Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (43 page)

Of Russia’s former glory . . .
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Museums, libraries, and archives became a refuge for many nobles. These outposts of culture were safe places where former people gathered out of the glare of the more politicized state offices and agencies. No one had to explain himself, for they all typically came from the same social milieu and had shared similar fates since the revolution. Surrounding themselves with books, manuscripts, and art from old Russia allowed them to escape, if only for a while, the hostile world of the present for the comforting familiarity of the past. Moreover, with so much of the country’s cultural patrimony destroyed—palaces and estates looted and burned, entire libraries torn to pieces for cigarette paper, paintings slashed, statues pulled down and smashed to pieces, graves robbed, churches stripped of their holy relics—former people felt a profound sense of mission in their work as the keepers of Russia’s cultural heritage.

They were the logical ones to undertake this. First of all, they knew intimately many of the items being gathered in the new state museums and libraries since they had once owned them or known well those who had, and second, not many other Russians had the requisite education and training. If, to paraphrase Lenin, the government administration was to become so orderly and well organized that even a cook could run the state, this did not necessarily mean she could work with old Slavic manuscripts. Nikolai Ilin of Moscow’s Rumiantsev Museum made this very point: “While a cook, if necessary, could run the state, she was as yet not able to catalog books in every European language.”
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Olga Sheremetev, on the other hand, was able, and she did. She bound books, worked as a translator, compiled bibliographic information for a number of Moscow libraries, gave lectures, and taught foreign languages. In the 1930s, she also worked at the Literary Museum in Moscow, which became a nest of former people. There, laboring together with the former noble Dmitry Shakhovskoy, she reconstructed the personal library of the nineteenth-century writer-philosopher Pyotr Chaadaev and wrote commentary on his marginalia. The literary scholar Emma Gershtein frequented the museum at the time to consult with Olga, who was helping Gershtein in her work on a biography of Mikhail Lermontov. As a Jew, Gershtein was an outsider in this gentry nest, which she found fascinating, if strange. She was surprised by the number of nobles working there, including members of the Turgenev, Bakunin, and Davydov families. The elderly Davydov, who she thought “personified the culture of the country estate,” liked to sing Gypsy romances, and Kirill Pigaryov, curator of the Muranovo estate museum (another nest of former people) and the great-grandson of the poet Fyodor Tyutchev, would stop by for friendly contests with the staff on noble genealogies.

Olga loved the museum and the people there. “It is pleasant to see the people I work with,” she wrote in her diary. “The air with its smell of books and archival dust is pleasant. The conversations are pleasant. It must be this is something I was born with.” Gershtein held Olga Sheremetev in the highest regard: “Modest, poor and educated,” she wrote in her memoirs, “with a profound glowing gaze and abundant grey hair, she was a true pioneer.” As for the others, Gershtein was less impressed. “Oh, those gentry types! They were themselves particularly scared and always cautious.” Gershtein might have been correct in her
assessment, though her inability to see the reasons for their behavior is difficult to understand.
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Many Soviet citizens viewed these museums and the people working there not as oddly curious but darkly sinister. Nikolai Ilin observed that the Rumiantsev Museum, where he worked, was considered a place where “the double-dyed vermin of the old regime had comfortably ensconced themselves and so had to be destroyed for the benefit of society.”
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Attitudes like this, encouraged by the state’s leaders, grew over the course of the 1920s and 1930s until finally action was taken against most centers of old Russian culture.

The director of the Rumiantsev Museum was Prince Vasily Dmitrievich Golitsyn. A former officer in the Cossack Guards Regiment, court equerry, painter, and wealthy landowner, Golitsyn had been the museum director since 1910. Following the revolution he continued in his post, laboring tirelessly to safeguard and add to the museum’s exquisite collections and to wring more money, food rations, and firewood out of the new government for the museum’s staff, winning him their loyalty and admiration. For years after the revolution the staff continued to call him Prince out of respect. His assistant, the historian and librarian Yuri Gotye, wrote in 1920:

Last Tuesday we quietly and modestly celebrated the tenth anniversary of Prince V. D. Golitsyn’s directorship of the Museum. [. . .] We had a warm and heartfelt talk after expressing our best wishes to the prince. Many of us in the museum still don’t understand his true significance: the fact is that this irreproachably decent lord and gentleman is truly the living conscience of the museum—for ten years he has prevented us from quarrelling, playing dirty tricks, and intriguing. That sort of thing could have especially flourished “in the revolution,” but this was impossible precisely because of his presence. God grant him strength and health for many years, until he carries us to some shore and we can rest from life’s storms.

Golitsyn, however, would not be able to carry them to the other shore. He was arrested on March 10, 1921, just as Lenin was announcing NEP, and removed from his position as director. Although no formal charges were made, there was talk of Golitsyn’s running a secret “bourgeois society” at the museum.
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Unlike Pavel Sheremetev, a historian by education, most of the nobles working as curators, translators, and archivists had no special training. After being freed from the Butyrki, Nikolai Golitsyn landed a job as a translator at the Institute of Marx and Engels in Moscow, and his brother Mikhail earned money translating the writings of Zola, work that brought him immense pleasure.
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Their father, the mayor, had received a commission to translate Balzac’s
Droll Stories
and Goethe’s
Faust
and was paid to give lectures for groups like the Friends of Old Moscow, the Society for Friends of the Book, and the Salon TsEKUBU.
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The work fed the mayor’s body and soul at an especially difficult time. On November 10, 1925, Sofia, his wife of fifty-four years, died in Sergiev Posad at the age of seventy-four. Her death left him disconsolate. “It was inexpressibly painful to find myself in our room,” he wrote in his diary upon returning to Moscow, “now so painfully empty for me. I got settled in my cell and wrote letters all morning. Oh, but how heavy is my soul . . . now that she is no longer. I keep hearing all around me her final words—‘Quel beau moment!’ ” The pain of losing Sofia never lessened, and for the rest of his life he wrote of his longing for the day when they would be together again forever, “THERE.”
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The mayor’s grandson Sergei dreamed of becoming a writer as a young man, but his parents pushed him to get a practical education, so he took courses in accounting and bookkeeping. Still, he refused to forsake his love of literature and hoped one day to be able to study it at university. By the mid-1920s, his chances of being admitted to a university were shrinking. Purges against the children of former people at institutes of higher learning had begun; Sergei’s sister Sonya was expelled from the university, and no intervention from noted scholars could get her reinstated.
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Sonya’s expulsion reflected a larger wave of increased repression beginning to sweep over former people. In February 1927, for example, a modification to the law on outcasts extended this status to the
children of all former landowners. Official policy, however, was far from consistent. That same month, former gendarmes, police, and prison guards were removed from the ranks of the disenfranchised, and their rights reinstated.
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Sergei noticed the increased politicization as an eighth grader; the teachers began to single out for praise the children of workers and the children in the Pioneers and Komsomol, Communist youth organizations. A new subject called
politgràmota
, or political literacy, was introduced, and his entire school was forced to march about Red Square with Soviet flags on Revolution Day. Sergei’s parents were against his taking part and had him stay home; they sent a note to his teacher saying he was ill, and when he returned to school, there were no negative repercussions.
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In the autumn of 1927, Sergei took the entrance examination to the VGLK (Higher State Literary Courses or Higher School of Literature) in Moscow. The most nerve-racking question on the examination had nothing to do with literature, but with his class: “What is your social position?” Sergei gave the safest possible answer: “Father: office worker, Mother: homemaker.” It worked, and Sergei was accepted. The atmosphere at the VGLK deteriorated not long after Sergei’s matriculation. The school newspaper bemoaned the lack of students of peasant and worker origin and denounced the large presence of “socially alien elements.” CLEAN OUR RANKS OF THE ALIEN ELEMENT! urged one headline. At meetings, students spoke out against the “various princes and counts” at the school. Once Sergei stood up to one of these activists, insisting that his father had worked his entire life and that his family’s only crime was “the title of prince.”

There was a call to purge the school’s teaching staff, and a meeting was held at which everyone was instructed to be on the watch for “hidden enemies.” Each student had to submit to a special interview with the school director, the head of the student committee, and the chairman of the Communist Party’s district committee. Sergei awaited the meeting with apprehension that made him physically ill. The party chairman was the one to ask the question he knew was coming: “Are you related to Prince Golitsyn?” Sergei gave the answer he had prepared in advance. Yes, he admitted, his grandfather’s brother had been a rich man; but his great-grandfather had been a Decembrist, and his father had never owned any land and had worked every day of his life. Sergei’s sister Masha, also attending the VGLK, had to submit to a similar
interview. For three days they awaited the committee’s decision. In the end, they both were allowed to stay.

Not all former nobles survived the interview. Princess Kira Zhukovsky was expelled from the school, and her father was arrested soon after; a Prince Gagarin was forced out as well. Sergei’s favorite teacher, the philosopher Gustav Shpet, was later arrested as a monarchist; he was shot in Tomsk in 1937. Regardless of his luck, Sergei did not have a chance to complete his education since the VGLK was closed as a den of idealists, former people, and fox-trotters in the upheavals of Stalin’s Cultural Revolution.
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In 1927, Yuri Saburov was released from his term of exile in Irbit and came to stay with the Golitsyns in Moscow. Unable to find work, Yuri was invited by Vladimir Golitsyn to contribute sketches and drawings to the various magazines at which he had connections. Sergei Golitsyn remembered him as a hard worker, shy and quiet, who gave what little money he earned to his mother. Sergei’s sister Masha was smitten with Yuri and flirted with him shamelessly. The family learned the depth of her feelings for Yuri only when years later she broke down in tears upon hearing of his arrest.
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Anna Saburov was then living with her daughter Xenia in Kaluga, southwest of Moscow, where many of the former people arrested in 1924 and given a sentence of Minus Six had gone. Yuri joined his mother and sister later that year, as did his brother, Boris. After completing his three-year sentence in the Butyrki, Dmitry Gudovich went to Kaluga as well to live with his mother and siblings.
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Tatiana Aksakov-Sivers was also there, and she spent much of her time with both families. She noticed that Anna was no longer “that gorgeous woman in the white lace dress and black hat with feathers” that she remembered from years ago, although even at the age of fifty-four and after so many hardships she was still striking and capable of having a strong effect on people. The Saburovs lived in a small house on Gorshechny Street. Two gilded chairs salvaged from the Corner House highlighted the poverty into which they had fallen. Xenia had sold off the family’s few other pieces of their former wealth on her trips to Moscow to raise money for food. Boris earned a miserly income designing political posters. The once elegant Saburov had greatly changed: “He appeared worn out and went
around in unusually tattered clothes.”
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The Gudoviches struggled to get by as well. Maria gave French and English lessons while Dmitry looked for work. In the meantime, his uncle Pavel Sheremetev sent him what money he could spare.
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Among the fox-trotters in Kaluga were Pyotr Istomin and the three Lvov brothers—Yuri, Vladimir, and Sergei. Yuri and Sergei had shared Cell 8 in the Butyrki with Dmitry Gudovich, while their brother Vladimir had escaped prison by jumping out a back window as the OGPU was coming in the front door of his apartment. They all were reunited in Kaluga. Istomin fell in love with Merinka, Dmitry’s sister, and the two married in 1926. It proved a short marriage; Pyotr was arrested only months later and sent to Solovki. His arrest reminded everyone, if anyone had ever forgotten, that danger remained and even though they had served their sentences, no one could be certain of tomorrow. It was with this terrible knowledge that these young men and women gathered in the evenings to dance and drink to the sounds of Yuri Lvov’s fine voice and guitar. As they laughed and sang, Tatiana Aksakov-Sivers could not help thinking of the what the future held. “At the height of the merrymaking I was at times seized by an aching sensation. I understood that all of these youths were doomed, that this was nothing more than a brief respite. I recall how sad I became when sweet Dmitry Gudovich suddenly jumped up from the table, singing the gypsy refrain: ‘We’ll drink, we’ll carouse, and when death comes, we’ll die.’”
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