Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (8 page)

Pavel’s concern over the crisis facing Russia led him to help found a group called
Beséda
, the Symposium, in Moscow in 1899. Made up of about forty aristocrats active in the zemstvos, Beseda brought together men united by a common question: How to avoid revolution? The group was unique for its diversity of political views, which extended from Slavophile monarchists like Dmitry Shipov, on the right, to Marxist radicals like Prince Vladimir Obolensky, on the left, with room for liberals like Prince Mikhail Golitsyn in the middle. All its members were committed to an honest, open discussion of Russia’s ills, especially the state’s attempts to curtail the influence of the zemstvos, and of the need to secure local self-government. At its first meeting the group declared its main goal to be “the awakening of social activity and public opinion, which are so weak in Russia and have been so artificially repressed, to such an extent that it will have greater authority for Petersburg.”
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Political organizations like Beseda were illegal, and Pavel and his fellow
sobesédniki
knew th is, yet given the lofty status of its members, the state was willing to turn a blind eye. For Pavel, autocracy could coexist with a law-based state that allowed society to organize itself and express its own interests. One of the speeches he gave in 1905 bore the oxymoronic title “Autocracy and Self-Government.”
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The Englishman Bernard Pares met Pavel during this period and heard him speak of Beseda and his ideas for Russia. Pares was greatly impressed, calling him “a brilliant and fascinating young noble [. . .] who
must have been one of the cleverest and most convincing spokesmen of conservatism.”
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Count Sergei recognized Pavel as his spiritual heir. In February 1907, he composed a testament to be read by Pavel upon his death. “I turn to you, knowing your love and your feelings for our native past, knowing your special care and sympathy for our familial history. Preserve these feelings together with your attachment to our holy Orthodox church and our beloved motherland.”
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For the rest of his life Pavel felt the responsibility to Russia and to the family that his father had placed upon him. It later influenced greatly the difficult decision he would have to make about whether to leave Russia.

Anna was the elder of the two Sheremetev daughters. Born at Mikhailovskoe in 1873 and named after Sergei’s much adored mother, she received an excellent education and was gifted with a beautiful voice. Her parents sent Anna to study singing in Italy, and after her return Sergei loved to have Anna sing for guests of the Fountain House. She was a maid of honor at the court of Empress Maria Fyodorovna in the reign of Alexander III, and as a teenager she danced with the tsarevich Nicholas at balls at the Winter Palace.
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One contemporary described Anna as refined and charming and the kind of woman who moved men to spill blood and compose love songs. Aware of her power over men, she enjoyed using it and watching its effect.
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Profoundly religious, she was drawn to mysticism and the spiritual world and believed she possessed the power of prophecy.
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Politically, she agreed with her family’s ideas about Russia’s unique character and considered autocracy the only true system for Russia, although she too complained of Tsar Nicholas’s weakness and lack of courage.
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Still, she was a young woman of her day. She read the monthly
The Women’s Cause
, followed the educational ideas of Montessori, and wondered in her diary whether she was a
feminístka
. She often found society life in St. Petersburg suffocating and longed for a quieter, simpler life in the countryside. When the society hostess Countess Betsy Shuvalov asked Anna to join a new women’s club, she wondered what benefit to society there was in a bunch of aristocratic ladies gathering to drink tea and gossip.
³³
At the family estates of Mikhailovskoe and Voronovo she taught peasant orphans in the village schools how to read and write.
³⁴

In 1894, Anna married twenty-four-year-old Alexander “Alik” Saburov. The young groom did not impress his father-in-law. “Your taste,
not mine,” he informed his daughter, his words in part motivated by his belief that the Saburovs did not measure up to the Sheremetevs, even though the Saburovs were an ancient Muscovite boyar family. Aristocratic society seemed to agree. Anna had been one of the most sought-after young ladies of her day, and most seemed to think she could have made a better match.
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Alik’s father had been a prominent diplomat, and one of Saburov’s grandfathers, Alexander Ivanovich Saburov, had taken part in the Decembrist movement. Alik served in the Chevaliers Gardes, which he found empty and pointless, before being made deputy governor of Moscow in 1902 and then, in 1916, civil governor of Petrograd, as well as master of ceremonies at the imperial court. He spoke German and Italian, played the piano, and was a noted dancer, a particularly popular partner of Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna.
³⁶

Anna and Alik were happy together. They had four children—Alexei (who died young), Boris, Xenia, and Georgy (called Yuri)—with whom they spent summers at Mikhailovskoe and winters on the French Riviera. Shortly before the revolution, Anna and Alik were making plans to betroth Xenia to Grand Duke Fyodor Alexandrovich, the son of Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich and Grand Duchess Xenia, the younger sister of Nicholas II.
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Anna’s younger sister, Maria, born in 1880, was her father’s favorite. Shy, delicate, and religious, Maria was given a fine education at home and showed artistic talent as a painter. Like her sister Anna, she was a maid of honor at court. In 1900, Maria married Count Alexander Gudovich, a former cavalry officer and gentleman of the bedchamber. Among those attending the wedding was Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, governor-general of Moscow and younger brother of Alexander III.
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The grand duke would be blown up by a terrorist bomb outside the Kremlin five years later.

3

THE GOLITSYNS

Tracing their family back to Grand Prince Gedymin, the fourteenth-century founder of Lithuania, the Golitsyns were among Russia’s oldest and most esteemed noble clans. They were also its largest. Under the Muscovite grand princes, the Golitsyns counted twenty-two boyars, more than any other family, and by the end of the nineteenth century the massive family tree had grown to sixteen distinct branches.
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For centuries the Golitsyns had distinguished themselves on the battlefield, at court, in the diplomatic service, and in the arts and sciences. Prince Nikolai Borisovich Golitsyn, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, was a patron of Beethoven’s and the dedicatee of the so-called Golitsyn String Quartets (Opus 127, 130, 132); Prince Boris Golitsyn was one of the founders of modern seismology and the creator of the first electromagnetic seismograph; Prince Dmitry Golitsyn was the first Catholic priest ordained in the United States, in 1795, and for forty years he spread the gospel in western Pennsylvania as the “Apostle of the Alleghenies”; and Prince Nikolai Dmitrievich Golitsyn was the last prime minister of tsarist Russia in 1917.
²

Prince Vladimir Mikhailovich Golitsyn was born in 1847 in Paris. Much of his early years were spent in France, and for the rest of his life he professed a profound love for everything French. French was his first language, and he learned to speak Russian fluently only after returning to his homeland for good in the 1860s. Growing up in France, Prince Vladimir attended the imperial balls of Napoleon III, where he
once met Baron d’Anthès, notorious as the duelist who felled Alexander Pushkin in 1837. In Nice, he met Pushkin’s aging widow, Natalya Goncharova (he found her still quite beautiful), and in Berlin he was introduced to Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck. As a boy he had been presented to Emperor Nicholas I, and on visits to Moscow he shared meals with ancient courtiers from the reign of Catherine the Great and the heroes of Borodino and Austerlitz.
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In 1865, Prince Vladimir enrolled in the faculty of natural history at Moscow University. He was swept up by the optimism during this era of the Great Reforms under Tsar Alexander II. “We all had one cherished wish, one dream,” he wrote in his memoirs, “the continuation and expansion of the recently given freedom.”
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After serving several years in the Moscow City Duma, Prince Vladimir was appointed deputy governor of Moscow in 1883 and then governor of Moscow Province four years later. In 1891, however, he was suddenly and unexpectedly removed from his position by the new governor-general of Moscow, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. Although this was never publicly acknowledged, Prince Vladimir had been fired as punishment for his increasingly liberal views.
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His work in the provincial government had proved to him what he called “the complete vileness” of the autocracy and especially the abuse of power by its officials and the “criminal blindness of the ruling circles.”
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Completely disillusioned with the tsarist political system, Prince Vladimir railed against Russians’ “civil and political ignorance,” which he traced back to the reign of Tsar Paul I (1796–1801), who, in his opinion, began “to teach us to see tsarist power as a form of despotism, personal caprice and proizvol and to consider this the law of power, order, and prosperity.”
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A pacifist who abhorred violence of any kind (he would not hunt, fish, or even pick flowers), Prince Vladimir refused to equate patriotism with blind loyalty and love of the Romanovs; revolted by notions of Russians as God’s chosen people, he called himself a follower of “Pantheism in the spirit of Spinoza and Goethe, whom I idolize.”
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He was ambivalent toward his own social class, preferring what he called “an aristocracy of culture and intelligence, an aristocracy of lofty souls and sensitive hearts.”
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Prince Vladimir returned to public life in 1897, when he was elected mayor of Moscow, a post to which he was to be reelected three times and that established him as a prominent voice for liberal reform and the
defense of the rule of law. As mayor he built schools and hospitals, improved the city’s water supply, began the plans for a city subway system, and helped negotiate the establishment of the Tretyakov Art Gallery. In late 1904, the mayor (as Prince Vladimir will be called in this book) appealed to the government to undo its long-standing repressive measures and to introduce freedom of conscience, the press, and assembly. His appeal was seen in many conservative circles as a direct challenge to the authority of the tsar; progressives hailed him as “the bright Champion of honor and truth.” Minister of the Interior Alexander Bulygin threatened the mayor with legal action, and the right-wing extremist Black Hundreds later blamed him for the revolutionary violence in Moscow that followed in 1905. The government forced the mayor from office by the end of the year. As a show of support, the city Duma voted unanimously to bestow upon him the title of honorary citizen, making him only the twelfth person ever to be accorded the distinction.
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Vladimir married Sofia Delianov in 1871. Sofia spoke five languages, played the piano, and patronized artists such as Isaac Levitan, Leonid Pasternak (father of the writer Boris), and Valentin Serov, as well as the more experimental World of Art and Knave of Diamonds groups. At their Moscow home the Golitsyns hosted a salon for many of the day’s leading creative figures.
¹¹
Between 1872 and 1892 Sofia bore ten children, eight of whom survived to adulthood. All the sons attended Moscow University. Mikhail, the eldest, studied law; Nikolai studied philology and later became the director of the State Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Alexander studied medicine and became a doctor; and Vladimir Vladimirovich studied physics. The elder two daughters, Sofia and Vera, were maids of honor at court. By the outbreak of war in 1914, all the children had married and started their own families.
¹²

Growing up in Moscow, Prince Mikhail Golitsyn and his younger brother Vladimir Vladimirovich were frequent guests at the Sheremetevs’ Corner House, where they took dancing lessons with the children of Count Sergei and Countess Yekaterina. Under the direction of a former dancer of the Bolshoi Theater, the boys and girls learned the classical ballet poses and were taught to waltz, polka, and dance the mazurka. Each lesson ended with a large quadrille. Young Maria Sheremetev was
Vladimir Vladimirovich’s favorite partner. All the grown-ups came to watch them with approving smiles. After the lessons tea and cakes were served and the children were released to play on the grand main staircase or organize games of hide-and-seek throughout the expansive house.
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In 1896, Mikhail left Moscow for the Golitsyn estate of Buchalki in Tula Province, where he was elected chairman of the district nobility and became active in the work of the local Epifanovsky District zemstvo. The following year in Tula Mikhail crossed paths with Count Pavel Sheremetev. The two young men shared many views about the need to expand the power of the zemstvos and to resist the encroachment of the central government in its affairs. Whereas others placed Pavel within the conservative camp, Mikhail found him to be liberal, even leftist, in his political opinions and noticed he was associating with “so-called Reds.” Count Sergei Sheremetev became so upset with his son that he threatened to cut off his allowance; for a time Pavel barely had enough money to get by. In 1900, Mikhail became a member of Beseda and attended its meetings along with Pavel at the Sheremetev homes in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Mikhail remained active in Beseda for several years.
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