Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith

  Leningradskaia Pravda printed workers’ speeches dripping with outrage over the fact that these “age-old exploiters and bloodsuckers” had managed to stay hidden for so long in the “cradle of the proletarian revolution.” The workers spoke at length about how the nobles had once dressed in gold and kept pet dogs while they had starved and had spit in their faces and even shot them when they had dared go out on strike. And now, having camouflaged themselves, the old nobles were secretly collaborating with foreign powers to undermine the work of “millions of their former slaves” and stop the advance of socialism. “Hitler’s trustworthy allies,” one report called them. These people were not even human, but “venomous chameleons, trying to take on a Soviet appearance,” “tsarist scum,” “poisonous snakes,” “parasites,” “vermin.” Echoing the stories in The Change, the workers described in Leningradskaia Pravda applauded the efforts of the NKVD and “the Great Leader Comrade Stalin” to clean their city, and they vowed to do their part to sniff out the enemies still hiding at their places of work and in their homes. “The avenging sword of the proletarian dictatorship should know no mercy,” proclaimed the workers from the Kirov factory.16

  Before long former people in Moscow and cities across the country began to fear the witch hunt would reach them.17 By late February 1935, Olga Sheremetev in Moscow was writing in her diary about the “Petrograd pogrom.” On April 1, 1935, the NKVD summoned Olga to appear for questioning at the police headquarters on Petrovka Street. The summons did not surprise her: Pavel Sheremetev had been called in as well the other day. Nonetheless, everyone in her apartment was panicked. Certain she had nothing to fear, Olga took her passport and her work pass and set off to Petrovka. The building was crowded with “old former people of various stripes.” From one of the rooms loud voices could be heard every time the door opened; people were coming out in tears, hysterical, having been told they had one day in which to leave Moscow.

  Olga waited for about two hours before being called into an interrogation room. She was seated at a table with a green-shaded lamp; across from her sat a man with an upturned collar and a military service cap, his face hidden by the shadows. He started with the usual questions: name, place of work, home address, length of residence in Moscow, parents’ names and backgrounds, their dates of birth and death, previous convictions or prison terms. The interrogation was punctuated by long, silent pauses; the interrogator would drum his fingers on the table and appear to be staring at her. Olga stared back, refusing to divert her gaze; to calm her shaking hand, she placed it firmly on the table. Two other women were being interrogated at desks on either side of her. One, an old woman in tears, was desperately trying to convince them that she had never been a noble landowner. When her interrogator got up to leave, the woman fell to pieces and started to scream. Olga sensed her own nerves tightening; a lump had formed in her throat. The questioning turned to Olga’s late husband, Boris Sheremetev, arrested in 1918. Then the interrogator got up and left. “I had a feeling everything would be all right,” she later wrote, “but the conversations to either side gave me reason for concern. There were tears and categorical orders to leave within two days, and then as some grand gesture of charity an extension of up to ten days was given. Presently, I began to notice how terribly little air there was in this small, smoky room.” Eventually, the man returned, handed back her passport, and, with a smile, told her she would be permitted to remain in Moscow and would not be bothered anymore. As she prepared to go, he offered Olga some advice: “You should change your name.”

  “So that you could then blame me of being afraid of it and thus changing it,” she replied.

  “If you will,” he laughed.

  “Of course, my surname does not bring me happiness,” she blurted out, surprised at her own directness.

  Why did I say that? Regardless, they had let me go. I walked out and those still waiting to be called looked at me with envy.

  I went out into the street. The pleasant spring freshness embraced me and I buttoned up my coat when I should have been taking it off, but I had to walk through the streets and people would stare. I walked for a while without thinking, just breathing and enjoying freedom. But when I reached the boulevard I began to feel that I was terribly tired, and I recalled that everyone at home must be worried about me. I climbed into a streetcar and, as I was riding, I kept thinking, what was the point of that interrogation? What is it for, how does it help the state, and what does it cost?18

  Tatiana Aksakov-Sivers was deemed a “poisonous snake.” She was in Leningrad at a friend’s apartment with Vladimir Lvov, one of the noble fox-trotters arrested and exiled from Moscow a decade earlier, on the evening of Kirov’s murder. Two days later she was stunned to read that 120 “hostages” had already been arrested and shot at the Shpalerka Prison. Soon she heard talk of more arrests. On February 1, Tatiana bumped into an acquaintance on Nevsky Prospect who told her that Vladimir’s brothers Yuri and Sergei Lvov (Merinka Gudovich’s husband) had been arrested the night before; not long thereafter, Vladimir was also arrested. The NKVD came for Tatiana on February 11 and took her to the Shpalerka for questioning. “Tell me,” the interrogator asked, “do you know any princes?” She told him she had known many princes in her life, that there was nothing unusual about this, so what was it exactly, she replied, they were getting at? Unhappy with her answer, they locked her up.

  In April, Tatiana, the three Lvov brothers, and many others at the Shpalerka were released for the night and told to return the next day to learn where they were being sent. She and Vladimir Lvov walked out of prison together; after two months inside its walls, the fresh air made her head spin. Between the two of them they had just enough money to split a chocolate bar. When she got home, she found a neighbor who worked for the NKVD had already moved into her room; most of her things had been stolen during a search.19 The next day she and Vladimir met for lunch—a last meal—at the Hotel Severnaya, filling themselves on soup, chicken and rice, wine, and ice cream before setting off for the Shpalerka. The three Lvovs were to be exiled with twelve others to Kuibyshev for five years; Tatiana to Saratov, for the same period.

  Instructions notifying all NKVD agents to be on the lookout for potential acts of terrorism and sabotage against hotels and other prominent buildings by former people were issued during the operation, and the police were put on heightened alert to prevent them from escaping the city. The NKVD found many of its victims by combing existing registration records as well as prerevolutionary city guides and old telephone books. None of those arrested held prominent positions in the city administration, army, or police. Typical of the victims were figures like former Prince B. D. Volkonsky, who worked on the floor of the Leningrad Diary Plant; Baroness V. V. Knoring-Formen, a sanitation worker at Cafeteria No. 89; Prince D. B. Cherkassky, an assistant to the chief accountant at the Aurora candy factory; and Count A. S. Lanskoy, a laborer at the factory Electro-Apparatus. Kirill Frolov was apparently arrested for no other reason than having served as valet to Pyotr Durnovo, minister of the interior under Nicholas II.20 Regardless, they and the rest were accused of being members of fictitious groups like the Fascist-Terrorist Group of Former Lawyers, the Terrorist Group of Former Noble Officers and Lycée Pupils, and the Terrorist Group of Former Nobles.

  The scholar Dmitry Likhachev, freed from Solovki in 1932, was working at the Academy of Sciences in a department full of former people in the winter of 1935. One day Likhachev happened to pass the head of the personnel department in the hall; pausing, she turned to Likhachev: “I am putting together a list of all nobles here. And I have put your name on it.” Likhachev was panic-stricken. But I’m not a nobleman, he protested; you must cross my name off the list. (His father had been a “personal noble,” a status that did not confer hereditary noble privilege on one’s heirs.) It was too late, she told him. It was a long list, she had typed up all the names herself, in alphabetical order, and it would be too much work to redo it. Desperate, Likhachev hired someone with his
own money to retype the list without his name. A few weeks later Likhachev arrived one day to find their offices practically empty. He asked one of his colleagues if they all had left for a meeting. “What? Don’t you understand,” he was told, “they’ve all been arrested!” Although he had saved himself, nothing seemed the same anymore; even the look of the city appeared altered. “With the exile of the nobility,” he recalled years later, “the cultural face of the city changed. The streets changed their appearance. The faces of the passersby became different.”21

  Few were as fortunate as Likhachev. Yelizaveta Grigorevna Golitsyn, the seventy-five-year-old widow of Prince Alexei Lvovich Golitsyn, was arrested in Leningrad along with her daughter and son-in-law. She wrote to Peshkov for help, noting, among other things, that she was a “princess” only by marriage, being “herself more of a proletarian by origin since my father [. . .] was not of noble extraction, but a doctor.” On March 14, they were sentenced to five years, exiled to a remote Kazakh village, and left to fend for themselves. Yelizaveta was too frail to work, and her children were too ill. Not long after their arrival, Yelizaveta suffered a stroke. Their friends kept writing to Peshkov begging for help since they were “dying of hunger.” Their ultimate fate is unknown.22 Prince Vladimir Lvovich Golitsyn, who had fought in the Red Army during the civil war, was sentenced to five years in the Karaganda labor camp in Kazakhstan. He served only two years, however, before being arrested a second time (while still in the camps), charged with “counterrevolutionary agitation,” and shot. Princess Nadezhda Golitsyn, once a maid of honor at court, had worked for a number of Soviet agencies before being exiled to Turkestan, where, in 1938, she was arrested again and executed at the age of sixty-seven.23

  As for Tatiana Aksakov-Sivers, she ended up in Saratov with a large group of exiled former people. Their big-city clothing made them stand out as they went door to door looking for rooms, and most had trouble finding work as repressed people. One woman survived by selling small paintings with scenes of Leningrad; another by making and selling women’s undergarments through her own small enterprise, which she called the Leningrad Workshop for the Artistic Shaping of the Female Figure. Tatiana scraped together some money by hocking some curtains saved from the old family estate of Popelyova and a portrait miniature by the noted eighteenth-century artist Vladimir Borovikovsky. In the summer of 1937, a new wave of arrests swept over the exiles in Saratov. The NKVD arrested Tatiana in November and sentenced her to eight years in a corrective labor camp. She was packed into a freight car and sent off in the spring of 1938 with no food and nothing but the clothes on her back. Another ex-Leningrader in her car shared her last onion with Tatiana. This woman was later axed to death by a fellow prisoner after she refused to have sex with him. The trip to the camp took two weeks. At stops along the way, Tatiana tossed out through the small cracks in the siding of the car notes addressed to her father and with a few words imploring whoever picked them up to mail them on. Unbelievably, two of these reached him.24 Tatiana remained in the camps until the summer of 1943.

  Operation Former People was a success, and by the end of March 1935 Leningradskaia Pravda could report a great outpouring of praise from workers at factories across the city for the NKVD and its efforts to clean the city. WE ARE CLEANING LENIN’S CITY OF THE REMAINS OF THE TSAR’S MEN, OF THE LANDOWNING AND CAPITALIST RIFF-RAFF read the headline on March 22. Indeed, between February 28 and March 27, 1935, more than 39,000 people, 11,072 of them former people, had been expelled from Leningrad.25 So crowded were the city’s railway stations with princes, counts, and the like that a joke was born:

  Dialogue overheard at a railroad ticket window in Leningrad:

  “Comrade Citizen, what do you think you’re doing jumping the line?”

  “Well, I’m a princess!”26

  As in the old days, nobles were being given special treatment, although now of an entirely different sort and for entirely different reasons.

  The laughter lasted only so long, however. As late as July of that year, the press was still carrying stories decrying the fact that many former people had somehow managed to escape detection and were still hiding in the city of Lenin.27

  25

  THE GREAT TERROR

  The Kirov Affair did not end with Operation Former People. Rather, it opened the door to the darkest chapter in Soviet history, the Great Terror. Having rid Leningrad of “Zinovievites,” former people, and other socially alien elements, Stalin and the party leadership expanded the hunt for internal enemies. The international situation was crucial to the origins and logic of the Great Terror. The rise of Hitler’s Germany in the west and the imperialist expansionism of Hirohito’s Japan in the east were quite rightly seen as serious external threats to the Soviet Union. Stalin, however, was arguably more obsessed with the domestic menace. He and others in the party convinced themselves of the existence of a fifth column comprised of closet anti-Soviet elements waiting to attack from within in coordination with the German and Japanese armies. The Great Terror was conceived as a preemptive strike to destroy any remaining internal enemies once and for all.1

  The Great Terror is most often associated with the destruction of the Old Bolsheviks and the show trials of 1936–38. Tens of thousands of party members from the state bureaucracy, the NKVD, and the military were purged and arrested. The entire high command of the Red Army was wiped out. Everyone, save Stalin, was suspect; enemies lurked everywhere. “We will destroy every enemy, even if he is an Old Bolshevik,” Stalin promised at the height of the terror; “we will destroy his kin, his family. Anyone who by his actions or thoughts encroaches on the unity of the socialist state, we shall destroy relentlessly.”2 In 1935, Yenukidze, the secretary of the Central Executive Committee, was denounced for his links to “former people” and accused of permitting White Guards to infiltrate the Kremlin and nearly assassinate Stalin. He was dismissed, expelled from the party, and shot two years later. The NKVD chief Yagoda also fell under suspicion for his lack of vigilance. At the end of September 1936, Yagoda was suddenly sacked as people’s commissar for internal affairs and replaced by his rival, Nikolai Yezhov.

  Yezhov, with Stalin’s blessing, encouragement, and, most important, guidance, was the ceremonial ringmaster of the Great Terror, the fifteen-month period from August 1937 to November 1938 known in Russian as the Yezhóvshchina. It was Yezhov who had attacked Yenukidze and Yagoda. In August 1936, Zinoviev and Kamenev, together with fourteen others of the “United Trotskyite-Zinovievite Center,” were tried, convicted, and immediately executed in the first of the Moscow show trials. Yezhov helped organize a second show trial the following year and then, in March 1938, a third, final trial of the “Anti-Soviet Block of Rightists and Trotskyites,” after which Bukharin and Yagoda were shot.3

  Although this side of the Great Terror is well known, its much larger side is not. The vast majority of the victims of the Yezhovshchina were in fact not Communist Party members, but ordinary citizens, mostly the same people who had been targeted as enemies for many years. On July 2, 1937, the Politburo passed a resolution titled On Anti-Soviet Elements. According to the resolution, local officials were to be ordered to register, arrest, and, if necessary, shoot all criminals, a term purposely left vague. On July 20, Yezhov issued Order No. 0047—On an Operation to Repress Former Kulaks, Criminals, and Other Anti-Soviet Elements—setting the date for the commencement of the repressive measures as the first two weeks of August. Quotas were set on the expected numbers of “spies,” “traitors,” and “counterrevolutionaries” to be arrested. Although these numbers came from the Kremlin, local leaders frequently exceeded the quotas in an effort to demonstrate their zeal and effectiveness; no one wanted to be seen as lacking the necessary vigilance. By the end of November, approximately 766,000 people had been arrested; nearly 385,000 were executed.

  The arrests and executions mounted, and the number of victims continued to grow well into 1938. Local party and NKVD officials had proved so enthusiastic and successfu
l that the party leadership in Moscow began to talk about “excesses” and “violations of socialist legality.” Stalin decided the repressions had gone far enough, and in November 1938 he forced Yezhov to retire and made him the scapegoat for the terror campaign. He was replaced by the Georgian party boss Lavrenty Beria, who promised a complete reform of the NKVD. On April 10, 1939, Yezhov was arrested. He immediately confessed to being a German spy and having used his position as head of the NKVD to organize a conspiracy to kill Stalin. On the night of February 2, 1940, Yezhov was shot in an execution chamber in the center of Moscow built according to his own design. His corpse was cremated and his ashes were tossed into a mass grave at the Donskoy Cemetery. The Soviet press passed over his death in silence.4

  We shall likely never know how many people perished in the Great Terror. According to one reliable estimate, the NKVD arrested 1,575,259 people during 1937–38. Of these, 1,344,923 were convicted, and more than half of them—681,692—were shot. This makes for a killing rate of approximately 1,500 people a day between August 1937 and November 1938.5 The scale of the violence and the fear it instilled in people’s hearts are hard to imagine. Few dared speak of such things or even dwell on them at the time.

  Among the victims of the Great Terror were two of Vladimir Vladimirovich Golitsyn’s three children, Alexander and Olga. In 1936, Alexander had been freed after serving three years in a labor camp but was denied the right to return to Moscow. That August he married a woman by the name of Darya Krotov, the daughter of a repressed peasant, in Yaya, the site of his imprisonment. By the end of 1936, Darya was pregnant, and Alexander began to worry that he was yet again being watched by the NKVD. They talked of fleeing somewhere and settled on a small village called Berikul where they might escape notice. But on the way to the train station, Alexander unexpectedly told Darya that he would not be going with her and that she, and the child she was bearing, would be safer without him. He gave her an address in Moscow as she boarded the train, telling her: “Never say a word about me to anyone. Don’t look for me, I will find you myself, if possible. If the baby’s a boy, name him Vladimir, if it’s a girl, Irina: these are our family names. Always remember what I’ve told you wherever you may be. If it’s absolutely necessary, you have the address. But I ask you, use it only if it’s an extreme emergency.” That was the last time they saw each other. Alexander sent Darya two short letters after that, but only so she knew he was still alive. He traveled illegally to Moscow to visit his father and then left for the Siberian town of Tomsk. He had long dreamed of becoming an actor and managed to land a job in a local theater.