Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (40 page)

No longer a social construction, malleable and dependent upon specific economic and political relationships, class came to be understood in quasi-biological terms. It became almost a racial category, a mark of inheritance that a person was born with and was powerless to change. What mattered most was not one’s life at the moment (read “social position”) but one’s family’s status before 1917 (read “social
origin”). The stain of one’s ancestors could never be washed clean. It ought to be noted, however, that this biological notion of class was not unique to the Soviets but was (and still is) embraced by some nobles themselves. Consider the tale of Vladimir Vladimirovich Trubetskoy, who while on a visit to Paris in the 1960s introduced himself to Count Musin-Pushkin as “a former prince from Moscow.” “Come now, you can’t be serious,” retorted a disbelieving Musin-Pushkin. “Has one ever heard of ‘a former poodle’?”
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16

THE FOX-TROT AFFAIR

With the end of the civil war and the advent of NEP, a certain normalcy returned to Russia. Life seemed easier, unremarkable, although only in contrast with the barbarism that had preceded it and, though no one knew it at the time, the barbarism to follow. NEP was a contradictory period. There was relative openness in cultural and artistic life, considerable debate within the Communist Party itself, concessions to private property, and a market economy. Yet at the same time the Cheka remained vigilant, ideological control over society increased, and centralized state planning of industry and the economy expanded. What is more, no truce was ever declared with the revolution’s enemies, real or imagined. The struggle went on against former people, but to quote one historian, the 1920s constituted not a frontal assault like the civil war but “low-intensity warfare.”
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The new stage of the war was fought on several fronts. Restrictive legislation was enacted. New laws aimed at so-called socially dangerous elements (SDE) were passed throughout the early 1920s. The criminal code of the RSFSR for 1922 fixed the notion of SDE in its Article 7, which established punishment for those whose activity showed them to be dangerous or harmful to society. The Central Executive Committee of the USSR further solidified the class principle in law in 1924 by stipulating greater legal protection for persons from formerly exploited groups and less for those from formerly exploiting
groups. Former people and other SDE received harsher treatment by the courts, in both conviction rates and sentencing.
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The political police continued to hound and arrest supposed enemies, and they also resorted to more elaborate schemes to entrap their prey. Kirill Golitsyn fell into just such a trap in 1923. The bizarre episode happened in this way. In 1922, Kirill and his family, then living in Petrograd, were introduced to Mikhail Burkhanovsky, purportedly the adopted son of a former tsarist general, and his recently deceased wife. Over the course of the year, Burkhanovsky visited the family often and slowly won their trust. After many months and then only with great hesitance, he let them in on his secret life. He told the Golitsyns that he was part of a large and powerful underground monarchist organization with connections to people in high places. They were putting together a major operation against the Soviet Union and at any minute were preparing to set it in motion. Burkhanovsky confessed he was in danger of being uncovered by the OGPU. One day he arrived at the Golitsyns with a stack of monarchist proclamations and asked Kirill to hold on to them until he returned.

But Burkhanovsky never did return, and the Golitsyns never saw him again, for he was not a monarchist spy, but an agent provocateur of the OGPU. Burkhanovsky was not even his real name; the real Mikhail Burkhanovsky had been captured and killed by the Cheka before this impostor even appeared on the Golitsyns’ doorstep. Burkhanovsky figured in a large deception operation code-named Operation Trust (as in “corporation”), directed against foreign and domestic monarchists potentially plotting against the Soviet Union. Active from 1921 to 1925, Operation Trust has been called the most successful Soviet intelligence operation of the 1920s, and a great many Russian exiles were lured back to the USSR and to their deaths by its agents. At the heart of Operation Trust was the Monarchist Union of Central Russia, a phony organization created by the Soviet secret police to smoke out and entrap anti-Bolsheviks, closet monarchists, and White Russian émigré groups in Berlin and Paris. Another operation known as the Syndicate, like Operation Trust the brainchild of Felix Dzerzhinsky, was created to capture Boris Savinkov, the erstwhile SR terrorist turned ardent anti-Bolshevik, then living abroad. Savinkov was lured back into the Soviet Union in 1924 by OGPU agents posing as members
of the counterrevolutionary underground. He was arrested and later died under mysterious circumstances.
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Burkhanovsky’s main target had been Kirill’s mother, Maria, a former lady-in-waiting to Empress Alexandra. Maria maintained friendships with members of old St. Petersburg’s high society, many of whom continued to visit her at the Golitsyn apartment, thus making it, in the eyes of the OGPU, a monarchist cell. Maria’s death in June 1923 saved her from arrest. On October 23, the OGPU picked up Kirill and charged him with membership in a counterrevolutionary organization by the name of Young Russia. As proof, they pointed to the monarchist pamphlets and $150 found during a search of the family apartment. In an admirable, if naive, attempt to pass along to his son information on the case against him, Nikolai Golitsyn inserted a handwritten note into a small pie and sent it to Kirill, who was imprisoned at the Home of Preliminary Detention, the notorious Shpalerka Prison, which had once held Lenin. The jailers, not surprisingly, discovered the note. On November 14, Nikolai was arrested (for the third time since the revolution) as a member of Young Russia. Fifteen persons in all were arrested in the case. The investigation dragged on until the spring of 1924. On the first day of March, a sentence of death was recommended for Kirill and eight of the others. Miraculously, Kirill’s name was taken off the list for execution, and his life was spared; later that month the OGPU sentenced him to five years’ confinement in a labor camp. His father was given a sentence of three years, which he would serve in a cell together with Kirill in Moscow’s Butyrki Prison.
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Upon learning of his son’s and grandson’s arrests, the mayor sent a letter in their defense to Commissar of Justice Dmitry Kursky, telling him that if Kirill was guilty of anything, it could be “only of frivolity and stupidity.” As for Nikolai, he had been “apolitical” his whole life, so there was no way the charges against him could be true. Others in the extended family sprang into action. Sonya Bobrinsky paid a visit to Abel Yenukidze, Anna Golitsyn went to see Pyotr Smidovich, and her husband, Mikhail, called on Yekaterina Peshkov.

Peshkov was one of Russia’s great, though little-known, heroes of the twentieth century. The daughter of an impoverished nobleman and a committed revolutionary herself, she met the writer Maxim Gorky while working as his proofreader in the 1890s and the two soon married. She bore him two children before they separated in 1903, although
they remained close for the rest of their lives. During the First World War Peshkov worked in aid relief for the children of war victims, and after the February Revolution she founded the Moscow branch of the Society for the Aid of Freed Political Prisoners to assist the mass of tsarist political prisoners then being released. In May 1918, she helped found the Moscow branch of the Political Red Cross (MPRC) dedicated to easing the plight of political prisoners. Peshkov and the MPRC provided a range of support to political prisoners and their families, including free legal counsel, evidence collection, food, medicine, clothing, and books. Peshkov was a fearless and committed defender of political prisoners, and she used her connections to the new leadership, thanks to her marriage to Gorky, to free hundreds of them and to lighten the sentences of many more.
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In August 1922, the police raided the offices of the MPRC. Following an investigation into its activities, the offices were sealed and the organization closed. Not one to be deterred, Peshkov managed to convince the police to let her establish a new organization in the same offices under the name Aid to Political Prisoners, which came to be known by its Russian acronym, POMPOLIT. The new organization was forbidden from defending people legally and now had to rely solely on Peshkov’s ability to plead their cases with the powerful. Its chief function became the material support of prisoners. To thousands of Russians in the 1920s and early 1930s, Peshkov was an angel in the darkness. She fought for everyone—socialists, anarchists, clergy, former nobles, and tsarist officers—regardless of his politics or past. Over the years she was inundated by an avalanche of appeals, nearly all of which she did her best to answer and investigate. She was granted access to prisons to check on inmates, offer moral support, and deliver letters and gifts from home. She could often find out the fate of imprisoned loved ones when their families could not get any information from the authorities. A note from POMPOLIT let a prisoner know he had not been forgotten and was often enough encouragement to give him the strength to go on living. In the mid-1930s ever-greater restrictions were placed on POMPOLIT’s operations. In 1937, Peshkov’s chief assistant was arrested and sent to the gulag; the following year, POMPOLIT was closed for good.
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The POMPOLIT offices were located at 16 Kuznetsky Most in a nondescript building at the end of a long corridor next door to a Berlitz
language school. In the front room sat two secretaries and usually a large crowd of visitors waiting their turn to see Peshkov. When Mikhail Golitsyn appeared at the POMPOLIT offices in 1923, he was shown directly in to see Peshkov. He had known Yekaterina since 1917, when they had worked together at the Society for the Protection of Mothers and Infants.
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Mikhail pleaded the case for his brother Nikolai and nephew Kirill. Peshkov was not able to get the men freed, but she did manage to keep them from being shipped north to the prison camps on the Solovetsky Islands, known as Solovkí. Thanks to her intervention, father and son were permitted to serve their sentences at Moscow’s Butyrki Prison; it possibly saved their lives.
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On January 21, 1924, Lenin died. He had been ill since May 1922, when he suffered the first of several strokes, and he had not been involved in the running of the country for months. For four days his body lay in state in Moscow’s House of Unions, formerly the home of the Noble Assembly, and hundreds of thousands came out for one final look at the leader of October. One of them was Sergei Golitsyn. He did not notice a great outpouring of sadness with Lenin’s death; rather, the people had fallen silent. He went to the House of Unions with a friend and did not get home till late. Not knowing where he had disappeared to, his family was worried, and when he told them he had gone to see Lenin, they were surprised and angry. “What is it you wanted to see?” his brother-in-law Georgy Osorgin barked. “If your uncle Misha were alive he’d box your ears!”
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One morning two months later Lilya Sheremetev showed up in tears at the Golitsyns’ apartment. She told them that the OGPU had been at the Corner House the night before and arrested her son Nikolai and her nephews Boris Saburov and Dmitry Gudovich. When Nikolai asked why they were being arrested, one of the agents snapped, “You ought to know.”
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The arrests marked the beginning of what became known as the Fox-trot Affair. Many others, including nearly everyone who had danced the fox-trot at Spiridonovka or attended the balls at the Corner House, were soon to be arrested. Even the aged Vladimir Gadon, master of the ball, was arrested. The one family untouched by the affair were the Golitsyns, for reasons that cannot be explained and attest to the
often random nature of Soviet repression. Kirill Golitsyn, already sitting in the Butyrki when the affair erupted, noted that “the régime had looked upon the parties of young people as part of some perfidious scheme” and thus “arrested all dancers of both sexes.”
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According to Galina von Meck, not only were the security organs monitoring many of these fox-trot parties, but they were even organizing some of them to set up people for arrest. Galina’s sister Lucy went with a young poet to a fox-trot party in Moscow that was raided by the OGPU; all the men were arrested, and many of them were sent to Solovki.
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The daughter of General Danilov was also arrested. Imprisoned in Tyumen, she committed her plight to light verse that belied the seriousness of her situation:

Though legend it may be, there was a scandal on Ostozhenka, you see.

An entire bunch, each but a child, to the Urals was exiled.

The Kadets and SRs forgotten, so fox-trotters, some twelve dozen,

Were arrested by the G-P-U . . . And why? No one knew!

And we, careless and gay, danced to jail without a fuss.

Yes, let’s admit with sad heart, the fox-trotters—that’s us!

Two hundred we were, from ten years to twenty, such a sinister age.

We loved and laughed, we sang and dance, ’twas all the rage.

We hardly knew each other, to them this was no bother.

Here we each came, and for each the charge was the same!

Oh, fox-trot, fox-trot, everyone ought to curse you. For you

Are the cause of our imprisonment. For you we danced

Into a damp prison, fallen under the most terrifying suspicion.

Oh, fox-trot, fox-trot, stronghold of dark forces, cover of fierce reaction!

You’re the nest of the Counter Rev. in the Russian Soviet Socialist Fed.,

You’re its hope, you’re its foundation!

Let our sad fate be a lesson to all—if you’re invited to fox-trot, by chance,