Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (21 page)

The resistance, however, was not just nonviolent. Kerensky, now largely deserted by the Russian army, had managed to win the support of General Pyotr Krasnov and some of his Cossacks of the Third Cavalry Corps and to convince the general to march against Petrograd. On
October 30, Krasnov’s men encountered a much larger group of Red Guards, sailors, and soldiers at Pulkovo Heights outside the capital. The Cossacks were repulsed and retreated to Gatchina, Kerensky’s headquarters. Two days later, fearing for their lives, the Cossacks sold out Kerensky to the Bolsheviks for the promise of safe passage to southern Russia. Half an hour before his arrest, Kerensky, disguised as a sailor, managed to escape. From Russia he made his way to Paris and then, in 1940, to the United States.
³⁵

On the evening of November 14, the extended Sheremetev family gathered at the Corner House to celebrate Count Sergei’s seventy-first birthday. Pavel Sheremetev arrived with the news of the
Sovnarkóm
’s having abolished all ranks and estates, and they discussed the elections for the Constituent Assembly set for November 19–21 in Moscow. Olga voted on the twenty-first. The mood in the city was panicky; the Bolsheviks were openly robbing banks, and all sorts of rumors were going about: some were saying that peace had been declared with Germany, others that a St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, when all the burzhui would be rounded up and killed, was being planned for Moscow. “No one knows where we’re heading!” Olga wrote in her diary. “We’re all waiting for something to happen, and preparing ourselves for anything.”
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The Socialist Revolutionaries were the big winners in the election, garnering more than 40 percent of the vote; the Bolsheviks received 24 percent. The liberal and nonsocialist parties, chiefly the Kadets, gained only 7.5 percent.
³⁷
To Olga, the results were meaningless. They proved to her that the country was becoming ever more polarized, not boding well for any experiment in parliamentary government; moreover, she was certain the Bolsheviks had no intention of ever allowing the assembly to meet.
³⁸

The
Sovnarkóm
postponed the opening of the assembly once the disappointing results became known. Next, the government outlawed the Kadet Party. The editorial offices of its newspaper were broken into and trashed, its leaders declared “enemies of the people” and arrested; two of them, Andrei Shingarev and Fyodor Kokoshkin, were murdered by their Bolshevik guards. Lenin and his followers believed that the Kadets, as representatives of the bourgeoisie, belonged to a class destined to extinction by Marx’s “scientific laws” of history. Thus, repressing them was justified as part of history’s master plan. “There is nothing
immoral in the proletariat finishing off a class that is collapsing: that is its right,” Trotsky stated. To Lenin, the assembly was as much a relic of the past as the bourgeoisie and the Kadets, and he had never seen any reason to allow it to meet. “A republic of Soviets is a higher form of democracy than the usual bourgeois republic with a Constituent Assembly,” he wrote in
Pravda
in December. The long-awaited assembly did finally meet in Petrograd’s Tauride Palace on January 5, 1918, though only for a day. The government immediately dissolved the assembly, which it characterized as, to quote
Pravda
, a gathering of “
THE HIRELINGS OF BANKERS, CAPITALISTS, AND LANDLORDS
[. . .]
SLAVES OF THE AMERICAN DOLLAR
[. . .]
ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE
.”
³⁹

The closure of the Constituent Assembly marked the death of Russian democracy. Anything and anyone that stood in the way of the Bolsheviks’ grasp for power were branded counterrevolutionary. Weak and barely in control, the Bolsheviks saw threats everywhere they looked, and their response was to attack their enemies, both real and perceived. “The bourgeoisie, the landowners, and all the rich classes are making desperate attempts to undermine the revolution,” Lenin wrote to Felix Dzerzhinsky in December 1917. “The bourgeoisie are prepared to commit the most heinous crimes.” Dzerzhinsky, the son of impoverished Polish aristocrats, called for the
Sovnarkóm
to form a special organization to combat counterrevolution. “Do not think that I seek forms of revolutionary justice,” he said. “We are not now in need of justice. It is war now—war face to face, a fight to the finish. Life or death! I propose, I demand an organ for the revolutionary settlement of accounts with counterrevolutionaries.” On December 7, the
Sovnarkóm
appointed Dzerzhinsky head of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage. The Cheka, as it was known by its Russian acronym, would become a key weapon in the coming war.
⁴⁰

The exodus out of Petrograd and Moscow that had begun earlier that year turned into a flood following the Bolshevik coup. Even with their world collapsing around them, few nobles were trying to leave the country, largely for the simple reason that almost none of them, like most Russians, could imagine the Bolsheviks remaining in power for more than a few weeks. The many who left the two capitals, often
selling whatever they had to buy scarce rail tickets, headed for the south or Siberia or for other fringes of the former empire, hoping to wait things out in quieter, safer surroundings and then return home once normalcy had been restored.

Vladimir Nabokov’s father, intent on sending them to the safety of the Crimea, put his family on the train in Petrograd. Instead of disguising himself, the supercilious Vladimir traveled in spats and a derby and sporting an elegant cane. Along the way Vladimir and his brother Sergei had numerous encounters with bands of Red soldiers, but remarkably they arrived unharmed. At the time Vladimir found it all one great adventure, though later he marveled at his stupidity and blind good fortune. Near Kharkhov, Vladimir left the car and strolled about the platform among the soldiers, his mere presence a challenge to the men. As the train was leaving, he dropped his cane onto the tracks and, stooping to retrieve it, found the train in motion and pulling out of the station by the time he stood up. He was saved by a “sturdy proletarian arm” reaching out of a car that pulled him up off the platform and to safety. Years later Nabokov had to marvel: “Had I been one of the tragic bums who lurked in the midst of that station platform where a brittle young fop was pacing back and forth, I would not have withstood the temptation to destroy him.”
⁴¹

Several of the Golitsyns too began leaving Moscow that autumn. In November, Sofia and the mayor’s daughter Sonya Lvov and her children left for the northern Caucasus and were soon followed by her sister Tatiana Lopukhin and her family.
⁴²
The next to leave was the family of Alexander Golitsyn.

In light of the growing food crisis and worried that his efforts as a leading anti-Bolshevik in their Moscow neighborhood put him at risk of arrest, Alexander decided they should leave the city. After talking with people recently returned from Siberia who told him that life there was still peaceful and cheap and that there was no shortage of food, Alexander decided they all would leave for the town of Tyumen. Also shaping his decision was his conviction that bolshevism would never take hold among the strong, independent Siberians.
⁴³
Alexander, his wife, Lyubov, and their five children left Moscow on December 3 on a hired sleeping car of the Northern Railway. The train was not scheduled to leave until 8:00 p.m., but they boarded three hours early to minimize the risk of being identified by the Bolsheviks. They were part
of a group of extended family and servants making the trip. Among the group was Anna Golitsyn’s mother, Anna’s brother Nikolai Lopukhin, his wife, Sofia (née Osorgin), and their three daughters. They were joined by Georgy Lvov, the former prime minister, and his female companion, Yevgenia Pisarev. They took with them only what they could carry: a washbasin and jug, two samovars, a box of books and photograph albums, a sewing machine, a container for milk, a copper mortar, some clothes, and a small crib. The mayor and Sofia came to the station to see them off. Marina Golitsyn noticed that as their train pulled out, tears were streaming down her grandmother Sofia’s face. “How sad,” the mayor wrote after they left. “How painful it is for us that our dear, wonderful family has in fact been broken.” At the time, no one ever could have imagined the travails that awaited them on their journey or that they would never see their loved ones again.
⁴⁴

The patriarchs of the Golitsyn and Sheremetev families—the mayor and Count Sergei—rarely agreed on anything, but on one thing they did: they would never leave Moscow. All around them family and friends were abandoning the city. Countess Yekaterina Sheremetev’s sister, Baba Ara, was contemplating leaving for the northern Caucasus; the Gudoviches were thinking of going as well. From Kislovodsk, Dmitry Sheremetev urged his parents to come south and join him and his family. But Count Sergei would have none of it. He was appalled at the notion of leaving his home for his comfort or safety. He was displeased with Dmitry and Ira for having left. “They’ve all gone off and joined the Cossacks,” he wrote in his diary, “and will have to pay for the unacceptable fact of being Christians. Panicky Ira is trying to save her posterity among the Cossacks.”
⁴⁵
Count Sergei was just as upset at the former tsar upon hearing a rumor that Nicholas had taken flight from his captors in Tobolsk; were it true, he would consider it a mark of shameful cowardice.
⁴⁶
Count Sergei tried to instill in his family the idea that it was ignoble “to flee a sinking ship, and that they all simply had to die on their native soil,” as one frequent guest to the Corner House recalled.
⁴⁷

Yelena Sheremetev’s son wrote that Count Sergei forbade anyone in the family not only from leaving Russia but from even discussing it.
⁴⁸

The many rumors going about the city at the time influenced decisions about whether to stay or go. There was word that things were going well for the anti-Bolshevik forces beginning to gather in the south. General Alexei Kaledin had recently been elected ataman of the Don
Cossacks, and some in Moscow dared hope that he and his Cossack warriors would topple the Bolsheviks. When the head yardman at the Corner House heard the rumor, he made sure to inform the Sheremetevs that he was no longer a supporter of the Bolsheviks. Pavel put faith in the bizarre rumor that there was a strong monarchist faction among the Bolsheviks and that they were gaining the upper hand and would restore the tsar in January. The speed with which rumors arose and spread kept Muscovites in a frenzied state of confusion. One minute the Bolsheviks’ days seemed numbered; the next it seemed they were preparing a decisive blow against their enemies. No sooner were the Sheremetevs rejoicing over the talk of Kaledin than they got word that four hundred guillotines, including one on Palace Square in Petrograd, had been set up across Russia for the immediate execution of the burzhui. Talk of an arrest warrant having been issued for Count Sergei caused the family to worry that he would be among the first executed. And then later that same day a visitor to the Corner House told them not to worry, that they had it on good authority the German army would be in Petrograd by December 12 and then Moscow soon after, saving them all from the Bolsheviks. Amid this roller coaster of fear and hope, life somehow went on. One night in late November, having had enough talk of politics, Pavel and Lilya went to a reading by the Futurist poet Igor Severyanin and laughed as they had not in a long time.
⁴⁹

Everyone had grown weary of politics. “Politics and politics. We are all tired of the decrees, strikes, acts of ‘sabotage,’ the crack-downs and breakups of gatherings, the discussions and theories,” Olga Sheremetev complained in early December. Of one thing she, and many Russians, were certain: the Bolsheviks would soon collapse. But she did not think there would be any restoration of the monarchy, as many in her circle now believed and hoped for. Such people were living in a dreamworld, she thought, and had created in their minds an image of life before the revolution that had never existed. Their talk that the revolution had been the work of Jews and Freemasons, ideas popularized by the writings of Sergei Nilus, notorious for spreading the anti-Semitic
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, repulsed her. Olga thought it likely that the Socialist Revolutionaries would take power after the Bolsheviks. But it did not matter, for regardless of who it was, life in Russia, she was convinced, was unlikely to get any better.
⁵⁰

On December 31, Princess Catherine Sayn-Wittgenstein wrote in her diary in Mogilev: “The last day of 1917, a year that will assuredly be remembered! It’s hard to imagine any country in all of history having experienced such a year. [. . .] Has it ever before happened that a people has spoiled, indeed destroyed, its native land with its own hands?”
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Both Count Sergei and the mayor, however, managed to strike positive notes in their diaries. “We are about to enter the New Year amidst complete anarchy, having bid farewell to the old year, one that has been so fatal to Russia! We shall maintain our good spirits, along with our faith and hope, and we shall thank the Lord for everything,” wrote Count Sergei.
⁵²
The mayor echoed these sentiments:

I end the year with a feeling of infinite gratitude to God for my family and for my familial happiness. Nonetheless, for the fourth time now we part with a year that forms a string of years, each of which has been more nightmarish than the previous. One doesn’t wish to sum up this year either, even though we have been witnesses to what someone has justly called the crisis of humanity. Now I must end the last line of my daily chronicle and express my prayerful wish—