The old Sheremetev gardener at Mikhailovskoe could have told Abbe some stories as well. Like the bizarre tale of Count Pyotr Sheremetev, buried there in 1914. In the spring of 1929 rumors began circulating that Pyotr had been laid to rest with weapons of gold in his coffin. Thieves tried to smash their way into the crypt but failed; to put an end to the rumors, the authorities broke open the crypt and dug up his grave. What they saw upon opening his coffin sent chills down their spines. Placed in a tightly sealed double coffin, Pyotr’s body, although fifteen years in the ground, had hardly decayed. All the skin was still there, just dried out and tighter now. Some claimed they had seen the body of a holy man. Having dispelled one rumor, the officials now worried they had inadvertently created a new one. To make certain the crypt did not become a place of pilgrimage, they secretly reburied Pyotr’s body in an unmarked spot on the grounds, not bothering to put it back in the coffin.11
The eternal rest of a good many Sheremetevs was disturbed during these years. In May 1927, Olga Sheremetev recorded a story Maria Gudovich had told her about the fate of the ancient Sheremetev crypt in Novospassky Monastery’s Znamensky Church:
Today she came from Novospassky where she had met some old woman (I never meet such old women) who talked about how they had opened up the crypts at Novospassky, how they had destroyed the chapel where Sister Dosifeya was buried, how they then dug up the graves and searched the corpses. In the crypt under the Znamensky Church in one of the coffins they even found a gold saber, which they took. The old woman said she saw all this herself and even helped dig, even though they don’t let anyone inside its walls. But this is all entirely possible, for I myself saw in 1923 crypts and graves in the Simonov Monastery that had been broken into and dug up. I know that they took tombstones from the Novospassky Monastery for use in the remodeling of the Bolshoi Theater. I know that they rob the dead. This isn’t what’s interesting; what is interesting is the very romantic legend she talked about, how early in the morning and in the evening candles light themselves and the sound of singing can be heard coming from inside the locked temples. These are the deceased, abandoned and insulted, holding services in the destroyed, crumbling, and forgotten churches, and the prisoners and their guards do not dare enter out of fear.12
Alexandra Tolstoy was an inmate at the Novospassky Monastery when this happened. One night she heard the sound of crowbars and spades clanking against marble headstones and tombs as some of the female prisoners dug up the graves. In the morning she went out to see the ground littered with bones and skulls, and women sitting on the profaned grave stones admiring their booty—“gold rings, bracelets, and crosses,” many with precious stones. The pillage went on for several nights, and nothing was done to stop it. Only after some of the women went mad, wailing and screaming in the dark and claiming to have seen the ghost of a monk in gray robes in one of the tombs, did they stop.13
More Sheremetev graves were desecrated in Nizhny Novgorod. Several generations of Sheremetevs (from the nontitled noble branch of the family) had been buried in a local church that was closed and then vandalized after the revolution. The graves were dug up, the coffins opened, and the bodily remains dumped out, stripped, plundered, and left on the ground. The crypt was turned into a storage room for kerosene, and the church became a cinema.14
Of course, the fate of the Sheremetevs’ remains was not unique. In 1928, the former prince Pyotr Obolensky went to visit his mother’s grave at the Tikhvinskoe Cemetery in Leningrad’s Alexander Nevsky Monastery. When he got to the chapel crypt, he saw that the steel doors had been ripped open. Pyotr descended the stairs and found the crypt dirty, dug up, and defiled; people had apparently been living there for a time. The squatters had not been able to get to his mother’s grave, though they had managed to dig up that of his aunt. The family crypt of the Baryatinskys at the Marino estate church was ruthlessly destroyed in 1937. The marble sarcophagi were smashed to pieces, and the remains of nineteen Baryatinskys were thrown in a pile and burned in the work yard. The ashes were left to the wind, and the crypt was used to store coal.15
Much of the vandalism was spontaneous, although from the late 1920s most of it was officially planned and carried out. The destruction of the Baryatinsky crypt, for example, had been ordered by Moscow. Bricks were needed for a new school floor, and some official decided the best place to get them would be from under the corpses of the Baryatinskys. Across Russia, officials looked to cemeteries for free building material; perhaps as many as forty thousand tons of iron, bronze, granite, and other stones were ripped out of the ground and repurposed. Much of the marble used to decorate the earliest Moscow subway stations in the 1930s came from tombstones. Stripped of their material assets, many cemeteries were then bulldozed, and apartment blocks, workers’ clubs, parks, and soccer fields were built over the dead. The obliteration of these old cemeteries and graveyards served both to further erase Russia’s tsarist past from the landscape and to show that the Soviet government was indeed making life better, more cheerful.16
With the United States and much of the industrialized world mired in the Great Depression, with labor unrest swelling, and with little objective information coming out of the Soviet Union, it is not surprising that some people in the West looked to the rising Communist state with hope. What is surprising is that some of them were Russian nobles.
Alexei Ignatiev, born in 1877, had graduated from the Corps des Pages in St. Petersburg and then joined the Chevaliers Gardes. After fighting in the Russo-Japanese War, Ignatiev served in various foreign capitals and was the country’s military attaché in Paris when the revolution occurred. As early as November 1917 he sided with the Bolsheviks and helped procure arms for them. He was apparently motivated in part by the murder of his father, Count Alexei Pavlovich Ignatiev, the reactionary governor of Tver Province, killed in 1906 by the Socialist Revolutionaries. Ignatiev had never believed the story of his father’s murder, insisting that he had actually been killed by the tsarist secret police because of his father’s disgust with Nicholas’s political concessions following the Revolution of 1905. Alexei officially began to work for the Soviets in 1925, earning him the revulsion of the White émigré community. After many years in exile, Ignatiev made his first trip back to Russia in 1930. It made a powerful impression on him. On the last night of his visit, Ignatiev stood on Red Square and listened with overflowing emotion as the Kremlin bells rang out the “Internationale.” “With pride I felt myself to be a Soviet citizen, an equal among equals, a free man among the free,” he confessed. Returned to Paris, he wrote a glowing appraisal of the USSR for the influential Vu magazine, which brought even more scorn from the exile community.
“It’s funny, and also shameful,” he later remarked, “that I have had to hear base lies about Soviet Russia from people of the former ‘privileged’ class who have abandoned their homeland forever and become traitors.” In 1937, at the height of the Great Terror, Molotov telegrammed Ignatiev asking him to return immediately to Russia to work in the People’s Commissariat for Defense. Ignatiev returned, and amazingly, this former nobleman, guards officer, and son of a reactionary tsarist official not only survived the Great Terror and Second World War but even outlived Stalin, dying at the age of eighty.17
Ignatiev was someone who identified as much with the growing power of the Soviet Union as with its Communist ideology. Not so Dmitry Svyatopolk-Mirsky, another noble returnee. The son of the former tsarist minister of the interior Prince Pyotr Svyatopolk-Mirksy, Dmitry and his brother Alexei had fought with the Whites in the civil war, during which Alexei was killed. Dmitry fled to England, where he became a noted literary scholar and university lecturer. In 1931, he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and the following year left for the Soviet Union, having been granted a “pardon” by the Soviet government with the help of Gorky. Virginia Woolf saw him days before he left. “I thought as I watched his eyes brighten and fade—soon there’ll be a bullet through your head,” she wrote. Woolf was wrong, and Mi
rsky was left alone until the summer of 1937, when he was attacked in the press as a “Wrangelite” and “White Guard.” Shortly thereafter Dmitry was arrested and sentenced to eight years in the camps on “suspicion of espionage.” He died of enterocolitis near Magadan in the Far East in June 1939.
The British journalist and writer Malcolm Muggeridge met Mirsky in Moscow in 1932. Privately, he described Mirsky as “very brave,” if “a little mad,” for returning to Russia; publicly he slurred Mirsky in his novel Winter in Moscow in the character of Prince Alexis, describing him thus: “What is he but a man who’s managed to be a parasite under three régimes? An Aristocrat under the Tsarism. Professor under the capitalism. Proletarian man-of-letters under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”18
The most famous (or infamous) of all repatriated noblemen was the writer Count Alexei Tolstoy, once described as “the most authoritative apologist for the Stalinist regime.” A distant relation of Leo Tolstoy’s, Alexei was born in 1883, educated in St. Petersburg, and then covered World War I for the Russian press. During the civil war he sided with the Whites, even serving in General Denikin’s propaganda section for a period before leaving Russia for Western Europe. Tolstoy was not in exile long before experiencing a political change of heart and returning in 1923. The so-called Comrade Count (also Worker-Peasant Count) established himself as one of the leading men of Soviet letters alongside Gorky. He became chairman of the Soviet Writers’ Union in 1936 and was later made a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and deputy to the Supreme Soviet. Tolstoy received three Stalin Prizes, including one for his historical novel Peter the First in 1941. Under Stalin he lived in grand style in the former Tsarskoe Selo, like “an old-fashioned barin out of Turgenev’s pages,” observed the American journalist Eugene Lyons disdainfully. At his home he was waited on by a servant who had been with the family since before the revolution and who still addressed him as “Your Excellency.” He died, unmolested, in Moscow in 1945.19
24
POISONOUS SNAKES AND THE AVENGING SWORD: OPERATION FORMER PEOPLE
Late on the afternoon of December 1, 1934, just as he was about to enter his office at the Smolny building in Leningrad, Sergei Kirov, first secretary of the Leningrad Communist Party, was shot in the back of the head at close range. He died instantly. The following day Vladimir Golitsyn wrote in his diary: “Yesterday I heard on the radio that Kirov has been murdered. Our entire family is terrified. We all fear new repressions. God forbid the killer wasn’t a prince, count, or some other nobleman. Everyone’s been so upset by this senseless trick.”1
Many observers have long speculated that Stalin had arranged Kirov’s murder in order to rid himself of a potential political rival. It now seems most likely, however, that Stalin had nothing to do with the killing and that it was the work of a lone assassin. The gunman, Leonid Nikolaev, the unemployed son of a worker, had a history of emotional problems and had recently been expelled from the party. Angered at the downward spiral his life had taken, he sought revenge for his troubles against his supposed enemies by putting a bullet into the head of the city’s boss. Although Vladimir Golitsyn’s fear that the murderer was a nobleman proved unwarranted, still, he, like every other former person, had good cause to worry because the Soviet leadership used Kirov’s murder as a pretext for a new campaign of repression and terror.2
Kirov’s assassination was presented to the public as the work of the usual “enemies” who had been targeted since the beginning of Stalin’s revolution. Within weeks of the killing the hunt to uncover a supposed underground “Center of Zinovievites” was unleashed, and Stalin signed a resolution exiling 663 former Zinoviev supporters from Leningrad to northern Siberia and Yakutia.3 The repressive measures also hit non-Russian nationalities living in that part of the country. Ethnic Finns in the Leningrad district and Karelia, for example, were arrested as members of an alleged fifth column. As many as 46,000 people were deported from areas along the Soviet frontier and sent to special labor colonies in western Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Tadzhikistan.4 In Leningrad itself, however, the main target was former people.
On February 16, 1935, a report marked “top secret” was drafted by the NKVD of the Leningrad district for Genrikh Yagoda, chief of the NKVD, alerting him to the “serious overpopulation of enterprises, institutes of higher learning, and especially administrative offices of the city of Leningrad by members of the defeated bourgeoisie, powerful officials of the former state apparatus, [. . .] the offspring of executed terrorists, saboteurs, spies, and even prominent representatives of the former tsarist aristocracy, former tsarist generals, and their descendants.” The report went on to list five groups of enemies, the two largest of which were families of “former big landowners” and “former aristocrats—former princes, barons, counts, and others of the ancient, hereditary nobility.”5 The situation called for action, and on the night of February 27–28, Operation Former People was set in motion to rid Leningrad of every last former person within four weeks. In addition to the typical victims (nobles, tsarist military and police officers, Orthodox clergymen), this time the NKVD made sure to include their children and grandchildren, members of what was called the “counterrevolutionary reserve.”6 Although the Kirov Affair served as the catalyst for the operation, its origins can be traced back to 1933, when plans had been drawn up to purge the city of “socially alien elements.”7 For several years the Leningrad OGPU had already had the city’s former people under special observation in light of their “overt hostility,” as one police document put it, to the Soviet regime.8
Calls for action against former people began appearing in the local press even before the operation was officially launched. On February 8, Leningradskaia Pravda printed a letter by one Comrade Yakovlev under the heading “A Nest of Nobles.” According to Yakovlev, the apartment building at No. 105/4 Griboedov Canal had been taken over by a gang of former nobles who were “persecuting the workers and tormenting the Communists” who also lived there. The letter named names (“former baron and landowner Osten-Saken, former princess Putyatin”) and demanded that the nest be destroyed.9 Of course, the views expressed in the Soviet press have to be approached with caution and should not be taken as direct, unfiltered expressions of public opinion. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to think there was no popular support for the wide-scale attack on the former people; indeed, there is evidence to suggest that while not universal, such popular sentiment did exist and was cleverly used, though not manufactured, by the authorities for specific purposes.10
The Yakovlev letter is significant since it highlights one of the problems the authorities were trying to solve by way of Operation Former People—namely, housing. Following collectivization and the rush of peasants fleeing the countryside for the cities, the housing shortage in many urban centers became critical. One way to alleviate the problem was to empty the cities of undesirables. Between 1933 and 1935, 75,388 Leningraders were exiled, or simply shot, freeing up 9,950 apartments and rooms.11 Should anyone fail to see the social benefit from such a policy, a Soviet textbook on housing law from 1935 made the point in explicit terms:
One of the most spectacular demonstrations to the working men of what the Revolution really could mean to them was the moving of people who had been living in the cellars and little shacks out in the poverty-stricken suburbs to the palaces and former mansions of the rich. A worker had only to open his eyes in the morning to realize that something tremendous had happened and to draw the conclusion that as the chief beneficiary he owed allegiance to the cause.12
Employment was also a problem, and the newspapers were full of complaints about the injustice of allowing former people—“obvious class enemies,” as one writer put it—to remain in their places of work. Not only was it wrong that these people were taking jobs from more deserving workers, as many saw the matter, but they could not be trusted; it was widely believed these former people must be surreptitiously engaged in sabotage.13 For some Soviet citizens, attacking the old elite que
nched their thirst for revenge. In late March the newspaper The Change published the letter of a worker from the Red Vyborg factory under the rubric “The Horrid Past.” “When they used to beat me,” he recalled of his life in tsarist Russia, “I always wondered—will I ever have my revenge on these vermin? The hounds of the revolution settled the score for me. Many of those I have written about are already no longer among the living. As for those still alive, I am certain that the NKVD will ‘take care’ of them and their friends.”14
At factories throughout Leningrad meetings were held at which workers called for immediate, merciless action. “The Party organization demanded the purging of the mechanic workshop of all ‘former people,’ ” wrote Leningradskaia Pravda about the factory Soviet Star on March 9. “With their resolutions the laborers of the city of Lenin approve the actions of the organs of the NKVD and accept the responsibility of raising their revolutionary vigilance to new heights in order to more actively unmask the enemies of the working class,” reported The Change. “The honor of living in the great city of Lenin should belong only to workers [. . .] Our horrid past has sunk into oblivion! Never again will these human degenerates—the aristocrats of tsarist Russia—exult over Soviet land. [. . .] We shall clean our great city of any and all counterrevolutionary scum.”15
Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy Page 39
