Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (55 page)

Calls for action against former people began appearing in the local press even before the operation was officially launched. On February 8,
Leningradskaia Pravda
printed a letter by one Comrade Yakovlev under the heading “A Nest of Nobles.” According to Yakovlev, the apartment building at No. 105/4 Griboedov Canal had been taken over by a gang of
former nobles who were “persecuting the workers and tormenting the Communists” who also lived there. The letter named names (“former baron and landowner Osten-Saken, former princess Putyatin”) and demanded that the nest be destroyed.
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Of course, the views expressed in the Soviet press have to be approached with caution and should not be taken as direct, unfiltered expressions of public opinion. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to think there was no popular support for the wide-scale attack on the former people; indeed, there is evidence to suggest that while not universal, such popular sentiment did exist and was cleverly used, though not manufactured, by the authorities for specific purposes.
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The Yakovlev letter is significant since it highlights one of the problems the authorities were trying to solve by way of Operation Former People—namely, housing. Following collectivization and the rush of peasants fleeing the countryside for the cities, the housing shortage in many urban centers became critical. One way to alleviate the problem was to empty the cities of undesirables. Between 1933 and 1935, 75,388 Leningraders were exiled, or simply shot, freeing up 9,950 apartments and rooms.
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Should anyone fail to see the social benefit from such a policy, a Soviet textbook on housing law from 1935 made the point in explicit terms:

One of the most spectacular demonstrations to the working men of what the Revolution really could mean to them was the moving of people who had been living in the cellars and little shacks out in the poverty-stricken suburbs to the palaces and former mansions of the rich. A worker had only to open his eyes in the morning to realize that something tremendous had happened and to draw the conclusion that as the chief beneficiary he owed allegiance to the cause.
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Employment was also a problem, and the newspapers were full of complaints about the injustice of allowing former people—“obvious class enemies,” as one writer put it—to remain in their places of work. Not only was it wrong that these people were taking jobs from more deserving workers, as many saw the matter, but they could not be trusted; it was widely believed these former people must be surreptitiously engaged in sabotage.
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For some Soviet citizens, attacking the old elite
quenched their thirst for revenge. In late March the newspaper
The Change
published the letter of a worker from the Red Vyborg factory under the rubric “The Horrid Past.” “When they used to beat me,” he recalled of his life in tsarist Russia, “I always wondered—will I ever have my revenge on these vermin? The hounds of the revolution settled the score for me. Many of those I have written about are already no longer among the living. As for those still alive, I am certain that the NKVD will ‘take care’ of them and their friends.”
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At factories throughout Leningrad meetings were held at which workers called for immediate, merciless action. “The Party organization demanded the purging of the mechanic workshop of all ‘former people,’ ” wrote
Leningradskaia Pravda
about the factory Soviet Star on March 9. “With their resolutions the laborers of the city of Lenin approve the actions of the organs of the NKVD and accept the responsibility of raising their revolutionary vigilance to new heights in order to more actively unmask the enemies of the working class,” reported
The Change
. “The honor of living in the great city of Lenin should belong only to workers [. . .] Our horrid past has sunk into oblivion! Never again will these human degenerates—the aristocrats of tsarist Russia—exult over Soviet land. [. . .] We shall clean our great city of any and all counterrevolutionary scum.”
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Leningradskaia Pravda
printed workers’ speeches dripping with outrage over the fact that these “age-old exploiters and bloodsuckers” had managed to stay hidden for so long in the “cradle of the proletarian revolution.” The workers spoke at length about how the nobles had once dressed in gold and kept pet dogs while they had starved and had spit in their faces and even shot them when they had dared go out on strike. And now, having camouflaged themselves, the old nobles were secretly collaborating with foreign powers to undermine the work of “millions of their former slaves” and stop the advance of socialism. “Hitler’s trustworthy allies,” one report called them. These people were not even human, but “venomous chameleons, trying to take on a Soviet appearance,” “tsarist scum,” “poisonous snakes,” “parasites,” “vermin.” Echoing the stories in
The Change
, the workers described in
Leningradskaia Pravda
applauded the efforts of the NKVD and “the Great Leader Comrade Stalin” to clean their city, and they vowed to do their part to sniff out the enemies still hiding at their places of work and in their
homes. “The avenging sword of the proletarian dictatorship should know no mercy,” proclaimed the workers from the Kirov factory.
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Before long former people in Moscow and cities across the country began to fear the witch hunt would reach them.
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By late February 1935, Olga Sheremetev in Moscow was writing in her diary about the “Petrograd pogrom.” On April 1, 1935, the NKVD summoned Olga to appear for questioning at the police headquarters on Petrovka Street. The summons did not surprise her: Pavel Sheremetev had been called in as well the other day. Nonetheless, everyone in her apartment was panicked. Certain she had nothing to fear, Olga took her passport and her work pass and set off to Petrovka. The building was crowded with “old former people of various stripes.” From one of the rooms loud voices could be heard every time the door opened; people were coming out in tears, hysterical, having been told they had one day in which to leave Moscow.

Olga waited for about two hours before being called into an interrogation room. She was seated at a table with a green-shaded lamp; across from her sat a man with an upturned collar and a military service cap, his face hidden by the shadows. He started with the usual questions: name, place of work, home address, length of residence in Moscow, parents’ names and backgrounds, their dates of birth and death, previous convictions or prison terms. The interrogation was punctuated by long, silent pauses; the interrogator would drum his fingers on the table and appear to be staring at her. Olga stared back, refusing to divert her gaze; to calm her shaking hand, she placed it firmly on the table. Two other women were being interrogated at desks on either side of her. One, an old woman in tears, was desperately trying to convince them that she had never been a noble landowner. When her interrogator got up to leave, the woman fell to pieces and started to scream. Olga sensed her own nerves tightening; a lump had formed in her throat. The questioning turned to Olga’s late husband, Boris Sheremetev, arrested in 1918. Then the interrogator got up and left. “I had a feeling everything would be all right,” she later wrote, “but the conversations to either side gave me reason for concern. There were tears and categorical orders to leave within two days, and then as some grand gesture of charity an extension of up to ten days was given. Presently, I began to notice how terribly little air there was in this small, smoky room.” Eventually, the man returned, handed back her passport, and,
with a smile, told her she would be permitted to remain in Moscow and would not be bothered anymore. As she prepared to go, he offered Olga some advice: “You should change your name.”

“So that you could then blame me of being afraid of it and thus changing it,” she replied.

“If you will,” he laughed.

“Of course, my surname does not bring me happiness,” she blurted out, surprised at her own directness.

Why did I say that? Regardless, they had let me go. I walked out and those still waiting to be called looked at me with envy.

I went out into the street. The pleasant spring freshness embraced me and I buttoned up my coat when I should have been taking it off, but I had to walk through the streets and people would stare. I walked for a while without thinking, just breathing and enjoying freedom. But when I reached the boulevard I began to feel that I was terribly tired, and I recalled that everyone at home must be worried about me. I climbed into a streetcar and, as I was riding, I kept thinking, what was the point of that interrogation? What is it for, how does it help the state, and what does it cost?
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Tatiana Aksakov-Sivers was deemed a “poisonous snake.” She was in Leningrad at a friend’s apartment with Vladimir Lvov, one of the noble fox-trotters arrested and exiled from Moscow a decade earlier, on the evening of Kirov’s murder. Two days later she was stunned to read that 120 “hostages” had already been arrested and shot at the Shpalerka Prison. Soon she heard talk of more arrests. On February 1, Tatiana bumped into an acquaintance on Nevsky Prospect who told her that Vladimir’s brothers Yuri and Sergei Lvov (Merinka Gudovich’s husband) had been arrested the night before; not long thereafter, Vladimir was also arrested. The NKVD came for Tatiana on February 11 and took her to the Shpalerka for questioning. “Tell me,” the interrogator asked, “do you know any princes?” She told him she had known many princes in her life, that there was nothing unusual about this, so what was it exactly, she replied, they were getting at? Unhappy with her answer, they locked her up.

In April, Tatiana, the three Lvov brothers, and many others at the Shpalerka were released for the night and told to return the next day to
learn where they were being sent. She and Vladimir Lvov walked out of prison together; after two months inside its walls, the fresh air made her head spin. Between the two of them they had just enough money to split a chocolate bar. When she got home, she found a neighbor who worked for the NKVD had already moved into her room; most of her things had been stolen during a search.
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The next day she and Vladimir met for lunch—a last meal—at the Hotel Severnaya, filling themselves on soup, chicken and rice, wine, and ice cream before setting off for the Shpalerka. The three Lvovs were to be exiled with twelve others to Kuibyshev for five years; Tatiana to Saratov, for the same period.

Instructions notifying all NKVD agents to be on the lookout for potential acts of terrorism and sabotage against hotels and other prominent buildings by former people were issued during the operation, and the police were put on heightened alert to prevent them from escaping the city. The NKVD found many of its victims by combing existing registration records as well as prerevolutionary city guides and old telephone books. None of those arrested held prominent positions in the city administration, army, or police. Typical of the victims were figures like former Prince B. D. Volkonsky, who worked on the floor of the Leningrad Diary Plant; Baroness V. V. Knoring-Formen, a sanitation worker at Cafeteria No. 89; Prince D. B. Cherkassky, an assistant to the chief accountant at the Aurora candy factory; and Count A. S. Lanskoy, a laborer at the factory Electro-Apparatus. Kirill Frolov was apparently arrested for no other reason than having served as valet to Pyotr Durnovo, minister of the interior under Nicholas II.
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Regardless, they and the rest were accused of being members of fictitious groups like the Fascist-Terrorist Group of Former Lawyers, the Terrorist Group of Former Noble Officers and Lycée Pupils, and the Terrorist Group of Former Nobles.

The scholar Dmitry Likhachev, freed from Solovki in 1932, was working at the Academy of Sciences in a department full of former people in the winter of 1935. One day Likhachev happened to pass the head of the personnel department in the hall; pausing, she turned to Likhachev: “I am putting together a list of all nobles here. And I have put your name on it.” Likhachev was panic-stricken. But I’m not a nobleman, he protested; you must cross my name off the list. (His father had been a “personal noble,” a status that did not confer hereditary noble privilege on one’s heirs.) It was too late, she told him. It was a
long list, she had typed up all the names herself, in alphabetical order, and it would be too much work to redo it. Desperate, Likhachev hired someone with his own money to retype the list without his name. A few weeks later Likhachev arrived one day to find their offices practically empty. He asked one of his colleagues if they all had left for a meeting. “What? Don’t you understand,” he was told, “they’ve all been arrested!” Although he had saved himself, nothing seemed the same anymore; even the look of the city appeared altered. “With the exile of the nobility,” he recalled years later, “the cultural face of the city changed. The streets changed their appearance. The faces of the passersby became different.”
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Few were as fortunate as Likhachev. Yelizaveta Grigorevna Golitsyn, the seventy-five-year-old widow of Prince Alexei Lvovich Golitsyn, was arrested in Leningrad along with her daughter and son-in-law. She wrote to Peshkov for help, noting, among other things, that she was a “princess” only by marriage, being “herself more of a proletarian by origin since my father [. . .] was not of noble extraction, but a doctor.” On March 14, they were sentenced to five years, exiled to a remote Kazakh village, and left to fend for themselves. Yelizaveta was too frail to work, and her children were too ill. Not long after their arrival, Yelizaveta suffered a stroke. Their friends kept writing to Peshkov begging for help since they were “dying of hunger.” Their ultimate fate is unknown.
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Prince Vladimir Lvovich Golitsyn, who had fought in the Red Army during the civil war, was sentenced to five years in the Karaganda labor camp in Kazakhstan. He served only two years, however, before being arrested a second time (while still in the camps), charged with “counterrevolutionary agitation,” and shot. Princess Nadezhda Golitsyn, once a maid of honor at court, had worked for a number of Soviet agencies before being exiled to Turkestan, where, in 1938, she was arrested again and executed at the age of sixty-seven.
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