Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (41 page)

Be sure to say, “Pardonne, but I don’t dance!”
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Nikolai Sheremetev was released within a few days and returned to the Corner House. Not long thereafter the OGPU returned yet again, though this time not to make any arrests but to inform the family that they had three days to vacate the house. With nowhere to go and no hope of moving all their possessions in so short a time, Nikolai, Yuri Saburov, and Andrei Gudovich hauled dozens of trunks, cases, boxes, and crates filled with art, antiques, and furnishings out into the street and sold them off to passersby for a pittance. Sheremetevs had lived at the Corner House for three centuries. Within three days they all were gone.
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For Lilya this was more than she could take. She had been considering trying to leave Russia for some time and chose to escape through a fictitious marriage to a friend of her late husband, a Latvian diplomat by the name of Baron Budberg. Budberg, Lilya, and her four youngest children—Natalya, Pyotr, Maria, and Pavel—left Moscow’s Belorussian Station for Riga, seen off by fifty family members and friends and watched the entire time by two undercover agents. Upon reaching the Latvian capital, Budberg proposed a real marriage, but Lilya declined, and he returned to Moscow. Lilya took the children to her parents’ Baltic estate for a time, before the family packed up once more for Paris and then finally Rome. Sergei Golitsyn was sad yet relieved to see his cousins go. He was certain that were they to stay, neither Pyotr nor Pavel would survive.
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The family was now broken in two. It had been an agonizing decision for Lilya’s daughter Yelena, but in the end she chose not to leave with her mother and siblings. Her husband, Vladimir, would not consider leaving leave Russia and his family, and they were just starting a family of their own. Yelena saw her mother just once more, forty-two years later in Rome for a brief visit. A few weeks after Yelena returned to Moscow, her mother died at the age of eighty-five.
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Nikolai too chose not to leave, also for reasons of the heart. Cecilia Mansurov was twenty-seven and beautiful, with penetrating brown eyes and lush hair. She was the new star of the Vakhtangov Theater, where Nikolai had just landed a job. Though she was already married
and six years his senior, Nikolai could not resist her, and he began to woo Cecilia, quietly, determinedly. She did not hold out for long. A gifted musician, charming, and handsome, Nikolai won Cecilia over, and soon they were living together in a room in the former stables off the theater’s courtyard. They were there but a short time before moving to an apartment at the new Vakhtangov Cooperative House on Bolshoi Levshinsky Lane. Stealing Cecilia from her husband was no great scandal; her being a Jew, however, was. Sergei Golitsyn wrote: “Many found it incomprehensible—Count Sheremetev, married to a Jew!” It was Mansurov who was responsible for getting Nikolai out of prison so quickly. She herself pleaded his case before someone with the right connections, and her beauty and acting skills did the job. She would have to do it again on her lover’s behalf in the coming years, appearing before the likes of Lev Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin, and Mikhail Kalinin. According to one of Nikolai’s fellow musicians, when his mother and siblings were leaving on the train from Moscow, Nikolai took out his passport and ripped it up in front of Cecilia as proof of his commitment to her. They spent the rest of their lives together, bound by a profound, if tempestuous, love and a shared passion for music and the stage.
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The arrests of the Fox-trot Affair continued. Anna Saburov, Maria Gudovich, and nearly all their children—Boris and Yuri Saburov, Dmitry, Andrei, Varvara, and Merinka Gudovich—were taken to the Butyrki in the spring of 1924. The OGPU began their interrogations by asking prisoners their political views. The correct answer, regardless what one really thought, was: “I am loyal to Soviet power.” During NEP such a response typically guaranteed one either a quick release from prison or internal exile. Many prisoners received the sentence known as Minus Six, banishment from the six largest cities in the USSR—Moscow, Petrograd, Kiev, Kharkov, Sverdlovsk, Tbilisi—as well as from any territories near the Soviet border. Prisoners who answered the loyalty question with “I am a monarchist” usually got sent to the camps for several years. Anna Saburov was exiled to the provincial city of Kaluga for three years, and her daughter Xenia followed her there; Boris and Yuri were given Minus Six and exiled for three years to the town of Irbit in the Urals. After serving their sentence, the brothers were sentenced to Minus Six again and moved to Kaluga in 1927. Maria Gudovich and her children Merinka, Andrei, and Dmitry
were exiled from Moscow and also ended up in Kaluga and then Tsaritsyno.
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Having thrown the Sheremetevs out of the Corner House, the OGPU was now removing them from the capital as well.

The Butyrskaya Prison, known as the Butyrki, had been built during the reign of Catherine the Great. The notorious Cossack rebel Yemelian Pugachev was held in the cellar of the original stockade before his execution in 1775, and his name was subsequently given to one of the prison’s four towers. Future rebels, revolutionaries, and assorted troublemakers under the tsars and then commissars, including Nestor Makhno, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Varlam Shalamov, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, were held there. Even Harry Houdini spent time inside its walls, performing a dramatic escape for the prisoners in 1908. After the revolution, Russia’s new leaders began locking up their enemies there. In 1924, the Butyrki became the home of a new wave of enemies, several of whom landed in Cell 8 together with Nikolai and Kirill Golitsyn in what the latter called “our noble collective farm.” Here Kirill had the opportunity that had never presented itself outside in the free world to make the acquaintance of a number of older noblemen and to become close friends with younger nobles like Dmitry Gudovich and Sergei Lvov. Vladimir Trubetskoy spent two months at the Butyrki following his arrest with a number of other former nobles in Sergiev Posad in December 1924.
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Kirill recorded the varied fates of the inmates of Cell 8. One of the stranger and sadder stories belonged to Avenir Vadbolsky. A graduate of the Corps des Pages and a former officer, Vadbolsky had danced at the Sheremetev balls until the OGPU arrested him, thinking he was a certain Prince Vadbolsky from the White Army of General Baron Peter Wrangel. The OGPU interrogated Vadbolsky at the Butyrki, after which he migrated from prison to Solovki, then back to the Butyrki, then to exile in Berezov on the Ob River, and finally back to Moscow. In 1929, he was taken to the Lubyanka, where his life came to an end. In the Butyrki’s women’s section, Kirill met the young and fetching Varenka Turkestanov, another victim of the Fox-trot Affair. Varenka was later released from prison, but only after having been subjected to strange sleep experiments (more likely, sleep deprivation). She went back to her mother an utterly destroyed person: withdrawn, uncommunicative,
cut off from everyone and everything around her. Eventually, she roused herself to one decisive and final act and threw herself out a window.
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Georgy Osorgin landed in Cell 8 in March 1925. He had been arrested at the apartment of Sandra Meiendorff, Lilya Sheremetev’s sister, in a so-called mousetrap. A technique borrowed from the Okhrana, the tsarist secret police, the mousetrap (
zasáda
) involved placing agents in the apartment of a person under suspicion and then detaining everyone who bothered to knock on the door. The mousetraps could go on for days until either the main target or enough possible enemies had been gathered. Sometimes the hostages were released, though not always; guilt by association was a widespread mode of operation. That Meiendorff had worked for John Speed Elliott, a representative of Averell Harriman, had attracted the attention of the OGPU.

Shortly before his arrest Osorgin wrote Grigory Trubetskoy in Paris of the worsening climate, stressing that “they have begun ‘cleansing Moscow of harmful elements.’ ” In one night, thirty of Osorgin’s friends had been arrested. So many people were being arrested a joke was born: “Question on a Soviet questionnaire: ‘Have you ever been arrested, and if not, then why?’ ”
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For former people like Osorgin, the humor might have been hard to find. “Yes, Uncle Grisha, life has become bleak,” he wrote to Trubetskoy, “not because of the constantly poised sword of Damocles, but because it seems there is no sign of any change.” Osorgin had been arrested for the first time in September 1921 in a raid of his aunt Olga Trubetskoy’s home. Before they took him away, he had managed to leave his wife, Lina, a short note: “So now your turn has come, my darling, to be tested. May God help you. Pray also for me, and be completely calm: I don’t worry about myself for a minute.”
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The Golitsyns sprang into action to get Georgy released, appealing as in times past to Yenukidze, Smidovich, and Peshkov. When asked the standard question about his loyalty to the Soviet regime, Osorgin refused to lie, telling his interrogators that he was a monarchist. Genrikh Yagoda, then the de facto head of the OGPU, stated that Osorgin had acted “provocatively” during his interrogation. On October 12, 1925, Georgy was sentenced to be shot, but Peshkov intervened and won a reduced sentence of ten years in prison, saving his life for a time. Georgy remained at the Butyrki for three years. At times, he felt guilty
at the suffering his arrest had caused Lina. “If it is my fate to die in prison,” he wrote on a handkerchief smuggled out of prison to his mother-in-law, Anna Golitsyn, “I would like that Lina and my family would know that I die peacefully, praying that Lina might still find happiness and that her life on earth will not be limited to that chain of suffering and grief that bound her on marrying me; poor, poor Lina, why did you let her marry me?” Georgy was supported while in prison by an unshakable religious faith and memories of family and the life they had shared before the revolution at their estate of Sergievskoe, what he called “that spiritual cradle in which everything by which each of us lives and breathes was born and raised.”
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A month after Georgy’s arrest, the OGPU arrived one night during Holy Week at the Golitsyns’ with arrest warrants for Mikhail and his son Vladimir. Led by a man named Chernyavy, the agents blocked the door so no one could get out and searched the apartment all night, going through their books, the children’s notebooks, their photographs and letters. The Golitsyns, who had been preparing for bed when the agents arrived, sat about in their nightclothes and watched. The samovar was lit, and they offered the uninvited guests some tea; Chernyavy refused, saying it was against regulations. In the early morning, the men finally found something: two large photographs of Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra inside a trunk left for safekeeping by a cousin now living abroad. The family told the men that the trunk was not theirs and that they knew nothing about its contents, but Chernyavy did not believe them. Mikhail and Vladimir were led downstairs. The rest of the family followed and pushed into their hands a bedroll, spoon, mug, and bowl, the necessities of prison life. A paddy wagon, the feared Black Raven, sat waiting. When the raven’s back doors opened, the Golitsyns could make out in the dark the faces of others arrested that night. Mikhail and Vladimir climbed in and took their places. Along with the two men, the OGPU agents confiscated all the family’s personal correspondence.
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The family was devastated. “We, those who remained, suffered greatly the arrest of our loved ones,” Sergei wrote. “I went to school and told none of my friends of my woe. I was not the only one in this situation. Andrei Kiselev, making me promise not to tell, whispered to me that Alyosha Nesterov’s father had been arrested. It was horrifying just to look at Alyosha. His face had gone all black and his eyes nervously
flittered about.”
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Peshkov and Smidovich immediately set to getting the men released. Peshkov met with Yagoda, who was considering letting them go had it not been for the portraits, which he was convinced the family knew about and were just waiting for the day when they could hang them again. In prison, Mikhail insisted he supported the Soviet government, particularly the efforts it was making on the behalf of the peasantry; Vladimir told them he was no monarchist, and in turn his interrogators told him to spend less time in the company of foreigners. Within three weeks, both men were freed.
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Mikhail and Vladimir had been struck by how much the secret police knew about them and their family’s private life. The family assumed someone close to them had to be an informant. Their suspicions landed on Mikhail’s nephew Alexei Bobrinsky. Alexei had been arrested along with Georgy Osorgin and then released almost immediately. Everyone in the family now made certain to be careful what they said around Alexei, although no one confronted him with their suspicions. His cousin Sergei Golitsyn, who had so looked up to him during their years in Bogoroditsk after the revolution, now fantasized about killing him as a traitor to his family and to the nobility.
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On the night of April 2, 1926, almost exactly a year to the day from his first arrest, Vladimir was arrested a second time and charged with espionage. Again, the agents spent an entire night searching the Golitsyn apartment for foreign literature and papers and letters from abroad. His grandfather was crushed. Yelena wrote to Peshkov, insisting Vladimir was loyal to the Soviet government and had nothing to do with any counterrevolutionary activities.

As before, the case against Vladimir was dropped, and after a few weeks he was home from the Butyrki.
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There would be more incarcerations in the years ahead, however, from which Vladimir drew an important moral: