Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (11 page)

In response to the regime’s crackdown, the revolutionary terror that had plagued Russia for decades now exploded. Between January 1908 and May 1910, 19,957 terrorist attacks and revolutionary robberies were recorded; 732 government officials and 3,051 private citizens were killed, and nearly another 4,000 wounded. Shadowy groups with names like Death for Death and the Group of Terrorist-Expropriators spread fear throughout society.
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In April 1902, a Socialist Revolutionary posing as an officer fired five shots at close range into Minister of the Interior Dmitry Sipyagin, the husband of Count Sergei Sheremetev’s sister-in-law
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; in July 1904, Minister of the Interior Vyacheslav Plehve was blown up by a terrorist bomb tossed into his carriage
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; the following year another bomb was lobbed into the carriage of Grand
Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, reducing him to nothing but bloody scraps
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; and in 1911, a double agent shot and killed Prime Minister Stolypin in the Kiev Opera House. The tsar was so near to Stolypin that night he heard the shots himself.
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A sense of doom settled over Russia. The apocalypse seemed to be approaching, and no one and nothing could stop it.
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One May night in Paris in 1914, while sharing a drink on the terrace of the Café de Rohan, a reflective Baron Nikolai Wrangel turned and announced to Count Valentin Zubov: “We are on the verge of events, the likes of which the world has not seen since the time of the barbarian invasions. [. . .] Soon everything that constitutes our lives will strike the world as useless. A period of barbarism is about to begin and it shall last for decades.”
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Back in Russia, aristocratic society was basking in the afterglow of a spectacular year. Nineteen fourteen would prove to be society’s last season and, even if only in retrospect, its brightest. Baroness Meiendorff later recalled that she had seen many sparkling social seasons, but “the
last
one, in 1914,” was by far the most “brilliant.”
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Princess Marie Gagarin remembered that last season as one of wild partying, “As if foreseeing the approach of catastrophe and striving to stifle a growing apprehension, all Petersburg nervously indulged in amusement and merrymaking.” It was a time of “unprecedented luxury and eloquence”; everywhere were champagne and fresh roses, lilacs, and mimosas imported from the south of France. The highlight of the season was the black and white ball at the home of Countess Betsy Shuvalov, with the officers of the Chevaliers Gardes resplendent in their uniforms. Six months later, nearly all these young men lay dead, killed in the first battles of the First World War.
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Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich cast these days in florid tones: “The gypsies cried, the glasses clinked, and the Rumanian violinists, clad in red, hypnotized inebriated men and women into a daring attempt to explore the depths of vice. Hysteria reigned supreme.”
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On June 28 (N.S.), 1914, Gavrilo Princip assassinated the archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo, setting in motion the events leading to the outbreak of World War I a month later. News of the war was greeted in Russia with an eruption of patriotic fervor, and for a moment the entire country seemed to unite behind the Russian throne.
Prince Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky witnessed drunken workers in St. Petersburg grab a passing officer and smother him with kisses as a crowd in the street looked on and cheered.
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It would not be long, however, before workers and soldiers would be smothering officers with deadly blows. Indeed, the danger the war posed for the regime, and for all society, had not gone unnoticed. As early as February 1914, a member of the Council of State, certain that if the war did not go well, it would lead to anarchy and revolution, had urged Nicholas to avoid war with Germany at any cost. The reactionary Minister of the Interior Nikolai Maklakov accurately sensed that the masses would rather fight Russia’s own privileged classes than German soldiers. (He himself was executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918.)
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In July, Count Sergei Witte told Boris Tatishchev that should Russia be foolish enough to go to war, it would mean “her immediate bankruptcy.”
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And in August, the mayor wrote prophetically in his diary: “Regardless how the war ends, this is the end of our vile regime.”
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Lenin sensed the war spelled the end of tsarism as well, and for this very reason he welcomed it. He later adopted the so-called defeatist position, hoping that the war would lead to the collapse of tsarist Russia and serve as a prelude to a new war—namely, a pan-European civil war of the proletariat against the ruling classes. Social democrats, he argued, had a duty to turn the war into a larger conflict along class lines.
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Even after the fall of the Romanovs in 1917, Lenin continued to urge a “revolutionary war” at home, throughout Europe, and even among the subjugated peoples of India, China, and Persia.
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In the summer of 1914 Russia entered a period of unprecedented savagery and bloodshed from which it would not exit until 1921, following four years of world war, two revolutions, and three more years of civil war and famine that claimed the lives of more than ten million people.
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No other country paid near the price for the folly of 1914 that Russia did. The losses were staggering. By the end of the autumn campaign, more than a million and a half men had been killed, injured, or taken prisoner. The officer corps, over half of which in 1912 were noblemen, suffered exceptional losses in the first battles against Germany.
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Fifteen million men served in the Russian armed forces during the Great War. More than four and a half million of them were killed or wounded.
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In the early months of the war, the Golitsyn family followed the action closely. They hung a large map in the study at the Buchalki estate and marked the shifting front lines with little red-flagged pins. Prince Vladimir Trubetskoy, Eli’s husband, was off fighting with his Blue Cuirassier Life Guards Cavalry Regiment. He received the St. George’s Cross for wounds suffered at the battle of Gumbinnen in August 1914. In 1915, Trubetskoy joined the staff of General Alexei Brusilov, who was so impressed with the prince that he made him commander of the first-ever Russian Army automobile unit. A man of impeachable bravery, Vladimir was left with not just physical but emotional scars as well. Once he and his men came across a young and handsome German officer covered in blood and hopelessly entangled in barbed wire; one of Trubetskoy’s comrades set upon the man and beat him to death. The killing horrified Vladimir and haunted him for the rest of his life.
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Mikhail Golitsyn spent the war years establishing and overseeing army hospitals in Moscow; his brother Alexander, a medical doctor, inspected hospitals at the various fronts and brought the latest medical techniques for treating the wounded back from visits to London and Paris. The family set up hospitals for wounded soldiers at Buchalki and the Zubalovo estate as well as at their Moscow home.
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Caring for sick and wounded soldiers was a popular way for nobles behind the lines, particularly women, to do their part for the war effort. The Sheremetevs too opened hospitals at a few of their properties. Countess Yekaterina Sheremetev organized shipments of relief packages to Russian prisoners of war, and her daughter Anna Saburov became the local head of an organization called the Family Hearth, dedicated to helping war orphans.
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Yelena Sheremetev, who turned eleven in 1915, organized a bazaar with the other Sheremetev grandchildren to sell items in order to raise money for wounded soldiers, and she also helped bandage the injured at a private infirmary.
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Of course, the most famous nurse of the war was the empress Alexandra, and her example encouraged others to get involved. While for most of these women their motives were honest and sincere, there was some element of what Countess Kleinmichel called “vanity and rivalry” to see who could house and feed and care for the men more splendidly than the rest.
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Vladimir Nabokov’s mother, who also set up a hospital, could not help seeing all these works as little more than “the ineffectiveness of part-time compassion.”
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Almost from the beginning of the war, Russia’s lack of arms and ammunition was apparent. The shortages became so severe that soldiers were sent to the front with no guns and ordered to look for them among the dead. A full quarter of the troops did not even have boots.
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The average Russian soldier fought bravely, but what was asked of him became more than anyone could withstand. By the summer of 1915, officers had found themselves wasting scarce artillery shells on their own troops in a desperate attempt to get them to fight. So dreadful were the conditions at the front that tens of thousands shot off their own fingers to escape the carnage; even more began to desert and head back to their villages, which had been drained of millions of men. Food shortages and the rapid increase in the price of goods fueled ever larger and more frequent strikes in the cities.
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In September 1915, Tsar Nicholas made the disastrous decision to replace Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich and assume supreme command of Russia’s armed forces. From this point on, the army’s mounting failures were blamed squarely on the tsar. The expression used to describe the condition of the army under Nicholas was “order, counterorder, and disorder.”
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Count Dmitry Sheremetev was at Nicholas’s side for almost the entire war. Despite their long history together, Nicholas had no interest in hearing Dmitry’s honest opinion on the conduct of the war. Dmitry found the post burdensome and retreated to the capital or to his estate in Finland to fish at every opportunity.
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With the tsar off at headquarters, Empress Alexandra, along with the mysterious holy man Grigory Rasputin, took over the government. Rasputin’s murky influence and the widespread perception of the German-born empress as an enemy spy fed talk of dark forces at work behind the throne and destroyed society’s waning trust in the Romanovs. Count Sergei Sheremetev was among those most vexed by Alexandra and Rasputin, and their actions, together with Nicholas’s inexplicable reluctance to address this widely perceived cancer on his reign, further destroyed his faith in the throne.
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Society’s lack of trust in the government was matched by the government’s lack of trust in society. Convinced that they represented the gravest threat to the crown, the Okhrana kept up surveillance on numerous aristocratic families. Among them was Count Dmitry Sheremetev’s wife, Ira. In the autumn of 1914, the forty-two-year-old
countess left her children for the front to set up a mobile medical unit with her own funds. Ira often found herself close to the fighting, and Dmitry worried constantly about her. So too did Alexander Protopopov, the last minister of the interior, although for different reasons. Protopopov sent his agents to spy on this “liberal lady and opponent of the ‘Old Regime.’ ” Countess Sheremetev was not the only aristocratic lady being spied on. Countess Ignatiev and her salon were also being monitored for subversive activity. The government feared these and other ladies were gathering officers in their salons and encouraging seditious talk that might lead to a modern-day Decembrists’ revolt.
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What the agents learned led them to see in the elite’s alienation from the throne a more serious threat than the one posed by the poor and disenfranchised.
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Nabokov père opined: “To be for the tsar meant to be against Russia.”
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And in the final year of its life, the tsarist regime found itself in the strange position of being attacked even by self-professed monarchists, who abandoned Nicholas as weak and incapable of turning around the ship of state heading for the shoals.
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In the autumn of 1916, at the twelfth congress of the United Nobility, deputies publicly criticized the emperor for the first time ever.
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Even members of the Romanov family were pleading with Nicholas for change and reforms to give society a greater voice and role in governing, although it was most likely too late by then to halt the drift toward revolution.
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During the winter of 1915–16, Prince Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky wrote from the front to his mother in Nice, advising her not to return to Russia. “The age of debility has passed,” he told her. “Cosmic events are approaching.” That same winter he took leave in Petrograd (the new name given to St. Petersburg during the war), staying at the Hotel Astoria and spending his nights out at the opera, going to parties, dancing the tango, and downing champagne in fancy restaurants. “I noticed in Petrograd an undercurrent of nervousness, a feverish desire to have a good time,” he wrote, “and I had the impression that people were spending money as quickly as they could because they did not know what was going to happen next.”
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