Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (15 page)

“When we meet again, where will Russia have got to? . . . Shall we meet again?” he asked.

“You are in a gloomy mood, Monseigneur,” the ambassador replied.

“How can you expect me to forget that I’m marked down for the gallows?” Grand Duke Nikolai had good reason to fear for his life. He was shot together with three other Romanovs—his brother Georgy and his cousins Dmitry Konstantinovich and Pavel Alexandrovich, the brother of Tsar Alexander III—in Petrograd in early 1919.
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The February Revolution took place in Petrograd, unbeknownst to the rest of the country. Yet as the news of the events spread, first to Moscow, then to other cities in Russia in the first days of March, the reaction was remarkable in its sameness. Joy and celebrations greeted word
of the abdication everywhere; there was almost no violence and no resistance.
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The reign of the Romanovs vanished into the air like so much steam from a boiling kettle. Yelizaveta Rodzianko, the daughter-in-law of Mikhail Rodzianko, was thrilled when the news reached her in the south. Russia, she believed, was finally pulling itself from the “muck” and heading out onto a “bright path.”
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Across Russia, many nobles shared that initial feeling of relief and optimism, followed by apprehension at what the future held. A noble schoolgirl in Ukraine, Marie Kastchenko celebrated wildly the news of the abdication with her classmates; at home, her father scoffed at their happiness: “ ‘Bloodless Revolution,’ this is only the beginning.”
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In Kazan, Olga Ilyn, born into the noted Boratynsky family, was riding in a sleigh with friends to a wedding when they came upon a crowd bearing red banners. The finely dressed Olga and her companions drew their attention. The crowd spat cries of “burzhui” and then warned, “You won’t be driving around like this for much longer!”
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By the first of March word had reached the Davydoff estate of Sably in the Crimea that something serious had taken place in Petrograd, but no one knew what precisely. Finally, when he learned what had happened, Alexander Davydoff sat stunned at his desk for two hours, contemplating the enormity of the event and the unknown future it heralded. He wondered whether he should stay or flee to one of the towns but could not be sure what to do. “To answer this question I lacked one certainty, which was whether the peasants would, as in revolutions of the past, immediately kill the landowners, destroy their homes and loot the agricultural buildings, or would they wait and see if their old dreams could not now fail to be accomplished by legal means?” Davydoff decided it would be cowardly to flee, and so he chose to remain on the estate and, as he put it, “take part in the revolution, prevent its excesses as best he could and try, even in a minimal role, to preserve the economic strength of the nation.”
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Most of the Golitsyns were then in Moscow. Little Sergei Golitsyn, the mayor’s grandson, heard about the revolution while recovering in the hospital from an appendectomy. His mother was at his side when the surgeon burst into the room, yelling, “There’s revolution in Petrograd!” Sergei could not understand why the two adults were so happy at the news. “It seemed remarkable to me. How could things like that happen—the tsar, who had all those medals, and then they just got rid
of him.” The change was apparent immediately. Sergei noticed on the way home that the tricolor tsarist flags that had adorned all the streetcars and houses when he had gone to the hospital had vanished and been replaced by red ones.
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Sergei’s father, Mikhail, was at work when the news of the abdication was announced. Everyone immediately burst into applause and let out cries of happiness.
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At home, the news split the family. While the mayor and his son Mikhail and Mikhail’s wife, Anna, supported the revolution, believing that now, finally, the war could be won, Russia would become stronger, and the peasants would live better and freer, the mayor’s wife, Sofia, and his brother Alexander cursed it. “My soul is troubled and worried,” Sofia wrote. “I can’t get used to the fact there is no more tsar and that he has been spurned and cast aside by everyone. And what will this so-called Freedom give us? The loss of our lands, destroyed estates, and all manner of violence.”
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Buoyed by a renewed sense of hope, Sergei’s parents threw themselves deeper into their work, Mikhail overseeing the city’s hospitals, Anna serving at the Society for the Protection of Mothers and Infants.
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Mikhail’s brother Alexander shared this optimism. Soon after the revolution, he left Moscow for the family’s Petrovskoe estate, where he spent much time talking to the peasants in the area about what the revolution meant and answering their questions. Alexander’s meetings with the peasants deepened his optimism for Russia’s future, and so he agreed to serve the new Provisional Government as the commissar responsible for helping reorganize the local Zvenigorod government. Like every other nobleman who tried to work with the new government and peasants, Alexander failed. Soon he had to flee the countryside and eventually Russia itself. Looking back, he wrote, “Revolution was not unexpected by us, we knew that it was inevitable, that the old rotten bureaucratic Government was too handicapped, was incapable of meeting the growing needs of the nation; but we did not expect it to come during the war and did not dream that it would come in this form. We all idolized too much the Russian people, and how we were mistaken!”
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Not everyone idolized the Russian people too much, however. Rather, it was mostly Russian liberals, especially zemstvo men like Alexander, his brother Mikhail, and their father, who did. It was the conservatives among the nobility, people like Alexander’s mother, less susceptible to myths of the innate goodness of the narod, who intuitively
sensed the danger the fall of the old regime posed and could see most clearly the dark future before them.

The family was a bit nervous about going out to Buchalki as usual that spring but decided to go anyway in early May. Life seemed to go on as before, although there were signs of change. The no trespassing signs outside the estate garden lost their power, and young local boys and girls freely came in to play and stroll and sit on the benches. On the first visit to church the Golitsyns found villagers filling the Princes’ Spot, something unthinkable only a few months earlier. There were instances of peasants cutting down their trees and hay; the overseer wanted to take action, but Anna Golitsyn decided to let it go, saying she did not want trouble with the peasants. Soon the peasants began to demand that the land be turned over to the “toilers,” although their demands were placated with the promise that the question of land reform would later be taken up by the Constituent Assembly.
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Meanwhile, in Petrograd, the Sheremetevs welcomed back Prince Boris and Princess Lili Vyazemsky. Lili, the daughter of Dmitry and Ira, had married Boris in 1912, after which they had spent much of their time at his estate of Lotarevo in Tambov Province. Lotarevo was a model estate, well known for its stud farm, and the Vyazemskys took great pride in it. Boris had served as marshal of the nobility for Usman district and president of the Tambov zemstvo and was later elected to the national Duma as a Kadet. Boris and Lili arrived at the Fountain House excited by the recent events and optimistic about the prospect of a Russian republic, all of which greatly upset Count Sergei.
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Throughout March Sergei had been receiving disturbing reports from his estate managers. On the sixth, a crowd of armed peasants at Mikhailovskoe had marched to the main house and demanded that all the pictures of the tsar’s family inside be destroyed. They found only one, a large portrait of Nicholas II in the dining room, which the overseer was forced to remove. Next, the crowd went to the school, pulled down portraits of Nicholas II, Alexander III, and even Alexander II—the Great Liberator—and destroyed them. That of Nicholas they tore from the frame and ripped to pieces before smashing the frame into splinters. The workers and employees at Mikhailovskoe held a meeting at which they drafted a petition demanding a ten-hour work day, “polite treatment” by their employers, and two weeks’ notice before being let go.
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Nikolai Shtegman, the overseer at Ostafievo, described what had transpired there that same day in a letter to Count Sergei:

The days of the revolution were much more alarming here than they were in 1905 or May 1915. On the morning of March 6 a large crowd of people appeared at the estate: two workers’ delegates and four guards with rifles and revolvers and a great many local peasants. They came into my apartment and immediately demanded I hand over all weapons, threatening me with their revolvers and with arrest. They rummaged through everything—the cupboards, commodes, trunks, etc. They looked everywhere for weapons, but I didn’t have any. I had given my gun to the watchman to keep the rabbits away from the apples. Then they demanded I open the main house so they could have a large meeting. I had to take out all the furnishings and close the side doors. They wanted to take all the weapons out of the dining room, but after several lengthy discussions and explanations to the effect that they were nothing but old flintlocks, and rusty ones at that, they left them in place. They searched the entire estate from eight o’clock in the morning until six o’clock in the evening, during which a great many people took part.

The crowd was all agitated because the day before at a factory meeting an orator named Baskakov misled them about the meaning of the revolution, telling them that now everything is ours, that if the vegetables are ripe—go on and take them, if the oats are ripe—go on and take them, if the apples are ripe—go on and take them, firewood, brushwood—you can now take everything you want and you won’t have to answer for it. Down with the teachers, don’t take your children to church, and a lot of other absurd nonsense. The same sorts of things were preached here too at the meeting on the estate. [. . .]

I have presented to the police a thorough report and have requested that the police be sent to guard the estate. I have been told a guard will be sent. Things are now, thank God, quiet.
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At the Sheremetev estate of Serebryanye Prudy (Silver Ponds), news of the abdication arrived along with “leaders of extreme left parties,” who organized meetings and gave speeches to the peasants aimed at turning them against the landowners and urging them to take all the land and not to wait for the Constituent Assembly. Peasants at the
Podkhozhee estate began to seize some of the Sheremetevs’ land and tried to stop a shipment of oats headed for Mikhailovskoe from being taken away, claiming that it was theirs now. Disturbances like this went on for a week before matters settled down. The overseer from the Sheremetev lands in the Baltic province of Livonia wrote: “After surviving the recent events we, too, have started to worry and are nervous—indeed, who at present isn’t anxious?”
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French Ambassador Paléologue noted the growing anxiety in Petrograd during these months. Dining one evening with several of his aristocratic friends, he encountered a mood of “the darkest pessimism.” One fear terrified them most: the partition of the land. “We shall not get out of it
this
time!” one landowner said. “What will become of us without our rent-rolls?” Those gathered were not just afraid of losing their land by legal means, but of “confiscation by the high hand, wholesale looting and jacquerie.” Paléologue wrote after dinner: “I am certain that the same sort of conversation can be heard in every corner of Russia at the present time.” Countess Lamoyska returned from the family estate in Podolia to tell her friends that “a dangerous agitation” had reached the peasants there too; she said they were acting as if they were preparing to divide up the land for themselves and now no one in the family dared return.
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To Paléologue, this talk came as no surprise. In the first days of the February Revolution he had witnessed the looting and occupation by a mob of the Petrograd mansion of Mathilde Kschessinska, the ballerina and former mistress of Nicholas II. For him, this seemingly trivial event masked a deeper significance. “The revolution was pursuing its logical and inevitable course,” he observed.
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Count Alexander Sheremetev, Count Sergei’s half brother, was among those aristocrats most deeply affected by the revolution. On a visit in early April to the Fountain House, Sergei was shocked by Alexander’s changed manner and appearance and barely recognized him. He had shaved his mustache, lost a good deal of weight, and looked old and broken; gone were all his vaunted lively spirit and endless aplomb. He was now seeing the same specialist in nervous disorders who had treated Pavel following his breakdown in February; Sergei wryly commented in a letter to Maria that “the number of such sick persons has greatly increased.” Upon his wife’s insistence, Alexander had bought several acres of land in Finland should the situation in Russia get any worse.
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Once a resolute defender of the old order, Alexander had suddenly been transformed into a democrat and now claimed, amazingly, to have been one of the victims of tsarism. In April, he wrote to Alexander Guchkov, the Provisional Government’s minister of war:

Being in my soul a republican, I have suffered morally so much, especially during the war years, that my health has been utterly shattered. The great and important events of late February, which struck me like a blinding light after a long dark nightmare, have happily ended forever that repugnant despotism that nearly destroyed our beloved Fatherland. With this powerful and great revolution, the Provisional Government, which thanks to its moral strength is equally great, has created a miraculous and glorious monument to itself.