Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (83 page)

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Authors: Douglas Smith

Tags: #Non-Fiction, #History, #Biography

BOOK: Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy
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23. Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, grandson of Tsar Nicholas I and commander in chief of Russian forces in the Caucasus from 1915, and Prince Vladimir Emanuelovich Golitsyn (fifth from left, with goggles, staring at the camera). Prince Vladimir took part in the Russian victory at Erzurum in February 1916 and was sent by the grand duke to report the news to the emperor at Tsarskoe Selo. (Courtesy of George Galitzine)

24. A crowd gathers in the streets to watch the burning of the imperial coat of arms in the early days of the revolution. (Photograph © CORBIS Images)

25. Members of the former elite forced to clean snow and ice from the sidewalks of Petrograd under the watch of a Soviet official. (Courtesy of Russian State Archive of Documentary Films and Photographs)

26. Burzhui made to shovel snow while guarded by Red Army soldiers in Petrograd, ca. 1918. (Courtesy of Russian State Archive of Documentary Films and Photographs)

27. A former tsarist officer selling matches on the streets of Petrograd, ca. 1918. (Courtesy of Russian State Archive of Documentary Films and Photographs)

28. Princess Katia Golitsyn with her sons George (left) and Nikolai during the civil war in the northern Caucasus. A Red Army soldier was so taken by George’s beautiful blue eyes that he gave him a fifteen-kopeck piece and called off the search of the family home. A grateful Katia spent the money on a church candle and prayed for the man’s safety. (Courtesy of George Galitzine)

29. The British battleship HMS
Marlborough
anchored off the Crimean coast waiting to take Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna and seventeen members of the imperial family into exile, April 1919. Among those present to see them off were Prince Vladimir Emanuelovich Golitsyn and his wife, Katia. Playmate of the tsarevich Alexei, Princess Sophy Dolgoruky, in hat and braids, stands staring at the camera on the right. (Courtesy of George Galitzine)

30. Golden wedding anniversary of Vladimir and Sofia Golitsyn, Bogoroditsk, spring 1921. Of the twenty-two pictured here, thirteen were to be arrested by the Soviet government, five died or were shot in prison, and five left the country.

31. The wedding reception of Varvara Gudovich and Vladimir Obolensky, Ostafievo, August 7, 1921. Among the guests at the reception table are the groom and bride (seated middle left), flanked by Maria Obolensky (Vladimir’s mother) and Pavel Sheremetev. Across from them are Yekaterina Sheremetev (peering out at the camera) and Boris Saburov (extreme right with cigarette, gazing downward). Standing (in back from left) are Dmitry Gudovich, Nikolai Sheremetev, and Yuri Saburov (partially obscured). Yelena Sheremetev stands in white at the far end of the table, just to the right of the centerpiece. (Author’s collection)

32. The wedding party on the front steps at Ostafievo. The bride and groom are flanked by Maria Gudovich and Pavel Sheremetev. Bottom row, left to right: Yevgeny Lvov, Dmitry Gudovich, Boris Saburov (smoking, legs crossed), Nikolai Sheremetev (in bow tie with head turned). Middle row, left to right: Yuri Saburov (smoking, in white), Pyotr Sheremetev (in sailor suit), Lilya Sheremetev (behind him, in white), Praskovya Obolensky (future wife of Pavel Sheremetev, next to Pyotr in large hat with black bow). (Author’s collection)

33. A photograph of Vladimir Golitsyn and Yelena Sheremetev taken around the time of their wedding in 1923. “It’s as if we were born for one another!” Vladimir said of Yelena the previous year. “There’s no way I cannot love her!” (Courtesy of Alexandre Galitzine)

34. Vladimir Trubetskoy and the writer Mikhail Prishvin hunting near Sergiev Posad, 1920s. (Courtesy of Mikhail Trubetskoy)

35. Vladimir and Yelena Golitsyn with Yelena’s mother, Lilya, and three of her siblings (Maria, Natalya, and Pavel) shortly before they left Russia in 1924. (Courtesy of Andrei Golitsyn)

36. Vasily, Pavel, and Praskovya Sheremetev at the Novodevichy Monastery, ca. 1930. (Author’s collection)

37. Pavel Sheremetev in the Naprudny Tower alongside a photograph of his late mother and surrounded by the remains of the family archive and library that he fought to preserve. (Author’s collection)

38. Vasily Sheremetev in the Naprudny Tower, 1936. (Courtesy of Russian State Archive of Literature and Art)

39. The Sheremetevs and Obolenskys at the Naprudny Tower to celebrate Vasily’s name day, January 14, 1937. Seated, left to right: Yelizaveta Obolensky, Nikolai Obolensky, Vladimir Obolensky, Andrei Obolensky, Pavel Sheremetev. Standing, left to right: Varvara Obolensky (b. Gudovich), Olga Prutchenko, Maria Gudovich (b. Sheremetev), Yevfimiya Obolensky, Vasily Sheremetev, Praskovya Sheremetev. Shortly after this photograph was taken, Varvara and Vladimir Obolensky were arrested and never seen again. (Courtesy of Russian State Archive of Literature and Art)

40. Vladimir and Yelena Golitsyn with their children—Illarion, Mikhail, and Yelena—in Dmitrov, ca. 1930. (Courtesy of Andrei Golitsyn)

41. The mayor and his granddaughter Irina Trubetskoy, late 1920s. (Courtesy of Mikhail Trubetskoy)

42. Maria Golitsyn, her mother, Anna, and her grandfather Vladimir Golitsyn (the mayor) in Dmitrov shortly before his death. (Courtesy of Alexandre Galitzine)

43. Count Naryshkin shown sucking up to Emperor Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra. The caption reads: “
FROM THE BIOGRAPHY OF A GOLD CHASER IN HIDING . . . AND NOW UNDER THE SOVIET REGIME—WITHOUT ANY REGULAR OCCUPATION
.” (
Leningradskaia Pravda
, March 24, 1935)

44. Another cartoon from
Leningradskaia Pravda
during the Operation Former People campaign of 1935. Published together with a collection of articles under the headline
WE WILL CLEAN THE CITY OF LENIN OF THE TSARS
’
REMAINING MEN AND THE LANDOWNING AND CAPITALIST RABBLE, THE CAPTION READS
: “
CLEANING UP THE CITY
.” (
Leningradskaia
Pravda,
March 22, 1935)

45. The nobleman as dirty layabout. The caption is a play on words that means both “on noble mattresses” and “on noble layabouts.” Quoting Mikhail Kalinin’s “Report on Communist Education” and Ivan Goncharov’s classic novel
Oblomov
, the cartoon suggests that despite their books and learning, former nobles are indolent, uncultured, and filthy, perfectly content to live in apartments swarming with bedbugs and too foul even for cats.
(Komsomolskaia Pravda
, November 2, 1940)

46. Xenia, aged thirty-five. (Author’s collection)

47. Boris, aged thirty-eight. (Author’s collection)

48. Yuri, aged thirty-one. (Author’s collection)

49. The actor Alexander Golitsyn was arrested in Tomsk during the Great Terror and shot on July 11, 1938. The charges against him included portraying Soviet heroes onstage in a “perverse light.” (Courtesy of Alexandre Galitzine)

50. Alexander’s sister Olga was arrested in Tomsk on New Year’s Eve, 1937, a week after her husband, Pyotr Urusov. Charged with spreading “defeatist” and monarchist propaganda, she was shot on March 5, 1938. She was twenty-six. (Courtesy of Alexandre Galitzine)

51. The final prison photograph of Vladimir Trubetskoy. He was shot on October 30, 1937, the same day as his daughter Varvara. (Courtesy of Mikhail Trubetskoy)

52. Of all the Trubetskoy children, Varvara (“Varya”) made the greatest effort to fit into the Soviet system. Regardless, she was arrested in July 1937 and charged with having taken part in the plot to kill the Leningrad boss Sergei Kirov. (Courtesy of Mikhail Trubetskoy)

53. The final photograph of Varya Trubetskoy. It was more than half a century until the surviving family members learned that she and her father had been shot in the autumn of 1937. (Courtesy of Mikhail Trubetskoy)

54. Arrested around the same time as her father, her sister Varya, and her brother Grigory, Alexandra “Tatya” Trubetskoy was charged with plotting to kill Stalin and sentenced to ten years in the gulag. The harsh regimen destroyed her health, and she died in 1943 at the age of twenty-four. (Courtesy of Mikhail Trubetskoy)

55. The final photographs of Eli Trubetskoy, taken shortly before her death from typhus in Moscow’s Butyrki prison on February 7, 1943. (Courtesy of Mikhail Trubetskoy)

BEFORE THE REVOLUTION

1. Count Sergei Sheremetev and his younger half brother, Count Alexander, from the 1870s. The uniform notwithstanding, Sergei’s interests ran toward Russian history and culture, while Alexander’s passions were music and firefighting. (Author’s collection)

2. The family of Count Sergei and Countess Yekaterina Sheremetev, the Fountain House, St. Petersburg, early 1880s. Front row, left to right: Pavel, Boris, Countess Yekaterina, Maria, a governess, Sergei. Back row, left to right: Dmitry, Count Sergei, Anna Sheremetev (Count Sergei’s cousin), Pyotr, Anna. (Author’s collection)

3. Alexander Saburov, his wife, Anna, and their children Boris and Xenia, ca. 1900. Musical, deeply religious, and possessed of the kind of beauty that, according to one contemporary, moved men to spill blood and compose love songs, Anna was to know terrible loss: her husband was executed and her two sons perished in the gulag. (Author’s collection)

4. The younger of the two Sheremetev girls, Maria was her father’s favorite. She is shown here in 1899, a year before her marriage to Count Alexander Gudovich. (Author’s collection)

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