Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy

by Douglas Smith

  In Russia, I cannot thank enough Andrei and Tania Golitsyn. They took the time to meet with me on several occasions and did everything possible to help, supplying me with books, offering family documents and photographs, arranging introductions, and critiquing my book in manuscript. I owe them a large debt. Ivan Golitsyn welcomed me to his studio to talk about his family and to show me the items in his personal collection; he has always been ready to answer my many questions. Nikolay Trubetskoy agreed to meet and tell me what he knew of his families’ past and, unknown to us both at the time, gave me the ending to my book. His brother Mikhail Trubetskoy provided many family photographs and the unpublished letters of his grandfather and an unpublished portion of his father’s memoirs, materials that proved to be of great use. Yevdokia Sheremetev, the sole grandchild of Count Pavel Sheremetev, allowed me to visit her on several occasions and told me much about her family. I also wish to acknowledge the generous assistance of Alexandra Olsufiev, Elizabeth Apraxine, Konstantin and Marianna Smirnov, Mikhail Katin-Yartsev, Yekaterina Lansere, and the Pavlinovs—Varvara, Nikolai, and Sergei.

  Mikhail Vladimirovich Golitsyn and his wife, Tamara Pavlovna, deserve special acknowledgment. Although surrounded by boxes in anticipation of a big move to a new apartment in Moscow, they invited me to lunch at short notice and welcomed me with a well-laid table. We talked for several hours—and drank perhaps a few too many vodka toasts—and I left feeling amazed by their youthful spirit, despite their advanced age, and by their sense of optimism, despite the hardships they have faced in their lives. It was a day I shall never forget.

  Father Boris Mikhailov helped me immensely with both my previous book and now with Former People. For years he gathered information on the Sheremetev family while working as a curator at the Ostankino Estate Museum. He had himself intended to write a book on the fate of the family after 1917 but then gave this up to become an Orthodox priest after the collapse of the Soviet Union. When I called him while on a visit to Moscow in 2009 and mentioned the topic of my new book, he asked if we might meet because he had something he wanted to give me. I was shocked when he showed up carrying two large bags full of his research. He handed it to me and asked me to make good use of it, saying he was glad to know the years he had spent gathering the information had not been wasted. I am humbled by his generous gift.

  It is a pleasure to thank the many friends and colleagues who have provided assistance during the course of my research and writing: Nikita Sokolov, Tatiana Safronova, Alexander Bobosov, Aleksei Kovalchuk, Elena Campbell, Ekaterina Pravilova, Igor Khristoforov, Bob Edelman, Mark Steinberg, William Husband, Steve A. Smith, Seymour Becker, Richard Robbins, Golfo Alexopoulos, Glennys Young, Michael Biggins, Anatol Shmelev, Carol Leadenham, Catriona Kelly, Sofia Chuikina, Richard Davies, Sean McMeekin, Susanne Fusso, Ruzica Popovitch-Krekic, Stephanie Lock and Gary Hawkey at iocolor, Eric Lohr, Steve Hanson, April Bodman, Ronald Vroon, Frances Welch, John Bowlt, Randy Steiger and the team at Conflare, Tatiana Enikeeva, Ludmila Syagaeva, Olga Novikova, Galina Kalinina, Olga Solomodenko, Mikhail Loukianov, Marina Kovaleva, Lena Marassinova, Alla Krasko, Maxim Smirnov, Tatiana Chvanova-Leto, Varvara Rakina, Tatiana Smirnova, Tanya Chebotarev, Svetlana Dolgova, Marina Sidorova, Boris Dodonov, Galina Korolyova, Marina Chertilina, Iskender Nurbekov, and Gerold Vzdornov.

  For help gathering material I am grateful to Veronika Egorova, Yulia Galper, Dmitry and Arina Belozerov, Yury Nikiforov, and especially Natalya Bolotina, Yelena Matveeva, Yelena Mikhailova, and Mariana Markova. David Cain produced beautiful maps and family trees for the book and was a pleasure to work with. Several colleagues read various drafts of the book and gave me excellent advice on how to improve it: Arch Getty, Lisa Kirschenbaum, Willard Sunderland, Geoffrey Hosking, Priscilla Roosevelt, and Peter Pozefsky.

  I am grateful to a number of archives, museums, and libraries and their staffs: the Bakhmeteff Archive at Columbia University; the London Library; the British Library; the University of Washington Libraries; the Russian State Library; the Russian National Library; the Russian State Historical Archive; the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art; the Central State Archive of the Moscow Oblast; the Literary Museum of Moscow; the Kuskovo Estate Museum, the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts; the State Archive of the Russian Federation; the Russian State Archive of Documentary Films and Photographs; the Hoover Institution Archives; and the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre.

  I benefited from the opportunity to present some of the material in Former People at Columbia and Oxford universities. At Columbia, I am especially grateful to Timothy Frye, director of the Harriman Institute, and to Alla Rachkov and Masha Udensiva-Brenner. Cynthia Whittaker, Richard Wortman, and Hilde Hoogenboom attended my talk and offered insightful comments on my research. At Oxford, I would like to thank Andrei and Irina Zorin for their assistance and friendship. Andrew Kahn, also of Oxford University, has been a marvelous source of information and the perfect guide to all things Russian (and English) for a long time.

  I would like to thank Melissa Chinchillo, Christy Fletcher, and the employees of Fletcher and Company for their hard work and commitment over the years. I have been exceedingly fortunate to have had Eric Chinski as my editor and am grateful to him for all his encouragement, insight, and enthusiasm. I would like to thank Jonathan Galassi and everyone I have worked with at FSG, especially Eugenie Cha, Gabriella Doob, Jeff Seroy, Kathy Daneman, Katie Freeman, Abby Kagan, Marion Duvert, and Devon Mazzone. Georgina Morley, my U.K. editor at Macmillan, has not only been wonderful to work with but a welcoming friend. I wrote this book at a window overlooking the house where nearly two hundred years ago Thomas Carlyle wrote his famous history of the French Revolution. A historian could hardly ask for better company, although this is just what I was fortunate to receive from so many wonderful friends (too many to name) in London.

  While working on this book, I have been constantly reminded of the importance of family. I wish to thank my loving parents, Bill and Annette Smith, Michael and Merdice Ellis, Allyson and Todd Aldrich, Graham Smith, Angela Ellis, Emma Bankhead, Emily and Robert Aldrich, Tara and Elana Smith, and especially Emma and Andrew—my children—to whom Former People is dedicated. As always, my greatest debt is to my wife, Stephanie, for her patience, wisdom, and love.

  ENDNOTES

  1. Although Former People explores the fate of the entire nobility (dvoriánstvo, in Russian), since so much of the book follows the aristocratic Sheremetev and Golitsyn families, I have chosen “aristocracy” for my subtitle.

  2. Patriarch Hermogen, Kuzma Minin, and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky helped rally Russians during the so-called Time of Troubles in the early seventeenth century. “Mikhails” refers to the first Romanov ruler elected to the throne in 1613.

  3. The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre refers to the mass killing of French Huguenots (Protestants) by Catholics in Paris in 1572 during the French Wars of Religion. Rumors and fear of another such massacre based not on religion but on class were common in Russia during the revolution and the later civil war. Such rumors persisted into the 1930s.

  4. Created at the Second Congress of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies on October 25, 1917, along with the Sovnarkóm, it functioned with the latter as the executive wing of the new state.

  5. Th e Petrovichy (from the Russian Christian name Pyotr) were the children of the late Count Pyotr Sheremetev.

  6. Anna and Mikhail’s elder son.

  7. Mikhail Kalinin, titular head of the new Bolshevik state.

  8. Ninety-six miles.

  9. Nikolai Lopukhin.

  10. A reference to Alexander Pushkin’s dramatic work “A Feast During the Plague” (1830), later the basis for César Cui’s 1900 opera of the same name.

  11. The great warriors of the medieval Russian epic poems.

  12. The mayor and his son Vladimir Vladimirovich.

  13. Georgy was thirty-six; Lina, twenty-nine.

  14. Fifth, if one counts the Winter War (1939–40) against Finland.
/>   15. A village in Poltava Province.

  16. Dmitry, Ira, and their younger children were then in Cannes.

  17. TsEKUBU—the Central Commission for the Improvement of Scholars’ Life—had been created by the Sovnarkóm in 1921 to help the country’s educated elite, barely alive following the civil war, by providing food rations, small monetary grants, firewood, clothing, pen and ink, and lightbulbs. It was closed in 1931.

  INDEX

  Abbe, James, ref1

  ABC of Communism, The (Bukharin and Preobrazhensky), ref1

  Achinsk, ref1

  Afanasy, Father, ref1, ref2

  Affair of the Slavicists, ref1

  agriculture, collectivization of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

  Aid to Political Prisoners (POMPOLIT), ref1

  Aksakov-Sivers, Tatiana, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; Operation Former People and, ref1, ref2

  Alapaevsk, ref1

  Alexander II, Tsar, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; assassination of, ref1, ref2, ref3

  Alexander III, Tsar, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12; death of, ref1

  Alexander Mikhailovich, Grand Duke, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

  Alexandra, Empress, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8; murder of, ref1; Rasputin and, ref1, ref2; in Tobolsk, ref1, ref2

  Alexeev, Mikhail, ref1

  Alexei Mikhailovich, Tsar, ref1, ref2

  Alexei Nikolaevich, Tsarevich, ref1, ref2

  Alliluyeva, Svetlana, ref1

  All-Russian Central Executive Committee, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7

  All-Russian Congress of Peasant Soviets, ref1

  All-Russian Union of Landowners, ref1

  All-Russian Union of Writers, ref1

  Almedingen, Marta, ref1, ref2

  American Relief Administration (ARA), ref1

  Andijan, ref1, ref2

  Andronievsky Monastery, ref1

  Ankudinov, Dmitry, ref1

  Antonov, Alexander, ref1

  Arctic and Antarctic Scientific Research Institute, ref1

  aristocrats, ref1, ref2; false, ref1; see also nobility

  Article 58, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

  Astronomical Institute, ref1

  Atarbekov, Georgy, ref1

  Atheists’ House, ref1

  Austro-Hungarian Army, ref1

  Austro-Hungarian Empire, ref1

  Azbukin, Vsevolod, ref1

  Bagázh: Memoirs of a Russian Cosmopolitan (Nabokov), ref1

  Bagration-Mukhransky, Alexander, ref1, ref2, ref3

  Bagration-Mukhransky, Princess, ref1

  Bakunin, Mikhail, ref1

  Bakunin family, ref1

  Balakirev, Mily, ref1

  Balanda, ref1, ref2

  Baldwin, Alexandra “Alka” (née Bobrinsky), ref1, ref2, ref3; marriage of, ref1

  Baldwin, Philip, ref1, ref2

  balls: Sheremetev, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; at Winter Palace, ref1

  banishment sentences, ref1

  Bank for Foreign Trade, ref1, ref2

  banks, ref1, ref2, ref3; safe-deposit boxes in, ref1

  Baryatinsky, Nadezhda, ref1

  Baryatinsky family, ref1

  Bashkiroff, Zenaide, ref1

  Belbaltlag, ref1, ref2

  Benkendorff, Maria, ref1

  Beria, Lavrenty, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

  Bermudian, SS, ref1

  Beseda, ref1

  Bismarck, Otto von, ref1

  Black Army, ref1

  Black Hand, ref1

  Black Hundreds, ref1

  Bloody Sunday, ref1

  Bobrinsky, Alexandra “Alka,” see Baldwin, Alexandra “Alka”

  Bobrinsky, Alexei (son of Catherine the Great), ref1

  Bobrinsky, Alexei (son of Lev and Vera), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; arrest of, ref1

  Bobrinsky, Gavril, ref1, ref2

  Bobrinsky, Lev, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; marriage of, ref1

  Bobrinsky, Sofia “Sonya,” see Witter, Sofia “Sonya”

  Bobrinsky, Varvara, ref1, ref2

  Bobrinsky, Vera Golitsyn, ref1, ref2, ref3; marriage of, ref1

  Bobrinsky, Yelena (daughter of Lev and Vera), ref1

  Bobrinsky family, ref1, ref2

  Bogoroditsk, ref1, ref2, ref3

  Bolshevik Revolution, see Russian Revolution

  Bolsheviks, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15; banks and, ref1; in Caucasus, ref1; Cheka of, see Cheka; in civil war, see Russian Civil War; concentration camps and, ref1; Constituent Assembly closed by, ref1; coup of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; economic control seized by, ref1; hostages taken by, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; inquiry into crimes of, ref1; Lenin and, ref1, ref2, ref3; name change, ref1; officer corps and, ref1; Old, destruction of, ref1, ref2; proletariat and, ref1; Red Terror campaign of, ref1, ref2, ref3; resistance to, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; rumors about, ref1, ref2; and soldier uprising in Petrograd, ref1; War Communism policies of, ref1; wealth seized by, ref1; see also Communists

  Bonch-Bruevich, Vladimir, ref1, ref2

  Borovikovsky, Vladimir, ref1

  Borus Godunov (Pushkin), ref1

  Botkin, Yevgeny, ref1

  bourgeoisie, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12; death of, ref1; homes confiscated, ref1; mandatory labor for, ref1; taken hostage, ref1

  boxcars, ref1, ref2

  Britain, ref1, ref2, ref3

  Brusilov, Alexei, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

  Buchalki, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

  Buchanan, George, ref1, ref2

  Budberg, Baron, ref1, ref2

  Bukharin, Nikolai, ref1, ref2, ref3

  Bulygin, Alexander, ref1

  Bunin, Ivan, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

  Bunin, Vera, ref1, ref2

  Bunin, Yuly, ref1

  Burgustan, ref1

  Burkhanovsky, Mikhail, ref1

  Butovo Polygon, ref1

  Butyrskaya Prison (Butyrki), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19

  Cantacuzène, Princess, ref1, ref2, ref3

  Cap d’Antibes, ref1

  Captain’s Daughter, The (Pushkin), ref1

  Catherine the Great, ref1, ref2, ref3; Tsaritsyno and, ref1

  Caucasus, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7

  Cement (Gladkov), ref1

  cemeteries, ref1

  Central Commission for the Improvement of Scholars’ Life (TsEKUBU), ref1n, ref2

  Central Executive Committee, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7

  Central Museum of Fiction, Criticism, and Journalism, ref1

  Chaadaev, Pyotr, ref1

  Chaliapin, Fyodor, ref1

  Change, The, ref1

  Cheboksary, ref1

  Cheka, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21; American Relief Administration and, ref1; concentration camps run by, ref1; at Sheremetev home, ref1, ref2, ref3

  Chekhov, Anton, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

  Chelyabinsk, ref1, ref2

  Cherkassky, D. B., ref1

  Cherry Orchard, The (Chekhov), ref1, ref2, ref3

  China, ref1

  Churchill, Winston, ref1

  Ciliberti, Charles, ref1

  class, see social classes

  clothing, ref1

  collectivization, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

  Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland and Revolution, ref1

  Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly, ref1

  Communist Party, ref1; elite in, ref1; leadership struggle in, ref1

  Communists, ref1; American Relief Administration and, ref1; Cheka of, see Cheka; class warfare and, ref1; Eleventh Party Congress of, ref1; peasant rebellions against, ref1; Tenth Party Congress of, ref1; workers’ rebellions against, ref1; see also Bo
lsheviks

  Communist Youth League (Komsomol), ref1

  concentration camps, ref1, ref2

  consolidation, ref1

  Constantinople, ref1

  Corner House, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8

  Cossacks, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12

  “Count and ‘His Servants,’ The,” ref1

  country estates, ref1

  Crimea, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; evacuation of, ref1, ref2, ref3

  Cuba, ref1

  Cui, César, ref1n

  culture: American, ref1, ref2; Russian, nobles as keepers of, ref1

  Czech Legion, ref1

  Danilov, Yuri, ref1

  D’Anthès, Georges-Charles de Heeckeren, ref1

  Davies, Joseph, ref1

  Davies, Marjorie, ref1

  Davydoff, Alexander, ref1, ref2

  Davydov family, ref1

  Day, ref1, ref2

  Day of Peaceful Insurrection, ref1

  De Baye, Joseph, ref1

  Decembrists, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7

  Declaration of the Rights of the Laboring and Exploited People, ref1

  Decree on Land, ref1, ref2

  Decree on the Press, ref1

  Demidov, Anna, ref1

  Denikin, Anton, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10

  denunciations, ref1, ref2

  Depository of Private Archives, ref1

  Depression, Great, ref1

  Derevitsky, Alexei, ref1

  Derevitsky, Maria Golitsyn, ref1

  De Robien, Louis, ref1

  Dmitlag (Dmitrov Corrective Labor Camp), ref1, ref2

  Dmitrov, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9

  Dmitry Konstantinovich, Grand Duke, ref1