In Russia, I cannot thank enough Andrei and Tania Golitsyn. They took the time to meet with me on several occasions and did everything possible to help, supplying me with books, offering family documents and photographs, arranging introductions, and critiquing my book in manuscript. I owe them a large debt. Ivan Golitsyn welcomed me to his studio to talk about his family and to show me the items in his personal collection; he has always been ready to answer my many questions. Nikolay Trubetskoy agreed to meet and tell me what he knew of his families’ past and, unknown to us both at the time, gave me the ending to my book. His brother Mikhail Trubetskoy provided many family photographs and the unpublished letters of his grandfather and an unpublished portion of his father’s memoirs, materials that proved to be of great use. Yevdokia Sheremetev, the sole grandchild of Count Pavel Sheremetev, allowed me to visit her on several occasions and told me much about her family. I also wish to acknowledge the generous assistance of Alexandra Olsufiev, Elizabeth Apraxine, Konstantin and Marianna Smirnov, Mikhail Katin-Yartsev, Yekaterina Lansere, and the Pavlinovs—Varvara, Nikolai, and Sergei.
Mikhail Vladimirovich Golitsyn and his wife, Tamara Pavlovna, deserve special acknowledgment. Although surrounded by boxes in anticipation of a big move to a new apartment in Moscow, they invited me to lunch at short notice and welcomed me with a well-laid table. We talked for several hours—and drank perhaps a few too many vodka toasts—and I left feeling amazed by their youthful spirit, despite their advanced age, and by their sense of optimism, despite the hardships they have faced in their lives. It was a day I shall never forget.
Father Boris Mikhailov helped me immensely with both my previous book and now with Former People. For years he gathered information on the Sheremetev family while working as a curator at the Ostankino Estate Museum. He had himself intended to write a book on the fate of the family after 1917 but then gave this up to become an Orthodox priest after the collapse of the Soviet Union. When I called him while on a visit to Moscow in 2009 and mentioned the topic of my new book, he asked if we might meet because he had something he wanted to give me. I was shocked when he showed up carrying two large bags full of his research. He handed it to me and asked me to make good use of it, saying he was glad to know the years he had spent gathering the information had not been wasted. I am humbled by his generous gift.
It is a pleasure to thank the many friends and colleagues who have provided assistance during the course of my research and writing: Nikita Sokolov, Tatiana Safronova, Alexander Bobosov, Aleksei Kovalchuk, Elena Campbell, Ekaterina Pravilova, Igor Khristoforov, Bob Edelman, Mark Steinberg, William Husband, Steve A. Smith, Seymour Becker, Richard Robbins, Golfo Alexopoulos, Glennys Young, Michael Biggins, Anatol Shmelev, Carol Leadenham, Catriona Kelly, Sofia Chuikina, Richard Davies, Sean McMeekin, Susanne Fusso, Ruzica Popovitch-Krekic, Stephanie Lock and Gary Hawkey at iocolor, Eric Lohr, Steve Hanson, April Bodman, Ronald Vroon, Frances Welch, John Bowlt, Randy Steiger and the team at Conflare, Tatiana Enikeeva, Ludmila Syagaeva, Olga Novikova, Galina Kalinina, Olga Solomodenko, Mikhail Loukianov, Marina Kovaleva, Lena Marassinova, Alla Krasko, Maxim Smirnov, Tatiana Chvanova-Leto, Varvara Rakina, Tatiana Smirnova, Tanya Chebotarev, Svetlana Dolgova, Marina Sidorova, Boris Dodonov, Galina Korolyova, Marina Chertilina, Iskender Nurbekov, and Gerold Vzdornov.
For help gathering material I am grateful to Veronika Egorova, Yulia Galper, Dmitry and Arina Belozerov, Yury Nikiforov, and especially Natalya Bolotina, Yelena Matveeva, Yelena Mikhailova, and Mariana Markova. David Cain produced beautiful maps and family trees for the book and was a pleasure to work with. Several colleagues read various drafts of the book and gave me excellent advice on how to improve it: Arch Getty, Lisa Kirschenbaum, Willard Sunderland, Geoffrey Hosking, Priscilla Roosevelt, and Peter Pozefsky.
I am grateful to a number of archives, museums, and libraries and their staffs: the Bakhmeteff Archive at Columbia University; the London Library; the British Library; the University of Washington Libraries; the Russian State Library; the Russian National Library; the Russian State Historical Archive; the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art; the Central State Archive of the Moscow Oblast; the Literary Museum of Moscow; the Kuskovo Estate Museum, the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts; the State Archive of the Russian Federation; the Russian State Archive of Documentary Films and Photographs; the Hoover Institution Archives; and the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre.
I benefited from the opportunity to present some of the material in Former People at Columbia and Oxford universities. At Columbia, I am especially grateful to Timothy Frye, director of the Harriman Institute, and to Alla Rachkov and Masha Udensiva-Brenner. Cynthia Whittaker, Richard Wortman, and Hilde Hoogenboom attended my talk and offered insightful comments on my research. At Oxford, I would like to thank Andrei and Irina Zorin for their assistance and friendship. Andrew Kahn, also of Oxford University, has been a marvelous source of information and the perfect guide to all things Russian (and English) for a long time.
I would like to thank Melissa Chinchillo, Christy Fletcher, and the employees of Fletcher and Company for their hard work and commitment over the years. I have been exceedingly fortunate to have had Eric Chinski as my editor and am grateful to him for all his encouragement, insight, and enthusiasm. I would like to thank Jonathan Galassi and everyone I have worked with at FSG, especially Eugenie Cha, Gabriella Doob, Jeff Seroy, Kathy Daneman, Katie Freeman, Abby Kagan, Marion Duvert, and Devon Mazzone. Georgina Morley, my U.K. editor at Macmillan, has not only been wonderful to work with but a welcoming friend. I wrote this book at a window overlooking the house where nearly two hundred years ago Thomas Carlyle wrote his famous history of the French Revolution. A historian could hardly ask for better company, although this is just what I was fortunate to receive from so many wonderful friends (too many to name) in London.
While working on this book, I have been constantly reminded of the importance of family. I wish to thank my loving parents, Bill and Annette Smith, Michael and Merdice Ellis, Allyson and Todd Aldrich, Graham Smith, Angela Ellis, Emma Bankhead, Emily and Robert Aldrich, Tara and Elana Smith, and especially Emma and Andrew—my children—to whom Former People is dedicated. As always, my greatest debt is to my wife, Stephanie, for her patience, wisdom, and love.
ENDNOTES
1. Although Former People explores the fate of the entire nobility (dvoriánstvo, in Russian), since so much of the book follows the aristocratic Sheremetev and Golitsyn families, I have chosen “aristocracy” for my subtitle.
2. Patriarch Hermogen, Kuzma Minin, and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky helped rally Russians during the so-called Time of Troubles in the early seventeenth century. “Mikhails” refers to the first Romanov ruler elected to the throne in 1613.
3. The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre refers to the mass killing of French Huguenots (Protestants) by Catholics in Paris in 1572 during the French Wars of Religion. Rumors and fear of another such massacre based not on religion but on class were common in Russia during the revolution and the later civil war. Such rumors persisted into the 1930s.
4. Created at the Second Congress of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies on October 25, 1917, along with the Sovnarkóm, it functioned with the latter as the executive wing of the new state.
5. Th e Petrovichy (from the Russian Christian name Pyotr) were the children of the late Count Pyotr Sheremetev.
6. Anna and Mikhail’s elder son.
7. Mikhail Kalinin, titular head of the new Bolshevik state.
8. Ninety-six miles.
9. Nikolai Lopukhin.
10. A reference to Alexander Pushkin’s dramatic work “A Feast During the Plague” (1830), later the basis for César Cui’s 1900 opera of the same name.
11. The great warriors of the medieval Russian epic poems.
12. The mayor and his son Vladimir Vladimirovich.
13. Georgy was thirty-six; Lina, twenty-nine.
14. Fifth, if one counts the Winter War (1939–40) against Finland.
15. A village in Poltava Province.
16. Dmitry, Ira, and their younger children were then in Cannes.
17. TsEKUBU—the Central Commission for the Improvement of Scholars’ Life—had been created by the Sovnarkóm in 1921 to help the country’s educated elite, barely alive following the civil war, by providing food rations, small monetary grants, firewood, clothing, pen and ink, and lightbulbs. It was closed in 1931.
INDEX
Abbe, James, ref1
ABC of Communism, The (Bukharin and Preobrazhensky), ref1
Achinsk, ref1
Afanasy, Father, ref1, ref2
Affair of the Slavicists, ref1
agriculture, collectivization of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Aid to Political Prisoners (POMPOLIT), ref1
Aksakov-Sivers, Tatiana, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; Operation Former People and, ref1, ref2
Alapaevsk, ref1
Alexander II, Tsar, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; assassination of, ref1, ref2, ref3
Alexander III, Tsar, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12; death of, ref1
Alexander Mikhailovich, Grand Duke, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Alexandra, Empress, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8; murder of, ref1; Rasputin and, ref1, ref2; in Tobolsk, ref1, ref2
Alexeev, Mikhail, ref1
Alexei Mikhailovich, Tsar, ref1, ref2
Alexei Nikolaevich, Tsarevich, ref1, ref2
Alliluyeva, Svetlana, ref1
All-Russian Central Executive Committee, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
All-Russian Congress of Peasant Soviets, ref1
All-Russian Union of Landowners, ref1
All-Russian Union of Writers, ref1
Almedingen, Marta, ref1, ref2
American Relief Administration (ARA), ref1
Andijan, ref1, ref2
Andronievsky Monastery, ref1
Ankudinov, Dmitry, ref1
Antonov, Alexander, ref1
Arctic and Antarctic Scientific Research Institute, ref1
aristocrats, ref1, ref2; false, ref1; see also nobility
Article 58, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Astronomical Institute, ref1
Atarbekov, Georgy, ref1
Atheists’ House, ref1
Austro-Hungarian Army, ref1
Austro-Hungarian Empire, ref1
Azbukin, Vsevolod, ref1
Bagázh: Memoirs of a Russian Cosmopolitan (Nabokov), ref1
Bagration-Mukhransky, Alexander, ref1, ref2, ref3
Bagration-Mukhransky, Princess, ref1
Bakunin, Mikhail, ref1
Bakunin family, ref1
Balakirev, Mily, ref1
Balanda, ref1, ref2
Baldwin, Alexandra “Alka” (née Bobrinsky), ref1, ref2, ref3; marriage of, ref1
Baldwin, Philip, ref1, ref2
balls: Sheremetev, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; at Winter Palace, ref1
banishment sentences, ref1
Bank for Foreign Trade, ref1, ref2
banks, ref1, ref2, ref3; safe-deposit boxes in, ref1
Baryatinsky, Nadezhda, ref1
Baryatinsky family, ref1
Bashkiroff, Zenaide, ref1
Belbaltlag, ref1, ref2
Benkendorff, Maria, ref1
Beria, Lavrenty, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Bermudian, SS, ref1
Beseda, ref1
Bismarck, Otto von, ref1
Black Army, ref1
Black Hand, ref1
Black Hundreds, ref1
Bloody Sunday, ref1
Bobrinsky, Alexandra “Alka,” see Baldwin, Alexandra “Alka”
Bobrinsky, Alexei (son of Catherine the Great), ref1
Bobrinsky, Alexei (son of Lev and Vera), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; arrest of, ref1
Bobrinsky, Gavril, ref1, ref2
Bobrinsky, Lev, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; marriage of, ref1
Bobrinsky, Sofia “Sonya,” see Witter, Sofia “Sonya”
Bobrinsky, Varvara, ref1, ref2
Bobrinsky, Vera Golitsyn, ref1, ref2, ref3; marriage of, ref1
Bobrinsky, Yelena (daughter of Lev and Vera), ref1
Bobrinsky family, ref1, ref2
Bogoroditsk, ref1, ref2, ref3
Bolshevik Revolution, see Russian Revolution
Bolsheviks, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15; banks and, ref1; in Caucasus, ref1; Cheka of, see Cheka; in civil war, see Russian Civil War; concentration camps and, ref1; Constituent Assembly closed by, ref1; coup of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; economic control seized by, ref1; hostages taken by, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; inquiry into crimes of, ref1; Lenin and, ref1, ref2, ref3; name change, ref1; officer corps and, ref1; Old, destruction of, ref1, ref2; proletariat and, ref1; Red Terror campaign of, ref1, ref2, ref3; resistance to, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; rumors about, ref1, ref2; and soldier uprising in Petrograd, ref1; War Communism policies of, ref1; wealth seized by, ref1; see also Communists
Bonch-Bruevich, Vladimir, ref1, ref2
Borovikovsky, Vladimir, ref1
Borus Godunov (Pushkin), ref1
Botkin, Yevgeny, ref1
bourgeoisie, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12; death of, ref1; homes confiscated, ref1; mandatory labor for, ref1; taken hostage, ref1
boxcars, ref1, ref2
Britain, ref1, ref2, ref3
Brusilov, Alexei, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Buchalki, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Buchanan, George, ref1, ref2
Budberg, Baron, ref1, ref2
Bukharin, Nikolai, ref1, ref2, ref3
Bulygin, Alexander, ref1
Bunin, Ivan, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Bunin, Vera, ref1, ref2
Bunin, Yuly, ref1
Burgustan, ref1
Burkhanovsky, Mikhail, ref1
Butovo Polygon, ref1
Butyrskaya Prison (Butyrki), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19
Cantacuzène, Princess, ref1, ref2, ref3
Cap d’Antibes, ref1
Captain’s Daughter, The (Pushkin), ref1
Catherine the Great, ref1, ref2, ref3; Tsaritsyno and, ref1
Caucasus, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
Cement (Gladkov), ref1
cemeteries, ref1
Central Commission for the Improvement of Scholars’ Life (TsEKUBU), ref1n, ref2
Central Executive Committee, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
Central Museum of Fiction, Criticism, and Journalism, ref1
Chaadaev, Pyotr, ref1
Chaliapin, Fyodor, ref1
Change, The, ref1
Cheboksary, ref1
Cheka, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21; American Relief Administration and, ref1; concentration camps run by, ref1; at Sheremetev home, ref1, ref2, ref3
Chekhov, Anton, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Chelyabinsk, ref1, ref2
Cherkassky, D. B., ref1
Cherry Orchard, The (Chekhov), ref1, ref2, ref3
China, ref1
Churchill, Winston, ref1
Ciliberti, Charles, ref1
class, see social classes
clothing, ref1
collectivization, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland and Revolution, ref1
Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly, ref1
Communist Party, ref1; elite in, ref1; leadership struggle in, ref1
Communists, ref1; American Relief Administration and, ref1; Cheka of, see Cheka; class warfare and, ref1; Eleventh Party Congress of, ref1; peasant rebellions against, ref1; Tenth Party Congress of, ref1; workers’ rebellions against, ref1; see also Bo
lsheviks
Communist Youth League (Komsomol), ref1
concentration camps, ref1, ref2
consolidation, ref1
Constantinople, ref1
Corner House, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
Cossacks, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12
“Count and ‘His Servants,’ The,” ref1
country estates, ref1
Crimea, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; evacuation of, ref1, ref2, ref3
Cuba, ref1
Cui, César, ref1n
culture: American, ref1, ref2; Russian, nobles as keepers of, ref1
Czech Legion, ref1
Danilov, Yuri, ref1
D’Anthès, Georges-Charles de Heeckeren, ref1
Davies, Joseph, ref1
Davies, Marjorie, ref1
Davydoff, Alexander, ref1, ref2
Davydov family, ref1
Day, ref1, ref2
Day of Peaceful Insurrection, ref1
De Baye, Joseph, ref1
Decembrists, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
Declaration of the Rights of the Laboring and Exploited People, ref1
Decree on Land, ref1, ref2
Decree on the Press, ref1
Demidov, Anna, ref1
Denikin, Anton, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10
denunciations, ref1, ref2
Depository of Private Archives, ref1
Depression, Great, ref1
Derevitsky, Alexei, ref1
Derevitsky, Maria Golitsyn, ref1
De Robien, Louis, ref1
Dmitlag (Dmitrov Corrective Labor Camp), ref1, ref2
Dmitrov, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
Dmitry Konstantinovich, Grand Duke, ref1