Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (25 page)

Yelena and her brother Nikolai attended a new Soviet school at the time, though the constant hunger made it nearly impossible to focus on their lessons. The high point of the day was lunch, when the children were served a bowl of watery lentil soup. Every schoolchild competed for the job of server since he could take a bit extra for himself. Yelena had to drop out of school the following year so she could stand in the food line at the League to Save the Children.
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The famine gripping Russia in those years spared no one, except for the new elite; the Sheremetevs’ remaining chef left them around this time to cook for Lenin and his comrades in the Kremlin. The family was helped by a few former peasants who brought them food from the villages. Regardless, food was scarce, and the battle against hunger was inescapable.
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Yelena and her family earned a bit of money by selling women’s
overshoes that they themselves made from old beaver-skin rugs. Like so many former nobles, they also sold their jewelry, antiques, and art for a pittance. Yelena’s mother, Lilya, sold the diamond diadem she had worn to receptions at the Winter Palace for a bag of flour. They had to be wary of any such transactions since prominent families were often targeted by con men and tricksters.
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By 1918, life had become so hard that some at the Corner House had begun to consider leaving Russia.
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Discussions about whether to stay or go were then taking place in noble families throughout the country. The decision was never an easy one and was shaped by a number of factors. Leaving required money, which by now many no longer had; leaving meant saying goodbye to one’s family and loved ones, which many could not bear; leaving meant having a place to go and an idea of how to cross Russia’s armed and dangerous borders; leaving meant giving up all hope for a life in Russia; leaving, to some, meant treason.
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After making his escape abroad, the beloved son of Princess Meshchersky wrote to let his family know he was safe. His mother replied just once, only to say that he was now dead to her and the rest of the family. “You have forgotten about love for the Motherland—you have left your native land, so now you can forget about the mother and sister you left there.”
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Leaving also meant you felt you were in danger. Marta Almedingen, from an impoverished and obscure noble family, chose to remain since, as her mother put it, “We are so unimportant that it does not matter whether we stay or not.”
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This was definitely not the case for members of the great aristocratic clans with prominent surnames. They found themselves before an extremely difficult decision. If they chose to leave and managed to make it abroad, they had a better chance to establish themselves than the typical Russian nobleman given their education, knowledge of foreign languages, wealth (even if only some jewels and silver stuffed in a few suitcases), and personal connections to other European noble families. But leaving could only be an act of last resort. If they could have known at the time, however, what awaited them in Communist Russia, perhaps most would have chosen this path, for only a few individuals survived from these aristocratic families. The fate of the princes Obolensky is instructive. Prince Vladimir Obolensky was killed at his estate
in early 1918; later that year his older brother Alexander was shot at the Fortress of Peter and Paul in Petrograd. Prince Mikhail Obolensky was beaten to death by a mob at a railroad station in February 1918. Prince Pavel Obolensky, a cornet in the Hussars, was shot by the Bolsheviks in June 1918 and left for dead, although he somehow survived and fled to the Crimea. Princess Yelena Obolensky was killed at her estate in November 1918; her dead body was burned along with her manor house. Many more Obolenskys suffered similar horrific fates; they included seven members of the family who perished in Stalin’s prisons years later.
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Of course, no one could foresee the future. What is more, no one had a clear idea of what was happening in Russia. A decision about whether to stay or leave could be made only on the basis of trustworthy information, and ever since the Bolshevik coup, this had become as scarce as food. Rumors became the currency of the day. “I was in no position to form any opinion as to what was happening in Petrograd, still less so in the rest of the country, let alone the outer world,” wrote Marta Almedingen. “There were no papers, and even the inland post functioned erratically. For human pebbles on the national beach (and I was one of them), the only channel of information was the interchange of rumors in the food queues. [. . .] Those were the only clubs left in the city.”
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In Yekaterinoslav, Princess Vera Urusov complained of “no mail, no telephone, no trains anymore, and the rare newspaper reveals nothing. We live only by
On dit . . . On dit . . .
”
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“We live under the power of rumors,” Olga Sheremetev wrote in early 1918. “If someone said Lenin had become a Muslim or I don’t know what nonsense, everyone would believe it.”
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The idea that Lenin was a closet Muslim was not too farfetched. One popular rumor of the day held that the Bolsheviks were full of closet monarchists who planned to ride bolshevism back into power in order to restore the monarchy.
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In the spring of 1918, in some provincial cities, there was talk that the Bolsheviks had been overthrown and Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich installed in Petrograd as the new tsar; a different rumor had it that Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich had established a dictatorship in Moscow.
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There were rumors that Lenin and Trotsky had been killed and that Tsar Nicholas had escaped to England.
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The German Army was the subject of intense gossip. Nearly every day new rumors appeared on the whereabouts of the
Germans, how they were soon to march into Petrograd and Moscow, overthrow the Bolsheviks, and save the country from ruin.
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While Count Sergei was alive, any talk of leaving Russia was shunned in the Sheremetev family. A Russian noble, the count believed, should be ready to die on his native soil.
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Regardless, after his death, some in the family did leave. His sons Boris and Sergei left Moscow around 1919 and eventually settled in Western Europe. Yelena’s elder brother Boris also appears to have quit Russia for Europe around this time, possibly with his uncles Boris and Sergei.
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Life in exile was a struggle for most Russians. In France, Count Sergei’s son Boris held a number of jobs, trying to make ends meet. In Geneva in 1929, his daughter Tatiana married Theodore Carl Fabergé, a fellow émigré and the grandson of Carl Fabergé, the famous founder of the family jewelry firm. The only work Theodore was able to find was repairing radios.
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Alik Saburov and Alexander Gudovich, the count’s sons-in-law, contemplated leaving for Finland for a time but then received word that matters there were no less difficult than in Russia. Moreover, as officers they felt a sense of duty to remain in Russia.
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For Pavel, there was never any thought of leaving Russia. First of all, he was not married and had no children to worry about. Second, unlike his brother Dmitry off in the northern Caucasus, he had never occupied any prominent official position under the old regime that put him at special risk. His mother had no intention of leaving, and it appears that Pavel felt an obligation to stay with her. Perhaps paramount in his decision to remain was his relationship to his father and their shared interest in Russian history and culture. Like his late father, Pavel believed it was his obligation to try to protect whatever he could of the family’s and the country’s cultural patrimony from the ravages of the revolution. Before he died, Count Sergei told his son: “You are not to sell a thing simply to fill your stomach. The Rembrandts, Raphaels, Van Dycks, Kiprenskys, and Greuzes—they all must belong to Russia, we did not collect them for ourselves, and so a museum must be established before the cold and upheavals destroy everything . . . We have no present,” Sergei said, “but we have a past and we must preserve it in the name of the future.”
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For Count Sergei’s daughters Anna and Maria there could be no thought of leaving Russia or even Moscow since their husbands were still being held in the Butyrki Prison, even though no charges had ever been made against them. The Sheremetev family had been working hard to get the two men released throughout the winter of 1918–19. They even appealed to Abel Yenukidze, a longtime Bolshevik and member of the Central Executive Committee, considered a “tame Communist” with a reputation for helping nobles caught in the repressive machinery of the new Bolshevik state. Yenukidze was one of a handful of powerful Bolsheviks with such a reputation, and it was indeed earned, as some repressed nobles gladly acknowledged. But in this instance Yenukidze was unable to help.
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The prisoners were being held as hostages, handy targets for retribution in the event of any attacks on the Bolsheviks.

Saburov and Gudovich remained at the Butyrki until July 1919, when they were moved to a concentration camp in the Andronievsky Monastery. Lenin had called for the creation of concentration camps in August 1918 (Trotsky had made a similar call two months earlier), and the idea was approved by the
Sovnarkóm
the following month. The official decree set out the rationale for the camps: “It is essential to safeguard the Soviet Republic from its class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps.” The Bolsheviks were not the first to establish such camps. In 1896, General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, the Spanish governor of Cuba, set up the first
campos de concentración
as part of his strategy to suppress the uprisings on the island against Spain. At their height, the camps on Cuba held approximately four hundred thousand peasants; the number of people who died in them is not known. In Russia, the Cheka ran the concentration camps, which by 1922 numbered fifty-six and held roughly twenty-four thousand people. In 1919, another system of camps—forced labor camps—were also set up by the Cheka; their inmates numbered some sixty thousand by 1922. There were camps for men and women too.
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Princess Tatiana Kurakin was arrested in Kiev and later moved to a women’s camp also set up at the Andronievsky Monastery.
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Saburov and Gudovich joined many other nobles at the camp, including Prince Alexander Dolgoruky (the son of Countess Maria Benkendorff ). The prisoners were put to work. Dolgoruky and Gudovich were regularly sent out into the city together on work details and
quickly became close. Xenia Saburov would visit her father and bring him food and clothing. In August, some of the men—including Gudovich, Saburov, and Dolgoruky—were moved to a camp in the Ivanovsky Monastery. On September 21, 1919, the men were returned to the Butyrki.
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Five days later Saburov, Gudovich, Dolgoruky, and twenty-six others were taken out and shot.
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The reason for their murders remains a mystery. According to one story, the men were shot as the easiest way to solve the problem of overcrowding at the Butyrki. Another account has it that the men were executed in response to the northern advance of General Denikin’s army, which by mid-September was approximately two hundred miles south of Moscow and appeared to be moving inexorably toward the Bolshevik capital. A third explanation posits the idea that they were shot in retaliation for an anarchist bomb attack on the Bolsheviks’ Moscow Committee headquarters that killed twelve and wounded fifty-one persons that month.
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The family members learned of the murders only a good time later. First there were just rumors, which Yenukidze eventually confirmed. The widow of a former tsarist governor purportedly told Anna Saburov that she had seen Alik when the men were being led out to be shot. “Tell my wife that I go calmly to my death,” he said to her. Neither Anna Saburov nor her sister Maria would accept that their husbands were dead. For years they clung to the belief that they were alive and being held in a secret prison. Shattered by the loss of their husbands, the sisters cut themselves off from the life of the Corner House and retreated into prayer.
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10

SPA TOWN HELL

Dimitry and Ira Sheremetev and their children spent the winter of 1917–18 in Kislovodsk in the northern Caucasus. The town, together with neighboring Yessentuki and Pyatigorsk, had long been a popular destination for wealthy Russians who came to escape the harsh Russian winters and enjoy the local hot springs, curative mineral waters, and mud baths. That winter Dmitry had spent much of his time in Kislovodsk’s two libraries, gathering material for a book he was writing titled “Russian Nature and Hunting in the Works of Our Classics.” His sons Nikolai and Vasily attended school, and his daughter Irina was being courted by a suitor, Georgy Mengden.

Much of the aristocracy was there with them in the spa towns. Life was easy and quiet and enjoyable and seemed to go on as if the revolution had never happened. In Yessentuki, the Tolstoys, Lvovs, Uvarovs, Bobrinskys, Trubetskoys, and other prominent families relaxed, strolled the wide streets, fortified their health at Dr. Zernov’s sanatorium, and staged theatrical performances. The mystic George Gurdieff was there, Sergei Rachmaninov too. No one thought they would be away from Russia for long. Dr. Zernov and his family had left Moscow for Yessentuki in late November 1917 without their heavy winter clothes since they were certain they would be back home by Christmas. Dmitry was contemplating which Moscow publisher would be best for his book.
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Count Vladimir Kokovtsov, former tsarist prime minister,
found life in Kislovodsk in early November “a perfect idyll” after Petrograd. His many old friends and acquaintances shared his view and were convinced that they were safe from the Bolsheviks thanks to the presence of the Cossacks in whose lands they now found themselves and who they were certain would never allow the Reds to gain a foothold.
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