Former People
The Last Days of the Russian Aristocracy
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- € 4,99
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- € 4,99
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Epic in scope, intimate in detail, heartbreaking in its human drama, this is the first book to recount the history of the nobility caught up the maelstrom of the Bolshevik Revolution and the creation of Stalin’s Russia.
Historian Douglas Smith's Former People is a book filled with chilling tales of looted palaces, burning estates, of desperate flights from marauding thugs and Red Army soldiers, of imprisonment, exile, and execution. It is the story of how a centuries’-old elite famous for its glittering wealth, its service to the Tsar and Empire, was dispossessed and destroyed along with the rest of old Russia.
Drawing on the private archives of two great families – the Sheremetovs and the Golitsyns – Former People is also a story of survival, of how many of the tsarist ruling class, so-called 'former people' and 'class enemies,' abandoned, displaced, and repressed, overcame the loss of their world and struggled to find a place for themselves and their families in the new, hostile world of the Soviet Union. It reveals how even at the darkest depths of the terror, daily life went on – men and women fell in love, children were born and educated, friends gathered, simple pleasures were cherished. Ultimately, Former People is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Smith examines the much-neglected "fate of the nobility in the decades following the Russian Revolution," when they were sometimes given the Orwellian title "former people." The author of several books on Russia (The Pearl; Working the Rough Stone), Smith focuses on three generations of two families: the Sheremetsevs of St. Petersburg and the Golitsyns of Moscow. He begins by showing their extravagant wealth before the revolution; in the late 19th century, Count Dmitri Sheremetsev owned 1.9 million acres worked by 300,000 serfs. From the 1917 Bolshevik revolution until Stalin's death in 1953, these families and others suffered, at best, severe persecution and impoverishment; at worst, murder by mobs or the secret police, or a slow death in the gulag. In his sprawling but well-paced narrative, Smith tells many memorable stories, including one of Vladimir Golitsyn's son-in-law, who hid the fact that he'd been sentenced to death from his wife, who'd been allowed a three-day visit. Smith also provides fascinating background information, such as the Bolsheviks' jaundiced view of "decadent" Western culture. Maxim Gorky said the foxtrot, popular among nobles during the 1920s and early '30s, "fostered moral degeneracy and led inexorably to homosexuality." This is an anecdotally rich, highly informative look at decimated, uprooted former upper-class Russians. 16 pages of b&w photos, 3 maps.
