Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (18 page)

On July 3, an uprising of soldiers broke out in Petrograd that nearly toppled the Provisional Government. For three days mutinous soldiers and armed workers traded gunfire with forces loyal to the government. As during the February Revolution, much of the violence during the July Days was directed against the burzhui. Hundreds of people were killed and wounded in the streets of the capital. Historians continue to debate the Bolsheviks’ role in planning and organizing the insurrection, but most agree that had they so chosen, they could have overthrown the government. Lenin, however, hesitated, allowing the government to prevail. The leaders of the Bolsheviks were arrested on charges of treason, while Lenin managed to escape in disguise to Finland.
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A correspondent who had just experienced the revolt wrote Count Sergei a letter from Petrograd in which she described life in the capital and the strange, unbelievable changes taking place there. With admirable humor and pluck, she informed him how “the breadth of my political horizons is expanding not by the day, but by the minute, and all thanks to our country’s democratic system.”

When, during those July Days, the bullets were freely whistling along the streets, flying through the windows and thus proving all the delights of freedom in a law-based state and causing me to save myself by crawling into my bathtub, I realized that my previous understanding of a bathtub had been nothing but a narrow cliché, but now my knowledge has grown and I realize a bathtub can also serve as a fortress.

“Permit me to wish you good health and rest at your historic estates,” she added, “created in that happy time when people understood the meaning of the word ‘Motherland’ and when they still had the right to be called Russians, and not ‘former people.’ ”
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The term, “former people,” sounded odd at the time, although it soon became all too familiar.

Exhausted after four grueling months in office, Prince Georgy Lvov resigned as prime minister and left the government. He was replaced by Kerensky, who moved into the former rooms of Tsar Alexander III in the Winter Palace and began to present himself as a Russian Napoleon sent to save the country and the revolution. By now, many in Russia were in search of just such a figure. Since May Count Sergei had been counting on a strongman’s stepping forward as their only hope. “But where is he, amidst this universal collapse?” he wondered.
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The outlines of a conservative movement began to take shape that summer. Small groups sprang up with names like the Union of National Defense, the Union of Officers, and the Republican Center, all calling for order, discipline, and the curbing of the Petrograd Soviet’s power. Increasingly, members of the broad Russian elite were coming to the opinion that Russia needed an authoritarian government, if only to create the necessary conditions for the successful meeting of the Constituent Assembly. Some groups went even further, arguing that only a military dictator could save Russia from destruction. If to some this smelled of counterrevolution, to conservatives, moderates, and even some liberals, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were the real counterrevolutionaries. By fomenting class conflict, undermining the authority of the Provisional Government, and generally pushing Russia deeper into chaos, the Bolsheviks, many believed, were trying to undo the February Revolution in order to seize power.
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By August, the mayor could see a dictatorship in Russia’s future. “Revolution, in its extreme development, always leads to dictatorship,” he commented in his diary, “that is, to the despotism of one man and the proizvol of his stooges, and despotism and proizvol, once introduced
into a system and knowing neither limits nor responsibilities, as was the case under our autocracy, inevitably lead to revolution. We know this, and we shall see this ourselves here in the future.” It was an excruciating time for him. Like his fellow liberals, he looked with despair on the chaos around him and found it hard to understand how fast the profound joy over the collapse of the old order had been replaced by disgust and shame over what had followed. Regardless, he continued to believe that they had been right in their struggle to create a law-based society. “This had been the only path to save ourselves from the reckless proizvol of the first regime as well as its indivisible product—the destructive carelessness of the subsequent anarchy.”

As the political polarization grew, such voices of moderation were drowned out. Even the mayor began to wonder whether he and his fellow liberals had been naive to think Russia was ready for a constitution and representative government. Maybe the Russians were only fit to be “Forever under the yoke and kept in the condition of slavery. First there was the yoke of the tsarist regime and its dark forces, and now the yoke of the mob and groups of proletarians, these fortuitous people, and then either the yoke of a dictator or a foreign people.”
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From August 8–10, several hundred industrialists, landowners, politicians, clergy, and generals met in Moscow at the first Congress of Public Figures to unite the country’s nonsocialist forces and discuss the possible role of the military in the government. The participants agreed that national goals were being sacrificed for narrow class and personal interests. Civil war threatened Russia, and something had to be done, although they did not go so far as to endorse a military dictatorship. To rally support for the government, Kerensky responded with the State Conference, also in Moscow that same month. His attempt to unite left and right proved a public failure, highlighting the collapse of any political center at the expense of growing extremism. The conference did, however, greatly enhance the profile of General Lavr Kornilov, commander in chief of the Russian armed forces, a development that many welcomed, while others interpreted as a threat to the revolution.
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Protests against perceived counterrevolution broke out across Russia just as Kornilov, in response to talk of a planned Bolshevik coup, began making preparations to suppress any such uprising and move against the soviet. In what became known as the Kornilov Affair, one
of the most debated moments in the history of the revolution, Kerensky turned on Kornilov, convinced that Kornilov was planning to topple him and not the soviet. Kerensky had Kornilov and several other generals arrested. The sole victors in the Kornilov affair were the Bolsheviks. Kerensky had enlisted their aid in, as he saw it, “saving” the revolution from Kornilov. He freed their leaders from prison and had forty thousand guns distributed to workers in the capital. The Bolsheviks found their fortunes revived after the fiasco of the July Days, while Kerensky lost all the support of the conservatives and liberals, the military leadership, and even much of the left. As summer gave way to autumn, Russia found itself adrift with no national government to assert authority across its enormous territory.
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On April 11, the day the Sheremetevs arrived in Moscow from Petrograd, Boris and Lili Vyazemsky left for their estate of Lotarevo in Tambov Province. Count Sergei was relieved to see them go. He could not make peace with their liberal views, and the unending conversations about politics left him exhausted. The situation at Lotarevo was tense. That spring the Vyazemskys had buried Boris’s brother Dmitry (accidentally killed by a stray bullet while riding in an automobile in Petrograd) in the family crypt against the wishes of the peasants, who hated Dmitry for the harsh methods he had used to subdue the violence in the area during the Revolution of 1905. Boris began to worry. Outside agitators arrived, and acts of vandalism against the estate grew over the summer. Boris sent appeals to the capital for help, but none came. As it became clear that their lives were in danger, Vyazemsky decided he and Lili would have to leave Lotarevo before the end of August. Tragedy struck, however, before they could make their escape.
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In July, a peasant committee demanded Vyazemsky hand over his land. In turn, the peasants would agree to leave him twenty-seven acres and a small number of livestock. Vyazemsky refused, telling them they would have to wait for the Constituent Assembly. The peasants repeated their demands again in August, and this time Boris did not bother to reply.

One morning in late August hundreds of peasants from the area, led by the main Bolshevik agitator in the area, a man named Moyeseev, descended on Lotarevo. Lili and the servants urged Boris to get in the
wagon out back and ride off for a few hours until they had gone, but he refused. Vyazemsky had dealt with angry mobs before and had always managed to cool tempers and keep the peace, and he went out of the house that day to meet the peasants and talk to them as always. This time, however, under the goading of Moyeseev, they refused to be talked down. For a time it was not clear which side the peasants would take: some argued Vyazemsky should be killed, some that he should be arrested, and others that he should be sent off to the front. When a group of women placed a rope around Lili’s neck, the menfolk shouted at them to stop, and they took it off.

As the mood shifted back and forth, Moyeseev continued to insist that the time had come for the peasants to show the Vyazemskys who was in charge. According to one peasant, Vyazemsky finally said, “My friends, just let me go unharmed and whatever you like, you may take—be it money, land, or the estate, only leave me in peace.”
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Instead, the peasants seized Boris and Lili and locked them up in the local school. Hours passed as the peasants debated what to do next. Lili’s maid brought them their raincoats and cigarettes as they waited. The village women kept staring at them through the windows, so Boris covered them up with their raincoats.
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The next day the villagers decided to take Boris to the train station and send him to Petrograd with orders he be sent straight to the front. A local peasant, Ivan Talitsky, said the villagers assumed the trenches would be Boris’s grave.
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Lili was left to the mercy of the peasants, who by now had gotten hold of the Lotarevo wine cellar. Boris was taken to the local station, but he never made it to Petrograd. When the villagers and Boris arrived, the station was overrun with deserters and glum recruits being shipped out. Soon word spread that Prince Vyazemsky was being held at the station. The deserters found Boris, dragged him out of the station master’s quarters, and beat him to death with metal rods.
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With the help of a maid, Lili disguised herself as a peasant and escaped to the neighbors’ house. She told them what had happened, and they took her to the station to look for Boris. She found his mutilated body lying in an empty freight car off on a side track. She crawled in, sat beside him, and remained there for a long time. A young girl happened by and handed Lili some flowers. Lili then took Boris’s coffin on the train back to Moscow.

The Sheremetevs learned of the killing on August 25 while at
Mikhailovskoe. The following day they received further details of what had happened to Boris, including the fact that his body had been defiled as it lay dead in the dirt. Count Sergei was deeply shaken. “This is staggering. Signs of a Pugachyovshchina, requiring we be extremely cautious.” His wife, Yekaterina, suffered a mild heart attack upon hearing the news.
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Alexander Gudovich met Lili when the train reached Moscow. A requiem was held for Boris on the twenty-ninth. Lilya Sheremetev noted that Lili “continues to be brave, supported by her strong faith. She cried today after the night service.”
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After Boris’s murder, the peasants in the area waited for some sort of government response. But as the days and then weeks passed and nothing happened, they became emboldened. Four months after the murder, Lotarevo was pillaged and then razed. Boris’s brother Dmitry’s grave was dug up, and his corpse tossed out onto the ground. Lili later met their old estate steward in the Crimea, and he told her how the peasants had torn the estate apart. One of the peasants said to him, “We wanted to destroy everything so that the old owners could never come back.”
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The events at Lotarevo spread fear to the surrounding estates. The landowners demanded protection from the government and punishment of the Vyazemsky peasants, but still nothing happened. Violence erupted at several estates, and manor houses were set ablaze. By the end of October, 154 estates had been plundered and destroyed in Tambov Province.
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Despite the tragedy at Lotarevo, not everyone in the family lost hope. Princess Cantacuzène met Boris’s mother in the Crimea not long after his murder. The princess was moved by his mother’s forgiveness and by the fact that like most of the nobles the princess met there, she remained optimistic about Russia’s future.
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As autumn arrived, the terror in the countryside exploded. Newspapers no longer wrote about “disturbances” and “unrest” sweeping the land but about “anarchy.”
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reported in late September that the peasants in Tula Province were spreading word of “the total destruction of all landowners” and seizing all their land and manors without waiting for the Constituent Assembly.
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In October, signs began appearing in the Kozlovsky district informing the peasants on which estates nobles had fled for safety and urging them to “burn these estates as
well” and so drive all the landlords out of the area for good.
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In Kursk Province in mid-October, a mysterious organization called the Black Hand came to life, urging the peasants on to violence against the landlords.
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In some places the violence was not limited to nobles but was directed at Jews as well.
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The greatest explosion of peasant violence was in the traditionally volatile region of the Volga River, especially the provinces of Saratov, Samara, Penza, and Simbirsk. The peasants in this region played a crucial role in determining the fate of the revolution and spelling the end of the old order in the Russian countryside.
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