Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (36 page)

By the spring of 1921, it was clear to Lenin that the groups in whose name the Communists had seized power had turned against them. Concessions would have to be made were the Soviet state to survive. Beginning with the Tenth Party Congress that spring, Lenin introduced a series of reforms that came to be known as the New Economic Policy, or NEP. Never intended as a permanent program, NEP was conceived as a temporary retreat to allow the country to recover and the government to maintain control before returning to the full-scale construction of a socialist society. Forced grain requisitions were
replaced by a tax, and the peasants were permitted to keep their surpluses and sell them for a profit on the open market. The so-called commanding heights of the economy (large- and medium-scale industry, finance, foreign trade, wholesale commerce) were retained by the state, but retail trade and small manufacturing (fewer than twenty workers) were legalized. Reform of the financial system and the introduction of the gold-backed
chervónets
as the new monetary unit brought stability and tamed the wild inflation of the civil war years. NEP proved to be immensely successful at reviving Russia’s ravaged economy. Within a few years, agriculture, industry, and trade had rebounded, and the cities came back to life. Yet with economic recovery there arose a new bourgeoisie of rich traders and entrepreneurs, the Nepmen, whose wealth and ostentatious lifestyles echoed the inequities of the old regime and caused many Russians to wonder whether the promise of the revolution had been betrayed.
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The British reporter Walter Duranty arrived in Moscow in 1921. Among his earliest impressions of the Soviet capital was the dreadful condition of the old aristocracy. “The countesses work as servant girls and the ex-servant girls ride in government automobiles as heads of important offices,” he observed.

Most pitiable is the lot of those aristocrats, male or female, who are devoid of any qualifications of practical value. One sees them stand patiently for hours in the open-air markets holding coats, furs, small pieces of silver, or last scraps of jewelry by sale of which they can eke out existence for a few weeks longer. The New Economic Policy has given a chance to the younger ones to open restaurants, hat stores, etc. but the position of the older ones is hopeless. However pathetic may be the sight of fortune’s favorites “fallen from their high estate,” there is no escape from the law of the Russian hive: “The drones must die.”
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To another Western reporter, Edwin Hullinger, the same scene testified to the revolution’s great achievement. Having stripped away the institutional foundations upon which class and caste had been built, the revolution had exposed people’s true essence:

This process has resulted in many startling revelations, where every man and woman, regardless of their former social caste, has been measured up in accordance with his inherent qualities and strength. [. . .] Real nobility in the primal elements of life has been brought out and enriched, made nobler than ever, whether in prince or peasant. Feebleness and smallness, formally screened by breeding or etiquette, have been exposed. [. . .] Like a giant X-ray, the Revolution has gone through the social structure, revealing the human fiber of which it was made.
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As proof, Hullinger quoted the words of a former countess. “Yes, many of us can see that the Revolution was for the best,” she told him. “It made us into living, real people. Many were only existing before. We have gained confidence in ourselves because we know we can do things. I like it better. I would not go back to the old. And there are many young people of our class who think as I do. But we paid a terrible price. I presume it was necessary, however.” Hullinger visited the apartment of an old lady-in-waiting to the empress, her daughter, and their former servant. Below the harsh glare of the single electric lightbulb illuminating their one room, the daughter told him: “We have learned to draw happiness from the littlest of things. Before a diamond piece seldom held my delight for more than a moment. Now I am made happy—so happy—by a new pair of knitted gloves, a glimpse into a foreign newspaper, or a chance smile which fate throws my way on some kind face.” Struck by her words, he told them: “You have simply grown nobler.”
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“People who had never been near a stove learned to cook,” wrote Alexandra Tolstoy. “They learned to do washing, to sweep streets; they had to hunt for food, sell, exchange, travel on the roofs of trains, on the couplings. They even learned to steal. But what was to be done?”
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As for Alexandra, she was among the down-and-out aristocrats selling her few belongings (some old shoes and dresses, a clock, teapot, and lace) on the Moscow sidewalks.

Marta Almedingen shared Alexandra’s somber assessment after arriving in Moscow from Petrograd that same year.

In Moscow the vanished aristocracy in Russia went on living out their squalid existence. In Petrograd you never heard much about them, at least not in the world I lived in. But in Moscow they seemed everywhere, crushed, piteous, and almost forsaken. It looked as though the same city which had once surrounded them with Oriental splendor was now determined to hug them closer and closer to her own thin and hungry breast, sucking their mind and blood.
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Marta was part of a wave of former nobles who left Petrograd for Moscow in the early 1920s. The movement out of the old capital had begun during the revolution and picked up pace during NEP. If early on many nobles had left to try to escape the street violence and then the attention of the Cheka, by the early 1920s they were coming back since life in Moscow, grim as it was, was more vibrant and exciting and offered more opportunities for work and education, even if it placed them directly in the shadow of the central authorities. Kirill Golitsyn was one of the former nobles who departed Petrograd for Moscow with the introduction of NEP. Moscow struck Kirill as the center of everything. Everyone seemed to be out having fun, in cafés, restaurants, and theaters, at dances and house parties, and Kirill wanted to be part of the action.
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Like the rest of his family, Kirill considered NEP the first intelligent act of the new Soviet state, and he arrived in Moscow in late 1922 as a nineteen-year-old eager to take advantage of the new conditions. His first order of business was to make some money. After years of drab necessity, Kirill, as was true for many young Russians in those days, wanted to discard his old clothes for something new and stylish. Education, though important, was a secondary concern.
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Two of Kirill’s cousins, Lina Golitsyn and Alka Bobrinsky, were by then back in Moscow, having left Bogoroditsk in 1920 to enroll at the university. They were soon joined by other young members of their extended family—Lina’s sister Sonya, her brothers Vladimir and Sergei, Alka’s sister Sonya, Yuri and Misha Samarin, Mikhail Olsufev, and Artemy Raevsky. They all were young, most still teenagers, and excited to be making their own way in the world, out from under the supervision of their parents. They settled in the old Samarin mansion on Spiridonovka Street in the city center. The house had long since been taken over and consolidated, but they crowded into three empty rooms on the mezzanine, creating a sort of commune of
jeunesse déclassée
.
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Yuri Samarin later recalled of this time:

Thus began the era that became known as “Spiridonovki.” It was a collection of carefree youth whose lives until then had been nothing more than digging up potatoes and cutting firewood. A happy and, I would say, talented life began, although it was, thanks to our young age, rather wild. In the evenings until late into the night we played all sorts of games, including charades, and would sleep till midday, when the next trader in old clothes and things would knock on the door. Then we would head for the café by Nikitsky Gates and tuck into buns and liver sausage, not seen for a long time. Taking care of business, tending to our studies, that is, preoccupied us little. [. . .] Our life was disorganized, but friendly and harmonious, and our pranks were generally in this same spirit.
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They were desperately poor. Lina once wrote her mother that she could not go out since the sole had come off one of her shoes and she did not have another pair or the money to repair it.
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They sold the Samarins’ remaining possessions to get by.
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The 1920s saw a brisk trade in art, jewelry, and antiques as the old nobility unloaded for money the last of its treasures on the new rich of Soviet Russia. A key role in this trade was played by the
mákler
, or broker acting as middleman for a commission. The brokers were often people with good connections among the former nobles, individuals such as Georgy Osorgin. The Osorgins were an old provincial noble family from Kaluga, driven off their estate of Sergievskoe by the Bolsheviks in 1918. Georgy was respected for his honesty and integrity, and so he was entrusted to arrange many of these sales.
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It was a shady business, and the sellers, including the Golitsyns, were often taken advantage of. In the early 1920s, the Golitsyns disposed of books, jewelry, tsarist medals, paintings, and silver champagne buckets. They sold the mayor’s old fur coat, though they did not get as much for it as hoped because it was rather worn and dreadfully out of fashion.
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Of course, families like the Golitsyns were among the fortunate. Some young women of the old elite had nothing to sell but their bodies. It has been estimated that more than 40 percent of the prostitutes in Moscow in the early 1920s were from the gentry or once well-off families. The American Frank Golder was appalled at the pathetic condition of young women of the old elite in Moscow, noting
that even prostitution did not pay enough to save them. As another American Golder knew at the time put it, “You can get any girl for a square meal.”
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Although poor, this young gang on Spiridonovka was happy and overflowing with enthusiasm for life’s simple pleasures. The parties, games, and dancing went on almost every night, often till dawn. They were forever playing jokes and pulling pranks, gossiping, and flirting. Georgy Osorgin fell in love with Lina Golitsyn, and they married in the autumn of 1923. Their marriage ended tragically six years later.
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Although it needed no help, the young Russians’ social life was given a boost in the late summer of 1921 with the arrival of the Americans. In response to an appeal by the Soviet Union, the United States agreed to take on a massive famine relief program in Russia. Known as the American Relief Administration (ARA), the program was led by Herbert Hoover, the future U.S. president and the country’s leading figure in organizing help for Europe’s starving population after World War I. The ARA, operated in Russia by three hundred American men from August 1921 to June 1923, fed eleven million people a day at its high point at a cost of sixty million dollars. The work of the ARA saved countless lives and eased the suffering of an entire nation, making its designation as the “
beau geste
of the twentieth century” justly deserved.
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About fifty of the American men were stationed in Moscow. They were set up in the large houses of former nobles, each given a nickname based on its colored facade: the Pink, Blue, Brown, Green, or White House. The main administration was housed at 30 Spiridonovka Street, a large gray mansion down the street from the Samarin house. The ARA hired as local guides, interpreters, translators, and secretaries many Russians, mostly women, a great number of them from the former nobility who had the requisite education and knowledge of English. No one could have imagined then that working for the ARA could have harmful consequences. Yet later, after the Americans had left, many of these Russian employees were arrested or exiled as spies.
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Lina and Sonya Golitsyn and Alka Bobrinsky all got jobs with the ARA. Lina wrote her mother in Bogoroditsk how excited she was to be working for the Americans since they paid “huge wages.” The Russian
employees also received food parcels, and the Americans helped process aid from relatives abroad: family members could send the ARA ten dollars, and their relations in Russia would receive the equivalent in foodstuffs.
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Although modest by American standards, the parcels evoked awe among the Russians; “the food of the gods,” was how Irina Skariatina described her ARA rations.
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The first crate of food to reach the Golitsyns in Bogoroditsk caused a sensation. The entire family gathered around the wooden crate emblazoned with an American flag, opened the lid, and then stood back in wonder at its contents of canned condensed milk, American bacon (something no one had ever seen before), macaroni, rice, and sugar, all of it wrapped up in bright, decorative packaging.
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Such food was not available in Moscow stores, for any price.

The Russians found the work fun and exciting and drew satisfaction from knowing they were doing something important. Kirill Golitsyn wrote of the immense impression the “elegant and independent” Americans made on them, how they behaved so freely and spent their money without the slightest care. They were unlike any people the Russians had ever known.
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Irina Tatishchev was hired as a bookkeeper for the ARA and then promoted to secretary. She liked working with the Americans: “They were so merry, not like all those gloomy Soviet officials who were dominated by fear.”
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Sonya Bobrinsky worked as the secretary to the American William Reswick. His interpreter was a “Princess Irina,” whom he described as “a girl of rare beauty from one of Russia’s great aristocratic clans whose entire family had apparently been murdered by the peasants during the revolution.” Reswick was amazed by Irina’s energy and boundless compassion for the poor and suffering.
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