Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (39 page)

Vladimir took great pride in his family name and the role of the Golitsyns in Russia’s past. This pride took physical expression in the many portraits of generations of Golitsyns that Vladimir lovingly
looked after his entire life. They had long hung in the Petrovskoe manor house but were taken for safe keeping to a storeroom in Moscow during the revolution. After moving to Yeropkinsky Lane, Vladimir retrieved the portraits and carefully hung them in the new Golitsyn home. These portraits remained with Vladimir through ten subsequent moves over the next two decades. Vladimir and the rest of the family seemed to derive a certain security and inner strength from the presence of their ancestors. Vladimir handled the portraits with an almost superstitious care, always making certain to hang them in the exact same arrangement each time they moved.
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The mood at the Golitsyns was welcoming, friendly, relaxed. While the younger generation enjoyed themselves, the mayor, undisturbed by the noise, sat quietly over a game of solitaire. On Saturdays a dancer from the ballet came to give lessons to the Golitsyn children and their friends; on Sundays the whole family went to church. One frequent guest remembered:

The Golitsyn family was special . . . and I cannot compare it with any other family. In a rather small apartment four generations of this family lived in complete harmony. Everyone was given a bit of space, no one bothered anyone else, and no one complained about his fate. The Golitsyns were true aristocrats in the very best sense of the word. They never made visitors to their home from other circles feel unwelcome, as long as they did not disturb the family’s established order. Anyone who happened to find himself in the Golitsyns’ home felt this atmosphere and easily adapted to it. I can only recall one instance when a young man who by mere chance found himself in their company went beyond the accepted bounds of behavior. They immediately let him know that his comportment was inappropriate. Embarrassed, he excused himself and never again visited Yeropkinsky Lane.
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Despite the loss of their wealth and property, of their privileged legal and social status, and of so many family members from imprisonment, exile, emigration, and death, the Golitsyns remained “true aristocrats.” And curiously, despite the war that had been waged against it for years, the aristocracy still possessed considerable allure. There were some Russians in the early 1920s who sought to claim the identity for
themselves even when they had no right to. Moscow had a number of sham aristocrats with fanciful and wholly made-up titles such as the princes of Tversky and Macedonia. A Baron Palmbach proudly went about sporting a monocle and earring until it was discovered he was actually the son of a carpenter. Merinka Gudovich’s brother Dmitry attended a ball at the home of one “Princess Zasetsky.” There he came across a large portrait of his hostess as a young woman. It struck him as odd that the clothes on the portrait were not of paint, but of silk, as if they had been cut from old drapes and then affixed to the canvas. Curious, he gently lifted a corner to get a better look. Suddenly, the fabric fell to the floor, and Dmitry was shocked to be standing before “Princess Zasetsky” utterly naked in the pose of a courtesan.
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Identity was problematic in the early years of the Soviet Union. Just who was who? And how could one tell since the old markers of status, rank, and wealth had been destroyed? In the summer of 1922, Nikolai Sheremetev visited Vladimir Golitsyn near the northern city of Arkhangelsk. One evening they were invited to the home of an Estonian man and his family. They drank and sang and played music, enjoying themselves immensely. Over tea Vladimir asked his host how long he had been in the area. He told them he had arrived in 1914 from the Estonian village of Pebalg. With this, Nikolai sat up. “Really?” he asked. “That’s our family’s estate.”

“Excuse me,” the man said, offended, “but that estate belongs to the Counts Sheremetev.”

“Yes, of course!” exclaimed Nikolai.

“So, you’re saying that you’re Count Sheremetev?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm, and then who’s this with you?”

“This is Golitsyn.”

“There are princes by that name,” the man said.

“He
is
a prince,” said Nikolai.

“Ah, come on now, don’t take me for a fool!” the man hollered.

An awkward silence followed. Nikolai and Vladimir wanted to show the man their documents to prove they were telling the truth but then thought better of it. Would he believe them, and did it really matter anyway? The atmosphere had been ruined. The two men stood up, thanked their host, and left.
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Of course, people who had known one another since before the
revolution could tell who was who. In the early 1920s, Yelizaveta Fen visited her former school friend Katya Kozlovsky, an orphan who had been left the large estate of Dedlovo at the age of fourteen. After many years apart, Yelizaveta was stunned by her friend’s transformation. The former wealthy noble girl had shed her past life and gone native. She dressed and talked like a peasant and was making house with a scruffy villager by the name of Vanya. Katya told Yelizaveta that despite her poor appearance, she had never been happier, thanks largely to Vanya. It was true, she confessed, he could be rough, but the sex with him was better than anything she had ever experienced and for the first time in her life she felt fully alive. The villagers, however, did not care much for their sex lives and were particularly upset to see their former mistress acting the peasant. Soon after Yelizaveta’s visit they ran Katya and Vanya out of the village.
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Katya’s story highlights an important paradox concerning notions of class in the Soviet Union. If, following Marx, class was a function of one’s relationship to the means of production and a person’s social being determined his consciousness, how was one to make sense of the class system in 1920s Soviet Russia? In light of the radical transformation of the past several years that witnessed the wholesale dismantling of the old order, and its social classes as well, were there any classes left, and if so, what were they? Part of the problem was that the class the Bolsheviks had claimed to represent, the proletariat, had largely disappeared during the fighting and industrial collapse of the civil war years. The workers who manned the factories in 1917 had vanished, for either the countryside or the Red Army, and the country’s urban centers had emptied out. It would be several years before a working class of any size developed again in Russia. As for the political and economic elite, it had been destroyed as a distinct social group. And so the Communists, who had made a revolution and established a state based on the idea of class warfare, faced an awkward situation: classes in Russia had disappeared.

The state’s response to this was to manufacture new classes to meet its needs. Throughout the 1920s legislation was put into place to continue the older notion of a proletarian class, which now included the poor peasantry, and a bourgeoisie, fashioned out of former nobles and aristocrats, tsarist officials, clergy, nepmen, and kulaks. (Kulaks were in theory well-to-do peasants, though the term was so vague and used
so indiscriminately as to mean little more than one’s enemy.) “Former people” was another manufactured class or caste made by lumping together groups that had had little or no shared identity before 1917. A related group, whose ranks overlapped with that of the former people, were the so-called outcasts or disenfranchised (
lishéntsy
), persons who had been stripped by the Soviet state of their voting rights. Of course, losing the right to vote in the Soviet Union was no great loss. Nevertheless, what made this designation so damning was the fact that with the loss of voting rights (indeed of all civil rights) came a whole series of restrictions, all crucial for survival: the denial of access to housing, ration cards, employment, higher education, and medical care.

Outcasts were denied access to public cafeterias or institutional dining halls where most average Soviets took their meals. What services outcasts were still entitled to, they had to pay higher rates for than the rest of the populace. In effect, outcasts were expelled from society and turned into pariahs, the Soviet Union’s own untouchables. The names of outcasts were often posted on signs or published in newspapers as a form of public humiliation. The first outcasts had been created by the Soviet Constitution of 1918 as a way to create a class of enemies within the new order. As the 1920s progressed, restrictions against the outcasts expanded, and their numbers swelled to as many as four million. Although a great many outcasts were from the former elite, the majority had never belonged to Russia’s wealthy or privileged. In predominantly Jewish towns of Ukraine, for example, nearly 40 percent of the population were outcasts in the late 1920s.
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The ambiguity of social class was made worse by the confusion over how one’s class was to be determined. Standard questionnaires required of anyone seeking housing, education, or employment capture this confusion. In an attempt to define class, respondents were asked to give either their “social origin” or “social position.” The two were obviously not the same thing, and not surprisingly, members of repressed social groups tended to ignore the former in favor of the latter. They did not write “former prince” or “son of a count” but gave their current positions. In a sense, they were trying to “pass” not unlike the way some fair-skinned American blacks tried to pass for white before the 1960s to escape the United States’ system of racial apartheid. In the 1920s such deception was not usually dangerous, but it became so during the Stalin years. Efforts to hide one’s past, to create what became known as
a good biography, placed one in the dangerous position of being outed or discovered as an impostor. According to the logic of the time, hiding one’s past in this way was proof of being a class enemy hostile to Soviet power.
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The Soviet Union was a country founded on the idea of struggle against internal enemies, and it is fair to say that regardless of how former people responded to questions about their social origin or position, they would have continued to face persecution. History, so the Marxists claimed, moved forward by class struggle, and the Soviet Union would be no exception. Once its rulers had invented new classes, it logically followed that there would be struggle between them. Unlike during the revolution and civil war, however, the struggle had changed. The class enemy had gone underground, and so the need for vigilance, for an ever-watchful eye, became a pervasive aspect of Soviet life. This despite the fact that the OGPU (the acronym for the Unified State Political Administration, successor to the Cheka from late 1922) in its top secret internal reports for the party leadership in the 1920s reported that the monarchists had been utterly destroyed and represented no threat.
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The sense of being watched by others strengthened the process of masking and internal vigilance that had begun after the revolution. Galina von Meck described this as “the years when all of us in Russia lived a double life, wearing a mask when outside our homes, taking it off only when we knew it was safe to do so.”
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Humiliation of former people figured in the class struggle and became a conscious policy of the state. The policy was motivated in part by the leadership’s anxiety about its degree of control over society. Although their enemies had been defeated, still the party leaders obsessed over what they saw as the precariousness of their authority, a feeling that far from diminishing actually grew throughout the decade. The sense of vulnerability was exacerbated by the continuing reliance on the old “bourgeois specialists.” Approximately 20 percent of all Soviet bureaucrats and technical experts were from the old elite; 35 percent of the leadership of the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture, for example, were former nobles, and many more nobles filled the lower rungs of the ministry.
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Even as late as 1938, former people could not be replaced. That year Mikhail Shreider, an assistant NKVD commissar and head of the Kazakhstan police, carried out an aggressive campaign to expel “socially harmful elements” from Alma Ata but had to take
many of the former people off the list because the city simply could not function without their skills as doctors, engineers, and educators.

The dependence on “class enemies” not only fed a sense of insecurity among the authorities, but also fostered disillusionment among the working and lower classes, in whose name the revolution had been made. Periodic campaigns against former people, harsh critiques, and calls to “unmask the enemy” functioned as safety valves to let off social tension. Encouraging denunciations of former people that led to their firing and loss of living space allowed for upward social mobility without the state’s having to actually improve living standards. The hostility of the poorer, less educated classes toward the old elite was real, however, and not a manufactured phenomenon. Even a decade after the revolution, the ability to destroy members of the old elite filled a great many with fervid pleasure. The “promotees” from the lower rungs, often made painfully aware of their lack of education, training, and sophistication when moved up to work alongside former people, delighted in seeing them brought down.
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The same people also felt anger toward the new political and social elites. As the twenties progressed, Russia’s workers were forced to make ever more concessions and to improve their productivity for the same pay. They lost much of their autonomy and control over their labor. At the same time, the new bosses were wrapping themselves in privilege that dredged up memories of the old elite. Strikes broke out, as did demonstrations by the unemployed, anti-Communist rallies, and even attacks on officials. An OGPU agent secretly monitoring a rally of unemployed metalists in late 1926 recorded the words of one speaker: “There are two classes today: the working class and Communists who have replaced the nobles and dukes.”
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To deflect this anger, the party channeled it against the old bourgeoisie, former people, and outcasts, pinning the blame for any problems on them and other hidden enemies. The ever-increasing preoccupation with these groups paralleled a shift in the notion of class itself.