A nurse was preparing a fresh bandage when a group of Chekists, members of the infamous Bolshevik political police, burst into the room. “Can’t you see that the man is dying?” she fussed. It was a gloomy Moscow day on 23 November 1918. Count Sergei Dimitriyevich Sheremetev, the seventy-three-year-old scion of one of Russia’s most famous aristocratic families, was lying in a hospital bed. He had been ill for many years, but now gangrene was slowly spreading up his body and doctors decided to amputate his legs. The Cheka officers retreated from the room, leaving only their leader, Yakov Peters, to see if the man they had come to arrest would survive.
The Chekists drove several vehicles straight from the Kremlin without warning, turned into the courtyard of the corner house where the Sheremetev family lived, and locked the fence gates so that no one could escape. The servants were terrified, as they did not know what was happening. Since Tsar Nicholas II had abdicated the previous year and the old regime had collapsed, the country had descended into chaos and lawlessness. Armed groups, to whom no one knew who they belonged, roamed the streets at night, beating and looting. Once powerful and still wealthy families were their favourite targets.
But the men in black leather coats were not robbers, they had a political mission. The Cheka – All-Russia Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle against Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, as it was officially called, was set up just a few weeks after Lenin took power in Russia. The Chekists then broke into the dining room where the Sheremetev family was having dinner, and someone shouted ‘Roke kvishku’. The adults were locked in the dining room overnight, but the grandchildren were allowed to go to the nannies on the top floor of the house. When the nannies heard what had happened, they dropped the family jewels, sewn in a piece of cloth, into the water reservoir, as they had been ordered to do.
Many members of the Šeremetev family already suspected that something similar would happen, as some of them had already been arrested several times. Yakov Peters, together with the head of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, known as Iron Felix, was the founder of the Cheka, whose ultimate aim was to destroy all “class enemies”, which included all members of the aristocracy, the opposition and opponents of the regime.
The essence of this “red terror” was explained by Peters himself: “Anyone who agitates against the Soviet government will be immediately arrested and imprisoned in a camp. We will destroy the enemies of the working class and they will be smashed by the heavy hammer of the revolutionary proletariat.”
During the night hours, the Šeremete family’s house was ransacked. Furniture, carpets, bed linen and paintings were loaded onto trucks, letters, correspondence and diaries were piled into sacks, and jewellery, gold, jewels and money were stuffed into pockets. Seven family members were also arrested and taken away.
Count Sergei Sheremetev awoke from unconsciousness the next day, spent the following days in a semi-conscious state and died a few weeks later. Shortly before his death, he said: ” I think I am riding on a train that has derailed .” He was buried in the new cemetery near the monastery of Novospaski. He was not allowed to be buried in the crypt of this monastery, where his ancestors had been buried for centuries. The monastery had been turned into a prison by the new authorities.
They say that history is written by the winners, but it is forgotten that history is written more about the winners than the losers. There are more books about the men of the October Revolution than about what happened to the ‘class enemies’. Their fates quickly faded into obscurity, as the public attention was soon drawn to the purges within the Bolshevik Party itself and the horrors of the world wars.
The former Russian aristocracy was expropriated and destroyed between 1917 and World War II, their palaces and estates looted, their members imprisoned, shot or expelled from the country. Some of them, however, adapted to the new situation, their psychological and physical wounds from the loss of the world healed, and they began to find their place in a system hostile to them, the Soviet Union.
It was the Sheremetev and Golitsyn families who felt the blows of the new regime the hardest. Both belonged to the very top of the Russian aristocracy, with roots going back to Catherine the Great. Both suffered terribly during and after the Revolution, and some members left Russia for good, leaving behind letters, diaries, memoirs and photographs that testify to their former glory.
The Golicini – unlike the Šeremete family – were a widespread family branch with as many as twelve separate family trees. While the Sheremetevs maintained close contacts with the Tsarist court in St Petersburg, the Golitsyns were a true Muscovite family and had little contact with the imperial capital in the north of the country. Nevertheless, the families knew each other well, although the Golitsins were more liberal and the Sheremetevs more conservative.
Two of their grandchildren – Yelena Sheremetev and Vladimir Golitsin – fell in love in 1920 and married three years later. Thanks to their large numbers, the Golitsins survived, while the Sheremetevs did not.
Between 1917 and 1941, the Russian nobility experienced several waves of Red Terror. Most of the former nobles concealed their origins or spoke only in whispers, others lied and gave evasive answers about their past. The children of former noblemen born in the 1930s and 1940s had no personal experience of life before the Revolution, and were warned not to delve into the past. It was only in the years after Stalin’s death that the descendants of Russian noblemen began to write occasionally about their ancestors.
At the end of the 19th century, the Russian aristocracy numbered 1.9 million members. They differed in ethnicity, education and wealth. At the top was an elite of perhaps 100 families, who could prove their descent at least from the beginning of the 18th century. Its members held high positions at court and in government, and male descendants served in the elite ranks of the tsarist army.
Princess Sofia Dolgoruki recalled that for her, anyone who was not born into this privileged caste did not exist. “Elle n’ est pas née” was the phrase for the girl who had been born into this select aristocratic club but had no birthright to the name. Beneath this aristocracy was a crowd of noblemen, which was filled out by the ranks of officers and senior officials, or by doctors, lawyers and scientists. Naturally, there were privileges associated with the nobility. When Lenin was deported to Siberia in 1897, he claimed his noble birth in order to make his life easier in Siberia, and in Geneva in 1904 he entered his name in the library as “W. Oulianoff, Russian nobleman”.
Šeremetevi and Golicini
The Sheremetevs were in the service of the Russian Tsar since 1500. Count Sergei Sheremetev also grew up in luxury, enjoyed privileges and was at a young age an adherent of Tsar Alexander III. He loved history and culture, travelled around his many estates and had three houses in St Petersburg and two in Moscow. He was conservative, religious and patriotic. His wife Ekaterina was the granddaughter of Prince Vyazemsky, the poet and friend of Pushkin. They had seven offspring (Dimitri, Pavel, Boris, Anna, Pyotr, Sergei and Maria).
Dimitry and his younger brother Pyotr were both the Tsar’s henchmen, but Pyotr was closest to their father, having studied history at university. Pyotr was a complicated person, and during the revolutionary ferment he was constantly wondering what had happened, who was to blame and how to move forward. Anna was the older of the two sisters, had a beautiful voice and had studied singing in Italy. She found life in St Petersburg suffocating and would have preferred to live in the countryside. In 1894 she married Alexander Saburov. “Not to my taste,” murmured her father Sergei. The younger daughter, Maria, was gentle and deeply religious. When she married Count Gudovich in 1900, several members of the Tsar’s immediate family were present at her wedding.
Prince Vladimir Golitsyn was born in Paris in 1847 and spent many years there before returning to Russia, serving as a member of the State Duma and being appointed Governor of Moscow Province in 1883. A few years later he was deposed, allegedly for being too liberal. He married Sofia Delianov and their eight children went to university. Their young son, Prince Mikhail Golitsin, was a frequent guest at the Sheremetevs’ house, where he learned to dance with Count Sergei’s children. Politically, he was drawn to the left and attended secret meetings to discuss the bad situation in Russia.
His brother Vladimir Vladimirovich was the most “red” of all Golitsyn’s sons. During a visit to one of his estates, he met a peasant girl, Tatyana, who was tending a flock of geese. “She had dull eyes and a beautiful face” and love was there. They married secretly in 1907. The Golitsyn family somehow survived the marriage of their son to a peasant girl, but his liberal views caused quarrels in the family, especially with his mother Sofia.
Other sons and daughters married into respectable noble families. Daughter Yelizaveta chose Prince and Tsarist officer Vladimir Sergeyevich Trubetskoy as her husband. The Trubeckoy family was the third great aristocratic family of Russia. His father was rector of Moscow University and when he died aged only 43, the speaker at his funeral said, “His death is proof that only great and free people die in Russia”.
The Golitsyn family spent their winters in Moscow and their summers on an estate in Buchalka, Tula province. Here she made it clear who was the master. They went to mass in the same church with the villagers, but the Golitsins had a special entrance and a special place in the church. Separating the lord from the common people was important at that time, but not always easy. When the first car appeared in Buchalka, there was the problem of where the English chauffeur would sit at dinner. His knowledge, his dark glasses, his leather jacket and leather helmet made him more than a servant eating in the kitchen, but less than a servant sitting on the verandah with his family. So they set up a special small table for him on the veranda, where he ate alone. Examples like this showed that the world was changing and life in aristocratic Russia still followed the old patterns, rituals and traditions.
In February 1903, the last Grand Imperial Ball was held at the Winter Palace. Everyone who mattered was invited. But the Tsar demanded that everyone should come in 17th century costumes. St Petersburg seamstresses sewed precious costumes night and day. From then on, it was all downhill. In January 1905, on “Bloody Sunday”, the police fired on demonstrators, killing 150, Russia lost the war with Japan, the country was boiling, workers went on strike, peasants revolted and burned estates and mansions, World War I followed, Rasputin was assassinated, and the Tsar and Tsaritsa sought solace in reading, listening to music and playing cards.
The situation became untenable and in March 1917 Nicholas II abdicated the throne, but this did not change the situation. At the request of his relatives in Moscow, Sergei Sheremetev decided to leave Petrograd for a more peaceful Moscow. On 10 April, the train pulled out of Nikolayevskaya station and Count Sergei, at the sight of the crowds, the soldiers armed with rifles and the waving red flags, sighed: “Thank God we are leaving smelly, criminal Petrograd.”
A week earlier, another train had brought Lenin from Finland to Petrograd, who was returning to Russia after 16 years of exile abroad. Russia’s fate was sealed.
The Golic family spent this summer on their property in Bučalka. They read reports in the newspapers about the disturbances in the countryside, and their servant Anton, who usually did not open his mouth, told them that deserters were gathering in the village and pestering the peasants to seize their land. The Golitsyns were the few landlords who spent that summer on their estates in relative peace before returning to Moscow in the autumn. The estate in Buchalka was later burnt down. In any case, at the height of the revolution, theatre tickets in Petrograd and Moscow were nevertheless almost always sold out.
Summer came, the unrest was still not over and the nobility filled their suitcases and headed for the warm south, to the Crimea and the Caucasian hot springs, where nothing revolutionary was happening. In Kislovodsk, many members of Dimitri Sheremetev’s family gathered. Maria Sheremetev and her husband Alexander Gudovich stayed in Petrograd, but later they took refuge in Finland. Life abroad was good until they ran out of money. Then they moved to France and lived in poverty. They died there and were buried in a Russian cemetery in Paris. They were the first members of the Sheremetev family to taste the fate of exile.
Count Sergei Sheremetev’s financial situation began to deteriorate as the Comptroller warned him that the income from the estates was no longer coming into his account and that he did not know where he would get the 75,000 roubles to cover his family’s monthly expenses. Then peasants began to seize or plunder many of the estates of the then “former Count Sheremetev”.
Meanwhile, Count Sergei Sheremetev and his family have returned to Moscow from the countryside. With nothing to do in the countryside, the owner of a neighbour’s estate and his family were murdered by strangers. Yelena Sheremeteva now had to milk the cows and bake the bread herself, and at night they kept watch with loaded guns. Then a peasant woman whispered to them that it was best for them to leave, otherwise nothing good would happen to them. So they left and never came back.
Once in Moscow, Count Sergei was happy that his granddaughter Yelizaveta Sheremeteva and her husband Boris Vyazemsky, whom he disliked, had decided to leave Moscow and go to the Lotarevo estate. But here the situation was tense. In July 1917, the Peasants’ Committee demanded that they give them their land. After much persuasion, Vyazemsky and Yelizaveta were imprisoned in the school, broke into the wine cellar and started drinking. The next day Vyazemsky was dragged to the railway station to be sent to Moscow. But the station was full of escaped soldiers, and when they heard that Prince Vyazemsky was there, they snatched him out of the hands of the guards and beat him to death with stakes.
Yelizaveta managed to escape from her school prison and sneak to the train station disguised as a peasant, where her husband’s bloodied body lay in a freight car. She sat down beside him and sobbed. A peasant girl came by and offered her a bunch of wild flowers to put on the corpse.
Taking power
Autumn 1917 came and the riots continued. An unknown organisation, the Black Hand, appeared in the province of Kursk, calling on peasants to drive landlords off their estates. Russia was on the brink of civil war. On 25 October, Princess Meshchersky went to the Petrograd Opera House. She wrote in her diary that there were some problems with the lights in the theatre, but nothing unusual. That evening the military revolutionary committee of the Petrograd Soviet occupied the power station, the post office, the State Bank and the telegraph office, the main bridges and the railway station. The Provisional Government was so weak that it did not even notice.
The next day, a group of soldiers came to the Winter Palace and arrested the government. No one stood up to them. The looting of the palace began. The soldiers broke into the wine cellar and the crowd swarmed after them. The wine flowed in torrents. The Bolshevik takeover in Moscow did not go as smoothly as in Petrograd. Count Sergei Sheremetev was awakened by gunfire on 27 October as the Bolsheviks occupied the Kremlin; the next day they lost it again. For the next two days, shooting could still be heard near the Corner House, so that Sheremetev was unable to leave the house. Then, suddenly, there was no electricity and the telephone no longer worked. On the third of November, the Red Guards had already stormed the Kremlin and occupied it.
In October, some peasants warned Alexander Golitsyn to leave the Petrovskoye estate and return to Moscow or face arrest. The family arrived in Moscow in the midst of the worst fighting, with bodies still lying in the streets and children crying. The revolution then took its first victim in the Golitsyn family. Four-year-old Tatyana Trubetskoy was suffering from scarlet fever and her uncle, Alexander Golitsin, wanted to bring a doctor to her, but heavy gunfire in the streets prevented them from doing so. Four days later, the girl was dead. The extended Golitsyn family began to gather in concern at Alexander Golitsyn’s house. They had to set up night watches, as the house had been broken into several times by robbers.
The Bolsheviks now had Petrograd and Moscow in their hands, but the countryside still had to be conquered. “There will be no more private ownership of land, all land will be confiscated without compensation and will become the property of all the people”, Lenin argued. The only exception was land cultivated by peasants.
Lenin knew the importance of this decision. The right of the peasants to seize the land of the landlords would destroy the nobility and win the peasants to the plans of the Bolsheviks. All “counter-revolutionary” newspapers were banned and the nobility was stripped of all privileges and titles of nobility. All the people were now just “citizens”.
Olga Sheremetev wrote at the time, “The Bolshevik Revolution is over. They have won and we are under their rule. For how long? There are voices about various counter-revolutions. We are all waiting for something to happen and we are ready for anything.” But nothing good has happened. On 7 December, Feliks Dzerzhinsky was appointed head of the Cheka, the political police of the new regime.
The exodus from Petrograd and Moscow began only after the Bolsheviks took power. But almost none of the aristocracy fled abroad, for the simple reason that no one believed that the new power would last long. The aristocracy that left these two cities bought rail tickets to the Black Sea, the Caucasus or Siberia and other outlying places of the empire, with the intention of returning as soon as the situation had calmed down.
Some of the Golitsyn family started leaving Moscow in autumn. Alexander Golitsyn chose Siberia because some people had told him that it was still quite peaceful there and, above all, there was plenty of food. He left Moscow with his wife and five children on 3 December 1917 and went to Tyumen. They arrived at the railway station three hours before the train was due to leave, to avoid being recognised by the Bolsheviks.
But the patriarchs of the two families, Sergei Sheremetev and Vladimir Golitsyn, who rarely agreed on anything, were unanimous this time that they would never leave Moscow. Everyone around them was leaving the city and they were invited from various parts of Russia to join them. “Go ahead and join the Cossacks,” wrote Count Sergei bitterly.
Rumours that counter-revolutionary forces were already massing in southern Russia, in the territory of the Don Cossacks, Siberia and the Baltic, had a great influence on where anyone would take refuge. As the old year was already saying goodbye, Count Sergei Sheremetev nevertheless wrote some positive thoughts in his diary: “Soon we shall enter the New Year in complete anarchy and bid farewell to the old one, which was so fatal for Russia. We shall still be in good spirits and, full of faith and hope, we shall thank God for everything.”
Lenin wrote in State and Revolution that the main task of the workers’ state is the destruction of the bourgeoisie. He did not say this only in theory, but he also thought that it had to be carried out in practice. The bourgeoisie must be controlled, once their property is taken away they will be forced to live on food stamps and those who refuse to work will starve.
The following year, in October 1918, the Soviet of People’s Commissars issued a resolution demanding that the bourgeoisie start working. Its members were now required to prove every month, by means of special work books, that they had worked for the common good. Those who failed to prove this were not given food vouchers and were not allowed to travel freely in the country. Under the first Soviet constitution of 1918, those who served in the tsarist family or the police were also not allowed to vote, nor were those who lived off the income of capital, priests and merchants.
Then came the order for all bank safe deposit box owners to open them, and special commissions seized everything of value in them. Many Russian aristocrats therefore hid their valuables. Prince Felix Yusupov, with the help of his servant Grigory, had the diamonds and jewels walled up in a secret compartment under the stairs of a Moscow villa. When he left Russia, Cheka tortured Grigory to betray the hiding place, but he remained faithfully silent. The jewellery remained hidden until 1925, when it was discovered when the house was being renovated. Alexandra Tolstoy, the writer’s daughter, hid her jewellery in the bottom of a large flower pot, where it remained hidden for many years.
Meanwhile, Olga Sheremeteva wrote in her diary in September 1918: ‘We are living under the Red Terror. In the last few days there have been many executions in Petrograd and Moscow. They say that it is worse in Petrograd than here, there is hunger and constant arrests.”
Trotsky reacted coldly to the mass executions: ‘There is nothing immoral in the proletariat getting rid of a class that is collapsing. That is its right.” In such an atmosphere of Red terror, Yakov Peters and the Chekists visited the Vogal House and arrested six members of the Sheremetev family. But the arrested were lucky. Ekaterina Sheremetev had come into contact with the head of the Moscow Soviet, Lev Kamenev, through acquaintances. When she entered his room, Kamenev stood up and kissed her hand, politely asking what he could do for her.
Count Sergius died two weeks later. “He died with a deep faith in Russia. Russia will rise again”, he said before his death. Pavel Sheremetev was released shortly afterwards, while the other five family members remained at large until the end of the year. However, the two sons-in-law of the Sheremetev family, Alexander Saburov and Alexander Gurovich, were still in prison. In 1919, they were transferred to a concentration camp, where they met many former noblemen, including Prince Dolgoruki. All three were shot in September 1919.
For a long time, their deaths were unknown to their relatives. Why they were shot never came to light. Anna and her sister Maria, both daughters of Count Sergei, never believed in their deaths. They thought they had been put in a secret prison and prayed for years for their release.
The year 1918 was so difficult that some people from the Corner House, as well as others, were already thinking of leaving Russia. The decision was never easy. Money was needed to leave, and this was no longer available, and it was also difficult to say goodbye to other members of the family. For some, it was also a betrayal of their homeland. Princess Meshchersky’s son reported from abroad to say that he was safe. His mother replied that he was dead to her and the rest of the family.
But if the high aristocracy had known what was in store for them, they would probably not have had such misgivings, as few of their representatives are still alive. The fate of the Princess of Obolensky is instructive. Prince Vladimir Obolensky was killed on his estate in 1918, his brother was shot in Petropavlovsk Fortress a year later, Prince Mikhail Obolensky was beaten to death by a mob in 1918, and Prince Pavel, who served with the Hussars, was shot by the Bolsheviks and thought dead, but somehow managed to make his way to the Crimea, Princess Yelena Obolensky was killed on her estate and her corpse burned with the house, and seven members of the Obolensky family disappeared in Stalin’s purges. Of course, no one could have known what would happen in the future and the decision to leave or not was based mainly on rumours.
Caucasian thermal baths
Dimitry and Ira Sheremetev spent the winter months of 1917/18 with their children in the North Caucasus at the Kislovodsk health resort. This town, like the neighbouring spa towns of Pyatigorsk and Jesentuki, was a popular refuge for the aristocracy from the harsh Russian winter. Life here was pleasant, with tennis, mud baths and theatres. The Revolution was hardly felt here.
But this idyll did not last long, as these cities soon found themselves on the front line between the Reds, the Whites and the Cossacks. The post office was no longer open, rail transport was cut off and towns changed hands. Early in 1918, the Bolsheviks seized Pyatigorsk and demanded that the assembled aristocracy collect five million roubles as a “contribution” to the costs. If this contribution was not forthcoming, they would be imprisoned.
Upon hearing the news, Dimitry Sheremetev fled with his family to Yemen, where it was supposed to be more peaceful. But he was wrong, because it was even worse there, and some men decided to flee the city. In the morning they went to the market in Pyatigorsk, bribed the Cossack women who brought their produce to the market, hid under empty baskets, and so got out of the city and took refuge in the mountains. A few weeks later, in retaliation, the Cheka issued orders for the execution of 32 hostages taken in three health resorts.
Former Moscow Mayor Vladimir Golitsyn was still in Moscow in the spring of 1918 with his wife Sofia, his son Michael, his wife Anna and their children. Mikhail had found a job in a bank, where the salary was not high, but at least it was there. The family lived mainly on bread, potatoes and vegetables. In May, Vladimir and Sofia’s daughter Vera Bobrinski invited them to the Bogoroditsk estate. She told them that there was enough food and that they were protected from the Bolsheviks.
The Bogoroditsk estate was huge. The Bobrinsky family was also among the highest Russian nobility, and the father of the family was Catherine the Great’s illegitimate son by Prince Orlov. Tragedy struck in the summer months when several members of the family became involved in a plot to rescue the former Russian Tsar Nicholas and heir to the throne, young Alexei, from Siberian captivity. One of the leaders of the conspiracy was Mikhael Lopukin, Anna Golitsyn’s brother, who was in charge of carrying out the escape.
The conspirators were already travelling individually towards their destination when they realised that this was mission impossible. All the railway stations on the way had already been occupied by the Red Guards. Fearing that they would soon be discovered, they returned to Moscow. For most of the conspirators, that was the end of the story. But not for Mikhail Lopukin, who began to set up anti-Bolshevik secret organisations in the major cities, made up of former Tsarist officers.
They were without resources, they did not understand the need to cooperate and they did not trust each other, and soon most of the officers were arrested, about 600 in Moscow alone. Many escaped, and Mikhail Lopukin found himself in prison. His sister Anna immediately rushed to Moscow to rescue him. The Bolsheviks Lev Kamenev, Peters and Dzerzhinsky refused to help her. Lopukin could only save himself by publicly renouncing his beliefs. But he refused to do so. In August 1918, he and 40 other prisoners were taken outside Moscow and shot at the Bratskoye cemetery. Anna went to look for her brother’s grave, but found only the cemetery wall pierced by bullets and the body nowhere to be found.
By the late summer of 1919, the White armies were already advancing towards the north of Russia, and rumours spread that the Bolsheviks were taking hostages among the aristocracy and would later shoot them. Vladimir Golitsyn and his son Mikhail knew they had to hide. When the Bolsheviks came for Mikhael, they could not find him, so they arrested Mikhael’s wife Anna and the children. They would only be released when Mihael turned himself in.
Michael did not hesitate and surrendered. He and Vladimir were taken to the camp in Tula, accompanied by Anna and one of her daughters. In the morning and evening, Anna cooked vegetable soup for her father and husband, while they spent the day stacking bricks and working in the fields. After three months of suffering, they were both released. Vladimir Trubecko was also released, but as a decorated officer from the First World War, he was immediately summoned to Moscow and tried to persuade him to join the Red Army.
The Bolshevik takeover and the civil war that followed divided Russian officers. Many officers, like Trubetskoi, refused to take sides, 48,000 officers joined the Red Army, and twice that number fought on the side of the White armies. The Red Army needed trained officers, so they gladly accepted Tsarist officers who wanted to join them. This was the case with Mikhael Tukhachevsky, who defected to the Bolsheviks in 1917 and was an excellent commander in the Civil War. Later he was Chief of Staff of the Red Army and became Marshal in 1935.
Often, members of the same family were on opposite sides. Mikhail Golitsin returned to his family, but because there was no money, he and his wife Anna learned to make felt winter boots, which they did not sell but exchanged for food, while the children picked nettles and clover for soup.
Alexander Golitsyn left Moscow with his family and some friends and arrived in Tyumen in December 1917. During the train journey, they had to worry about deserting soldiers. Most of the urban centres in Siberia went over to the Bolsheviks in the first months. Nevertheless, no major violence was felt and Alexander decided to open a medical practice here. Of course, he immediately dropped the title of prince and was just Dr Golitsin. But in January 1918 a detachment of Red Guards came to Tyumen, deposed the local soviet, took power, banned meetings, confiscated money in bank accounts and began to imprison potential enemies. So they arrested Dr Golitsyn and two of his friends, and when he asked why they arrested him, he was told, “Because you are a prince, a bourgeois, a counter-revolutionary and a white officer.”
Dr. Golitsyn was locked in a train carriage and there he treated the sick Red Guards. In the first week of March 1918, the train moved and nobody knew where they were going. When they arrived in Yekaterinburg, they were not allowed to go on, as word had spread that some princes and ministers of the former Provisional Government were on the train. A threatening crowd gathered around the train and demanded that the prisoners be handed over. Fortunately, after much cajoling, they were just locked up in the city dungeon.
But the Red Guards had to retreat and leave Yekaterinburg and Tyumen. So Alexander Golitsyn returned to his family in Tyumen, stayed there throughout 1918 and part of the following year. Soon, however, the luck of the war turned. General Kolchak’s White Armies suffered defeat after defeat, followed by a headlong retreat eastwards. Alexander Golitsyn dutifully cared for the wounded and retreated with them, but his family could not follow him.
The retreat was in complete disarray, with the troops separating and everyone taking care of themselves first. The marauding bands also retreated, looting, killing and stealing. Trains were held up for weeks at a time, there was no food, dead bodies piled up on the roads and along the tracks, and snow began to fall. Alexander reached Irkutsk and took a job at the Red Army hospital there. He overcame typhoid fever, finally convinced the Cheka agents that he was only a doctor who healed, and got a pass to go to Vladivostok. From there he crossed to Habrin in China in September 1920.
It has been more than a year since he last saw his family. Finally, his family joined him in Harbin. With the Red Cross’s mediation and $300 in his pocket, he travelled to the United States in October 1923 and immediately renounced his Soviet citizenship. His family joined him the following year.
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Headlong flight abroad
By the beginning of 1920, it was clear that the Red Army would be the winner of the civil war, and the exodus of the aristocracy from the southern part of Russia and the Crimea began. After fleeing the North Caucasus, Dimitri Sheremetev’s family somehow managed to make their way to Crimea. At that time, all that remained of the Tsarist family had gathered there, including the Tsar’s widow, Maria Feodorovna, her daughter and Grand Duke Nicholas.
When the sound of cannons could be heard in the distance, the remaining members of the Romanovs were put on board an English warship and taken into exile. On the same day, the Sheremetevs, together with other refugees, sailed on another British ship to Istanbul. As the last outlines of the Crimean coastline disappeared on the horizon, Dimitry Sheremetev listened to the other passengers around him; they were saying that they were only leaving temporarily and would be back in a few months. He knew that this was goodbye forever.
The Sheremetevs spent Easter on a boat with several hundred Russian refugees. By the end of April, they were already in Malta and settled on the French Riviera. They were lucky to take with them shares in an oil company in Baku. They sold them, bought a house in Cap d’ Antibes and stayed there for several years. Alexander Sheremetev later became President of the Association of Russian Nobility in Exile. He died in Rome in 1943 and was buried there. His children, when they grew up, worked in various professions. One became a long sea captain, the youngest was a chauffeur and later bought a small vineyard and inn in the south of France.
The last evacuation from the Crimea took place in November 1920. In just a few days, almost 146,000 refugees were transported by ship to Istanbul. The last to leave Crimea was the white General Wrangel: “May God give us the strength and the wisdom to endure this period of Russian misfortune and survive it,” he said, crossing himself.
When the troops arrived in Crimea, they immediately divided the remaining inhabitants into three categories; those to be shot, those whose place was in the camps, and those who would be spared. It is not known how many of the aristocracy left Russia at that time, but some estimates suggest that no more than 15% of the former nobility remained in the country.
Those who stayed had to muddle through life as best they knew how. Countesses worked as maids, noblemen delivered newspapers, and many stood on the streets selling their last possessions; fur coats, silver spoons, leftover jewellery. People who had never set foot in a kitchen before in their lives learned to cook and wash dishes, to forage for food, to ride in overcrowded buses, to mend shoes and alter clothes, some even learned to steal and to squeeze themselves and their families into just one room.
The remaining members of the Šeremetev family were living in the already nationalised Vogala House. Most of the house was first occupied by a section of the State Archives, then 50 students from the Marks-Engels Institute moved into the third floor. The Šeremetevs had to move to the top floor, so 28 family members shared ten rooms. The corner house thus remained the home of three branches of the family, headed by three widows; Liliya Sheremetev, the widow of Pyotr Sheremetev, Anna Saburov and Maria Gudovich.
Forty-year-old Lily was the real mistress of the rest of the house. When young Sergei Sheremetev came to greet her, she did not shake his hand, but gave it in a kiss. The three widows embodied old Russia and were a bridge to the new generation of Sheremetevs, who were too young to remember the former luxury. The new generation already loved different music, dance and literature, even if they did not reject the lost world of their parents. This allowed them to participate in the rebirth of some of the characteristics of a bygone era.
Young Sergei Sheremetev accompanied his mother to the first Soviet ball at the Corner House. Upstairs, the furniture had been removed from the large room, a piano had been dragged in from somewhere and chairs had been placed along the walls. On small tables were canapés with cheese and sausages and apples, and someone had made a bovlo. All the mothers sat to one side and watched the young people through the lorgnettes, joking, dancing and laughing, going outside to smoke a cigarette. When a young lady came into the room, the boys kissed her hand, the older ones just bowed. For the ladies, a long dress was compulsory. All the dancers were children of aristocrats and therefore “class enemies”. Many faced a tragic future and most did not survive the next ten years.
Decades later, Sergei Sheremetev wrote: “And what were the fates of the participants in this bale? I began to draw up a sad list, read it and shuddered in horror. Most of these young people, especially the men who had partied light-heartedly at the ball, disappeared into the camps and endured the torments of hell. Others emigrated, others were arrested just because of their name.”
But not all of Russia’s aristocracy has been wiped out of public life. For many years the young country still needed trained professionals and bureaucrats, and these were largely former aristocrats. Until 1938, they were an indispensable part of the life of the Soviet state and made up one fifth of the bureaucracy and technical professions. For example, the leadership of the Commissariat of Agriculture employed as many as 35% of the former elite.
It was at these balls of the Corner House that young Vladimir Golitsin and 17-year-old Yelena Sheremeteva fell in love. Vladimir was in a difficult situation, as Yelena had enough admirers and he was an explorer who had spent many months wandering the Arctic regions on expeditions. It was the dances at the Vogal House that gave him the opportunity to get closer to Yelena. They were married in April 1923 in the Church of the Assumption. The whole family and about a hundred guests gathered, and after the wedding the couple went on a wedding trip to Petrograd.
With the end of the civil war and the new economic policy of the NEP, which allowed at least a modicum of entrepreneurial initiative, life seemed to be getting easier. It was a time of relative openness in cultural and artistic life, and even debates within the party were tolerated. Nevertheless, there was a vigilance of the Cheka, ideological control was increased and, importantly, there was no truce towards the enemies of the revolution, real or imaginary.
In January 1924, Lenin, who had been ill since 1922, died. Two months later, Lilya Sheremeteva appeared in tears in the Golitsyns’ apartment. The previous night, the police had come to the Vogal House and taken away her son Nikolai and two of her nephews. These arrests were the beginning of what was known as the “Foxtrot” affair. Almost everyone who attended the dances at Spiridonovka or the balls at the Vogala House was arrested.
Nikolai soon returned from prison with the message that the whole family had to leave the Corner House within three days. They hurriedly gathered a few boxes and crates, threw their belongings in them and offered them to passers-by in the street for a ridiculously low price. The arrests in the “Foxtrot” affair continued and almost all members of the extended Sheremetev family found themselves in Butirskaja’s jail. They all knew that there were only two possible answers during the interrogations. The answer, I am a loyal citizen of the Soviet Union, brought either release or a sentence of internal exile, usually with a sentence of the infamous “minus six”, which meant that they were expelled for several years from the six largest cities in the country – Moscow, Petrograd, Kiev, Kharkov, Sverdlovsk and Tbilisi. Anyone who answered that he was a convinced monarchist disappeared into a labour camp.
For Lilia Šeremeteva, it was more than she could bear. She had been thinking about going abroad for some time. Fifty family members and friends said goodbye to her and her four youngest children on the train to Riga. From Riga they travelled to Paris and finally to Rome. The large family was now divided. Her daughter Yelena and her husband Sergei Golitsin did not decide to leave, as they had just married and were planning to start a family of their own. Yelena saw her mother once more, 42 years later, when she visited her briefly in Rome. When Yelena then returned to Moscow, her mother died a few weeks later, aged 85.
A few months later, a check knocked at the Golice family’s house at night and took away Michael and his son Vladimir. They closed all the entrances to prevent anyone from escaping and started to ransack the apartment. It was only in the early hours of the morning that they made their discovery. Inside a box, they found photographs of Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra at the bottom. Mikhail and Vladimir were pushed into a van, known to the Muscovites as the Black Raven, in which several of the arrested men were already sitting, and taken away. During the interrogation, they were both surprised at how many details of their lives the police knew and suspected that they had a traitor in the family. They were released after friends intervened, but were arrested several more times in the following years on charges of being spies.
Years of trials
In 1921, Ekaterina Sheremetev turned 72. She has suffered a lot in recent years. Her husband was killed, two of her sons-in-law were shot, three of her four sons emigrated with their families, and several other family members died during the Civil War, either from starvation, shooting, disease or simply disappeared. She now lived on the former family estate of Ostafijevo in a small apartment with her son Pavel and his wife.
A year ago, Pavel became a member of the All-Russian Writers’ Association, which brought some privileges, especially more food vouchers. I have always been convinced that it is more right to make my life here, where my home is, and I am sure I am right. I have no intention of leaving, although I would like to return to a normal life,” he wrote to his relatives.
Paul’s words confirm that members of the aristocracy, even from the same families, experienced different fates. This division has caused rifts that are still evident today. Not only did those who stayed and those who left begin to think differently, but individuals who did not leave Russia also thought differently. The fact was that life in Russia was difficult, and some were prepared to face the difficulties. They often found refuge in museums, libraries and archives, where they felt almost safe. They worked as archivists, translators and curators.
Thus Prince Vasily Dimitriyevich Golitsyn became the director of the Rumyantsev Museum and remained so for ten full years, until the authorities decided in the 1930s “to eradicate this poison of the former regime for the benefit of society”. At that time, they began to remove all “foreign elements” from higher education institutions as well. Every student was questioned about his or her origins in front of a committee. “Are you related to Prince Golitsyn?” The correct answer was: “Yes, but I come from a side branch that never had land, we were poor and my parents worked hard all their lives.”
After Lenin’s death, when Stalin took power, the new society began to develop in its own way, independently of the Party. The party leadership began to fear that it was losing control as problems piled up; workers were angry at the poor living conditions, peasants resisted the compulsory handing over of their produce, corruption flourished, even the youth distanced themselves from official politics.
Stalin’s “revolution from above” therefore began in 1928 with a five-year plan to transform Russia from a predominantly agricultural to a highly developed industrial society. A whole series of new industrial enterprises grew up from nothing. Every private initiative was banned, including peasant fairs, but food was nevertheless becoming scarce and foodstuffs, above all bread, were rationalised.
Industrialisation has succeeded, but at a price. Millions died of starvation, especially in the breadbasket of Russia, Ukraine, two million “class enemies” were deported to Siberia and Central Asia, and millions worked in inhuman conditions in mines, forests and digging canals.
In such a situation, former members of the aristocracy had nowhere to hide. They were not only hunted down in the cities, but the countryside, where they had been able to cultivate small patches of land that had once been theirs, was no longer safe for them either. In 1926, collectivisation drove them out of the countryside too. Alexandra Tolstoy was also driven out of Yasnaya Polyana, even though she was a supporter of revolutionary ideas. Despite her famous father and the support of the People’s Commissar Lunacharsky, she was arrested six times. This was too much for her and she left Russia in 1929, never to return.
In January 1929, several hundred family members and friends of the Šeremetev family went to Ostafijevo. Ekaterina Sheremetev died of tuberculosis at the age of 78. Pavel wrote abroad to his brother Dimitri: “Mother was beautiful in her coffin.” This was the last time that almost all the family members who had remained in the homeland were gathered together. This naturally attracted the attention of the authorities, who decided that this nobleman’s nest should be destroyed, as dangerous ideas could develop in it. In the following years, the marriages, births and deaths in the Sheremetev and Golitsyn families attracted the least attention.
In 1929, an article appeared in the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, entitled The Count and His Servants, which directly attacked Pavel Sheremetev. He and his family had to leave Ostafievo , and later the manor house of the estate was completely emptied, the rich library destroyed, the paintings taken to an unknown destination and the furniture smashed.
Paul and his family took refuge in the Novodevichy Monastery in Moscow. Originally a fortress, then housing Orthodox nuns, the monastery’s cells had been converted into accommodation for the students and workers who came to Moscow from all over the world. “They were very nice people and very simple,” one student recalled of Pavel and the family. They were given a small room in the monastery’s tower, but water, toilet and stove were in another part of the monastery. At the beginning, Paul was unemployed, but in his thirties he got a job in the Commissariat of Education.
During these years, the Šeremete clan almost disappeared. Of the princes, only Pavel remains. Family gatherings were small and modest and far from the public eye. In 1935, one of the older members of the Sheremete clan was buried. The funeral procession was led through the streets of Moscow by a young priest holding an icon. Passers-by stopped and stared, some scolded, others threw snowballs at them.
Two years later, they gathered to celebrate the feast of Paul’s son, Vasilios. Seventeen-year-old Pavel stood next to his father, mother and aunt Maria Gudovič. Maria’s daughter Varvara, her husband and children stood behind him. Some of them forced a smile while taking the photo, others looked expressionless. It was the last time they were together. Before the snow melted, Varvara was arrested, then her husband, and both disappeared in Stalin’s purges.
The Golitsyns took it better. In 1929, 75-year-old Vladimir Golitsyn was still receiving monthly remittances from abroad from his son Alexander, who was in Los Angeles. One of his sons worked as a translator, another in a Moscow bank for international trade, a third was an economist at Gosplan, and the other children were studying.
Then the unpleasantness began. One day, Sergei, who was studying literature, came home to see a list of people who had been deprived of all their rights as citizens posted on the door of the house. On the list were all seven members of the Sheremetev family, except for two under-age girls. They were described as “unemployed former noblemen, princes, noblemen or princesses”. All of them had also lost their jobs or the right to study.
This purge of the former aristocracy then swept the country. Some of the Golitsyn clan found their way into jobs as translators or museum staff. The worst hit by the purge was Michael Golitsin, who had previously been employed by Gosplan. When he was looking for a job, they closed the door on him everywhere, saying that socialism would be built without him. This depressed him, he had heart problems, and at night he would lie awake in bed saying, “How are we going to survive! How will we survive!”
A lawyer suggested that he should go to a mental hospital for an examination and perhaps he would be declared unfit for work. That way he could receive at least a minimum level of support. When he got there, however, he saw that the mental hospital was full of healthy people who were hiding there because of their unsuitable biographies or because they were avoiding serving their sentences. Someone kept shouting, “Long live the Tsar!” When Michael told him he was crazy, he replied that he wasn’t. For him, the hospital was the only place where he could say or shout whatever he wanted.
In the autumn of 1929, all the Golitsyns had to move out of Moscow within two weeks. This particularly affected the old Prince Vladimir Golitsyn, who had lived in Moscow all his life. They sold some of their furniture, loaded the rest of their possessions on a horse-drawn cart and drove to the village of Kotovo. Only old Vladimir Golitsyn decided to move in with his daughter Yelizaveta, who was married to Prince Trubetskoi and lived with his family in Sergeyev Posad. Old Vladimir Golitsyn died there in 1932.
Arrests of members of the Golitsyn clan continued. Almost no one escaped. After being released a few months later, they were arrested again a year later. In the end, some of them were sentenced only to a few years’ exile, others had to go to a camp for a few years, and a few were simply shot in the camps. All of them were alleged to have been involved in various plots and to have spread anti-Soviet propaganda.
A better life?
“Life, comrades,” Stalin announced in 1935, “has become better, life has become more cheerful.” Compared with the horrors of the previous years, this was true for many, although life in Russia was by no means cheerful. Restaurants were opening, jazz and the infamous foxtrot were back, silk stockings appeared in the shops and putting up a Christmas tree was no longer a crime. The years of the great Stalinist trials were better spent by the remnants of the aristocratic families than they could have expected, because Stalin wanted to use the trials above all to eliminate the old Bolshevik Guard and the top of the Red Army who might threaten him.
Arrests of members of the Sheremetev and Golitsyn families continued, but they were not involved in major trials. Imprisonment, sentencing, labour in camps and exile to the desolate regions of Russia seemed to them almost normal, something to be accepted. But when Vladimir Golitsyn the Younger learned that the Germans had invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, he was terrified: “Now they will come after us again.”
He was right. A few weeks later, his cousin Kirill Golitsyn was arrested and spent the next ten years in a camp. Then he was arrested too, allegedly for pro-German sympathies. His wife, Yelena Sheremeteva, brought him some food and a warm blanket to the prison, and he was sent to a camp on the Volga River, where he died of illness in 1943.
Vasily Sheremetev volunteered for the army immediately after the German attack. Because he was too young for it, he lied about his age. His parents received letters from him for a while, but after December 1941 they were gone. His father, Pavel Sheremetev, was desperate with grief and weak from hunger. He had spent his whole life caring for his family, but now he was no longer able to do so. He died in the winter of 1943, and his wife died the year before him.
His sister Olga didn’t have the money to take his coffin to the cemetery, so they loaded it on a sledge and dragged it through the snow to the cemetery. There, the gravedigger told them that the ground was too cold to dig a hole, so they dug a grave somewhere else and covered it with earth. Vasilij Šeremetev survived the war, was wounded and captured by the Germans, but escaped and joined the Soviet troops. He lived to see the end of the war in Vienna.
He didn’t know what had happened to his parents at the time. Immediately after the end of the war, he went to the Novodevichi Monastery and found the door locked. He was completely traumatised by the events of the war. Unable to lead a normal life and shaken by the fate of his parents, he was repeatedly hospitalised in psychiatric hospitals. He suffered a stroke at the age of fifty-seven and spent the next ten years of his life paralysed and unable to speak.
But Vasily Sheremetev was not the only one with that name who fought in World War II. His cousin, Vasily Dimitriyevich Sheremetev, who left Russia in 1919, fought not side by side with his cousin, but against him as a member of the French Legion under German command. He was wounded outside Moscow in the winter and barely survived. The two cousins had different views on love of country.
