Read Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy Online
Authors: Douglas Smith
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #History, #Biography
Boris was having a much more difficult time adjusting to exile, which he recognized in a letter to their mother. “I have given him the palm to bear some time ago and now I’m happy for him: he’s full of energy and is doing so well, not at all like his brother.” From Samarovo he had been moved to the village of Seliyarov, where he was living in a yurt with a family, paying them what little money he had for room and board. Food was meager, typically nothing more than some broth, fish in aspic, and tea. He was not able to find any work and instead spent most of his day reading religious works, sleeping, writing, and waiting for letters from home. He struggled with depression.
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Anna and Xenia were extremely worried about both of them, and they went to Moscow to see what they could do to help. They sought meetings with various tame Communists, sent appeals, and visited Peshkov. Their efforts, however, proved unsuccessful.
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The months passed, and little changed. The year 1930 gave way to 1931, and Boris and Yuri were still in exile. Yuri’s spirits remained high, and he continued to make the most of his life in this remote corner of Siberia. Nonetheless, he too suffered periods of sadness and regret. It pained him that his fate caused his mother and sister so much grief, and he wrote to them over and over not to worry, to keep what little money and food they had for themselves and not to waste them on him. He also struggled at times with the isolation of exile. “I would so love to know what is happening in the world,” he wrote on April 5, 1931, to his mother.
Being so cut off from life is not usual in any way and does have its humorous aspects, but the main thing one feels is curiosity. [. . .] Time here neither passes nor flies, but rushes past at a gallop. There’s the impression of the days flashing by, like telegraph poles seen from the window of a train. On one hand it’s pleasant, but on the other it’s a bit terrifying. They are vanishing, utterly wasted.
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If Yuri was preoccupied with a lost future, Boris was obsessed with the lost past. By the summer of 1931 he had moved back to Samarovo, where he shared a room with a stranger in the house of an old couple. Still not working, he managed to survive on the money his mother and Yuri sent; he was so poor he could not afford envelopes for the letters he was forever writing his mother, fashioning them out of old newspapers
instead. The longing for his family, and especially his mother, was so intense he sought relief in comforting images of life before the revolution and in a growing religious faith of such intense mysticism that he began to experience visions and hallucinations.
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Boris’s preoccupation with the past apparently had begun in 1926 during his first exile in Irbit. It was there that he had saved a Bible that his roommates had wanted to use to feed their stove. It was an older Bible, printed in 1883, and the date led him to wonder what his mother had been doing then. “It was long ago, isn’t that right?” he asked her. “When this was printed, you were sitting somewhere in the Fountain House, what room did you live in then? Was it the one by the stairs down near Grandfather’s? You once talked about how you loved this room because you had lived in it.”
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He wrote to his mother of his memories of services in the Fountain House church, of sitting and reading with Grandmother Sheremetev “in a field of rye and cornflowers,” of an Easter celebration at Moscow’s Uspensky Cathedral with “a crowd of people,” he seated on the floor staring in wonder at the reflection of the brilliant iconostasis in an old lady’s silk dress.
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He warmed himself with the memory of a trip he took as a child before the Great War with his father through the Swiss Alps (how he had marveled at the long tunnels) and then Lombardy on their way to meet Anna in Florence. “How good it is that people have such memories, and how happy I was just now recalling you and Papa and all of us together! The fruit! The flowers! Florence! Hotel Baglioni!”
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Anna replied: “And I too, Borya, my dear, live in the past through my memories, especially because Papa was with us, because that life was harmonious, unbroken, and whole, and because all of our children were with us.”
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In September, she wrote how that time of the year always reminded her of the apple harvest, of happy gatherings by the samovar.
. . . when Papa would come in around five o’clock in the afternoon from the orchard and drink white wine with peaches and then tea and he would select for himself some crusty bread or rolls. [. . .] How soothing and happy it would make me to see his calm figure again, the way he would slowly smoke his Egyptian cigarettes. [. . .] The sounds of Chopin and Schumann, or Wagner, coming from the other room, Papa swaying at the piano, losing any sense of time or place and just living in a world of sounds, even the walls came to life, everything was filled with life. And I would go off to read in the old pink drawing-room (the one with the fireplace and bust), a fur coverlet from Albania lying across the couch. [. . .] I sat under a palm, surrounded by various old bookcases, shelves, baskets, and other small items, all very old, much from Rome.
Regardless, she counseled Boris of the need to live in the present: “Many live in the past or the future (as we do now), but one must always live in the moment—as long as you are alive, wherever you find yourself, you must fill the space all around you with yourself.” Her children had been fortunate to have had such a happy childhood, “for without that nest and our little corner we would all be poorer. But the time of the vultures is at hand. Soon the land, every home, the waters, everything will have to give up its corpses.” Remarkably, Anna never lost faith in tomorrow, and until her death, despite losing her husband and two of her three children to horrific deaths, she kept her faith in humanity. What is more, she had learned to live without fear; all her fear, she confessed to Boris, had died in the Corner House on Vozdvizhenka in 1918 the night the Cheka took “Papa” away.
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Everything of value has been preserved in us, and the traces left by the good things cannot be wiped out. I am an inveterate optimist. Neither grief nor even a pogrom, nothing at all has the power to destroy that which we hold dear and keep in our hearts.
Borya, we are sad now, we have all been separated, and each of us has his own heavy heart, and along with spiritual troubles we must struggle with physical deprivations that take much of our energies and possibly even our health. But this is nothing. The hidden meaning of my letters to you all, and most often especially to you, is my deep certainty that we must first and foremost master our own struggles and the dramas in our hearts, that is, within ourselves.
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Yes, Boris admitted to his mother, he still did have interests that kept him from being completely cut off from life: he loved literature and wanted to read more of Russia’s great writers; he thought a good deal about art, about Futurism, about the paintings of Uncle Pavel Sheremetev.
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His escape into the past could be explained by recent memories
that “burned” and filled him with horror.
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Boris was overcome with worry for his mother and sister and concerned that the money they sent him made their poor lives that much more difficult.
My wish, my mad wish, that grows with every day is always for you, Xenia, and Yuri to be well, comfortable, and at peace, I’m tormented by this and can barely stand it. Sometimes it makes me crazy. [. . .] Dear Mama, do what you must for yourself! [. . .] I’m well since you support me, but who supports you? It’s hard for me to even think of this, Christ Our Lord may not be far, but who’s close to you?
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Her help unleashed awful memories of the civil war years when they were living together and she would give up her paltry share of food for him. “It’s unpleasant, shameful even, to recall this. Those hungry years on Vozdvizhenka. Why is it no matter how I try I cannot stop thinking about it? I never can.”
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The summer of 1930 found Anna and Xenia in Kaluga. Anna was offered a job teaching singing at the music school on the condition that she promise to stop attending church services and help with the school’s antireligious propaganda. She refused. “I am very sorry,” she told the school director, “but I simply cannot agree to this.” She managed to earn a bit of money giving private English lessons. Xenia found work selling newspapers on the street. She worked a twelve-hour shift most days, and the rest of the time she helped out at the library in a technical college for some extra income.
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For many years Xenia had been keeping a secret from everyone in her family that finally came to light in 1931. After moving to Kaluga in 1924 following the Fox-trot Affair, Xenia had made the acquaintance of an Englishman by the name of George Daniel Page, then working as a language teacher. He was decades older than Xenia, older even than her mother. Regardless, Xenia, then twenty-four, was smitten. They became engaged but agreed not to tell anyone and kept their secret for six years before finally marrying in 1931. When Anna found out about the marriage, she was furious. The marriage, however, proved to be brief, all of one month and five days. Soon after the wedding Page began preparing to leave the Soviet Union to return to England, possibly
because of pressure from the OGPU. He wanted Xenia to come with him, but though she loved him, she refused; she simply could not imagine abandoning her mother while Boris and Yuri were away in exile. On January 2, 1932, Page left the country. Xenia never saw her husband again, although she did correspond with him for many years.
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Though the marriage was short, its consequences for Xenia would be profound.
In 1932, after three years in exile, Boris and Yuri returned home from Siberia. Anna was there in Moscow in December to meet Boris. He was a pathetic sight, weak, exhausted, bedraggled, his feet covered in worn-out galoshes stuffed with straw and held together by twine.
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Reunited, the Saburovs settled in the provincial town of Vladimir and tried to get on with their lives. Tatiana Aksakov-Sivers visited them and could not help noticing how difficult their lives were. All had trouble finding work; they had little to eat and relied on Pavel Sheremetev’s regular gifts of food and money. The four of them looked pale and weak, but at least they were all together at last.
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Life went on in this fashion for four years. And then tragedy befell the Saburovs once more.
In the early-morning hours of April 26, 1936, the NKVD came and arrested Boris and Yuri. “I will never forget Mother’s face,” Xenia recalled almost a half century later, “she came to me, stood in the door way, utterly shaken: ‘Both!’ ” It was all Anna could say. They were sent to the commandant’s office of the Ivanovo NKVD and held in the inner prison there in isolation for months. During the search of the Saburovs’ apartment, the agents had found several Bibles and various books on church history. When his interrogators asked Yuri about his political beliefs, he openly stated, “I am a monarchist.” Both brothers were convicted of counterrevolutionary propaganda and agitation and keeping counterrevolutionary literature—Article 58, Section 10 of the criminal code, just as in 1929. Yuri was also charged with being a member of an underground military organization. The arrests were part of a larger operation in Vladimir. A few days before the Saburovs were taken several clergymen had been arrested. One of them was Father Afanasy, bishop of Kovrov (later canonized), charged with being in contact with the Vatican and White Guards in Ukraine. The brothers were sentenced to five years in a corrective labor camp and
were shipped out of Ivanovo by train sometime in September. Xenia, who had been bringing them food ever since their arrest, was at the station to see them off. Yuri claimed they were “cheerful and in good humor.”
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The brothers traveled to Vologda and then farther eastward to the town of Kotlas. There they were separated. Yuri was sent to a group of camps known as Ukhtpechlag situated in the area of the Ukhta and Pechora rivers in the Komi region of northwestern Russia. Boris was sent to Belbaltlag in Karelia.
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They never saw each other again. Yuri’s route took him farther to the north and east, while Boris rode westerly. He stopped for a period in a transit prison in Leningrad, when he wrote Anna in the middle of October to tell her not worry, for both he and Yuri were “in good health and fine spirits.” Four days later he sent another letter saying:
[I]t has been pleasant to breathe the Leningrad air again [. . .] The familiar sky grows light in the windows, a wet snow fell all day yesterday and today it’s slushy. I can image the wet railings of the Fontanka, the sidewalks, the autumn days. All of this is so close to me, I’ve only to walk out through the prison gates. But since this is impossible, this closeness blurs into something infinitely far away and unattainable.
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Yuri was moved between a number of camps from late 1936 to early 1937. He wrote home on April 19, 1937, from a camp near the railway head of Vetlosyan to say that he had received a few of their postcards but none of the letters, packages, or money they had sent. He felt bad that he had been so long in writing but had been without paper or pencil for a good while. “I am not living too badly, all things considered. So far I have been in three camps, but have never been required to do any heavy labor. I’ve been ill with dysentery. [. . .] Lately, I’ve been making bast shoes—I’ve learned how to weave, though I don’t do any of this myself, but just prepare the bast for weaving. It’s not difficult, of course, and I work in a warm building.” He went on to say that all his clothes had worn out, but they should not bother to send him any since he could get some through the camp authorities, though he would like some tobacco. Other than one or two fellow prisoners he could talk to, the rest were not terribly interesting, and they had few books or newspapers; but still they managed to pass the time in the evenings playing
chess or reading aloud. He ended by expressing his desire to see Boris again.
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