Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (16 page)

Alexander went on to offer the government the use of his private airplane squadron for the war effort and regretted that given his age (fifty-eight) and poor health, he was not able to do more for the new regime. No longer a “count,” Alexander had become, he proudly announced, “a Russian citizen.”
⁶⁸

Revolutions produce counterrevolutions. Yet it is one of the remarkable things about the February Revolution that it produced no counterrevolution seeking to restore the Romanovs. The nobility, and indeed the entire Russian elite, exactly those who stood to lose the most with the fall of tsarism, either embraced the revolution or at least begrudgingly accepted it. Despite a few isolated voices, there were no calls for a return to the past. Rather, the nobility immediately pledged itself to the new Provisional Government. The permanent council of the United Nobility and local noble associations met in early March to discuss how they might help the new government and encouraged all nobles to work with it. At the same time members of the State Council, including Count Sergei, swore an oath to the Provisional Government.
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As a whole, the nobility rallied around the new government as the best way to restore order and to unite the country against what most considered Russia’s greatest challenge—namely, the war against Germany. In their eyes, the revolution had been accomplished with the downfall of the autocratic system, and the duty of every Russian was to
come together in defense of the motherland against its enemy abroad and against chaos at home. For some nobles, like the mayor and his sons Mikhail, Alexander, and Vladimir Vladimirovich, the long-held dream of building a constitutional order based on law and full civil and political rights led them to support the Provisional Government; for others, support of the new order was chiefly motivated by a sense that this was the only hope for holding back the forces of disorder threatening to engulf the country. As Count Sergei expressed in a letter to the historian Sergei Platonov, “My wish for the new government is that it grows stronger and so becomes less provisional, for so far its life has meant nothing but anarchy.”
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For more than half a century Count Sergei and his family had celebrated Easter at the Fountain House. That year relatives in Moscow had been urging them to leave Petrograd early and join them in Moscow, where life was calmer and more settled. Count Sergei, although he too wished to leave the capital, refused to break with tradition, and so on the night of April 1 the Sheremetevs once again marked the Orthodox Church’s main holy day as they had every year before.
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Finally, on the evening of April 10, Count and Countess Sheremetev and the rest of the family left the Fountain House for the Nikolaevsky Station. Everywhere were crowds, bands of soldiers, and red flags. At half past eight, the train pulled out for the overnight trip to Moscow. “Thanks be to God,” Count Sergei wrote in his diary. “We are leaving stinking, criminal Petrograd.”
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One week before this train took the Sheremetevs from Petrograd, another had arrived at the city’s Finland Station from Stockholm. After sixteen years in exile, Lenin had returned to Russia.

6

A COUNTRY OF MUTINOUS SLAVES

Lenin was given a hero’s welcome by the members of the Bolshevik Party when his train pulled into the Finland Station shortly after 11:00 p.m. on April 3. After a few short remarks delivered from atop an armored car, Lenin left for the Bolshevik headquarters in the former Kschessinska mansion. His speech to his fellow Bolsheviks there in the early hours of April 4 struck them like a thunderbolt and threw the gathering into frenzied confusion. Lenin attacked any support of the Provisional Government, insisting that the overthrow of the Romanovs was but the first phase of the revolution, not its end. Rejecting the view of fellow Marxists that Russia had just entered the bourgeois-capitalist stage of development that was to last for some indefinite time, Lenin insisted on the idea that had preoccupied him since the outbreak of World War I—namely, that the only path to peace lay in transforming the “bourgeois” war of nation against nation into a “class” war of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, and the time for such a civil war was now.

Lenin laid out his ideas in the so-called April Theses. He advocated an immediate end to the “imperialist” war; no collaboration with the new government; a move to the next “socialist” phase of the revolution; the transfer of all power to the Soviets; the confiscation of landlords’ estates and the nationalization of all land; the abolition of the police and army, the latter to be replaced by a people’s militia; and the
creation of a single national bank under Soviet control as well as Soviet control over the means of production and distribution. His fellow Bolsheviks, and indeed the entire left, found his ideas absurd. The Bolshevik newspaper
Pravda
called Lenin’s plan “unacceptable,” and it was denounced in various left-wing circles as “claptrap” and “the ravings of a madman.” Lenin’s program was rejected by the Petrograd Bolsheviks, as well as their branches in other cities. The general consensus was that after so many years in exile, Lenin was out of touch with the realities of Russia.
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Prime Minister Prince Georgy Lvov, the blind optimist of 1917, would have agreed. “The great Russian revolution is truly miraculous in its majestic, quiet progress,” he stated early that spring; “every day that passes renews the belief in the inexhaustible creative power of the Russian people.” Others drew different conclusions from what they saw happening around them. Ambassador Paléologue saw “anarchy spreading through all of Russia,” and his British counterpart, George Buchanan, opined that “Russia is not ripe for a purely democratic form of government” and predicted “a series of revolutions and counterrevolutions.”
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The Provisional Government was proving helpless in stopping the country’s descent into disorder as the lawlessness and contempt for established authority that had brought down the autocracy continued to grow and spread. In the first days of May, Kerensky replaced Minister of War Guchkov, who had become convinced that Russia was ungovernable. “Is it really possible that Free Russia is only a country of mutinous slaves?” Kerensky asked as he launched his campaign to reinvigorate Russia’s army. “Our army under the monarchy accomplished heroic deeds. Will it be a flock of sheep under the republic?”
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Russia’s soldiers had no desire to be sheep, but neither did they desire to go on fighting and dying for a cause they did not believe in. According to General Alexei Brusilov, “The soldiers wanted only one thing—peace, so that they could go home, rob the landowners, and live freely without paying any taxes or recognizing any authority.”
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Given the vastness of the Russian Empire and the isolation of the village, it was not until mid-April that news of the fall of the Romanovs had reached all of the peasant masses. The news rarely produced sudden
changes, and for a time life in the countryside largely went on as before. Gradually, however, as the significance of the events sank in, many peasants began to believe that the local nobles had purposely tried to keep them ignorant of what had happened and to distort the meaning of the revolution for their own benefit.
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Even before the end of March, voices of concern about the situation in the countryside could be heard. On March 26,
New Times
quoted Prince Yevgeny Trubetskoy from Kaluga: “The danger in the countryside is quite real. The villages now have no courts, no government administration, mercy be to St. Nicholas. It is being said that the deep snows and the muddy season will save us. But for how long? Soon evil elements will realize the advantages to be had out of this disorder.”
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Evil elements, however, had already begun to realize the advantages. On March 17, the newspaper
Day
reported peasants near Bezhetsk had locked the local landlord inside his manor and then burned it down with him inside.
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Before the end of April, reports of pogroms and violence were coming in from a number of provinces.
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On May 3,
New Times
printed a story on the terror that had gripped the town of Mtsensk in Orlovsk Province. For three days straight as many as five thousand peasants and soldiers went on a drunken rampage, torching several nearby estates. The rampage had erupted when a group of soldiers, looking for weapons at an estate of the Sheremetevs, came across a large wine cellar. After getting drunk, they ransacked the manor, and when word got out what was going on, the local peasants and garrison joined in. Troops, even some of the officers, sent in to restore order went over to the side of the looters. Mysterious individuals appeared in officers’ uniforms and began handing out liquor and inciting the masses to further destruction. The town’s residents did not dare go out at night as the crowds, armed with rifles and knives, shouted and sang and caroused.
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“It was during the summer of 1917,” Ivan Bunin later wrote, “that the Satan of Cain’s anger, of bloodlust, and of the most savage cruelty wafted over Russia while its people were extolling brotherhood, equality, and freedom.”
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Freedom for the peasants meant
vólia
, license. Anton Kazakov, a peasant from Chernigov, said freedom was “Doing whatever you want.” And what the peasants, together with the returning army deserters, wanted was to destroy the landlords and take their property.
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It was not enough to plunder them; they had to be physically
annihilated and driven off the land for good. In June, a landowner near the village of Buerak in Saratov Province was shot at his estate and his servants were strangled. The entire contents of the manor were carted off.
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The next month, the eighty-year-old son of Ivan Kireevsky, one of the founders of Slavophilism, was murdered together with his wife at his estate in Moscow Province by a group of deserters looking to steal their collection of rare books and antiques.
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At the Kamenka estate of Countess Edith Sollohub, mutinous soldiers turned a large library into rolling papers.
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At the estate of Popelyova, where Tatiana Aksakov-Sivers went to join her mother in the spring, things at first seemed normal. Yet as the months wore on, outside agitators appeared and warned the local peasants to be wary of “wolves in sheep’s clothing,” meaning the local masters.
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At the Rodzianko estate of Otrada in the southern province of Yekaterinoslav, Yelizaveta Rodzianko noticed that well into the summer the peasants seemed unusually quiet. “The people are silent,” she thought, recalling the famous line from Pushkin’s historical drama
Boris Godunov
. This was the quiet before the storm. At a church holiday the Rodziankos were joined by all the villagers for an outdoor feast. A handsome young stranger appeared and began to speak to the crowd of the achievements of the revolution, eventually coming to the subject of the landlords. “Don’t touch your landowner. This land will be yours regardless. All this,” he said with a grand gesture sweeping the entire horizon, “will be yours!” Yelizaveta rode home with a strange feeling. Within months the family were forced to flee Otrada for good.
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The countryside that spring and summer was full of “strolling players,” outside agitators, often deserting soldiers and sailors. They, according not just to the accounts of dispossessed nobles but to Soviet authorities as well, played a pivotal role in getting the peasants to act against the landlords.
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At the Kastchenkos’ estate of Vesyolaya in Ukraine life seemed the same as always, at least outwardly. But then things began to change in small ways. “The change was indefinable, hard to pin down, yet grimly unmistakable,” Marie Kastchenko remembered. The two old coachmen “kissed our hands with the usual respectful cordiality, but seemed uneasy and looked around, as though they were afraid somebody was watching them.” In the house, things began to disappear—a scarf, a blouse, a bottle of eau de Cologne; the servants began to whisper in
groups and would “then lapse into sullen silence if any of us appeared.” On her walks, the peasants no longer stepped off the path to let Marie pass as before; now she had to give way to them.
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Alexei Tatishchev noticed that at the family estate of Tashan in the Poltava province the servants that summer “seemed reticent and at times surly” and reluctant to do their work. One day a peasant delegation came to the house to speak to his aunt. They waited on the marble terrace outside, some spitting on it in defiance. Later, one peasant, when asked to stop herding her cows in the yard, walked onto the terrace, hiked up her skirt, and then defecated in front of Tatishchev’s aunt. When the woman had finished, she told the mistress to herd them herself if she was not happy. Not long thereafter, the family packed up and left for Kiev.
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Bunin had left Petrograd for the family estate of Glotovo in May 1917. One night soon after his arrival, the barn was torched, and then the peasants burned down the neighbor’s barn. They blamed the fire on the landowner, beat him mercilessly, and hauled him off to the local town hall. Bunin went to intercede on his behalf. The crowed yelled at Bunin as speaking “for the ‘old regime’ ” and refused to listen; one woman called Bunin and his ilk “sons of bitches” who “should be thrown into the fire. “It is disgusting to live in the country now,” Bunin complained. “The village men are true children, just vile. There is ‘anarchy’ here and throughout the district, willfulness, confusion, and the most idiotic misunderstanding of all these ‘slogans’ as well as the most basic human words—it’s astounding.”
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In June, Bunin was forced to submit to a humiliating inspection at the local rail station. “There are no laws,” he cried. “Everyone has power except us of course. In ‘free’ Russia only soldiers, peasants, and workers have a voice.”
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Yet despite the horrors, Bunin, like most of the gentry, could not help feeling a deep connection to the family estate; its sense of history and simplicity and seeming timelessness was a balm amid all the upheavals. But by the middle of October, the situation had become too dangerous for the Bunins to remain in the country. During the last week of the month, they loaded up their things and left in the dark. On the way a group of women tried to block their path; Bunin pulled out his Browning and threatened to shoot, and the women stepped aside.
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