Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (57 page)

Vladimir Vladimirovich lived until 1969 with his sole remaining
child, Yelena, and her husband. He died at the age of ninety. He spent the rest of his life trying to learn the whereabouts of his son and daughter, although the authorities never told him the truth. For years the only reply he received was that both Alexander and Olga had been sentenced “without the right of correspondence.” In 1974, five years after Vladimir Vladimirovich’s death, the Tomsk Office of Civil Registration sent a letter to his old address stating that Alexander had died on January 13, 1944, of sclerosis of the brain. It was not until 1989, fifty years after their murders and twenty years after the death of Vladimir Vladimirovich, that the truth of Alexander’s and Olga’s deaths was officially acknowledged. As for Natalya Urusov, she too went to her grave never having learned the fate of her sons Andrei and Pyotr.
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After two years in Andijan, Vladimir Trubetskoy had grown tired of life in Central Asia. The initial excitement of its natural beauty and cultural exoticism had worn off, and Vladimir had had enough of the town and the area, with its stultifying heat, relentless mosquitoes, and stinging scorpions. Crime was a problem as well. The town had been plagued by a rash of knifings. A waiter in the restaurant where Vladimir played was stabbed in the heart while waiting tables; the assailant was so skilled with a knife no one even noticed the attack. Vladimir’s work was monotonous and low-paid. “I have no private life and whether I return home in the day or night it’s only to sleep,” he wrote in August 1936 to Vladimir Golitsyn back in Dmitrov. “I’m becoming stupid from all these fox-trots, blues, tangos, and Bostons that seem to be slowly turning me into a quiet idiot.” Regardless, Vladimir still had more than two years remaining on his sentence. “If we’re still alive, then we’re thinking of making our way to some nice place on the sea. [. . .] I need the sea, good fishing, hunting, and taverns, taverns that pay well so I can earn enough to feed my family.”
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His daughter Varya was doing her best to get on with her life. In 1936, she joined the
Osoaviákhim
(Special Detachment of Aviators and Chemists). She took cavalry courses, learned how to shoot and attack with a saber, and began dressing in a Red Army uniform and riding breeches. On January 16, 1937, the Andijan Regional Municipal Soviet of Osoaviakhim issued Varya a certificate on her passing the tests as a “Voroshilov Horseman,” noting that she had been given a grade of “Excellent”
in “Political Training.”
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Andrei observed that his sister had become a “complete Soviet person”; she even bought a six-volume set of Lenin’s writings.
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Vladimir sensed the noose tightening around them in the spring of 1937. He sent a letter in May to the local NKVD to say that he knew people were spreading rumors about him and insisting that none of them were true. He was a loyal Soviet citizen, Vladimir wrote, who wished nothing more than to be left alone to work and care for his wife and children. He was not a counterrevolutionary, nor was he a Trotskyist, a rumor he found especially ridiculous. “It’s absurd to think,” Vladimir wrote, “that some Jew named Trotsky would want to return to some Russian prince the old estates and wealth of his noble ancestors! I have not yet sunk to that level of moral degradation that I would wish to achieve all this with the price of the destruction of my motherland and the blood and suffering of millions.”
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It is not surprising that reading Vladimir’s letter, the NKVD was not about to let him live, for this was not the letter of a scared animal pleading for mercy, but that of a man still unbroken after two decades of repression, a man filled with pride, irony, wit, and humor. For the NKVD, Vladimir’s words were a provocation. Vladimir no longer cared. A year earlier he had made it clear cowering was pointless. “It makes no difference, for they just look at you like some White Guard bastard,” he had remarked.
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On July 29, 1937, the NKVD arrested Vladimir and Varya. Andrei came home that evening to find two men in civilian clothes carefully going through the contents of the family’s apartment. In a letter from Vladimir Golitsyn they found a Nazi swastika that he had used as a shorthand reference to Hitler’s Germany. To the agents, however, this was proof of Trubetskoy’s connection to an underground fascist organization. The arrest warrant described Vladimir as a “former Prince—hereditary noble, former guards officer” and charged him with being in contact with counterrevolutionary elements in Western Europe. Varya was accused of having taken part in the plot to kill Kirov. The pressure against the family grew. On August 28, the NKVD arrested Tatya. Andrei and Leonid Yakushev, Tatya’s boyfriend, went to look for her at the NKVD’s headquarters. From the street they could see her in the window of an interrogation room. An agent noticed them and covered up the window with a newspaper. A short while later Tatya was led out of the building and bundled into a car. She managed to cry out a few
frightened words to Andrei and Leonid before the doors shut and the car drove off. She was never seen again. Andrei left Andijan to tell his brother Grisha, then living in a neighboring town, what had happened. “Well, that’s it,” Grisha said, “that means they’ll soon be coming for me.” Three days later they did. Upon hearing a group of prisoners were being taken to the railway station, Eli went and found Grisha in the crowd. She, along with many others seeking their loved ones, tried to get close enough to say a few words to him, but the guards drove them back with their dogs.

Eli was crushed by the arrests. She told Andrei that she would never see her husband or her three children again. Andrei tried to convince her otherwise, pointing out that his father had been arrested many times before and had always been released, though in the poisonous climate of 1937 he doubted his own words. One morning Eli awoke to find that a cross had mysteriously appeared on the ceiling over Vladimir’s side of the bed. It was a bad omen. She pointed it out to Andrei, saying, “He will never be coming back.” Not long thereafter, a policeman came for Vladimir’s things. Eli told him there was nothing left except some old boots, trousers, and Vladimir’s cello and plastic fife. The man told Eli that Vladimir was soon to be exiled and would need the instruments to earn a bit of money. It was a heartless lie, but Eli was overjoyed at the thought that Vladimir was still alive, and she gave him her husband’s things. A few days later, while walking along Andijan’s main street, Eli and the children passed a secondhand store; there for sale in the dirty front window lay Vladimir’s clothes and musical instruments.

Andrei, a tenth grader, had to continue going to school following the arrest of his father and three siblings. The atmosphere was thick with paranoia and hate. He had to attend meetings at which every pupil was expected to get up and endorse the execution of the country’s enemies. Traitors were being hunted and uncovered everywhere. At school someone discovered the face of Trotsky hidden in the campfire depicted on the pins worn by the Pioneer Youth. The next day the pins disappeared. As the country prepared for elections for the Supreme Soviet in December 1937, Andrei proposed placing a red flag on top of the school since it had been selected as one of the polling stations. The principal approved his idea, and Andrei was sent up on the roof with the flag. It was only when he got to the flagpole and looked down that he realized he could see into the inner yard of the NKVD
headquarters. It was filled with small cells, and he could not help thinking that down there sat his father, sisters, and brother. Maybe, he thought, one of the cell doors would open and he would see one of them. (He, like everyone else in the family, did not know that Vladimir and Varya were already dead.) Andrei noticed how his person had been split in two: at school he continued to be a loyal Soviet subject and take an active role in the witch hunt for enemies of the people; at home he put all this aside to dwell on the fate of his family, never believing for a moment that they were guilty of a thing.
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Vladimir and his children were questioned throughout the late summer and then sentenced on October 1. He and Varya were sentenced to death for preparing a “terrorist act” against Stalin; Tatya, also charged with plotting to kill Stalin, and Grisha, charged with praising fascism, were given ten years in a work camp.

From prison Tatya wrote two letters to Lavrenty Beria insisting on her innocence. How, she pointed out, could she be arrested as a “former princess” when she was born in 1918, a year after the Bolshevik Revolution? “I am twenty years old. I want to study, to live, to be happy and merry, like all honest girls in the Soviet Union. [. . .] I am a child of October. [. . .] My sole ‘guilt’ is that I am the daughter of former Prince Trubetskoy. That I am a Trubetskoy. My social origin was apparently a sore point for the investigative organs of the city of Andijan.” Like other children of former people arrested in the 1930s, she made certain to include Stalin’s own words about how a son does not answer for his father.
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Tatya was sent to a labor camp in the western Urals and put to work in the forests. She survived for several years, but in early 1943 Tatya became ill, and when it became apparent she would not live, she was freed. There was nothing humanitarian about this, just coldhearted accounting. The gulag did not like to report deaths, as this undermined its claim to being devoted to rehabilitation; releasing prisoners at death’s door helped whitewash the horror of the camps. A few of her fellow inmates dug a grave and buried Tatya under a birch cross. She was twenty-four years old.
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In December 1937, Eli wrote to Stalin pleading for the release of her husband and children. She admitted that there was a good deal of “sabotage” in Uzbekistan and that the authorities had to be vigilant, but she protested their innocence. She wrote that they all “loved” and “respected” Stalin and then dared him to arrest the rest of the family,
noting that if her husband and three children truly were “saboteurs,” then she and their other children must be as well.
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But by then it was already too late: Vladimir and Varya had been shot on October 30, 1937. Eli knew nothing of this. It was not until the following year that she received any information about her husband and daughter. The police informed her that Vladimir and Varya had been sentenced to ten years in distant labor camps without the right of correspondence. At the time, victims’ loved ones did not know that this was a perverse lie, NKVD code for execution. The Soviet political police did not have the courage to admit to the truth of its actions.

The sentence, not surprisingly, meant families clung to the slender hope that their loved ones were still alive. They put stock in the slightest rumors of sightings of family members by former prisoners. No one wanted to think the worst. Grisha, who finally returned from the camps a broken man in 1947, recalled how prisoners would tell him that they had seen his father in the Kolyma camps, playing in an orchestra. None of it was true, but who could blame them for not wishing it to be so? It was not until Khrushchev’s Thaw in the 1950s that the real meaning of this Orwellian language became known. It was then, in 1955, that Grisha was rehabilitated; his father and two sisters would only be rehabilitated three decades later. And it was not until 1991, more than half a century after the executions, that the family finally learned the truth of Vladimir’s and Varya’s deaths.

As the mother of eight children, Eli had been entitled to yearly state assistance of two thousand rubles beginning in 1936. To receive the money, however, she had to show proof that all her children were alive. When her three children were arrested, the NKVD took their documents, and Eli lost her subsidy. She went to the bank to explain her situation in the hope of receiving the full sum, but the employee spit at her: “We don’t give money to such mothers!” Eli’s family insisted she leave Andijan, and they scraped together enough money to bring her and the children to the village of Taldom (just outside the one-hundred-kilometer border around Moscow) in 1939 once it became clear there was no more reason to stay.
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On May 1, 1937, the first steamship passed through Dmitrov on the newly opened Moscow-Volga Canal. It was a big holiday, and the entire
city turned out to celebrate this special May Day. Sergei Golitsyn was there, together with his wife, Klavdia, and their two young children. The sight of the gleaming white
Joseph Stalin
gliding through the canal on this unusually warm spring day filled Sergei with pride, and he considered himself fortunate to have taken part in this Soviet achievement.
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Semyon Firin, head of Dmitlag, was not there to mark the occasion. He had been arrested a month earlier along with more than two hundred others from the canal works’ administration on charges of espionage and treason. Almost all of them, including Firin, were shot. The arrests in Dmitrov mounted as the year progressed, but amazingly, the Golitsyns were never touched, and the Great Terror passed over them, although it did strike close. Soon after the canal opening Yelena Golitsyn’s cousin Dmitry Gudovich was arrested as a member of an underground counterrevolutionary fascist organization. He was taken to the Butyrki and executed on July 2.
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Sometime that year, Dmitry’s brother-in-law Sergei Lvov (Merinka’s husband) was also arrested and shot.
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On August 23, Dmitry’s other brother-in-law, Vladimir Obolensky (Varenka’s husband), was arrested in Tsaritsyno and then sentenced to death on October 17 as a Finnish spy. Four days later he was driven to a wooded area a few kilometers outside Moscow known as the Butovo Polygon and shot, one of the more than twenty thousand men and women murdered there between August 1937 and October 1938.
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