Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith

  That spring Anna was also preoccupied with her concern for Yuri. She had been sending him parcels too, but each time they came back marked “Undeliverable.” It had been two years since she had had any word from him, but she refused to give up hope. She kept writing letters to the camp officials, to the gulag administration in Moscow too, begging them for information and pleading for her lost son.40 She never received any answers.

  By late May, Xenia’s spirits had revived, in part because of the possibility that she might be freed. She had recently learned that some of the prisoners convicted in Ivanovo around the same time as she had been and for the same charge (Article 58, Section 6) had had their cases reviewed and their convictions overturned. Xenia was intent on writing an appeal to the NKVD and was hopeful of her chances. There was, however, one problem: all appeals had to submitted in triplicate, and there was no writing paper at the camp. And so she would have to wait until she could get paper to make her appeal.

  Xenia’s revived mood was also due to her good relations with the other prisoners. Throughout June and July she was out working in the forest, cutting branches and debarking felled trees. It was not easy work, but Xenia was getting on well, thanks to the men who pitched in to help her. Xenia was amazed at their compassion and sympathy. One of them in particular impressed her. He was a Turk, but she called him the Babylonian. He went out of his way to be helpful, to look after Xenia, picking up her ax when she was too tired to go on, finishing her work, and always sharing his rations. She was flattered and fell in love. When he was caught giving her money, he was sentenced to twenty-two days in an isolation cell, which made her love him all the more. “He is despotic, handsome, and smart,” Xenia told her mother, “passionate and good.”41 Xenia was convinced she would have died there had it not been for the Babylonian and some of the other men she had met in the camps. She wrote to her mother:

  All these meetings, these random meetings with people, not in some ballroom, but in the middle of a forest, in the middle of the taiga, are so unusual and rare. We experienced so much together that our friendship can, of course, never be broken as if we had met in the circumstances of ordinary life. Even if we may be, so to say, people from different planets, still these relationships will remain “until the grave.”

  Anna, who had never been in the camps, found this difficult to understand, and despite everything that had happened to the family, she worried Xenia had let herself become too familiar with a non-Christian Turk. “But we were a hair’s breadth from death!” Xenia tried to explain.

  We shared everything—joy and grief, the last crumb of bread, even clothes. Not surprisingly, given such circumstances it’s hard to remain on formal terms. [. . .] Whether in the camp or in exile, everything is completely different. We had found ourselves in such conditions in which one day is equal to a year. The Babylonian and I had been acquainted for six months, yet it felt to me as if it had been an eternity! [. . .] He is so close to me, so dear to me. There is nothing at all alien about him. I understand what you are saying, and you are right, if you look at things from an older point of view, from, say, the perspective of Grandfather and Grandmother—what would they think, what would they say? But could Grandmother have ever thought, or even have imagined, that her granddaughter, with the upbringing I had and the traditions I inherited, would suddenly end up a “lumberjack” in the taiga!? And so one must measure things with a different yardstick here. Of course, I, too, think it necessary that one remain modest, and to a certain point decorum should not be lost. [. . .] Men have shown and still do show me great respect thanks to my “modesty.” I am not vulgar or forward like most modern women, so, dear Mama, you need not worry yourself about me.42

  Throughout the late summer and into the autumn Xenia’s hope of being freed grew. In August, six inmates were released; in October, thirty-six more. The promise of freedom excited Xenia’s longing for home and her mother. She could see herself back in Vladimir, together again, in the kitchen baking, laughing, and rejoicing in life under the same roof. Finally, by December writing paper had become available. Her hands aching from the long days in the forest gripping her ax, Xenia sat down on December 2, 1939, and wrote, in triplicate, her appeal. And then she began to wait.43

  23

  HAPPY TIMES

  Life, comrades,” Stalin announced in 1935, “has become better, life has become more cheerful.” His words became the defining slogan for the mid-1930s, the brief three years from 1934 to 1937 between the end of the First Five-Year Plan and the Great Terror. To millions of Soviet citizens this was quite possibly the case, if only because the massive upheavals caused by the campaigns of forced collectivization and crash industrialization had ended. Compared with the nightmare of the Great Break, life truly was better. But there was still much about life in Soviet Russia that was far from cheerful.

  The same year Stalin made his famous remark, the newspaper Komsomolskaia Pravda ran a series of articles on “Teaching Hatred” by such luminaries as Maxim Gorky and Ilya Ehrenburg. Hatred, it turns out, was not to be condemned but instilled, encouraged, and celebrated, for persons “who cannot hate with passion are unlikely to be able to love with passion.” One article printed under the headline our hatred spelled out what brand of hatred was to be cultivated: “Among the noble qualities of the Soviet citizen, of the young person in the Land of the Soviets, is class hatred. We hate those principles on which the old society was founded and shall destroy them.” And it was not just principles. “In our country we avail ourselves not only of amnesty, but also of a harsh and noble law: ‘If the enemy does not surrender, he will be destroyed.’ ”1 Happy times indeed. If the middle years of the thirties provided a moment for much of the population to catch its breath, violence’s dark specter was never out of sight.

  The relaxation of the Cultural Revolution was signaled by the opening of restaurants to Soviet citizens (previously only foreigners could enjoy such luxuries), the return of jazz and the nefarious fox-trot, and a boom in homegrown musical comedies. Silk stockings reappeared in the stores, and the ban on Christmas trees was lifted.2 There was a softening in the rhetoric concerning former people and outcasts as well. In 1935, Stalin remarked, “A son does not answer for his father,” words that millions of stigmatized and oppressed Soviet citizens recited in the coming years as a weapon in the struggle to regain their civil rights. The new thinking culminated in the so-called Stalin Constitution of 1936, which guaranteed full rights to all citizens “irrespective of race, nationality, religious confession, education level, way of life, social origin, property status, and past activity.” Stalin himself had killed a proposed amendment that would have stripped of their rights all former people, clergymen, former White Guards, and anyone “not engaged in socially useful labor.” While such restrictions had been necessary in the past, Stalin noted, they no longer were. “The distinctive thing about Soviet society at the present time,” he said, “in contrast to any capitalist society, is that there are no longer any antagonistic classes. The exploiting classes have been liquidated.” With the Stalin Constitution, the problem of former people seemed to disappear.3

  The thirties also saw the abandonment of any official talk of egalitarianism and an open endorsement of privilege and favor based on one’s usefulness to the state. No one enjoyed greater privilege than the party elite. Of course, there was nothing new about this. As early as the spring of 1918, Madame Lunacharsky was being driven around Petrograd in a limousine that months earlier had belonged to Grand Duke Pavel Alexandrovich, his former chauffeur Zvereff at the wheel. That same year she and her husband took up residence at the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo, just above the former rooms of the dowager empress Maria Fyodorovna. Madame Lunacharsky attended the theater dressed in brilliant evening gowns.4 This was standard for the leaders of the revolution. But under Stalin, privilege was expanded, and the wealth made available to the ruling elite grew to mirror more fully that enjoyed by the prerevolutionary aristocracy.

  Charle
s Ciliberti, chauffeur to U.S. Ambassador Joseph Davies, was stunned the first time he visited the dacha of Vyacheslav Molotov, chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, in 1937. He was there to deliver Mrs. Davies, born Marjorie Merriweather Post, socialite and heiress to the enormous cereal fortune of her father, C. W. Post. Molotov’s property was considerably larger than Mrs. Davies’s hundred-acre Long Island estate, with more and better food, and butlers who made hers look like “amateurs,” in Ciliberti’s estimation. In the garage, Molotov kept a sixteen-cylinder Cadillac along with several Packards and Fords. The following year Ciliberti drove Mrs. Davies to lunch at the country home of Maxim Litvinov, people’s commissar for foreign affairs. So heavily laden was the serving table Ciliberti felt certain it would collapse. Like other wealthy foreigners in the Soviet Union, Mrs. Davies frequented the Torgsin stores to buy the art, antiques, and furnishings of the former nobility. She was also granted access to secret vaults filled with jewels and gold and silver, all available for purchase. When the Davieses left the country, Soviet officials presented her a pair of Chinese vases from the Sheremetevs’ former palace of Ostankino.5

  Stalin had a number of luxurious houses at his disposal. There was the dacha at Zubalovo, for example, built by a nobleman who had made a fortune in the oil business. The leader’s daughter, Svetlana, loved it there, where she felt very much at home; “our Zubalovo,” she liked to call it. When in the Crimea, Stalin preferred to stay at Koreiz, the former palace of Prince Felix Yusupov outside Yalta. Stalin even took the nobility’s former servants; Svetlana’s nanny had earlier been the governess for the children of Ulyana Samarin (née Osorgin).6 The unashamed adoption of life’s finer things extended well beyond the Kremlin court and trickled all the way down the political ladder, rung by rung, to first the provincial and then the local party bosses.

  Access to special stores, cars and drivers, dachas, servants, sanatoriums on the Black Sea, elite schools and summer camps for their children: the new ruling class of Russia lived a life inconceivable to the masses. The people, however, were not entirely ignorant of their masters’ lifestyle. The secret police recorded dangerous comparisons being made between the Communists and the old aristocracy: “Communists in Moscow live like lords, they go round in sables and with silver-handled canes”; “They want to get rid of equality. They want to create classes: the Communists (or former nobility) and us ordinary mortals.”7 The Soviet elite not only rejected such criticisms but refused to acknowledge them. In their eyes, they remained revolutionaries, proletarians, Communists. They pointed out what they held to be a crucial distinction between themselves and the former tsarist elite: they did not own these things but merely had access to them. The English tourist Norah Rowan-Hamilton was stunned by the lavish lifestyle of a Soviet minister she visited. When she expressed surprise that the family ate off china from the old tsarist mint, he defended himself: “Yes, but we do not own these luxuries. They belong to the State. Only as servants of the State do we use them.” Pure sophism, thought Norah.8

  Olga Sheremetev was hired to help the new elite acquire the desired polish and sophistication. She taught French at a top military academy to the likes of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, civil war hero and marshal of the Soviet Union (shot in 1937), and Alexei Okulov, old Bolshevik and commander of Red Army forces in eastern Siberia (shot in 1939). She also gave private French lessons to the children of the Soviet diplomat Nariman Podolsky. Getting to know these men and their families, Olga had to admit that “among the Communists there are some surprisingly sympathetic and nice people. [. . .] They are new people, but their interests and tastes are old; they simply bow down before different idols, though they be idols nonetheless.” Be that as it may, she still wanted as little to do with such people as possible. One winter evening in 1935, Olga was invited to a party at the Podolskys’. The guests talked of nothing but politics and Stalin; when someone mentioned the recent death of Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, the composer and director of the Bolshoi Theater, no one expressed the least bit of interest. “I didn’t feel myself there at all,” Olga wrote in her diary, “and left as soon as I could. As I walked home I kept thinking that even with all their pursuit of an educated and cultured way of life these communist families are greater philistines than we are, although this charge is forever being thrown in our faces.”9

  Among those granted access to this rarefied world was the American fashion photographer James Abbe, who visited the USSR in 1932. Abbe went to the opera and sat next to Soviet officials and their wives in fancy dress, all engaged in lots of “hand-kissing”; he went to the Moscow racetrack, which he found nearly as “snobbish” and “fashionable” as any other in Europe; and he hung out at the bar in the swanky Metropole Hotel. The bar was popular with diplomats and journalists and Western tourists because of its jazz bands and the beautiful, elegantly dressed barmaids and cocktail waitresses. According to Abbe, most of these women were the daughters of former aristocrats and rich bourgeois. Fluent in English, French, and German, they were forced into working in the bar as honeypots for the OGPU. It was said women who failed to get information out of the Western men disappeared. Nothing, however, could compare with the formal parties thrown by Madame Litvinov, wife of the commissar for foreign affairs. The guests would arrive in chauffeured limousines at her large prerevolutionary mansion on Moscow’s Spiridonovka Street, where a decade earlier young Golitsyns and Sheremetevs had partied with their friends from the ARA. There, waiting at the top of the large staircase in a brilliant gown, Madame Litvinov welcomed her guests, a gloved hand outstretched to receive their kisses.

  Perhaps the strangest experience Abbe had in the Soviet Union was his visit to a group he called “The Ex-Bomb Throwers,” officially known as the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiles. This collection of former revolutionary terrorists lived in an urban mansion “in the atmosphere of an aristocratic club of bygone days, with a private restaurant and picture gallery containing photographs, drawings, paintings, and etchings—many of them works of art—that depict the less pleasant side of prison life under the Czars.” Abbe lunched with the members in their Moscow club before being driven out to their country house, the former Sheremetev estate of Mikhailovskoe. Abbe was given a tour of the beautiful estate grounds, with its fragrant pines, clear lakes, and well-kept lawns; the old barns had been converted into a children’s colony, and peasants continued to dwell in the small cottages, though now they no longer served the Sheremetevs but the members of the society. An ancient gardener left over from the days of the Sheremetevs still tended the flowers.

  To Abbe, as he toured the manor, it seemed as if the previous owners had just left the day before. Everything appeared to be in excellent condition, and the house, with its elegant furnishings, lovely music room, and enormous, dark-paneled library filled with leather-bound editions of the French and English classics, exuded “the Old Régime atmosphere of culture.” The members slept upstairs in canopied poster beds; a number of smaller iron cots had also been set up “for the overflow of ex-revolutionaries on summer vacation.” A musical gong summoned them to dinner. “The aristocrats of Revolution were seated about the round mahogany table. As I took my place at this proletarian Round Table I observed that the Bolshevik knights and ladies were being served by peasant retainers on china which bore the coat-of-arms of the Society of Ex-Political Prisoners: a barred prison window and a chained manacle wreath!” Seated with Abbe were some of the most famous names of the Russian revolutionary movement, now old and gray and wrinkled. To one side sat Vasily Perovsky, the brother of Sofia Perovsky, who had been hanged for her role in the assassination of Alexander II. Across the table sat Mikhail Frolenko, another of the assassins and cofounder of The People’s Will, who had spent twenty-four years in prison. “Throughout dinner the little group chatted, laughed, joked and recounted soft-spoken tales of bloodshed and terror of the old days of the Revolution.”

  As he was leaving, Abbe encountered a tiny white-haired lady sitting on the b
alcony. He introduced himself and was stunned to learn she was none other than Vera Figner. Figner was perhaps the most famous and notorious of Russia’s revolutionaries, whose early days in the movement stretched back to the 1870s. A member of the executive committee of The People’s Will, she had helped plan the assassination of Alexander II, for which she was later sentenced to death, though subsequently pardoned and given twenty-years in prison. After the revolution the publication of her memoirs brought her world fame. Abbe was stunned to meet this icon of the revolution, and he found it difficult to reconcile the image of the unbreakable terrorist-revolutionary with the sweet-looking octogenarian in her lace cap quietly picking away at her embroidery. “Here on the balcony where Old Régime nobles sunned themselves while it lasted, Vera Figner reminisced verbally with me,” Abbe wrote. “The conversation veered to the present Soviet system. As Vera Figner discussed the government she had devoted her life to establishing, her comment came softly and her eyes were dull with tragedy. Her words caused me to glance sharply over my shoulder for fear she might be over-heard. ‘This is not what we fought for,’ she murmured.”10