Vladimir’s brother, Sergei, was among those defending Moscow. Mobilized in July 1941, he had taken part in the construction of defensive fortifications around the capital during the battle of Moscow that autumn and early winter. Sergei served at Stalingrad the following year and had made it all the way to Berlin with the Red Army by war’s end, for which he received numerous medals.23 He never suffered any repression and went on in the postwar years to fulfill his lifelong wish of becoming a writer.
While one brother fought foreign invaders, the other fought for his life. Hunger had been a major problem for all Soviet citizens during the war; for the prison population it was a problem of life and death. Conditions for gulag prisoners became much worse after the start of the war; work norms increased just as the food rations decreased. “Enemies of the people” were frequently singled out for extra repressive measures. Camp deaths rose rapidly: the years 1942 and 1943 saw the highest mortality rates in the history of the gulag. At least 352,560 prisoners died in 1942, approximately one-quarter of all inmates. Between 1941 and 1946, more than 2 million gulag prisoners perished.24
Shortly after arriving at Sviyazhsk, Vladimir came down with pellagra, a common disease in the gulag, caused by a lack of niacin or tryptophan (an essential amino acid). The symptoms include skin lesions, diarrhea, and insomnia; severe cases result in ataxia, dementia, and ultimately death. Vladimir spent most of the last year of his life in the camp’s infirmary. Up until the end, he believed he would get better. He drew hope from the fact that he was being kept in ward No. 18 (No. 19 was for the hopeless cases) and from the chance of seeing his family again:
My dearest wife, will I ever see you again? Do you recall how I studied your face in the final minutes before I left? I felt that we’d not see each other for a long time, but that it would be this long, none of us could have imagined.
My darling! It’s not possible that I’ll turn up my toes here and my life beyond these walls is over. Whatever it takes, I’ll get out of here—oh, how I wish to love you more!
Lariushka! Draw more! Try doing portraits. Draw Mama for me. Mishka, you’ll no doubt be called up soon. Try to get attached to some technical service and learn mechanics. It’ll be of use to you later in life. Yelenka! Don’t get married just yet, you can live with me a bit longer and we’ll work together. And you, my darling wife, I kiss you 1000 times.
My dear one, I’ve been living through my memories. I remember every detail of our daily life as if looking through a magnifying glass. And it’s both depressing and sweet. What sentiments! This year has taught us all a lot.
On November 24, 1942, Vladimir’s father died.
My beloved Mama, of course I have awaited the news of Papa’s death. But it’s so, so sad. When I left you, I parted with him knowing it was forever. But you, my dear old one, live, live for my return. [. . .] Mama, bless your poor son.25
Anna did live, hoping for Vladimir’s return. She lived for another thirty years, in fact, dying in Moscow at the age of ninety-one, though she never did see her son again.
In the final weeks of 1942, the rations in the camp became even worse. For an entire month the prisoners had to subsist on a diet totally devoid of any fats. Vladimir began to imagine the unspeakable. “We must expect the worst,” he wrote to Yelena, “and then if I manage to get out of here, it will be a Miracle! Pellagra is a terrible thing. [. . .] My dearest! We have to see each other once more. We must, but when? I’ve been making a calendar for 1943 and keep staring at the dates. But perhaps I’m to perish here and my life outside these walls has ended. I’ll get out of here somehow. Oh, but how I want to go on loving you.”26
In early 1943, Yelena received notification that Vladimir was soon to be freed. And then came the devastating letter from Sofia Olsufev. Sofia, a cousin of Vladimir’s, had been interned at Sviyazhsk in December. She cared for him in his final weeks. Shortly before his death, Sofia had helped the emaciated Vladimir to bathe, and for a while he felt better but then became weak. She told Yelena of his death in a letter of coded language. “Suddenly, on the morning of February 6, he was sent off from the camp, and so he is now with his father. I can imagine how it grieves you to hear that he has left this place . . . I kiss you all tenderly, and pass along his parting greeting.” A month later, Sofia too was dead. In 1956, the Soviet government acknowledged the charges against Vladimir had been baseless, and he was officially rehabilitated.27
Vladimir’s aunt Eli Trubetskoy was the third family member to die that month. Three of her sons—Andrei, Vladimir, and Sergei—were off at the front, and Eli was living alone with her youngest child, Georgy, aged eight, in a village outside Moscow. Like so many, Eli had been reduced to desperate poverty during the war. At one point she was forced to go from village to village, begging for food; good people showed kindness and would give her a couple of potatoes or carrots and a few slices of bread. Despite her own circumstances, Eli took pity on a war refugee and asked her to come live with her. When the woman found out she was living with a former princess and the wife of an enemy of the people, she began to blackmail her: in exchange for whatever money Eli could scrounge, the woman would keep her mouth shut. In the end, she denounced Eli anyway, telling the NKVD she had heard Eli complain how things had been better under the tsars. Eli was arrested in January 1943; she barely had time to tell an old neighbor woman what was happening and ask her to go find her daughter Irina, then in a tuberculosis sanatorium, and ask her come fetch little Georgy. Eli was taken to the Butyrki in Moscow, where she died of typhus on February 7. Little Georgy was also sick with typhus at the time (their rooms were overrun with lice), but he managed to survive.28
While walking along an icy street in January 1942, Anna Saburov slipped and fell. She tried to get up but could not stand. She had broken her leg. She lay there for hours, calling for help, but none of the passersby would stop, mistaking her for a drunk. Eventually, she managed to convince some people to take pity. They picked her up, put her on a sledge, dragged her back to her apartment, and laid her in bed. Someone tried to find a place for her in the hospital, but there was no room. Pavel did what he could for her from Tsaritsyno, and some caring neighbors stopped by every few days to check in on her and bring her food; her landlady would not raise a finger to help.29
Xenia became distraught when she heard the news. It grieved her to know her mother was bedridden and she was unable to go to her; she worried Anna would die before her sentence was up.30 Xenia began writing again to the NKVD, asking permission to go to her mother. She pleaded for mercy, saying that her mother was certain to die if she did not get to her soon. Her letters were ignored. By the autumn of 1942, Xenia had begun to entertain the idea of sneaking away and trying to reach Anna in Vladimir illegally. She had to abandon the idea, however, since she was simply too weak from hunger to make the journey. Some days she had no solid food at all; she was often dizzy and suffered from fainting spells. Finally, in March 1943, Xenia was informed her sentence was up, although because of the disruptions caused by the war, it was not until September that she was able to get a train ticket home.31
By the time Xenia reached Vladimir, Anna had been moved to the hospital. She had been saved several months earlier quite by accident when a group of health inspectors turned up at her apartment. The landlady had tried to keep them from entering, but they pushed past her and found Anna. She was immediately taken to the hospital, and a bed was found for her. Out of the fear born from decades of repression, Anna refused to tell them who she was. One of the nurses thought she had seen her face before. Then it came to her. She had cut out the wedding photograph of Alexander Saburov and Anna Sheremetev published in the Moscow Leaflet in 1894 and kept it for some reason all these years. She went home and brought the yellowed picture to show to the doctors. No one could believe it at first. Could this be the same person? they wondered. Anna was in dreadful condition, emaciated and weak. For the rest of her life she was unable to walk. No one ever heard her complain, however. She continued
to thank God for everything and told anyone who would listen, “So it must be.”32
After five and a half years apart, mother and daughter were reunited. Xenia took Anna to live with her in a one-room apartment on the edge of town. Anna’s doctor visited them there in 1944:
People who had known the tsars approached the tragic end of their existence. And not one complaint, not one grumble, not one moan. The room had no heat, dinner was rare. They often had no bread. Mother and daughter would go all day without eating. The daughter would spend a few hours at the market trying to sell her things, but no one would buy them, and she would return home when I was there empty-handed. Her mother would console her, saying, “The bad times before the good.”33
Xenia cared for her mother for the rest of her life. Shortly before her death, Anna, delirious, kept seeing visions of her husband and two sons. “They are coming to me,” she would murmur. The day before she died, she gently stroked Xenia’s arm and then pointed upward. “Are you leaving?” Xenia asked, and her mother nodded. On May 13, 1949, Anna Saburov, died in bed surrounded by her icons, Xenia at her side. She was seventy-five. Going through her mother’s things, Xenia found some uncompleted memoirs. Just to be safe, she burned them. Xenia outlived her mother by thirty-five years, dying in the same one-room apartment in the spring of 1984.34
Vasily Sheremetev returned home to Moscow at the end of the war. The details of his war experiences are murky. It seems he had suffered some sort of brain injury during combat and was subsequently taken prisoner by the Germans. According to one source, he managed to escape, joined the Soviet paratroopers, and ended the war in Vienna. He never received the news of his parents’ deaths and went straight to the Novodevichy Monastery, only to find their door locked and no one at home. He wrote to his Obolensky aunts in Tsaritsyno, and they told him what had happened to his parents. They were amazed to hear from Vasily. “You can feel my joy, my happiness, my exultation that comes from my having lived to hear from you again, to know that you are alive and well, and that you’ll soon be here with us!” Yevfimiya Obolensky wrote him in late June 1945 after receiving his unexpected letter. “Dearest, we embrace you fervently and tenderly for the beloved ones you have lost and for all of us as well. We are full of love and joy at the thought of your soon return to us! In our hearts and minds we are with you forever!”35
Vasily was not the only grandson of Count Sergei Dmitrievich Sheremetev to fight in the war. Indeed, amazingly, he was not even the only “Vasily Sheremetev” to fight on the eastern front. His first cousin Vasily Dmitrievich Sheremetev, who had fled southern Russia in 1919 with his family, also saw action there. Like his cousin Vasily Pavlovich, Vasily Dmitrievich fought out of a sense of patriotism and profound love of Russia. Yet the circumstances of their lives largely determined how they understood this love, for Vasily Dmitrievich did not fight alongside his cousin, but against him or, more accurately, against the Red Army, as a member of a French legion under the German army. Vasily Dmitrievich was wounded outside Moscow and nearly froze to death in the snow in the winter of 1941. A Russian peasant woman took him in and saved his life. It is interesting to wonder whether the two Vasilys ever faced each other in combat.
Vasily Dmitrievich considered it his duty to help free Russia from communism. In this he was not alone, but part of the larger so-called Russian Liberation Movement that comprised White émigrés and many Soviet citizens in the German-occupied lands. Their battle against the Soviet Union can been seen as a final echo of the Russian civil war. Russian opposition to the Stalin regime has long been linked to the name of Andrei Vlasov, the grandson of a serf and a lieutenant general in the Red Army, who was captured by the Germans in July 1942. In captivity Vlasov defected and tried to convince the Germans to make use of widespread anti-Soviet sympathy and support his idea for a Russian liberation army. In the Soviet Union, Vlasov’s name became synonymous with treason, but Hitler’s distrust of Vlasov, and the Russian Liberation Movement in general, meant his army would never become much more than a grand idea and it played a negligible role in the war. In the spring of 1945, Vlasov was captured by Soviet troops in Austria and taken back to Moscow, where he was convicted of treason and hanged. As for Vasily Dmitrievich, after recovering from his wounds, the Germans sent him to fight in northern Italy. Because he was neither a German nor a Nazi, this was not Vasily’s war, and so he deserted and escaped to his family in Rome.36
Like his cousin, Vasily Pavlovich was one of the fortunate soldiers to survive the war. He was also fortunate not to be arrested after returning home, as happened to many. Andrei Gudovich was arrested and imprisoned, and it was not until 1959 that he was finally rehabilitated and permitted to move to Moscow. Andrei Trubetskoy had been injured and taken prisoner early in the war. Through the intervention of a relative in Lithuania he was freed and brought back to health. He was determined to return to the fighting and managed to make his way through the German lines first to the Russian partisans and then by war’s end to the regular Red Army. Like his brothers Vladimir and Sergei, he came home a decorated war hero, having suffered life-threatening wounds. In 1949, however, after refusing to cooperate with the political police, Andrei was arrested and spent the next six years in the camps laboring in a mine.37
Vasily moved back into his parents’ room at the Novodevichy Monastery. Relatives soon noticed he was not the same person who had left for the front in the summer of 1941. He was profoundly disturbed by the death of his parents and had been traumatized by the war. Nightmares haunted his sleep. He saw a number of doctors and was in and out of psychiatric hospitals, but nothing seemed to help. He studied art and did a little painting. No matter how he tried, Vasily was unable to adjust to normal life. Some in the family called him Don Quixote, others referred to him as a yuródovyi, one of those holy fools common throughout Russian history who combine great piety and faith with poverty and bizarre, unconventional behavior. He suffered a stroke at the age of fifty-seven and spent the last ten years of his life paralyzed and unable to speak.38
EPILOGUE
In July 1983, the brothers Mishka and Lariusha (now Mikhail and Illarion, grown men) took a trip to the town of Sviyazhsk. The area had changed since their father, Vladimir, had been brought there in 1941; a dam on the Volga had flooded the land around Sviyazhsk, turning it into a small, steeply sided island reachable only by motorboat from Kazan. The town on the island was still little, no more than a few dozen buildings and houses, a church, and the monastery ringed by a brick wall. A narrow path led along the monastery’s outer wall. Before falling away down to the Volga, the ground beyond the path was riven by several large, uneven depressions covered in tall weeds. These were the camp’s common graves. They were unmarked, and there was nothing to communicate to the unknowing eye the reason for this odd geographical feature. Here, in one of these graves, lay their father.
The labor camp was gone, and the monastery now housed an insane asylum. Mikhail and Illarion were admitted through the main gate into the courtyard. Before them, enclosed in a large metal net, were dozens of inmates, all shaved bald and dressed alike in work clothes. Many sat in odd poses; others were standing still or walking about the ground, now packed down and devoid of grass from their ceaseless wanderings. To Mikhail, the faces appeared expressionless; he found them terrifying. Yet maybe, he thought, these inmates, unaware of where they were and what had happened to them, were happy in their own way.
As he looked upon them, his mind raced back forty years to a time when the monastery held an entirely different group of prisoners. These men and women had known exactly where they were and what had happened to them, if not always why. He could see before him in the crowd his father: “tall, handsome, but very thin. He was looking through the bars at the church cupolas, at the monastery walls, beyond which flowed the Volga and that near yet distant freedom that he never experienced again.”1
Vsevolod Azbukin, the man in charge of the restoration work at the monastery, led Mikhail and Illarion about th
e island. He took the brothers to one of the houses and called the woman living there to come out. She was old and round and had what Mikhail described as a “friendly Russian face.” She had been a guard at the camp during the war, and Mikhail was convinced she must have seen their father.
“There were no men then, so they put rifles in our hands,” she told them upon learning the reason for their visit. “We were just sixteen-year-old girls, and they ordered us to guard the prisoners.”
Mikhail asked, “Do you happen to recall a tall man, an artist with a limp?”
She thought for a minute, and then said: “No, I don’t remember. There were so many of them . . .”
There were many indeed. At the beginning of 1941, the NKVD’s corrective labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons held almost 2,500,000 prisoners. By the time the war broke out six months later, the number of persons caught up in the numerous divisions of the gulag likely reached 4,000,000. How many of these poor souls perished and were dumped in unmarked graves like Vladimir will never be known.2
I met Nikolay Trubetskoy on a clear afternoon in September 2010 outside Moscow’s Frunzenskaya subway station, named in honor of the Bolshevik civil war hero Mikhail Frunze. Nikolay, a nephew of Mikhail and Illarion’s and a grandson of Vladimir Golitsyn’s, had agreed to meet and tell me what he knew about his family’s history. We walked upstairs to the TGI Friday’s above the station, where we might sit and have some lunch. For the next two hours, over chicken caesar salads and bottles of Perrier and under the relentless blare of Western pop music, we talked about his family, about history, about Russia, and its future.
An energetic, intelligent man in early middle age, Nikolay runs a large logistics company in the oil and gas industry that he built himself after first working as a geologist and then a taxi driver in the difficult early 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Despite his obvious success, Nikolay is devoid of any self-made-man bravado. He refuses to take too much credit for what he has managed to create, attributing much of what has happened in his life to God’s inscrutable influence. But there is something else too. Nikolay knows that in Putin’s Russia whatever he builds and whatever capital he manages to amass, be it his business, houses, cars, or money, it can be taken from him as soon as someone with enough power and the right political connections decides he wants it. And he also knows, like every Russian, that should this happen, he is helpless to stop it.
Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy Page 43
