Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (46 page)

Seven OGPU agents paid a visit to the Kuskovo Estate Museum about the time Ostafievo was being destroyed. They did not at all like what they saw, and their subsequent report drips with disdain for the museum and its employees. “The palace-museum of former Count Sheremetev [. . .] is of doubtful historical value since there already are quite a number of such lairs of former satraps outside Moscow [. . .] now populated by persons with suspicious pasts.”
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They noted that the
money spent on the museum could not be justified and recommended the museum be liquidated and the buildings turned into a hospital or school. The Moscow Department of Education fought to save Kuskovo. Key to the department’s strategy was to rethink the ideological message of the estate. No longer intended to showcase the life of the nobility, it was now presented as a monument to Russia’s serfs, exploited for the decadent whims of their masters. While Kuskovo may have been built to order by Count Sheremetev, the labor had been that of his serfs, and this, so went the new message, was what the museum was meant to celebrate and showcase. The serf masters were henceforth presented in the worst possible light. The official script intended for museum guides from the mid-1930s included lines about “how extremely boorish the Counts Sheremetev were” and instructed visitors to gaze upon the sumptuous halls and galleries of the palace in order to “better know our enemy, and consequently develop a deeper and more conscious hatred of him.”
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By the end of the Second World War, a staggering 95 percent of Russia’s country estates had disappeared. Some had been targeted for destruction; most, however, were simply abandoned, plundered, and then forgotten, left to rot and decay and finally fall to ruin.
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An entire cultural legacy had been wiped from the face of the earth.

Expelled from Ostafievo, Pavel and his family were sent to live in Moscow’s Novodevichy Monastery. Boris Sadovskoy, the Silver Age poet and critic, recorded their arrival in his diary:

At the right wing of the monastery, two carts; wretched, pitiful jades in foul harnesses, the carts worn-out, two degenerates, one in a hat, the other a peaked cap—descendants of the once steady drays of the Russian
bogatýri
.
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“What is this?”

“Count Sheremetev has arrived.”

“Which Sheremetev?”

“Pavel Sergeevich. They’ve brought his books.”

A little while later a decrepit man of medium height appeared with a thin woman. “Pavel Sergeevich.” He came over. He was dressed like some pauper—a torn jacket, a dirty cap, puttees on his legs. I greet him. [. . .] He replies as if we’ve been acquainted for ages. [. . .] Upon learning that I am Boris Sadovskoy, he displays a keen sympathy in me and introduces me to his wife, an old-fashioned and most unattractive woman in an old green dress. I kissed her sunburned, brittle hand, a wedding ring on one finger. Then the count and the countess walked out of the monastery gates. I have the impression the count has nothing to pay the draymen, and he’s gone off to look for some money. The most moving thing is that he’s brought his books with him or, rather, the pathetic remains of the enormous Sheremetev library, his last comfort. The draymen stood around waiting for several hours. They and the Sheremetevs—two poles of degeneration, the remnants of our two main classes: the former count and the former peasants, former owners, former masters, former people, former Russia.
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Sadovskoy, himself a nobleman’s son, welcomed the Sheremetevs to the monastery with a dinner in his basement room.

Founded in the early sixteenth century by Vasily III, grand prince of Muscovy and father of Ivan the Terrible, the Novodevichy Monastery had for centuries served as fortress, cloister for Orthodox nuns, and quasi prison for Russian royal women forced to take the veil. In 1922, the Communists closed the monastery and turned it into a Museum of Women’s Emancipation. With the beginning of the Great Break, the ancient Cathedral of the Virgin of Smolensk was shuttered, and the refectories and former cells of the sisters were converted into housing for students, factory workers, and new state employees now streaming into Moscow. One of these students, Olga Gorlushkin, became friendly with the Sheremetevs. “They were very good people,” she remembered, “very simple.”

Pavel Sergeevich and Praskovya Vasilevna and their nanny were all good people. They would visit me and always gave me money when I was short, even though they barely had enough for their own food and clothing. Pavel Sergeevich would go off somewhere every morning and come back in the evening. He was pensive, not very talkative, even a bit withdrawn. But their nanny and Praskovya Vasilevna always had a good word for everyone.

The Sheremetevs were given a large and bright room, but their neighbors soon objected to former people having such nice accommodations, and they were moved to a smaller, darker room in the monastery’s Naprudny Tower.
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The tower had a special place in Russian history. It was here that Sophia, the older half sister of Peter the Great and regent of Russia in the 1680s, lived out the remaining years of her life as a prisoner after Peter seized the throne. When a group of musketeers (
strél’tsy
) tried to put her back on the throne in 1698, Peter had several hundred of them hanged below her tower window to remind Sophia who was in charge. The bodies were left hanging for five months.
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The tower room was round and small, about fifty-five square meters. It felt even smaller since it was crammed with books, paintings, icons, and the remains of the ancient Sheremetev archive. Most of this family legacy was heaped in a pile in the center of the room and covered with a tarpaulin; bookshelves ringed the walls. Word soon spread about the new residents and their possessions, and their room was repeatedly burgled. There was no toilet, sink, or stove, all located elsewhere in the monastery. In winter the tea would freeze in their cups.
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Pavel scrambled to earn a bit of money to support the family. Even though he had had his rights reinstated, he still could not find work. Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, the old Bolshevik, historian, and head of the Central Museum of Fiction, Criticism, and Journalism (part of the basis for the State Literary Museum, the haven for former people, which he also headed from 1934), came to Pavel’s aid and remained a reliable ally. It was apparently thanks to Bonch-Bruevich that Pavel was hired in late 1930 as an employee of the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment and given the room in the Naprudny Tower, technically listed as his “office,” or the family might have been turned out into the street.
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Thanks to Bonch-Bruevich, Pavel received a number of small scholarly projects (writing articles, doing translations), but these still did not provide enough money to live on, and so Pavel had to hustle to find work elsewhere. He wrangled small commissions at various museums, constructing dioramas, illustrating guidebooks, writing wall text, compiling inventories, and giving tours. A scion of Russia’s greatest serf-holding family, Pavel earned a few rubles making paintings depicting the harsh cruelties of serfdom. For the Ostankino museum, Pavel painted portraits of his great-grandmother, the serf
opera singer Praskovya, as well as her father, an illiterate serf blacksmith, and her closest friend, Tatiana Shlykova, a brilliant serf ballerina.
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Pavel had always favored the company of scholars and artists. Some, such as the painter, art historian, and conservationist Igor Grabar and the painter and art restorer Pavel Korin, helped Pavel find work and were frequent visitors to the Naprudny Tower. Pavel cherished these relationships as much for the comfort and stimulation of being with persons who shared his passions as for the lifeline these friends extended him. The artistic atmosphere impressed itself on little Vasily. Pavel taught him about Russian history, culture, and religion and how to draw and paint, for which he showed talent from an early age. “One force opposing another never produced anything, other than destruction and barbarism,” he told Vasily. “Only good, peaceful actions produce results, and our country must be governed with the help of good deeds.” A cousin remembered Vasily as a good-looking, well-mannered boy. The two cousins acted together and loved to dance the waltz and tango.
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By the 1930s, the Sheremetev clan had been reduced to almost nothing. Of the counts Sheremetev, only Pavel remained. Family gatherings had become small, intimate affairs, either in the tower or in Tsaritsyno, on Moscow’s southern edge, where Praskovya’s brother Vladimir Obolensky lived with his family. In January 1935, the family gathered to bury one of its oldest members, Yekaterina Sergeevna Sheremetev, aged seventy-two, part of the untitled line of Moscow Sheremetevs. Led by a priest and a young relative bearing an icon, the mourners followed the funeral carriage through the Moscow streets to the Dorogomilovsky Cemetery. As they walked, passersby stopped to stare. Some hurled insults; some pelted them with snowballs. After the funeral, they returned to the tower. The priest joined them to conduct a brief service for the soul of the deceased. It happened to be Vasily’s name day as well, so they shared a cake to mark the occasion. Despite everything, Olga Sheremetev had to admit it had been a fine day. “The mood was very good, and we shared very warm memories of Katya, and one could feel the love we had for her.”
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Two years later, on January 14, 1937, they gathered again in the tower to celebrate Vasily’s name day. A photograph records the occasion. Vasily, aged seventeen, stands behind his father, his mother and
aunt Maria Gudovich to either side of him. Maria’s daughter Varvara is there, along with Varvara’s husband, Vladimir, their children, and Vladimir’s sisters. A few manage a weak smile; others look blankly at the camera. It was most likely the last time they all were together. Before the snows had melted, Varvara was arrested; a few months later they came for Vladimir. Both disappeared into the abyss of Stalin’s Great Terror, never to be seen again.
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20

OUTCASTS

The Golitsyn family found themselves relatively comfortable at the beginning of 1929. The mayor, in good health for his seventy-five years, was receiving monthly money transfers from his son Alexander, now settled and working in Los Angeles. His son Nikolai had a job as a translator at the Institute of Marx and Engels, and Vladimir Vladimirovich was working at the Bank for Foreign Trade, where he had been employed since 1923. Son Mikhail was an economist in the chemicals division at Gosplan, the state planning agency, earning a respectable two hundred rubles a month, and his wife was helping run a small business called The Embroidered Cushion. Mikhail and Anna’s children were also getting on well with their own lives. Vladimir and Yelena were busy raising their three children on the money he earned as an illustrator; Sergei was studying literature at school and making some money on the side as a draftsman. Three of the girls were also studying: Masha at the Higher School of Literature, Katya at a regular state school, and Sonya at an institute for social health.

And then the troubles started.

One day in March Sergei came home to find a large sign had been hung on the gates outside their apartment block on Yeropkinsky Lane. On it were the names of nine of the building’s residents who had recently been stripped of their rights and declared outcasts. Seven of them were members of his family. Indeed, everyone in his family was
on it, except, that is, the two youngest—Masha and Katya—both minors. Even Alexandra Rosset, the Golitsyns’ longtime domestic, still living with them a decade after the revolution, was on the list. Each was identified by the status he or she had held before the revolution: “former head of the nobility,” “former prince,” “former landowner,” “former princess.” Next to most of their names was also written “currently not working,” the suggestion being they were parasites, living off the labor of others, just as in the days of old. Sergei looked for his name and saw the words “Son of a former prince, currently not working.”
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The men were then fired from their jobs—Nikolai from the institute and Vladimir Vladimirovich from the bank. Mikhail was warned he was about to be let go, and so he resigned, thinking this would be less of a blemish on his record. Large-scale purges of former people were under way throughout the country. Not everyone, of course, lost his job. Sergei noted that it was not necessary to fire everyone; rather, it was enough to go after one or two individuals to terrify everyone else and cower all of them into submission. Some, like Prince Kirill Urusov, fought to keep their jobs. A young geologist in Moscow, Urusov was one of the few not willing to go away quietly. He publicly defended himself as a productive, loyal worker, and somehow he managed to keep his job.

Nikolai Golitsyn was the most fortunate in the family, quickly landing a new job as a translator for the French newspaper
Journal de Moscou
, where he remained until his death in 1942. Vladimir Vladimirovich was hired and fired from six different positions within three years. He managed to get by on the little money he earned from assignments at the Literary Museum, compiling a catalog of its folklore section, for example, and doing the occasional translation. (He knew five foreign languages.)
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Vladimir Vladimirovich was fortunate to have his rights soon reinstated, some thought because his late wife, Tatiana, had been a peasant. (This is possible, though it did not help her own brother, repressed as a kulak in the 1930s.) Mikhail had it the hardest of the brothers. He was turned away everywhere he looked for work. “What are you sticking your nose in here for? We’ll build socialism just fine without you,” he was told. He fought to have the family’s rights restored. He gathered all the documents from their past employers and petitioned to have the decision rescinded. His son Vladimir, who never did
put faith in the Soviet system to right its wrongs or listen to law or reason, refused to have anything to do with this, telling his father he did not care one way or another, for he knew that he was working, and this was all that mattered. The mayor also asked Mikhail not to fight for his rights. “Just leave me in peace,” were his words.
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