Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (47 page)

Mikhail turned to Peshkov and Gorky for help. As proof of the injustice of being declared an outcast, he pointed out the fact that he was the descendant of a Decembrist, that he had been under surveillance by the tsarist police as a subversive liberal, and that he had had an excellent work record since the revolution. Neither Peshkov nor Gorky, however, was able to help. It aggrieved Mikhail to be without work. The forced inactivity and lack of purpose soon took a toll on his emotional well-being; he became despondent and lost hope for his own life and that of the family. He began to have heart trouble and could not sleep. He would lie in bed at night, repeating in the dark, “How are we all going to survive?” On the advice of his lawyer, Mikhail agreed to undergo tests at a mental asylum; the idea was if a doctor would be willing to testify to his being unable to work, this might give him some legal basis for fighting his case against the state. Upon arriving at the asylum, Mikhail felt as if he had just entered a novel by Ilf and Petrov. The place was full of completely sane people, all in hiding because of their questionable biographies or fleeing a purge or prison sentence. One of the patients would sing “God Save the Tsar!” at the top of his lungs every morning. Mikhail finally asked him, “Are you crazy?” No, the perfectly sane man answered, but “this is the only place in the entire country that I can sing whatever I want without fear of being punished.” Mikhail was soon sent home, although without a doctor’s certificate of mental illness and so no closer to finding a way out of his plight.
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When not comforting her husband, Anna was dealing with her own struggles. Together with a number of former noblewomen and a group of villagers from Buchalki, Anna had founded a workshop called The Embroidered Cushion a few years earlier. The village women made embroidered linens and pillows that Anna and her colleagues marketed and sold. The venture took off, and soon everyone at The Embroidered Cushion was making good money. When the tax inspectorate noticed the presence of several former people at the workshop, they shut it down, citing class exploitation. Anna was arrested and held for
two weeks. Twice she was tried in a criminal court as a parasite on the backs of the peasant class, and both times she was acquitted. Her lawyer argued that the state should be calling her a hero and awarding her a medal for her hard work. The state, however, did not agree. Thus ended Anna’s career as an entrepreneur.
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The repression continued. In the late hours of June 12, 1929, an OGPU agent along with several soldiers arrived at the Golitsyn apartment armed with an arrest warrant for Sergei. The usual scene followed: they searched the apartment into the early morning as the family sat dumb in their nightclothes and prepared tea and things for Sergei. Before they took him away, his parents made the sign of the cross over him and his sisters Sonya and Masha whispered to him to only answer their questions and not to say another word. He was placed in a Black Raven and driven to the Lubyanka. Part of Sergei was proud to be taken; he saw it as a sort of rite of passage marking his transition to manhood.

The following night he was awoken from his sleep and led through a warren of corridors to a small room with a writing desk, some papers, and a lamp with a green shade. A thin young man in uniform sat on the other side. He told Sergei to sit down. He offered him a cigarette, paused, and then lit into him with a volley of invective and threats and foul language. He said they knew all about Sergei, that he was a strident monarchist and a fascist, and he called him “Prince Riurik, a class enemy, a foe of Soviet power.” (Here Sergei, unwisely, pointed out that the Golitsyns were in fact not descendants of Riurik, the mythic founder of the first Russian state, but of Gedymin, a fourteenth-century grand prince of Lithuania. The stunned interrogator found this elucidation neither helpful nor to the point.) He told Sergei they were well aware of what he and his friends were up to: the fox-trotting, the parties, the anti-Soviet talk. (Sergei’s suspicions fell on his cousin Alexei Bobrinsky, suspected by some in the family of being an informer ever since the Fox-trot Affair of 1924.) The agent put a piece of paper in front of Sergei and asked him to write a report about his friends’ anti-Soviet behavior, but Sergei refused, even after being threatened. The next day Sergei was moved to the Butyrki, where he was questioned day and night. Now his interrogators informed him it was no longer enough to prove his loyalty by telling them what he knew; now they wanted him to inform on his friends. Again, Sergei refused, and again, they let him
off, though he did agree to sign a paper promising not to tell anyone about his interrogation, which they said was a “state secret.” The next day the guard opened his cell: “Golitsyn! With your things.” He was free.
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That autumn the Golitsyns were ordered to leave Moscow within two weeks. The order hit the mayor especially hard. Moscow had been his home for most of his life. His entire career had been devoted to Russia’s ancient capital, and he loved the city as if it were a member of his own family. It was a part of him, and exile at his age meant he was likely to die without ever seeing it again. He was beside himself with grief when the day to leave arrived. He told his family he would not go; he simply could not leave. They did their best to calm him down. Everyone was anxious and exhausted. The previous two weeks had been busy. They had given away most of their furniture and also a great deal of their remaining books. In the courtyard they burned several generations’ worth of family letters. There was only so much they could pack up and take with them. Finally, one Sunday morning in October several horse-drawn drays arrived, and they started to load up their belongings—a bit of furniture, a few cases, trunks, and boxes. Only after all the heavy things had been loaded did Vladimir bring out the family portraits, lay them on top, cover and then secure them for the journey. As they rode off, the neighbors watched in silence. Sergei wondered what they must have been thinking. The Golitsyns had lived on Yeropkinsky Lane for seven years. Here they had celebrated four weddings and three births. And here five family members had been arrested. As they were making their exit from Moscow, the wind kicked up, and it started to rain. Vladimir fussed with the tarps and ropes, trying to make certain the portraits were safe and dry. That evening they arrived at their new home, a small dacha in the village of Kotovo on the Savelovsky rail line.
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The mayor did not go with them to Kotovo, choosing instead to live with his daughter Eli’s family in Sergiev Posad. Things were not good there either for former people. In January 1926, Eli, her husband, Vladimir, and many other former people, including the Istomins, Shakhovskoys, and Olsufevs, were stripped of their rights and declared outcasts.
In all, about three thousand individuals, or some 10 percent of the town’s population, lost their rights, and it was not just nobles, but clergymen, traders, small business owners, and even tailors, metalworkers, and craftsmen. According to official documents from the time, persons were singled out if they had hired labor to make a profit, if they lived off rents or any unearned income, if they engaged in trade, if they had served in the tsarist police force, or if they happened to be dependents of outcasts over the age of eighteen. A final category comprised all “lunatics.”
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In May 1928,
Komsomolskaia Pravda
and other newspapers began running articles complaining that Sergiev Posad was “sheltering an unbroken gang of nobles, Black Hundreds, and various other ‘Excellencies.’ ” The press demanded to know how a group of former people could live so openly and work without fear in a number of Soviet institutions. Vladimir Trubetskoy was personally singled out.
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“
ALL THE BARONS AND PRINCES MUST BE FIRED IMMEDIATELY AND RUN OUT OF SOVIET PLACES OF WORK
,” screamed one headline.
¹⁰
The
Workers’ Newspaper
attacked the Museum of the Holy Trinity of St. Sergius Monastery for the large number of former people on its staff. The same month the newspaper
Working Moscow
described the museum’s former people as “two-legged rats.” That month eighty people were arrested, including fourteen monks who worked at the museum and many former people.
¹¹

The Trubetskoys were now living on the edge of starvation. Beginning in late 1928, bread was rationed, but as outcasts Vladimir and his family were not entitled to any ration cards. Then, in the spring of 1929, Vladimir lost his jobs in the restaurant orchestra and the movie theater. “We are threatened with hunger,” the mayor wrote; “there’s no more bread.” They tried to raise rabbits, but the animals died. Their few remaining personal things of value the family sold to Torgsin, a network of state stores where food and other rationed goods could be purchased for hard currency or gold, silver, jewelry, antiques, and art.
¹²

In 1930, Anna Golitsyn sent a letter to her daughter:

The Trubetskoys’ situation is bad. Vladimir’s income is not nearly enough to support them. I went to see them, and found they had no firewood, and almost no potatoes, not to mention even the least bit of fat in their diet. They had just a simple soup—water with a few potatoes, followed by a few more potatoes sprinkled with salt. [. . .] I came with 20 rubles for grandfather from Vovik,
¹⁵
but I gave it to the Trubetskoys instead. They bought a load of firewood, some more potatoes, and some horsemeat. When I left Vladimir was expecting to receive some sort of pay, which will be scattered here and there, for they are 300 rubles in debt. The children’s boots are all worn out, and they can’t be mended, and the children are freezing, especially Varya, whose feet have frozen and become all swollen and hurt terribly whenever she walks. We are now trying to sell a red bedspread with old needlework on it to raise some money for them.
¹³

If such state-enforced poverty was not humiliation enough, Vladimir had to live with the defamation of his ancestors when in June 1929 the head of the St. Sergius Holy Trinity Museum dug up the grave of Vladimir’s great-grandfather. As soon as he heard of this, an outraged Vladimir went to complain, asking how he dared disturb someone’s final resting place. The director, however, was utterly unfazed by Vladimir’s complaint, insisting rather on sharing with him the marvelous things he had found there, such as the deceased’s epaulets (still in excellent condition, he noted) and his skull, which he was keeping in his office but was willing to part with if Vladimir really wanted it. The grave robbers had also pried the leather boots off the dead man’s feet. One of Vladimir’s sons later saw a man strutting the streets of Sergiev Posad in them, immensely proud of his fine footwear.
¹⁴

“Given what’s happened to me this year, there’s a grievous thought I cannot get out of my head . . . We’ve all been crushed, utterly crushed,” Vladimir said to his friend Mikhail Prishvin one day returning from hunting in the woods. The destruction and brutality made Vladimir feel so despondent for Russia that at times he was physically ill.
¹⁵
Prishvin shared Vladimir’s grief. “The Russian people have spoiled their light, they have thrown down their cross and pledged an oath to the prince of darkness,” he wrote.
¹⁶

Amazingly, the Trubetskoy children found ways to have fun amid these struggles. With empty stomachs they would go out into the snow to slide and ski in the nearby woods. Every year there would be a Christmas tree and Easter eggs. In the summer they loved to play in
the rain. When they had time, Eli and Vladimir were sure to take the children on outings to historical places. Through it all, Eli and Vladimir tried to give them a true childhood by hiding the stresses they were under and by distracting the children with games, music, and laughter from the growing danger outside the door.
¹⁷

On April 14, 1928, the mayor’s son-in-law Georgy Osorgin was sent from Butyrki to the prison camp at Solovki. When his wife, Lina, learned that he was being transferred, she went with her sister Masha to search for him at the Nikolaev train station. They caught sight of his face, now covered by a long beard, sticking out a window. Lina and Masha got close enough to speak to him but were told to move off by a guard. Among the prisoners at Solovki was Dmitry Likhachev. Likhachev, who became a great literary scholar and one of the country’s most respected moral voices, was taken by Georgy. Osorgin, he recalled later, was “of average height, with blond hair and a beard and mustache, and always held himself erect in military fashion; he had a beautiful bearing. [. . .] He was always lively, happy, and witty.” Likhachev saw in Georgy a humanitarian nature, infused with a profound religious faith. He was the kind of man who looked out for others. As head clerk of the infirmary Georgy always tried to help the weaker prisoners, especially the intellectuals, by finagling to get them released from hard labor.

In
The Gulag Archipelago
, Alexander Solzhenitsyn singled out Georgy as one of the “genuine aristocrats” in the camps, together with the philosophers, career military men, artists, and scholars: “Because of their upbringing, their traditions, they were too proud to show depression or fear, to whine and complain about their fate even to friends. It was a sign of good manners to take everything with a smile, even while being marched out to be shot. Just as if all this Arctic prison in a roaring sea were simply a minor misunderstanding at a picnic.” Solzhenitsyn writes how Osorgin and these other inmates would laugh and be witty and ready to make light of the absurdity of their situation, all of which was lost on the camp guards. “Georgi Mikhailovich Osorgin used to walk around and mock: ‘Comment vous portez-vouz on this island?’ ‘A lager comme a lager.’ (And these jokes, this stressed and
emphasized independence of the aristocratic spirit—these more than anything else irritated the half-beast Solovetsky jailers.)”