Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (23 page)

Between November 1917 and the end of the civil war, the Bolsheviks transferred almost all of the country’s public and private wealth into their own hands in what one historian has dubbed “history’s greatest heist.” Perhaps as much as 1.6 billion rubles (roughly $160 billion in today’s dollars) was, for want of a better word, stolen.
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First, the Bolsheviks went after the landowners. The Decree on Land of October 26, 1917, revoked all private ownership of land without compensation for redistribution. By February 1918, on the basis of data from nineteen provinces, 75 percent of all estates in Russia had been confiscated from their owners.
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About 10 percent of the noble landowners did manage to remain in the countryside and were given some land to work; these tended to be poorer landowners, the richer ones
typically having fled or been chased off the land for good.
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The victims were not just noble landlords. Wealthy peasants were attacked as well, their property seized and often destroyed by their poorer neighbors.
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The attacks against the landlords in Usman county, the site of the Vyazemsky estate of Lotarevo, raged into the first months of 1918. By then at least half of all the estates there had been destroyed. When the local land committee decided to let some of the landlords stay on their estates, the peasants unleashed even greater fury, attacking the remaining estates and tearing them to the ground. Peasants in other regions acted similarly as the only way to once and for all drive off the landowners and take the land for themselves.
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Along with the attack on individual landownership, the Bolsheviks also turned against the Orthodox Church, nationalizing church lands, including more than one thousand monasteries, in January 1918.
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On August 20, 1918, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee
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decreed that the “homes of the bourgeoisie” were to be confiscated and handed over to city Soviets.
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A great number of former people were either forced from their homes or subjected to what the Russians call
uplotnénie
, consolidation. The case of Prince Pavel Dolgorukov is instructive. Having recently been released from prison, Dolgorukov was living at his family’s Moscow mansion in the spring of 1918. The upper floor had been taken over by a group of Red soldiers, who banged away on the family’s Bechstein piano all night and sang, feasted, and drank. When the Bolsheviks moved their capital from Petrograd to Moscow in 1918, this merry band was forced out to make room for a state ministry. The ministry initially requisitioned only part of the house but then kept taking more and more rooms until it took Dolgorukov’s sole room and forced him out onto the street. Dolgorukov was fortunate to have been allowed to remain in his home as long as he did. Some nobles in Moscow were given only twenty-four hours to clear out of their homes to make room for Soviet government offices.
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Not only was consolidation for former people physically uncomfortable (at times entire families were squeezed into a single room), but more important, it robbed them of any privacy. The fear of
denunciation meant old family traditions (parties, Christmas celebrations, baptisms, and the like) had to be abandoned or conducted in secrecy; one no longer talked freely in one’s home, but in a whisper to avoid being overheard. The mechanisms by which family memory and customs were passed from generation to generation were often severed.
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Through a set of policies that later came to be known as War Communism, the Bolsheviks seized control of the country’s entire economy. Land, property, and private industry were nationalized; private trade was outlawed; peasants were denied the right to sell their produce and forced to turn it over to the state. The Bolsheviks began their radical transformation of economic life immediately after seizing power. Between the middle of November 1917 and early March 1918, Lenin issued approximately thirty decrees on the nationalization of private industry and manufactures.
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On December 27, 1917, the Central Executive Committee issued decrees nationalizing the country’s banks, and the same day the government sent soldiers to occupy twenty-three private banks and credit institutions in Petrograd and arrested their directors. Next the government threatened to arrest any bank directors who tried to block Bolshevik withdrawals.
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Once in control of the banks, the Bolsheviks went after what lay in the vaults. In January, the holders of safe-deposit boxes across Russia were ordered to show up and present their keys so that their boxes could be inspected. Persons who failed to comply within three days would automatically forfeit their possessions.

Irina Skariatina was one of those who showed up at their banks that month. She wrote in her diary that everyone she knew went to open his or her box out of fear of reprisal of some sort. What met all of them at the bank was a complete surprise. The soldiers had no intention of just inspecting the boxes; rather, they confiscated the contents of every last box, not just money and jewelry, but deeds, documents, and even lockets of baby hair. It all happened so fast, and they all were so shocked by what they were witnessing, that it was only after the soldiers had marched them out of the bank and onto the street that Irina and the others realized what had happened to them. Some tried to make their way back into the bank but were stopped by the soldiers. Women broke down in tears. One woman turned and said gloomily:
“What’s the use of crying? This is only the beginning—wait and see what will happen to all of us soon. Then we can cry.”
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The Bolsheviks’ timing was excellent. Following the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, wealthy Russians believed it unpatriotic to send capital and money out of Russia; some nobles apparently even sold off investments in other parts of Europe to bring their capital back home to Russia. During the war laws limiting the ability to buy foreign currency were also passed. Amid the revolutionary upheavals of 1917, when a great many nobles left Petrograd and Moscow for the south or other Russian borderlands, most left their money and valuables in the banks, never thinking for a minute they would not be safe there. The banks were thus fully loaded with money, gold, and jewelry when the Bolsheviks struck.
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The Bolsheviks’ Safes Commission, charged with cracking the country’s bank vaults and safe-deposit boxes, working together with the State Treasury for the Storage of Valuables (
Gokhrán
), had taken in nearly nine hundred million rubles’ worth of coin, art, antiquities, precious metals and stones by late 1921. This was added to a half ton of gold, silver, and platinum bullion; seven hundred thousand rubles in coins of various precious metals; sixty-five million tsarist rubles, and almost six hundred million rubles’ worth of government and corporate bonds seized by the Bolshevik Revision Committee in Moscow banks alone in 1918.
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Many wealthy Russians responded to this mad hunt for precious metals and stones by hiding whatever they had left. In the spring of 1918, Countess Irina Tatishchev’s grandmother packed all her pearls, rings, gold, and diamonds in a leather valise and gave it to Irina to hide. Irina took the valise to a friend’s apartment, where they stashed it in a secret compartment in a bedroom wall.
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Such stories were legion and inspired Ilf and Petrov’s novel
The Twelve Chairs
. Everyone in Russia with anything of value was trying to hide it. In 1917, Prince Felix Yusupov and his trusted servant Grigory took the family’s most valuable diamonds and jewelry from Petrograd to their Moscow palace and hid them in a secret room under the stairs. After Yusupov fled Russia, the Bolsheviks captured Grigory and tortured him to tell them where they had hidden the jewels, but he never divulged the location. The Cheka set up surveillance on the palace and monitored the activities of everyone who went in and out. This went on for years, but no one was ever caught with any diamonds. The secret
room was not discovered until 1925, when workmen were repairing the stairs. They found two English safes, several old trunks under heavy locks, and a large rusty metal chest, all filled with jewels and precious metals. A few years earlier Yusupov’s secret fireproof rooms in the former family home on Petrograd’s Moika Street had been discovered. Here the prince had hidden more jewelry, books, more than a thousand paintings, as well as musical instruments, including a rare Stradivarius artfully hidden inside a hollowed-out interior column.
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Alexandra Tolstoy, the daughter of the novelist, hid her jewels in the bottom of a flower pot, where they remained undetected for years. When the young Alexei Tatishchev and his cousins boarded a train in Kiev for Odessa on the last day of 1918, they noticed their scouts’ uniforms felt heavier than usual but thought nothing of it. Upon their arrival, Alexei’s aunt had them all immediately strip and then proceeded to rip open the linings of their pockets to retrieve the strings of pearls she had hidden. Olga Schilovsky’s mother took her teddy bear and stuffed it with the diamond cipher given to her by the empress Alexandra. During a house search some soldiers threatened to rip the bear open but were stopped by little Olga’s pleading sobs.
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The Nabokovs stashed much of the family jewelry in a secret hiding place in their Petrograd mansion until their doorman, Ustin, ratted to the Reds. They fled Petrograd for Gaspra in the Crimea with their remaining jewels hidden in a container of talcum powder, which upon their arrival they buried out in the garden near an oak.
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Princess Lydia Vasilchikov buried her pearls and rings in the woods behind the Crimean estate of Charaks. Many of her family and friends had sewn their jewels into the hems of skirts and dresses, into furs and hats.
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The dowager empress Maria Fyodorovna had hidden her jewels in cocoa tins and buried them under some rocks at her daughter Xenia’s Ai Todor estate in the Crimea; a dog’s skull marked the spot.
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And it was not just jewels that people were frantically burying or sewing into their clothing. Galina von Meck’s family buried most of their wine cellar in a flower bed behind their Moscow house. Later, when Galina grew worried the hiding place had been compromised, she began surreptitiously digging up the bottles at night with the help of some friends. They would dig while it was dark and then move the bottles during the day to a new location by disguising them under a blanket in a baby’s pram.
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The Nabokovs’ chauffeur Tsiganov took apart
the large Wolseley automobile piece by piece, which he then buried so well that nothing of the automobile has apparently ever been found.
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In Petrograd, Baroness Meiendorff was so afraid of having her sugar confiscated she poured it between two sheets that she had sewn together and then laid flat on her mattress.
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The lust for money and valuables was boundless. In Saratov in April 1919, the town’s twenty jewelers were called to a meeting at the office of the provincial auditor to answer some questions. When they realized they had been lured there as a ruse, they tried to leave but were stopped by armed guards and taken captive. One by one each jeweler was marched by Red soldiers to his store, which they robbed of all its gold and silver. Only after all the jewelers had been robbed were they let free.
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Dentists were arrested and held hostage until they divulged where they stored the gold used to fill rotten teeth.
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Beginning in late 1917, members of the former privileged classes were frequently arrested and held for ransom or threatened with death unless they paid extortion money. In one such example, the Cheka arrested 105 residents of Nizhny Novgorod and held them hostage until the city’s notables could come up with twenty-two million rubles. In the summer of 1918, Nicholas von Meck, the scion of a noble family that had made their fortune in the railway business, was arrested and held until his employees could raise a ransom of one hundred thousand rubles. Lenin not only knew of such practices but endorsed them.
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The elder anarchist prince Pyotr Kropotkin was so disgusted by the Bolsheviks’ policy of taking hostages that he wrote to Lenin himself to condemn it, describing it as a return to the Dark Ages.
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Several times during the civil war bourgeois hostages were shot en masse. In June 1919 in Kharkhov, between five hundred and one thousand men and women were shot; in August in Kiev, about eighteen hundred and some two thousand in Odessa.
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(Workers were not exempt. In March 1919, the Bolshevik government arrested and then shot about two hundred striking metalworkers.)
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The official policy of hostage taking soon spread to the criminal world. Bands of outlaws and Mafia-style gangs adopted the practice as their own, at times claiming to be acting as Soviet officials. The victims and their families could not always be certain who had taken away their loved ones or whether paying ransom would win them back.
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