Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (59 page)

Pavel and Praskovya, cold, hungry, and worried about Vasily, suffered through the first winter of war in the Naprudny Tower. By the spring of 1942, they were no longer able to care for themselves and had moved to Tsaritsyno to live with Praskovya’s sisters Olga and Yevfimiya and her niece and nephew, Yelizaveta and Nikolai Obolensky (the orphaned children of Vladimir and Varenka Obolensky). They were not there long before Praskovya died of an illness on June 11. Pavel was grief-stricken and chose not to return to their room in the tower. Ever since the revolution and the death of his father in 1918, Pavel had done everything possible to support the family. So many times throughout his life when he had barely enough food and money to keep himself together, he had sacrificed to help a sister, a cousin, a niece or nephew.

On February 16, 1943, Pavel wrote Anna from Tsaritsyno to wish her well on her name day. He apologized for not having written in some time; he had started many letters to her, Pavel explained, but could never finish them. Because he had no money to send her, it pained him too much to write. “I’m sitting here penniless myself, but just as soon
as I get some money, I’ll immediately send you and Maria a tidy sum. [. . .] I’ve been ill for a long time now.” Four days later, Pavel died. He was seventy-one.
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His sisters-in-law did not know how to get Pavel’s coffin to the cemetery. No one had a car, and they had no money to hire one; nor were they able to find a horse, so they placed his coffin on a sledge, and Olga and her niece and nephew pulled it themselves through the snowy streets to the cemetery. They wanted Pavel buried alongside Praskovya, but the gravediggers refused, saying the ground was too hard and icy, and so they went off and dug a hole somewhere else and dropped Pavel’s coffin into the cold earth.
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February 1943 proved to be an especially cruel month for the extended Sheremetev family.

After his arrest in October 1941 Vladimir Golitsyn was taken to the Dmitrov jail across the street from Lariusha’s school. Yelena brought him some more food and a warm blanket. He was held there briefly before being moved first to Moscow and then to a labor camp in a former monastery in the small town of Sviyazhsk. Situated on the Volga River, Sviyazhsk had been built by Ivan the Terrible as a fort for his troops during the victorious siege of the Tatar capital of Kazan in 1552. It was later the site for one of the decisive battles of the Russian civil war. It was to Sviyazhsk in August 1918 that Trotsky came in his armored train to rally the Red Army as it retreated in the face of the White advance. Trotsky, who once wrote, “An army cannot be built without repression,” imposed discipline with utter ruthlessness. He executed the commander and commissar of a regiment that had abandoned its position and then shot soldiers selected at random from its ranks. “A red-hot iron has been applied to a festering wound,” he proclaimed. The retreat was halted, the army reinvigorated, and the next month Kazan fell to the Red Army.
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Vladimir had been prohibited from writing or receiving letters, and for ten months he had no word from home. He was extremely worried about what might have become of his loved ones in his absence, especially after hearing rumors that Dmitrov had fallen to the Germans. Finally, in late August 1942, he received a postcard from Yelena saying that they all were fine. He wrote back, telling her how relieved he was to have word from them and to know that they were safe. The past ten
months had been hard on Vladimir. “Apparently, I’ve changed a good deal since my arrest,” he confessed to Yelena, “for the men here call me grandfather.” (He was all of forty years old.) He was not informed of his sentence—five years in the gulag—until early September, news Vladimir greeted with “indifference”; he had been expecting to get ten years. “I’ve already been in for one year, so it’ll just be one, two, three Easters here, and then I’ll be home,” he wrote, as much for himself as for his family.
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Back home, the family struggled without him. Yelena found work sewing padded jackets and trousers for the army and gathering peat in the nearby bogs for the power station. The children did their part to help, and the hardship brought everyone closer together. Lariusha never forgot the image of his mother sewing late into the night in their unheated house, the old family portraits surrounding her on the walls, a single flame burning in a heavy old candlestick. After the war, the Soviet government gave Yelena a medal “For Labor Prowess.” In the first months of the fighting, it looked as if Dmitrov would fall to the Germans. Messerschmitts and Junkers screamed overhead, and the air was filled with the growl of antiaircraft guns; burning villages to the west glowed in the night sky. The town was saved on December 6, when Siberian regiments arrived and pushed the Germans back. As soon as it was safe, Yelena set out for Moscow, traveling much of the way over the ice and snow on foot, to let the rest of the family know they had survived the German attack.
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Vladimir’s brother, Sergei, was among those defending Moscow. Mobilized in July 1941, he had taken part in the construction of defensive fortifications around the capital during the battle of Moscow that autumn and early winter. Sergei served at Stalingrad the following year and had made it all the way to Berlin with the Red Army by war’s end, for which he received numerous medals.
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He never suffered any repression and went on in the postwar years to fulfill his lifelong wish of becoming a writer.

While one brother fought foreign invaders, the other fought for his life. Hunger had been a major problem for all Soviet citizens during the war; for the prison population it was a problem of life and death. Conditions for gulag prisoners became much worse after the start of the war; work norms increased just as the food rations decreased. “Enemies of the people” were frequently singled out for extra repressive measures. Camp deaths rose rapidly: the years 1942 and 1943 saw the highest mortality
rates in the history of the gulag. At least 352,560 prisoners died in 1942, approximately one-quarter of all inmates. Between 1941 and 1946, more than 2 million gulag prisoners perished.
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Shortly after arriving at Sviyazhsk, Vladimir came down with pellagra, a common disease in the gulag, caused by a lack of niacin or tryptophan (an essential amino acid). The symptoms include skin lesions, diarrhea, and insomnia; severe cases result in ataxia, dementia, and ultimately death. Vladimir spent most of the last year of his life in the camp’s infirmary. Up until the end, he believed he would get better. He drew hope from the fact that he was being kept in ward No. 18 (No. 19 was for the hopeless cases) and from the chance of seeing his family again:

My dearest wife, will I ever see you again? Do you recall how I studied your face in the final minutes before I left? I felt that we’d not see each other for a long time, but that it would be this long, none of us could have imagined.

My darling! It’s not possible that I’ll turn up my toes here and my life beyond these walls is over. Whatever it takes, I’ll get out of here—oh, how I wish to love you more!

Lariushka! Draw more! Try doing portraits. Draw Mama for me. Mishka, you’ll no doubt be called up soon. Try to get attached to some technical service and learn mechanics. It’ll be of use to you later in life. Yelenka! Don’t get married just yet, you can live with me a bit longer and we’ll work together. And you, my darling wife, I kiss you 1000 times.

My dear one, I’ve been living through my memories. I remember every detail of our daily life as if looking through a magnifying glass. And it’s both depressing and sweet. What sentiments! This year has taught us all a lot.

On November 24, 1942, Vladimir’s father died.

My beloved Mama, of course I have awaited the news of Papa’s death. But it’s so, so sad. When I left you, I parted with him knowing it was forever. But you, my dear old one, live, live for my return. [. . .] Mama, bless your poor son.
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Anna did live, hoping for Vladimir’s return. She lived for another thirty years, in fact, dying in Moscow at the age of ninety-one, though she never did see her son again.

In the final weeks of 1942, the rations in the camp became even worse. For an entire month the prisoners had to subsist on a diet totally devoid of any fats. Vladimir began to imagine the unspeakable. “We must expect the worst,” he wrote to Yelena, “and then if I manage to get out of here, it will be a Miracle! Pellagra is a terrible thing. [. . .] My dearest! We have to see each other once more. We must, but when? I’ve been making a calendar for 1943 and keep staring at the dates. But perhaps I’m to perish here and my life outside these walls has ended. I’ll get out of here somehow. Oh, but how I want to go on loving you.”
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In early 1943, Yelena received notification that Vladimir was soon to be freed. And then came the devastating letter from Sofia Olsufev. Sofia, a cousin of Vladimir’s, had been interned at Sviyazhsk in December. She cared for him in his final weeks. Shortly before his death, Sofia had helped the emaciated Vladimir to bathe, and for a while he felt better but then became weak. She told Yelena of his death in a letter of coded language. “Suddenly, on the morning of February 6, he was sent off from the camp, and so he is now with his father. I can imagine how it grieves you to hear that he has left this place . . . I kiss you all tenderly, and pass along his parting greeting.” A month later, Sofia too was dead. In 1956, the Soviet government acknowledged the charges against Vladimir had been baseless, and he was officially rehabilitated.
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Vladimir’s aunt Eli Trubetskoy was the third family member to die that month. Three of her sons—Andrei, Vladimir, and Sergei—were off at the front, and Eli was living alone with her youngest child, Georgy, aged eight, in a village outside Moscow. Like so many, Eli had been reduced to desperate poverty during the war. At one point she was forced to go from village to village, begging for food; good people showed kindness and would give her a couple of potatoes or carrots and a few slices of bread. Despite her own circumstances, Eli took pity on a war refugee and asked her to come live with her. When the woman found out she was living with a former princess and the wife of an enemy of the people, she began to blackmail her: in exchange for whatever money Eli could scrounge, the woman would keep her mouth shut. In the end, she denounced Eli anyway, telling the NKVD she had heard Eli complain how things had been better under the tsars. Eli was arrested
in January 1943; she barely had time to tell an old neighbor woman what was happening and ask her to go find her daughter Irina, then in a tuberculosis sanatorium, and ask her come fetch little Georgy. Eli was taken to the Butyrki in Moscow, where she died of typhus on February 7. Little Georgy was also sick with typhus at the time (their rooms were overrun with lice), but he managed to survive.
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While walking along an icy street in January 1942, Anna Saburov slipped and fell. She tried to get up but could not stand. She had broken her leg. She lay there for hours, calling for help, but none of the passersby would stop, mistaking her for a drunk. Eventually, she managed to convince some people to take pity. They picked her up, put her on a sledge, dragged her back to her apartment, and laid her in bed. Someone tried to find a place for her in the hospital, but there was no room. Pavel did what he could for her from Tsaritsyno, and some caring neighbors stopped by every few days to check in on her and bring her food; her landlady would not raise a finger to help.
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Xenia became distraught when she heard the news. It grieved her to know her mother was bedridden and she was unable to go to her; she worried Anna would die before her sentence was up.
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Xenia began writing again to the NKVD, asking permission to go to her mother. She pleaded for mercy, saying that her mother was certain to die if she did not get to her soon. Her letters were ignored. By the autumn of 1942, Xenia had begun to entertain the idea of sneaking away and trying to reach Anna in Vladimir illegally. She had to abandon the idea, however, since she was simply too weak from hunger to make the journey. Some days she had no solid food at all; she was often dizzy and suffered from fainting spells. Finally, in March 1943, Xenia was informed her sentence was up, although because of the disruptions caused by the war, it was not until September that she was able to get a train ticket home.
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By the time Xenia reached Vladimir, Anna had been moved to the hospital. She had been saved several months earlier quite by accident when a group of health inspectors turned up at her apartment. The landlady had tried to keep them from entering, but they pushed past her and found Anna. She was immediately taken to the hospital, and a bed was found for her. Out of the fear born from decades of repression, Anna refused to tell them who she was. One of the nurses thought she
had seen her face before. Then it came to her. She had cut out the wedding photograph of Alexander Saburov and Anna Sheremetev published in the
Moscow Leaflet
in 1894 and kept it for some reason all these years. She went home and brought the yellowed picture to show to the doctors. No one could believe it at first. Could this be the same person? they wondered. Anna was in dreadful condition, emaciated and weak. For the rest of her life she was unable to walk. No one ever heard her complain, however. She continued to thank God for everything and told anyone who would listen, “So it must be.”
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After five and a half years apart, mother and daughter were reunited. Xenia took Anna to live with her in a one-room apartment on the edge of town. Anna’s doctor visited them there in 1944: