Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (29 page)

The mayor and his two sons-in-law were freed after six weeks. They had not been home for long before being arrested a second time in early 1919. The men were first taken to Tula and from there to the Butyrki in Moscow. This time the mayor and Lev were quickly released; Kamenev, now the chairman of the Moscow Soviet, invited the mayor to come see him before he left the city. He apologized to the mayor for his arrest, telling him how well he remembered the kind treatment the mayor had given to political prisoners when he had run the city and presenting him with a letter of protection. The Golitsyns guarded Kamenev’s letter with care, and it is still in their possession; it may well have saved the mayor’s life, though its power did not extend to the rest of the family.
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Vladimir Trubetskoy was eventually released as well and returned to his wife and children.
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Despite the arrests, searches, and horrendous living conditions, life went on for the extended Golitsyn family. Kirill Golitsyn, one of the mayor’s grandchildren, who had been sent from Petrograd to live with the family at Bogoroditsk, noticed how no one gave up or even complained of his fate.

No one was downhearted and the abnormality of life in no way showed itself in people’s moods or character. Everyone adapted to the difficulties, just as every living thing adapts to the conditions of its environment. It was no doubt hardest for Grandfather and Grandmother, but the old folks didn’t complain. My aunts and uncles had no time to be downhearted—they were utterly consumed by the daily struggle to find enough food for everyone.
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The youngest members of the family made secret nighttime raids on the apple orchard back at the former estate; the family’s meat consisted of the occasional foal.
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One of their former servants, worried that the family was starving, managed to send Anna a bit of chicken and some rusk; though they had little themselves, Anna too shared their meager larder and sent bread and coffee to those in need.
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The desperate search for food placed them on par with the rest of Russia. In Petrograd, people were stripping the bark from the trees and pulling up the grass from the city’s parks to make soup; they descended
on horses that dropped dead from starvation with knives and hatchets, lugging back to their freezing apartments whatever flesh and organs and sinew they could salvage. Prince Sergei Trubetskoy had to laugh that when his servant now announced, “Your Excellency, your horse is ready,” this no longer meant it had been saddled, but cooked and served.
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Anna was eventually able to move her family out of the inn and into the apartment of a local schoolteacher. One of the lodgers was a young Bolshevik who fell for the charms of Anna’s daughter Sonya. When Sonya rejected his advances, he denounced the family to the local authorities, and once again the family was kicked out and forced to move, this time within twenty-four hours. The harsh memory of this incident never left Sonya’s brother Sergei:

This feeling of having been insulted—they offend you, they keep you down, they run you out, they don’t recognize you simply because you are your father’s son—this feeling, first born in me when we were run out of the Bobrinskys’ estate, and then compounded by this second eviction, which I fully comprehended and was so hard to bear, has been with me nearly my entire life.
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By late summer of 1919, as Denikin’s White Army marched northward, talk had begun to spread in town that the retreating Reds had begun taking hostages and shooting them. The Golitsyns knew the risk was real. That year two of Anna’s cousins had been taken hostage and shot in Orel.
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The mayor and his son Mikhail decided to hide; the former quietly checked himself into the local hospital in a common ward, and the latter went to live with a work colleague. The danger seemed to pass after several days, however, and both returned home. On the night of October 16, the mayor was awakened to find that Vladimir Trubetskoy had been arrested after a search of his apartment in town. The Cheka had also come to arrest Mikhail, but he had managed to hide. So they arrested Anna instead, as well as their daughter Lina and Sonya Bobrinsky, their niece. As they took the women away, the Chekists told the family they would release the women if Mikhail turned himself in. The family got word to Mikhail, and he immediately presented himself to the Cheka. That evening of the sixteenth, the women were freed. A few hours later Mikhail and Vladimir and the other hostages were
taken to the train station. Family members followed the two men to the station, and Mikhail’s son Sergei was able to toss a few potatoes to his father before they were herded onto the train.
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They were taken to Tula and interned in a concentration camp. Anna said goodbye to the family and left to be near her husband. Mikhail wrote their children from the camp on November 12:

My dear ones, I write from the concentration camp, where I have been held for three days now. The camp consists of a row of wooden barracks, with all 280 of us occupying two of them and two more being readied for some new hostages. We sleep on wooden cots, and it is warm and dry inside, and the appearance is not bad. The camp is circled with barbed wire and surrounded by guards. The camp is run by a commandant [. . .], who used to work in the Bogoroditsk Cheka and questioned me about Grandfather and knows you, Vladimir.
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The commandant has a rather difficult assistant, a lawyer by training, but he’s not so bad. They feed us little. Some soup during the day and mashed potatoes in the evening—sometimes they give us a bit more, sometimes very little at all. Twice daily they give us boiling water, sugar, and some bread. One cannot survive on this, and they do allow the prisoners to receive food from the outside [. . .] The last three days here I’ve had to do physical labor. The first day I tried to screw up my courage and walked to the Kursk railway station on the other side of town and spent the entire day loading wood and came home utterly exhausted. The next day I was deemed fit only for light work, but even this work proved to be rather difficult, and I have spent the last two days hauling around bricks, boards, and garbage. Of course, my work at an office will be arranged soon. Kalinin
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will be here today to inspect the camp. After that, so they say, a commission on hostage taking will be established, and then maybe we’ll be freed. I will be seeing Mama this evening [. . .] It seems to me our case is being dragged out and it’s hard to count on being freed. Still, it appears the danger to our lives has passed. Nonetheless, it’s boring here with nothing to do and I miss you all. I think of you often. [. . .] I hope you are all well, settled, and getting well with each other; I trust you older children are being nice to your younger siblings, and you younger ones are not misbehaving. Do remember me and Mama and pray for us [. . .] Your Papa.
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A few weeks later he wrote again:

My dear parents and children, I received today Grandmother and Grandfather’s letters and we are all glad to hear that you are all well and healthy. We, too, here are all safe and well and can’t wait for the amnesty process to begin. It still isn’t clear whether the amnesty will apply to me and Uncle Vladimir, since we are considered titled persons, and for this reason the Cheka harbors all sorts of suspicions about us, all of which are utterly baseless. [. . .] We are indeed worried, and all this amidst the usual horrific filth. There are insects everywhere and the sinks have frozen, they feed us poorly and we survive only thanks to the food parcels from our loved ones, which they secretly give us every day or give to some good people to hand over to us, which is forbidden. [. . .] Our spirits are good, and we are well. It has been very good for me to be out in the open air so much, although it is sometimes cold at night, and I would very much like to have my felt boots or my feet get wet. It’s terribly cold for so early in the season. We worked harvesting cabbage again today, which has become my specialty! We occasionally read the newspapers, though there’s little in them.
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From Tula Anna wrote to Pyotr Smidovich, telling him what had happened and begging for help. She insisted that Mikhail represented no threat to the Bolsheviks and that he had been taken hostage only because he was “a former prince.” All her efforts in Tula to gain his release had come to naught because everyone “was afraid to raise a finger ‘for a former prince.’” Anna reminded Smidovich of her brother Mikhail’s horrible fate the previous year and wrote that unless someone from Moscow would help, then Mikhail “will be among the first to perish.”
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Anna and Mikhail’s children suffered without their parents. Little Sergei sent his father drawings and kept asking when he would be coming home.
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“Dear Mama, when will our torments finally end!” his sister Sonya wrote.

I simply have no more strength! How I want to see you both, to unburden my heart. It seems as though I’m losing my mind. I can’t understand a thing and will soon be a complete fool. Now when I begin to say something, all of a sudden my head fills with a strange fog. It is terribly difficult for me to concentrate during my lessons, or to hear and understand the teachers. What am I to do? I really do think I shall lose my mind! [. . .] Oh God, if only this would all soon be over! I don’t know what to do [. . .] Oh, mama, dearest mama, how hard this is for me! Help me, save me, pray for me.
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Lina Golitsyn went to Tula to be with her mother. She and Anna took turns delivering a bowl of cabbage soup every morning and evening to Mikhail and Vladimir, who were spending long days hauling bricks and digging up cabbage in the icy fields with their bare hands. The conditions at the camp were horrible, and soon all the men were infected with fleas, lice, and bedbugs; many of the hostages died from cold and hunger. Mikhail fell ill with typhus, and Vladimir began to show signs of tuberculosis. They were lucky, however, and were sent to the prison hospital to get better and were spared further outdoor work that most likely would have killed them. After three months in the camp, Mikhail was freed on January 15, 1920. An appeal to Kamenev by Mikhail’s brother appears to have played a crucial role in his release.
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Vladimir Trubetskoy was also freed from the camp at the end of January. He returned to his family for a visit but soon had to leave. A decorated hero of the First World War, Trubetskoy was instructed to return to Moscow, where the leaders of the Red Army tried to convince him to join their ranks.

The Bolshevik coup and subsequent civil war split the Russian officer corps. Many former tsarist officers, like Vladimir, chose to sit out the war; more than forty-eight thousand officers joined the Red Army, and about double that number fought on the side of the Whites.
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Those who fought for the Reds did so for a number of reasons. Some believed in the ideas of the Bolsheviks; some were motivated by a sense of patriotism; some were desperate for the food and money that service provided; some were coerced; some were afraid to refuse. The Bolsheviks began to call up former officers in the summer of 1918 out of dire need.
To ensure officers’ loyalty, family members were sometimes taken hostage or threatened with arrest.
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Prince Vasily Golitsyn, director of Moscow’s Rumiantsev Museum, had one son serving on the Red Army general staff, while another son was off fighting for the Whites. During the civil war, Prince Vasily lived with his daughter Maria and her husband, Alexei Derevitsky, a soldier in the Red Army. Such cases of divided loyalties were not unheard of.
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The two best-known noblemen to join the Red Army were Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Alexei Brusilov. Tukhachevsky’s motives have been the subject of considerable speculation, though it seems they were neither simple nor straightforward. Part pure ambition, part ideology, part desire to join in the forward march of history, part snobbish pleasure of being a nobleman among peasants and proletarians, Tukhachevsky, the “Red Bonaparte,” joined the Bolsheviks in 1917 and was a brilliant and ruthless commander in the civil war. From 1925 to 1928, he was the chief of staff of the Red Army, and in 1935 he was named marshal of the Soviet Union. Together with eight other high-ranking military commanders, Tukhachevsky was executed on fabricated charges of treason in 1937 during Stalin’s Great Terror.
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Born in 1853 into a noble family with a long tradition of military service, Brusilov had fought in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 and, after serving as the commander in chief of the southwestern front in 1916, was made the supreme commander in chief of the Russian army in May 1917 under the Provisional Government. Brusilov was Russia’s greatest living war hero, yet he refused to take sides in the civil war. In 1918, he was arrested by the Cheka and held briefly. Four of his family members were also arrested and held hostage; they were threatened with death if Brusilov joined the Whites. Brusilov’s only son from his first marriage, Alexei, had also fought in World War I and was arrested by the Bolsheviks. Later freed, he joined the Red Army cavalry and was captured by the White Army and executed in the autumn of 1919. His son’s death at the hands of the Whites was important in shaping Brusilov’s decision to join the Reds. But perhaps just as important was his belief that whatever his own personal feelings, the Russian people had sided with the Reds and as a patriot he had to respect their wishes. In 1920, after extreme inner struggle and anguish, Brusilov joined the Red Army, an act that earned him the hatred of much of the old Russian nobility.
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