Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (60 page)

People who had known the tsars approached the tragic end of their existence. And not one complaint, not one grumble, not one moan. The room had no heat, dinner was rare. They often had no bread. Mother and daughter would go all day without eating. The daughter would spend a few hours at the market trying to sell her things, but no one would buy them, and she would return home when I was there empty-handed. Her mother would console her, saying, “The bad times before the good.”
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Xenia cared for her mother for the rest of her life. Shortly before her death, Anna, delirious, kept seeing visions of her husband and two sons. “They are coming to me,” she would murmur. The day before she died, she gently stroked Xenia’s arm and then pointed upward. “Are you leaving?” Xenia asked, and her mother nodded. On May 13, 1949, Anna Saburov, died in bed surrounded by her icons, Xenia at her side. She was seventy-five. Going through her mother’s things, Xenia found some uncompleted memoirs. Just to be safe, she burned them. Xenia outlived her mother by thirty-five years, dying in the same one-room apartment in the spring of 1984.
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Vasily Sheremetev returned home to Moscow at the end of the war. The details of his war experiences are murky. It seems he had suffered some sort of brain injury during combat and was subsequently taken prisoner by the Germans. According to one source, he managed to escape, joined
the Soviet paratroopers, and ended the war in Vienna. He never received the news of his parents’ deaths and went straight to the Novodevichy Monastery, only to find their door locked and no one at home. He wrote to his Obolensky aunts in Tsaritsyno, and they told him what had happened to his parents. They were amazed to hear from Vasily. “You can feel my joy, my happiness, my exultation that comes from my having lived to hear from you again, to know that you are alive and well, and that you’ll soon be here with us!” Yevfimiya Obolensky wrote him in late June 1945 after receiving his unexpected letter. “Dearest, we embrace you fervently and tenderly for the beloved ones you have lost and for all of us as well. We are full of love and joy at the thought of your soon return to us! In our hearts and minds we are with you forever!”
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Vasily was not the only grandson of Count Sergei Dmitrievich Sheremetev to fight in the war. Indeed, amazingly, he was not even the only “Vasily Sheremetev” to fight on the eastern front. His first cousin Vasily Dmitrievich Sheremetev, who had fled southern Russia in 1919 with his family, also saw action there. Like his cousin Vasily Pavlovich, Vasily Dmitrievich fought out of a sense of patriotism and profound love of Russia. Yet the circumstances of their lives largely determined how they understood this love, for Vasily Dmitrievich did not fight alongside his cousin, but against him or, more accurately, against the Red Army, as a member of a French legion under the German army. Vasily Dmitrievich was wounded outside Moscow and nearly froze to death in the snow in the winter of 1941. A Russian peasant woman took him in and saved his life. It is interesting to wonder whether the two Vasilys ever faced each other in combat.

Vasily Dmitrievich considered it his duty to help free Russia from communism. In this he was not alone, but part of the larger so-called Russian Liberation Movement that comprised White émigrés and many Soviet citizens in the German-occupied lands. Their battle against the Soviet Union can been seen as a final echo of the Russian civil war. Russian opposition to the Stalin regime has long been linked to the name of Andrei Vlasov, the grandson of a serf and a lieutenant general in the Red Army, who was captured by the Germans in July 1942. In captivity Vlasov defected and tried to convince the Germans to make use of widespread anti-Soviet sympathy and support his idea for a Russian liberation army. In the Soviet Union, Vlasov’s name became synonymous with treason, but Hitler’s distrust of Vlasov, and the Russian
Liberation Movement in general, meant his army would never become much more than a grand idea and it played a negligible role in the war. In the spring of 1945, Vlasov was captured by Soviet troops in Austria and taken back to Moscow, where he was convicted of treason and hanged. As for Vasily Dmitrievich, after recovering from his wounds, the Germans sent him to fight in northern Italy. Because he was neither a German nor a Nazi, this was not Vasily’s war, and so he deserted and escaped to his family in Rome.
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Like his cousin, Vasily Pavlovich was one of the fortunate soldiers to survive the war. He was also fortunate not to be arrested after returning home, as happened to many. Andrei Gudovich was arrested and imprisoned, and it was not until 1959 that he was finally rehabilitated and permitted to move to Moscow. Andrei Trubetskoy had been injured and taken prisoner early in the war. Through the intervention of a relative in Lithuania he was freed and brought back to health. He was determined to return to the fighting and managed to make his way through the German lines first to the Russian partisans and then by war’s end to the regular Red Army. Like his brothers Vladimir and Sergei, he came home a decorated war hero, having suffered life-threatening wounds. In 1949, however, after refusing to cooperate with the political police, Andrei was arrested and spent the next six years in the camps laboring in a mine.
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Vasily moved back into his parents’ room at the Novodevichy Monastery. Relatives soon noticed he was not the same person who had left for the front in the summer of 1941. He was profoundly disturbed by the death of his parents and had been traumatized by the war. Nightmares haunted his sleep. He saw a number of doctors and was in and out of psychiatric hospitals, but nothing seemed to help. He studied art and did a little painting. No matter how he tried, Vasily was unable to adjust to normal life. Some in the family called him Don Quixote, others referred to him as a
yuródovyi
, one of those holy fools common throughout Russian history who combine great piety and faith with poverty and bizarre, unconventional behavior. He suffered a stroke at the age of fifty-seven and spent the last ten years of his life paralyzed and unable to speak.
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EPILOGUE

In July 1983, the brothers Mishka and Lariusha (now Mikhail and Illarion, grown men) took a trip to the town of Sviyazhsk. The area had changed since their father, Vladimir, had been brought there in 1941; a dam on the Volga had flooded the land around Sviyazhsk, turning it into a small, steeply sided island reachable only by motorboat from Kazan. The town on the island was still little, no more than a few dozen buildings and houses, a church, and the monastery ringed by a brick wall. A narrow path led along the monastery’s outer wall. Before falling away down to the Volga, the ground beyond the path was riven by several large, uneven depressions covered in tall weeds. These were the camp’s common graves. They were unmarked, and there was nothing to communicate to the unknowing eye the reason for this odd geographical feature. Here, in one of these graves, lay their father.

The labor camp was gone, and the monastery now housed an insane asylum. Mikhail and Illarion were admitted through the main gate into the courtyard. Before them, enclosed in a large metal net, were dozens of inmates, all shaved bald and dressed alike in work clothes. Many sat in odd poses; others were standing still or walking about the ground, now packed down and devoid of grass from their ceaseless wanderings. To Mikhail, the faces appeared expressionless; he found them terrifying. Yet maybe, he thought, these inmates, unaware of
where they were and what had happened to them, were happy in their own way.

As he looked upon them, his mind raced back forty years to a time when the monastery held an entirely different group of prisoners. These men and women had known exactly where they were and what had happened to them, if not always why. He could see before him in the crowd his father: “tall, handsome, but very thin. He was looking through the bars at the church cupolas, at the monastery walls, beyond which flowed the Volga and that near yet distant freedom that he never experienced again.”
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Vsevolod Azbukin, the man in charge of the restoration work at the monastery, led Mikhail and Illarion about the island. He took the brothers to one of the houses and called the woman living there to come out. She was old and round and had what Mikhail described as a “friendly Russian face.” She had been a guard at the camp during the war, and Mikhail was convinced she must have seen their father.

“There were no men then, so they put rifles in our hands,” she told them upon learning the reason for their visit. “We were just sixteen-year-old girls, and they ordered us to guard the prisoners.”

Mikhail asked, “Do you happen to recall a tall man, an artist with a limp?”

She thought for a minute, and then said: “No, I don’t remember. There were so many of them . . .”

There were many indeed. At the beginning of 1941, the NKVD’s corrective labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons held almost 2,500,000 prisoners. By the time the war broke out six months later, the number of persons caught up in the numerous divisions of the gulag likely reached 4,000,000. How many of these poor souls perished and were dumped in unmarked graves like Vladimir will never be known.
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I met Nikolay Trubetskoy on a clear afternoon in September 2010 outside Moscow’s Frunzenskaya subway station, named in honor of the Bolshevik civil war hero Mikhail Frunze. Nikolay, a nephew of Mikhail and Illarion’s and a grandson of Vladimir Golitsyn’s, had agreed to meet and tell me what he knew about his family’s history. We walked upstairs to the TGI Friday’s above the station, where we might sit and have some lunch. For the next two hours, over chicken caesar salads
and bottles of Perrier and under the relentless blare of Western pop music, we talked about his family, about history, about Russia, and its future.

An energetic, intelligent man in early middle age, Nikolay runs a large logistics company in the oil and gas industry that he built himself after first working as a geologist and then a taxi driver in the difficult early 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Despite his obvious success, Nikolay is devoid of any self-made-man bravado. He refuses to take too much credit for what he has managed to create, attributing much of what has happened in his life to God’s inscrutable influence. But there is something else too. Nikolay knows that in Putin’s Russia whatever he builds and whatever capital he manages to amass, be it his business, houses, cars, or money, it can be taken from him as soon as someone with enough power and the right political connections decides he wants it. And he also knows, like every Russian, that should this happen, he is helpless to stop it.

Nevertheless, Nikolay cannot imagine selling his business and leaving Russia for the greater safety and comfort of the West, as many of his partners have tried to convince him to do. For Nikolay his life, and the lives of his family, are too tied to Russia to consider leaving. Material things come and go. His family once possessed large country estates and urban palaces and collections of art. All this was taken from them, and Nikolay has no interest in such things. His decision to remain in Russia is connected to a different form of capital, what he calls the capital of being part of the six-hundred-year-old history of the Trubetskoy family. This is a form of capital, he says, free of vanity, that no one can ever take from him and that he is most proud of; this is the capital—the knowledge of one’s family, its role in Russian history, and one’s duty to one’s ancestors—that he is most adamant on passing about to his children and that keeps him in Russia.

Such an attitude might strike some as irrational, fatalistic, typically Russian. But considering what happened to Nikolay’s family, to the nobility, indeed to Russia itself in the last century, it is easy to see where such thinking comes from. To condemn it would prove only an absence of empathy and blind arrogance, for the events described in this book or, more precisely, the causes behind them, lie beyond reason, as much as we might like to think otherwise. Although the larger causes of the revolution can be accounted for, can anyone say why some perished
and some survived? Why, for instance, was Count Pavel Sheremetev, the sole surviving male of the family and someone who had taken part in monarchist politics before the revolution, allowed to live and die a free man? Why was Pavel’s sister Anna left to die an old woman even though her husband had been imprisoned and shot and all three of her children sent to the gulag, two never to return? Why was Dmitry Gudovich shot in 1938 and his brother Andrei spared? Why did one Prince Golitsyn, Lev, die of typhus while a prisoner of the Reds in Irkutsk in 1920 and another Prince Golitsyn, Alexander, also a prisoner near death from typhus in Irkutsk in 1920, survive, escape Russia, and spend the rest of his life in comfort in Southern California surrounded by his family? Absurd enigmas such as these could be cited over and over. There was a randomness to the violence and repression that speaks to the illogical nature of Russian life in the twentieth century, indeed to the illogical nature of life itself, however much we may wish to think otherwise. There simply is no way to explain why some perished and some survived. It was, and remains, inexplicable. It was chance or, as many Russians would have it, fate.

Of Nikolay’s four grandparents, three died behind bars. Vladimir Trubetskoy was shot in Central Asia in 1937, and his wife, Eli, died of typhus in Moscow’s Butyrki Prison in 1943, the same year Vladimir Golitsyn perished at Sviyazhsk. Only Nikolay’s grandmother Yelena Golitsyn lived a full life, dying of natural causes in 1992, aged eighty-seven. I ask Nikolay whether his grandmother talked much about her life and all that had befallen her family, both the Sheremetevs into whom she had been born and the Golitsyns into whom she had married. Yes, he tells me, she did. What stood out most was the time Yelena told him that three hundred of her relatives had been killed by the Bolsheviks. He once asked her whether she was still angry at their killers and whether she could ever forgive them. I forgave them long ago, she explained to Nikolay, but I will never forget.