Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (4 page)

It was not just the scale of the killing either. When Napoleon, himself a ci-devant, seized power in 1799, he began to bring back the old nobility and to merge it with a new titled elite of his own making. Repressive legislation was abolished, and nobles of the ancien régime slowly began to return to positions of authority. With the final defeat of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbons in 1814, the process of revival was complete.
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But in Russia there would be no restoration, neither of the monarchy nor of the nobility. Stalin, unlike Napoleon, was no ci-devant; far from retreating from the revolution’s early extremes, he would reinvigorate them and unleash a new, final war against the state’s class enemies.

By the 1940s, the nobility had been annihilated. For those persons who had somehow survived, there was little left to remind them of life before 1917. They had lost their homes and sold off their belongings over the years at outdoor markets or commission stores for a pittance; their letters and photographs had been destroyed or hidden away. Families had been decimated and separated one from another by exile and imprisonment. Most former nobles hid as best they could in the shadows. One’s past was poison, and the stories told of the ancestors were purposely forgotten or spoken of in a whisper. Some changed their names to avoid notice; some lied or gave evasive answers to questions about their past and family history. Survival typically required self-imposed amnesia, the repression of memory. Those who refused to do this often suffered the harshest punishment.
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Yet, paradoxically,
through its unceasing repression of former people the state made it impossible for them to forget who they were and where they came from.
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The children of the old nobility born in the 1930s and 1940s had no personal knowledge of life before the revolution, nor were they exposed to the horrors of the civil war. Still, they too learned of the need for silence. Learning to keep quiet about one’s private life was part of every Soviet person’s experience, but it was even more so for former people and their children.
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They grew up in a world that acted as if there had been no life before 1917. Yelena Shuvalov, born in 1930 into an old family of Russian counts whose ancestors had included prominent courtiers, diplomats, and generals, recalled how as a child she soon understood that self-preservation necessitated silence:

We did not take any interest in the past. That just wasn’t done. It wasn’t even a consideration. I remember from my early childhood, when I’d ask something, I was told, and it always amazed me, “The less you know, the better.” I heard this either from my uncle or from mama or papa. I was grade-school age, it was the end of the 1930s, and that was the way back then, no one said anything.
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It was only after the Second World War, and particularly with the death of Stalin in 1953 followed by Khrushchev’s Thaw, that the silence began to fade. A few former nobles began to talk and write openly about their forefathers, and then in the 1960s some began to return, surreptitiously, to the places where their ancestral country homes had once stood. In the 1980s under Mikhail Gorbachev’s new policies of glasnost and perestroika, local historians, teachers, and folklorists began to seek out the children and grandchildren of provincial nobles for information on the life and culture of these small corners of Russia. After seventy years, a few thin bonds between the locals and the heirs of the old landlords were reestablished.
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The past two decades have witnessed an explosion of interest in reclaiming Russia’s lost history, and this process has extended to the fate of Russia’s noble families. No longer afraid to speak, noble descendants are publishing their family archives, organizing conferences, studying their genealogies, and trying to recover a sense of connection to their families and their past.
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Olga
Sheremetev was in her apartment across the courtyard from the Corner House that November night the Cheka came. She and the rest of her family cowered while the men ransacked the house. No one could sleep, and they sneaked glances out their windows to see what was happening. Throughout the night and early morning cars came and went. Men could be seen in the darkness going in and out and hauling things to the cars. Peters and his men did not leave until seven in the morning. Olga’s husband, Boris, himself only recently freed from a Bolshevik prison, went next door as soon as they had left. He found Count Sergei utterly crushed. The men had taken his personal correspondence, his diaries, and gold and silver worth around ten million rubles. Maria Gudovich, the count’s younger daughter, was forced to watch as the Cheka agents stuffed their pockets with her jewelry. One Chekist took Countess Yekaterina Sheremetev’s pincushion in his hand, and as he plucked from it every last jewel-headed pin, he told her, “This is how we take everything.”
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But worst of all, they had arrested nine men. Six of them were family members: the Sheremetevs’ sons Pavel, Boris, and Sergei, their sons-in-law Gudovich and Saburov, and their grandson Boris Saburov. Anna Saburov, the elder Sheremetev daughter, was beside herself with worry over her husband and son and kept trying to calm herself by repeating words about the inescapability of fate and God’s will. Everyone was anxious the Cheka would return. No one had any idea what had become of the men. “We’re completely in the dark,” confided Olga to her diary.
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Both Gudovich and Saburov père would be shot in prison the following year.

Four days later Count Sergei turned seventy-four. He was in a dreadful state that morning, drifting in and out of consciousness, but as the day wore on, he revived. He spent his birthday in the company of his wife and a few family members. At one point his old friend Vladimir Dzhunkovsky, an adjutant to Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich and governor-general of Moscow, stopped by to pay his respects. His visit unleashed a flood of memories for the count of his days at the court of Alexander III. Count Sergei lived a few more weeks, dying in his bed on December 17. His body was laid out on a table and dressed in a black suit. They buried him two days later at a new cemetery across from the Novospassky Monastery. He could not be buried there in the family
crypt, where Sheremetevs had lain for centuries, since the Bolsheviks had run off all the monks and turned it into a prison.

The revolution and everything it wrought almost destroyed Count Sergei, a man committed to tsarism and all it represented. In letters to friends he wrote of the tragedy that had descended upon their homeland; they were living through “a modern-day Mongol yoke” and under “the sword of Damocles.” “I have the feeling,” he wrote, “that I’m riding on a train that has just left the tracks.” Still, he tried to keep faith in Russia and its future. He busied himself reading histories of the French Revolution and Napoleon and sought comfort in the thought that Russia too would emerge from the dark night of anarchy into the light of a better future with order and peace restored. He continued to profess his faith in God and quoted the words of Alexander Pushkin: “I gaze forward without fear.”
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PART I

Before the Deluge

Were we all, the whole upper crust of Russian society, so totally insensitive, so horribly obtuse, as not to feel that the charmed life we were leading was in itself an injustice and hence could not possibly last?

—Nicolas Nabokov,

Bagázh: Memoirs of a Russian Cosmopolitan

1

RUSSIA, 1900

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Russia was hurtling into the modern age. In the two decades before the First World War, the country experienced exceptional rates of industrial growth, outpacing those of the United States, Germany, and Great Britain. Under Minister of Finance Sergei Witte massive domestic and foreign investment was made in Russian industry, mining, and railroads. Between 1850 and 1905, Russia went from 850 miles of railroads to nearly 40,000. The oil industry grew to match that of the United States, and Russia surpassed France in steel production. In the early 1880s, St. Petersburg and Moscow were connected by the longest telephone line in the world. The first cinemas appeared in Russia in 1903, the same year the number of electric streetlights in St. Petersburg reached three thousand. By 1914, Russia had become the fifth-largest industrial power in the world.
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The pace and future promise of economic growth and power made the other powers view Russia with a combination of wonder, envy, and fear.
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Yet despite rapid industrialization, the explosive growth of Russia’s urban centers, and unprecedented foreign investment, Russia in 1900 was still a feudal society. Its social makeup resembled a pyramid with a large base extending gradually to a narrow tip. At the bottom was the great mass of peasants, 80 percent of the entire population. At the top was the emperor, the autocratic ruler of a vast, multiethnic empire of almost 130 million people in 1897. In between lay several social groups
defined by laws and customs that went back hundreds of years: the clergy, the townsmen, the so-called distinguished or honored citizens, the merchants, and the nobility.
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Unlike Western Europe or the United States, there was no large urban middle class or bourgeoisie. In the late 1890s, just over 13 percent of the population lived in cities, compared with 72 percent in England, 47 in Germany, and 38 in the United States. Russia’s cities were home to the vast majority of the country’s small educated elite, while in the rural areas less than a quarter of the population was literate.
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Not only was Russia still a traditional peasant society, but it remained politically mired in the past. Russia was ruled not by laws or institutions but by one man, the emperor. According to the Fundamental Laws of 1832, “The Russian Empire is ruled on the firm basis of positive laws and statutes which emanate from the Autocratic Power.” The Russian emperor’s power was understood as unlimited; imperial decrees, as well as verbal instructions and commands, had the force of law. This is not to say there were no laws or no sense of legality, rather, that the emperor had the freedom and power to decide whether he cared to recognize them.
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By the latter decades of the nineteenth century Russia’s educated classes were growing increasingly concerned by the dichotomy of a modernizing society and an old-fashioned and rigid political system. While the country was moving into the modern era, the state seemed impervious to change. Tsar Alexander II had of course taken steps to modernize Russia during the era of the Great Reforms. In 1861, the serfs were freed, ending a horrific system of human bondage stretching back hundreds of years that, by the eighteenth century, had descended to a level of inhumanity akin to American slavery.
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In 1864, the legal system was reformed to create an independent judiciary in which all Russians, except peasants, the vast majority of the population, were to be equal before the law. The same year local society was granted greater authority over managing its affairs, chiefly in the areas of public education, health, and roadways, with the creation of zemstvos, elected institutions of local self-government separate from the central government. The “tsar-liberator” had approved a plan to consult with a small number of representatives of society to consider further reforms (the so-called Loris-Melikov Constitution) when he was blown up by a bomb thrown by members of the terrorist organization The People’s Will on March 1, 1881.