Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (56 page)

As for Tatiana Aksakov-Sivers, she ended up in Saratov with a large group of exiled former people. Their big-city clothing made them stand out as they went door to door looking for rooms, and most had trouble finding work as repressed people. One woman survived by selling small paintings with scenes of Leningrad; another by making and selling women’s undergarments through her own small enterprise, which she called the Leningrad Workshop for the Artistic Shaping of the Female Figure. Tatiana scraped together some money by hocking some
curtains saved from the old family estate of Popelyova and a portrait miniature by the noted eighteenth-century artist Vladimir Borovikovsky. In the summer of 1937, a new wave of arrests swept over the exiles in Saratov. The NKVD arrested Tatiana in November and sentenced her to eight years in a corrective labor camp. She was packed into a freight car and sent off in the spring of 1938 with no food and nothing but the clothes on her back. Another ex-Leningrader in her car shared her last onion with Tatiana. This woman was later axed to death by a fellow prisoner after she refused to have sex with him. The trip to the camp took two weeks. At stops along the way, Tatiana tossed out through the small cracks in the siding of the car notes addressed to her father and with a few words imploring whoever picked them up to mail them on. Unbelievably, two of these reached him.
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Tatiana remained in the camps until the summer of 1943.

Operation Former People was a success, and by the end of March 1935
Leningradskaia Pravda
could report a great outpouring of praise from workers at factories across the city for the NKVD and its efforts to clean the city.
WE ARE CLEANING LENIN
’
S CITY OF THE REMAINS OF THE TSAR
’
S MEN, OF THE LANDOWNING AND CAPITALIST RIFF-RAFF
read the headline on March 22. Indeed, between February 28 and March 27, 1935, more than 39,000 people, 11,072 of them former people, had been expelled from Leningrad.
²⁵
So crowded were the city’s railway stations with princes, counts, and the like that a joke was born:

Dialogue overheard at a railroad ticket window in Leningrad:

“Comrade Citizen, what do you think you’re doing jumping the line?”

“Well, I’m a princess!”
²⁶

As in the old days, nobles were being given special treatment, although now of an entirely different sort and for entirely different reasons.

The laughter lasted only so long, however. As late as July of that year, the press was still carrying stories decrying the fact that many former people had somehow managed to escape detection and were still hiding in the city of Lenin.
²⁷

25

THE GREAT TERROR

The Kirov Affair did not end with Operation Former People. Rather, it opened the door to the darkest chapter in Soviet history, the Great Terror. Having rid Leningrad of “Zinovievites,” former people, and other socially alien elements, Stalin and the party leadership expanded the hunt for internal enemies. The international situation was crucial to the origins and logic of the Great Terror. The rise of Hitler’s Germany in the west and the imperialist expansionism of Hirohito’s Japan in the east were quite rightly seen as serious external threats to the Soviet Union. Stalin, however, was arguably more obsessed with the domestic menace. He and others in the party convinced themselves of the existence of a fifth column comprised of closet anti-Soviet elements waiting to attack from within in coordination with the German and Japanese armies. The Great Terror was conceived as a preemptive strike to destroy any remaining internal enemies once and for all.
¹

The Great Terror is most often associated with the destruction of the Old Bolsheviks and the show trials of 1936–38. Tens of thousands of party members from the state bureaucracy, the NKVD, and the military were purged and arrested. The entire high command of the Red Army was wiped out. Everyone, save Stalin, was suspect; enemies lurked everywhere. “We will destroy every enemy, even if he is an Old Bolshevik,” Stalin promised at the height of the terror; “we will destroy his kin, his family. Anyone who by his actions or thoughts encroaches on the
unity of the socialist state, we shall destroy relentlessly.”
²
In 1935, Yenukidze, the secretary of the Central Executive Committee, was denounced for his links to “former people” and accused of permitting White Guards to infiltrate the Kremlin and nearly assassinate Stalin. He was dismissed, expelled from the party, and shot two years later. The NKVD chief Yagoda also fell under suspicion for his lack of vigilance. At the end of September 1936, Yagoda was suddenly sacked as people’s commissar for internal affairs and replaced by his rival, Nikolai Yezhov.

Yezhov, with Stalin’s blessing, encouragement, and, most important, guidance, was the ceremonial ringmaster of the Great Terror, the fifteen-month period from August 1937 to November 1938 known in Russian as the
Yezhóvshchina
. It was Yezhov who had attacked Yenukidze and Yagoda. In August 1936, Zinoviev and Kamenev, together with fourteen others of the “United Trotskyite-Zinovievite Center,” were tried, convicted, and immediately executed in the first of the Moscow show trials. Yezhov helped organize a second show trial the following year and then, in March 1938, a third, final trial of the “Anti-Soviet Block of Rightists and Trotskyites,” after which Bukharin and Yagoda were shot.
³

Although this side of the Great Terror is well known, its much larger side is not. The vast majority of the victims of the Yezhovshchina were in fact not Communist Party members, but ordinary citizens, mostly the same people who had been targeted as enemies for many years. On July 2, 1937, the Politburo passed a resolution titled On Anti-Soviet Elements. According to the resolution, local officials were to be ordered to register, arrest, and, if necessary, shoot all criminals, a term purposely left vague. On July 20, Yezhov issued Order No. 0047—On an Operation to Repress Former Kulaks, Criminals, and Other Anti-Soviet Elements—setting the date for the commencement of the repressive measures as the first two weeks of August. Quotas were set on the expected numbers of “spies,” “traitors,” and “counterrevolutionaries” to be arrested. Although these numbers came from the Kremlin, local leaders frequently exceeded the quotas in an effort to demonstrate their zeal and effectiveness; no one wanted to be seen as lacking the necessary vigilance. By the end of November, approximately 766,000 people had been arrested; nearly 385,000 were executed.

The arrests and executions mounted, and the number of victims
continued to grow well into 1938. Local party and NKVD officials had proved so enthusiastic and successful that the party leadership in Moscow began to talk about “excesses” and “violations of socialist legality.” Stalin decided the repressions had gone far enough, and in November 1938 he forced Yezhov to retire and made him the scapegoat for the terror campaign. He was replaced by the Georgian party boss Lavrenty Beria, who promised a complete reform of the NKVD. On April 10, 1939, Yezhov was arrested. He immediately confessed to being a German spy and having used his position as head of the NKVD to organize a conspiracy to kill Stalin. On the night of February 2, 1940, Yezhov was shot in an execution chamber in the center of Moscow built according to his own design. His corpse was cremated and his ashes were tossed into a mass grave at the Donskoy Cemetery. The Soviet press passed over his death in silence.
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We shall likely never know how many people perished in the Great Terror. According to one reliable estimate, the NKVD arrested 1,575,259 people during 1937–38. Of these, 1,344,923 were convicted, and more than half of them—681,692—were shot. This makes for a killing rate of approximately 1,500 people a day between August 1937 and November 1938.
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The scale of the violence and the fear it instilled in people’s hearts are hard to imagine. Few dared speak of such things or even dwell on them at the time.

Among the victims of the Great Terror were two of Vladimir Vladimirovich Golitsyn’s three children, Alexander and Olga. In 1936, Alexander had been freed after serving three years in a labor camp but was denied the right to return to Moscow. That August he married a woman by the name of Darya Krotov, the daughter of a repressed peasant, in Yaya, the site of his imprisonment. By the end of 1936, Darya was pregnant, and Alexander began to worry that he was yet again being watched by the NKVD. They talked of fleeing somewhere and settled on a small village called Berikul where they might escape notice. But on the way to the train station, Alexander unexpectedly told Darya that he would not be going with her and that she, and the child she was bearing, would be safer without him. He gave her an address in Moscow as she boarded the train, telling her: “Never say a word about me to anyone. Don’t look for me, I will find you myself, if possible. If the
baby’s a boy, name him Vladimir, if it’s a girl, Irina: these are our family names. Always remember what I’ve told you wherever you may be. If it’s absolutely necessary, you have the address. But I ask you, use it only if it’s an extreme emergency.” That was the last time they saw each other. Alexander sent Darya two short letters after that, but only so she knew he was still alive. He traveled illegally to Moscow to visit his father and then left for the Siberian town of Tomsk. He had long dreamed of becoming an actor and managed to land a job in a local theater.

Alexander was joined in Tomsk by his sister Olga and her husband, Pyotr Urusov, in late September after they had narrowly avoided arrest in Alma-Ata. In the summer of 1937, Pyotr, having completed his three-year term of exile in Petropavlovsk, left with Olga for the Kazakh capital, where his brother Andrei and mother, Natalya, were living. On the night of September 24, NKVD agents came to arrest the brothers, but found only Andrei at home. As soon as they had left, Natalya ran to Pyotr and Olga’s apartment to tell them to flee before it was too late. They immediately left for Tomsk to join Alexander. Natalya had saved their lives, although only for a time.

In November, Natalya received word that Andrei had been sentenced to ten years in prison “without the right of correspondence.” Like everyone else, she did not realize that this was a lie meant to cover up his execution, which likely took place in Alma-Ata soon after his arrest. Buoyed by the news, Natalya packed up some food and clothes and set off for Siberia in search of her son. In Novosibirsk she found a train loaded with prisoners and convinced herself that Andrei was on it, even though no one could confirm this. Satisfied Andrei was alive, Natalya traveled to Tomsk to be with Pyotr and Olga. Pyotr had found work in the theater with Alexander, and he and Olga felt safe and settled. It was a happy reunion, and mother and children spent three delightful days together full of love and warmth. Then, on the night of December 23, the NKVD came and arrested Pyotr. The bundle Natalya had intended to give to Andrei she now handed to Pyotr. The agents came back on New Year’s Eve and took Olga. A month later, on the final day of January 1938, they arrested Alexander.
⁶

The NKVD had singled out Tomsk as a center of counterrevolutionary enemies since the early summer of 1937. On June 17, the head of the NKVD for western Siberia wrote Yezhov that he had uncovered a “Monarchist-Kadet-SR organization,” working in conjunction with
Japanese agents, that was planning an armed coup. The organization, called the League for Russia’s Salvation, the report went on, had been founded by former princes Volkonsky and Dolgoruky and several White generals, including one named Sheremetev. They were being aided by noble émigrés as well as former people within the USSR and had set up a large network of underground cells in Novosibirsk, Tomsk, and other cities. Yezhov forwarded the report on to Stalin.
⁷
Over the next few months 3,107 people, many of them former people, were arrested in Tomsk as members of the league; 2,801 of them, including the poet Nikolai Klyuev and the philosopher Gustav Shpet, were shot. Overall, 9,505 people were arrested in Tomsk during the Great Terror, and more than three-quarters of them were executed. Needless to say, the charges against them were groundless fabrications.
⁸

The absurd nature of the charges and the evidence to prove them can be seen in the case made against Alexander Golitsyn. Accused of being a member of the league, Alexander had supposedly been involved in “counterrevolutionary riotous activity.” As proof, the NKVD pointed to his acting, noting that “working on the stage of the Tomsk city theater he acted the roles of heroes in a perverse light and ideologically distorted the inner content of heroes’ roles.” At first Alexander denied the charges, but then he began to sign whatever papers they put in front of him, most likely after having been tortured. Olga too was broken by her interrogators and confessed to having been engaged in “defeatist agitation and the dissemination of monarchist propaganda.” All three of them were shot: Pyotr on January 13, 1938; Olga on March 5; Alexander on July 11.

Alexander’s widow, Darya, meanwhile had given birth to a son a year earlier. She kept her promise to Alexander, naming him Vladimir and telling no one about him for two years. Finally, after having no word from Alexander for a long time, she took the “secret address” and wrote a letter to Vladimir Vladimirovich in Moscow, asking whether he knew where Alexander was and enclosing a photograph of little Vladimir. Vladimir Vladimirovich replied that he too had had no word from Alexander or Olga in years, but he offered to raise the boy. Darya thanked him but refused his offer. In hindsight, she likely should have taken the boy to Moscow, for she would be arrested in October 1941. Little Vladimir somehow survived and later settled in Moscow.