Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (20 page)

The extended Golitsyn family now began to gather at the home of
the mayor and Sofia on Georgievsky Lane. Mikhail and his family came to live, as did the families of his sisters Eli Trubetskoy and Tatiana Lopukhin. (The Lopukhins had been forced to flee their estate of Khilkovo after it had been burned to the ground.) The men set up a night watch. This did not prevent burglars from breaking in and getting away with the family’s silver. The youngest members of the family found all this most exciting. The mayor’s grandson and namesake, Vladimir Golitsyn, was thrilled when he was considered old enough to be given a small-caliber gun and added to the watch. The burglary and subsequent investigation were perfectly timed since Vladimir was then devouring the detective stories of Nat Pinkerton (“King of Detectives”) and Nick Carter (“Master Detective”). For Vladimir’s siblings Sergei and Masha the truth of the revolution’s destructive power came one morning when their governess took them to buy chocolate at their beloved Viktoria shop and found in its place a large smoking crater.
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To the mayor it seemed as if they were experiencing Chapter 18 of the Apocalypse. Some in the household blamed the revolution on international Zionism, some on the devil; some said it was punishment from God. Sofia was not so concerned about who was responsible, just that it all would go away somehow: “I want to wake up and everything will be as it was of old.” Her husband refused to hear such talk of “the good old days.” Rather, it was the old days that had produced their horrific present. “In our domestic strife one cannot but see retribution for the evil done to the people, for centuries of repression,” he observed.
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The cook, Mikhail, still came out after every dinner with his pad and pencil to take Sofia’s order for the next day, but now he usually had to tell her, “That is no longer possible to buy, madam.” By December, they had gone through their supply of firewood. Sergei awoke one morning to find the air in his room icy, his nanny standing over him holding his fur coat and heavy felt boots.
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Most Russians knew nothing of what had transpired in Petrograd, and it took several days and—for a good part of the population—weeks for the news of the Bolshevik insurrection to reach them. The general reaction, as best can be judged, was not one of astonishment or outrage. The conditions across the country had deteriorated so terribly and so swiftly since the fall of the Romanovs that most Russians were too
preoccupied with their own immediate problems to worry about what might or might not be happening far away in the capital. The revolution was about events not in the capital but in their own villages or towns.

When the Kastchenko family received the news of the coup on their Ukraine estate, the first thing they decided to do was drink up all the wine in the cellar, for no doubt it would not be long before it was lost to the mob. The wine was wonderful, but it did nothing to lighten their mood. The Kastchenkos left the estate after hearing of the murder of a nearby noble family. Soon thereafter, peasants plundered the estate. The family managed to return in the summer of 1918, after troops from the Austro-Hungarian Army had moved into the area. The peasants went out to welcome the Kastchenkos back, carrying with them the things taken from the manor and the estate and explaining that they had been holding on to them “for safekeeping” until their return. When the Hungarians pulled out, so too did the Kastchenkos, afraid to remain alone amid the peasants. They made their way to Poland, certain they would someday return home, although they never did.
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The Sayn-Wittgensteins were at their Bronitsa estate near Mogilev when they learned of the coup on the last day of October. For weeks they had been hearing rumors that the Bolsheviks were plotting to seize power and that a plan was in the works to carry out a St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in their area against all the landowners.
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Catherine Sayn-Wittgenstein and her sister began wearing men’s clothing since they decided this would make it easier to get away unnoticed, and Catherine began to carry a small Clément revolver. There was talk of looting on nearby estates, so they barricaded the manor house until it looked like “a medieval castle” and waited to see what would happen next. In November, several hundred Cossacks arrived, and the Sayn-Wittgensteins received them, mistakenly, as their protectors. The Cossacks set themselves on the family and robbed them before riding off. Defenseless, the family was next attacked one night by a band of drunken men who
cut the phone line, besieged the manor, and demanded money. The Sayn-Wittgensteins escaped the next morning to Mogilev, a few days before a mob descended on the manor and tore it to the ground, leaving nothing left standing but the walls.
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“Russia jumped off the rails on February 27,” Catherine wrote in her diary, “and will not stop until she has fallen to the very bottom of the slope.” This was not surprising, she noted, since the rails on which Russia had been riding “were so worn out, so unreliable, that she could not have failed but to have come off them.”
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The Second Congress of Soviets met in Petrograd on the evening of October 25. Dominated by the Bolsheviks and boycotted by peasant organizations and army committees as unauthorized, the congress erupted into violent debate almost as soon as it opened. On one side were Trotsky and the Bolsheviks (Lenin was still in hiding in the capital, awaiting word that the Winter Palace had been taken), the architects of the coup against the Provisional Government; on the other were the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries who opposed the coup and wanted to open negotiations with the government. The Mensheviks issued a declaration describing the events of the past day as a “military conspiracy [. . .] organized and carried out by the Bolshevik Party in the name of the soviets behind the backs of all the other parties and factions represented in the soviets.” The Bolsheviks’ opponents called their actions “insane and criminal” and certain to ignite a civil war. Trotsky stood up and denounced them as “pathetic bankrupts,” vainly instructing them to “Go where you belong from now on—into the garbage heap of history!” With that, Yuly Martov, the Menshevik leader, and his supporters rose and made for the exit amid wild, derisive cheering from the Bolsheviks and their backers among the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries. As he left, Martov turned and spoke: “One day, you will understand the crime in which you are taking part.” Trotsky, evincing a mind-set that was to come to dominate the Bolshevik Party, assured those who remained that this rupture would only make the soviets stronger “by purging them of counterrevolutionary elements” and then went on to read a resolution denouncing their opponents.
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Not long after word arrived that the ministers of the Provisional
Government had been arrested at the Winter Palace in the early hours of the twenty-sixth, Anatoly Lunacharsky, the future Bolshevik commissar of enlightenment, read a statement from Lenin proclaiming that the congress, “backed by the will of the vast majority of the workers, soldiers, and peasants,” was taking power into its own hands and promising immediate peace to all nations, total democracy in the army, the right of self-determination for all peoples and nationalities, worker control of the factories, and the transfer of all lands held by the nobility, the bourgeoisie, the church, and the government into the hands of the peasants. “Long live the Revolution!” Lunacharsky shouted, and was met with a wave of joyous cries and wild applause. Lenin’s manifesto, adopted by the congress that day, became the key document in the creation myth of the Soviet Union, according to which the Bolsheviks were swept into power on a wave of massive popular support. In truth, thanks to the breakdown of all authority, which had begun in February of that year, they had been able to seize power without hardly anyone in the country knowing about it.
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It was one thing to claim power; it was quite another to possess it. Now that they had toppled the government, the Bolsheviks had to scramble to win over the country. The Decree on Land, adopted by the congress late on the twenty-sixth was a crucial first step. Lenin addressed the congress that day, saying that the new government’s first duty was to settle the land question. “Private ownership of land,” he told them, “shall be abolished forever,” adding that all privately held land “shall be confiscated without compensation and become the property of the whole people.” The only exception would be land worked by peasants, which they would be allowed to keep.

Lenin realized the importance of this decisive act. By giving the peasants the right to seize the nobles’ land, he correctly judged how this could help both destroy the old order in the countryside and win the support of the peasantry. Trotsky later assessed the decree as having played a vital role not only in “the foundation of the new regime, but also as a weapon of the revolution, which had still to conquer the country.” Lenin told Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, executive secretary of the new government known as the Council of People’s Commissars (or
Sovnarkóm
, the Russian acronym), “Now we have only to see to it that it is widely published and publicized. Then let . . . [the bourgeoisie] try to take it back.”
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The Decree on Land did not incite the peasants to seize the land; rather, it sanctioned and encouraged what was already taking place. The destruction of the old order had begun well before the Bolsheviks seized power and was not their making. But Lenin understood how they could use the forces of anarchy to sweep away the remaining institutions of tsarist Russia, a prerogative for the creation of the new state. In the bloody summer of 1905, Lenin had written: “Revolutions are festivals of the oppressed and exploited. [. . .] We shall be traitors to and betrayers of the revolution if we do not use this festive energy of the masses and their revolutionary ardor to wage a ruthless and self-sacrificing struggle.”
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This was just one aspect of the civil war that Lenin had been preaching for years. Along with this came attacks on political parties, on the press, on the institutions of self-government, indeed on anything that smacked of the old order or of the fragile democracy that began to take root after the fall of the Romanovs.
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On October 27, the government issued the Decree on the Press, banning the “counterrevolutionary press”—that is, all newspapers that did not endorse the coup. A Left Socialist Revolutionary described the decree as a “clear and determined expression of a system of political terror and incitement to civil war.” Outraged, Russian journalists fought back, and the
Sovnarkóm
, still too weak to enforce the decree, was not able to crush the independent press until August 1918.
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The following month the
Sovnarkóm
abolished all legal estates and their privileges, all court ranks, and all noble titles, creating instead one single designation for everyone: “Citizen.” All property belonging to noble institutions and societies was nationalized. Since March, the newspaper
Izvestiia
had been calling for “the complete abolition of all classes,” and where the Provisional Government had dragged its feet, the
Sovnarkóm
had acted.
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At the end of November, a law abolishing all private urban property was drafted (and finally approved in August 1918); special house committees were established as a tool for monitoring the urban populace.
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“The Bolshevik insurrection has ended,” Olga Sheremetev wrote at the Corner House in early November. “They have won, and we find ourselves under the dominion of the Bolsheviks. For long? Already rumors about various counterrevolutions are spreading.”
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Russia’s educated classes resisted the coup from the beginning. Almost immediately, the country’s civil servants went out on strike in protest, and a Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland and Revolution was established in Petrograd to coordinate the actions of the various groups committed to restoring the Provisional Government. It was a diverse alliance of city officials, postal workers, government officials, representatives of the All-Russian Congress of Peasant Soviets, and members of various socialist parties. The committee issued a proclamation to the “Citizens of the Russian Republic,” calling on all workers, peasants, soldiers, and the intelligentsia not to recognize the authority of the Bolsheviks, warning that “[a] civil war, begun by the Bolsheviks, threatens to plunge the country into the indescribable horrors of anarchy and counterrevolution.”
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(For the Bolsheviks, “counterrevolutionaries” were anyone opposed to the coup, while for their opponents, the Bolsheviks were the “counterrevolutionaries” for having overthrown the government and begun to repress their enemies.)

Russia’s civil servants tried to bring down the
Sovnarkóm
by shutting their offices, locking up their files, and refusing to cooperate with their self-proclaimed new bosses. The banks closed; telegraph and telephone employees stopped working; even the capital’s pharmacists went out on strike. When, in mid-November, the employees of the State Bank refused to open the vault to Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, the new commissar of finance, he had its officers brought in under armed guard and forced at gunpoint to open it. He then loaded five million rubles in a velvet bag and personally delivered it to Lenin. The strikes and work stoppages spread to Moscow and from there to several provincial towns.
³³
After the Union of Unions of Government Employees in Petrograd went out on strike, the Military Revolutionary Committee issued an appeal “To all Citizens” stating that “the rich classes are resisting the new Soviet government,” and threatening that “the rich classes and their supporters” will be denied the right to food unless they halt their “sabotage.”
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