful degenerative knee ailment. After years of suffering, he finally decided to have an operation. He nearly died from an overdose of ether while the surgeon removed most of his knee joint. His leg was now fused and an inch and a half shorter than the other, requiring Vladimir to use a cane for the rest of his life.23

  Despite all this, Vladimir managed to find solace. One night, as he sat writing, his family having gone to bed, he reflected on how the revolution had affected them, on how the repression, arrests, and executions, the confiscations and forced moves had “created in our family a certain immunity, a philosophical relation to such things.”

  On the other hand, such uncertainty in tomorrow creates a devil-may-care attitude to one’s apartment, to one’s everyday surroundings and the like. Is it worth hanging new wallpaper, is it worth fixing anything if perhaps they’ll come for you tomorrow? [. . .] On the other hand, you do feel with greater intensity the happiness of the moment when you’re seated at the table, drawing something, and your wife is worried that she has done a poor job coloring Lariusha’s trousers, Papa is moving some burning wood, stoking the fire, Mama is busy on her sewing machine, and the children are playing in the yard, which is drying out after the rains. For now, all’s well, and I can feel this. But tomorrow?

  He ended this diary entry with the words “Written at twelve midnight, too late, that is, for a search or arrest.”24

  Such moments were rare. By the spring of 1935, the atmosphere in Dmitrov was growing worse. Vladimir wrote: “Each time someone in a police uniform walks past we feel the acid in our stomachs churn. Only the children are happy and carefree.” One day they heard a rumor that their house had been promised to someone else and they were to be evicted. Some in the family wanted to leave Dmitrov straight away for the town of Cheboksary, on the Volga. There, in the provinces, perhaps they might have more chance of escaping the notice of the police.25 But in the end they chose to stay.

  On November 25, NKVD agents came to the Golitsyn hou
se and told Vladimir he had twenty-four hours to leave Dmitrov and move outside the one-hundred-kilometer zone around Moscow. The day before, he and Yelena had put their daughter in the hospital with scarlet fever; their two sons had been placed in isolation. There was no way they could leave. “Cruel fate has us by the throat,” he complained. “Where are we to go? Why this pointless cruelty? Why are we more dangerous in Dmitrov than Mozhaisk?”26 Vladimir sent a letter that day to Korin to ask whether he would be willing to speak to Yagoda, now the people’s commissar for internal affairs—chief, that is, of the NKVD. Not wanting to put his friend in too difficult a position, he told Korin not to bother if he feared it might hurt him in any way: “It’s not a catastrophe, since by our count we’ve already had to move ten times.” Korin agreed to help and mentioned their problem to Yagoda. “So, I see you’re pleading once more for your prince!” Yagoda shouted at Korin. Despite his outburst, Yagoda agreed to help. The order was rescinded, and the family was permitted to remain in Dmitrov.27 The Golitsyns were grateful for Yagoda’s intervention, but they could not count on it for much longer. The following year Yagoda was removed from his post and replaced by Nikolai Yezhov. In March 1938, during the Great Terror, Yagoda was arrested along with several thousand of his former NKVD supporters, and later shot.

  Vladimir had long foreseen an equally horrifying fate for himself. A man he once met remarked how he felt “like a mouse caught in a trap who has been doused with kerosene and is just waiting for someone to come with a match.

  “I see that match all the time,” Vladimir added grimly.28

  22

  ANNA’S FORTUNE

  In 1775, Empress Catherine the Great began building a large neo-Gothic palace south of Moscow. Work at Tsaritsyno, as it became known, went on in fits and starts for the next two decades. It was still under way in 1796, when the empress died, and was never completed. The palace soon fell into disrepair, the gardens went to seed, and in the following century the area became a popular place for Muscovites to build their summer dachas, a fact reflected in its new name, Tsaritsyno-Dachnoe. In the early years of the Soviet Union, Tsaritsyno-Dachnoe became Lenino-Dachnoe, and it was there that in 1928, having completed their three-year term of exile, Anna Saburov and her children Boris, Yuri, and Xenia settled. They were drawn to Tsaritsyno, as they never stopped calling it, largely because of its proximity to Moscow and the fact that they had family there—namely, Varvara and Vladimir Obolensky. Vladimir had found work in the area managing a state farm and later had taken a position as bookkeeper in a brick factory after having been fired for being a former prince. Around the same time the Saburovs arrived, so too did Varvara’s mother, Maria Gudovich, and her siblings Dmitry, Andrei, and Merinka.1

  The reunion was short-lived. In early 1929, Boris and Yuri were arrested; a few months later, Dmitry and Andrei were also arrested. The four cousins were charged with being members of a counterrevolutionary monarchist organization and convicted under Article 58, Section 10 of the state criminal code. Boris and Yuri were sentenced to three years of exile in Siberia, their second such sentence following the Foxtrot Affair of 1924.2 Andrei Gudovich also received a three-year term of exile, also in Siberia, also for the second time.3 Dmitry was given the harshest sentence: five years in a labor camp. He was sent to Belbaltlag in Kem, Karelia, near the White Sea, where he was set to work loading wood and transferred to work on building the Belbalt Canal. He remained there until 1932, when he was freed ahead of time and sent to work on the Moscow–Volga Canal in Dmitrov.4 Amid all the misery, former Prince Sergei Lvov was courting Merinka Gudovich, and they married that same year.5 Merinka’s second marriage, like her first, would end tragically.

  Boris and Yuri were moved to the Butyrki Prison to await word of their fates. At eleven o’clock on the night of August 31 they were roused from their cells and taken to the Kazan railway station. The next day the train took them into exile. Neither of them had any idea where they were heading. Xenia had gone to Moscow to check on her brothers and was there to see them off from the station. They rode as far as Sverdlovsk (the former Yekaterinburg), where they were placed in solitary confinement. It was there, on December 5, that they apparently learned they both were going to be sent to the Tobolsk district—Boris to the town of Samarovo; Yuri, to Surgut. Once he learned his destination, Boris wrote his mother asking her to send him warm things and a Bible. The brothers traveled together to Samarovo, and then Yuri went on alone to Surgut.

  The brothers experienced their second Siberian exile very differently. Yuri found work doing drawings for a small reading room located in a peasant hut, and he asked his mother to send him some paints, brushes, and paper for his work. “Don’t worry about me,” he told his mother. “There’s absolutely no need to worry. You can worry about Boris, but not about me. I am well and feel marvelous.” After a few weeks Yuri was moved to Saygatino, a collection of fifteen yurts on the banks of the Ob River about thirty-five kilometers west of Surgut. Still, he was happy. He had taken a small room for himself, had enough warm clothes and plenty to eat (milk, butter, meat, fish, partridge), had learned how to make a bit of money sewing fur hats, and was gathering material for an ethnographic article he hoped to submit to a journal for publication. When he had time, he strapped on his skis and went out hunting.6

  Boris was having a much more difficult time adjusting to exile, which he recognized in a letter to their mother. “I have given him the palm to bear some time ago and now I’m happy for him: he’s full of energy and is doing so well, not at all like his brother.” From Samarovo he had been moved to the village of Seliyarov, where he was living in a yurt with a family, paying them what little money he had for room and board. Food was meager, typically nothing more than some broth, fish in aspic, and tea. He was not able to find any work and instead spent most of his day reading religious works, sleeping, writing, and waiting for letters from home. He struggled with depression.7

  Anna and Xenia were extremely worried about both of them, and they went to Moscow to see what they could do to help. They sought meetings with various tame Communists, sent appeals, and visited Peshkov. Their efforts, however, proved unsuccessful.8

  The months passed, and little changed. The year 1930 gave way to 1931, and Boris and Yuri were still in exile. Yuri’s spirits remained high, and he continued to make the most of his life in this remote corner of Siberia. Nonetheless, he too suffered periods of sadness and regret. It pained him that his fate caused his mother and sister so much grief, and he wrote to them over and over not to worry, to keep what little money and food they had for themselves and not to waste them on him. He also struggled at times with the isolation of exile. “I would so love to know what is happening in the world,” he wrote on April 5, 1931, to his mother.

  Being so cut off from life is not usual in any way and does have its humorous aspects, but the main thing one feels is curiosity. [. . .] Time here neither passes nor flies, but rushes past at a gallop. There’s the impression of the days flashing by, like telegraph poles seen from the window of a train. On one hand it’s pleasant, but on the other it’s a bit terrifying. They are vanishing, utterly wasted.9

  If Yuri was preoccupied with a lost future, Boris was obsessed with the lost past. By the summer of 1931 he had moved back to Samarovo, where he shared a room with a stranger in the house of an old couple. Still not working, he managed to survive on the money his mother and Yuri sent; he was so poor he could not afford envelopes for the letters he was forever writing his mother, fashioning them out of old newspapers instead. The longing for his family, and especially his mother, was so intense he sought relief in comforting images of life before the revolution and in a growing religious faith of such intense mysticism that he began to experience visions and hallucinations.10

  Boris’s preoccupation with the past apparently had begun in 1926 during his first exile in Irbit. It was there that he had saved a Bible that his roommates had wanted to use to feed their stove. It was an older Bible, printed in 1883, a
nd the date led him to wonder what his mother had been doing then. “It was long ago, isn’t that right?” he asked her. “When this was printed, you were sitting somewhere in the Fountain House, what room did you live in then? Was it the one by the stairs down near Grandfather’s? You once talked about how you loved this room because you had lived in it.”11 He wrote to his mother of his memories of services in the Fountain House church, of sitting and reading with Grandmother Sheremetev “in a field of rye and cornflowers,” of an Easter celebration at Moscow’s Uspensky Cathedral with “a crowd of people,” he seated on the floor staring in wonder at the reflection of the brilliant iconostasis in an old lady’s silk dress.12 He warmed himself with the memory of a trip he took as a child before the Great War with his father through the Swiss Alps (how he had marveled at the long tunnels) and then Lombardy on their way to meet Anna in Florence. “How good it is that people have such memories, and how happy I was just now recalling you and Papa and all of us together! The fruit! The flowers! Florence! Hotel Baglioni!”13

  Anna replied: “And I too, Borya, my dear, live in the past through my memories, especially because Papa was with us, because that life was harmonious, unbroken, and whole, and because all of our children were with us.”14 In September, she wrote how that time of the year always reminded her of the apple harvest, of happy gatherings by the samovar.