Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (19 page)

In September, the mayor, Sofia, and the rest of the Golitsyn family returned to Moscow for the beginning of the new school year. Their son Alexander was particularly upset about recent events. Since the February Revolution he had worked diligently to help reorganize the local government in Zvenigorod until he was forced out by the Bolsheviks, who were gaining support in the area. He had now lost all his earlier optimism for the revolution and was convinced that only a strong man like Kornilov could have saved the country.
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With chaos swirling about them, their hopes for the future dying, the mayor nonetheless looked upon his family gathered around him and was filled with joy. “At the present, tragic time, it is not just our private lives, filled with their small concerns and work, that are our refuge as well as our salvation, but even more so it is the life of our family, the feeling of complete happiness that we find in our family, so beloved and so beautiful.”
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Few nobles were able to find such happiness. That same month Princess Catherine Sayn-Wittgenstein could think of little else but the civil war she saw gathering on the horizon. Life in Russia was a tragedy, and everyone was responsible: the Bolsheviks, the soldiers, the peasants, politicians, merchants, and the nobility as well.

Can we say that everyone but us was guilty, that we suffer innocently? Of course not. We, the noble estate, that is, have been guilty before all the other estates for centuries. We do not care to recall this, however, it is only natural that this hatred for us, for our estate, hatred based on envy, would have to explode sooner or later. Now they hate us with unyielding malice, not differentiating individuals among us, and seeing only a class of “lords,”
“burzhui,”
“landowners,” and “masters,” a class that so many obliging people have been encouraging them to hate more than anything. It is understandable and it is
forgivable
that they hate us, for we in fact hate them, we hate them with the same unyielding malice and, what is more, we despise them. [. . .] We accuse them of stupidity, of cupidity, of brutish rudeness and filthiness, we accuse them of a lack of patriotism and of all humanity, save selfishness. That they are dark and backward, this is true, but are they to blame for this? [. . .] Who taught them to love the Motherland? Cupidity, rudeness, impudence, and stupidity—these are their noted traits, but can one really expect better of a people who only recently were slaves? [. . .] Both sides have always thought in terms of “us” and “them,” and we now see that therein lay our ancestral error. Both sides desire not to understand each other, not to come together, not to forgive, rather to vanquish the other.

If Russia were indeed on the verge of civil war, Catherine remarked, and one day she were to find her own head under the guillotine, she would feel no self-pity or anger and would understand, for no one was blameless.
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7

THE BOLSHEVIK COUP

One constantly feels oppressed by worry of a German attack and Bolshevik supremacy. If they seize power that will be the final step into the abyss. [. . .] My soul is full of sorrow. I grieve for the Motherland.”
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Count Sergei’s grief, recorded in his diary in the first days of October, was shared by many Russians at the time. In their eyes, the country was being destroyed from without by the Germans and from within by the Bolsheviks. Popular support for the Bolsheviks was growing that autumn together with the persistent rumors of an impending Bolshevik coup. While some of the Bolshevik leadership continued to resist Lenin’s insistence on an immediate seizure of power, in the end Lenin managed to impose his will at a secret meeting of the Central Committee in Petrograd on October 10, when it was agreed to prepare for an armed coup d’état against the Provisional Government. Lenin refused to consider any cooperation with the other socialist parties, and even though the attack against Kerensky’s government would be carried out under the banner of “All Power to the Soviets,” this would be nothing but a smoke screen to hide the Bolsheviks’ real plans for a complete monopoly of power.
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On the evening of October 25, Princess Meshchersky went to the opera in Petrograd. She noticed some trouble with the lights and a strange atmosphere in the theater, but nothing out of the ordinary. Her experiences accord with most others in the city that night, for whom
life, though chaotic and unpredictable, was uneventful.
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But as the city’s residents went about their business, the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC) of the Petrograd Soviet, together with Red Guards and Bolshevik soldiers and sailors, were at work overthrowing the government. That day the MRC took control of the electric power station, the main post office, the State Bank, and the central telegraph exchange, as well as key bridges and railway stations. So weak had the government become that no one seemed to notice what was happening. There was almost no one left to defend the government, and so it collapsed with a whimper when faced by no more than several thousand armed men. In the early-morning hours of the twenty-sixth, a group of soldiers marched into the Winter Palace to arrest the government ministers, and there was no one to stop them. The few hundred loyal troops had all but left, either for home or for one of the city’s restaurants. Kerensky himself had already abandoned the capital.

The number of soldiers who captured the Winter Palace was quickly dwarfed by those that followed, as news spread that the massive wine cellar of the tsars—tens of thousands of bottles—was being handed out and sold off. A bacchanalia of unseen proportions erupted. Crowds of drunken workers, soldiers, and sailors, including the men responsible for the attack on the palace, rioted and looted. They vandalized the Winter Palace, broke into liquor stores and shops, attacked, robbed, and killed the burzhui in the streets and in their homes. Moisei Uritsky, the head of the Petrograd Cheka from 1918, dressed every bit the Jewish
intelligént
, barely escaped the mob with his life. The Bolsheviks tried to pump the wine from the palace cellar out into the gutter to end the chaos, but the crowds simply lowered themselves onto the street to drink it up. Martial law was declared, and the prisons were soon filled beyond capacity. Even machine guns and threats to blow up the cellar with dynamite proved ineffective in stopping the rioting. The disorder lasted for several weeks and did not end until every bottle had been drunk. Maxim Gorky moaned that what they were witnessing was not a revolution but “a pogrom of greed, hatred, and vengeance.”
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Count Sergei spent much of October 27 overseeing the hanging of paintings brought to Moscow from the Fountain House. Looking at the large canvases depicting scenes from Russia’s past amid the present
crisis brought only anguish, and he went to bed early. Around four in the morning of the twenty-eighth he was awoken by the sound of heavy gunfire from the direction of the Kremlin, only a few blocks away from the Sheremetevs’ Corner House on Vozdvizhenka Street. He looked out his window and saw in the light of the streetlamps young cadets at their posts across the street guarding the state revenue building. Then the shooting stopped, all was quiet once more, and Count Sergei went back to sleep. At breakfast the shooting began again, accompanied now by heavy machine-gun fire. Soon the shooting intensified and surrounded the house. No one had any idea what was going on. There were no newspapers, nothing but rumors, including one that Generals Mikhail Alexeev and Alexei Brusilov had arrived in Moscow to set up a new government separate from Petrograd.
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The Bolshevik insurrection in Moscow did not go as smoothly as that in Petrograd. On October 26, the Moscow Military Revolutionary Committee, with as many as fifty thousand men, seized the Kremlin. They were opposed by the Committee for Public Safety, created upon the initiative of the city’s Socialist Revolutionary mayor and consisting of military cadets, a small number of elite assault troops, and volunteers. On the morning of the twenty-eighth, the troops of the committee retook the Kremlin, during which hundreds of soldiers, the majority of them Bolsheviks, were killed.
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That night Count Sergei wrote to a relative: “The Kremlin has been taken by the cadets. Moscow, it seems, is once again destined to play the decisive role in Russia’s fate.”
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For the next two days there was sporadic gunfire near the Corner House, with bullets landing in the courtyard. The street battles between the Bolsheviks and the cadets quickly became so intense that the Sheremetevs could not leave the house. The men and the remaining servants organized a night patrol. On the morning of the twenty-ninth, a car drove by and someone tossed a hand grenade into the intersection in front of the house, setting off a big blast but causing little damage. The same day the family managed to get a copy of the newspaper
Labor
, from which they learned that Moscow had been placed under martial law and that no one was permitted out in the streets without a pass. Late on the evening of the thirtieth all the lights went out. The family fumbled around in the dark with candles and fearing that the municipal workers had gone out on strike, began filling bathtubs and
samovars with water. Next the telephones went dead. On the last day of October, the Sheremetev family office, the large bureaucracy that for centuries had managed their vast wealth and properties, ceased operations for good. That night the sky over the Corner House glowed from the fires burning across the city.
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The fighting grew on the first and second days of November. The committee controlled the center of Moscow, while the Bolsheviks dominated in the outlying workers’ districts. During the battle for Moscow, the Red Guards units slowly progressed from the suburbs into the city, making their way toward the Kremlin. On November 2, there were rumors of the Bolsheviks gaining the upper hand and of closing in on Vozdvizhenka Street. Panic overtook the household, and Countess Yekaterina alone remained calm. The family now felt as if they were trapped inside a besieged fortress. All they had left to eat was potatoes. The gunfire and explosions kept getting louder and closer. They covered the windows and moved to the interior rooms for safety.
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And then, when they arose on November 3, it was all over. The previous evening the Red Guards had blasted their way into the Kremlin and sent the remaining cadets running for safety. The Committee for Public Safety signed an act of surrender to the Revolutionary Committee and agreed to lay down its weapons.

Count Sergei wrote on the third:

We have learned that last evening a peace was agreed to and we all arose with a sense of relief, although conscious of the victory of the Bolsheviks thanks to the inaction of the government’s defenders and the unmistakably transparent treason against and betrayal of the cadets, who were supported by no one and have perished at the hands of the conspirators! We are relieved that the bloodletting and damage to the Kremlin have stopped and recognize that although power has now passed into the hands of Lenin and Company this is both unacceptable and bound to be short-lived. The changes are visible from the window. Rifles have been laid down in the street, and Vozdvizhenka has taken on that Bolshevik look of disorder. The gunfire has largely subsided. There are lots of people out walking in the streets, as if they had all just escaped, women and children . . . We’ll soon learn how many have been killed and the extent of the damage. Thank God it’s all quiet again, even if only for a while.
¹⁰

As soon as the shooting stopped, Pavel Sheremetev left the house for the Kremlin, which had been terribly damaged during the fighting. He spent almost every day there for the next several weeks, gathering up the bones of the old Muscovite grand princes that had been scattered about the ground by grave robbers.
¹¹

The mayor and Sofia were also in Moscow. Throughout October he had been following the rumors that “extremists” were making plans to overthrow Kerensky’s government and seize power in Petrograd, none of which, given how thoroughly discredited the government had become, surprised the mayor. The rumors grew during the last week. There was word that the government had indeed been overthrown and civil war had broken out, but then on the twenty-sixth he heard that Kerensky had in fact crushed the coup against him. No one could be certain what in fact was taking place.
¹²

By October, peasants at Petrovskoe were warning Alexander Golitsyn that he should leave for Moscow, for there was talk in the village of having him arrested. Fearful of the old home being pillaged, he first packed up the most valuable objects (paintings by Palma Vecchio, Canaletto, and Vigée-Lebrun) and sent them to his parents in Moscow.
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Later that month the family decided they all would be safer in Moscow with Alexander’s parents. “We are going to Moscow,” Alexander and Lyubov’s twelve-year-old daughter Marina observed. “It is getting dangerous to live in the country. The Bolsheviks come and talk to the peasants. Some are very unfriendly.”
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The family left Petrovskoe on October 26, the day of the Bolshevik coup. Marina’s older sister Olga wondered would they ever see the estate again. They arrived in Moscow in the midst of the heavy fighting. Dead bodies lay in the streets, frightening the children.
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By then, the revolution had already claimed the first life in the family. Four-year-old Tatiana, the daughter of Vladimir and Eli Trubetskoy, had fallen ill with scarlet fever in Moscow. Her uncle Alexander Golitsyn had been to tend to her in early October, but when the shooting began, he was unable to make his way back to the Trubetskoys for several days. By the time he finally reached her, Tatiana was dead. “Poor innocent victim of the revolution,” he remarked.
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