Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (30 page)

Vladimir Trubetskoy was part of a group of officers ordered to report to Moscow for a meeting with Brusilov. The two former cavalry officers had known each other for years, and Brusilov had held Vladimir in high regard ever since his valiant exploits in the last war. After joining the Reds, Brusilov had helped free hundreds of imprisoned officers, and it is possible his efforts helped Vladimir.
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Brusilov is purported to have played to Vladimir’s patriotism, saying, “Prince, the cart has gotten stuck, and there is no one but us to pull it out. Without the army, Russia cannot be saved.” Vladimir was a monarchist, and Brusilov’s siding with the Bolsheviks disturbed him, yet in the end he acquiesced to his former commander’s call. Vladimir was given his orders and left to join the Red Army in the south. He decided, however, to take a detour to Bogoroditsk on the way to visit his wife and children and share with them his food ration. Vladimir had only just arrived when he was denounced to the Cheka by someone suspicious of his “aristocratic appearance.” Once more, Vladimir was back behind bars. Just as had happened in Tula, Vladimir soon showed the early signs of tuberculosis. As the illness grew worse, Vladimir was freed to return to his family, his military career over. In all, Vladimir was arrested three times during the five years he lived in Bogoroditsk.
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Mikhail Golitsyn returned to his family from Tula and found a secretarial job. Money and food were scarce. Anna took some lessons from a local cobbler and began making shoes out of the green felt carpet that had been pulled up from the floor of the mayor’s study in his Moscow home. Mikhail helped in the evenings making shoe strings. Anna did not sell the shoes for money but traded them for food. They also stripped the brown suede off the old ledger books from the Bogoroditsk estate and sewed it into attractive coin purses and billfolds that they either sold or traded for necessary items back in Moscow. Their clothes they bartered at local markets for salt or sugar. The children gathered nettles and sorrel to make soup or dug potatoes. The family was too poor by now to buy horsemeat; they could afford only the head and hooves, which Anna boiled for days to create a light brown aspic. Sergei found it repugnant, but hunger was stronger than revulsion.
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Even though the Golitsyn children worked to help support the family, their education was not overlooked. Grandmother Sofia taught them
French, Lev Bobrinsky’s sister gave them English lessons, and Anna found the children a German tutor.
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This preoccupation with education was not unique to the Golitsyns, but generally characteristic of the nobility as a whole.
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Impoverished, hungry, and anxious over what future troubles lay ahead, the Golitsyns still took pleasure in life. Sonya joined the local theater and thrilled in her career as a thespian. The former princess now just played the part of nobility, acting the role of Countess Olivia in Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night
.
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In October 1920, they finally got electricity in their home, which everyone in the family greeted as nothing short of a miracle. Instead of sitting in the dark with nothing but a few candles to break the gloom, they now had light in the evenings. One of their favorite things to do was gather around Mikhail, as he read aloud to them bathed in an electric glow.
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There was an empty place in the home, however. Anna and Mikhail’s son Vladimir had left the family that year to join a scientific exploration of the Far North. It was a fabulous adventure for Vladimir, a budding artist who captured the icy wilds of Novaya Zemlya in his vivid watercolors and had a chance to meet fellow explorers from Norway and England, contacts that later became a factor in his arrest. Nevertheless, the family missed the humorous and creative Vladimir and pined for his return. Anna wrote her son in September, asking him to write them more often since “every letter from you is an event, a true holiday for us in our ‘little peasant hut.’ ”
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12

DR . GOLITSYN

After leaving Moscow, the family of Alexander Golitsyn and their accompanying friends rode the Northern Railway for five days before arriving in Tyumen in the middle of December 1917. Along the way the train was besieged by deserting soldiers, but they managed to protect themselves by closing all the curtains, locking the doors, and stationing outside two women from the group disguised in nurses’ uniforms, who frightened off any intruders with stories of patients ill with dangerous infectious diseases. Life in the Siberian town was a marked improvement over Moscow. Most of the major urban centers in Siberia, Tyumen among them, had sided with the Bolsheviks within the first months of the coup. Nonetheless, the local Bolshevik leaders were quite tame, things were quiet and comfortable, and there was plenty of food. They all found lodgings, and Alexander set up his own medical practice. He made sure to drop the title of prince from all his papers, however, and presented himself simply as Dr. Golitsyn. Prince Georgy Lvov and Nikolai Lopukhin went a step further, adopting assumed names to avoid notice.
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All was well until a detachment of Red Guards arrived in late January 1918. They overthrew the existing soviet and began suppressing any opposition and harassing the bourgeoisie. The new bosses forbade all gatherings, seized the homes and bank accounts of the well-to-do, and arrested potential enemies. After seeing some of their friends arrested
and robbed and others flee Tyumen, the Golitsyns began to debate whether they too ought to leave. In the end they chose to remain since it appeared to them all Siberia had been lost to the Reds. They put their fate in the hands of “Providence.” In March, soldiers came and arrested Georgy, Nikolai, and Alexander. When Alexander asked one of the men why he was being arrested, he was told, “Because you are a prince, a bourgeois and counterrevolutionary. We know all about you and your gang here, you are plotting something. You are not a doctor, you are a disguised officer of Kornilov’s army.”
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After they had taken Alexander away, his children and the servants got down on their knees to pray.
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Alexander was taken to a train car at the Tyumen rail station that served as the soldiers’ local headquarters. Georgy and Nikolai were held in an adjacent car; when Alexander inquired about his friends, he was informed they were due to be shot the next day, a threat that was never carried out. No charges against the men, other than the vague comments directed to Alexander upon his arrest, were ever made, and they were held prisoner for almost two weeks. Alexander was put to work treating wounded Red soldiers, which he was happy to do since he abhorred inactivity. A Red orderly with a bit of medical training was attached to Alexander to make sure this “class enemy” did not try to harm any of his patients, and Alexander quickly won over many of the men with his knowledge and care.

Alexander found most of the men to be rough and uneducated, chiefly motivated by a love of plunder and the promise of money and adventure. A few were doctrinaire Communists who truly believed they were going to build a new society in which all men would be equal. Yet even these men, Alexander noted, saw the need for blood. One young soldier told Alexander that he was ready to “unload my revolver” into the head of anyone who opposed them. When Alexander replied this would certainly require a great many bullets, he retorted: “Oh, not so many as you think, one million or so . . . Most of the people are with us.” Alexander overheard the soldiers brag of their killings. He learned of soldiers going out to requisition gold and jewelry, most of which they turned over to the commissar, although some of the finest pieces they saved for themselves, which they would show to Alexander and regale him with their tales of thieving and pillaging.
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All the while, Lyubov had been pleading, unsuccessfully, with the commissar to free her husband.

In the first week of March, the train left Tyumen. None of them knew where they were heading. Every time the train came to a stop the soldiers would pull out Georgy and parade him before the angry crowds. Lvov was certain he would never get out alive.
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Around March 6, they arrived in Yekaterinburg on the eastern edge of the Ural Mountains. Having received word that the train was carrying several princes and ministers of the tsarist government, a mob of workmen converged on it and demanded the prisoners be handed over. “Why are you keeping those princes in safety?” they shouted at the Red soldiers. “If you can’t get rid of them, we’ll do it. Perish the bourgeoisie! Long live the proletariat!” Terrified the mob would get him, Alexander cowered in a dark corner of his compartment. His guard, an anarchist named Orlov, assured Alexander they would not give him up and that they would fire on the crowd if necessary. Alexander found this of little comfort, sensing that either way—sooner or later—he would be killed. The next morning he learned that the Yekaterinburg Soviet had refused to let the train leave without first handing him and his two companions over to the local revolutionary tribunal for trial. The news left Alexander distraught. He sensed his chances of surviving were slim.
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Revolver-wielding Chekists took the three men from the train, placed them in a truck, and drove off to the city prison. Alexander noted in his memoirs the relief he felt upon hearing the heavy prison door close behind him. “It meant complete isolation from the world, from my family and friends; but at the same time it meant a certain safety behind these thick white walls, safety from a hostile crowd or a sudden fancy of a Commissar.”
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He was placed in a solitary cell and fed some tea and dark bread. To keep his spirits up, Alexander paced back and forth from wall to wall, trying to walk what he estimated was about four miles a day; he also took comfort in the Bible and a few books by William James that he had managed to take with him. Later Georgy and Nikolai were moved in to share his cell.

About a week later, Lyubov, having left the children behind in Tyumen, arrived in Yekaterinburg. For several days she petitioned the local commissar of justice, the Left SR Nikolai Poliakov, for a chance to see her husband, and eventually he acquiesced. No formal charges had been made against the men, and their fate was unforeseeable. Fillip Goloshchekin, the hard-line Bolshevik leader in Yekaterinburg, wanted Georgy shot, although it seems the men’s jailer, who took a liking to
the old prince, found a way to keep them all alive. Lyubov had written to family and friends to request assistance from Moscow. News of their arrest shook the rest of the Golitsyn family.
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Finally, in the middle of April a lawyer from Moscow arrived to try to gain the men’s freedom.
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The men were not freed by Easter, as they had hoped, but their jailers did allow them to move to a different part of the prison so they could hear the bells of the local church. They also permitted the men a small Easter supper and quiet service, conducted by their fellow inmate Bishop Hermogen of Tobolsk. (The Reds drowned Hermogen in the Tura River two months later.)
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In May, the men were moved to a new prison, where they met Prince Vasily Dolgoruky, the former marshal of the court. Dolgoruky informed them that the emperor and several members of the royal family had recently been brought to Yekaterinburg.
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Nicholas, Alexandra, their five children, and numerous servants had been sent by Kerensky in the summer of 1917 to the remote Siberian town of Tobolsk, chiefly to protect them from the increasingly radical, angry mobs in the capital. By the spring of 1918, the Soviet leaders had decided to move the Romanovs and a handful of their remaining servants to Yekaterinburg; the city was under the control of the Bolshevik Regional Soviet of the Urals, which could be relied on to guard them and was loyal to the leadership back in Moscow. Soon after the arrival of the Romanovs, Alexander, Georgy, and Nikolai were released and allowed to return to Tyumen, where they were to await trial on charges of counterrevolutionary activities. The fact that Georgy was released has never been fully explained and seems to have been either a mistake or a miracle.
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Regardless of the reasons, had the three men stayed in Yekaterinburg, they most likely would have shared the fate of the Romanovs.

By the summer of 1918 Yekaterinburg was being threatened by an unlikely foe. During the First World War, many Czechs had refused to fight for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, even though they were its subjects, preferring instead to side with the Russians, their fellow Slavs. Fearful of being caught by the advancing Central Powers in the spring of 1918, the Czech Legion received the permission of the Bolshevik government to leave Russia via Siberia and the Trans-Siberian Railway, going almost all the way around the globe to rejoin the battle on the western front. The legion had gotten as far east as Chelyabinsk in the
Ural Mountains in late May 1918, when after the Czechs had rioted with Hungarian POWs there, the Soviet authorities ordered the legion disarmed and disbanded; those who resisted were to be shot on the spot. With that, fighting erupted in western Siberia between the legion and Red forces. The Czechs showed lightning success, and soon they controlled all Siberia and beyond to the Pacific Ocean. Mastery of Siberia depended on control of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the vital lifeline that stretched forty-nine hundred miles from Perm in the Urals to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. More than in any other theater of the civil war, the railway was key: controlling the rail lines meant controlling the movement of men and matériel and ultimately, controlling the war. Armored trains bristling with heavy guns and cannons served as the battleships across a sea of forests and swamps.