Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (58 page)

To this day, no one knows for certain what happened to Varenka Obolensky. It appears she was arrested on March 3, 1937. According to some in the family, she was shot later that year at the Butovo Polygon, although the most reliable and recent publications do not include her name among the victims; others in the family claim she died of typhus in a Siberian labor camp the following year. According to letters exchanged between family members, it seems many believed Varenka perished in late 1938.
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Two years later, however, a former camp inmate told Varenka’s mother that he had seen her alive in 1939; as late as January 1941, the family was receiving reports of sightings of Varenka in the camps, though these amounted to nothing more than rumors.
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Then, in April 1941, Anna Saburov wrote Xenia to say she had received a letter from a certain “lady” who claimed to have watched Varenka die of tuberculosis in the camps with her own eyes. Anna seemed to want to believe this woman’s testimony, and she herself had been witness to a sign that she was convinced corroborated the letter.

In late 1940, Anna found two butterflies on her windowsill. At first she thought they were dead, but then, when the weak winter sunlight hit them, they miraculously came to life. Anna fed the butterflies drops of honey, and she managed to keep them alive through the entire winter. She had heard somewhere once that in Japan butterflies were thought to be the souls of departed loved ones, and she could not help thinking that she had been visited by the spirits of Boris and Varenka.
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26

WAR: THE END

In Dmitrov, on the morning of June 22, 1941, Vladimir Golitsyn turned on his Pioneer shortwave radio. He picked up a German broadcast and began to listen. Almost immediately he knew their lives were about to be overturned once again: Germany had invaded the Soviet Union. He looked at Yelena and told her what had happened. Yelena immediately set out for the bank. Food was certain to become scarce, and she went to withdraw their savings and buy as much as she could at the market to fill their shelves. There were 250 rubles in their account. All of it belonged to their son Mishka, who for years had been collecting empty bottles and saving the small return money in the hope of eventually having enough for a bicycle. Mishka’s dream would have to wait.

The family had been planning on going fishing that day at their favorite spot on the Yakhroma River, a place they called the meadows. After lunch, Vladimir stood up from the table. “Well,” he said to the children, “are you ready? Who knows when we’ll be able to go to the meadows again.” Accompanying them that day was Yelena’s aunt Nadezhda Raevsky. As they walked to the meadows, Mishka overheard Nadezhda and his father talking. “They’ll start arresting people again,” Vladimir said. “They’ll need political hostages.” They talked of the Butyrki, where both had spent time. “You know, Vladimir,” Nadezhda confessed with a sad grin, “I was calmer in there. You know that they won’t come for you anymore, but out here, you wait for them to come
every day, or every night, that is.” They caught a few perch and bleaks that afternoon and ate them with some roasted potatoes there by the river. It was the family’s last fishing trip. The next day Dmitrov mobilized for war. Accompanied by their loved ones and the sounds of the accordion, men marched down the street to the enlistment office. The entire city seemed to be out-of-doors, singing, dancing, and crying.
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For the fourth time in forty years Russia was at war.
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Each successive war had been more disastrous than the last, and this would be no less true this time, for even though the Soviet Union repulsed Hitler’s armies and eventually crushed the enemy, it came at a staggering cost. The Soviet Union bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine. According to historians, for three years roughly 90 percent of Germany’s fighting strength was directed against the USSR. As Winston Churchill noted, the Red Army alone “tore the guts” from Hitler’s military. Thirty million Soviet men and women were mobilized, and many went off to the front with minimal training and arms. By war’s end in May 1945, the country had lost twenty-five million people: about nine million soldiers and sixteen million civilians. The numbers are rough approximations, conservative ones at that. The scorched earth policy of both the Soviet and German militaries left the country in ruins. Perhaps as much as a third of the country’s physical wealth (towns, villages, livestock, factories, equipment, etc.) was destroyed.
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Vladimir Golitsyn had been right about a new wave of arrests. Indeed, the threat of war had been used as a pretext for years, particularly during the twelve months before the Nazi invasion, when approximately three million Soviet citizens were arrested.
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On July 18, Vladimir’s cousin Kirill Golitsyn was arrested in Moscow and given ten years for anti-Soviet agitation. He served the entire sentence in the camps and was not permitted to return to Moscow until 1955. The NKVD came for Kirill’s father the winter following his arrest. His wife told them they were too late; Nikolai had died just the other day. They did not believe her, so she showed them into his study. There he lay on his desk, an icon in his hands, awaiting his coffin. The agents shook the body to be certain he was dead.
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The NKVD rounded up many remaining former people in the early months of the war. It would be the final act in the Soviet government’s campaign against the nobility, begun nearly a quarter of a century before. Now not just counterrevolutionaries and saboteurs, former nobles were construed as followers of Hitler, defeatists, and traitors. On July 2, the former princess Maria Vasilevna Golitsyn and her husband were arrested on charges of espionage and imprisoned in Zlatoust; he died there in prison, she perished in a camp in the Urals two years later. In August, a granddaughter of Prince Lev Lvovich Golitsyn was arrested in the Ukrainian countryside and shot for harboring pro-German sympathies. The following month, Viktor Meyen, Vladimir Golitsyn’s brother-in-law, was arrested and sent to a prison camp in Kazakhstan. The evidence against him was his surname, which the NKVD assumed was German; his forefathers were, in fact, Dutch. Viktor survived only one year in the camp.
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Vladimir was arrested for reportedly expressing pro-German sympathies on October 22, four months after the outbreak of the war. Around noon two men in civilian arrived at the Golitsyn house and asked to see Vladimir’s passport. They presented an order for his arrest and began to search the house. Mishka was stunned at how calmly the adults reacted to what was happening. He was too young to understand that they had been through this many times before and had been readying themselves for it again. Anna prepared lunch, Mikhail continued to work on his translations (or at least pretended to), and Vladimir gathered up the illustrations he had completed and gave them to Yelena with instructions about where to deliver them. The agents searched and searched but found nothing; after a while it seemed they were simply going through the motions.

Yelena wrapped some food in a sack and handed it to her husband. He put on his black sheepskin coat, and they began their goodbyes. Anna made the sign of the cross over her son, then kissed him and whispered a blessing, followed by Mikhail, then Vladimir’s wife and daughter, and finally his son Lariusha. Mishka followed his father out the door and down Kropotkinsky Street; it was a cold day, and an unforgiving wind chased the remaining leaves from the trees. Neighbors looked out their windows in frightened silence as they passed. After a few blocks, one of the agents, a man named Koryagin, told Mishka to get on home. He protested, but then Vladimir looked at his son and said, “Go,
Mishka.” He hugged Mishka, turned, and walked on. “And I stood there, swallowing my impotent tears and watching,” Mishka remembered. He watched them walk until they disappeared from view. Once they were out of sight, Mishka regained himself. He swore he would someday kill Koryagin, not realizing, as he wrote later, “that he was nothing more than a tiny screw in an enormous machine of violence.”
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Vasily Sheremetev volunteered in the first days of the war. Too young to enlist, he lied about his age and was taken into the home guard and sent to the front as an infantryman. His parents blessed him before he left. During the first few months of the fighting they received the occasional letter from their son, and then in December 1941 Vasily vanished, and they never heard from him again.
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Although seventy-years old and in poor health, Pavel volunteered as a fire spotter at the monastery. Every night he would go out and patrol for German incendiary bombs. One night twenty bombs landed in the monastery; all of them were doused, thanks in part to Pavel’s help.
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Olga Sheremetev was among those killed during the Moscow air raids when a bomb landed near her apartment in a wing of the Corner House on the night of August 12.
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Pavel’s nephew Nikolai Sheremetev also remained in Moscow and spent his nights as a fire spotter on the roof of the Vakhtangov Theater, barely escaping with his life on one occasion. Nikolai talked Cecilia into leaving Moscow to stay with his sister Yelena and Vladimir in Dmitrov. In the early autumn of 1941, the entire Vakhtangov theater company was evacuated to Omsk. Yelena, Vladimir, and the rest of the Golitsyns saw Cecilia to the station in Dmitrov. They watched as the train left that evening to take Cecilia to Moscow, her face, streaked by tears, pressing against the glass. Mishka next saw his uncle Nikolai two years later in Moscow. He looked thin and weak. In May 1944, Nikolai died while out hunting with friends. He had apparently been injecting himself with morphine for some time to numb his chronic pancreatic pain. This time he overdosed. They found him dead on the ground near a bog, his rifle in his arms, an empty vial off to his side. Mishka rode alongside his uncle’s body in the car from Dmitrov to Moscow. He watched as they cremated his remains. His ashes were interred at the cemetery in the Novodevichy Monastery not far from the tower
room of his uncle Pavel and aunt Praskovya. Cecilia was buried alongside him in 1976.
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Pavel’s sisters, Maria and Anna, found themselves separated and alone in the summer of 1941. Maria was then living in Kuibyshev (Samara), taking care of two young grandchildren, Alexander and Sergei Istomin. The previous year she and the boys had watched in horror as their mother, Merinka Gudovich, drowned in the Volga River in front of them. The heavy current pulled Merinka down below the surface, and she vanished. For days the boys searched the banks for her body. It was not recovered for several weeks.
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Maria’s son Andrei had helped her through this tragedy, but then he volunteered in the summer of 1941. Maria died in Kuibyshev in 1945 before Andrei returned home from the war.

Anna was living in Vladimir, renting a room in the home of a cruel woman who delighted in abusing her. Hard as this was, Anna wrote Xenia in the summer of 1941 that it was for the best that she and Yuri were imprisoned far away, for were they free, Yuri would be sent to the front and Xenia would be forced to spend her days digging trenches.
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For a brief moment Xenia had expected to be back in Vladimir with her mother by now. A year and a half earlier, in late January 1940, Xenia had been notified that she was to be released from the labor camp in Plesetsk eight years ahead of schedule. Her wish had come true. Xenia could not believe her good fortune; soon she would be reunited with her mother. When she arrived at the local rail stop, however, the officials informed her that her sentence had not been overturned, merely modified: instead of serving the remainder of her time in the camp, she was being sent into internal exile in northern Kazakhstan for five years. She arrived in the remote steppe village of Presnovka with nothing but her torn coat and a small sack of personal items. Abandoned and alone, Xenia went in search of a place to sleep; eventually she found shelter in a simple dugout that she shared with three peasants.
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Anna was stunned to learn that Xenia was not coming home to her. She urged Xenia to write to the NKVD chief Beria and plead her case. For the next year Xenia, Anna, and even Pavel wrote to Beria, but with no success.
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Anna sent her daughter clothing and food that she could ill afford to part with. Xenia begged her to stop, to keep these things for herself. She wrote with pride, for example, how she had bartered her camp skirt for some flour and how she had gotten a job as a street vendor.
Still, she had to admit she was often hungry. “Sometimes I’m able to earn enough for some bread or even some potatoes and milk, but there are days when I’ve nothing, only boiled water. Nonetheless, I have this inner certainty that this is all just temporary and that everything will be all right. And so my spirits are good, and I’m filled with inner peace.”
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That winter of 1940–41 tested them both. Anna nearly froze to death in her unheated room. At one point Xenia feared she was on the verge of starvation; she could not even find bread to buy and begged her mother to send anything she could spare. With the arrival of spring, Xenia’s spirit revived. She felt certain Yuri would come home to Vladimir any day. Life was looking up again.
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Anna shared her daughter’s hope for the future, even after war broke out. “I am full of confidence that our situation will be reversed and the motherland will be saved,” she predicted in October during one of the worst periods of the war when it looked as if Moscow would fall. “This is a difficult moment, and my heart aches for everyone, but it will end with universal joy at the defeat of the Germans, when all nations will together disarm and banish them for good like some madman, and then a bright new era of peace shall begin throughout the world, a ‘Golden Age’ of sorts and all these nightmares shall be consigned to history. In the meantime, however, we must suffer just a bit more.”
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