Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (9 page)

Whereas Pavel was moving further to the right after 1900, Mikhail was moving further to the left. He took part in secret underground meetings with other liberal nobles to discuss the sorrowful condition of rural Russia and ways to bring equal rights to the peasants. At his Buchalki home, he and his wife hosted weekly gatherings with local teachers at which they read political literature and talked ideas. Mikhail’s activities and political opinions became known to the Tula governor, who pressured him to stop the meetings and placed the Golitsyns under surveillance. By 1905, Mikhail had become convinced of the need for a constitutional order. He was once nearly arrested for meeting with a group of peasants, and the pressure of the government authorities, plus the disapproval of many of his conservative noble neighbors, who by now had come to view him as almost a revolutionary, led Mikhail to quit the zemstvo and to leave Buchalki with Anna and their children for Moscow in 1912.
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Mikhail’s brother Vladimir Vladimirovich was considered the “Reddest” of all the Golitsyn sons. After university he left Moscow to run the family estate of Livny in Orel Province. He too served in the
zemstvo, acting as the chairman of the zemstvo board, and in the local town Duma. As a young man one summer in the countryside he happened to catch sight of a peasant girl, “with big sad eyes and a charming face,” tending a flock of geese. He fell in love with this “rare treasure” and knew someday they had to be married. Tatiana Govorov was a dozen years his junior, uneducated, and ignorant of Vladimir’s world, but regardless they married secretly in 1907. Only after he had helped educate her did Vladimir introduce Tatiana to his family, and they all took to her at once. They settled at Livny and were still there with their three young children (Alexander, Yelena, and Olga) when the revolution broke out in 1917.
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Most in the family could overlook a Golitsyn’s marrying a peasant, but the liberal notions of the mayor and his sons were another matter. Even the mayor’s own wife found their liberalism distasteful and misguided. An unbending supporter of autocracy, she blamed her son Mikhail’s politics on the pernicious influence of the other nobles in the Epifanovsky district, strangely overlooking the influence of his father. Reflecting on these years in 1918, Sofia wrote that such liberal views had been common in their circles: “In those days many liked to act the liberal and so they led us to this current terrible time when everything has been ruined.” The Golitsyn household in the years leading up to 1917 was filled with heated political rows between Sofia and the mayor and their children; no one would back down or even admit that the other side had a valid point. Nevertheless, none of them, she wrote, could have imagined the coming horrors: “We hardly suspected the kind of disaster that was approaching our beloved Motherland.”
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The liberalism of Mikhail and Vladimir Vladimirovich so upset their uncle Prince Alexander Mikhailovich Golitsyn, the mayor’s older, unmarried brother, that he passed them over in his will and left his large estate of Petrovskoe to their brother Alexander. Alexander and his new wife, Lyubov, settled there in 1901. He set up a small free hospital for the peasants and also began work as a surgeon in the hospital at Zvenigorod.
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Sofia and the mayor’s daughters dutifully married into respectable noble families: Sofia (Sonya), their eldest, to Konstantin Lvov, an officer in one of the guards regiments; Vera to Count Lev Bobrinsky, a wealthy
landowner; Tatiana to Pyotr Lopukhin, the brother of Anna Lopukhin, Mikhail Golitsyn’s wife; and Yelizaveta (“Eli”) to Prince Vladimir Sergeevich Trubetskoy. The Trubetskoys were, like the Sheremetevs and Golitsyns, another of Russia’s great aristocratic clans with a distinguished, ancient lineage. Vladimir’s father, Prince Sergei Nikolaevich Trubetskoy, was a noted philosopher, the rector of Moscow University, and a prominent liberal of national reputation. He was chosen by the zemstvos in 1905 to present their appeal for representative assembly and major reforms to the tsar. He spoke before Nicholas on June 6, and the tsar, moved by what he heard, seemed to agree with Trubetskoy’s appeal, though in the end he failed to act. Trubetskoy died a few months later at the age of forty-three in the middle of a fight to ensure the autonomy of Moscow University from the authorities. His funeral attracted large crowds and occasioned violence in the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg. A student speaking at his funeral captured the mood of many: “The death of Trubetskoy proves again that in Russia, great, free men can only die.” Sergei Trubetskoy’s family was talented and well educated. His brother Yevgeny was a religious thinker, writer, and founding member of the liberal Kadet Party, and his son Nikolai became one of the great linguists of the twentieth century.
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Vladimir, however, shared neither his family’s intellectual interests nor its political views. From a young age, Vladimir cared little for his studies, much to his parents’ displeasure. His passion was the military, and after originally flirting with the idea of a career in the navy, he enrolled in the Blue Cuirassier Life Guards Cavalry Regiment. Tall, lithe, handsome, and fearless, Vladimir excelled in the guards, becoming a model officer. He loved what he called the regiment’s “primitive romance”—its tradition and discipline, its fabled history, its standard, its handsome chestnut chargers, its esprit de corps. The highlight of the year were the maneuvers and parades before Nicholas II. The first time Vladimir saw the tsar, he was overwhelmed: “My first, large parade in the summer of 1912 evoked in me a hitherto unknown feeling and ushered in a decisive change in my thinking. I felt, suddenly, that I loved the Emperor with a profound passion, although I did not really consider why. The thought struck me what a great fortune it would be for me to be taken into his brilliant suite.”
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That same summer Vladimir, aged twenty, married Eli, two years his
senior. The subject of his marrying was a concern to the other men in the Blue Cuirassiers, for none of them could choose a bride without the approval of his fellow officers. Any acceptable young lady had to be of noble background; no guards officer was permitted to marry a peasant, a merchant’s daughter, or any other commoner, regardless of her wealth or education. The officers also had to be convinced of her good reputation and virtue as well as the quality of her relations.
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For someone of Eli’s background, this was not difficult, and their marriage marked the union of two illustrious families. The mayor had to admit, however, that his cherished liberalism and pacifism were utterly foreign to his new son-in-law. Vladimir and Eli went on to have nine children in their twenty-five years of marriage before dying many miles apart from each other in Stalin’s dark prisons.

The Golitsyns wintered in Moscow and summered at Petrovskoe or Buchalki. Sergei Golitsyn, the younger of Mikhail and Anna’s two sons, born in 1909, recalled his early years at Buchalki in his richly detailed memoir. Although his family did not have the wealth of the Sheremetevs or Yusupovs, still, Sergei grew up surrounded by servants, who were seemingly everywhere in the manor house and on the grounds. As early as the age of four Sergei knew that he was different from other children. He was a prince, a descendant of Gedymin, and so had to be brave like his ancestors. He knew this in part from what his nanny and his grandmother Golitsyn told him; Sergei secretly liked thinking he was better than the other children his age. His father, on the other hand, was chiefly concerned with his work and was rarely at home, much less tending to the children. From his rather liberal mother, little Sergei learned that the society they lived in was not perfect, that there were good and bad tsars, that resisting the bad ones, as the Decembrists had, was a good thing, and that the reigning tsar was surrounded by some wicked men, especially “Grishka” Rasputin. His mother believed in hard work and made sure her children were each assigned a small plot of the garden at Buchalki that they were responsible for tending. With regard to religion, there was no disagreement in the family: Orthodox faith and belief in God were at the foundation of life and beyond question.
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We belonged to the class of masters, and this order seemed natural [Sergei wrote], in accordance with centuries’ old traditions. True attachment could exist between masters and their people, but at the same time there was always a high invisible glass barrier between them. Some masters were known as liberals, they tried to help the peasants, yet they would never, for example, make their own bed or empty their own chamber pot; and their children were brought up in the same spirit. Once a peasant woman came to see my mother together with her son. I took him by the hand and led him to my sandbox, hoping to play with him, but just then Auntie Sasha [Sergei’s nanny] grabbed me by the arm and took me away with a hiss. Yes, the life of the masters was completely different from that of the peasants.
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This glass barrier was everywhere. The linden tree walk at Buchalki leading to the manor house was only for the masters; servants and others were to stick to the narrow path along the walk’s far left side. Although the villagers and the Golitsyns attended the same church, the masters had their own entrance, which led to a raised and enclosed section, the so-called Princes’ Spot, reserved for them. Distinguishing masters from the people was important, but not always easy. When Pyotr Raevsky appeared in Buchalki in the first automobile—a bright cherry red contraption that terrified the locals with its noise and smoke—the pressing question at lunch was where to seat his English driver. His background, attire (dark goggles, leather helmet and jacket), and obvious skill with this new device seemed to place him above the status of the servants who ate in the kitchen, yet it did not seem quite right to seat him at the table on the veranda with the family and their guests. In the end a compromise was found: the driver ate on the veranda, but by himself at his own table.
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Situations like this suggested the world was changing, though great effort went into denying it. Life was lived according to a set pattern of rituals and traditions that seemed to exist outside time, to have the appearance of being eternal. Life was thoroughly structured and ordered, and there was a familiar, comforting rhythm to the days, months, seasons of the year. The evening meal at the Golitsyns, for example, never varied from the routine. At three in the afternoon, tea was served from the samovar. At six-thirty, Gleb, the mayor’s white-liveried servant, summoned all to dinner with a bell. Around this time, Mikhail
Golitsyn, Sergei’s father, returned from work and joined the other men at a small table for a little vodka (always Pyotr Smirnov, No. 21) and fish or mushrooms before taking their seats at the main table. Grandmother Sofia occupied one end; the mayor, the other. The men sat near him; the women, near her. The guest of honor always sat at the first place to Sofia’s right. A bottle of French Beaujolais stood in front of the mayor; a German Riesling, in front of Sofia. The bread was always black and always sliced into perfect rectangles. Gleb would appear with a large china soup tureen and place it before Sofia, followed by Anton, Sergei’s father’s lackey, bringing the bowls. Sofia would fill each bowl and instruct the servants whom to give it to. The children were served last. Just serving the soup took fifteen minutes. After three courses, Sergei’s father typically got up and returned to work, and the rest remained at the table while Mikhail Mironovich, the cook, stood alongside Sofia in his white cap and wrote down her wishes for the next day’s dinner menu. Finally, everyone got up and retired to the drawing room for coffee, candy, and cookies.
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So great was the respect for tradition at Petrovskoe that nothing in the house could be moved or altered. Even the furniture stayed exactly where it had been placed decades earlier.
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4

THE LAST DANCE

Over two nights in February 1903, the Winter Palace hosted the grandest costume ball in the reign of Nicholas II. The first night featured a concert in the Hermitage Theater with scenes from Modest Mussorgsky’s
Boris Godunov
featuring Fyodor Chaliapin and dances from Tchaikovsky’s
Swan Lake
with Anna Pavlova, followed by a lavish buffet. The second and main night of the ball highlighted the dancing of sixty-five officers of the guards regiments specially selected by the empress, a dinner service, and then more dancing until the early hours of the morning. All of aristocratic society was there: the political elite, the diplomatic corps, and the foreign ambassadors.

The Ball of 1903 was to be imperial Russia’s last great ball. What made it so spectacular and unusual was in large part its special theme. Although held on the two-hundredth-year anniversary of the capital’s founding by Peter the Great, Nicholas chose as the theme for the ball the reign of Peter’s father, Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, and all the guests were instructed to come in costumes from the seventeenth century. Such was the excitement that vast sums of money were spent on designers and the finest tailors to create exquisite outfits of fancy brocades, silks, and satin decorated with gold, pearls, and diamonds. The men came attired as boyars, gunners, falconers, and Cossack hetmans; the ladies, as boyarinas, peasants (elaborately costumed ones anyway), and Muscovite ladies of the court. Some dressed as concrete historical
figures. Count Sergei Sheremetev, for example, came as Field Marshal Count Boris Sheremetev, his great-great-grandfather. The emperor came as Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, and Empress Alexandra, wearing a costume estimated at a million rubles, as Tsaritsa Maria Ilinichna.
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So enormous was its effect that the ball was repeated shortly thereafter at the home of Count Alexander Sheremetev.