Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (26 page)

The idyll did not last long, however, and soon the civil war reached the northern Caucasus. The formerly quiet spa towns were caught in the shifting battle lines of the Reds, Whites, Cossacks, and bands of marauders. Families like the Sheremetevs went from relaxing and looking forward to their return to Russia to worrying about their own safety and even survival. By the end of 1917, the fighting had begun to disrupt rail connections in the area; then the postal service stopped, cutting the towns off from all news of the outside world. In early 1918, the Reds took Pyatigorsk, after which they began to arrest the officers in the town and close the banks. Around this time they took Kislovodsk as well. They organized public meetings to whip up the poor against the officers and bourgeoisie. They carried out house searches for money, weapons, and valuables, and all former tsarist officers were forced to register with the local authorities. In the early spring, a group of Bolsheviks arrived from Vladikavkaz and published a list of the visiting nobles and wealthy burzhui required to appear at the Grand Hotel. Among those on the list were the ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska and, likely, Dmitry Sheremetev. The assembled group was informed it was to come up with five million rubles in two weeks as a “contribution.” Should it fail, everyone on the list would be taken away to Vladikavkaz.
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Terror swept over the town. Many talked of trying to escape to Yessentuki, some sixteen kilometers away. They had heard that it was safer there, but no one could be certain.
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The Bolsheviks’ main opponent in the area was the forces under the command of the Cossack general Andrei Shkuro, a brave, if reckless, veteran of World War I and, to some, a mere bandit, who later joined the army of General Denikin. Shkuro’s Cossack fighters attacked several of the towns held by the Reds in the spring of 1918, including Kislovodsk. The Cossacks, usually anti-Bolshevik, were seen by the nobles as their defenders, although they could not necessarily assume the Cossacks’ protection or friendship. Shkuro and his men were excellent raiders, but they had trouble holding on to territory taken
from the Reds. Moreover, they were at best temporary allies of the exiled nobles.
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After Shkuro’s men arrived in Kislovodsk that spring, Count Nicholas Ignatieff asked one of the fighters whether they intended to restore the monarchy once they had vanquished the Reds. “Monarchy, nothing!” the Cossack bellowed. “When we are through with these Bolshevik devils, we’ll cut all the aristocrats’ throats, the bloodsuckers!”
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In May 1918 Dmitry and Ira used Shkuro’s raid to escape Kislovodsk for Yessentuki. Here they found a good many other nobles, some of them old friends and family, including Count Pyotr Vyazemsky (Dmitry’s uncle), Countess Maria Musin-Pushkin (Ira’s sister), and Princess Maria Trubetskoy (Anna Golitsyn’s sister). In late June, Dmitry wrote his mother to wish her the best on her golden wedding anniversary. He told her that all was well and that their daughter Irina was now engaged to Georgy Mengden and looking forward to setting a wedding date. The entire family was busy spending the days working in the vegetable garden across the street from their dacha. Although he did not mention this in his letter, their gardening was no innocent hobby to while away their idle time, but necessary to ensure an adequate food supply, especially for the coming winter. Unlike in his previous letters, Dmitry no longer urged his parents to come join them.
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Yessentuki too had not avoided the disturbances in the area. As early as the autumn of 1917, nobles with well-known names had been subject to arrest.
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Then, in March 1918, an old truck waving a tattered red banner and filled with soldiers arrived from Pyatigorsk. The men stopped in the local park to announce to a small group of onlookers that Yessentuki was now part of the Soviet Socialist Republic. At first, little changed. The Sheremetevs and their friends played tennis and bridge, attended church, hiked the mountains, and picked berries and gathered mushrooms. Life went on as before, although things were not easy. The money people had brought with them was running out, and they had been reduced to raising vegetables like the Sheremetevs or opening bakeries, restaurants, cafés, laundries, and other “bourgeois enterprises” to get by.
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After a time, the Bolsheviks began to search people’s homes; then some of the men were taken hostage and held for ransom. One day proclamations announcing that all the hostages had been shot as a necessary part of the policy of class warfare being introduced by the authorities were posted throughout Yessentuki. It
was soon learned, however, that the signs were nothing more than a provocation.

Such confusion became the norm. No one could be certain what was happening or even who was in charge. For a time two competing Red factions fought for control of Yessentuki. Terrified, the Sheremetevs and other nobles hid what valuables they still had and tried their best to stay out of sight. In early summer a commissar by the name of Alexander Gay appeared. A leader of the Russian anarchists, Gay (born Golberg) had spent many years in exile in Switzerland before returning to Russia after the revolution. He sided with the Bolsheviks and left Moscow in May for Kislovodsk, where he became the head of the local Cheka. Joining him was his young wife, Xenia Gay, the daughter of a tsarist general and a committed Bolshevik. Alexander had something of a contradictory personality. Some sources describe him as one of the authors of the Red Terror in the northern Caucasus; others say that he could be kind and decent and did what he could to defend the nobles in the area from some of the more zealous Bolsheviks. As for Xenia, who joined her husband in the Cheka, most sources agree she was cruel and rapacious, responsible for the deaths of dozens of people. Among her schemes was a plan to socialize young bourgeois women in Kislovodsk and force them to become sex workers for the Red Army, a plan that was derailed by one of Shkuro’s raids during which the women were freed from prison.
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One evening in late August, a car carrying a group of Bolsheviks arrived at the home of the Vorontsovs. They began to search for weapons and threatened to arrest all the men, including Dmitry Sheremetev. The men managed to send word to Gay, who came and spoke to the Bolsheviks alone. After two tense hours, the men were called before the Bolsheviks, who harangued and threatened to shoot anyone who dared set foot in the street but left without taking any of the men with them. Gay had managed to convince the Bolsheviks not to arrest the men and so in all likelihood saved their lives. Gay tried to assure them that they were in no great danger, especially with him in the area, but no one could be certain how long he could protect them, and so some of the men decided the only option was to flee Yessentuki. The plan was to escape into the mountains and to reach the Kabardin’, a Muslim people of the northern Caucasus, and, with their help, to make it to the White Army. Dmitry and his sons, as well as Nikita Tatishchev and
members of the Vorontsov and Pushkin families, were likely among those who decided to make their escape.

They decided to rise early in the morning and, disguised as peasants, walk to the weekly market at Pyatigorsk. There they would make contact with the Cossack women returning from market with their empty carts; for some money, they would hide on the carts under empty burlap sacks until they were safely away up in the mountains. Everything went as planned, and many of the men, including the Sheremetevs, managed to escape; only later did it become clear that their decision had saved their lives. Those who stayed behind in Yessentuki tried to make it appear as if nothing unusual were going on. If asked where their men were, the women simply said they had left for Moscow or to visit a neighboring town. At the end of August, the hostage taking began again and continued on into early September. Most of the victims were former tsarist officers, members of the government, or simply men with prominent names and titles, including the former general Nikolai Ruzsky, a sixty-four-year-old commander of the First World War; Prince Alexander Bagration-Mukhransky, another former general; and the brothers Prince Leonid and Vladimir Shakhovskoy. Hostages were also taken in Pyatigorsk and Kislovodsk.

The residents of Yessentuki placed their hopes in Shkuro and his men, and they did run the Reds out of town in mid-September, but only briefly before being forced to retreat. Shkuro’s raids heightened the Reds’ anger at the nobles and cemented their conviction that they were secretly fighting against them. And so, when the Reds returned, they redoubled the terror against the remaining nobles. A new round of house searches began. A group of soldiers came to the home of the Vorontsovs, searched it from top to bottom, and then looted and ransacked the place. Along with weapons, they had apparently also been searching for Dmitry Sheremetev. Ira was there, and the soldiers threatened to beat her with their rifle butts unless she told them where he was. They then marched all the women, children, and servants out of the house and had them line up as if they were about to be shot. Three of the servants were then led behind the house. The soldiers shot two of them dead and let the third go. Next, they set off with the women and children. After a ways, a maid caught up with them; she threw herself on her knees and begged them to let the prisoners go, and they did, thus likely sparing their lives. Ira and her
children ran and hid in an abandoned hut, where they remained for more than a week, not even their family members knowing where they were. They were then taken in by the Lieven family and went into hiding. They dressed in simple peasant clothes, and Ira managed to acquire fake identity papers in the name of Fyodorov. The Bolsheviks carried on looking for Dmitry and Ira. During the two months Ira lived with the Lievens, the Bolsheviks captured and shot two more of the Sheremetevs’ servants, possibly for refusing to reveal the family’s whereabouts.
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On October 8, the Cheka of the northern Caucasus issued an order condemning thirty-two hostages arrested in the spa towns to immediate execution for the next counterrevolutionary uprising or attempt on the lives of “the leaders of the proletariat.”
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Countess Varvara Bobrinsky, her twenty-year-old son, Gavril, and more than eighty other families and their servants had arrived in Yessentuki in late 1917 on a train from Moscow. Like many other noble women, she had tended to wounded soldiers and served in charitable organizations during World War I; such was her good reputation that in May 1917 the Moscow Soviet had even hired her to do educational work with soldiers being sent to the front. Gavril was among those arrested by the Bolsheviks in Yessentuki in September 1918. He was taken to Pyatigorsk, the Bolshevik center for the northern Caucasus, and locked in the cellar of the Cheka headquarters. “The hole,” as the cellar was called, was filthy, rat-infested, and so crowded many slept sitting upright on the cement floor. It was overseen by a man named Skryabin, a former executioner under the tsarist regime and a sadist who liked to brag about the number of people he had tortured and executed over the years.

Varvara and her daughter followed Gavril to Pyatigorsk to see what they could do to effect his release. At first they were given no information, but then in early October they were told Gavril would be executed unless they could come up with fifty thousand rubles. Gavril was being held with approximately eighty other noblemen from Yessentuki, including the brothers Prince Nikolai and Sergei Urusov.
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The Bolshevik bosses in Pyatigorsk tried to shake down other family members. One
of them told Princess Bagration-Mukhransky that for two hundred thousand rubles she would free her father. Some did try to raise the money to free their loved ones. Varvara Bobrinsky’s daughter, who had also come south, left for Yessentuki to collect enough money to save Gavril. By the time she returned it would be too late.
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After two weeks, thirty-two of the men, including Gavril, the Urusovs, and Prince Bagration-Mukhransky, were moved from the hole to the New Europe Hotel. The conditions there were better, and they were permitted to receive family and other visitors. Still, their future was unclear, and some of the guards delighted in tormenting them. One of them, a sailor, said in their presence, “These aren’t people here, but bears and wolves, who ought to be brought up to Mashuk Mountain and dealt with just like Nicholas II was.”
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In early October, a technician was brought to the hotel to repair an electrical cable. He whispered to Gavril that he was a Cossack and part of a group planning a secret operation to free the men. Gavril believed his story and helped him scout the hotel for the best escape route. The plot, however, was soon uncovered. Gavril was sent back to the hole, and the security tightened at the hotel.

The fate of the hostages darkened. Acting upon a rumor that a local Red commander had died of wounds suffered in battle, the Cheka had several of the hostages executed early in the morning of October 6. Next, on October 13, Ivan Sorokin, a Left SR and commander of the eleventh Red Army, led a revolt against the Soviet government in the Caucasus. The revolt failed, although four high-ranking Bolsheviks were killed; Sorokin was captured in Stavropol and executed. To the local Bolshevik leaders, the revolt was an expression of counterrevolution requiring swift and harsh retribution.
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On the night of October 18, fifty-two hostages at the New Europe Hotel were told to gather their things and come out into the hall. Most of them thought they were about to be freed or at least moved to better accommodations. They were taken outside into a cold, wet night and marched along with thirteen other prisoners from the Pyatigorsk jail to the Cheka’s headquarters. The hostages were instructed to strip down to their underwear, and their hands were tied behind their backs with thin wire. Twenty-five of them were then marched to the city cemetery. They were admitted by the cemetery’s watchmen, and fifteen
of the men were conducted to the edge of a large, fresh grave. Everyone was silent. They were ordered to kneel and extend their necks. Then the executioners lifted their swords.