Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (2 page)

PROLOGUE

THE CORNER HOUSE
,
MOSCOW
,
NOVEMBER
23, 1918,
LATE EVENING

The nurse was preparing a fresh bandage when the men from the Cheka, the feared Bolshevik political police, burst into the room. “Can’t you see there’s a man dying in here?” she asked, and turned, stopping them in their tracks.
¹
There before them in the half-light lay Count Sergei Dmitrievich Sheremetev, aged seventy-three, aide-de-camp to the late emperor Alexander III, member of the Imperial State Council, chief master of the hunt, and scion of one of Russia’s great aristocratic families. In poor health for years, Count Sergei was near death, the gangrene in his legs spreading toward his torso and requiring the doctors to make one last attempt to save his life by radical amputation. The unexpected visitors, all except one, filed out of the room. The leader of the group, Yakov Peters, an intense man with thick dark hair and a prominent forehead, stayed to observe the operation and see whether the man he had come to arrest would survive.

They had arrived without warning, driving up Vozdvizhenka Street in several cars from the direction of the Kremlin. After turning into the courtyard of the Corner House, the grand Sheremetev home, they parked and locked the gate behind them to keep anyone from escaping. Panic gripped the servants on the main floor of the Corner House. At first it was not clear what was happening; ever since the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II the previous year and the collapse of the old regime
the country had descended into chaos and lawlessness. Armed gangs roamed the streets at night, robbing, looting, and killing at will. Once powerful and still enormously rich families like the Sheremetevs were their preferred victims. Yet as the men in their dark leather jackets barged into the house, it became clear these were not mere bandits, but members of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage, the so-called Cheka.

After mounting the main staircase, they charged into the dining room, where they found the Sheremetev family seated at the table. “Hands up!” shouted Peters, leveling his Nagant revolver at them. Stunned, they all remained seated and raised their hands. Even the old butler, Dmitry Fyodorovich, just then serving Countess Yekaterina Sheremetev, Count Sergei’s wife, laid the food platter on the floor and put his hands in the air. Not seeing Count Sergei at the table, Peters and a few of the other Chekists went to find him. The adults were locked in the dining room for the night, while the Sheremetev grandchildren were permitted to go to their nanny in another part of the house. Among the children were Yelena Sheremetev, in a gold silk skirt, her long hair tied up with a big white bow, and her older brother, Nikolai. When the children told their nanny what was happening, she took the family jewels that had been sewn to a long piece of velvet and dropped them into a water tank, just as she had been instructed to do in such an event.

Many in the family had sensed this day was coming; there had been numerous signs during the past months that the Bolsheviks had placed the Sheremetevs in their sights. That summer two of Count Sergei’s sons-in-law had been briefly arrested: Alexander Saburov, a former officer of the Chevaliers Gardes and civil governor of Petrograd, and Count Alexander Gudovich, a gentleman of the bedchamber at the court of Nicholas II. Shortly thereafter, a Red Army soldier had come to the house and arrested Baron Joseph de Baye, a French citizen and old friend of Count Sergei’s, who had lived with the family for many years. When the count asked on whose orders his friend the baron was being arrested, the soldier pointed at the Kremlin, saying, “Theirs.” In September, the count’s son, also named Sergei, was arrested at the family estate of Ostafievo, the Cheka agents mistaking him for his father. A group of worried scholars wrote to Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Bolshevik commissar of enlightenment, requesting that he extend “special protective measures” to the count and his son Pavel at their Vozdvizhenka home.
Lunacharsky replied that “all Revolutionary powers” would be used for their protection.
²
The commissar evidently had little power to offer protection.

The importance the Bolsheviks attached to Count Sheremetev, one of the most prominent representatives of old Russia, the Russia now being swept away by the whirlwind of the revolution, was evident by the presence of Yakov Peters that night at the Corner House. Born to the family of a poor Latvian farmer, Peters had been a committed revolutionary since the beginning of the century. He had been arrested by the tsarist police for taking part in labor strikes and tortured after the Revolution of 1905. For the rest of his life he had the mangled fingernails to prove his commitment to the cause. After his release he fled to London in 1908. Peters returned to Russia in the spring of 1917 and played an active role in the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in October. Together with Felix Dzerzhinsky, he established the Cheka and for years served as one of its leaders, notorious for his cruelty.
³

Peters was among the authors of the Red Terror unleashed in September 1918 after the murder of Moisei Uritsky, head of the Petrograd Cheka, and the failed assassination attempt on the life of Lenin by Fanya Kaplan in late August. The goal of the Cheka’s terror was to unleash a campaign of class warfare against “counterrevolutionaries” and so-called enemies of the people. In September, the Communist leader Grigory Zinoviev pronounced: “To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.”
⁴
Peters’s Cheka colleague Martin Latsis let there be little doubt where these unfortunate ten million were to be found: “Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.”
⁵
Peters himself had expounded on the role of terror: “Anyone daring to agitate against the Soviet government will immediately be arrested and placed in a concentration camp.” The enemies of the working class will meet with “mass terror [. . .] and will be destroyed and crushed by the heavy hammer of the revolutionary proletariat.”
⁶

The hammer of the Red Terror had now been lowered on the Corner House. Yakov Peters and Sergei Sheremetev embodied the epochal struggle facing Russia in 1918: on one side stood Peters, young, strong, and armed with the righteous conviction of the Bolshevik cause; on the other lay Sheremetev, sick, weak, defeated, and dying. In Count Sergei’s room that night, two Russias stood face to face—that of the future and that of the past.

History, we are told, is written by the victors. What is less often stated, though no less important, is that history is usually written
about
the victors; winners get more attention in the history books than losers. The literature on the Russian Revolution proves the point. The biographies of Lenin vastly outnumber those of Nicholas II, as do the books on the Bolsheviks compared with those on the Mensheviks. Yet losers are no less worthy of being remembered than winners, if only to help us to appreciate the full richness of what came before and to preserve the memory of those unjustly forgotten by history.

I came across this forgotten history while writing a book on Count Sergei’s grandfather Count Nikolai Sheremetev, an eccentric and fabulously rich aristocrat famous for his private serf opera company and his scandalous marriage to its prima donna, a singer named Praskovya Kovalyova, who performed as “The Pearl.”
⁷
Through my research I came to know several of Nicholas and Praskovya’s descendants, and hearing their stories about what had happened to the family during the revolution, I was drawn to the larger history of the fate of the nobility during these tumultuous years. While on a visit to Moscow in the spring of 2006 I searched the many drawers of the card catalog devoted to the “Great October Socialist Revolution” at the Russian State Library (the former Lenin Library, not fully online at the time) but could not find anything on the nobility. Surprised, I asked a librarian why there was nothing in the catalog. The look she gave me was one of disbelief, as if I had asked who was buried in the Lenin mausoleum. “
Shto?
What?” she stuttered. “The revolution and the nobility? Of course not, because the revolution had nothing to do with the nobles, and they had nothing to do with the revolution,” she instructed this clueless American historian.
⁸
While researching this book, I have received similarly dismissive
comments from people in the West. Of course, the nobility was destroyed, I have been told, and rightly so. There is a belief among some people that the nobility got what was coming to it, and so we need not be surprised or even care. Both points of view—that the revolution had nothing to do with the nobility or that it did but need not concern us—are wrong, historically and morally.

As one of the overlooked stories of the Russian Revolution, the fate of the nobility warrants being told. The destruction of an entire class cannot help eliciting our interest. But there are other reasons as well. The destruction of the nobility was one of the tragedies of Russian history. For nearly a millennium, the nobility, what the Russians called
bélaya kost’
, literally “white bone” (our “blue blood”), had supplied Russia’s political, military, cultural, and artistic leaders. The nobility had served as the tsars’ counselors and officials, as their generals and officers; the nobility had produced generations of writers, artists, and thinkers, of scholars and scientists, of reformers and revolutionaries. In a society that was slow to develop a middle class, the nobility played a preponderant role in the political, social, and artistic life of the country disproportionate to its relative size. The end of the nobility in Russia marked the end of a long and deservedly proud tradition that created much of what we still think of today as quintessentially Russian, from the grand palaces of St. Petersburg to the country estates surrounding Moscow, from the poetry of Pushkin to the novels of Tolstoy and the music of Rachmaninov.

The story of the Russian nobility also warrants telling since its fate foreshadowed that of other groups in the coming decades. The Bolsheviks’ decision to single out the nobility for political persecution, for the expropriation of its property, for imprisonment, execution, and its designation as “former people” signaled a ruthless, Manichaean mentality that condemned entire collectives of people to harsh repression and even death. What is more, the tactics used against the nobility would be adopted against all of the regime’s supposed class enemies. Lenin saw such enemies everywhere, whether among the more moderate socialists who refused to endorse his radical vision or the Russian peasant slightly better off than his neighbors. He insisted such enemies had to be crushed, and they were. Yet in one of the strange dynamics of the revolution, defeating one’s class enemies was no guarantee of safety, for
as the old enemies were defeated, new ones had to be found to justify the continuing struggle for the bright future of the Communist tomorrow. And so just as Stalin later destroyed the Old Bolsheviks, including Yakov Peters, who was arrested and killed in the Great Terror, so too would the entire peasantry be brutally subjugated. A revolution made in the name of the poor would destroy their lives in even greater numbers than those of the rich, the revolution’s original targets.