Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (37 page)

Not all the former nobles were so enamored of their American employers, however. Yelizaveta Fen worked in Moscow for the ARA and then for the Quakers, one of the other Western groups involved in the aid program. Like her peers, she got the job because of her knowledge of English and general education, and she too was happy to be receiving the food rations in addition to free medical care and imported medicines. But Yelizaveta did not like most of the Americans and Englishmen she met. She was especially upset with one American woman she met while working for the Quakers. The woman came in wearing an evening dress with a fine fur and rings and started to talk like a Red
commissar. When Yelizaveta tried to open the woman’s eyes to the famine and despotic violence around them, the American woman looked at her with pity, Yelizaveta later recalled, as if to say: “Poor girl! Her family must have lost all their privileges in the Revolution; no wonder she’s against the Soviet government!”
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Fen believed the Westerners then visiting Russia came with ideological blinders. No one cared to hear about the plight of people like her. She later recalled how she used to love to visit the museums at the former Yusupov estate of Arkhangelskoe and the Sheremetevs’ Ostankino. She would stroll about under the stare of dour attendants and admire the art, paintings, photographs, and antiques that made it seem as if the owners had just stepped out for a moment. At Ostankino she was transfixed by the story of forbidden love between Count Nikolai Sheremetev and his serf-mistress and secret wife, Praskovya “The Pearl” Kovalyova. When she came across foreign visitors, Fen tried to tell them this remarkable story, but no one wanted to listen to her, preferring the guides’ officially sanctioned explanations of the former gentry as “tyrants” and “retrogrades.”
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Fen’s reaction was not the norm, however, and it was not long before the Russians and Americans at the ARA were not just working together but socializing. The Americans threw big parties at their rented mansions, and the Russians reciprocated in their dim, cramped apartments. There were also parties at the home of John Speed Elliott, an ARA man and the chief representative of Averell Harriman’s interests in Russia. His secretary, Alexandra Meiendorff, a former noble related to the Sheremetevs, was a frequent guest at his place, as were Vladimir Golitsyn and Yelena and Nikolai Sheremetev.
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The American reporter Hullinger attended many of these parties, including one thrown by the Bobrinskys. He remarked on the contrast between the grim living conditions and lack of food and the infectious happiness of his Russian hosts. Everyone was laughing, flirting, and dancing. It made him wonder if the revolution had freed these young people to a lifestyle unknown and impossible to their parents. “Over it all hung an atmosphere of free camaraderie which would not have been possible under the gilded chandeliers and in the stately drawing-rooms of their ancestors. There was an unaffected, frank jolliness that reminded me of our own American Far West.” The young women in their “pre-war dress” looked “as charming and pretty as if just home from college.” One of these
noble daughters told Hullinger, “I am trying to live on the surface of life. I have been in the depths for five years. Now I am going to be superficial. It hurts less.”
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The Americans offered an escape from life’s dark depths, and the Russians were grateful. They were fascinated by the Americans and their culture, especially jazz and the fox-trot. Young Russians, and not just the former nobles working for the ARA, wanted to have fun, to be frivolous and silly; they rejected the dour puritanism of official Communist culture that deemed fun to be bourgeois. The Russians and Americans danced through the night, the latest records from America spinning on their gramophones, and then raced through the empty streets in the ARA’s automobiles as the sun rose over Moscow.
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The American men were besotted by these exotic “Madame Butterflies,” and their advances were frequently returned.
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In 1923, Alka Bobrinsky married her ARA boss, Philip Baldwin, and not long thereafter left Russia for Italy to live with his mother. Her younger sister Sonya married the Englishman Reginald Witter the following year, and they left for his homeland. Not all these unions ended happily. Irina Tatishchev heard of one Russian girl from the ARA who had left Russia with an Englishman, only to learn that he had no intention of marrying her but set her up as his mistress. Devastated at his betrayal, she committed suicide.
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From the start, Lenin and the Communist leadership had been suspicious of the ARA and had accepted it into the country with great reluctance. It seemed to represent a beachhead of bourgeois influence. The Cheka closely monitored the ARA as well as the Russians who worked for it.
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Many of these Russians were later singled out for repression. The Communist leadership saw the West not just as a political threat but as a more insidious source of cultural contamination. Both Maxim Gorky and Anatoly Lunacharsky were shrill critics of the fox-trot, which they considered decadent and lacking in class consciousness, a dance that was too individualistic and improvisational. The Communists wanted dancing that was only collective and planned. Gorky was convinced the fox-trot fostered moral degeneracy and led inexorably to homosexuality; Lunacharsky wanted to ban all syncopated music in the entire country. Even Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Futurist poet turned Soviet propagandist, denounced the fox-trot as “bourgeois masturbation.” Foreign jazz was eventually outlawed, and
playing American jazz records was punishable by a fine of one hundred rubles and six months’ jail time. No one would be getting hot in the Workers’ Paradise.
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Back in Bogoroditsk, Anna Golitsyn worried about her children living on their own in Moscow. She sent Lev Bobrinsky’s sister to check on them at Spiridonovka. After going around and visiting, she wrote back to Anna that they were doing fine and she was not to worry since this was proving to be a good “school of life for our young folk.” This did not put Anna at ease, and later she had Lilya Sheremetev check in on the young people as well. Her report to Anna was equally positive.
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Heartsick at their lengthy separation, Anna wrote a letter in the winter of 1922:

My dear, sweet older children, if only you could know, feel, or understand how much I think of you and how my soul aches for each of you, how I pray for you, and how I pine for you.

You used to say about me: Mama always says—“Pray,” and all of her conversations always lead back to this. You still do not understand this. You are young, you think you are strong, and you have not yet felt just how weak we are. How difficult it is, impossible in fact, to perfect ourselves without help from on high, to live well without help from on high. Prayer strengthens one’s desire to live a new life, it is what animates and inspires us. God cannot but answer if you ask Him to help you live a good life. Remember this always, believe this, and then the impossible will become possible.

Maybe someday, perhaps, you will recall my words and they will help you.
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They all would need a strong faith in the years ahead.

15

NOBLE REMAINS

Several blocks from the old Samarin mansion on Spiridonovka in the direction of the Kremlin, the remaining members of the Sheremetev family continued to hold out at the Corner House. In August 1921, the Socialist Academy, in control of the building since 1918, gave the family one week to move out of the third floor to make way for fifty students from the Institute of Marx and Engels. The family packed up their things and moved to the top floor, where twenty-eight people now had to share ten rooms. Other family members were scattered about other parts of the house, making for a chaotic situation. The house was stuffed and overcrowded. Bookcases, old portraits in large gilt frames, all manner of trunks, chests, and boxes with the Sheremetevs’ possessions crammed the Corner House’s many corridors, staircases, and storerooms; despite the previous requisitioning by the Cheka, the walls were still covered with Gobelins, and the floors with heavy old rugs; dark mahogany furniture filled the rooms.
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The Corner House was home to three branches of the family, those of the widows Lilya Sheremetev, Anna Saburov, and Maria Gudovich and their fourteen children, as well as a number of other relations. Lilya, aged forty, had become the mistress of the house. She made a strong impression on young Sergei Golitsyn when he saw her for the first time since returning to Moscow from Bogoroditsk. This was no regular woman, he thought, but “a Lady.” “Her entire appearance and
proud carriage were so regal and so beautiful that in my mind I called her a queen.” Lilya held out her hand to Sergei, not for him to shake but to kiss. Born too late to have learned the etiquette of his parents’ generation, a nervous Sergei was not sure quite how to proceed, but he somehow managed to awkwardly put his lips to the ends of her fingers.
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Anna and Maria shared a room on the house’s top floor. Astral specters, they were almost never seen, leaving their room mostly to go to church to pray for their missing husbands, whose deaths they refused to accept. Sergei Golitsyn had been visiting the house for two years before seeing them for the first time. He found the two sisters “majestic” yet “pale, their skin like porcelain. They were silent, sad, and having left the vanities of the world behind them, they rarely ventured out into the corridors, and when they did, everyone stepped aside to make way for them.”
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Olga Sheremetev found herself drawn to Maria. “It’s strange,” she wrote in her diary, “but whenever I see Maria I want to write. She is an unusual person, an unusually good person, who believes like a child and without any doubts. [. . .] Still, she is not a fanatic or pedant, and whenever I see her, my soul is warmed.”
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The presence of these widows, as well as the sad recent history of the house, created an atmosphere markedly different from that which reigned on Spiridonovka. The Corner House was not a lively place; rather, “a certain etiquette was followed here combined with a premonition of the fragility and ephemerality of the merriment that recalled ‘the feast during the plague.’ ”
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This was not to say that no fun was had there, however, for the many younger Sheremetevs, Saburovs, and Gudoviches liked to have a good time. Yelena Sheremetev, who turned seventeen in 1921, was now living in the room where her grandfather Count Sergei had died three years earlier. Like her cousins, she studied rather haphazardly when she had the time and money and inclination, though it seems her main goal was keeping up an active social life. She loved going to the cinema with her friends to see the reigning stars—especially the beautiful Vera Kholodnaya (“The Queen of the Screen”)—or to marvel at the latest silent film featuring the suave thief Arsène Lupin.
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Yelena’s young
cousin Grisha Trubetskoy shared her passion and collected photographs of his favorite actors—Buster Keaton, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin.
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Yelena and her cousins also liked to go hear Fyodor Chaliapin at the Moscow Conservatory and to
Boris Godunov
and
Demon
at the Bolshoi.
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Yelena, her sister Natalya (then fifteen), and their cousin Merinka Gudovich (sixteen) were never apart and made up their own “merry young pack,” to quote one admiring male visitor. They all were pretty and just on the threshold of womanhood, ready to trade their girlish braids for the latest stylish cuts. They made a bit of money by selling pies in the coffeehouses then springing up around Moscow.
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Yelena’s brother Nikolai was a gifted violinist, and in 1920 he started playing in the orchestra of the Herzen Club on Novinsky Boulevard. Over the next few years he played for a number of groups, including the Dmitrovsky Dramatic Theater and the Stanislavsky Studio. In 1924, Nikolai was hired as the concertmaster, as well as composer and violinist, at the Moscow Art Theater’s Third Studio, later renamed after its founder, Yevgeny Vakhtangov. He remained at the Vakhtangov Theater for the rest of his life.
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Tatiana Aksakov-Sivers frequented the Corner House in those days, and she was impressed by this young generation, which she described as “talented and beautiful.” Of all of them, she was most impressed by Boris Saburov.
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Here is how Yuri Samarin remembered him years later:

Boris Saburov was an attractive personality in many ways. At first glance he seemed dry and vain, but once he opened up, one saw in him a very unique nature. A gifted artist, and subtle poet, he brought art and culture to our lives in distinctive, special ways. On his own initiative, he began publishing a hand-made journal at Vozdvizhenka under the name “Pens for Dreams.” He was both its editor and the author of its contents, and in a real sense he did it all himself. [. . .]

We would await with interest every Saturday when a new issue of “Pens” would appear. It would always have colorful illustrations in a vaguely abstract style, short novellas, verse, and caricatures poking fun at each of us. Boris was the first to introduce us to Esenin. It was his reading of Esenin that taught us to love this magnificent, unique lyric.
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