Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (33 page)

At Irkutsk Yevgenia and the Lopukhins were forced to stop and once again find a new train to attach their car to. Thanks to the efforts of Pierre Gilliard, General Maurice Janin, the French commander in Siberia, agreed to take them, though only the women; Nikolai managed to talk his way onto a Red Cross train, narrowly escaping arrest as they resumed their journey. On the last day of 1919, Yevgenia wrote in her diary: “The farther we ride, the more hopeless, the murkier the future presents itself to us. Kolya
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dreams of America. If we encounter SRs in Vladivostok, he won’t be able to stay there and would like to try to reach America. [. . .] We’ve all decided to go to bed earlier than usual so we won’t have to meet the new year.”
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Passing Lake Baikal, they entered the territory of Ataman Semenov,
appointed head of the White forces in Siberia by Kolchak before his arrest. The stories told of Semenov’s savagery were bloodcurdling. “They rob, they burn villages to pacify the inhabitants, and they turn everyone against them,” Yevgenia wrote. “Semenov’s savage division consists of Buryats and officers no less savage than the savage Buryats themselves. [. . .] I’ve heard soul-chilling stories of the deeds of the Semyonovtsy. They are tales straight out of the Middle Ages, with torture-chambers and not only individuals but entire groups disappearing without a trace.”
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The stories were not exaggerations. Such was the ferocity of the civil war that victims were frequently tortured in the most grisly fashion. Mutilation of the still living was not rare. Heads and limbs were hacked off; faces bashed in, the sexual organs of men and women violated and cut off. Some people were scalped; some burned alive.
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One witness to Semenov’s atrocities claimed the ataman liked to brag that he could sleep peacefully at night only if he had killed someone that day.
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Paul Rodzianko, a former tsarist officer, witnessed the horrors in Siberia. In his memoirs, he wrote, “The spirit of personal revenge is so deep in human nature that even military discipline cannot curb it. When our soldiers found comrades or relations mutilated they could not resist the desire to inflict suffering back. Red hate and White hate raged side by side through the beautiful wild country.”
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After the White forces entered Yekaterinburg in July 1919, they carried out a pogrom that left more than two thousand dead, most of them Jews. That same year Whites in Yalta hanged a seventeen-year-old boy for the sole reason that his surname, Bronstein, was the same as Trotsky’s.
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Appalled and frightened by the barbarism of Semenov, Yevgenia was also saddened by the news from Russia. In early January, she learned that Denikin and his army had abandoned southern Russia and were retreating to the Crimea and Caucasus. “Our last hope has died!” she cried. “Oh, Lord, can it be that our loved ones in the Caucasus will once more fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks?” Given the confusion around them, they could not decide whether to make for Vladivostok or the city of Harbin, in Manchuria.
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For several days they stopped in Petrovsky Zavod, a picturesque town that had been the home of the Decembrists, the first Russian revolutionaries exiled to Siberia by Tsar Nicholas I a century earlier. Being in this place filled with memories of these aristocratic exiles gave Yevgenia and Nikolai
hope and strength. “One feels that their spirit is alive,” Yevgenia wrote, “and thus we exiles feel better here, we find it easier to bear our cross, having such an example before our eyes.”
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By the middle of January they had left behind the heavy forests of Siberia and come out into the barren steppe of Manchuria. Camels dotted the landscape. The local people, in long blue and black gowns and braids, came to look at the trains filled with bedraggled Russian refuges and sell them food.
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On February 1, after six weeks’ travel, Yevgenia, Nikolai, and the others finally reached Harbin.
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Two months later, to the great surprise and delight of their friends, Lyubov and the children arrived as well.
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Harbin had been a small village until the turn of the twentieth century, when the Chinese granted the Russians a concession to construct a rail line to connect the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok via Manchuria, thus drastically reducing the distance of the original route. Harbin grew rapidly, and by the outbreak of the First World War it was home to more Russians than Chinese. Well into the twentieth century, it was one of the major centers of Russian émigré life, thanks largely to the stream of refugees fleeing the chaos and fighting of the civil war in Siberia.
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After years of deprivation, Harbin appeared like an oasis of calm, orderliness, and abundance. The Golitsyns and Lopukhins were amazed by the goods and food available in the stores and shops. “I have never in my life seen such a quantity of bread,” gasped Yevgenia. But prices were high, they all were running out of money, and many did not know how they might earn a living. For some like Yevgenia, after having lived for so long in the world of the boxcars, the transition back to normal life was not easy. “In the end, despite the dark, the damp, and the cold of our boxcar,” Yevgenia admitted, “nonetheless I had grown accustomed to it. In the last days our Tyumen family had lived in it so happily, so pleasantly. The walls of our boxcar did indeed protect us against all difficulties and life’s hopelessness, and now we must plunge back into life.”
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Plunging back into life meant in large part deciding whether one intended to stay in Harbin, travel on to America or Europe, or consider making peace with the revolution and returning to Russia. It was this last option that with a heavy heart Yevgenia assumed would eventually be their fate. But Yevgenia never did return to Russia. Instead, she joined
Georgy Lvov in Paris, to share his final few years with him in a house near the Bois de Boulogne.
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Unable to catch up with his family in December 1919, Alexander and his small party arrived at the town of Achinsk, some one hundred miles west of Krasnoyarsk, at the beginning of January. They were urged to leave immediately since the Reds were not far off, but their horses were exhausted, and so they had no choice but to stay. That night they heard shooting and several loud explosions. When they awoke the next morning, Red soldiers were entering the town. For a minute, Alexander thought of trying to run, but it was too late. They were trapped. They immediately burned all compromising papers, unharnessed the horses, unpacked their medical supplies, and hung out the Red Cross flag. Several soldiers showed up and marched them off to the commandant to register. “Prince Golitsyn?” the commandant asked Alexander. “No, Dr. Golitsyn,” he replied. The commandant informed Alexander that they would be using him to help fight the new enemy, typhus, now that the Whites had been defeated, and so they were sending him to Krasnoyarsk. At the rail station he came upon a ghastly sight: a car loaded with dynamite had exploded next to a train packed with refugees days earlier. Hundreds of people had been blown to pieces, and their bodies still lay about the tracks.

On the trip to Krasnoyarsk they passed the remains of Kolchak’s army and more corpses and dead horses. They heard stories of coachmen frozen stiff still gripping the reins of horses coated in ice and of a carriage with a frozen young woman clutching her dead baby in her arms. Upon reaching Krasnoyarsk, Alexander was given permission to go look for his family, but when he found the place, the people living there told him they had left two weeks earlier. He asked where they had gone, but all they could tell him was that Lyubov had spoken about going to Vladivostok. Distressed at having missed them, Alexander was glad they were at least safe.
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Alexander was next taken to Irkutsk and put to work in a Red Army military hospital. All the while, he plotted his escape. He fell ill with typhus after several months and could no longer work; that, paradoxically, helped save his life. He managed to obtain false documents in the name of Serebriakov and secure a place on a train carrying former
German prisoners of war and Russian nonmilitary invalids bound for Vladivostok. Emaciated, ill, and dirty, Alexander convinced the Cheka agents screening the passengers that he was indeed at death’s door and of no use or danger to the Bolsheviks. He traveled for fifteen days, and past several more Cheka inspections, before arriving in Vladivostok, then under the control of Ataman Semenov. From there Alexander was able to make his way to Harbin, where he arrived in September 1920. It had been more than a year since he had last seen his wife and children.
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There had been another Prince Golitsyn in Irkutsk who was not so fortunate. Prince Lev Golitsyn, the last tsarist governor of Samara, had fled to Siberia with his family in the autumn of 1918. Like Alexander’s family, their distant relations, Prince Lev and his family tried to stay a step ahead of the Reds in Siberia, traveling by rail, sledge, and even horseback. Lev served in Kolchak’s army as a representative of the Red Cross. After Kolchak’s collapse, the family ended up in Krasnoyarsk, where Lev found work in the Veterinary Department of the Red Fifth Army, charged with procuring horses for the army. The whole time Lev was under the surveillance of the Cheka and spied on by secret informers. He was arrested on May 14, 1920, as a “White Guard” and “Kolchak’s Hangman,” the latter a result of mistaken identity. The family saw him off to the rail station in early June 1920, when he was sent to Irkutsk. “God be with you,” were his last words to them. He died that same month of typhus in the prison infirmary.
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Reunited with his family, Alexander set up a medical practice caring for the city’s large number of refugees. Life was difficult, but nothing like what the villagers faced back at their former estate of Petrovskoe. Three years since the last Golitsyn had been forced off the estate, the overseer continued to write to Alexander and Lyubov of the dreadful conditions. All the art and furnishings had been stolen long ago and now decorated the homes of the villagers and the former estate employees. What remained in the house had been smashed and destroyed. The pages from the books in the library had been torn out to roll cigarettes, and the large archive, including maps from Napoleon’s marshals, had been burned to feed the ovens and stoves. The glass had been broken out of all the windows; the woods cut down, loaded on wagons, and hauled off to Moscow for firewood.

After a year and a half fighting with the Red Army, the former butler, Ivan Kuznetsov, wrote the Golitsyns in July 1922 upon his return
to Petrovskoe. He was motivated to write after so many years, he said, after attending a service in the church on St. Peter’s Day. Seeing the church “lit by candles,” he wrote, “reminded me of old times and of you.” He went on: “The house is very spoiled and I even shed a few tears when I saw for the first time what had become of the place. In many rooms there are stoves which are heated in the winter and everything is black with soot. Outside the plaster has fallen off in places and the windows are broken and boarded up. The door handles have been pulled off and they are closed with string.” He noted the people were still hungry and tea and white bread were prohibitively expensive. He asked Alexander and Lyubov to recall his former service and to find it in their hearts to send him whatever clothes they could spare, for his had been reduced to rags and he had no money to buy any new ones. “I don’t know how we are going to survive,” he cried.
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Alexander and Lyubov settled into life in Harbin. He began teaching anatomy at the Harbin Medical School and was also hired to work as a medical officer at the British consulate. Times were still hard, however. Lyubov wrote her brother-in-law Mikhail Golitsyn back in Moscow in November 1922 to tell him things had taken a turn for the worse. Once more they were facing “troubling and difficult times,” and she doubted whether they would be able to remain in Harbin. They wanted to return to the family in Moscow, but none of them could imagine trying to make the trip back across Siberia after what they had been through.
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Their salvation came in the form of the Red Cross, which engaged Alexander to find a home in Canada or the United States for the many refugees in Harbin and Manchuria. It was as a Red Cross representative that he left Manchuria for the United States, arriving in Seattle on the
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on October 7, 1923, with three hundred dollars in his pocket. A week later Alexander renounced his Russian citizenship. Lyubov and the children joined him in America the following year.
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13

EXODUS

In June 1918, Ivan Bunin and his wife, Vera, arrived in Odessa from Moscow. They found a nice apartment, furnished it with antiques, and hired a maid as if nothing had changed. Their home became a meeting place for politicians and intellectuals like General Baron Peter Wrangel, the writers Count Alexei Tolstoy and Konstantin Paustovsky, and Olga Knipper, the actress widow of Chekhov.
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Despite his own material comfort and safety, Bunin was pained to be so far from his family, living under the Bolsheviks: “I send my soul over thousands of miles, into the night, the darkness, and the unknown so that I will be with my family and loved ones, and so that I can express my fear for them, my love for them, my agony for them, and my hope that God will save and protect them.”
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