Kshesinskaia's Mansion: High Culture and the Politics of Modernity In

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Kshesinskaia’s Mansion: High Culture and the Politics of Modernity in Revolutionary Russia

A Dissertation submitted to the

Division of Research and Advanced Studies

of the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

in the Department of History of the College of Arts and Sciences

2009

Krista Sigler

M.A., University of Cincinnati 2001 H.A.B., Xavier University 1998

Committee chair: Dr. Willard Sunderland Abstract

This dissertation is a biography of a house, utilizing a particular building as a prism through which to see Russian modernity. The Kshesinskaia mansion, a founding work of the Art

Nouveau in Russia, was originally a St. Petersburg socialite’s salon. Through 1917, it became the center of one of the most famous lawsuits in the country and the headquarters of the Bolsheviks as well. In the aftermath of the Revolution, the house was dedicated to a number of social service causes and as of the 1930s became what it is today, a museum dedicated to the revolutionary past. This saga of this building, with its extraordinary links to the central players of the Russian

Revolution, thus allows us a rare stage on which to see the revolutionary era unfold.

This dissertation therefore speaks to the Russian Revolution and in particular, Russia’s experience with modernity. While historians have tended to trace Russia’s steps to 1917 through the eyes of particular groups, in this work, I show that “modern society” was a vision multiple groups embraced, although they understood that term differently. Through the figures of this dissertation (aristocrats, architects, writers, lawyers, and revolutionaries alike), we see that a number of visions existed of what “modern society” should be. In my work, I bring all of these visions together to suggest that all of them played a role in bringing about the Russian

Revolution as it developed. I show how these small stories, played out on the stage of the

Kshesinskaia mansion, reflected the fall of one culture and the rise of another, premised entirely on the idea of service to the people. The Petersburg nobles, although united by the idea of service, believed too much in ritual and expectation to allow them to spontaneously change, en masse, to befit the expedience of a new industrial order. The artists and intelligentsia

(represented here by the architects) sought to keep one foot in the patronage system of the

imperial world and another in the new, international, professional vision of their field; because they were insistent on their role as servants to the people, they were not necessarily against the rise of a “People’s Government.” By looking at the courts of 1917, I demonstrate that the

Provisional Government was inept and at points hypocritical in its application of the law, and ultimately undermined its own role as the guardian of civil rights. Meanwhile, just as the

Provisional Government was contradicting its own values, the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, created a truly accessible organization that offered the Russian people a solid vision of an organization, and later government, that desired to serve the people. Of all of these visions of modern society, it would be the Bolsheviks that would triumph, partly because they were able to create a credible argument, through their use of the spaces of the Kshesinskaia mansion, that they were indeed servants of the people.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Visitors If These Walls Could Talk… p. 1

Chapter One: The Actors Noblesse Oblige: The Late Imperial Aristocracy’s Search for Relevance p. 28

Chapter Two: The Designers Building a Civil Society: The Architects of Imperial Russia p. 80

Chapter Three: The Imaginers Center Stage: The Media and the Relaxation of Censorship in Revolutionary Russia p. 100

Chapter Four: The Lawyers Barbarians at the Gates? Law and the Seizure of the Kshesinskaia Mansion, 1917 p. 121

Chapter Five: The Users The Hydra: Local Initiative in Public Space in 1917 p. 157

Chapter Six: The Founders Architects and Experts: Building the Modern Civil Society p. 191

Conclusion: The Constructors The Secret Garden: Politics, the Past, and the House of Participation p. 205

Bibliography p. 212

Introduction: The Visitors If These Walls Could Talk…

Capstone

In spring 2003, St. Peterburg was in the middle of an elaborate face-lift. For the tercentary of the former imperial capital, the majority of its historic landmarks had been cleaned and rebuilt. Nevsky Prospekt gleamed in pastel colors, and the famous wedding-cake façade of

Smolny Cathedral still had the scaffolding of the reconstruction work wrapped around it.

A walk around the city would, however, suggest the depth of change to be only a paint- chip deep. While the Winter Palace was outfitted with Wi-Fi, the stairs to the Stroganov were crumbling; newspapers worried about the costs of the outfitting, and the necessity to rent landmarks to foreigners who had the finances to refit them. The interior spaces of the city were cracking and falling apart, just as the exteriors were polished for the world’s view.

For some cultural critics, this is the hallmark of modernity. According to the Belgian feminist Luce Irigaray, modernity is obsessed with boundaries and exteriors, not the spaces within them.1 While this argument may fit Irigaray’s discussion of gender and the body, what my work on physical environments has suggested is the opposite: modernity is intricately entwined with the use of space. Our reworking of the matter around us extends to all of the themes of modernity: defining the past versus the present, creating an illusive (and misnamed) private sphere, projecting a society’s control of nature, projecting a government’s control of society itself. All of this is done, meanwhile, in the icon of modernity itself, the city. Modernity and

1 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985).

space, our arrangements of the physical structures around us, are deeply connected, and should be studied as such.

My work here demonstrates that interconnection in the biography of a St. Petersburg house. The building, the Kshesinskaia mansion, had been both a stage for Russian history and, in its own way, an actor in it. This structure, a former imperial salon, had been seized by the

Bolsheviks during 1917, cleared out and utilized as an operational center.2 It even formed the heart of a legal battle between the Bolsheviks and the Provisional Government in that year.

Later, in the years after the Revolution, much of the interior had been removed in an effort to make the center of the 1917 Revolution fit for the needs of Soviet life.

By looking at the house over time (between 1900 approximately through the 1920s), we see revolutionary tensions reflected in its history. Each group that held or was linked to the house utilized the building to present its own image of how modern society should be shaped; the only link between these visions would be the idea, which all groups shared, that a modern society was one in which groups owed service to their society. The Bolshevik option would eventually win out, but all of these meanings were part and parcel of imperial society’s confrontation with modernity, attempts to define society through the use of spaces.

In this dissertation, I tell the story of this house, a biography of a building that can tell us about the competing visions of modernity urban Russians held before the Revolution. In turn, these bricks point out something much larger: part of the foundation of modern society is our use of space.

2 See Pavel Miliukov’s claim that the center of the Revolution was the “classic balcony” of the Kshesinskaia mansion, in which the Bolsheviks had their headquarters. Quoted in Leon Trotsky, A History of the Russian Revolution, translated by Max Eastman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1932), vol. 2, 60.

A Concrete Mix: Methodology

This dissertation is premised on the idea that buildings offer a unique contribution to our historical knowledge. They serve not just as artistic statements of their era, but also as lasting witnesses to the events around them, made and remade to fit the needs of the surrounding society. Where books and paintings capture a given moment in time, a building can record, through its alterations and uses, multiple moments over time—a text that is always being rewritten by the human beings using the structure.

Moreover, the power of the building as subject offers more for study than simply multiple stories of a site: because a building, its content, and utility is the product of hundreds (from architect to owner, builder to servants), the study of a house, in all of its aspects, forces topics together that would not otherwise be compiled (to pardon the pun) under one roof. In this dissertation, I have scoured the blueprints of architects, the memoirs of aristocrats and revolutionaries alike, the files of a Provisional Government court case, the archival data of charity organizations, and the building in life today. Studying a house over time requires the historian to pursue the larger issue at hand, rather to satisfy oneself with a niche organization or individual’s story; the biography of a house is thus a powerful prism for the study of cultural history.

Beauty and the Brick

There are two chief characters in my dissertation. The first, significant for three chapters, is the figure of the first owner, Mathilde Kshesinskaia, prima ballerina of the Mariinsky Theater.

The second is the house itself.

Without the lady, of course, the house would not have not been created. Mathilde

Kshesinskaia was born in the outskirts of St. Petersburg in 1872, the child of two dancers for the imperial theater.3 Although neither of her parents were mere company dancers, her father in particular was singled out in the company for his command of the mazurka, a tribute to his Polish father, also a dancer in the St. Petersburg company. He was significant enough in the Mariinsky troupe to be given the original role of the king in Tchaikovsky’s 1890 debut of Sleeping Beauty.

Because of these family connections, Mathilde Kshesinskaia was assured entry into the highly selective state theatrical school, informally known as Theatre Street. In 1880, she began work there when she was just eight years old, and finished ten years later. Her work there was a success: She graduated with the highest honors, a recognition of her academic and athletic performance.4

Family connections brought Kshesinskaia into the world of ballet, but it cannot be said she did not make her own success after entry. By the early 1890s, she had begun to lead productions, alternating with the Italian lead ballerina Pierina Legani. She originated several lead roles, including spots in Le Réveil de Flore (1894), Le Perle (1896), and Harlequinade (1900).

Her star climbed higher in the company with her mastery of signature dance feats. In particular, the world of dance society had been captivated by her first rival Legnani’s ability to turn rapidly and repeatedly on point, marking thirty-two consecutive turns before bringing both feet down.

3 Due to Kshesinskaia’s Polish origins, and later transliteration issues, her name takes on many spellings. For the sake of future researchers, here are some of the other names assigned her: Kshesinsskaia, Kshesinskova, Kchessinskaia, Kzecinsksaia, Krzesinskaia, Kschinsky, Kschessinska, Krzesinska, Kschessinskaya, Kjzanski, Kschinskinska, Ksheshinsky, Krashinska, and the Princess Romanovsky-Krassinsky. For the purposes of consistency, in my own usage I will rely upon the most direct transliteration of her name from Russian, Kshesinskaia.

4 Matil’da Kshesinskaia, Vospominaniia (Moscow: Artist, Rezhisser, Teatr, 1992), 30.

Kshesinskaia, studying Legnani, learned the skill of the thirty-two fouettes, a movement that became her hallmark.5 Thanks to her work, by 1896, at the age of twenty-four, she became the first Russian to receive the title Prima ballerina assoluta of the St. Petersburg theater, the highest rank in the profession.

Were this all of Kshesinskaia’s life, her place in Russian history might not have been so significant. But this star of the ballet crossed paths with the Russian royal family, and from there her importance in Russian imperial society skyrocketed. First and most famously, she had a three-year relationship with Nicholas II during his years as tsarevich. After Nicholas married and ended the relationship with Kshesinskaia, she formed a relationship with his cousin, Grand

Duke Sergei, who told family members he considered her his platonic wife.6 In addition, in 1900 she met and began a lifelong relationship with Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich, the presumed father of her only child, Volodya, born in 1902.

Kshesinskaia’s attachment to the Romanovs and her financial gain from that relationship was well known, thanks to Kshesinskaia’s position as a hostess in elite imperial society. In the late years of the Empire, she built a home which became a symbol of her life as the imperial favorite. Architect Alexander Ivanovich von Gogen, who had previously worked on projects for the War Ministry and the Imperial family, designed and constructed the house, a landmark of the

Russian Style Moderne, in 1904-1906. The building, known later as the Kshesinskaia Mansion, was created for the corner of the newly fashionable Kronverskii Prospekt, overlooking the old

5 E. Kartsova, Nashi Artistki, Vypusk’ 3: M.F. Kshesinskaia. Kritiko Biograficheskii Etiud (Saint Petersburg: Trud, 1900).

6 Alexander, Once a Grand Duke, 150, and “Iz perepiski S.M. i N.M. Romanovov v 1917,” Krasnyi Arkhiv vol. 4- 53 (1932): 141-143. (Letter 9 March 1917.)

Trinity Square and across the Neva from the Winter Palace, the residence of the tsar. It was there that the semi-retired ballerina made her home, primarily as a society hostess, in the years before

World War I. Yet although she was almost fully retired, the symbol of this woman, her home, was one of the first and most savagely attacked homes in the February Revolution.

The ballerina, a symbol of the imperial family, thus left a house that became a powerful symbol in its own right—first of the failures of the Romanovs, then of the glory days of revolution. In March 1917, the Bolsheviks quickly took over the house and used it as their headquarters in the city, despite ongoing legal attempts by Kshesinskaia to reclaim her home.

Finally, in July 1917, the Provisional Government enforced a court order evicting the

Bolsheviks, but, ironically, the house was not returned to Kshesinskaia.7 Instead, the Provisional

Government simply claimed it for itself and used it until its troops ultimately surrendered the building in October 1917. After the October Revolution and throughout the 1920s, the Soviet government took over the mansion and carefully capitalized on its power as a revolutionary symbol. Making good on their revolutionary promises for a new society, they utilized the space to house a number of social service organizations, including a veterans’ assistance office, a public kitchen, an orphanage, and the offices of Proletkult, the government’s propaganda subdivision. But these tenants did not remain for long. In 1937, following the assassination of

Leningrad party leader Sergei Mironovich Kirov, the house was emptied and turned into the

Kirov Museum, the first step towards the house’s eventual rebirth after World War II as the official Museum of the October Revolution.8 The house thus completed its transition from a site

7 She fled Russia after the failure of her lawsuit. Kshesinskaia died in 1971 at the age of ninety-nine in Paris, running a dance studio which supported herself, her then-husband (Grand Duke Andrei), and their son.

8 The Museum of the October Revolution was the parent museum of the Kirov; the former had been founded in a wing of the Winter Palace (October 9, 1919) but had outgrown its quarters already by the end of the 1920s.

of local activism and the quest for social justice to a propaganda piece serving the revolution’s view of itself.

Laying the Foundation

I approach this house, its construction and many reconstructions, as a gateway to understanding the foundation of modern urban society in Russia. Modernity is the subject of an enormous body of literature, all works seeking to define this elusive target. One key question scholars have asked is how modernity defines the relationship between state and individuals.

Does modernity imply a new quality of government power over the populace, as Timothy

Mitchell has argued of the regimented life in colonial Egypt?9 He described the intensity of

British social control over Egypt: “The powers of monitoring and instructing were designed to keep the mental as well as the material under observation.”10 If modernity is not some government-impressed arrangement, as this view suggests, is it then part of a broader cultural effort to sedate the masses, as Vanessa Schwartz said of fin-de-siècle France?11 Is it an internalized message, passed along by individuals as well as structures of social power, as

Foucault theorized?12

State and modernity is not the only issue theorists of modernity have confronted. They have interrogated its links to the city and to consumerism alike.13 They have asked how

9 Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkley: University of California Press, 1991).

10 Ibid., 101.

11 Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

12 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1990).

13 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) and Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

modernity differed between European and non-European models, as Wen-Hsin Yeh suggested for China, arguing that wars and urbanization, not necessarily capitalist explosion, brought China into the modern.14 They have inquired how modernity actually differs from the pre-modern, as

James Scott, in his comparative analysis of the modern state, challenged modernity’s claim to be without roots.15 And they have examined the role of intellectuals in this process. Mitchell, for example, argued the academic studies of the Egyptians went hand-in-hand with political domination; Nelson Moe, in his article in Italy’s Southern Question, has shown that northern

Italian intellectuals, in the first waves after the Risorgimento, created an image of a poor and less-civilized south that would go on to shape national policy in Italy for decades.16

Within the sphere of Russian writings, the questions of modernity have become increasingly more specific. Four stand out:

1.) When did it begin? Peter the Great’s claim to modernizing all of Russia has been correctly set aside by historians. Instead, many look at the period of the Great Reforms for modernity’s birth.17 Still others would look well into the twentieth century for the arrival of modernity. Stephen Kotkin argued modernity truly came to Russia with Stalin’s industrialization, bringing the industrial world into the populace beyond the former imperial capitals.18

14 Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond, edited by Wen-Hsin Yeh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). See also the collections What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), edited by Richard Calchman; Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

15 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

16 Nelsoe Moe, “The Emergence of the Southern Question in Villari, Franchetti, and Sonnino,” in Italy’s Southern Question, edited by Jane Schneider (New York: Berg, 1998): 51-76.

17 See the collection, Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855-1881, edited by Ben Eklof, John Bushnell, and Larissa Zakharova (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

18 Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

2.) Where was modernity? Katerina Clark positioned modernity’s birth in Petrograd, saying its heritage of iconoclasm gave birth to the destructive edge of revolution.19 The authors in the collection, Merchant Moscow: Images of Russia’s Vanished Bourgeoisie have looked to the rising middle class in the old capital as the true birth of Russian modernism.20 Daniel Brower has looked across all of the cities in the empire for modernity, arguing that it formed thanks to the mixture of old elites, new urban elites, and a constant stream of migrants.21 The city, he suggests, served as a turbulent melting-pot of sorts for Russians, symbolized by the rising literacy within the cities, as well as institutions that brought the city together (including prisons).22 The focus on the city is essential to depictions of Russian modernity: Of the articles in

David Hoffmann and Yannis Kotsonis’ Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, not a single one is particularly rural in focus.23

3.) Who could participate in the making of modern society? Was modernity a project in which all could participate? Laura Engelstein discussed how women, in particular, engaged with street-side novels that were scorned by intellectuals and government members alike.24 The response of professionals to boulevard sexuality revealed a “fundamental ambivalence about modernity,” for “they sought expanded autonomy of men on the grounds of custody of

19 Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

20 Merchant Moscow: Images of Russia’s Vanished Bourgeoisie, edited by James L. West and Iurii A. Petrov (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

21 Daniel Brower, The Russian City Between Tradition and Modernity, 1850-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

22 Ibid., 79.

23 Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, edited by David Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsons (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).

24 Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1992).

women.”25 Louise McReynolds looked at the upper-middle class entrepreneurs, who invested in the creation of a mass press, and found a way to social success in spite of state censorship.26

If modernity was therefore urban, in its Russian variant, was it uniquely “Russian”? As an additional corrective to this mythology, they have turned to see how modernity was experienced in subsets of the Russian empire. Was it, they asked, specifically an ethnically

Russian experience, or not? Charles Steinwedel discussed the use of ethnicity as a political label in the government hands, but other authors have tackled regional issues from the perspective of those not ethnically Russian.27 As Adeeb Khalid has shown in his work on the jadids of Central

Asia, local intellectuals, the reformist jadids, used the tropes of Russian modernity to argue for their own program of social and religious reform.28 “The jadids esteemed modernity, not necessarily the Russians.”29

4.) What was its legacy? To what extent did modernity “take” broadly? Historians have danced along the lines of a Russian variant of the German Sonderweg, suggesting Russia’s path to modernity was a path to revolution.30 Speaking more broadly of modernity, in All That is

Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman interrogated Marxism and Goethe alike to argue that at its

25 Ibid., 422.

26 Louise McReynolds, The News Under Russia's Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press (New Haven: Princeton University Press, 1991).

27 See Charles Steinwedel, “To Make a Difference: the Category of Ethnicity in Late Imperial Russian Politics, 1861-1917” in Russian Modernity: 67-86.

28 Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) and “Representations of Russia in Central Asian Jadid Discourse,” Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700-1917, edited by Daniel J. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1997), 200.

29 Ibid., 196.

30 See Alexander Chubarov (The Fragile Empire: A History of Imperial Russia, 1999, and Russia’s Bitter Path to Modernity: A History of the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras, 2001) and David Christian’s Imperial and Soviet Russia: Power, Privilege and the Challenge of Modernity (London: Macmillan, 1997).

core, modernism contains a destructive force, allowing the modern to break down, and be built up, in waves. 31

While modernity has been the subject of a vast literature, I follow here recent works, such as the volume edited by Bruce M. Knauft, Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities,

Anthropologies (2002). This literature has described modernity as an experience varying between

Western and non-Western nations, but sharing two consistent core qualities: 1.) an enhanced sense of change over time (that is, the ability to distinguish between the past, and a present/future); 2.) rapid transformations in areas including, but not exclusively, technology, communication, and social organization.32 In this dissertation, I use this definition of modernity to mark my own approach towards the Russian case. While arguments about modernity’s spread into the Stalin years bear merit, it is appropriate to look to the zones where it first developed— the fin-de-siècle cities—for the start of this process. Although others have looked to modernity in the life of specific groups, in my work, I show that modernity is not a singular event but a series of phenomena filtered through the perception of different groups. There is no one “modernity” applicable to all, despite the fact that some of the values and ideas embraced by these groups overlap.

In this dissertation, I therefore draw out five visions of urban modernity, all of which were projected onto the rooms of the Kshesinskaia mansion. Russia’s modernity is best described as fragmented, I suggest, which is one of the reasons this empire was the site of revolutionary violence—the empire became an arena for the contest of these ideas of modernity.

31 Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Verso, 1983).

32 See also Sibel Bozdogan, Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic: Studies in Modernity and National Identity Series (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001) and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Five of these visions are at the center of my dissertation, all reflecting groups that existed within the Kshesinskaia mansion. These visions of modern society conflicted on almost front, with the exception of a belief in service to the state:

1.) An aristocratic vision, in which leadership flowed naturally from those of gentle birth,

who in turn had to lead gentle lives of culture and grace in order to demonstrate their

superiority;

2.) An international, technocratic vision, applied by experts such as architects who

reached across bureaucratic and national lines alike to address social needs in their

designs of buildings and neighborhoods;

3.) A mass press image, marked by bourgeois ideas of patriotism, hard work, and

attendance to ideas of sexual morality, all to be hawked for public consumption in

streetside pages;

4.) A liberal institutional vision of a society based firmly on the creation and defense of

civil rights, including male suffrage, freedom of speech, and civil rights;

5.) A streetside vision, cornered by the Bolsheviks, which combined values of

neighborhood group initiative, social equality, social service, and above all, popular

access to political participation.

Nobles, professionals, government, masses: The ideas of these groups all existed, and conflicted, in the years leading up to 1917, and all five played a role in the life of the

Kshesinskaia mansion. As part of the public debate about the nature of modern Russian society,

the Kshesinskaia house was made, and remade, its spaces bound up in the question of what was to happen to this society.

What was to happen was the Russian Revolution, which is both frame and focus of this work. The story of the Russian Revolution has been told as many times as the tragi-comic tale of

Rasputin’s death. And just as tales of Rasputin’s demise have varied, so too have the multitude of histories produced on this enormous subject. Who “did it”? Was it the nobles, who danced while Petrograd revolted? The masses, who whispered rumors about the regime? The artists, who were too willing to upend tradition and embrace a new order? The Provisional Government and liberal middle class, who were too idealistic to deal with the sordid realities of rule? Was it

Lenin, driving a band of militant followers to power? Or was it the Bolsheviks themselves, representing and drawing on the desires of the Russian people? And where did all of this take place? What is the value of studying the revolution as an urban, versus national, experience?

When was this—just 1917, or more?

These are the large themes of Russian Revolution studies, and this is my contribution to the scholarship of this period. In my dissertation, I fuse together facets of the urban Russian experience between 1900 and the early 1920s. I focus in on Petrograd, believing that the imperial capital, for the purposes of a doll’s house view of revolution, offers the best option for capturing all of those fragments of perspective. Regardless of the allure of the “Petersburg myth,” historians have been tempted to focus on Petrograd simply because of its role as the center of political action in 1917. In addition, scholars have worked to suggest the actual environment of

Petrograd had an impact on cultivating this revolution. In his 1976 monograph, St. Petersburg:

Industrialization and Change, James Bater made one of the first arguments that the physical environment of the city reflected the tumultuous political situation within it. By 1900, the

government’s social experiment, the government-designed St. Petersburg, had failed, he argued, largely because of failures of administration to deal adequately with population sanitation; the implosion of the government in the Revolution reflected an untenable living situation in the capital city.33 Literary scholar Katerina Clark has challenged us to see a new energy rising in the turbulent artistic world there, one that contributed uniquely to the emergence and death of the

Revolution.34

Both Bater and Clark’s works take a narrow view on the revolutionary era, however—

Bater focusing on government statistics, Clark looking to the intelligentsia. My work allows a retelling of the Revolution in the imperial capital from several different points of view, emphasizing those with either social, cultural, or political power—those creating what I call

“elite culture” in this dissertation’s subtitle. Elite culture has the power to speak broadly, to be replicated, and for this reason, it is featured in my dissertation.

Although my work, focusing on one building and its inhabitants, is a microcosm of life in the imperial capital, it shows us the importance of considering even one of the largest stories in historiography, the Russian Revolution, from the perspective of multiple players. Historians have traditionally created analyses highlighting just one of these players. The “what if” question has driven interest in the Provisional Government and its inability to hold power, linking the

Provisional Government to the disastrous missteps of the Tsarist order. Historians have emphasized the poor political choices at the center of the Provisional Government in undermining its position. Marc Ferro’s 1972 work, The Russian Revolution of February 1917,

33 Ibid., 165.

34 Clark.

captures this position: he argues that the Duma was delaying dealing with major legal reforms

(like land allotment) at the expense of the genuine enthusiasm of the Russian people for change.35 Echoing that position, H. J. White argued that civil rights were not a major issue for the Provisional Government, which unwisely delayed legal revision to define those rights.36

Analysis of the government by cultural and social historians has simply stressed its ineptness and how it assisted in undermining its own legitimacy. These historians, like Orlando Figes, Boris

Kolonitskii, and Frederick Corney have read these moves of the Provisional Government as significant failures to define new symbols for the regime.37

If the Provisional Government was weak, what of its ultimate opponent, the Bolsheviks?

The most oldest and most prominent subset of the Revolution literature has zoomed in on the political role of the Bolsheviks, beginning with the role of their leader. For the early revisionist

Robert Daniels, “The Bolsheviks had a singular role both in Russia and world history, a role they never would have played without the sheer force of Lenin’s personality, his determination to seize power no matter what.”38 The conservative Richard Pipes locates his significance in his ruthless utilitarianism. “One need not believe that history is made by ‘great men’ to appreciate

35 Marc Ferro, The Russian Revolution of February 1917, translate by J. L. Richards (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1972), viii, 155. For insight into how the imperial system itself failed in its legal reforms, see William G. Wagner, "Tsarist Legal Policies at the End of the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Inconsistencies," Slavonic and East European Review 54, no. 3 (1976): 371–94.

36 H.J. White, "Civil Rights and the Provisional Government Between February to October," in Crisp and Edmondson, Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, 287-312.

37 See Orlando and Boris Kolonitskii. Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), B.I. Kolonitskii, Simvoly vlast’ i bor’ba za vlast’ (Sankt-Peterburg: Rossiiskaia Akademia Nauk, 2001), and Frederick Corney, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

38 Robert Daniels, Red October: the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 (New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1967) 225.

the immense importance of Lenin” as the “psyche” of Communist Russia, he claims.39 Lenin is a world-shaking figure in Pipe’s Concise History of the Russian Revolution: “Lenin not only expected civil war to break out in his own country and around the globe…but he took power to unleash such a war.”40

Historians crossing the waves of social and cultural history have emphasized the

Bolsheviks as representatives of the people, although they acknowledged Lenin’s importance within the movement. Social historian Marc Ferro argued that the activities of February 1917 onwards were spontaneous eruptions of civic spirit, but suggested that October was a coup brought on by a dictator.41 S.A. Smith saw the Revolution in terms of its impact on factory life.42Adam Ulam, focused on the intellectual history of Communism in Russia, crowned Lenin as the instigator of the Revolution: “In retrospect, no one other than Lenin could have brought about the ‘Great October.’ ”43 The eminent social historian Alexander Rabinowitch moved the discussion farther from Lenin himself. While one might acknowledge Lenin’s importance to the

Bolsheviks, he argued, we should not ignore other significant characteristics of the Bolsheviks’

39 Richard Pipes, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution. New York: Random House, 1996), 102.

40 Ibid., 233.

41 Marc Ferro, The Russian Revolution of February 1917, translated by J.L. Richards (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1972).

42 S.A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). See also the work of Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), and Mark Steinberg, Voices of Revolution, 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.)

43 Adam Ulam, The Bolsheviks: the Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1965).

success. Rabinowitch, who seeks to show the Bolsheviks rose out of genuine popular action, aptly sums up their organizational style as flexible.44

Rabinowitch’s work is focused on the importance of Petrograd to the revolution, as opposed to newer historians who look to a more national experience.45 In either case, historians have preferred to focus on the experience of the majority of the Russians, the lower classes. The nobility have (no doubt to their horror) been slighted in imperial historiography, which has focused, with good reason, on the lower classes. The foundational study of the Russian aristocracy, Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia, is a 1985 work that focuses on the economic and social fate of the nobility.46 Seymour Becker argues that after the Great Reforms, the nobles, diminished of land and stripped of serfs, found new positions in industry, professions, and state service. His analysis is a broad overview, however, driven mostly by statistics of the rural elites; if offers no cultural analysis of the period and revolves instead around a discussion of the nobles as a class or an estate.

Other works that invoke the aristocrats have fallen back on a single theme: crisis. Gary

Hamburg utilized the Laurence Stone phrase, “crisis of confidence,” first, arguing that the panicked nobility were trying to find a new way to assert themselves politically.47 “The fate of

44 Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 4. See also his 1976 The Bolsheviks Come to Power: the Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd and the 1968 Prelude to Revolution: the Petograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising, in which he reiterates these themes of popular involvement and organizational flexibility.

45 See Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: 1891-1924 (New York: Penguin, 1998), for an example of looking at the rural revolution; for a work stressing the importance of urban revolution, see, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa. The February Revolution: Petrograd, 1917 (Seattle: University of Washington, 1981).

46 Seymour Becker, Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1985).

47 Gary M. Hamburg, Politics of the Russian Nobility, 1881-1905 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 14.

the Russian nobility was sealed not so much by the breakdown of government authority and the passions of the Revolutionary year,” he insisted, “as by economic change and a long process of internal disintegration within the nobility.”48 In his Fall of the Romanovs, Mark Steinberg goes back to the same theme: “For many Bolsheviks, the revolution was a time of hope and imagination…For Nicholas and Alexandra, the tsar and tsaritsa, as for many others, the revolution was a time of profound personal and political crisis.”49 In his comparative study of the aristocracy across Europe, Dominic Lieven comes to the same answer: a twilight of cultural crisis. “Modernity threatened traditional values,” he argued, forging an insurmountable gulf between rural magnates and the rising new urban elites.50

If the nobles were, at the least, in crisis, and at best, challenged to adapt to a new order based on a commercial culture and not birthright, what of those beneath them, the middling to lower classes? The historiography of civil society has focused on niche studies of the evolution of this arena. Scholars have used a variety of examples to show that the middle class professional elite were forming a public sphere in the decades prior to the Revolution, only to be frustrated by the inflexibility of the imperial government. For example, in the 1996 monograph, ‘Poverty is

Not a Vice’: Charity, Society, and the State in Imperial Russia, Adele Lindenmeyer sheds light on a developing opposition between the government and volunteer charity workers on the eve of

World War I.51 Similarly, in 2002, Patricia Herlihy traced how temperance workers transformed

48 Ibid.

49 Mark Steinberg and Vladimir Khrustalëv, The Fall of the Romanovs (Yale: Yale University Press, 1995), 2.

50 Dominic Lieven, The Aristocracy in Europe, 1815-1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 5.

51 Adele Lindenmeyer, ‘Poverty is Not a Vice’: Charity, Society, and the State in Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

into political agents: “In studying alcoholism and its causes and remedies, reformers became social critics.”52

Even historians who have gone beyond the more classical definition of the middle class have stuck to niche studies: In Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, Richard Stites argues the 1917 revolutions unleashed a surge of utopianism amidst the educated public, which was to be closed down by the Stalinist government.53 While he uses an array of examples (musicians, artists, writers, architects), his image of the period remains fixed on a single group, the educated elite.

In my work, I bring all of these stories together to suggest that all of them played a role in bringing about the Russian Revolution as it developed. Assembling these small pieces into a mosaic of revolutionary culture, I show how these small stories, played out on the stage of the

Kshesinskaia mansion, reflected the fall of one culture and the rise of another, premised entirely on the idea of service to the people. The culture of the Petersburg nobles, although built on the idea of service, contained too much in the way of ritual and expectation to allow them to spontaneously change, en masse, to befit the expedience of a new industrial order. The artists and intelligentsia (represented here by an understudied group, the architects) sought to keep one foot in the patronage system of the imperial world and another in the new, international, professional vision of their field; because they were insistent on their role as servants to the people, they were not necessarily against the rise of a “People’s Government.” By looking at an

52 Patricia Herlihy, The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 13.

53 Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

understudied topic, the courts of 1917, I demonstrate that the Provisional Government was inept and at points hypocritical in its application of the law, and ultimately undermined its own role as the guardian of civil rights. Meanwhile, just as the Provisional Government was contradicting its own values, the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, created a truly accessible organization that offered the

Russian people a solid vision of an organization, and later government, that desired to serve the people. Of all of these visions of modern society, it would be the Bolsheviks that would triumph, partly because they were able to create a credible argument, through their use of space, that they were indeed servants of the people.

My work revolves around one building as an example of modernity and the revolutionary experience. While historians have not neglected modernity as a theme, none of them have explored the history of a discrete physical site in order to expose the ambivalences of the modern in revolutionary Russia.54 Across the chapters of my dissertation, I seek to understand how different visions of modern society, articulated throughout the process of revolution, were reflected in shifting understandings and uses of a physical structure. While the granite and cement at the foundation of a structure may have been permanent, I argue, the meanings attached to them were very much in flux. The story of the Kshesinskaia mansion through the years of the

Russian Revolution demonstrates that re-imagining one’s physical surroundings was part of the creation of a modern society and is an essential element in modernity.

54 See Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, edited by David Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsons (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), the seminal Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Verso, 1983), and Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond, edited by Wen-Hsin Yeh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Alternate models of urban European modernity may be found in Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1992), Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) and Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late- Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

This is a novel take on the story of the Russian Revolution, where no work locates modernity within the story of a single structure over time. Historians looking at structures have focused on buildings as snapshots of the fin de siècle, not a moving picture, as it were, of the people who lived and worked there over the decades. For example, architectural historian

William Craft Brumfield looks to the Moscow Trading Rows (built 1889-1893, now known as the shopping center GUM) as the glass-and-steel symbol of the Moscow merchants’ definition of modernity, but he goes no further than the actual framing of the Rows.55 In step with Brumfield’s assessment, Edith Clowes has emphasized private architectural sponsorship in her own research on turn of the century Moscow merchants.56 In Clowes’ work, architecture was a public statement for a class that lacked a clear political forum for their views.57 In particular, personal homes became a way of staging the importance of individuals: “Men were groping for a time and space in which they would act as the hero and enjoy a large measure of legitimacy and authority.58

The choice of a house as the setting of this dissertation allows for a new and important way to study the history of the revolutionary era, going beyond a civil society consisting of one single group and showing the other sides of the story: that the so-called civil society of late imperial Russia was defined by highly fractured viewpoints, often at odds with one another.

55 William Craft Brumfield, “Aesthetics and Commerce: the Architecture of Merchant Moscow, 1890-1917,” in Merchant Moscow: Images of Russia’s Vanished Bourgeoisie, edited by James L. West and Iurii A. Petrov (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 119-132.

56 Edith W. Clowes, “Merchants on Stage and in Life: Theatricality and Public Consciousness,” in Merchant Moscow, 147-159. See also the collection, Between Tsar and People, edited by Edith Clowes, Samuel Kassow, and James West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.)

57 Ibid., 147.

58 Ibid., 157.

In particular, in this dissertation, I examine how the uses and positions of this house intersected with the decline of the aristocracy, the rise of civil society (both through academia and the mass media), the emergence of a concept of government based on popular ideas of contractual legitimacy, not divinity, and the perfection of mass organizational techniques. In short, through the varying uses of this house by groups frequently at odds with one another, we see a singular expression: the desire to make a modern Russia. In the years leading up to 1917, what we see therefore is not just the growth of civil society (one of the great themes of writing on the revolution), but a real splintering of views about what would make a “modern” Russia.

Revolution erupted, spiraling into the Soviet settlement of the 1920s, because the imperial elites could not create a successful, convincing definition of modern Russia, in which they were seen as chief servants of the state; because the Provisional Government elites could not live up to the promises of civil rights they made for their vision of modern Russia; because the Bolsheviks, in contrast to their opponents, were able to utilize the popular energy by which they defined modern

Russia as a service state.

All of these points intersected with the use of space. Inside the Kshesinskia mansion, five dreams of modern Russia played out. Of all the definitions of modern Russia demonstrated in the Kshesinskaia mansion, only the Bolsheviks’ concept, marked by mass participation, was able to live up to its promise. In telling the story of these visions of modern Russia, I offer historians the ability to bring these often conflicting images together, as they were then, and offer one more reason for revolution. Of the five visions of modernity, only the Bolsheviks’ schema managed to successfully incorporate any of the others, by sticking to its premise of participation. Of the five, only the Bolsheviks could offer a convincing argument to show that they were living up to their promised image, that the house, and nation, in its care was one in which people had true power.

The story of the Kshesinskaia mansion is thus not just the story of the life of a house, but the life of a nation, and the dreams locked like a time capsule within its walls.

The Potential for Cracks

Any historian working with the story of Mathilde Kshesinskaia must attend to one major problem: bias. Her 1960 memoirs are the most significant work on her and they are a prime example of what one theater scholar has called “diva speak”: “the language of put-on (faked aristocracy, faked humility) that utterly believes in the effectiveness of its gestures—or pretends to.”59 Her sole English-language biographer, Coryne Hall, openly admits the memoirs can be “a fantasy” in regards Kshesinskaia’s more exalted claims.60 Tim Scholl, a Slavic scholar who analyzed Kshesinskaia’s writing as a case study of the artistic memoir, asserted she “lied about almost everything—though in a very charming way.”61

Revolving government attitudes toward Kshesinskaia have problematized Russia- language research on her life. She was uniformly praised in the tsarist-censored press, and alternately ignored or dismissed in the Soviet era. In Soviet Russia, her name was “vilified and blanketed with silence,” according to one dance historian.62 While his description is dramatic, it is true that as a daily rule discussion of Kshesinskaia was discouraged. A ballerina from the

Vaganova Ballet School remembered, “Little was said [of Kshesinskaia in the 1970s]…Her

59 Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (New York: Poseidon Press, 1993), 131-132.

60 Coryne Hall, Imperial Dancer: Mathilde Kchessinka and the Romanovs (London: Sutton Publishing, 2005), 21. See Hall’s investigation into Kshesinskaia’s claims of noble Polish heritage as an example of a distortion in the autobiography.

61 Email between Krista Sigler and Tim Scholl, dated August 16, 2005. See also Scholl’s paper, “ ‘My Usual Triumph’: Mathilde Kshessinska and the Artists’ Memoir,” presented at the 1998 AATSEEL conference.

62 Gennady Smakov, The Great Russian Dancers (New York: Knopf, 1984), 63.

affiliations with the Romanovs and her extravagant lifestyle were a taboo subject.”63 While there is evidence of informal discussion of Kshesinskaia, 64there is still, because of the official attitude towards her, a deficiency of Soviet and Russian-language historical literature on her life. What exists now in contemporary Russian-language literature is a mix of delayed information and romanticization. Kshesinskaia’s memoirs were only published in Russia in 1992 (a year after the first exhibit on her life was staged in the museum then occupying her home). With the exception of Kolonitskii’s work, which mentions Kshesinskaia as part of the general field of political obscenity in 1917, recent references to Kshesinskaia have been either in novels or sensationalistic news accounts promising new revelations on her life.65

Constructing a Revolution

The story of the Kshesinskaia mansion is presented here in five thematically and chronologically organized chapters. Each uses the mansion as a stage to consider a question concerning the uses and implications of space in modern society. In Chapter One, “Noblesse

Oblige,” I argue, through the very rooms of the Kshesinskaia mansion, that noble life, as exemplified by the house’s first owner, was one in which aristocrats new and old sought

63 Quoted in Hall, v.

64 According to workers at the Museum of Political History in Kshesinskaia’s Petersburg home, visitors routinely asked if a secret passage did exist, as rumored, between the house and the Winter Palace. See Aleksandra Nevskaia, “Vremia i liudi v osobniake Kshesinskoi,” Mir Muzeia No. 6 (2002): 10-12. In a March 2004 discussion with Alexander Wall of St. Petersburg, Russia, he recounted how his mother pointed out to him, in the 1970s, the summer theater at which Kshesinskaia danced.

65 See recent claims that Kshesinskaia either had a love child by the tsar, or buried a fortune on the grounds of her Petersburg home. See Valentin Bobrov, “Posledniaia doch’ poslednego imperatora?” Vecherinyi Peterburg No. 96 (May 23, 2003): 288. Almost all papers carried stories about the search for treasure on the grounds of the Kshesinskaia Mansion in summer 2002, but an example is “Taina sokrovishch baleriny Kshesinskoi,” in Komosol’skaia Pravda (May 28, 2002), available online: http://www.kp.ru/daily/22557/17750/print/. Novels include E. A. Arsen’eva, Liubovniki tsarits, podrugi korolei (2005), D. Vronskaia, Neistovaia Matild’da: Liubovnitsa Naslednika (2005), Gennadii Sedov, Madam Semnadsat’: Matil’da Kshesinskaia i Nikolai Romanov (2006) and the edited collection, Russkie bogini (2005).

desperately to justify their privileged status. I suggest their efforts merely served to make their anachronistic position the more obvious. In Chapter Two, “Building Civil Society,” the story of the main architect of the building, Alexander von Gogen, demonstrates that the scientific vision of modernity, articulated by the architectural professionals before the Revolution. Chapter Three,

“Center Stage,” shows how mass media helped to up-end the imperial order, as the wartime media evaded imperial censorship and began to produce negativity commentary on Kshesinskaia.

Chapter Four, “Barbarians at the Gate?”, records the court case over the Bolshevik occupation of the house, and the downfall of the Provisional Government in its inability to defend one of its basic legal principles, private property. Chapter Five, “The Hydra,” looks more closely into the house, observing how the Bolsheviks rejected the imperial vision of a household for a new, dynamic, loosely organized “home” of the people, a vision they carried into through the 1920s.

Finally, in the conclusion, “The Secret Garden,” I illustrate how the Soviet Government co-opted this discussion of a service-based modernity that had broken out in 1917, replacing flexible local institutions with zones of state-mandated interpretations of the past.

Through the brick and mortar of the Kshesinskaia mansion, we see that the success of the

Soviets, and the fall of the Romanovs, came down to the same story: the success or failure of the state to tap a unifying vision of modernity. As suggested by the varying uses and lives within this house, definition of the use of space—not just its borders, as Irigaray would suggest—was an essential feature of this debate. Modernity is built into our spaces, not just the borders we mark around them.

The Foundation of It All

A phrase for “thank you” exists in all of the world’s languages. None of these options, however, truly express the depth of my gratitude to those who helped me during the course of this project.

For their assistance in my language education and subsequent research, I thank the

Department of State, the University of Cincinnati’s Von Rosenstiel Fund, Taft Foundation,

University Research Council, and Graduate Student Governance Association. Their investment in my work made this dissertation possible.

For his unending optimism and equally unending editing skills, I thank my advisor, Dr.

Willard Sunderland. There are not Chinese lunches enough to say “thank you,” but I hope a beer sometime by the Publichka might start to say that. In addition, for their insight, encouragement, and time, I would like to thank the other members of my board: Dr. Maura O’Connor, Dr. Martin

Francis, and Dr. Mark Steinberg.

For their boundless assistance and support, I thank the graduate students and faculty of the History Department of the University of Cincinnati, and its heart, the fittingly named Hope

Earls. Hope not only shepherded me through more grants than I can list, but monitored my progress with an honest eye and sympathetic shoulder. I pity scholars who do not have a Hope in their lives, and feel blessed that I do.

Within the university as well, I thank the library staff, particularly Ms. Olga Hart, for their work in hunting down Russian works, despite the challenges of transliteration.

In Russia, I want to thank all of the library and archival staff, but in particular I would like to thank the wonderful people who took me into their homes: the family of Tatiana

Nikolaievna Tkachenko, who became and will always be my Russian family, and the family of

Tatiana Kapustina in Moscow, who provided a home (as well as wonderful music!) In addition, I want to thank Anna Bafradjan and her family, as well as Stephanie Roach, for being an oasis of gossip, comfort, shopping (and good food) for me when I was far from my American home. Last but not least, I want thank my tutors over the years, but particularly Alexander Wall of St.

Petersburg, who introduced me to Anna Karenina and Cheburashka both.

Last of all, but never least, I would like to thank all of those friends and family who listened to my complaints, drove me to and from airports at strange hours of day and night, accepted calls at unholy hours of the morning, and never gave up the faith that some day, this dissertation would be done. Siglers and Setsers, Miki, Renee, Corey, Jodie, Liz, Susan, Mike, and all of the rest—you brought me here in more ways than one.

The Actors

Noblesse Oblige: The Late Imperial Aristocracy’s Search for Relevance

I. Introduction

1 “Everyone knows what aristocracy means until they have to write a book on the subject.”

In 1919-1923, 17 rooms of St. Petersburg’s Shuvalov Palace were opened to the young

Soviet public as a museum of the late nobility’s lifestyle. Through the luxurious rooms and their ornate artifacts, the Soviet people were meant to understand all there was to know about the nobility: that they lived with a grotesque amount of wealth, were entirely irrelevant to modern society, and produced little for it.2

One woman who would have visited the Shuvalov in its imperial days became the very image of the imperial nobility: ballerina Mathilde Kshesinskaia, a ballerina of the Mariinsky theater, best known for her scandalous attachments to a series of Romanov men, including the

Tsar himself. In the year of the Revolution and afterwards, the Russian populace knew the

Petersburg socialite held no government office, gloried in her uselessness, and offered nothing more to the world than wealth and lurid romantic affairs.

But in fact this assessment—of the nobility as a whole and Kshesinskaia personally—was not entirely accurate. Every aspect of the lives of the imperial nobility—their homes, their staff,

1 Dominic Lieven, The Aristocracy in Europe, 1815-1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), xiii.

2 Zoia Belyakova, The Romanov Legacy: the Palaces of St. Petersburg (London: Hazar Publishing, Ltd., 1994), 190.

their ideas of entertainment, their attempts at public service—bespoke a collective effort to assert that being noble was more than vaults of gold and a lazy life. In the later years of the imperial order, nobles sought in every dimension of their lives to express this message, that the nobility were the natural and proper leaders of modern Russia. As role models, cultural patrons, charity crusaders, and the natural epitome of social grace, they consistently attempted to position themselves as essential leaders of the Russian public, determined that they had a position to serve. The luxury and frivolity epitomized in their homes, obscene to later eyes, was to theirs a signal of the good taste, cosmopolitanism, and refinement required to be the leaders of Russia.

To do without the physical settings and rituals of nobility would have meant abandoning the noble class, and with it, a claim to social leadership. In short, nobility meant service to good taste as well as leadership, and while critics might (and did) find that belief distasteful, the nobles could not, and therefore did not, alter their mode of existence.

This insistence that they were the appropriate leaders of modern Russia would drive the aristocrats into a series of fatal errors—from simply ignoring how their lavish lifestyles might offend a starving wartime populace, to rashly assuming positions of political leadership, to their utter refusal to compromise with a new political order that increasingly saw modern governance as the portion of the talented rather than the inheritance of a specific class. But despite their utter failure to successfully assert their modern relevance, the fact remains that the Russian nobles saw themselves as essential to modern society and tried to convey their vision of modern life in everything they did. The impact of their choices has been debated; most famously, Arno Mayer saw the old regime as a force for at best, stasis, and at worst, destruction. More recently, Ellis

Wasson argued the aristocrats were actually able to fall in step with the new century, and should

not be written off so easily.3 I position this chapter between these two poles of thought: service was at the heart of the elite mission, but changing how they served society would prove fundamentally problematic for the nobles.

This chapter will accordingly focus on the lives of the nobles, at home, at leisure, in travel, and ultimately, seeking officially to serve, tracing all aspects of their lives to their homes and the ritualized social worlds they built therein. While an array of noble lives will be discussed here, the focus will remain on the most notorious of the “parasite” nobles, Mathilde

Kshesinskaia.

II. The Problem of the Nobility

The state of the nobility at the start of the century was problematic. The French ambassador himself, Maurice Paléologue, summed up the Russian nobility as beset with boredom: “The men get round it with overindulgence in pleasure, drink, or high play, whereas with the women ennui is usually brought on by the monotony of their existence.”4 A Russian noble summed up the situation as desperation: “They are all more or less tormented by the desire to play some sort of role, above all a political role.”5

At the dawn of the twentieth century, this was the reality for the Russian nobility, creating social leadership in their homes and imagining this guaranteed them leadership before

3 See Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981) and Ellis Wasson, Aristocracy and the Modern World (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006).

4 Maurice Paléologue, An Ambassador’s Memoirs: The Last French Ambassador to the Russian Court, translated by F.A. Holt (New York: George H. Doran Company: 1923-1925), v. 3, 18.

5 Count Paul Vasili, La Société de St. Petersbourg (Paris: 1886), 208-10.

the entirety of the Russian people. “Nobility” in Russia had been difficult to define precisely since Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks paved the way for individuals to acquire, not inherit, nobility. At the top, the ancient nobility—the tiniest segment—marked their genealogies back to the oldest noble families from the days of Muscovy. But all other branches of the nobility were open to new members. There were the three branches of the newer titled nobility—the counts and barons, whose titles dated to after Peter the Great, and the princes. Beneath these, in a larger pool, were the hereditary nobility, the non-hereditary nobility (whose titles could not be passed down), and the service nobility (the one branch that granted the title, but not land ownership, to the noble). Service to the state could earn a Russian access to any of these branches.

For all of the seemingly openness of the nobility, however, they were in a vulnerable position at the turn of the century. Mathematically, they occupied a tiny segment of the Russian population. The court itself numbered 16,500 people, with aristocrats not at court contributing just a few more thousand to that number.6 Most of those aristocrats were heavily inbred, with

870 titled families in Russia before the Revolution7; names like Bariatinsky, Dolgoruky,

Sheremet’ev, Orlov, Shuvalov, Golitsyn, Naryshkin, and Vorontsov would open any palace door.

Still, despite their grandeur, their numbers were declining just at a time when the post-serfdom economy was reorienting itself away from ideas of natural-born power.8 The nobles were decreasing in size. According to David Christian’s statistical analysis, for example, of the so-

6 Alexander Mossolov, At the Court of the Last Tsar (London: Methuen, 1935), 182.

7 Dominic Lieven, Nicholas II: Twilight of Empire (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 47.

8 Christopher Read in fact has suggested the aristocracy’s greatest failing was an inability to reproduce as quickly as the larger lower class, the numbers of their children in government positions dropped dramatically in the last decades of imperial power. Christopher Read, Culture and Power in Revolutionary Russia: The Intelligentsia and the Transition from Tsarism to Communism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 5. He notes that sons of nobles held 23.2% of government posts in 1880, but just 7.6% of them by 1914.

called “ruling group” (his branding of the nobles, officials, intelligentsia, and merchants) in imperial Russia, only the allotment of the nobles within that group declined between 1860 and

1917.9 Although this figure still was larger than the population number of the officials, as

Dominic Lieven has pointed out, the trend of growth for other groups, and decline for the aristocrats, was set.10 This was linked to another change in Russian society. Aristocracy was no longer needed to access elite state power. As of the zemstvo reform of 1864, the nobility’s traditional monopoly on local government had been broken, replaced with an institution that represented in theory all classes.

In addition to their diminishing cohort, the nobles faced another problem: they were fragmenting based on position. Between regions they varied, too, with Baltic and Polish nobility ranked beneath Russian families.11 The rural nobility remained actively engaged in agricultural questions, much as their families would have one hundred years before, while the urban nobles only set foot on a country estate for a vacation. Even between cities, the nobles varied, with

Moscow becoming the zone of the greatest entrepreneurial members of the nobility. These urban aristocrats, in Moscow and elsewhere, often served as a boundary wherein the lines of the nobility began to blur: elite artists and merchants were raised to the nobility (as in the case of the

Bolin family, who were court jewelers based in Moscow and Petersburg), great merchants

9 David Christian, Imperial and Soviet Russia: Power, Privilege and the Challenge of Modernity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), 131.

10 Dominic Lieven, “The Elites,” in The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. II, edited by Dominic LIeven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 227-244.

11 Ibid.

operated as quasi-nobility themselves (the Tretyakovs of Moscow) and scattered individual nobles who were willing to participate in a new industrial order.12

When the traditional aristocracy, whose lives were closely entwined with that of the court, looked around them, they saw a problem. At the time of the Revolution, they argued that the street mobs “let loose against us and all we stood for in life: culture, order, tradition, cleanliness, honor.”13 They saw themselves as the guardians of those qualities, the messengers bringing those characteristics to modern Russia. Their larger-than-life existence, which would become so mocked and loathed in 1917, was meant to confirm and honor this vision. It is useful to bring forward Edith Clowes’ analysis of the Moscow merchants here: “It is thus possible to invoke the broader cultural concept of ‘theatricality’ to emphasize various kinds of nonverbal presentation of self-mirroring, posing, trying-on of personalities” to create a “rhetoric of public self.”14 Their grandiose lifestyles, so offensive to the Russian populace, were in fact a demonstration of a philosophy of life to which the nobles were wed, a vision of modern society in which their role was not frivolous at all, but essential, an existence cultivated to lead in taste and society both.15

III. The Home

12 Alfred Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982).

13 Princess Sofia Aleksieevna Bobrinskaia Volkonskaia, The Way of Bitterness: Soviet Russia, 1920 (London: Methuen and Company, Ltd., 1931), 37.

14 Edith W. Clowes, “Merchants on Stage and In Life: Theatricality and Public Consciousness,” in James L. West and Iuri A. Petrov’s Merchant Moscow: Images of Russia’s Vanished Bourgeoisie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998): 147-159.

15 For the idea of culture marking a “sharp break” between stages, see Yurii M. Lotman, Lidiia Ia. Ginsburg, and Boris A. Uspenskii, The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.)

The noble house stood at the center of the late imperial aristocracy’s efforts to demonstrate their claim to leadership. The house was the stage that framed the noble’s existence and importance.16 Edith Clowes has argued the architecture of the home was crucial for the rising

Moscow merchant class, using their personal domains to illustrate their political importance:

“The theatrical redesign of private homes built around 1900 are witness to men’s efforts to recast private space and integrate it with public space.”17 It was no less crucial for the nobles, both to isolate themselves from the world around them and assert their superiority to that world.18

For this reason, this chapter is arranged around a tour of an aristocrat’s home, tracing the use of its interior and exterior spaces. One particular noble home is central to this story: Mathilde

Kshesinskaia would have one of the most famous noble abodes in St. Petersburg. Her home took form in the early 1900s. After the 1902 birth of her son, she claims in her memoirs, she wanted a larger establishment for him than the small home she had held before.19 “I had decided to build a larger and more comfortable home so that he might have several rooms and feel at home when he was older,” she said.

For Kshesinskaia and the other nobles, location and structure were essential here. Not all areas of the imperial capital (the fourth largest city in Europe by 1900) were equal. Petersburg,

16 Priscilla Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) and John Randolph, “The Old Mansion: Revisiting the History of the Russian Country Estate,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 1: 4 (Fall, 2000): 729-49.

17 Clowes, 157.

18 In the words of Rebecca Gates-Coon on the Hungarian nobles: Their estates were an “environment…[to] enjoy the company of congenial peers while remaining for the most part segregated from and oblivious to the sordid realities of existence amongst the lower orders of society.” Gates-Coon, The Landed Estates of the Esterházy Princes: Hungary During the Reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1994), 2.

19 Mathilde Kshesinskaia, Dancing in Petersburg, translated by Arnold Haskell (London: Gollancz, 1960), 103.

founded in 1703, sits in the delta of the Neva river, its environs wrapping up and around the Gulf of Finland like a lobster’s claw. Positioned as it is, the city spans over forty islands and numerous canals. Although original plans called for its center to be placed on the biggest and most central island, Vasilievsky Island, the great palaces were placed across the Neva, on the southern, so-called “Palace Embankment.” That desirable landscape, however, was changing with an influx of workers’ quarters and overpopulation. Kshesinskaia herself explained this when she described her search for a home: industrial encroachment on the old chic areas meant that they were less preferable to areas where the air might be cleaner. “I preferred a smarter district,” she wrote, “far from the factory chimneys which had begun to spring up on the English

[Embankment],” an older zone on the Neva in central St. Petersburg, where she had her first home.20 The high life magazine Stolitsa i usad’ba agreed with her assessment, indicating the central area between the Winter Palace and the Tauride was losing favor in favor of the areas closer to Kamenoostrovskii Prospect.21

The location selected was near Trinity Square, an area charged with meaning (and squarely in the zone Stolitsa i usad’ba prescribed). Industrial growth, which had made the

English Embankment so undesirable, made possible the attractions of Trinity Square. The

Petrogradskaia side, although as old as the rest of the city, had had sluggish population growth until the Troitskii Bridge formed a link directly to the business and government center across the

Neva. As of 1903, it was the site of one of the newest bridges in St. Petersburg, linking the area directly to the neighborhoods near the Winter Palace.

20 Kshesinskaia, 103.

21 Stolitsa i usad’ba 74 (1 February 1917).

As a downside, the bridge and square both were the space in which forty-eight soldiers died as part of the 1905 Revolution. At the time Kshesinskaia began construction on her home, however, it was merely a blank terrain located just above the Neva. Photographs of the area before construction reveal a mostly empty street and a modest two-story dwelling occupying the land of her future home.22 But Kshesinskaia chose the site for its good geography, not the already existing building on the site: “I liked the position, which was in the best part of town, far from the factories, and its width allowed for a large, light house surrounded by a beautiful garden.”23

Her definition of the “best part of town” is clear. This area was significantly positioned within walking distance of the Peter and Paul Cathedral, and eyeshot of the Winter Palace; short of building her home in the palace courtyard, Kshesinskaia could not have picked a more clearly

“royal” area.

Geography was one concern for the noble; to show the world one’s quality, one had to position oneself accordingly. In addition, the nature of the building had to suit the job of framing the aristocrat’s lifestyle. Experts were necessary for this, and as a result, the early years of the

Kshesinskaia house were marked by the intervention of several professionals working on

Kshesinskaia’s behalf. On April 6, 1904, her agent, A.E. Collins, purchased plots 1-3 of

Kronversky Prospekt from the window of Court Chancellor O. L. Petrov for 88,000 rubles.24 The plot technically sat on two streets, bordering Kronversky Prospekt and Bolshaia Dvorianskaia

22 The location of the house has prompted, to this day, rumors that the house is connected by a secret underground channel to the Winter Palace, located beneath the Neva.

23 Kshesinskaia, 103.

24 GARF, f. 616, op. 1, d. 5, l. 100/128 and RGALI, f. 2602, op. 1, d. 1, ed. xp. 17.

street, and the nearest neighbor was the mansion of a timber merchant, Baron Vassili Brandt.25

The lead architect selected for Kshesinskaia’s project was Alexander von Gogen, a graduate of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. Gogen had an exceptionally attractive resume: He had recently completed several court projects, including the Officers’ Club on Liteinyi Prospekt, and the Suvorov Museum. By hiring von Gogen, clients could associate themselves directly with the

Romanovs. Working from these references, Kshesinskaia negotiated with von Gogen for the creation of a new home. She was in a unique position: within a five-minute walk of the Peter and

Paul Fortress and Trezzini’s cathedral there, within eyeshot of the Winter Palace across the

Neva, but beyond her, simpler, more modern structures.26

Although she had no architectural background herself, and lived in a home built in the early 1800s previously, she agreed to the most fashionable design possible: an art nouveau plan, inspired by the most cutting-edge architectural style of the moment but classically eclectic enough to fit with the surrounding buildings.27 The house design was submitted rapidly for approval. After the land purchase in April, von Gogen’s drawings were submitted to the city on

July 26, 1904, and approved five days later.28 The building’s style was the dom osobniak, a smaller mansion style then in favor with the professionals as the essential expression of the modern life. One architectural critic of the time described the dom osobniak as:

25 Brandt’s mansion would later be joined to the façade of the Kshesinskaia mansion as part of the modern expansion of the Kshesinskaia house/museum. The two buildings were never connected in Kshesinskaia’s residence there, however.

26 Her neighbor as of 1913 would be St. Petersburg’s first mosque, also designed by Alexander von Gogen.

27 Brandt’s house had been built in the style moderne in 1904 by R. Meltzer. Kshesinskaia’s former ballet colleague, Lydia Kyasht, actually described Kshesinskaia’s house as “in the style of a French villa,” an error that reveals just how much the style moderne was associated with elite fashion (and therefore France). Lydia Kyasht, Romantic Recollections (New York: Dance Corps Press, 1978), 238.

28 TsGIA SPb, f. 513, op. 102, d. 7953.

the optimal form of dwelling…Here a person can spend his private life in peace, satisfying his personal requirements and inclinations without troubling himself or others. Everything takes on the imprint of individuality, everything acquires the more enclosed, intimate character that is so valuable for concentrated and productive work, for the development of independence, self-awareness, and the cultural strength that follows from these.29 The noble home was not, as today’s homes might be, about personal preference and budget. It was a stage to indicate the grandeur of the owner’s social ambitions. Kshesinskaia’s home shows this. In location, artistic style, and building choice, the owner had three times opted for the most fashion-forward home possible. Von Gogen’s job was to deliver a home that lived up to Kshesinskaia’s clear desire to make a statement, one that she could (and did) promote across the St. Petersburg newspapers.30 In this, he succeeded completely. Her building won a silver medal in a city competition for the best architectural design (1906) and has remained the most significant Style Moderne work in St. Petersburg.31 In layout, the mansion was notably turned to the side. Rather than walking up to an obvious front doorway, one walked alongside the street to an opening in the gate that wrapped around the compound; from the courtyard within, one could then access the recessed doorway. The effect was to turn the building’s shoulder to the street, suggesting the building’s private, not public, nature. The building thus signaled to the world the importance of the exclusive, aristocratic interior. This plan was dictated by the proximity of the Brandt mansion, but it also embodied the secluded, restricted sense of space that

Kshesinskaia was seeking. From the street, facing the lengthy wrought iron and concrete fence

29 E.Iu. Kupfler, Zhiloi dom: rukovodstvo dia proektirovaniia i vozvedenia soveremennykh zhilishch (St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1914), 197. See also Lovell, 81-82.

30 See Stolitsa i usad’ba, Petersburgskaia gazeta, Zodchii, Nedelia stroitel’ia, and others.

31 Ibid., 240. See also GARF, f. 616, op.1, d. 5, l. 283. The official city Duma letter congratulating Kshesinskaia was sent directly to her, complete with city seal and an offer to send her the medal for the cost of 18 rubles. My research has located no letter sent to congratulate Alexander von Gogen for his design, although he is mentioned as the architect in the letter.

with its corner turret, one would have been hard pressed to guess where the front door was, let alone know all the outlying buildings on the property: a service court, a garage, and stables

(intended chiefly for the cows to provide Kshesinskaia’s son’s milk.)

The home was built as a work of fashion and turned on its side to shy away from street riff-raff. The exterior façade did everything it could to hammer home the idea that the owner within was a person of great power and wealth, and that to be in her presence was a rare privilege. Thus the visitor who approached the Kshesinskaia mansion would be greeted with a composition stressing a range of textures. While the visual effect is consistent with the eclectic style to an artist’s eye, to the pragmatic observer, the point is clear: the owner had the power and wealth to accumulate rich materials from a number of sources, and to use them most whimsically. At ground level, rough-cut red Finnish granite (Valaam Granite) is topped by smooth planes of dark gray Serdobol’sky stone, followed by light gray granite from the

Kovantsaari district.32 Higher up than the ground floor, white-yellow brick with visible grout marks create an orderly ensemble, presumably floating above the chaotic, then classical, features of the foundation. The entire façade is broken up with window sills of the light grey granite again, stressing the excess of materials at the builder’s hands, and again the unlimited wealth of the owner.

If the heavy materials did not make the point sufficiently, the last flourishes on the building clearly established that the Kshesinskaia house was a symbol of wealth and power. In particular, the consistent use of wrought iron, a specifically modern decorative technology, is a crowning feature for the building. Along the roofline, both red ceramic molds of traditional oak

32 A.G. Bulakh, St. Petersburg Stone (http://www.geology.pu.ru/bulakh/Chapter_15.shtml), accessed 2/24/2005.

wreaths and wrought-iron wreath works trace the edges of the building, showing off laurels from past and present times. Around the exterior of the structure, the wall wrapping around the garden is a medley of grey granite and ten-foot iron fencing and lamps, again showing an excess of wealth at hand. In addition, the great balcony is granite topped with wrought iron. Last but not least, the giant, multi-story winter garden is framed with a dazzling, multi-story wrought iron window, with a central circle reflecting the motif of wreaths at the top of the building.

The use of all this wrought iron, bent and twisted like ribbons on the ensemble, was a tour de force of the latest building technologies, a show of wealth no less dazzling than if the house had been dipped in gold.33 All told, the construction the house was alleged to cost anywhere between 500,000 to one million rubles.34 It took sixteen months to build. By fall 1905, decoration of the interior had begun, and Kshesinskaia moved her family into the building about

Christmas 1906.

Kshesinskaia sunk a small fortune into this building, as many nobles did for their own structures, because it was a stage for her life. To the people on the streets as well as the St.

Petersburg press that followed the building’s construction, the message was clear: Kshesinskaia was a woman whose fortune and will could command impossible displays of technology in pursuit of being the most chic. Through their homes, this message was sent: the noble life was one that demanded recognition of its power.

Foyer and Winter Garden

33 The impressive attention to detail with these wrought iron details can be seen in von Gogen’s drawings, held by GMI SPb, I.A. 3744-i. Even the keys were specially made and decorated.

34 Kyasht, 204.

While the Kshesinskaia mansion contained over two dozen rooms, there were ten principal areas that defined Kshesinskaia (and the Russian aristocracy in general). While dedicated to different uses, these rooms shared overlapping themes of space usage: they evoked a world of financial abundance, of great cultural sensibility, of cosmopolitan tastes, of expectations of leadership within a ritualized elite and the classes beneath it. The first of these spaces would be the rooms that first greeted the visitor, including the foyer and winter garden.

From the very first step, the house was meant to impress. Entering the main doorway, the visitor entered a circular marbled foyer of classical design, signifying Kshesinskaia’s pretensions to traditional aristocratic values. It was flooded with light, thanks to dramatic one and a half story windows, and on closer inspection, proved again the wealth of the owner, with an array of different colored marble in the lower wall and floor, and an ormolu chandelier from Paris above.35 To the left, however, was her nod to fashion: the entry to Kshesinskaia’s multi-story winter garden, the private greenhouse whose iron frames one could gawk at from street level.

Inside the winter garden, exotic plants like wisteria, ivy, honeysuckle, and even tall palms proved again the wealth of the owner; the goal was to evoke the “natural terrain” of a gazebo, according to the architect.36

These rooms were of great significance in establishing the immediate character of the home and its owner. Kshesinskaia herself spoke repeatedly with the Russian press about how she used her marble foyer for dancing practice, making her home a “shining” temple of art. The

35 Bobrov and Kirkov, 62.

36 Ibid., 78. GMI SPb, f. I.A. 3738-i.

drawings accompanying one article depicted in Kshesinskaia mid-dance on the foyer’s marble floor.37

The foyer served as another kind of stage as well. Receiving—greeting guests and going as guests—was a daily practice for the Russian nobility, geared to confirm their status in each other’s eyes. By spending the time to go to an “at home,” ritualized visits in which aristocrats called upon each other, one validated the owner’s position of social importance; by being received, one in turn was confirmed as belonging to the elite.

Visits generally took place in the early afternoon. One British visitor described the aristocrats as near vampires, rising so late that it appeared they “[wished] to exclude the light of day as far as possible.”38 This routine, mostly performed by the women, went like this:

Every afternoon, Mama and I got into a closed carriage and drove from house to house, leaving cards or attending at-homes [weekly receptions]. We generally managed fifteen to twenty calls from two o’clock to seven. It meant hastily divesting oneself of one’s fur coat and felt overshoes and staying for some fifteen or twenty minutes at the most.39 Four days a week, aristocrats performed this rush from house to house, saving one day for their own “at home”—an open house of approximately twenty seven in which the hostess (or host) would make himself/herself available and have tea and sandwiches ready for guests.40

While men could avoid these functions (heading instead to the stock exchange on Vasil’evskyi

37 See the Petersburgskaia gazeta no. 321 (22 November 1911), 5, and no. 326 (28 Nov. 1911), 15.

38 E.A Brayley Hodgetts, The Court of Russia in the Nineteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1908), 75.

39 Baroness Sophie Buxhoevden, Before the Storm (London: MacMillan, 1938), 204.

40 Elizabeth Zinovieff, A Princess Remembers: A Russian Life, 1892-1907 (London: Y.N. Galtine and J. Ferrand, 1997), 109. Aristocrats often visited people who were not “at home” that day in order to spare themselves some time; it was considered socially acceptable to leave a card and drive on.

Island or a men’s club), women were always expected to be in attendance on these daily rituals.

The hostess’ function was to have a “sweet smile and a pleasant word for all,” and age was no excuse; by the age of seven, a child was expected to be able to welcome the guests and carry on a conversation.41

Although the idea of the “at-home” was an informal meet-and-greet, the standards were exacting, reflecting the importance of ritual to this class. Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, for example, “received at the head of her marble staircase, inevitably dressed in a black satin gown and wearing a magnificent wheat and oak leaf cluster diamond tiara atop her head.”42 Aristocrats were expected to be gracious and hospitable, demonstrating their natural social leadership. Only the most severe social transgressions could cause a person to be turned away from an at-home.

Prince Felix Yusupov recorded the amusing figure of an ancient miser who would go to an at- home for Yusupov every single day, finagling ways to stay for additional meals. At each meal, she would compliment the chef on the cooking and ask for the left-overs, a request with which a good host was bound to agree, even though all present knew this was her modus operandi.43

Drawing Room/Living Area

Once the guests entered the drawing room, the harsh impression of the foyer was softened. The drawing room was meant to be relaxing, not imposing; in their receptions and entertainments, those who were received—those who met the bar of social class—were meant to display their class in these rooms to one another.

41 Russian Court Memoirs, 254, and Zinovieff, 28.

42 Ian Vorres, The Last Grand Duchess (New York: Scribner, 1965), 144.

43 Felix Youssoupoff, Lost Splendor (New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1953), 76.

Displaying one’s class was not just a function of showing one’s wealth, but also showing one’s comfort in the world. Nobles saw themselves not just as those who passed the social test of being accepted, but those who were true global citizens. Looking around Kshesinskaia’s reception areas (her drawing room and living areas), one notes how easily the style could have been transferred to New York, London, or Paris. Three tall windows flooded the room with light, and the walls, decorated with light floral Victorian panels created a well-lit effect at a time when lighting was as expensive as jewelry.44 Furniture clustered together in the clumped London style for discussion and a series of plants, ranging to a tree in a tub, created a cozy and somewhat foreign effect.45 Dark oak furniture from Roman Meltzer’s company in St. Petersburg again stressed the owner’s wealth and on the furniture, one would likely find one of Kshesinskaia’s exotic pets—a small goat, Esmerelda, or her fox terrier, named Djibi. The place was a fantasy, as was the other sitting area in the mansion: still another corner drawing room featured Louis XVI furniture and walls hung in yellow Parisian silk.46

The animals and the furniture both signaled exotic locales, because internationalism was a key element of the noble lifestyle. International locales had two meanings for the aristocrats of this period. On one level, between war, colonies, specialty research, and enhanced access to long-distance travel, the nineteenth century had encouraged interest in international cultures.

This basic awareness and increasing knowledge of non-local cultures would have been standard for all those of education.

44 Kshesinskaia, 103. See also V.D. and B.M. Kirikov, Osobniak Kshesinskoi (Saint Petersburg: Beloe i Chernoe, 1996), 66-71.

45 “Zasluzhennaia artistka imperatorskikh teatrov M.F. Kshesinskaia u sebia doma,”Ogonek, n. 7 (1911).

46 Kshesinskaia, 103. Kshesinskaia claimed to have planned the décor of these rooms herself.

On another level, though, cosmopolitanism resonated in a different manner for the aristocrats. The aristocrats considered themselves cosmopolitans and prided themselves on their fluency in international culture.47 While they did not disavow their Russian birth, aristocrats imagined themselves as part of a class of aristocrats that transcended national lines.48 The aristocrats considered themselves cosmopolitans and prided themselves on their fluency in international culture.49 Again and again one catches reference to this—the furniture, the architectural style, the languages. Fluency in French and English were simply expected. One commentator recalled in horror that Madame Maria Artzimovich, the wife of the Assistant

Minister of French Affairs, did not speak French.50 As one French observer noted, “They are conversant with all of the details of French literature. They are great readers and many an author little known in France is widely read in St. Petersburg.” Aristocrats knew “the latest Paris scandals” and spoke “always in French.”51 Another commentator noted that “everything from abroad was accepted with delight.”52

47 For a theory of cosmopolitanism as “a philosophy of world citizenship,” see Jon Binnie, Julian Holloway, Steve Millengton, and Craig Young, editors of Cosmopolitan Urbanism (London: Routledge, 2006). For a look at how international influences were translated into a domestic arena, see Carl Schorske, Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980).

48 See Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002); for a longer-running history of cosmopolitanism, see Margaret Jacob, Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). For theory, see the collection Cosmopolitanism (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 2002), edited by Carol Breckenridge, Homi Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty.

49 For a theory of cosmopolitanism as “a philosophy of world citizenship,” see Jon Binnie, Julian Holloway, Steve Millengton, and Craig Young, editors of Cosmopolitan Urbanism (London: Routledge, 2006).

50 Russian Court Memoirs, 294.

51 Theophile Gautier, Russia, translated by Florence MacIntre Tyson (Philadelphia: the J.C. Winston Company, 1905), 201-3.

52 Alexandre Benois, Reminiscences of the Russian Ballet (New York: Da Capo Press, 1977), 81.

For that reason, foreigners (elite foreigners, that is) were particularly valuable as guests.

They allowed hosts and guests alike to show off their linguistic powers and knowledge of international climates. This battle for guests was considered extremely significant, reflecting one’s status within one’s own class. Salon hostesses waged social war over the best guests, since the most successful salon was defined by having the most interesting and informative participants. The Countess Kleinmichael always had with her foreign diplomats, ministers, high officials, artists, assorted “clever people” and “pretty women,” according to one visitor.53 Others hostesses like Countess Witte, Madame Naryshkin, the Countess Ignat’ieva and Madame

Serebriakova, offered suitable alternatives.54 Kshesinskaia’s own salon specialized in men of the arts and high politics: the artist Ilya Repin, singer Feodor Chaliapin, writer Alexandre Benois, lawyer Vasily Maklakov, semi-professional ballet fan Michael Stakhanovich, pianist Sergei

Rachmaninov, diplomats, assorted ballet staff, prima ballerinas Anna Pavlova, Tamara

Karsavina, jeweler Carl Faberge, actress Sarah Bernhardt, dancer Isadora Duncan, Prince

Christian (later King Christian X) of Denmark, Grand Duke Frederick Franz of Mecklenburg-

Schwerin, the head of the Court Chancellery Alexander Mossolov, and grand dukes (Sergei

Mikhailovich, Andrei Vladimirovich, Kyrill Vladimirovich, Vladimir Alexandrovich, and others).

Well-selected guests meant a desirable, and therefore powerful, salon, which in turn underscored the host’s special access to cultural and political leaders denied the lower classes, as well as a social victory over rival hosts. Princess Olga Orlova’s attendance was coveted by hostesses. They were “keen to secure her presence at their parties, as it gives them the patent of

53 Russian Court Memoirs, 254.

54 Ibid., 289.

smartness.”55 She herself held only “select” salons, limited to a maximum of one hundred invitations.56 Countess Betsy Bariatinskaia was described as “one of those women whose entire life was devoted to the cares of being a power in society…People go to her house because it is good form thus to affirm one’s right to belong to the circle of her friends. People also go because one’s sure to meet several members of the imperial family and many people of greater or less influence.”57 Salons were sites of significant cultural and political discussion. The Dowager

Countess Ignatieva offered her home on Mondays to a reception devoted to religious matters.

Every week, the former procurator of the Holy Synod would be in attendance with her, discussing religious affairs.58

The institution of the salon was one of the reasons the aristocrats offered for their lifestyle. They needed to attend, and promote, this ongoing social school. Their homes were thus akin to a soccer player’s shin guards and cleats; equipment that allowed them to engage in the field of play. That is not to say that all salons were devoted to high topics, however. Admittedly,

Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna’s home was “a hotbed of gossip,” as the grand duchess was famous for her knowledge of society.59 Maria Pavlovna’s salon was described by a critic as “fast

[and] vulgar. It is sufficient to have money, to be rich enough to entertain her, to talk slang, and to go every year to Paris, to give her money for the bazaar she patronizes.”60 While

Kshesinskaia’s home had a mildly scandalous reputation, due to her personal life, her salons

55 Ibid., 154.

56 Ibid.

57 A.A. Ignatiev, A Subaltern in Old Russia (London: Hutchinson, 1944), 173.

58 Russian Court Memoirs, 288.

59 Vorres, 91.

60 Count Paul Vasili, Behind the Veil at the Russian Court (New York: John Lane Company, 1913), 86.

were more tame. She was especially fond of gambling. The house kept a poker table on hand as well as a roulette wheel for baccarat. The dancer Nijinsky allegedly exclaimed after one game,

“Thank God, there is but one Kschessinkaia [sic] in St. Petersburg, for in between providing her with a remembrance and giving her butler a tip, we should be penniless for life.”61 In addition,

Kshesinskaia was fond of home theatricals, charades, tableaux, and actual productions.62

For all of their supposed relaxed atmosphere and simple play, the salons were expensive events, because they were part and parcel of the noble’s desire to present himself or herself as a creature of wealth so excessive that money was no longer a concern. In fact, it was déclassé to even consider extreme displays of wealth as offensive. Yusupov records how his grandfather carried a purse with uncut gems wherever he went, and would display them during games.63

Typical noble houses featured tables cluttered, in proper Victorian style; their knick-knacks, however, cost a fortune. Tiny, ancient animals, wrought in silver and decorated in precious stones, and Fabergé items were typical decorations.64 Kshesinskaia’s own tables included pieces like an deep bronze bust of Nicholas II, a malachite and gold pill box, a pure silver tea service done by Russian masters, and an exquisitely wrought agate, bronze, and ivory framed photo of the tsar, apparently done by the Fabergé master Mikhail Perkin.65 “All is pomp and show,” complained one gust,” with rivers of “truffles, oysters, champagne,” and hostesses “try[ing] to

61 Anatole Bourman , and D. Lyman, The Tragedy of Nijinsky (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1936), 234.

62 See the exhibition “Mathilde Kshesinskaia’s Mansion: Time and People” on display at GMPIR and featuring photographs of her guests in costume.

63 Youssoupoff, 27.

64 Odom, 35.

65 The frame, tea service items, pill box and bust were last held by a Sofia, Bulgaria antiquities seller. Militarya BG, personal communication,

outdo each other in the luxury they display.”66 War would make little dent in this high lifestyle, because anything less than full luxury was seen as base, cheap, and therefore not truly noble.

During World War I, the French ambassador Paléologue, walking with British ambassador

George Buchanan, saw four military wagons alongside Kshesinskaia’s house one night, with soldiers delivering precious sacks of coal.67 By May 1917, flour, sugar, and wood were scarce in

Petrograd, but an aristocrat could still expect to attend three dinner parties, a lunch, and some teas during the week.68

Bathroom

With such clearly expensive activities, noble salons had the reputation for decadence.

What outsiders considered offensive, however, was a mere statement of the refined tastes of the noble host—too delicate and gentle to limit herself to small-talk on a few couches.

Kshesinskaia’s was no different in this regard. Her salons, in fact, extended outside of her drawing rooms and to the upstairs bath. Kshesinskaia was “so proud” of this room: “It resembled a Grecian bathing pool, as the bath itself was made of white marble and sunk in the floor.” The tub itself was so heavy that von Gogen had to add extra steel beams beneath the floor to support the tub’s weight.69 Around the tub, “the walls were white marble inlaid with blue and silver mosard. Transparent net curtains hung around the sunken bath, which gave the bath the

66 Vasili, 185, 187.

67 Paléologue, v. 3, 233.

68 Pauline Crosley, Intimate Letters from Petrograd (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1920), 36.

69 Bobrov and Kirikov, 102.

impression of gazing through a limitless blue vista.”70 There she held parties, where guests could sit around the tub, smoke, and talk to the earliest hours of the morning.71

Ballroom

In the salons (including the drawing room and the bath parties), aristocrats jockeyed for favor and prestige. They demonstrated their fluency in international languages, their knowledge of world literature, their grasp of art, their relationships with the powerful. But these events were, despite their regularity, not the main testing-ground of noble social power. This was the rite of the ball.

The significance of the ball as a social event can be seen in Kshesinskaia’s ballroom.

Although her home was far smaller than the grandest Romanov palaces, her ballroom, the so- called White Hall, was still designed to be the biggest room in the house.72 It occupied a straight line along the street side and was, in addition to its size, the most heavily decorated room in the building. A classic white marble wainscot divided the room into two spheres: white marble below, and soaring panels of yellow Sienna marble above. Corinthian pilasters broke the vertical space up, reaching up to a molded frieze that began a stucco ornamentation continued across the vaulted ceiling; at each end of the wall, green agate vases on pedestals closed off the room.73

This room had five full-length windows on one side, reflecting into matching floor-length pier glass mirrors on the inner wall. At the center of the room, along the interior wall, was a fireplace,

70 Kyasht, 249, and Kshesinskaia, Dancing in Petersburg.

71 Kyasht, 249.

72 Bobrov and Kirkov, 72-74, and Kshesinskaia, 103.

73 GMI SPb, f. I.A. f. 3461-i.

its mantel carved with garlands and medallions, and above that, yet another giant mirror to reflect light. The room was outfitted with electricity and lamps to assist Mother Nature: on the sides of the windows and the fireplace were brackets with frosted electric globes, and two ormolu and crystal chandeliers hung above the parquet dance floor. Empire furnishings, ordered again from the Meltzer company, completed the room; marble-topped tables, couches and chairs tapestried in imported French silk.

This room, meant to be used less than a half-dozen times per year, cost a fortune. The fabrics alone cost three thousand rubles.74 As with the rest of the house, it was a deliberate investment. Balls were an opportunity to assert one’s social prestige, to show how one ranked against the other elites, and through this, gain real cultural power. As one historian as suggested, balls were “not just entertainment, but spectacles. The decoration of the hall, the selection of the room, and their architecture, the lighting, and even the table settings were all sublimated to the ideal of imperial presentation.”75 The season for the balls, the winter, was when St. Petersburg became the location to be: “It has been said that St. Petersburg came alive in the winter and died in the summer, woke at night, and slept by day, and to an extent that is true,” one aristocrat has conceded.76 Aristocrats danced until mid-winter. As Lent began, they opted for operas instead of balls.77

Balls demonstrated the ritualized life of the nobles. The season even had an acknowledged start date: January 10th, the date of the St. Nicholas Ball, held following the

74 Ibid.

75 E. V. Dukov, Razvlekatel’naia kul’tura Rossii XVIII-XIX vv (St. Petersburg, Russia: Arbis, 2001), 179.

76 Zinovieff, 85.

77 Ibid.

court’s blessing of the Neva. This was the grandest ball, and the most difficult ticket to get.

About five to eight thousand people, the top four ranks of the Table of Ranks, were invited.78

The menu took on mythical status for even those who were not invited; one former noble claimed it was “spoken of in all of those inferior circles of St. Petersburg society for whom asparagus and lobster represented the ne plus ultra of luxury.”79 After the January 10th ball, the court’s schedule dominated the ball season that continued for the next six weeks. The royals held about three to four receptions of eight hundred of the Emperor’s personal friends, where the Tsar would get up from his long dinner table and actually visit with the guests at their tables.80 Later in the season, he or his family would appear at the smaller Anichkov Palace ball (three hundred, maximum, and no diplomats present).81 In addition, there were suppers at the Hermitage and smaller “concert balls,” with live entertainment. Lastly, for the final Sunday of Carnival, a court reception was held at the Yelagin Palace, where dancers whirled to midnight.82 Altogether, twelve imperial balls were held during the season.

Around this royal schedule, aristocrats carefully positioned their own parties. An awareness of the imperial schedule was essential for having a successful event: Invitations granted to an imperial ball were refused only in the event of dire illness or death, so guests would never turn down the royal family.83 As a result, winters saw extensive activity in noble homes, all vying to show their prestige in conditions comparable to the Romanov events. Courtier Anna

78 Vasili, Behind the Veil, 155 and Russian Court Memoirs, 405.

79 Vasili, 156.

80 Mossolov, 196.

81 Vassili, 157.

82 Ibid.

83 Russian Court Memoirs, 405.

Vyrubova recalled a typical winter of twenty-two balls, including one that required a rehearsal.

In addition, she attended receptions, teas, and dinners.84 Even more than salons, balls were an arena to gain social prestige and flaunt one’s wealth. This was especially important to the nobles as the notoriously shy Empress Alexandra was reluctant to play her traditional role as the premiere hostess of Russian society.85

The balls held private homes across St. Petersburg thus echoed the luxury of the imperial ones. They were of two basic kinds: blanc balls (formal and designed to highlight the debutantes) and rose balls (more relaxed, where married couples might dance, featuring more risqué dances like the tango, and ending earlier, so that guests might stop at other parties as well).86 In either case, there was nothing modest about their level of display.87 Kshesinskaia herself loved masquerade balls, while the Countess Kleinmichael preferred to pack her house to the limits

(approximately 400).88 Countess Betsy Shuvalova held her own black-and-white ball of six hundred elite guests, all given hand-delivered invitations the week before.89 Clothing—such as the ability to go out and buy a special white evening gown for a single event—suggested the breadth of this wealth. “The brilliance of the dresses and jewels displayed at [the balls] was quite

84 Anna Vyrubova, Memories of the Russian Court (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1923), 5.

85 Kleinmichael, 213. The Countess goes a bit far to suggest aristocrats became liberals after 1905 simply because Alexandra stopped going to balls, but the point is made: they looked to the Tsarina for social cues and when she did not provide them, they had to make their own.

86 Buchanan, 17.

87 Other than attire, that is. When present, Empress Alexandra was notorious for correcting women whose ballgowns were deemed to show too much décolletage. See Gleb Botkin, The Real Romanovs (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1932).

88 Kleinmichael, 176. She had two balls of about 700 guests in 1914 alone.

89 Russian Court Memoirs, 262. The Countess Shuvalov’s event was part of a social war with the Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, whose friends refused to attend in sympathy for the snubbed Grand Duchess.

remarkable,” one noble remembered90 The aristocrats’ attire was intended to impress: “Among the several articles which distinguish the Russian nobility, there is none perhaps more calculated to strike a foreigner than the profession of diamonds and other precious stones, which sparkle in every part of their dress,” a countess recalled.91 Jewels covered the body, down to one’s own handbag; Kshesinskaia herself owned at least one purse decorated with genuine rubies and another with a solid gold monogram on it, and carried within them bejeweled cosmetic cases, like her silver-and-tortoise powder compact.92 The wealth on display far exceeded good taste, but almost no one openly denounced it. Yusupov, one of the wealthiest men in Russia, claimed to have noted the near obscene levels of wealth on display during his period of teenage rebellion.

Amusing himself by going incognito to a mansion at the time of a ball, he said he was taken aback: “Although I was only a fake beggar, I was indignant when grand ladies covered with jewels and costly furs, and fine gentlemen smoking big cigars, passed me without so much as a glance.”93

The balls were not simple parties; they were shows. As such, great expenditure was necessary. The most elite designers worked on the women’s ballgowns, including court costumers.94 Jewelers were an essential part of this display, where a typical lady’s gown might have ten emeralds as buttons, each bigger than a pigeon’s egg, and men’s cufflinks were equally

90 Vasili, 157.

91 Kleinmichael, 253.

92 The purses and the compact were last in the hands of a Sofia, Bulgaria antiquities seller. Militarya BG, “Re: Query about Kshesinskaia,” email to Krista Sigler, 25 March 2008.

93 Youssoupoff, 118. One should take into account that this was written after the Revolution, and his claim to have felt the anger of the poor might have been influenced by his reduced circumstances after the Revolution.

94 One lady even had theater impresario Sergei Diaghilev design her outfit for the tercentenary ball. See Odom, 17, and Nadine Wonker-Larsky, The Russia that I Love (London: Elsie Mac Swinney, 1987), 98.

bejeweled.95 The standard, of course, was the Emperor and his wife. Alexandra’s typical ball attire was similar to this:

Her light chestnut hair was decorated with a diadem set with two rows of diamonds, a ferroniere with a single diamond of two square centimeters crossed her forehead. A diamond necklace, the neck of her dress bordered with diamonds, with a flower at the back entirely of diamonds, set flat; two diamond chains leading, like enormous threads of fire, first to the front of the bodice and then to the back of the waist.96

While Alexandra was indeed the wife of one of the wealthiest men on the planet, and would have access to the court jewels, it is clear the other aristocratic ladies followed her lead and loaded themselves with jewels. One might buy from a Parisian jeweler (Cartier, Frederick

Baucheron, Lucien Falize for traditional styles; Rene Lalique for a stylish art nouveau piece), the

Finnish designer Alexander Tillander on Bolshaya Morskaya street, the Empress Alexandra’s favorite Kurt Hahn on No. 26 Nevsky Prospekt, or, for the most wealthy and privileged, call upon the business of Peter Carl Fabergé, official Purveyor to the Imperial Court.97 Kshesinskaia had a standing account with Fabergé and owned pieces like her gold, garnet, and diamond brooch, her platinum and diamond Fabergé ring, or her charming gold bracelet with hand-crafted

Fabergé eggs attached to it. 98 She even had a perfume bottle signed with the hallmark of a

95 Mossolov, 183.

96 Ibid., 196.

97 Greg King, The Court of the Last Tsar: Pomp, Power, and Pageantry in the Reign of Nicholas II (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, 2006), 253.

98 GARF, f. 616, op. 1, d. 3, l. 77, 93-95, 180, 196-197 for items. She was a frequent purchaser of items ranging from jars, to frames, to glassware, bowls, and powder compacts.

Fabergé master.99 Within her files, one can see had a standing account with the House of

Fabergé. Those who could not afford Fabergé often resorted to flaunting exotic stones as an alternative; one lesser lady admitted that she and her family bought their gems at a shop called

“Ural Stones,” with items from lapis lazuli and malachite.100

The French ambassador complained of “too much glass, silver, plate, food, and music, too many flavors and servants. It was all a dazzle.”101 But to aristocrats like Kshesinskaia, the dazzle seemed absolutely necessary. They invested heavily in balls and ballrooms, essential attributes of aristocratic life.

The Wardrobe

Clothing was an essential part of the balls, salons, and even receiving. Like the house of the aristocrats, dress was a frame for displaying one’s social position. Kshesinskaia herself had two rooms, a dressing room and wardrobe, dedicated to clothing alone. As private spaces, they were located on the second floor, next to her bedroom and the main bath, and filled with oak closets and cupboards. One room held Kshesinskaia’s stage costumes, which she owned as her private possessions.102 The other held her sizable personal wardrobe. Although kept in the private spaces of the upstairs, the closet was the servants’ domain as well as the owner’s: All of

99 The bottle was apparently made for her, as the word “balet” is written on it and the Romanov coat of arms was applied to the gold stem, marked with a diamond. The bottle, the bracelet, ring, and the tiara-shaped brooch were last in the hands of a Sofia, Bulgaria antiquities seller. Militarya BG, “Re: Query about Kshesinskaia,” email to Krista Sigler, 25 March 2008.

100 Zinoviev, 86.

101 Paléologue, v. 3, 113.

102 Theatrical stars had a greater degree of ownership of their attire on-stage than today’s theater performers. This is why Kshesinskaia kept her costumes at home. Note her goat, Esmerelda, was originally a prop in a ballet performance before being adopted by the performer.

the clothing was inventoried, so that when she traveled, Kshesinskaia could jot down the number of an outfit she wanted and have the items fetched immediately.103

A wardrobe that required cross-referencing was not unusual amongst Russian aristocrats.

Modernity’s connection with consumption is highly evident here, as the aristocrats invested heavily in the practice of purchase.104 The French ambassador Maurice Paléologue recorded his

December 29, 1916 run-in with a Countess who “just spent three days ordering clothes” from a famous dressmaker.105 At the height of the social season, a typical woman required six outfits in a single day: a morning dress, a tea dress, a visiting gown, a day dress, a dinner gown, and a ball gown. Elena Izvoliskaia, daughter of the Russian ambassador in Paris, recorded her mother’s panic when they were sent back to Petersburg: “We had to order a complete new wardrobe of formal and semiformal gowns, as well as the warm clothes indispensible in the northern city.

Mother had to have her jewelry reset, the small diamond tiara, the fine pearl choker, and the sapphire brooch, the three main pieces in her jewelry box.”106

The closets of Madame Izwolskaia, Kshesinskaia, and the other noble women would be filled with ten to twelve gowns for afternoon functions, like luncheons; two dozen day dresses; a variety of evening gowns; and five to six ball gowns.107 All of these required specific lingerie. In

103 Kshesinskaia, 104.

104 See Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) and Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990) to see consumption in an international light; see also the work of Sally West for advertising in imperial Russia, “The Material Promised Land: Advertising’s Modern Agenda in Late Imperial Russia.” The Russian Review 57, no. 3 (July, 1998): 345-363.

105 Paléologue, v. 3, 6.

106 Helene Izwolsky, No Time to Grieve (Philadelphia: Winchell, 1985), 73.

107 In the event of a death in the family, women were expected to dress all in black for six months (with the exception of formal events, for which the woman’s outfit was to be white), followed by six months of gray. Less

addition, she needed the necessary accessories: assorted cloaks, coats, furs, parasols, hats, shoes, boots, gloves (indoor and leather for outdoor wear108), and purses, to go with her outfits. Along with these “staples,” the aristocratic lady also required specialized accessories like

Kshesinskaia’s mother-of-pearl Fabergé opera glasses or her painted ivory cigarette case, also by

Fabergé.109 All of these items were to be purchased from a known international dressmaker— ideally, glamorous international names like the House of Doucet, or Paquin, or Charles North, whose designs any royal woman would wear unquestioned. In addition, near St. Petersburg’s

Nevsky Prospekt were at least seven dressmakers of note, including Anna Gindus, formerly of the House of Paquin, and another house that was dedicated to the unscrupulous copying of

Parisian originals.110 The most fashionable was Madame Auguste Bussac, whose workshop on

42 Moika Embankment contributed to Alexandra’s wardrobe as well as that of the leading society women.111

Men’s wardrobe received only slightly less attention. For day events, following the noble quest for internationalism, they modeled themselves on English style: gray striped trousers, a

well-off aristocrats might compromise by dying their clothing the appropriate colors, but the expectation was that the grieving lady in question would replace her wardrobe with new items in the suitable colors. Wealth made possible the lady’s ability to show the elegance of her grieving, shifting with the days. The ideal for any woman was to be so wealthy as never to have to wear the same dress again, like Princess Olga Orlova. See the Russian Court Memoirs, 33.

108 Some of Kshesinskaia’s leather gauntlets were last owned by a Sofia, Bulgaria antiquities reseller. Militarya BG, personal communication to Krista Sigler.

109 Kshesinskaia actually claimed to have lost furs worth 227,000 rubles at the time of the February 1917 mob seizure of her home. Her opera glasses (complete with a gold monogram of Nicholas II) and cigarette case were last held by a Sofia, Bulgaria antiquities seller. Militarya BG, personal communication to Krista Sigler.

110 Russian Court Memoirs, 259-260.

111 Tamara Korshunova, Russian Style, 1700-1920: Court and Country, Dress from the Hermitage (London: Barbican, 1987), 38, 155.

black frock coat with tails, bowler hats, and patent leather boots.112 They required an assortment of overcoats (fur-trimmed and cutaway jackets alike). For formal wear, the true aristocrat sported the ever-present uniform of white broadcloth trousers, mid-length black frock coat with gold emblems, a shirt of white cotton, and a cravat or tie. Lesser aristocrats might wear white tie, but the military uniform was preferred. Like the women, the men were always decked out in jewels:

“Even on an ordinary afternoon, gentlemen can be seen with rubies and diamonds in their studs and cufflinks. They would likely offer cigarettes from a gold case strewn with monograms of various friends in jewels.”113

Dining Room

The first floor of the Kshesinskaia mansion, as in many noble homes, was decorated to ornamentation and public appearance: rooms for receiving, the showpiece Winter garden, the ballroom. To support those public endeavors, one clearly needed the appropriate attire and jewelry, as noted. But one needed another element as well: food. The dining rooms (in this case, the breakfast room and the formal dining room) were a central feature of the public level of the home.

Kshesinskaia’s breakfast room and dining room were linked, two spaces separated by a twenty-foot wide opening. Like the ballroom and the drawing room, light and view, the architectural symbol of expense, were considered important in their design, with three nearly ceiling-height windows looking on to the gardens behind the house. These were formal rooms, as they were used only during social hours. For most aristocrats, the schedule of eating began after

112 Baroness Leonie Souiny, Russia of Yesterday and Tomorrow (New York: Century, 1917), 28.

113 Anonymous, Intimacies of Court and Society: An Unconventional Narrative of Unofficial Days, by the Widow of an American Diplomat (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1912), 41.

noon: they had a three-course lunch between 1:30-2, followed by some kind of light afternoon exercise or outing, followed again by dinner at 9 (never before 8, according to one source), and perhaps soup, tea, and sweets at 11.114 While the aristocrats enjoyed a variety of international dishes, the majority of the dishes would either be French or “cooked in the French way.”115

Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich flaunted his social savvy by harassing guests with his knowledge of French food: one visitor recalled that “none of us could have engaged him in conversation unless prepared to discuss subjects of art of the finesses of French cooking.”116

French cooking was such a necessity that one noblewoman paid for her cook to be trained at the

Grand Hotel, where the head chef was a Frenchman, Monsieur Prospère; she considered his skills a special point of pride.117 Nicholas II’s own chef was the former head of the international cuisine Cubat’s restaurant in St. Petersburg, who received 45,000 rubles/year.118 A look at

Kshesinskaia’s own menus shows she followed the same tastes. Kshesinskaia held regular parties involving food, with grand dinners scheduled every four days, according to her planner.119

Events ranged from an “intimate dinner” of twenty-two, to groups of upwards to hundreds, spilling out across the ballroom and dining areas.

The food had to live up to these sizable demands—to serve a horde of people, and to do so while conveying the themes of the aristocracy (specifically, wealth, taste, and internationalism). A typical dinner in Kshesinskaia’s planner usually featured six dishes, mostly

114 Zinovieff, 62.

115 Ibid., 42.

116 Alexander, Once A Grand Duke, 137.

117 Zinovieff, 42.

118 RGIA, f. 471, op. 1, d. 2077.

119 RGALI, f. 2602, op. 1, ed. xp. 4

French in origin, and even written in French: crème d’ artichaud (an artichoke sauce), timballe des écrovises (a crayfish dish), veal, gateau Napolitain (a kind of cake), mausseline d’orange (a whipped orange dish), and pissoles de foie gras (a duck liver dish).120 The table featured rare items for St. Petersburg, like pineapples, oranges, and apricots, with a budget to match.121 In

1909, on a reduced budget, Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich, who rarely entertained in his own home and more frequently entertained at Kshesinskaia’s, planned to spend 3,000 rubles in his kitchen and another 7,000 in his buffet.122 Such luxury makes it easy to believe Yusupov’s account, that he regularly was sick the day after Easter, thanks to overdosing on suckling pig, geese, pheasant, and tiers of champagne.123 Eugene de Schelking, a Russian diplomat, remembered how “champagne flow[ed] in streams,” and described the aristocrats’ dinner parties as a “world of people gone absolutely pleasure-mad, and drunk with money.”124

Kitchen

Despite the rarified air of the aristocrats’ social space, their home was not a purely aristocratic experience. Servants made the aristocrats’ homes function and served as the link connecting this very isolated world with the rest of urban Russia, giving the aristocrats the opportunity to admire their own ideally gracious overlordship of them.

120 Ibid. See especially June 8, 26, and July 15, 1915 listings.

121 Ibid.

122 GARF f. 650, op. 1, d. 11, l.1. The success of Andrei’s budgeting is doubtful. In the first two weeks of February 1916 alone, he went through 500 rubles for the kitchen/buffet supplies.

123 Youssoupoff, 89.

124 Eugene de Schelking, Recollections of a Russian Diplomat (New York: MacMillan and Company, 1918), 302.

The servants who fit into this arrangement were no small number. According to the

Princess Zinovieva, “comparatively few” servants for a city house would be: two butlers, three maids, a dressmaker, chef, housekeeper, female house staff, two gardeners, laundress, water carrier, and a steward.125 Grand Duke Andrei, Kshesinskaia’s partner, retained a valet, assistant valet, a seaman, a waiter, caretaker, janitor, electrician, chauffeur, coachman, assorted cooking staff, and a chef on retinue.126 Kshesinskaia herself employed slightly more: the caretaker

Denisov, two personal maids, a valet for her son, a housekeeper, two footmen, a pantry man, a chef, two cooks, a scullery maid, a dairy-maid, a boiler-man, and a chauffeur, M.S. Semenov.127

Servants were essential to the workings of the house, yet they were rarely highlighted.

This provided the illusion of a purely “family” setting. For example, their sphere was mostly below-ground for the Kshesinskaia mansion. After entering the side servant’s entrance, one descended to the basement, which held the oak-paneled kitchen, pantries, rooms for live-in staff, and the wine cellars, stocked with vintage wines. When contact was unavoidable, the aristocrats built the servants into their worldview, suggesting the true aristocrat was to be noted by gracious behavior towards one’s underlings. For example, Kshesinskaia took great care in approving the designs for the service rooms. She even showed the kitchen off to noble guests, who were

“stirred…to envy” over rooms in which they would never set foot in their own homes.128 The kitchen was “the kingdom of the chef,” and reflected her attitude towards the staff, she told them, as well as her sensitivity to the culinary art. “I thought that one could not ask for impeccable

125 Zinovieff, 35.

126 GARF, f. 650, op. 1, d. 11, l. 1.

127 Kshesinskaia, 144.

128 Kshesinskaia, 160.

service of one’s servants if one’s servants did not receive good lodging.”129 Again and again, in

Kshesinskaia’s memoirs and across aristocratic sources, one sees the reflection of the “family servant” myth. Much like bewildered former slave owners after the American Civil War, the aristocrats saw their servants as members of the family, while rarely questioning their subordination of “family.” Princess Zinovieva thought, “Things were much more free and easy in Russia than in England and we did not have the same difference between upstairs and downstairs.”130 Prince Yusupov remembered fondly a butler named Paul who had served the family for sixty years and felt free to spill wine on guests who were not in his good graces.131

The Yusupov household and larger aristocratic households so clung to this concept of the

“family servant” that they employed more servants than needed. Yusupov called them prijivalki,

“vague persons whose duties were ill-defined and who were to be found in the oldest families where they formed part of the household.”132

Kshesinskaia was no different from Yusupov and Zinovieva in this regard; she too retained individuals based on her fond feelings for them and a sense of family connection. When her chauffer of three years, M.S. Semenov, was called up for active service in 1916,

Kshesinskaia intervened, using her influence over Grand Duke Sergei to get him a prestigious

(and safe) position at headquarters. When she hired a butler, thirty-five year old Ivan Kournosov, in 1909, she also hired his daughter as a maid; after his death, she kept his wife on as a

129 Ibid.

130 Zinovieff, 21.

131 Youssoupoff, 64. He would also fail to serve them dessert.

132 Ibid.

housekeeper.133 In fact, after the Revolution, Kshesinskaia was highly bitter that one of these servants, the “penniless widow” of a Mariinsky set painter, defected to the Bolsheviks. She took pleasure in recounting the fidelity of the rest.134 Their loyalty confirmed her social position; she had governed them well, and had therefore “earned” her aristocracy.

Study/Library

Behind the ballroom on the first floor was the room that made all of this possible: the library, or study, where Kshesinskaia and the other nobles kept their books. This was a room of carved woodwork, again reflecting the English style. It featured inset bookshelves, a single large window, and an ornate honeycomb-style lighting panel near the top of the wall.135 What the room illuminated was another aspect of the noble life: that of the public businessperson. Nobles did not simply overindulge in French food and dance to Austrian waltzes; they were expected to be, at minimum, competent stewards of their fortune, if through the assistance of experts. For example, Kshesinskaia does not appear to have been a dynamic investor in her own right (her files in GARF are filled with notes of advice from her Moscow banker), but she was hands-on in the management of her money. Although this was a time when women wore diamonds in public so that the repossession agents could not claim them back, Kshesinskaia’s efforts to manage her funds had not led her to bankruptcy.136 This is no surprise; according to Michelle LeMarche

133 Kshesinskaia, 165.

134 Ibid. Kshesinskaia claimed only the cowhand and Madame Roubtsov were on the side of the street mobs in 1917. In contrast, she said her porter remained loyal even when threatened with death a mob’s firing squad. (His survival was due to the soldiers spotting a war medallion on his chest.) See Kshesinskaia, 165.

135 GMI SPb I.A. 3733-I and 3733-i.

136 Yurievsky, 6.

Marrese’s study, Russia elite women were expected to own and manage their property and finances.137

Kshesinskaia managed both. From her study, she followed the needs of her estates. Her land holdings included more than her Kronversky Prospekt mansion: at the least, she owned her old English Prospekt home (in part, if not whole), her dacha on the Strel’na, her St. Petersburg house, family resting places in the city, and her family’s countryside estate.138 Throughout her life, she made capital improvements to these structures.139 To fund these purchases, she maintained accounts with the Moscow Merchant Bank and the St. Petersburg credit union.140 She was meticulously involved with her building projects; an exchange of letters with the architect of her planned family vault in St. Petersburg shows she had specific plans for the vault that she wanted in writing, down to the amount of space (measured in sazhens) between the marble pedestals of the crypt.141 She took care to protect these properties: her accounts with the

137 Michelle LaMarche Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700- 1861 (Ithaca: Cornell University, 2002), 273.

138 Rumors that Nicholas II had given Kshesinskaia the English Embankment house after the affair fuelled rumors that her Kronversky Prospekt home had been purchased by the tsar. See the entry for 8 April 1894 in V.N. Lamzdorf, Dnevnik (1894-96), (Moscow: Mezhdurnarodnye Otnoshennie, 1991), 47.

139 A historian of her dacha on the Streln’a marveled that for all of the twenty-three years she owned the Strel’na land, she had it improved. See Oleg Varenik, Istorii Strel’ny. Dacha…sokrovishch v Strel’ne Klad i liubov Matil’dy Kshesinskoi (Sankt-Peterburg: Musei Morskaia Strel’na, 2001), 41. For receipts of Kshesinskaia’s non-stop furniture and building purchases, like her renovation plans for her family’s estate, see her file in GARF, f. 616, op. 1. Note that through summer 1915, despite the war, she was still laying out lavish funds for decorative items like marble work, mosaics, gold and silver pieces, a new 850 ruble water heater, and purely decorative furniture like icon display cases.

140 GARF f. 616, op. 1, d. 5, l. 290.

141 GARF, f. 616, op. 1, d. 5, l. 1. The money laid out for the vault was 9620 rubles. This highly detailed letter gives validity to Kshesinskaia’s claims in her memoirs to having been highly involved in the construction plans for her St. Petersburg home; she appears to have been highly informed on all construction-related matters.

Insurance Society of Russia (agent: N.P. Petrov) reflect policies for insuring the glassware and mirrors in her homes, as well as a fire policy on the Strel’na dacha.142

Bedroom

The library formed the last of the major public rooms on the first floor of the mansion.

Other rooms available, including the two guest bedrooms, merely supported the uses of the first floor of the house—to entertain, receive, and provide a stage to demonstrate the hostess’ social position. The second floor, less than a dozen rooms, was made by contrast of all private rooms, including the wardrobe and bath discussed earlier. They formed support for the two biggest rooms on the second floor, both ostensibly private in nature: the master bedroom and the nursery suite.

Of the two, the room that was most thoroughly discussed in elite culture was the private bedroom. In décor and design, the room itself was meant to evoke English fashion: once again done in foreign style, the room was wrapped in English cretonne, filled with bright oak furniture and chintz fabric. It was almost excessively feminine, with garlands as a border and a typical

Victorian wallpaper pattern of flowers plotted on a diamond design.143 It was a fairly plain room; its most extreme features were the sumptuous wardrobes and bath connected to it, not the room itself.144

142 RGALI, f. 2602, op. 1, ed.xp. 19 and ed.xp.4. The glass policy was 265 rubles, 69 kopeks per year. Her fire policy was in the amount of 10,000 rubles. GARF, f. 616, op. 1, d. 5, l. 290.

143 “Zasluzhennaia artistka imperatorskikh teatrov M.F. Kshesinskaia u sebia doma,”Ogonek, n. 7 (1911).

144 Kshesinskaia, 103.

The bedroom, however, remained the object of fevered gossip. Elite noble lives in the last decades of the empire were marked by romantic dalliances, most not with one’s spouse. Affairs were part of the ongoing aristocratic task of improving, or securing, one’s social standing.

Kshesinskaia’s life proved an example of this. As a single woman, she had moved from her parents’ home to join the tsarevich Nicholas in a building on the English Prospekt, a house traditionally associated with Romanov mistresses. “I knew indeed that this was one of the things that was just not done,” she admitted in her memoirs, but she risked the scandal in order to associate herself with Nicholas.145 After Nicholas broke off the affair, she became involved with both of his cousins, Sergei Mikhailovich and Andrei Vladimirovich, securing her position within the Romanov circle.

Just as the lavish food and dress of the aristocrats could be offensive to those outside of their circle, so too did their romantic entanglements strike an unpleasant chord with the masses.

Popular rumor set aside the practical utility of affairs as a way to maintain social status and focused instead on lurid details: Six months after meeting Andrei, who was significantly younger, Kshesinskaia was pregnant, and nobody knew if the child was Sergei’s or Andrei’s. 146

As unsettling as that notion was, rumor-mongers took it further: She was said to have two children, sons of Nicholas, living secretly in Paris.147 Her own son in St. Petersburg, Vladimir

(“Vova”), was said to be Nicholas II’s, even though all were aware the true mystery was whether

145 Ibid., 42.

146 Kshesinskaia’s associates teased her about being attracted to “kids” after she met Andrei. See Kshesinskaia, 78. As for the resultant child, she always claimed the infant was Andrei’s, and Sergei “forgave all.” In fact, Sergei remained a regular feature at her home and would be instrumental in helping her to flee Russia safely after the Revolution. See Kshesinskaia, 89.

147 Rumor mentioned in the World Magazine (12 March 1911), held by the Dance Archives of the Library-Museum of Performing Arts of Lincoln Center.

Sergei or Andrei had fathered the child.148 In addition to these trio of Romanovs, Kshesinskaia was alleged to have seduced an array of men, including Andrei’s own brother and father before moving on to Andrei himself. Her personal life was considered so disastrous that younger ballerinas feared to associate with her privately, and the press helped this image by printing only slightly disguised accounts of her love life.149

As scintillating as the topic of Kshesinskaia was, though, what mattered most was the perception that all nobles were as dissolute and depraved. The French ambassador recorded how an elite woman had followed “the new universal fashion. She’s divorced her husband. What for?

Nothing.”150 The tsar and his mother lamented together the fallen morals of the nobles, and accounts abounded of nobles whose sexual lives did not meet Victorian standards. Social scandals were typical: the Princess Bariatinskaia was the object of social pity, married to a man who carried on a prominent affair with an opera singer. In one disastrous incident, the wife complimented the singer (innocently enough) on an emerald necklace the Prince had awarded his mistress.151 Vices went beyond adultery. Yusupov had admitted his marriage was of convenience—“I married my wife out of snobbery. She married me for money”—and still

148 For the record, there is absolutely no evidence that Nicholas II was ever alone with Kshesinskaia after his marriage, let alone that he had interest in resuming their relationship. Kshesinskaia herself claimed her son was Andrei’s. While his birth certificate muddies the waters for some (Sergei being listed as the father), the mystery can be easily explained by noting Andrei’s mother’s deep hatred of Kshesinskaia, and her unwillingness to acknowledge a grandchild from the dancer. The child was later made hereditary nobility by act of the Tsar (15 October 1911), GARF f. 616, op. 1, d. 5, l. 10. His name became Vladimir Sergeivich Krasinsky; after the Revolution, Kshesinskaia would later be called the Countess Krasinskaia, as a nod to her son’s title.

149 Kyasht, 119.

150 Paléologue, 76.

151 Yurievsky, 6.

carried on transvestitism and public intimacy with other young men.152 Another grand duke, suspected to be homosexual, was alleged to have abused his wife. She was reputed “by universal consent, to be the victim of unmentionable vices.”153 Still another agonized over his sexuality:

“How appalled all those people who love me, respect me, would be if they knew of my depravity…I am loved, praised, and promoted, beyond what I deserve.”154

Nursery

While the aristocrats experienced confusion about their romantic lives, they were far more certain about their children. Aristocrats saw the rearing of their children as one of their primary duties, indeed, as the extension of their class; many of them were nearly obsessed with their children. Kshesinskaia even said it was the birth of her son that made her want a new house, large enough for his needs.155 Little Vladimir (Vova) was to have a room with a glass-paned door and the only balcony on the building, overlooking Kronversky Prospekt.156 The entire room was framed by a border of nesting white doves at the ceiling level, and an enamel art deco motif at the baseboard level.157

152 Youssoupoff, 182. It is unknown whether Yusupov could be called bisexual or not; at the very least, though, his peers thought he was. After the death of Rasputin, when Felix claimed he had used his wife Irina as bait to lure Rasputin into the Yusupov Palace, many Russian aristocrats believed it was Felix, not Irina, who was the sexual bait offered.

153 Brayley-Hodgetts, 231-232.

154 Grand Duke Constantine Konstantinovich, 1902, quoted in Andrei Maylunas and Sergei Mironenko, A Lifelong Passion: Nicholas and Alexandra in Their Own Words., translated by D. Galy (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 231, 240.

155 Kshesinskaia, 103.

156 This is the famous Lenin balcony

157 GMI SPb, f. I.A. 3737-I.

This nursery was important not just as a resting place for the innocent, but because it represented a separate sphere for the nobles, for the cultivation of the next generation. One noblewoman remembered that “our daily lives were quite separate from [our parents’]. We were not allowed out of our quarters, except when we were to kiss our parents good morning or goodnight, or on those occasions when we were sent for.”158 Without the parents around, the role of guardian fell to the nanny, who would become an all-important figure in the child’s life. The governess was the first step for aristocratic children of reaching the goal of cosmopolitanism. In the late imperial decades, the vogue was for English nannies and the English language. As one noble remembered, “It was through her that the first language we talked was English. I remember her singing nursery rhymes to us; later, she introduced us to the works of English high literature.”159 The Empress famously preferred English governesses, even going so far as to hire a separate Russian master for Grand Duchess Olga, whose English fluency exceeded her Russian skills.160 Grand Duchess Marie remembered, “Until I was six years old I hardly spoke a word of

Russian.”161 Yusupov’s first governess and tutor was English, followed by “a succession of

Russian, French, Swiss, and German” tutors.; the “infatuation” with foreign countries, he said, led the aristocratic children to feign a number of accents, in order to appear chic.162

Noble children, like Kshesinskaia’s son, were reared to be internationalists. They were also raised in a deliberately crafted bubble of fantasy and extravagance. Kshesinskaia regularly

158 Olga Voronova, Upheaval (New York: Putnam, 1932), 21.

159 Grand Duke Cyril, My Life in Russia’s Service (London: Selwyn and Blount, 1939), 3.

160 Charlotte Zeepvat, From Cradle to Crown: British Nannies and Governesses at the World’s Courts (Gloucestershire, England: Sutton Publishing, 2006), 79 and M. Eager, “Further Glimpses of the Tsaritsa’s Little Girls,” Girls’ Own Paper vol. xxx (1909).

161 Grand Duchess Marie of Russia, Things I Remember (London: Cassell, 1936), 11.

162 Youssoupoff, 44.

replaced Vladimir’s furniture with newer models more appropriate to his size.163 For one of his parties, she had a famous clown (Dura) appear; the clown was upstaged by a circus elephant who could nap on a bed and use a chamber pot, to the small guests’ delight.164 Life was a carnival on a daily basis; he had a cow in the outdoor stable to supply him constantly with fresh milk and his own pet pig. This was not abnormal; Princess Yur’evskaia remembered fondly how she and her siblings smuggled their baby donkey into the family nursery.165 Noble life, from childhood on, was meant to be as ideal and fanciful as was possible. Life was a fairytale, and to live in any other way was to reject one’s nobility.

IV. Service

Kshesinskaia’s son would be raised in a fairytale surrounding, but he was also meant to become a servant of the state. As a graduate of the Imperial Ballet School and an employee of the Mariinsky, Kshesinskaia would have grown up with the understanding that she was a servant of the Russian government. Officially, the Imperial Ballet and its schools were a division of the

Imperial Household, paid for by the court.166 Service to the Russian people, however, was the theme of all the aristocrats, not just Kshesinskaia. Over and over again, one can see in the actions of the Russian nobles that they believed it was their duty to serve the Russian people. Just as they were to be gracious to their servants, the most superior nobility emerged from service to the people.

163 Note the order for a children’s bookshelf of 550 rubles, RGALI f. 2602, op. 1, ed.xp. 11, and a complete children’s dining room suite on the same receipt.

164 Kshesinskaia, 97.

165 Yurievsky, 6.

166 The Mariinsky files are still listed under the Imperial Household in RGIA.

The lives of the noble men make this point most easily. As a guest at a ball commented,

“There were only a few white ties and tails, mostly foreign diplomats. Everybody in Russia seemed to be in uniform.”167 Military service, and the right to wear a uniform, “differentiate[d] a man from his lackey.”168 Elite men were forced into military careers, despite whether they wanted to be soldiers or not. Grand Dukes Nicholas and Georgii Mikailovich were both shoved into military careers, although neither had the skills for it.169 The Princess Dologorovky recorded how her brother had become an officer of the Guards as a teenager: “This had become practically a family tradition.”170 When the youthful Nicholas II was dispatched in a world tour before his marriage, he was escorted by a seeming regiment of these young, titled men: the Prince

Bariatinsky (Suite General), Prince Ololensky (Horse Guards Regiment), Prince Kochubei

(Cavalry Guards) and Prince Ukhtomsky (Department of Foreign Affairs). So distantly was a military title actually linked to service ability that Madame Makarova the widow of Admiral

Makarov, who had been killed in the Russo-Japanese War, wore her husband’s order of St.

Catherine. She called herself the “babushka of the Russian fleet,” and attended all official ceremonies and dinners for the navy in his stead. Once rejected at the door of the Duma, she upbraided the young guard, reminding him of what she considered to be her real claims to precedence: “Young man, you evidently don’t know the head of your own company.”171

167 Helene Izwolsky, No Time to Grieve (Philadelphia: Winchell, 1985), 75.

168 Baroness Leonie Souiny. Russia of Yesterday and Tomorrow (New York: Century, 1917), 22.

169 Alexander, Once and Grand Duke, 144, and David Chavchavadze, The Grand Dukes (New York: Atlantic International Publishers, 1990), 184. Grand Duke George’s paintings would end up in the Smithsonian.

170 Princess Stephanie Dolgorouky, Russia Before the Crash (Paris: Herbert Clarke, 1926), 16.

171 Russian Court Memoirs, 279.

These were the people who felt they had a claim to lead the Russian military: Clear social figureheads, like Madame Makarova, and noblemen neither trained, inclined, or of age to fulfill the requirements of professional military leadership. Their ineptness for their role, and their insistence upon fulfilling it, was clear. The General Prince Vladimir Orlov, Chief of the Military

Field Chancellery, was so obese that he could not sit on a horse; since he considered his participation in military processions essential, Orlov actually ran (or waddled) alongside the horses in his regiment.172 Inept leadership could result in more than an amusing parade display.

Grand Duke Alexander assessed Sergei Alexandrovich [Moscow’s Governor-General at the time of the Khodynka tragedy] as “a very poor official, he commanded the Preobrajensky Regiment, the crack regiment of the Imperial Guard. A complete ignoramus, he held fast to the general governorship of the Moscow area, which should have been entrusted to a statesman of exceptionally seasoned expertise.”173 While the officer corps of the Russian military was changing, transforming the former noble bastion into a professional service elite, at its top, many inept nobles of little experience cluttered the ranks. That Sergei himself was a Romanov should not undermine the point: men were being given military leadership that they simply did not deserve, and the results would not help the Russian war efforts.

Reared to believe they should be military leaders, it is no surprise that the noble men also believed they should have some say over civilian affairs as well. Military rank helped to secure a place at court: “To be admitted at court, a man must have attained an army generalship, a colonel of the guards, or an actual counselor of the state,” a memoirist recorded.174 Not surprisingly, the

172 Mossolov, 22, 163.

173 Alexander, 439.

174 Russian Court Memoirs, 146.

court was a sea of uniforms as a result.175 But beyond their decorative appearance at court,

Russian nobles sought to carve out a place of political influence for themselves. Don C. Rawson has documented how noble men flocked to noble political associations after 1905: the Beseda

Circle of 1904, helmed by the Princes Pavel and Peter Dolgoruki, and Prince E.N. Trubetskoi,

1905 Union of Russian Men founded by Count Pavel Sheremet’ev, the United Nobility of the same year.176 The noble men also attempted to assert their influence unofficially. At a December

19, 1916 dinner party at Schubine’s restaurant, guests argued the steps necessary to remove the

“evil counselors” surrounding the tsar.177

Russian elite men did not limit themselves to discussions of politics. As one would guess from their obsession with ballet, the noblemen considered themselves special patrons of the arts, gifted individuals endowed with the leadership, taste, and wealth to actively sponsor artistic productions. Their pursuit of entertainment was therefore an extension of their artistic leadership.

Noblemen served as the initial patrons of the Ballets Russes and the arts magazine, Mir

Iskusstva.178 Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich served as President of the Russian Academy of Arts from 1876 onwards, painted on his own, and collected ancient icons.179 Kshesinskaia’s

175 An 1865 London handbook for travelers to Russia actually claimed, “It is necessary to wear a uniform at court.” Quoted from Dominic Lieven, Aristocracy in Europe, 138.

176 For an extended discussion of the right-wing efforts of the nobles, see Don C. Rawson, Russian Rightists and the Revolution of 1905 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

177 The Russian Diary of an Englishman: Petrograd, 1915-1917 (New York: Robert McBride and Company, 1919), 73.

178 Beverley Whitney Kean, French Painters, Russian Collectors: The Merchant Patrons of Modern Art in Pre- Revolutionary Russia (London: Hodder and Stoughton, Ltd., 1994), xx.

179 Alexander, p, 136.

partner, Sergei Mikhailovich, was the president of the Society of Theater Aficionados, and held a

Monday night session for his choir of sixty voices, directed by the Imperial choir master.180

These activities all depended, for the most part, on volunteerism. Charity was the essential quality of the Russian noble, like Madame Alexandra Nicolaevna Narishkina, who helmed the Society for Aid to Poor Women and remade her estate in Riazai province into an agricultural school.181 While middle class experts attempted to organize their own charities, volunteer work and support was considered a particular point of pride for the nobles.182The

Empress herself made charity a feature of her court, forming a circle of women who would produce three garments a year for the poor.183 Felix Yusupov records how his mother Zinaida

“bravely bore the burden of her stupendous wealth, giving millions to worthy charities and trying to satisfy each deserving plea.”184 He praised his own grandmother as having “boundless” charity.185 The Yusupov ladies took part in an annual bazaar that Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna held with the support of all the aristocratic ladies. It was a three-day event in support of an assortment of Russian charities. Each day guests who paid to enter could purchase a variety of trinkets, listen to a gypsy orchestra, observe lessons in the tango or waltz, have their fortunes

180 Ibid., 150, and Kshesinskaia, Vospominaniia, 384, n. 95.

181 Russian Court Memoirs, 267.

182 See Adele Lindenmeyer, ‘Poverty is Not a Vice’: Charity, Society, and the State in Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

183 Anna Vyrubova, Memories of the Russian Court (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1923), 23.

184 Youssoupoff, p. 204. He notes how this very same mother was utterly horrified at his own plans for the family fortune. Youssoupoff wanted to remain single, remake his estates as an arts colony, and donate the remainder of the family fortune to the poor. Shortly after telling his mother his plans, he noted in his autobiography, he found himself married in the uniform of the nobility, with his charitable impulses limited to more conventional overtures. See Youssoupoff, 37.

185 Ibid., 131.

told, or visit the champagne bar, where the most beautiful aristocratic women worked as barmaids.186 The last day of this non-stop party was even more hectic than the first two, as all prices were reduced.187

The Russian war efforts brought forth a surge of charity from both men and women.

Princess Sophia Wacznade recalled, “Everybody was working for the war, the mothers and the fathers.”188 This motive to support the war effort by funding came through tradition: Felix

Yusupov’s grandfather sent two armed and equipped infantry battalions to the Crimean War, and equipped a hospital train for the Russo-Turkish War.189 Madame Alexandra Nicolaevna

Narishkina, unable to serve herself, donated one million rubles to the Russian fleet for the Russo-

Japanese War.190 For World War I, P.P. Durhovo offered his dacha over as a hospital for tuberculosis patients.191 The Emperor turned the Winter Palace into a hospital.192 Yusupov himself spent a fortune renovating his mansion on Liteinyi to become a functioning hospital. It was to be staffed with the “all the best” doctors and nurses.193 The ground floor was for soldiers, the first floor officers, and the ballroom was stocked with seventy beds. Upon being discharged,

186 Zinovieff, 88.

187 Many of these charities were led by women. Dominic Lieven has suggested aristocratic women in Russia could have seen the lack of social services in the countryside as an opportunity for them to show their own leadership, providing schools, orphanages, hospitals, and schools. Lieven, The Aristocracy in Europe, 136.

188 Horsburgh, 26.

189 Youssoupoff, 26.

190 Russian Court Memoirs, 267.

191 Lovell, Summerfolk, 197.

192 The Russian Diary of An Englishman, 2.

193 Yussopov, 197.

each soldier was to be given a set of new clothes and invalids were to be taught new careers.194

“The owners of the hospital took each small item into serious consideration and every detail has been carefully thought out,” the noble recalled.195

These acts of charity were not without a bit of gamesmanship. Commentators remarked on how organizations, and nobles, often worked against each other rather than helping each other’s charitable goals.196 Countess Karlova organized a war hospital of her own; Countess

Elizabeth Schuvalova attempted to top her hospital with a hospital train at the front.197 If unable to fund a hospital, a noblewoman boasted of her service in the hospitals. Just as the Empress

Alexandra and the eldest grand duchesses aided in the nursing effort, so too did many elite noblewomen. Countess Marie Galenestchev-Kovtovzoff “nearly lost her life in nursing the war wounded,” rumor gave out sympathetically.198

Kshesinskaia participated in this overflowing of generosity. She donated to the Dowager

Empress’ charities.199 She sold tickets personally for her twenty-fifth ballet anniversary, and ended up giving 3200 rubles to the Red Cross.200 She went on a ballet tour to raise funds for the

194 Vasili, Russian Court Memoirs, 78.

195 Ibid., 88.

196 Russian Court Memoirs, 33. A countess actually described the soldiers as “our spoilt and feted wounded,” because of the way they gained from the game of charity one-upmanship amongst the nobles. See Countess Kleinmichael, 219. Perhaps wisely, she noticed the problem inherent in housing soldiers in one’s own well-equipped palaces: Gratitude “found no room in the hearts of those whom we sheltered in our palaces. They would compare their poor smoky huts with the vast, well-ventilated rooms full of mirrors and pictures,” 218.

197 Ibid., 258.

198 Ibid., 297.

199 GARF, f. 616, op. 1, d. 5, l. 4. See the letter of 23 May 1913, thanking Kshesinskaia for her donation.

200 Russian Diary of an Englishman, 52.

wounded.201 At home in Petersburg, Kshesinskaia created her own hospital on

Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt. It opened in a large apartment building in December 1914, equipped with two operating rooms, three recovery rooms, and twenty beds overall. Like

Yusupov, she claimed to hire the very best doctors and staff: two male doctors, and two female nurses. Her opening ceremony featured appearances by the Red Cross Representative (A.A.

Polovstov) and administrators from the Public Health Service.202 Even the Prefect of St.

Petersburg, Prince Obolensky, came by to honor Kshesinskaia’s lavish little hospital. As it functioned, it included for the soldiers the obligatory new set of clothes (one could not let the

Yusupov hospital trump one’s own, after all), presents for both the wounded and their families, and parties for holidays and personal celebrations.203 Unable to stomach nursing duties herself,

Kshesinskaia limited her personal appearances in the hospital to taking dictation from the soldiers for their letters.204 Two years after its opening, the little hospital closed, due,

Kshesinskaia claimed, to a shift in military policy, moving the wounded to the provinces rather than sending them back to the capital.205

VI. Conclusion

Two months after the close of her hospital, Kshesinskaia’s home was seized by street mobs. The ballerina visited the Tauride Palace. She appealed to the official Beliavin, and later to

201 Kshesinskaia, Dancing, 52. She blamed a cold reception in Kiev on “jealousy” of her status.

202 Ibid.,

203 Ibid., 151.

204 At a time when most noblewomen boasted of their grueling service for the soldiers, Kshesinskaia’s silence about her actual work in the hospital is telling.

205 Ibid. Her biographer Hall also suggests that the government was withdrawing support for unofficial hospitals altogether by this time, 168.

the Bolsheviks actually working in the house, to split the home with her. She proposed either making it into a state embassy or transforming the upper floor into a bed and breakfast.206 The

Bolsheviks originally laughed at her suggestions, considering them a ridiculous attempt at currying favor. They failed to see that Kshesinskaia’s gesture was very much in step with the lavish gestures of the nobility before 1917. Right up to the Revolution, she, and the other aristocrats, saw themselves as a central feature of modern Russia: a class that was lavish, cosmopolitan, refined, exuberant, and always seeking to contribute in some fashion, a class of natural leaders. Their efforts to serve were inept, often absurd, and inconsistent, but the sincerity of these efforts is made manifest by the fact they never stopped. Central to this self-imagination of the nobility as “natural leaders” was their homes. Like Kshesinskaia’s, these were carefully arranged and staged to show off all of the qualities that confirmed the nobility’s claim to a leading role: their ease with money, their cultural sensibility, their embrace of internationalism, their knowledge of elite class rituals, their “easy” mastery of those beneath them, from the immediate servants to the social classes out on the streets outside. For the aristocrats, home was not just where the heart was, but a staging point for their claims to social supremacy.

206 See Hall, 180, and the writings of N.N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution 1917, edited by Joel Carmichael (London: Oxford University Press, 1955).

The Designers

Building a Civil Society: The Architects of Imperial Russia

“Architecture is the printing press of all ages and gives a picture of the state and society in which it was erected.” –Banister Fletcher, 19051

I. Introduction

In the files of one of the architects on the Kshesinskaia mansion, there is a project sketch with a short note scrawled on it: “Building begun—interrupted by war and revolution.”2

The quote begs for a metaphor and indeed, it would suit for the world of the architects. While the aristocrats like Mathilde Kshesinskaia would be shattered by 1917, their vision of modern society entirely rejected, for many of the professions, particularly the architects, this was not the case at all. Unlike the aristocrats, the architects, as an example of the professions, held a view of modern society that was not entirely incompatible with the Bolsheviks; this would allow many of their kind to survive the Revolution and stay on in Soviet Russia, living by the same vision of modern life. These architects, as exemplified by Alexander von Gogen, designer of the

Kshesinskaia mansion, typified a technocratic vision of modern society. The house’s design and

1 Banister Fletcher, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method (London: Batsford, 1905), 308.

2 B.M. Kirikov, Aleksandr Dmitriev (St. Petersburg, Beloe i Chernoe, 2004), 201. This biography is based on Kirikov’s dissertation on the same topic.

its lead architect exemplify this ongoing professional dialogue amongst this stream of the intelligentsia, the architects. They saw themselves as both leaders and social servants, able to use their skills to manipulate remake modern society for the better.

II. Architects of Modern Russia

The lack of attention paid to these architects in research on the end of the empire is surprising, because the architects were one of the most striking examples of Russia between the tsarist and Soviet periods. The enormous swelling of the city population by the end of the imperial period demanded the use of these architects. They were not mere decorators of the city: they were essential in building it. The numbers tell the tale: by the middle of the 19th century, there were about seventy million subjects of the Russian empire, of which ten percent were in cities. By 1913, that number had increased to 185 million subjects, of which now nearly eighteen percent lived in cities. Nearly three dozen cities had reached the 180,000 population mark by

1900, with some cities’ population soaring above others. 3 In particular, Moscow, Warsaw, and

St. Petersburg had all quadrupled since 1860 and the latter two were among the ten largest cities in Europe.4

This massive movement to the cities created a situation in which new buildings were not just in demand, but absolutely essential. And the ones who created these new structures, the architects, were therefore in a position of power within this society. They held not just the ability

3 Statistics from Hamm, “Introduction,” 2.

4 Statistics from Thomas Stanley Fedor, “Patterns of Urban Growth in the Russian Empire during the 19th Century” (Chicago: University of Chicago Department of Geography Research Paper, No. 163, 195). See also Bater, “Between Old and New St. Petersburg,” 46.

to create structure but the power to define the physical landscape of the city by marking out the use of space.

The architects rose to these demands for new structures that defined modern Russia. In particular, in the years before 1917, they developed strong professional bonds and traditions.

After the revolution, these did not change. In many ways, before 1917 and after, the architects functioned on the same lines: they prioritized education, they worked endlessly to self-organize, they required publication and conference participation, and they saw themselves at all times as active servants of society, with a deeply held duty to reflect on the needs of the modern Russian populace.

Education was key. Most major pre-Revolution architects were graduates of the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg (founded in 1757), which was graduating 150 students per year in the architectural department by 1919. In addition, a handful of major additional schools were opening up. In Moscow, the Palace School of Architecture (founded 1749) merged in 1865 with a private school to create the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. The new institute was tied with the Academy of Arts as the largest arts school in Russia. St. Petersburg had, in addition to the traditional academy, the Institute of Civil Engineering, which emphasized architecture as a structural science. The Institute’s influence was significant: By 1900, 168 of the

390 architects working in the capital were its graduates.5

These architects did not just create structures. They created an active professional sphere, working together in the form of organizations. By the time of the Revolution, there were at least four major professional societies devoted to architecture in Russia, and regular national

5 Brumfield, Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), xx, 26.

conferences had been held by the architects for almost thirty years. The first conference of

Russian architects dated back even further, to the 1867 gathering of the Moscow Architectural

Society. The first national meeting, however, was held in 1892 by Petersburg by the All-Russian

Congress of Architects. This conference was held on the campus of the Academy of Arts.

Exhibits were divided between those that dealt with artistic topics and those considering technical issues. In addition, the Congress held a series of lectures and question/answer segments covering technique, structure, and hygienic considerations for building design.6

The Congress’ size and social significance increased rapidly. By January 1911, the fourth

Congress, there were more than 800 participants, 90 speeches, and 24 events.7 They were successful enough to draw international attention: in April 1904, at the International Congress of

Architects, Russia had just one representative. Four years later, by 1908, they had an entire delegation to send to the Venice meeting, including the President of the Petersburg Society of

Architects, I.S. Kitner, F.O. Shecktel, head of the Moscow Architectural Society, A.N. Benois from the Petersburg Academy of Arts, and two civil engineers, L.A. Il’in and R.A Bekker.8

These representatives, as noted, came from multiple architectural societies. Four architectural societies of note existed in Russia by the end of the imperial era, each with a different founding vision. In the ancient capital, the Moscow Architectural Society was formed in 1867 as a counterweight to Petersburg’s dominance of the profession. In particular, this society sought to support scientific research and theoretical exchange in favor of the creation of a

6 100 let Obsshestva Arkhitekturnykh Organizatsii v SSR, 1861-1961 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1967), 14-17.

“national” style.9 Their most famous member was their chairman from 1906-1922, F.O.

Shekhtel, creator of pioneering works of modernism in Moscow.10 As of 1908, there were 17 distinguished members guiding the Moscow organization.11

The Moscow Architectural Society was formed as a response to Petersburg’s dominant position over the field. In addition to being the site of the oldest and most prestigious school for architecture, the Imperial Academy of the Arts, the capital’s society, the Petersburg Society of

Architects, had a tradition of dominating the All-Russian Society of Architects. As the All-

Russian Society sponsored the national congresses, dominating this group meant real domination of the national professional standards and goals. The St. Petersburg Society of Architects therefore molded the All-Russian version in its likeness. Originally focused on the classical architecture of the West, the St. Petersburg Society had a combined mission of cultivating public appreciation of architectural history, historic preservation, and study of civil engineering theory.12 Membership to the Petersburg Society was free but premised on receipt of an architectural degree and a demonstrated mastery in the field. Even with such stiff requirements, by 1906 there were 250 members.13

Both the Moscow and Petersburg societies attempted to embrace and emphasize the technical and artistic demands of the profession. Dispute over the prioritization of art over the technical, however, would lead to the emergence of the other two major pre-Revolution

9 Ibid., 25-26. RGALI, f. 965, op. 1, ed. xp. 82.

10 Ibid., 27.

11 Ibid., 22-27.

architectural societies. On December 17th, 1894, the first of these was founded: the Society of

Civil Engineers. This was formed in association with Petersburg’s Institute of Civil Engineers.

This was the most diverse pre-revolutionary society; by 1905, it had 863 members, 565 of which were drawn from outside of the capital.14 Born from the rivalry of the Academy of Arts and the

Institute of Civil Engineers, the Society of Civil Engineers was meant to promote architecture’s potential to change lives. N.V. Dmitriev, an architect who specialized in public health issues, openly argued that architects needed to attend to the “social struggles and living needs” of the public.15

As part of their program of socially aware architecture, the Society of Civil Engineers founded a subsidiary group, the Society of Architect-Artists in 1904, whose membership grew to

150 by 1917. The society operated like a club, with membership extended by invitation only to candidates chosen on the grounds of acknowledged greatness in the field. Such was their prestige that their leader was P. Iu. Suzor, the leader of the first All-Russian Congress of Architects. As part of their duties as the rulers of the profession, however, members of the society did not just single out leaders in the field; they also provided active support for architects in need and their families.16

Organization was a major feature of the professionalization of the architects. Another element in the development of their lively professional sphere was publication. Publication was a component from the start: after the opening of the first All-Russian Congress of Russian

15 Ibid., 28-29.

Architects, all the speeches were published in the journal of the meeting and as special collected works.17 Indeed, the work of each major architectural society was linked to a specific publication

(in some instances, publications). Members of the Moscow Architectural Society published a monthly “Notes of the Moscow Architectural Society” from 1905-1908; after 1908, they began publishing on a yearly basis. In addition, this organization subsidized the publication of monographs on notable architects.18 The Petersburg society meanwhile began publishing “The

Architect,” their digest, as a monthly in 1872 and a weekly in 1906.19 The Society of Civil

Engineers had their own press, the “News of the Society of Civil Engineers” (1895-1905), which they refitted in 1906 as Architectural Yearly.20 This annual was paired with an annual from the

Society of Architects-Artists (The Yearbook of the Society of Architect-Artists, published between 1906-1915) with works on contemporary styles (such as the style modern, neoclassicism, and retrospectivism) and Russian classicism.21

While these were the journals put out by the major professional societies, it is a sign of how popular the field had become that a large array of additional literature existed on the subject.

The Weekly Builder (Nedelia stroitelia) was on the stands next to Zodchii until their 1902 merger, allowing Zodchii to become a weekly. Our Housing (Nashe zhilishche) was in print between 1894-1985, to be followed by Stroitel’ (1895-1905). Arkhitekturnye motivy ran at the turn of the century, as did Iskusstva stroitelnoe i dekorativnoe. Along with these journals devoted

20 Ibid., 17-29.

21 Ibid., 30 and Elena Borisova and Grigory Sternin, Russkii Modern (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Galart, 1995), 25.

exclusively to architecture were others celebrating architecture as one of the arts: Apollon (1907-

1917) and Mir Iskusstva (1898-1904), which was edited by Alexandre Benois at and one point included the input of dance impresario Sergei Diaghilev.22

The architects were organized professionals who used the press as well as personal gatherings to discuss their ideas and promote their platform. Like Frieden’s physicians, or

Lindenmeyer’s charity workers, we see evidence here not of entrenched political interest, but rather of the professionals’ ardent sense of mission towards society. Well before NEP’s radical efforts to communalize the private home, the architects clearly saw their work as entwined with public service and the organization of human lives. This emerges from three themes or aspects of their work: a frank discussion of the link between health and construction; a sense that architectural preservation efforts were necessary to preserve national history; and a debate about modern style and its relevance to the national face of Russia.

Physical health—a theme from the programs of the architects’ gatherings—tended to appear less in the journals and thus, we have less evidence for it. Yet we can say health (or

“sanitary architecture,” as it was known at the time) was an ongoing topic of discussion. At the first national congress, organizer R. Iu. Suzor gave a speech in which he argued that architects might have “forgotten that there are other demands which architecture needs to satisfy.”23 In his speech, Suzor reminded his audience repeatedly of the impact of the physical environment on the national community. Russia, he said, had “schools in which students receive sustenance for the brain at the same time, physical defects and diseases…barracks where the best part of the

22 Brumfeld, A History of Russian Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 47-48. He refers to the editorship of Mir Iskusstva as “the Bohemian fringe of the moneyed class,” 25.

23 100 let, 15.

population are affected by diseases and acquire cancers…hospitals that hasten death” rather than preventing it.24

Concerns about health were a central issue for the emerging public sphere of the architects. So too was historical preservation and restoration efforts. At the same 1892 gathering where Suzor gave his speech, one exhibition featured older Russian architecture and Byzantine monuments.25 Within the publications of the period, there is evidence of attention to historic preservation. After an article appeared in the journal Mir Iskusstva, for example, at least one architect responded with an indignant appeal in Izvestiia Obsshestva Grazhdanskikh Inzhenerov for greater preservation efforts.26 The Society of Architect-Artists, the elite of the profession in

St. Petersburg, continued to promote this topic after their initial annual publication (1906) featured the Style Moderne; the rest of their yearly publications of Ezhegodnik Obsshestva

Arkhitekturov-Khudozhnikov, were devoted to classical and palladian themes, the core style of old St. Petersburg. The Society actually spun off a Committee for Research on Old St.

Petersburg, which was later reorganized as the Museum of Old St. Petersburg, opening historical exhibitions as of 1911.27 At its head was a founding member of the All-Russian Society, P. Iu.

Suzor yet again.

Through the museum, this internal discussion about preserving the past—its monuments, its styles—became an effort that engaged the broader public. It is therefore no surprise that this

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 See Mir Iskusstva No. 2 (1905) and A.I. Dmitriev, “Materialy po istori arkhitektury v Rossii,” Izvestiia Obsshestva Grazhdanskikh Inzhenerov No. 7 (1905).

27 Ibid., 30.

internal professional discussion became a motif of architectural journals oriented towards the broader public. In the arts journal Apollon, editor Sergei Makovsky frequently supported classicism against newer trends in architecture. Architectural historian William Craft Brumfield has noted Makovsky’s support for the older style had distinctive class overtones. (The editor

“oppos[ed classicism] to the bourgeois value of the style moderne.28) The point remains, however, that regardless of the potential social ramifications of the editors’ stance, Apollon trumpeted an appreciation of the constructed past.29 Such a tendency was apparent in the writings of Georgy Lukomskii, first in Apollon and then in his books. In his article, “New Petersburg” in

Mir Iskusstva, Lukomskii argued that new trends in architecture were rejecting the classical lines of the capital, representing a destructive break with the nation’s history.30 While his arguments were partly aesthetic (“[contemporary builders] simply have ceased to think of beauty,” he complained31), he also saw the shift in style as a symbol for the politics of the era. “The era of bourgeois and democratic modernism…has given nothing to Petersburg,” he concluded.32

Lukomskii’s critique highlights the major motif of pre-Revolutionary architectural discourse: the modern, which of course would influence the style of the Kshesinskaia mansion.

Architects acknowledged that part of their social role was defining the physical landscape of the imperial city; as such, they had the power to include new architectural standards, like the

28 Brumfield, Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 41.

29 See William Craft Brumfield, “Neoclassical Aestheticism in Prerevolutionary Russian Architecture” in New Perspectives on Russian and Soviet Artistic Culture, edited by John Norman (London: Macmillan, 1994), 41-53.

30 Georgy Lukomskii, “New Petersburg,” Mir Iskusstva No. 2 (1913): 5-38.

31 Ibid., 6.

32 Ibid., 7.

modern. This sparked debate within the profession, as to use the modern in Russia had definite political overtones.

The advent of style moderne architecture in Russia went hand-in-hand with increasing

Western European influence on Russia and the rise of the new, moneyed classes that sought to use building to express something other than genuflection to an imperial past. Style Moderne emphasized a rethinking of structure as art and a willingness to embrace the new technological world. In particular, the movement rejected symmetry of line, using asymmetrical jarring planes to create a sense of movement across facades; the sense of disruptions across a facade forced the eye to take note of other subtle details in the construction, like variance of construction materials.

Architects working with the Style Moderne played up “new” materials and contrasts in texture, working alternately with mosaics, stone, metalwork, and brick.33 Architects constantly sought new uses for materials, pushing for the merger of utility and visual appeal.34

The Style Moderne in architecture was threatening because it was strikingly different from the buildings that were considered national monuments and it suggested an overall willingness to experiment with the organization of human life. In addition, Russian architects would split over the Style Moderne because of its international roots and links with the rising middle class in Russia. The movement lacked native Russian roots, with clear links to international modern movements, such as the Finnish neoromantic, the Art Nouveau of France,

33 I.A. Murav’eva, Vek moderna (Sankt-Peterburg: Pushkinskyi Fond, 2004), 9, 14, 18. See also Brumfield, Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

34 B.M. Kirikov, Arkhitektura Peterburgskogo moderna: Osobniaki i dokhodnye doma (Saint Petersburg: Zhurnal Neva, 2003), 391. See also his article, “Obrazets Stilia Modern,” Stroitel’stvo i arkhitektura Leningrada 6 (1976): 38-41.

and Jugendstil in Germany.35 In all these areas, the arrival of the modern movement hailed the arrival of a new social group, breaking down traditional sources of power.36 Architectural historian Jeremy Howard described it as a “turn of the century transformation in arts to secularize and individualize,” seen especially in private buildings.37 Brumfield argues the

“essential precondition” for the Style Moderne was “the rise of a class of private patrons, whose wealth was derived from capitalist entrepreneurial activity.”38

For this reason, the Modern entered the Russian architectural landscape via Moscow, home of rising bourgeoisie. In December 1902-1903, the first major contemporary design exhibition was staged there, supported by the Moscow Architectural Society. 39 Because merchant patrons in Moscow there were less invested in traditional state power, they were much more willing to embrace experimental trends, including the Style Moderne. Indeed, the movement in Moscow was so influential that it ultimately evolved from pure Style Moderne to a neo-Russian style that playfully evoked ideas of medieval housing combined with Style Moderne principles.40

While enthusiasm for the Style Moderne was high in Moscow, the merchant center of late imperial Russia, it was far less in the imperial capital, St. Petersburg, where theorists were quick

35 100 let Peterburgskomu modernu. Materialy nauchenoi konferentzie, 30 Sept.-2 Okt., 1999 g, edited by L.A. Kirikova and A.V. Kornilova (Saint Petersburg: Beloe i chernoe, 2000), 330

36 Architecture 1900: Stockholm, Helsinki, Talinn, Riga, St. Petersburg, edited by Jeremy Howard (Talinn: Museum of Estonian Artchitecture, 2003), 7. See also Kirikov, Arkhitektura Peterburgskogo Modern.

37 Architecture 1900, 7.

38 Brumfield, Origins of Modernism, 425.

39 Ibid., 53.

40 Brumfield, A History of Russian Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 425.

to criticize and decry the new trend. The avant-garde arts journal Mir Iskusstva, founded in 1890 to promote a living experience of art, reared back in horror from Style Moderne’s inroads into

Russian architecture.41 When Pavel Makarov’s article “Architectural Musings” appeared to praise the new trend, the journal editor Alexandre Benois fired back with an ode to classicism in the capital and a dramatic appeal to his readers to “save [the city] from disfigurement [via] the absurdly interpreted Style Moderne.” 42 In the May 5 edition of the journal, he struck out again with the article, “Of the New in Art.” He dismissed the Style Moderne yet again as a trivial, if fashionable, set of clichés that offered nothing to contemporary Russia.43

Benois represents an ongoing dialogue on the Moderne that occurred within the profession of architecture prior to the Revolution. He was not the only critic to see the new style as more than mere disruption of traditional artistic design. The critic Lukomskii echoed Benois’ concerns. In Zodchii, he argued that the modern represented the final fragmentation of the disintegrating Petersburg; to embrace it was to embrace the death of one’s heritage.44 Architect

E.E. Babumgarten rejected the modern’s union of functionality and aesthetic: “The beauty of a structure of a house has no relation to [the techniques of its construction],” he insisted.45

VI. Portrait of an Artist: the Pre-Revolutionary Architect

41 For more on Mir Iskusstva’s position on modernism, see John Bowlt’s introduction to his edited collection, Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902-1934 (New York: The Viking Press, 1998), xiii.

42 Pavel Makarov, "Arkhitekturnye mechtaniia," Zodchii, No. 13 (1902) and Alexandre Benois, “Zhivopisnyi Peterburg,” Mir Iskusstva No. 1 (1902): 1-15.

43 See Benois’ articles “Arkhitektura Peterburga,” Mir Iskusstva, 1902, no. 4:82-85; and “Krasota Peterburga,” Mir iskusstva, 1902, no. 8:138-42, and “Novoe v iskusstve,” Zodchii, no. 18 (1902): 213-15.

44 Georgy Lukomskii, Zodchii No. 6 (1909), 322.

45 E. E. Baumgarten, “Sovremennaia arkhitektura,” Zodchii, no. 48 (1902): 543-47 and again in no. 49: 556-60.

The professional universe of the architects was a dynamic model of the professional public sphere. United by educational background, architects used their organizations and publications not just to contemplate aesthetic ideals but to raise questions about their role in building cities and creating a physical environment that would shape and protect Russia’s national identity.

A model image for this time would be one of the last great pre-Revolutionary architects,

Alexander Ivanovich von Gogen, the lead architect on the Kshesinskaia mansion. While other architects stand out in the period for their radical innovations, von Gogen’s moderation makes him more typical of the Russian architectural world overall.

Von Gogen was born in 1856 in Arkhangelsk.46 Despite his Germanic name, von Gogen’s background was that of a middle class Russian family. Education at the capital ultimately provided him access to the profession. In 1875, after graduating from primary school, he moved to St. Petersburg as a student of the architectural department of the Academy of Arts. Von

Gogen’s initial interests were tailored to serve his future clientele: for example, when he graduated from the Academy in 1883, his capstone project was a study of the royal suburban palaces.

Studying palaces over one hundred years old would suggest a certain complacency in the field, but this would not be a fair assessment of von Gogen’s early career. His period of education in the capital was very much one of professional grooming. By his second year in the

46 Von Gogen’s biographical information comes from his obituary (V. Evald, “Von Gogen: Nekrolog,” Zodchii no. 12 (1914): 143-144, and the following archives: RGIA, f. 798, op. 9, 1875, d. 184; TsGIA SPb f. 184, op. 3, d. 29, and f. 513, op. 102. Many of von Gogen’s designs are held to this day by the State Museum of Saint Petersburg (GMSPb). The most extensive biography of Von Gogen is in the small Russian monograph on the Kshesinskaia mansion, V.D. Bobrov and B.M. Kirikov, Osobniak Kshesinskoi.

Academy, von Gogen was engaged in hands-on work with practicing St. Petersburg architects, serving as on-site assistant to V.I. Slavianskii, P.Iu Suzor, A.F. Krasovskii, and S. Bogotolov.

Bogotolov in particular commended him on his mastery of the emerging fashion of “Russian style.”47

It was because of his professional grooming in St. Petersburg that, upon his 1883 graduation, von Gogen found work in diverse projects. In all cases, he had to accommodate both his artistic instincts and the needs of his client. One of his first projects, for example, was a factory mill (1884-1895) in Sestroretik. Immediately after that, he was engaged by Count A.D.

Sheremet’ev for work on a private mansion on the Garapinskyi Bank (Nab. Kutuzov, 4), not far from the Summer Gardens. In the same neighborhood, he rapidly took on another elite assignment, the home of the countess M. E. Kleinmichael (1885). In both cases, the work was unique and clearly tailored to the individual client. Whereas the Sheremet’ev house was a standard showcase mansion featuring elegant furnishings and lengthy parade halls, for the

Countess’ home he incorporated more of the Dutch-German qualities of St. Petersburg’s original architecture, nodding to the links between Western Europe and the Russian capital.

Von Gogen’s mansion work and elite capital education made him eligible for royal assignments. Beginning in 1890, he directed several Romanov projects and worked for a number of prestigious courtiers, including the reconstruction of a home owned by the Grand Duke

Vladimir Alexandrovich on Dvortsovoi Naberezhnoi, 28. Here von Gogen sought to acknowledge the influence of the eclectic (the most modern architectural trend) while keeping his works in line with the capital’s classical style. He wrote of his work on the mansion of F. G.

47 Quoted in V.D. Bobrov and B.M. Kirikov, Osobniak Kshesinskoi (Saint Petersburg: Beloe i Chernoe, 1996), 19.

Kozmeninov (ul. Pisareva, 12) for the journal Stroitel’, that he turned the building so that its corner faced the street in order to create a sense of intimacy. He also defended the rich ornamentation of the building as keeping it from being too “Oriental,” making it presumably a better fit with the surrounding city.48

Although von Gogen’s work was most known in its day for its ability to mesh the modern and the St. Petersburg traditional, von Gogen also challenged his designs by following the trends of his field. As of 1893, he was creating works in the neo-Russian style, fashioning modern buildings that were nonetheless deliberate throwbacks to Moscow’s 17th century. Between 1894-

1895, von Gogen worked with military engineer B.K. Gauger on an officers’ quarters in a

“strong Russian style.” He also produced an apartment building for I.A. Zheverzheva (ul.

Rubinshtein, 18/5). Having pushed his work outside of St. Petersburg’s neoclassical, he went further. Under his drawings of neo-Russian projects, he wrote short musings that seem to capture the spirit of his projects: “A new song on an peasant melody” and “in Russia all is Russian.”49

His first major work on this theme was the suburban home of A.V. Zernov, named “Maloe

Rybatskoe” (located near Oktiabroskaia nab., 72). Begun in tandem with A.I. Kuznetsov in 1889 and finished in 1893, the home evokes a pre-Petrine style with a dynamic arrangement of vertical painted towers and window cut-outs that suggest the faceted domes of St. Basil’s, but buried as it is in a suburban area, the building provides a surprising break from the buildings around it. His most visible neo-Russian project, the Church of the Divine Mother on Shisel’burgskoi prospect,

48 Stroitel’ citation from A.L. Punin, Arkhitekturnye pamiatniki Peterburga. Vtoraia polovina XIX veka (Leningrad: 1981), 182.

49 See designs in Nedelia stroitelia no. 2 (1895), 2; no. 4 (1895), 60; no. 26 (1895), 137; no. 33 (1895), 176.

was likewise hardly a rebellious piece, following a tradition of neo-Russian qualities in Russian church architecture (1893-1898).

Von Gogen’s ability to listen to, and follow, popular currents in the field led to the

Kshesinskaia mansion, which became his best-known work.50 Developed over two years, 1904-

1906, the house balanced the modern (expressed here in textbook fashion, with asymmetry, diverse building materials, and the crowning use of glass of ironwork in a multi-story “winter garden” window) and the neoclassical (shown via heavy use of marble and classical architectural clichés in the public rooms). Again insisting upon his duty to create a setting for lives, not just showpieces, von Gogen’s design created extensive second-floor family rooms that emphasized comfort and intimacy, including a feminine Louis XVI boudoir for the owner and a plain child’s room for her son.51 In frequent interviews with the journal Zodchii, von Gogen gave regular updates on his efforts to combine family comfort and public formality. In a September 1905 edition, for example, he noted the installation of the central heating system as a key feature of the mansion.52 The work required regular interaction with the client, as well. Kshesinskaia claimed in her memoirs that she oversaw all parts of the construction and actually designed the interior herself. This claim seems exaggerated given that there was an assistant architect working specifically on the interior design, but there is clear evidence of extensive interaction between

50 TsGIA SPb f. 513, op. 102, d. 7953.

51 That child’s room would become immortal in Soviet history as Lenin used it as his study during 1917 and appeared on its balcony to cheering hordes throughout the year of the Revolution.

52 Zodchii No. 37 (1905), Table. 13-145, 406.

the client and the architect.53 According to von Gogen, he had created over seventy drawings of the mansion, all made for client feedback.54

Although von Gogen worked for years after finishing the Kshesinskaia mansion (1906), in many ways it represented the apogee of his career. The mansion reflected his unique interpretation of the modern, while also providing a truly viable private home for his client. Even the layout of the building reminds us of this. With its front door located by a rear garden, the house seems to turn a cool shoulder to the street, creating a special private enclave within the city. In addition to understanding the needs of his demanding socialite client, von Gogen used this project for the enhancement of his field, giving frequent interviews and sharing his plans with builders’ journals like Zodchii or Nedelia stroitel’ia. He also made his work site a hands-on classroom, using his work as an opportunity to train younger architects. For the interior, for example, he relied heavily on Alexander Ivanovich Dmitriev, a graduate of St. Petersburg’s

Institute of Civil Engineers. Another assistant on interior work was Mikhail Khanimovich

Dubinskii, a graduate of the Academy of Arts.55 For help with all elements of the house design, von Gogen tapped Anatolii Vasilievich Samoilov, a student from the Institute of Civil

Engineering. Not surprisingly, all of the men went on to prominent architectural careers.

53 Mathilda Kshesinskaia, Vospominaniia (Moscow: ZAO Tsentrpoligraf, 2003), 103-105.

54 Zodchii, no. 37 (1905), 406.

55 Architectural historians Kirikov and Bobrov suggest personal connections might have helped Dubinskii get the job; his frequent partner on other projects was artist N.N. Rubtsov, the brother of Kshesinskaia’s housekeeper. See Kirikov and Bobrov, 14.

Von Gogen’s work on the mansion thus proved a success for everyone involved: for himself, his client, his assistants, and for his field in general.56 Throughout his career, von Gogen typified the pre-revolutionary attention to his field as well as his professional portfolio development. Von Gogen participated energetically in the activities of the Petersburg Society of

Architects. He taught in the classroom as well, leading courses at Baron Stiglitz’s Central School of Technical Drawing, at the Institute of Civil Engineering, and “structural art” at the

Nikolaevskii Engineering Academy. In 1905, he also taught briefly as an instructor at V.F.

Romanov’s institute for female builders. He served as a liaison between the professional architects, the public, and the state. He took a position in the chief engineering administration of the War Ministry and he worked for many organizations as a judge of design in architectural competitions. In a mark of his success in the field, by 1895, von Gogen had joined the Academy of Architects; by 1896, he had been invited to membership at the Imperial Academy of the Arts.

Von Gogen’s activity clearly helped to foster the sense of an active architectural profession in Moscow and Petersburg. But he also helped to expand the profession’s profile more broadly around the country. He repeatedly took jobs in provincial cities. In Kharkov, for example, he designed a factory. In Port Arthur, Russia’s most eastern edge, he drafted designs of officers’ quarters (1902). He also drew up an exhibit for the All-Russian Industrial Arts

Exhibition in Nizhnii Novgorod (1896) and for the world exhibition in Paris (1900).

Von Gogen typified the dynamic sphere of professional architects in Russia before the

Revolution, serving his profession as well as individual clients. In 1912, he gave an interview to

56 One might argue it was a success for the city as well. In 1907, the city administration award Kshesinskaia a silver medal for one of the best new buildings in the city. (Although the text acknowledges the work of von Gogen, the letter itself went to Kshesinskaia.) The letter remains in her file at GARF, f. 616, op. 1.

the Petersburga gazeta, criticizing the early modern, saying it tended to decadence, and arguing that “in the past 2-3 years, we have seen a change in the art of architecture, and now no longer do we build in the center of the city buildings twisted by whatever fancy strikes.”57

Von Gogen’s shadow over his profession was lengthy; such was his presence in the field that when he died in 1914, his student, engineer and architect V.V. Evald, submitted a lengthy obituary to Zodchii in his honor.58 Like his mentor, Evald, and the other students von Gogen trained, continued to participate in a profession that stressed the use of one’s expertise to serve social needs.

Although the Revolution certainly shaped this particular professional sphere, demanding new housing and later monumental architectural styles from these artists, the heart of this architectural public sphere was formed in the years before the Russian Revolution. As the architect and the design of the Kshesinskaia mansion illustrate, the architects of late imperial

Russia saw themselves as social servants, molding spaces to meet modern public needs; in their choices, these architects saw themselves as the leaders of modern society, able to sculpt cities to befit national and physical needs. Because their vision meshed well with the Soviet state’s desire to use its tools to remake the Russian society, this particular vision of modern life—the professionals and the world of service—would survive the Revolution, as the aristocracy’s conception of modern society (and their modern leadership of it) did not.

57 Petersburga gazeta No. 151 (4 June 1912) and No. 231 (23 August 1912). See also Trudy s’ezda ruskkikh zodchikh (St. Petersburg: 1911), 115-116.

58 V.V. Evald, “Nekrolog,” Zodchii No. 12 (1914), 143-144.

The Imaginers

Center Stage: The Media and the Relaxation of Censorship in Revolutionary Russia

While the imperial elite saw themselves as the cultural center of Russia, and while the architects toiled away at casting their country in stone, another group offered up its own interpretation of what Russia should be. This was the urban media, a group which began after

1905 to slip the muzzle of imperial censorship; through their wartime publications, increasingly as 1917 approached, they created their own image of Russia—a Russia without imperial favorites who corrupted the leadership and led the nation awry. For them, there was little division between private and public spaces; all was fair game as the Russian Revolution approached. For the press, modern society was to be assessed by a public jury, who judged individuals on their contributions to society. Nothing, not even the implied boundary of a closed door, was beyond their vision of modernity, in which the press saw (and reported) all.

The Kshesinskaia mansion, and its occupant, figured significantly in this discussion that assessed the worthiness of individuals to occupy any space, public or private. Although the press never lived in the mansion, and did not build it literally, they helped to build it in the imagination of the Russian people, first as the jewel-box of Russia’s great prize, its arts. Later, through World

War I, the writers replaced that image with a new one. Through their writings on the mansion and its occupant, the journalists constructed a vision of an imperial society shot through with corruption and in need of replacement.

100

The voice of the press was particularly important at this time. Although literacy in Russia was lower than in Western Europe, literacy had been climbing at the end of the Empire, particularly in urban areas. Daniel Brower considers literacy to have been “relatively high” in this period, particularly in the urban areas.1 In 1897, fifty-five percent of urbanites were literate, as opposed to the seventeen percent of the rural population, and the rates were climbing; by 1913, sixty-eight percent of new recruits were literate.2 Jeffrey Brooks has argued literacy was a side effect of the Reforms, suggesting the paperwork of the Emancipation and new institutions like the zemstvo created a “collective need for literacy.”3 In addition, peasants found literacy of use in gaining a shorter military stint (four as opposed to six years) and Old Believers required it in order to deal with textual references.4 The spread of print material in the late Empire supported the growth of literacy and made newspapers increasingly important as evidence of cultural trends. The regulation of 1865 requiring precensorship was abolished in 1905, just as Kshesinskaia’s house was being built.5 Technology, encouraged by high foreign investments, enabled the press explosion as well, with improvements in lithography and the introduction of half-tone engraving in 1880 and 1890.6 The word “explosion” is well chosen here—by the end of the nineteenth century, there were over 300 dailies, by 1908-433, and by 1909-684.7 Despite the economic slowdown caused by World War I, interest in war coverage provided a further boost to sales—by 1914, the number of dailies had

1 Brower, The Russian City Between Tradition and Modernity, 1850-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 79.

2 Bonnell, 4, and Brower, Russian City, 4.

3 Brooks, 6-8.

4 Ibid., 16, 32.

5 Peter Kenez, “Introduction,” in Bolshevik Culture: Experience and Order in the Russian Revolution, edited by Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez, and Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 22.

6 Elena Chernevich and Mikhail Anikst, Russian Graphic Design, 1880-1917 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1990), 6, and West, “Material Land.”

7 Brower, Russian City, 178, and McReynolds, News Under Russia’s Old Regime, Appendix A, Table 5.

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leaped to 836.8 It was only with the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power, granting the Council of Commissars permission to shut down “slanderous papers” as of October 22, 1917, that the mushrooming press in Russia finally began to die down.9 And while these papers were not free, we cannot discount their spread beyond the hand of their purchasers, both because of their low cost and the circulation of print materials in society. As Laura Engelstein has noted, “The boulevard did not target a select audience. It afforded possibilities to humble readers.”10 Erika Rappaport saw the same phenomena in Victorian Britain, where it was common for purchasers to pass on their reading materials to lower-class acquaintances (such as servants and dressmakers).11 Even illiterates were not excluded from the world of print, given the growing use of images in the press.12

Historians and cultural scholars of Europe have found the media to be a useful field for the study of revolution. Within historical studies, French historiography of rumor has led the field. Lynn Hunt and Robert Darnton have both shown how media representations of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette served to destabilize and delegitimize the old regime.13

8 Brooks, “The Breakdown in Production and Distribution of Printed Material, 1917-1927,” in Gleason, Bolshevik Culture, 152.

9 Kenez, “Lenin and the Freedom of the Press,” in Gleason, Bolshevik Culture, 137.

10 Ibid., 368.

11 Rappaport, 12.

12 Nadezhda Krupskaya, the director of the Committee for Public Education in the first years of the Soviet Union, conceded that workers thought in images. See James Von Geldern, “Introduction,” Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems, Songs, Movies, Plays, and Folklore, 1917-1953, edited by James Von Geldern and Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), xiii.

13 See Lynn Hunt, Eroticism and the Body Politic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), and her edited volume, The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800 (New York: Zone Books, 1993). See also Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of the French Revolution (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), “Philosophical Sex: Pornography in Old Regime France,” in Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity: Historical Essays in European Thought and Culture, edited by Mark Micale and Robert Dietle (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

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Within Russian historiography, the attention paid to celebrity and fame has been meager.

The most significant work is that of Boris Kolonitskii, whose work on political porn argues, like

Hunt’s and Darnton’s, that sexual imagery was deployed in the public media to delegitimize a ruling regime.14 Kolonitskii does not, however, look beyond the immediate years of the revolution to see how celebrity changed in the increasingly uncensored press of the revolutionary era.

In contrast to these scholars, this chapter is a study of the world of celebrity surrounding

Mathilde Kshesinskaia from approximately the start of her dance career (1890) through the

Revolution. While street journalists originally portrayed her in a favorable light, as a cultural icon in the field of dance, during the war years the print literature refashioned her image as a symbol of a corrupt regime that they, the press, the voice of the people, meant to expose. In attacking Kshesinskaia, the media revealed 1.) that they were no longer bound to the dictates of the tsarist government and 2.) that they saw themselves as those empowered to judge the worthiness of those who occupied prominent social positions.

I. Before World War I: the Artiste and her Admirers

The pre-World War I media references to Kshesinskaia show the extent to which the imperial printers were muzzled by the regime. To those of higher access to the theatrical world,

2000), 88-112, and Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). See also work on the Queen Caroline Affair in Britain, especially the scholarship of Anna Clark, e.g., Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

14 Boris Kolonitskii, “The Desacralization of the Monarchy: Rumors and ‘Political Pornography’ during World War I,” in Language and Revolution: Making Modern Political Identities, ed. Igal Halfin (Portland, Oregon: Frank Cass, 2002): 47-83; see also his work with Orlando Figes, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

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she was known as a power-player, someone with great influence over the productions and the staging. Very little of this appeared in the press, however, where the emphasis was on only the most flattering image of Kshesinskaia as an artist and professional working in a sphere completely separate from all social and political concerns.

A review of the press at the time tells the tale: writers hailed Kshesinskaia as an artist, often referring to her as a national treasure. A critic called her debut at Monte Carlo “without one mistake” and said the non-Russian audience was “in ecstasy.”15 An early biography of the ballerina referred to her as the “bright star of our ballet, our Russian ballerina…with the force of her talent, immediately drew the attention of the public.”16 This biography collapsed

Kshesinskaia’s rise to prominence with the rise of the Russian school of dance.17 The author,

E.E. Kartsova, included quotes from a variety of foreign journals to indicate the breath of

Kshesinskaia’s fame. She was “without debate the best Russian ballerina.”18 Success was the constant theme of the prewar press discussion of Kshesinskaia. Kartsova, her 1900 biographer, refers frequently to Kshesinskaia’s “dazzling success,” with lines such as “The success of

Mathilde Kshesinskaia in this ballet was colossal.”19 For her 1899 appearance as Esmerelda,

Kartsova gushed, “Is it necessary to say that the success of Matilda Felixovna in this role was colossal?”20 The tenor of this biography is evident from the first page, with a woman’s leg and

15 A.I. Pleshheeva, Nash balet (Saint Petersburg: A. Benke, 1896), 6.

16 E.E. Kartsova, Nashi Artistki, Vypusk’ 3: M.F. Kshesinskaia. Kritiko Biograficheskii Etiud (Saint Petersburg: Trud, 1900), 41.

17 Ibid., 5.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., 19.

20 Ibid., 20.

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foot depicted en pointe, surrounded by a circle of blazing stars; the caption indicates the leg is

Kshesinskaia’s. 21 Later publications did not abandon this point of view. Petersburgskaia gazeta covered her tour of London, complete with pictures.22 While Novoe vremia shoved the rising star

Nijinsky aside to fawn on how Kshesinskaia gave life to an old ballet, the journal Ogonek attempted to describe the beauty of her dancing: “in every movement, there is a sense of an opportunity…of alluring beauty.”23 The yearbook of the imperial theaters, a collection of essays on the prior season, decided “Kshesinskaia had lost nothing of her shining virtuosity” by her 20th anniversary on stage.24 Kshesinskaia was not dancing in new productions and not, by any description, debuting any new skills or interpretations of her roles, but the media said nothing to criticize her. Even in her biography, while searching for words to describe Kshesinskaia’s less than perfect technique, ballet master Christian Johan said she was “distinctive and original.”25

The worst said of her in the press was a mild rebuke after Kshesinskaia danced as Pakhita’s beggar woman while wearing her jewel collection: “Begging for alms, and suddenly in diamonds? Absurd!” wrote the Peterburgskaia gazeta.26

This was the only critique of Kshesinskaia that entered the press. Indeed, where one might assume it would have been easy to criticize her, for the creation of her lavish mansion, the

21 Ibid., 1.

22 See, for example, the Peterburgskaia gazeta No. 321 (Nov. 21, 1911), 5.

23 Novoe vremia No. 12474 (December 2, 1911), p. 5, and “Vozvrashhenie gospoda Kshesinskaia domov posle blestiashhikh Londonikh triumphov,” Ogonek (February 13, 1911), 42.

24 E.A. Stark, “Balet,” in Ezhegodnik imperatorskikh teatrov (St. Petersburg: 1911), 139. Lest it be considered that the imperial yearbooks were not likely to offer critiques of dancers, let it be known this is the same publication that had Diaghilev as a highly controversial editor.

25 Kartsova, 24.

26 Quoted in Hall, 159.

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press was nothing but positive. When her St. Petersburg home was built, special architectural magazines, like Zodchii, included inserts on the design and interviews with architect von Gogen.

In addition, the dancer allowed herself to be photographed in her household regularly.27 An article in Ogonek, “Performing Artist of the Imperial Theaters, M.F. Kshesinskaia at Home,” included both an interview with the dancer and an extensive tour of her luxurious residence.28 A piece in the Petersburgskaia gazeta after her London trip was as enthusiastic about her home as her “dazzling London triumphs”; the author indicated Kshesinskaia used the marble foyer of her mansion for dancing exercise and described the entire home as a lively stage for social life.29 No press commentary went beyond her foyer and salon; they stayed in the most public rooms, limiting themselves to Kshesinskaia’s public persona only.

Kshesinskaia was thus known as an elite lady, an artist, a national treasure. What is surprising in this literature, however, is just how much it omits about the facts of her professional and personal life: her extreme wealth, her scandalous personal relationships, her ongoing feuds backstage at the Mariinsky.

It was not that these things were not well known. Kshesinskaia’s fortune never made it into the press, but was clearly a by-word behind the stage and for all regular ballet attendees. A cartoon by her partner Legat, a caricature of her famous role as the gypsy girl in the ballet

Esmerelda, shows Kshesinskaia with giant diamond earrings.30 On stage in The Pharoah’s

27 Zodchii (1900), Tabl. 19 and No. 37 (1905), 406; Stolitsa i Usad’ba 42 (September 1915), 17.

28 “Zasluzhennaia artitstka imperatorskikh teatrov M. F. Kshesinskaia u sebia doma,” Ogonek 7 (12 February 1911): 21-22.

29 “Zhivopis’nykh ugol’kov stolitsy,” Peterburgskaia gazeta No. 326 (Nov. 28, 199): 14.

30 Nikolai and Sergei Legat, Russkii balet v karikaturakh (Saint Petersburg: Progress, 1902-1906). A folio of these caricatures is held by the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg (item ЭАлПК/2-6).

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Daughter, Kshesinskaia wore a Fabergé diamond and sapphire tiara.31 She even danced a role as a beggar woman while wearing a diamond necklace.32 Meeting her off-stage, Isadora Duncan described her as a “most charming little lady, wrapped in sable with diamonds hanging from her ears and her neck encircled with pearls.”33 Stories in the British press about her 1911 trip to

Covent Garden noted that Kshesinskaia had her jewelry sent with armed guards to London banks for the duration of her trip, in the event a piece would be needed on-stage or off; no similar stories appeared in the mainstream Russia press, from Peterburgskii listok to Petrogradskaia gazeta.34

Even when she was showered with expensive gifts on stage, there was no ripple of critical murmur in the Russian press. Dancers typically received gifts on their anniversary years, but Kshesinskaia’s bordered on the obscene. In 1910, she was offered a Fabergé diadem, a gold floral garland with the names of all her ballets engraved on the petals, a diamond circlet dog collar, large diamond stud earrings, an intricate diamond fretwork waistband ornamented with pearl pendants, a diamond festoon necklace with diamond drop pendants, and miscellaneous diamond, sapphire, and pearl brooches and waistbands.35 For her 20th anniversary gala

31 This was a work jointly produced by the jeweler’s workshop and the stage designer for the production, since the tiara was a gift from Grand Duke Andrei. See Galina Smorodinova’s article, “Kshesinskaia’s Memories,” in Fabergé: Imperial Jeweler, edited by Géza von Habsburg and Marina Lopato (New York: Abrams, 1994): 143-167.

32 V. Krasovskaia, Russkii baletnyi tear: Nachala XX veka (Leningrad : Iskusstvo, Leningradskii otd-nie, 1972), 47- 48. See also Peterburgskaia gazeta, quoted in Hall, 59.

33 Duncan, 163.

34 See articles in The Standard (9 November1911), Daily Telegraph (15 November 1911), Daily Mail (9 November 191), The Times (17, 20, 29 November 1911/1 December 1911), and The Lady (30 November 1911, 7 December 1911).

35 V.D. Bobrov and B.M. Kirikov, Osobniak Kshesinskoi (Saint Petersburg: Beloe i Chernoe,

1996), 106-108.

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performance, Kshesinskaia received a necklace in the form of an eagle, composed of diamonds on platinum with rose sapphire accents.36 In addition, Kshesinskaia’s fans presented her with a redwood table decorated with silver ornaments created by the Fabergé workshop, a set of gold drinking cups, a dinner service from the imperial porcelain factory, crystal vases set in silver bases, a gold samovar, Fabergé picture frames, necklaces, brooches, earrings, and a Louis XVI tea service, also created by Fabergé.37 All of these gifts were passed over without comment, if mentioned at all.

If mention of her wealth was curiously absent from the press, even more strangely, the press avoided what was the least-kept secret in the dance world: that Kshesinskaia was the most demanding and powerful ballerina in Russia. Thanks to the flood of irritated memoirists, there is no doubt on this point. Her former director, Teliakovskii, wrote at bitter length of her power: “A ballerina, employed by the company, should serve the repertoire, but in fact the repertoire served her, Kshesinskaia.”38 Gossip agreed that Kshesinskaia was a person of enormous influence in the dance world, a person above the rules, able to via manipulation and influence to dictate the staging of shows and the careers of the dances within them. Teliakovskii describes how a coworker explained to him, in his first days at the Mariinskii, that drafts of the company’s ballet schedule were to be submitted to Kshesinskaia for approval: “ ‘In any case one can do nothing with Kshesinskaia; it is a rule already established by our predecessors’,” Teliakovskii quoted his colleague. Teliakovskii himself explained the situation to a friend, “I am a very real director and

36 Smorodinova, 143.

37 Kshesinskaia, 177-178.

38 Teliakovskii, 152-153.

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a Privy Councillor as well. But there are other Directors who are in charge, though being of the feminine gender, they are not listed as such.”39 She

had great influence with the highest authorities, as well as with the public, the press, and even with those balletomanes [nearly professional ballet fans, whose critiques guided production choices] who did not visit the Smoking Room.40 Kshesinskaia carried through her own policies. Some dancers enjoyed her protection, while others she sought to discredit, especially those who could become her rivals.41

In his diary, Teliakovskii recorded how impresario Sergei Diaghilev groused that

“everything was permitted of [Kshesinskaia.]”42 Writer Benois acknowledged she “did not comform to the rules,” appearing at rehearsals at her leisure, often-times wearing an improperly shortened tutu to do so.43

Newspapers might not be expected to comment on Kshesinskaia’s poor grasp of team play, but one would expect the ballet-mad Russian press would note her power within the dance world. A fellow performer in the Mariinsky company, Fedor Lopukhov, noted she was “feared and worshipped,” for her power to change ballets, her own roles, and the careers of fellow

39 Teliakovskii, 153.

40 The Smoking Room was where the majority of balletomanes went at intermissions; those who did not go to the Smoking Room were of a higher social level, that is, grand dukes and their peers.

41 Teliakovskii, 424.

42 Teliakovskii, Dnevniki direktora imperatorskikh teatrov, 1901-1903, Sankt-Petersburg (Moscow: Armist/Rezhisser/Teatr, 2002), 2.

43 Alexandre Benois, Reminiscences of the Russian Ballet (New York: Da Capo Press, 1977), 280. Dance historian Smakov has suggested she did this “to make her brilliant pointe work more obvious” by removing the obstruction of a floor-length skirt, but since she threatened “war” on at least one costume designer over the issue, it seems more a point of personal taste. Smakov, 34.

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artists.44 In one famous incident in 1909, Diaghilev approached Kshesinskaia for her participation in one of his first attempts at a foreign tour. Although she was “less appreciative” of modern dance, according to Diaghilev’s associates, Diaghilev estimated the value of her participation came in the patronage she brought with her.45 The tour was to be sponsored by

Grand Duke Vladimir,46 President of the Academy of Fine Arts, subsidized by the Imperial

Treasury because of his recommendation, and supported by the Moscow ballet company’s loan of costumes and scenery. Diaghilev’s plan to win imperial support by hiring Kshesinskaia backfired, however, when she quit the tour: “At first, all went well…then came the great catastrophe; Diaghilev quarreled with Kshesinskaia, the all-powerful and…he lost the Imperial patronage.”47 None of this debacle saw the light of the imperial press, even though there were many angry parties who would have liked the truth be known. An associate of Diaghilev’s,

Sergei Grigoriev, explained, “We all shared [Diaghilev’s] indignation at such base intrigue by people in high places.”48

None of this made the press. Neither did any reference to Kshesinskaia’s ability to make or break the careers of individual dancers, and yet this was also well known in the dance world.

For example, when Kshesinskaia congratulated Nijinsky personally after his graduation (April

29, 1907) with the news that he would be her partner, he asked friends to pinch him to prove he was not dreaming. While he would still be paid on the scale of the corps de ballet, he would start

44 Fedor Lopukhov, Shestdeciat let v balete: Vospominaniia i zapiski (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1966), 106.

45 S.L. Grigoriev, The Diaghilev Ballet, 1909-1929 (New York: Dance Horizons, 1953), 9.

46 Beyond being a personal friend of Kshesinskaia’s, Grand Duke Vladimir was also the father of her lover, Andrei.

47 Ibid., 226.

48 Grigoriev, 12.

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as a soloist.49 A friend of Nijinsky’s recalled, “It was as much as to say his fortune was made. It was through her influence that Nijinsky, who failed his final history examination, was not just given a retest, but the questions beforehand.”50 His friend Anatole Bourman recorded Nijinsky’s amazement when Kshesinskaia singled him out as her future partner. “ ‘Pinch me, Tolya!’, he said, knowing better than anyone else that to dance with the all-powerful Kshesinskaia would spell immediate triumph.”51 This was not just a matter of one night as a star: “[To dance with her] could have one meaning. Vaslaw Nijinsky would never have to carve his own way to fame.

The all-powerful Kshesinskaia had chosen him for her partner and never again would he be permitted to dance in Russia with any but a premiere ballerina.”52

Her money did not make the papers. Neither did her power and her scandalous personal affairs. Kshesinskaia lived a notorious romantic life. A former mistress of the tsarevich Nicholas, she had gone on to link herself to at least two Romanov grand dukes (Andrei and Sergei), and had a child whose Romanov paternity was still unknown. Her house was widely believed to be the gift of Romanov men. Memoirists make it clear that they were aware of these tales and discussed them thoroughly. A famous anecdote describes her response to an onlookers’ comment about having two grand dukes (Andrei and Sergei) at her feet: “What’s surprising about that? I have two feet.”53 An alternate story has the Grand Dukes mockingly referring to her not as

49 Buckle, 41.

50 Ibid.

51 Anatole Bourman and D. Lyman, The Tragedy of Nijinsky (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1936), 83.

52 Ibid., 108. Bourman himself became Kshesinskaia’s piano accompanist.

53 Nijinska, 12.

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Mathilde, but as Notre-tilde.54 Dancer Alexandra Danilova recalled that “half of the company had protectors” but Kshesinskaia “flaunted her affairs with grand dukes, because she thought it showed the world how attractive she was. They gave her precious jewels, built her a palace.”55

Danilova recalled, “My aunt warned me that under no circumstances should I ever accept an invitation to Kshesinskaia’s palace, because it was considered not nice. Girls went there to pick a protector or be in vogue with the men.”56 A pupil at the Imperial theater school, Ludyia

Luboukova, recalled her horror when Kshesinskaia offered students walking homewards in winter a ride in her carriage: “Oh, no, no, we mustn’t go with her. She is a wicked woman,” she told the other students.57 Even the political ramifications of her associations with the Romanovs were studiously ignored. While Alexei Bobrinsky recorded in his diary that by 1910

Kshesinskaia was “widely believed to be a political power with great influence over the tsar,” there was no paper or booklet in Russia that dared write the same.58 Only the British press managed to bring up the topic. During her 1911 visit to London, the Sketch noted, “Her salon is frequented by royalty and diplomats, and she has great political influence.”59 The Daily News asked her about these stories and recorded her denial: “Isn’t that nonsense! I am afraid that I become thoroughly stupid when people begin talking about politics; my art has been my life.”60

54 Private conversation between Mary Clare and Sir Frederick Ashton, quoted in Hall, 71.

55 Alexandra Danilova, Choura: The Memoirs of Alexandra Danilova (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 38.

56 Ibid.

57 Quoted in Hall, 73.

58 Bobrinsky, diary entry 19 December 1910, 142.

59 Quoted in MacDonald, 515. Article from the 10 November 1911 edition.

60 MacDonald, 517.

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None of the most obvious characteristics of Mathilde Kshesinskaia’s life—her wealth, her power, her demanding character, or her personal life—ever made the pages of the pre-World

War I Russian press. Instead, the press dutifully reported the most flattering reports of her professional work only, avoiding anything that might be seen as critical to the favorite, and the regime she represented. They stayed at the most superficial public level, barely going beyond the door of Kshesinskaia’s public life.

II. Views of Kshesinskaia, approx. World War I-Revolution

This startling press blindness was the product of censorship and fear of imperial backlash.

As the legitimacy of Nicholas’ government declined during the military debacles of World War

I, and tsarist rule was increasingly questioned, the press more and more escaped government control and crossed new lines. In short, they dared to speak the words that were truly flying around the imperial capital: that Kshesinskaia was a selfish, manipulative harridan who had enriched herself to the detriment of the Russian army and the Russian people.

Gossip held that Kshesinskaia was a manipulator and a profiteer, exploiting her relationship with Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich. As Inspector General of the Artillery, Sergei was in charge of lucrative contracts which, word had it, Kshesinskaia sold to the highest bidder.

She was alleged to have sent her own emissary to France to negotiate with the arms company

Creuzat.61 The President of the Duma Rodzianko believed she had used Sergei’s position to influence government purchase of materials from her clients. He felt he had “irrefutable proof” she was selling state secrets abroad, and he argued specifically that the selling of contracts led

61 Rossiiskii imperatorskii dom (Moscow: Perspectiva, 1992), 190-191. See also John Curtis Perry and Constantine Pleshakov, The Flight of the Romanovs: A Family Saga (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 124.

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ultimately to Sergei’s quiet demotion in late 1915.62 A commentator writing shortly after the war blamed “highly placed toilers such as Raguzo-Suszczewki, a friend of the tsar’s mistress,

Kshesinskaia,” for the “repulsive atmosphere of profiteering,” in wartime Petrograd.63 Empress

Alexandra recorded these tales in her notes to Nicholas. “K. is very mixed up again—she behaved like Madame Sukhominlov [politician’s wife, said to have taken bribes] it seems with bribes of the Artillery orders—one hears it from many sides.”64 In a later letter, she reiterated,

“There are very unclean stories about her and bribes etc. which all speak about, and the artillery is mixed up in it.”65 Decades after her flight from Russia, Kshesinskaia apparently felt these rumors were still so wide-spread that she had to address them in her memoirs, laying the blame at the doorstep of her enemies: “Others have claimed and spread the story, both on the eve of the

Revolution and after it, that I received bribes, particularly for orders from the artillery.”66

Those stories emerged during the war years and through the Revolution, and they gained hold because they were—for the first time—captured in the Russian media. During the war years, and increasingly as Revolution neared, these previously taboo subjects (Kshesinskaia as a dictator in dance shoes, a profiteer, a woman of powerful and scandalous relationships) emerged in the Russian press, while the tsarist police were helpless to stop them. What went on behind the doors of her private home became a matter of public consumption.

62 Jamie H. Cockfield, White Crow: The Life and Times of the Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich Romanov (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 2002), 139.

63 A.A. Manikovski, Boyevoe snabzheniyev russkoy armii v mirovyi voyni (Moscow, 1920), v. I, 55, and v. V, 179. See also Norman Stone, The Eastern Front (London: Hoodder and Stoughton, 1975), 153.

64 The Complete Wartime Correspondence of Tsar Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra, April 1914-March 1917, edited by Joseph Furhmann, (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999), 169. Letter 376, June 25, 1915.

65 Ibid., p. 358. Letter 746.

66 Kshesinskaia, 97.

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In the hands of these writers, the rumors about Kshesinskaia were simplified to emphasize two points: she was a decadent personage, symbolic of the sexual and financial corruption of Nicholas’ court, and she was a betrayer of the Russian people, reflecting the treasonous behavior of the Romanov government.

By spring 1917, Petersburg was flooded with popular attacks on Kshesinskaia, emphasizing her dissolute lifestyle. One anonymous poet wrote a satirical piece toasting that

Petrograd citizens “[did] not take defeat amiss/And victory gives us no delight,” but rather preferred to know the scandals: “And is Kshesinskaia quite well,/and how that feast at Shubin’s went.”67 Another anonymous verse highlighted how she was received her fortune: “Like a bird you flew over the stage,/And without sparing your legs,/Danced your way to a palace.”68 Lewd poems, coarse songs, and cheap porn productions illustrated her sexual excess and connected this quality to the illicit regime that sponsored her. Caricatures of Kshesinskaia, draped in jewels, figured into satirical pornographic cartoons.69 Films in the spring of 1917 highlighted

Kshesinskaia as a symbol of the regime’s favoritism and decadence; titles included The Secrets of the Romanovs, The Shame of the House of the Romanovs, and The Secret Story of the

Ballerina Kshesinskaia. News headlines suggested her duplicitous dealings: “16 Poods of Silver from the Palace of Kshesinskaia,” “Espionage and the Ballerina,” “Secrets of M. F.

Kshesinskaia.”70

67 Quoted in Bernard Pares, The Fall of the Romanov Monarchy: A Study of the Evidence. New York: Vintage Books, 1939), 301-302. The translation belongs to Pares.

68 Hall, 106. See also the film Matilda Malya, Itäproiektt (1995).

69 Bobrov and Kirikov, 123.

70 Krasovskaia, 65.

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Novellas, small books, and pamphlets similarly told of Kshesinskaia, symbol of a corrupt, weak, and unfit government; her private life became the matter of public speculation. One of the

1917 skazki depicted Nicholas as a youth, weak and preferring to fritter away time with his ballerina lover than deal with the problems of state.71 In 1917, a part of the Secrets of the House of Romanovs book series was dedicated to the favorites of Nicholas. In The Favorites of Nicholas

II, the anonymous author places Kshesinskaia as the last and most powerful of Nicholas’ favorites.72 Unlike the elite gossips, who did not hesitate to condemn Kshesinskaia for her notorious behavior, the author focuses exclusively on Nicholas’ reign and his personal life; there is no reference to Kshesinskaia’s history after Nicholas, no mention of her relationships with

Sergei and Andrei. We soon see why; the author is preoccupied with Nicholas’ character failings, particularly his personal weakness, which this book shows at length. He falls on his knees before

Kshesinskaia shortly after meeting her, and “began to cry” when his father ordered him to marry

Alexandra.73 Lest we sympathize with star-crossed lovers, the author shows the obscene wealth lavished upon Kshesinskaia by the doting Nicholas. “How much money was heaped upon her?” the author inquires pointedly within the first paragraphs of his work on her.74 Her dressing room is depicted as an exotic den of seduction: “amid crystal bottles of champagne, among luxurious vases, and amid the sharp, alluring scent of spices” sat the ballerina in her boudoir.75 Although

Nicholas married Alexandra (against his will), the author suggests he was too ensnared by

Kshesinskaia to break off his relationship with her. Signs of his ongoing affection, the author

71 Anzhelika Saf’ianova (L. Nikulin), O startse Grigorii i russoi istorii…Skazka nashikh dnei (Moscow, 1917), 14.

72 Favoritki Nikolai II: Vypusk’ 1P (Petrograd: 1917).

73 Ibid., 4.

74 Ibid., 12.

75 Ibid., 14.

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notes, included a lavish mansion appointed in a fashionable district of the city, and “in the banks, heaps of wealth.”76 Part of this wealth came from a source other than Nicholas’ generosity; the author distorts the elite gossip of Kshesinskaia’s contract bribery to suggest she directly sold secrets to the Germans: “The ballerina used all these secrets together with Minister Sukhomlinov for greater wealth, received from the Germans.”77

Another 1917 publication, The Love Affair of the Tsarevich: the Great Romance of the

Life of Nicholas II, paints a similar image of a weak tsar, manipulated by a woman with an agenda other than Russian welfare. The author is listed here with a pseudonym; Strel’na historian

Oleg Varenik has suggested this is the work of the great poet Maiakovsky, but there is no evidence of this either in the text or Maiakovsky scholarship.78 In this book, a novel, the naïve

Nicholas bows to dynastic duty, unable to truly be master of either his society or his heart.79 He therefore yields to his parents’ pleadings that he marry Alexandra, although he knows his heart belongs to his dancer-mistress. He does this not without a great deal of conflict; the piteous

Nicholas proposes to his dying father that he, Nicholas, will renounce the throne, travel to India

(that is, leave the Russian empire), and marry Kshesinskaia there, if he might have his father’s sanction to do so.80 While his love would be touching, author Maria Evgen’eva, like the anonymous author of The Favorites of Nicholas II, makes it clear his affections were misplaced.

76 Ibid., 16.

77 Ibid.

78 See for example Vladimir Maiakovskii, Stixotvoreniia i poety (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1979) and Wiktor Woroszylski, The Life of Mayakovsky, translated by Boleslaw Taborski (New York: Orion Press, 1970).

79 Maria Evgen’eva, Roman Tsarevicha: Bol’shoi Roman iz zhizni Nikolaia II (Saint Petersburg: Interduk, 1990, original publication 1917).

80 Ibid., 104.

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Although Nicholas generously recognized his son by Kshesinskaia,81 granting him a title and a significantly sized bank account, Kshesinskaia “dreamed of more.”82 Although Kshesinskaia was not accused by Evgen’eva of selling secrets to the Germans here, the author points out repeatedly that her interests still did not coincide with Russian interests. Kshesinskaia, the granddaughter of a Polish couple, urged Nicholas to consider Polish national affairs as important to his rule as

Russian affairs, for “the blood of [Poland] runs in the veins of his natural son.”83 Nicholas obediently agrees that he will do all he can for Kshesinskaia’s people, and even entertains her argument that they marry. As Kshesinskaia (through the author) comments several times, Peter the Great married a low-born woman and made a powerful empress of her. The tragedy of

Nicholas II, however, as the author informs us, is that “he was not Peter the Great.”84 The author suggests Nicholas’ inability to stand up for himself was far more damaging to Russian interests than the selection of a suitable wife.

There was good news to report about Kshesinskaia—she had funded and worked at a hospital for ailing soldiers, and gave charity concerts regularly during the war—but what remained in the urban public’s mind were the stories of this Kshesinskaia: the meddler, the

81 In both this text, and the anonymously authored book Favorites of Nicholas II, Kshesinskaia is said to have sons by Nicholas II—here, ultimately, two sons. This might be a negative comparison with Alexandra, who had Nicholas’ son only after several daughters were first born. It is more likely, however, simply a distortion of a fact, that Kshesinskaia had a son. What is not factual is his parentage; he was born well after her relationship with Nicholas ended, and apparently fathered by Grand Duke Andrei.

82 Ibid., 29.

83 Ibid., 32. Kshesinskaia and her father were both born in Russia and Russian-speakers. They publicly maintained a link to their Polish heritage by specializing in the mazurka; Kshesinskaia’s father was considered the world expert in the dance.

84 Ibid., 53.

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profiteer, whose home was filled with contracts sold to the highest bidder.85 Anecdotal evidence makes it clear just how widely these stories had disseminated. Before she fled Petrograd in

February 1917, Kshesinskaia was regularly receiving anonymous hate mail; similar thoughts were expressed in letters from the front, according to Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, in which Grand Duchess Maria Pavlova and Kshesinskaia were both named as courtiers selling secrets to the Germans. When she fled Saint Petersburg, a Bolshevik soldier asked her if her son was indeed the son of the tsar. Lenin, in his April return to St. Petersburg, was greeted with the same set of stories; Bolshevik soldiers informed him that they’d seized her palace since it was bought with the money of the Russian people.86 The ultimate comment on her reputation, and general esteem, was the February Revolution, when it was Kshesinskaia’s home that was mobbed and sacked, not the imperial palaces. Private space had become most decisively public, in the hands of the press.

III. Conclusion

The stories about Kshesinskaia have been less discussed in Revolutionary historiography than the media fascination with Rasputin and Alexandra. The evolution of Kshesinskaia in the media, however, showed something that the stories of Rasputin and Alexandra did not: well before the debacle of World War I, the press was in an imperial chokehold, forced to make only the most flattering comments about favorites, even though there was plentiful darker material to report. During the quagmire of the war, press censorship broke down, allowing writers to act as

85 Kshesinskaia, 236-237 for an account of her war hospital (established 1914), and 250-251, for her participation in winter 1916 war benefits.

86 Kshesinskaia, 285, Bobrov and Kirikov, 97, Figes and Kolonitskii, 12, 18, GMPIR, “M.K. Evgev: Avtobronemasterskikh,” Otdel fondov, f. 8.

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investigative journalists, willing to expose court corruption and those associated with it. As a result of the collision of media and gossip, private lives were dragged into public forums, with not even the lock of the private citizen’s front door to keep the public out. In the hands of the journalists, modern society was one played out in text and available for public judgment.

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The Lawyers

Barbarians at the Gates? Law and the Seizure of the Kshesinskaia Mansion, 1917

In her memoirs, Kshesinskaia tells an especially vivid story of the fall of her mansion. In the days of the February Revolution, after Kshesinskaia had fled the house and gone into hiding, her housekeeper turned on her, betraying her to the mobs outside. The housekeeper threw open the doors to the mob, crying out, “The bird has flown!”1

We do not know if those words were in fact said. Certainly, the moment reads in

Kshesinskaia’s memoirs as suspiciously cinematic. But it does fit a wonderful metaphor that played out in the first half of 1917: something valuable, something precious, had left the house of the nation. Initially, Russians understood that bird of flight as order, then the fall of culture itself; finally, it would be clear, it was the rule of law, as symbolized by the Provisional Government.

With the flight of the “bird,” went the grounds on which the Provisional Government based its legitimacy; with the sacking and loss of the Kshesinskaia mansion to the Bolsheviks, the

Provisional Government proved it could not assert a monopoly on public power or the ability to enforce the rulings of its justice system. An analysis of the 1917 Kshesinskaia court case proves that well before the October Revolution, the Provisional Government had failed, on the national stage, to live up to its own standards.

1 Kshesinskaia, 160.

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The case of the Kshesinskaia mansion has not been analyzed as part of the public failure of the Provisional Government. This is surprising, given that the legal impact of 1917 has not been ignored. Trotsky himself claimed the Revolution was a redefinition of the imperial legal order: October “did not overthrow the Kerensky government alone [but] overthrew the whole social system that was based on private property.”2

Despite this awareness that something massive happened in 1917, Russian legal historians have not looked extensively at what took place in the courtrooms during the revolutionary year. Instead, they have focused on two earlier landmarks of Russian legal history, the Petrine period and the Great Reforms. In both cases, historians have sought to understand just how strong the Russian belief in civil rights (including private property) was before 1917.3

For the Petrine era, scholars like Richard Pipes have argued that private property simply did not exist as a firmly entrenched idea, and that this dismissal of private property would make it easier for the Bolsheviks to jettison the idea of private property in Russia altogether.4 For the Great

Reforms era, scholars have looked to the courts to gauge the depths of civil society.5

2 Trotskii, 14.

3 One of the earlier discussions of private property as a sign of freedom can be found in the works of the eighteenth century Russian playwright, Denis Fanvizin, “Rassuzhdenie o nepremennykh gosudarstvennykh zakonakh” in Sobranie sochinenii, edited by G. P. Makodonenko (Moscow, 1959), p. 254-267.

4 See the articles of George Weickhardt, “Due Process and Equal Justice in Muscovite Codes,” Russian Review 51, 4 (October 1992): 463-480 and “Pre-Petrine Property Law,” Slavic Review 52, 4 (Winter 1993): 663-579, as well as Richard Pipes’ response, “Was There Private Property in Muscovite Russia?” Slavic Review 53, 2 (Summer 1994): 524-538. Pipes’ ideas were later reformulated in his book, Property and Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999) and can be found as well in his seminal, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1976). For essays including the Soviet era, see William E. Butler’s edited collection, Russian Law: Legal and Historical Perspectives (Leyden: A.W. Sitjhoff, 1977).

5See W. Bruce Lincoln, The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1990), and the collection, Between Tsar and People. For articles, see Natasha Assa, “How Arbitrary Was Tsarist Administrative Justice? The Case of the Zemstvos Petitions to the Imperial Ruling Senate, 1866-1916,” Law and History Review (Spring 2006),

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Private property enters this discussion only to define the relationship between the tsarist government and the nobles. In Between Clan and Crown, Lee Farrow argued that the combined interests of the state and elite families choked off the development of individual property rights:

“Ultimately, state practices and the power of the clan restricted the development of private property rights in Russia to such a degree that even by 1917, one can only speak of limited private property at best.6 In his article in the collection Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, Richard

Wortman noted that “property rights” existed only in the context of great wealth and as such could hardly be seen as a perceived right in this period.7 In A Woman’s Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700-1861, Michelle LaMarche Marrese shows that

Russian noblewomen owed their property rights, greater than their Western European peers, to noble families’ insistence on their ability to defend family property against state encroachment.

The women’s legal empowerment was a result of a strategy to build up noble power, based on the land these women held; as that land fell away, after 1861, so too did interest in their empowerment.8

Private property therefore does not feature extensively in historical treatments of 1917.

Instead of looking at the law in 1917, when looking at government structures, including the courts, historians have emphasized the poor political choices at the center of the Provisional

(13 Apr. 2008), Elisa M. Becker, “Judicial Reform and the Role of Medical Expertise in Late Imperial Russian Courts,” Law and History Review 17 (1999): 1–26.

6 Lee Farrow, Between Clan and Crown: The Struggle to Define Noble Property Rights in Imperial Russia (Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 17-18.

7 Richard Wortman, “Property Rights, Populism, and Russian Political Culture,” in Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, edited by Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 13-17.

8 Michelle LaMarche Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700- 1861 (Ithaca: Cornell University, 2002). See also William Wagner, Marriage, Property and Law in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford, New York: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1994).

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Government in undermining its position. Marc Ferro’s The Russian Revolution of February 1917 exemplifies this position: he argues that the Duma was delaying dealing with major legal reforms

(like land allotment) at the expense of the genuine enthusiasm of the Russian people for change.9

Echoing that position, H. J. White argued that civil rights were not a major issue for the

Provisional Government, which unwisely delayed discussion to define those rights.10

Although historians have described the lack of reform in the actions of early 1917, they have not actively used the courts to illustrate this issue. The law itself has not been a focus of studies of 1917. Analysis of the government has simply stressed its ineptness and how it assisted in undermining its own legitimacy. Historians, such as Orlando Figes, Boris Kolonitskii, and

Frederick Corney, have read the moves of the Provisional Government as significant failures to define new symbols for the regime.11 Further scholars have echoed this rejection of the

Provisional Government by showing how the imperial government itself failed at the very street level: Joan Neuberger, retelling the difficulties of controlling street hooligans in the World War I era, argued that the capital was in a state of “moral panic” and on the “edges of civilized society,” thanks to the failures of the central government.12 Similarly, Daniel Brower has written

9 Marc Ferro, The Russian Revolution of February 1917, translate by J. L. Richards (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1972), viii, 155. For insight into how the imperial system itself failed in its legal reforms, see William G. Wagner, “Tsarist Legal Policies at the End of the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Inconsistencies,” Slavonic and East European Review 54, no. 3 (1976): 371–94.

10 H.J. White, “Civil Rights and the Provisional Government Between February to October,” in Crisp and Edmondson, Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, 287-312.

11 See Orlando and Boris Kolonitskii. Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), B.I. Kolonitskii, Simvoly vlast’ i bor’ba za vlast’ (Saint Petersburg: Rossiiskaia Akademia Nauk, 2001), and Frederick Corney, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

12 Joan Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 9.

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on the difficulty of policing the Russian cities before 1917, with the revolutionary year eroding what control the government had retained.13

Historians have therefore separated discussions of 1917 from discussions of the court system that continued to operate during that year. They have pushed discussion of the court system to the years before 1917, as if the court system in 1917 had no impact on, or relationship with, the turns of the revolutionary year. In this chapter, a history of one court case in particular, the seizure of the Kshesinskaia mansion, will be presented. It will become clear that although the

Provisional Government and the Bolsheviks scrupulously attended to the laws of private property, it was the Provisional Government which failed in its role of defending private property; it was the Provisional Government which failed to execute court orders; it was the

Provisional Government ultimately which proved willing to surrender the very legal principles it allegedly meant to defend. The story of the Kshesinskaia house in 1917 demonstrates the value of legal studies of 1917, showing that the government did not successfully defend the rights fundamental to its own mission. Although the Provisional Government made its defense of private property—the right to use and keep one’s own space at will—a legal right, it did not support this right and ultimately undermined its own liberal vision of modern society.

February-March

Once the February Revolution broke out, three things became clear: 1) that in the very days after the abdication, street mobs had bested the power of the Provisional Government, demonstrating this by taking over the homes of public figures; 2) that these buildings were

13 Daniel Brower, The Russian City Between Tradition and Modernity, 1850-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

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selected and abused quite deliberately as symbols of the regime; 3) that the Bolsheviks felt that they were not part of that chaotic street mob and were, in fact, quite the opposite of the street mobs—orderly, respectful, and absolutely entitled to use the properties they occupied.

The story of the first mob actions of February 1917 began before the Tsar abdicated. In an environment where the rich were described angrily as “pharaohs” and pornography about the court swirled, it was clear that the houses of the elite were vulnerable to imminent attack.14 The ballerina Kshesinskaia had been receiving threatening letters through the course of World War I; as the war effort floundered, the public hostility against her increased. In the first weeks of

February, General Halle, the Chief of Police of the Fourth District of Petersburgskaia, informed

Kshesinskaia that she should prepare to flee, he could not ensure her safety or that of her property. 15 She did not entirely ignore these warnings: she sent property to the Bank of Azov, the French Society State Savings Bank, and to the banks of the House of Fabergé Jewelers.16

Extra furniture was stored with the Meltzer Brothers furnishings store.17 Finally, on the day of

February 26th alone, she was telephoned by the police and advised to pack up what she could, “if the abscess burst.”18

14 Irina Skariatina, A World Can End (New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1931), 100.

15 Kshesinskaia, 208-9.

16 Ibid., 166-167. Faberge later requested that Kshesinskaia retrieve her larger pieces of jewelry from him, as he feared the new government would confiscate them as being court--and therefore public--property. His fears had basis; as of March 20th, all imperial property was deemed property of the state. See Aleksei Chuparron, “Liubovnitsa poslednogo imperatora,” Karavan Istorii (April 2000): 63-72.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid., 163.

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On March 1st (March 13), the day before Nicholas II abdicated, what the police called an abscess burst.19 The chaos that followed illustrated the utter inability of the tsarist government to defend its own citizens, and posed a dark challenge to the creation of a new government. With little warning, Kshesinskaia fled her home (the table set for a dinner party) and went into hiding in the city. Despite her absence, the mobs poured into her house with enthusiasm. Her home was the first to be attacked, according to one source.20 It was “sacked from top to bottom,” according to the French ambassador, who claimed she was “a symbol of the imperial order. It was that symbol which has been attacked today.”21 Even Trotsky admitted her home had been the subject of special violence, writing off the level of public fury as related to Kshesinskaia’s status as the

Tsar’s former favorite: “It is no wonder if after the Revolution, the abandoned Palace of

Kshesinskaia failed to awaken benevolent feelings among the people.”22

The mob was certainly after Kshesinskaia herself. Ignoring her ownership of the structure, believing the public had the right to determine what went on in the private home, they ransacked the house, looking for her. Once it was obvious she was not present, despite being welcomed by the housekeeper, they turned their fury on the servants who remained. Under the leadership of a Georgian student, Agababov, they forced the chef to cook for the mob as he would for Kshesinskaia and wait the table as well.23 Emptying the wine cellar of its comments, the crowd guzzled all the alcohol it could—the “champagne ran in torrents,” according to

19 Paleologue, v. 3, 230.

20 See Witnesses of the Russian Revolution, edited by Harvey Pitcher, (London: John Murray Publishers, 1994), 89.

21 Paleologue, v. 3, 229.

22 Trotsky, v. 2, 58.

23 Bobrov and Kirikov, 97.

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Kshesinskaia’s memoirs.24 The street mob then tracked down the porter, M. I. Denisov, and hauled him into the courtyard. When he failed to offer up information about Kshesinskaia’s whereabouts or any secret documents revealing her supposed conspiracy with the Germans, he was threatened with immediate death by firing squad. Only his military medal—the Cross of St.

George—convinced the crowd to let him go alive.25 No police presence, no armed response by either the tsarist government saved him—the government, as a defender of its people, was effectively dead.

The later memories of 1917 would claim all of this had been done by the Bolsheviks.26

Kshesinskaia’s mansion was ransacked in that first day of the February violence in St.

Petersburg, but despite the later impression that it had been in the hands of the Bolsheviks all along, none of this violence was led by the Bolsheviks. In fact, the other great house seized in these days was taken by a group of anarchists. General P.P. Durnovo, Nicholas II’s Minister of the Interior, had a dacha along the Neva; it was so luxurious that it was, to quote one historian, sa dacha “in name only.27 Durnovo was publicly despised, both because he had been involved in the government for years and because he had taken high-profile positions. He was, for example, the governor general of Moscow after the 1905 Revolution.28

24 Kshesinskaia, 165.

25 Ibid. His wife, who had heart problems, reportedly died from the shock of witnessing this.

26 According to one witness, “The Bolsheviks insisted on turning the better-off people out of their homes.” Quoted in Roy Bainton’s A Brief History of 1917: Russia’s Year of Revolution (New York: Carroll and Gray, 2005), 238.

27 Lovell, 121.

28 See his correspondence in “Neskol’ko dokumentov iz fonda P.P. Durnovo (1917-1919), Zvezda No. 11 (1994): 156-168.

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It could be argued that this was an expression of mob violence, the implosion of the tsarist government, and not a reflection of the Provisional Government. But as of 2 March 1917, via placards and article announcements, the Provisional Government had announced its governorship and its intention of forming a government based on civil liberties, which included the right to own property. The oath of allegiance to the new government specifically stated the principles of “civil liberty and civic equality.”29 The Executive Committee of the Duma itself insisted that “encroachments on private property, physical assaults, and attempts at murder cannot be tolerated.”30

But the Duma, and the Provisional Government itself, did not live up to this standard.

Even as the mob violence ebbed downwards, private property remained under assault in the cities and the countryside. Within Petrograd, the drama of the Kshesinskaia mansion illustrated this. The first Bolshevik-linked organization (an armed car division of the city government, representing the first Petrograd Soviet) moved into the house only after it had originally been sacked and left emptied by the mob, and that was because of the property’s sizable garage.31

Shortly thereafter, the armored car division sent letters of invitation to the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks, and the Petrograd Committee. The committees had been located in cramped lodgings in the Central Petrograd Labor Exchange previously (Kronverskii Prospekt, d. 49).

Beyond offering little space (the Petrograd Committee had just 2 small rooms in the Exchange),

29 “Revoliutsionnoi nedeli,” Izvestia, no. 2 (28 February 1917): 1, in The Russian Provisional Government 1917: Documents (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), v. 1, 166.

30 Ibid.

31 Trotsky, v. 2, 58, and Bobrov, 129. Novoe vremia of 9 March 1917 records the armored car division had moved in as well.

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the site lacked the features of the Kshesinskaia mansion.32 In addition to the building’s size and symbolic significance, it was of interest for strategic reasons: it was located near a worker’s district (the Vyborg District factories in particular were Bolshevik supporters), it was not far from the garrisoned machine gunners of the Peter and Paul Fortress, it featured a view to the

Troitsky Bridge leading directly to the Winter Palace, and it was near the Cirque Moderne, the hall of which could house a national Bolshevik meeting.33

The Petrograd Committee, which had held just two small rooms in the old Central

Exchange, moved into the building first. One account records that P.V. Dashkevich, acting as a liaison between the armored car division and the Petrograd Committee, announced the plan with the simple statement, “The agreement has been prepared.”34 The deal was approved unanimously by the Committee, beginning the movement of Bolshevik organizations into the Kshesinskaia mansion.35 On March 13, the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Bolsheviks decided officially to accept quarters in the house and to grant a pass to all members.36

These were not the only Bolshevik organizations to move into the house; the Bolshevik

Military Organization, the soldiers’ club Pravda, and the editorial board of Pravda also occupied

32 Bobrov, 99-100, and N.N. Cherepekov, “Starshii nauchnyi sotrudnik I nauchno ekspozittzionnogo otdela Muzeia,” in GMPIR.

33 See Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976), 8-9, N. Avdeev, Revolijutsiia 1917 goda-Khronika sobyti (Petrograd: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1923), v. 2, 115, and Pervyi Legal’nyi PK Bol’shevikoe v 1917 g, edited by P.F. Kuvili (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe, 1927), 208-9.

34 B.N. Zalezhskii, “Pervyii legal’nyi Pe-Ka,” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia no. 1/13 (1923), 151.

35 Cherepekov.

36 Bol’sheviki Petrograda v 1917 godu: Khronika Revoliutsionykh Sobytii v Petrograde, Mart-Oktiabr’ 1917 g, edited by A.P. Konstantinov (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1957), 53. See also the memoirs of N.A. Petrovskaia, held by GMPIR.

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the site. According to the March 19 Pravda, the Central Professional Bureau of the Bolsheviks applied to the Soviet for space as well.37 They began to distribute zones of the house to specific groups. Initially, the majority of the first floor was given to the soldiers’ club Pravda.38 There they established a reading room, a hospital room, and workshops.39 The War Organization for the Central Committee felt so secure in their selected rooms on the first floor that they had special stationary made up to list their new address.40 The armored car division took the garage and 5 first-floor rooms including the drawing room. From the balcony on the second floor,

Bolshevik speakers began to rail against the Provisional Government and how it was continuing the imperial policy of favoritism, lavishing “thousands” on Nicholas’ former favorites.41

By the expressed standards of the Provisional Government, all of this was illegal and not to be tolerated; the private home was an extension of the private self, to be defended against government and social tyranny. But they did nothing. Instead, it was up to the home to demand her rights and attempt to mitigate her damages. As the Bolsheviks began to move into the

Kshesinskaia mansion, the dancer herself did not abandon her property. Instead, she began a half-year of demands on the central government to live up to its promises of defending private property. Within days of the house’s occupation, on March 10th, she had officers from the

Department of the Petrograd Prefect there to assess the damage. They reported on the conditions found, but did not remove the Bolsheviks. Kshesinskaia also had had spies, like her porter

37 19 March 1917 (No. 13) Pravda, quoted in Bol’sheviki, 69.

38 M.K. Eveev, “Vospomaniia o 1917,” RGASPI, f. 71, op. 15, d. 465, l. 3.

39 Bobrov, 97-99.

40 GMPIR, f. II, VC 2415.

41 See the comments of V. Nabokov, a member of the Provisional Government, as quoted in I.V. Gessen, Arkhiv Russkoi Revoliutsii (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1991), 35.

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Denisov, for example, who braved the mobs again to explore the house and reported that linens, clothing, and even books had been taken.42 Assisted by a friend, Kshesinskaia’s maid Katia had entered the property to take some skirts for her, and her dresser Ludmilla had taken shoes; both reported widespread damage, including smashed bathroom mirrors, perfume bottles shattered on the floors, and shredded bedspreads.43 The Prefect officers found that while the majority of the property had been looted (the house had been “daily subjected to damage and destruction”) at least twenty three items of value were seized and sent back to the City Prefect.44 They took what papers remained in her desk (nine plans of her house, six packets of letters to her romantic companions Grand Dukes Sergei and Andrei, and what were presumably Sergei’s documents, relevant to his position as Inspector General of the Artillery).45 All items were dispatched to

Kshesinskaia and transferred to her banks. The officers also escorted Kshesinskaia’s sister Julie throughout the house, to determine what still remained (golden cups on the dining room shelves) and what was missing (a golden crown that was given to Kshesinskaia by fans in 1904, and was later found in the Prefect’s office).46

Repeatedly members of the Provisional Government failed Kshesinskaia. They listened, they were sympathetic, but they did virtually nothing to change the actual ownership of the home. Kshesinskaia bullied the government to do more than assess the damage. She began by

42 Kshesinskaia, 178.

43 Ibid. Some of Kshesinskaia’s dresses were later found in the house of her estranged brother Joseph; presumably, they were taken from the house during this tumultuous period.

44 Gessen, 99, and Kshesinskaia, 178. The items seized included mostly table setting and décor, like a large silver wreath, 2 small silver wreaths, a silver sugar basin, a silver-plated small vase, a silver-plated salt cellar, and cups of silver and gold. See Bobrov, 98-99, and GMPIR’s “Passport zdaniia Muzeia S.M. Kirkova,” Leningrad, 31-32. See also GMPIR, f. II, VC 22451.

45 Ibid.

46 Kshesinskaia, 179.

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writing a letter to Alexander Kerensky, and had it delivered to the Minister of Justice with the aid of the journalist Vladimir Krymov.47 This apparently worked, as Kerensky gave her his home telephone number in the case of emergency. 48 He told her he did not have the power to immediately evict the household occupants (by one account, he told her attorney that the situation fell under the Ministry of the Interior’s power) but a Justice of the Peace did give the

Bolsheviks twenty days to leave the premises.49 A personal meeting followed.50 Her companion,

Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, was certain the meeting had gone well; he informed his brother that Kshesinskaia, then under investigation for possible charges of treason, had received a grant of immunity from future prosecution.51

Kerensky and the Provisional Government could promise Kshesinskaia immunity, but they could not evict the men and women occupying her home. Kshesinskaia took matters into her own hands, again going to the government, but this time focusing on members who might have some specific sway over the Bolsheviks, rather than those would could wield the government power itself. She went to the Tauride, then still home of the Petrograd Soviet, and asked “that the

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid. Note the emergency was quite real—Kshesinskaia was at the time under threat from mob activity and the government. She was in hiding in this time, moving amongst the homes of former colleagues at the Mariinsky Theater, the houses of family members, and even the homes of former servants. At any moment, it was anticipated that she would, like other members of the tsarist court then under investigation, be arrested for treasonous links with arms dealers or the German government.

49 Gessen, 99.

50 A press article notes the meeting but suggests it was chiefly concerning whether Kshesinskaia would face state prosecution. According to the article, she promised not to leave the area during the investigation of her activities during the war. “M. F. Kshesinskaia u A.F. Keresnkogo,” Birzhevye vedomosti no. 16138 (16 March 1917), 4. The arrest of a figure not central to politics was not as unlikely as one might think: less than a week earlier, the elderly courtier Fredericks, the head of the Imperial Household, had been arrested. See Birzhevye vedomosti of 10 March, 1917.

51 Letter of March 9, 1917. GARF, f. 670, op. 1, d. 185, page unlisted.

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characters occupying my house be expelled.”52 She spoke with several members of the Soviet, including A.G. Shliapnikov and L.M. Mikhailov.53 After Mikhailov suggested she was a useless member of society who had only begun to work in the war (implying her fortune was made from wartime speculation), she reiterated that her fortune was made from her own work and it existed prior to the war. She asked the men not to believe what had been said of her, as a possible war profiteer, and instead described herself as a “pitiable woman,” living in difficulty, and who held only 900,000 rubles in the bank—far less than the secret fortunes of gold believed she was rumored to have.54 Shliapnikov promised assistance but affirmed he had “little hope of success.”55

Shliapnikov was not the only member of the Soviet Kshesinskaia approached. According to Nicholas Sukhanov, then a member of the Petrograd Soviet, she came with the claim that

Kerensky had sent her.56 Kerensky had apparently named Sukhanov as a Menshevik-

Internationalist absolutely against any kind of use of private property. In his memoirs of the period, he described himself: “I was violently hostile to all seizures, unauthorized requisitions, and all separatist and anarchist actions…I was resolutely hostile to lawlessness, law-making by anybody who felt like it, and fought against private seizures of houses and businesses without much success.”57 Before this man, Kshesinskaia presented herself as so timid and fearful

52 Kshesinskaia, 169.

53 In ironic phrasing, Mikhailov allegedly greeted Kshesinskaia with “How can I serve you?” (“Chem mogu sluzhit’?”) See Petrovskaia, in GMPIR.

54 A.G. Shliapnikov, Kanun Semnadtsatogo goda (Moscow: Respublika, 1992), v. 2, 459.

55 Ibid.

56 N.N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution 1917, translated by Joel Carmichael (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), 209.

57 Ibid., 211.

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(“halting and stammering….quite inarticulate speech”), that Sukhanov himself feared he was going to have to deal with a woman in tears.58 She identified herself by name and was

“offended,” according to Sukhanov, that he did not know “the famous palace, the magnetic focus of the Revolution.”59 She asked him pointedly why a private residence was now being held by the Bolsheviks: “Why and on what grounds had the house been occupied without authorization?”60 He responded with a defense of the Bolsheviks’ occupation of the home, and that is worthy of quotation:

The principal [of avoiding seizure of homes] conflicted with the crying needs of the new organizations that had sprung up, which had a right to exist. Secondly, the principal was unconvincing, not only to the Left but also to many people in the Centre, and individual and arbitrary action by right of revolution was taken far and wide.61

This was the official Bolshevik statement on the occupation: it was seized by “right of revolution,” to fit the needs of the Bolsheviks, and it was no different from what others were doing.62 In contrast to the Provisional Government, which observed a situation contrary to their standards and did nothing, the Bolsheviks maintained consistently they were working within the boundaries of the law and, in fact, were working hand-in-hand with the authorities. They allowed

58 Ibid., 209. One might be suspicious of her tears; after days of running for her life from anonymous street mobs, she had just walked into an organization many associated with those mobs. She had the moxie to enter that door and identify herself as Kshesinskaia; it is doubtful she lacked the nerve to tell her story without dissolving into tears— unless they were deliberate.

59 Ibid., 211.

60 Ibid., 211.

61 Ibid., 209.

62 Shliapnikov even groused at calling the Bolshevik use of the home an occupation, based on the fact they had moved into the house upon invitation only. Shliapnikov, v. 2, 460.

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Kshesinskaia and her attorney a tour of the building, promising to show her just how safely they held her belongings.63 Kshesinskaia saw a staircase strewn with books and personal papers, her bedroom stripped, stains on her priceless floors, wardrobes stripped of shelves and doors to make room for rifles, her grand piano smashed between two damaged marble pillars in the Winter

Garden, and so many cigarette stubs in the bathtub that she likened it to an ashtray.64 Some of the damage occurred during the initial seizure; other parts of the destruction were in response to

Kshesinskaia’s efforts to retake the building, as soldiers recalled tearing apart her library “to help” Kshesinskaia pack away her things.65

Although it was clear that little of significant value remained within the badly damaged structure, the question of ownership remained. Lacking any genuine support from the central government, she offered to make a deal with the Bolsheviks. The sources do not agree entirely on the terms of the deal, but it seems Kshesinskaia proposed devoting the first floor of the building to some service organization (such as the embassy she suggested in her memoirs), and while she would take the second floor for herself. She reportedly proposed alternately to live in a single room, to make the entire second floor a bed-and-breakfast, and to demand a room be turned into sealed storage of her remaining belongings.66 Although all of her plans were rejected, the idea of a compromise in which an occupied structure would be devoted to the public was not

63 According to Kshesinskaia’s memoirs, her tour guide did, apparently, believe the items had been stored safely. Kshesinskaia, however, interpreted what she saw as a disaster scene, with items stolen, smashed, and simply lost. See Kshesinskaia, 169.

6464 Ibid. This was not the only tour the Bolsheviks allowed; reportedly, members of the party served as tour guides for the curious public, showing off the rooms and mentioning stunning facts like the thousands of rubles Kshesinskaia lost in poker games. See Bainton, 185.

65 GMPIR, f. VI, folder 17 (M.K. Eveev, memoirs), p. 8.

66 See the accounts of Kshesinskaia, 169, and Sukhanov, 209.

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novel; the other famous private home taken by the February mobs, the Durnovo dacha, had become a rest house for workers while its legal ownership was defined.

April-June

Kshesinskaia’s deal with the Bolsheviks failed; they were unwilling to acknowledge her ownership of the home for any reason and maintained their right to use the space as they liked.

Moreover, the very government claiming to stand for public property and civil liberties did nothing. This would be damning for the Provisional Government, but what made it even more so was how very public this particular failure was becoming. Between April and June, papers reported on the progress of the court case against the Bolsheviks, making it clear to all just how ineffective the government was. Between April and June followed was a trio of months of tug-o- war, fought in the mass public and in the law courts. While Kshesinskaia won the public’s favor as to who should own the house, and won her legal ownership, she lost in the actual possession of the house. Once again, the Provisional Government and the Bolsheviks both appeared to follow the letter of the law, but the Provisional Government was unable to assert its will. Even though the public increasingly grumbled about the Bolshevik occupation of private property, even though the law courts confirmed the validity of Kshesinskaia’s ownership, even though it appeared the Bolsheviks intended to abide by the rulings of the court, the Provisional

Government was unable to execute and defend the rulings of its court system.

Before the courts moved in her favor, the press shifted decisively towards Kshesinskaia in this dispute, thanks to a new occupant in the house. At the start of the month, the house contained within it the Bolshevik Central Committee, the Petrograd Committee, the Bolshevik

Military Organization, the editors of Pravda, the soldiers’ club of the same name, and smaller

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organizations as well.67 As of April, Bolshevik regional conferences were being in the house as well; initially, these were informal gatherings of the Central and Petrograd Committee members, along with regular party delegates, but they later expanded to formal events, like the seventh All-

Russian Conference of the Bolsheviks and the All-Russian Conference of the Military Bolshevik

Organizations.68 In addition to these units of the Bolshevik organization, their most famous leader was to be added. Lenin was greeted at the train station on April 3/16 by the armored car division and a mob of Bolshevik followers. G.V. Elich, who was responsible for Lenin’s escort back to the Kshesinskaia house, noted the massive response from the crowds and their willingness to march with him back to the house.69

The Bolshevik headquarters was now transformed into an active hub of revolution.

Although Lenin did not live in the house, he worked there daily and was a highly visible presence. Workers remembered the site as a place to both listen to the speakers on the balcony and to join in Bolsheviks meetings there and at the nearby Cirque Moderne.70 From the balcony of the Kshesinskaia mansion he would follow other orators (M.M. Volodarskii, A.V.

Lunacharskii, and A.M. Kollontai) and daily offer words that indicated a high self-awareness of his context: “Poor wretches, you are starving while all around you are aristocrats and bankers.

Why do you not seize all of this wealth?...Steal what has been stolen!”71 Another witness

67 Bobrov, 129-121.

68 Izvestiia, no. 32 (5 April 1917), Pravda (23 April 1917), and Eveev, RGASPI, f. 71, op. 15, d. 465, l. 3. See also Commandant G.V. Elin’s memoirs, held by GMPIR, f. VI, d. 639, ed. xp. 45.

69 N.M. Podvoiskii, God 1917 (Moscow: Gospolitizdat’, 1957), 11. Elich noted that even after the crowds had been told Lenin would speak the following day, less than one third left the house’s doorstep; they were willing to sit there and wait for him. By June, 1917, the historian Podvoiskii estimated that 30,000 workers were regularly surrounding the Kshesinskaia mansion to listen to the speakers, 50.

70 GMPIR, f. VI, folder 9 (K. Gusakov, “Vospominaniia,” p. 1).

71 Pitrim Sorokin, Leaves from a Russian Diary (New York: The Beacon Press, 1950), 48.

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described a similar speech: “These palaces, citizens, belong to you! Exploiters and tyrants have lived in them, but the hour of vengeance has struck. But, comrades, it is not enough that we have possessed ourselves of their domains…These wretches…must be exterminated!”72

The visibility of the house as a center of Bolshevik power—enormous scarlet flags draped over the walls, shouting workers surrounding the balcony, listening to 24/7 oratory (“a daily racket,” according to one grand duke) against the war and the government—made it an increasingly popular focus of public discussion.73 One witness, E.H. Wilcox, described the scene as a dispatch center for trouble-makers:

From a kiosk in the garden, inflammatory harangues were delivered daily to open-mouthed crowds of workmen and soldiers in the street on the other side of the palings. Money Lenin had in abundance and the smartest motor cars in Petrograd carried his army of orators into the remote working class districts of the city.74

Wilcox’s words hint at a charge of hypocrisy: the workers’ friend, Lenin, with enough money to send out his assistants in luxury cars. This was typical of the media response to the house in these months. The house’s visibility as a political center provoked harsh press critique of its occupants. As Trotsky noted, the occupation “passed almost unnoticed at first. The indignation against the usurpers grew with the growth of the influence of the Bolsheviks. The

72 Fedor Chaliapin, Chaliapin: Man and Mask. Forty Years in the Life of a Singer, translated by Phyllis Melgroz (New York: Gordon City Publishing, 1932), 236.

73 Den’ no. 25 (5 April 1917), Buchanon, Dissolution, v. 2, 136-9. Grand Duke Nicholas Mikailovich is quoted in Jamie H. Cockfield, White Crow: The Life and Times of the Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich Romanov (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 2002), 203. Russkaia Volia ran a critical article describing the mobs of “Leninists” as simple people, unemployed and in need, randomly attaching themselves to the nearest orator with an answer for their problems. See the no. 54 (9 April 1917) issue, p. 3.

74 E.H. Wilcox, Russia’s Ruin (London: Chapman and Hall, 1919), 24.

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wild stories in the newspapers about how Lenin was occupying the boudoirs of the ballerina, and how all the decoration of the palace had been shattered to pieces and torn up, were mere lies,” he insisted.75

As the house became more visible as a revolutionary center, the media and public increasingly registered the take-over as a violation of civil rights, intensely aware that the government was not acting to correct the situation. Trotsky was angered by what he saw as traditional class hierarchy—“to requisition the peasants’ horses for the war—that is one thing, to requisition vacant palaces for the revolution—that is quite another. But the masses of people saw otherwise.”76 But as he himself first indicated, the public (negative) interest in the Kshesinskaia house occupation was as much about political beliefs as about class. Sukhanov acknowledged that amidst the rumors linking Lenin to the Germans was any kind of commentary about his life in the house:

Lenin was attacked for his past, for his real opinion, for his way of life, etc. Kshesinskaia’s palace, as the sign he lived there, was on everyone’s lips…Every possible organization, including the Soviet ones, began to ‘possess an opinion’ on Lenin [and] his pernicious activity.77 As the human symbol of the take-over, Lenin was singled out for special criticism. Lenin was portrayed popularly as the chief thug of the Bolshevik many, paid for by foreign financiers.78 According to the indignant Trotsky, “The press represented Lenin as guilty of an

75 Trotsky, v. 2, 59.

76 Trotsky, v. 2, 58.

77 Sukhanov, 289. T

78 Typically, he was accused of living off of Germany money, although at least one account had his bills paid for by a rich female sympathizer in Zurich, Switzerland. See Wilcox, 240.

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armed seizure of the house from the hands of a defenseless devotee of art. Tattered workers and soldiers amongst those velvets and silks, beautiful rugs, all of the drawing rooms of the capital shuddered with moral indignation.”79 Lenin was described as a “congenital criminal…and a religious fanatic,” surrounded by scandalous creatures like the women’s leader, allegedly hyper- sexed Alexandra Kollontai.80 He was accused of hypocrisy (“though he advocated peace without annexation and contributions, he has himself annexed Kzecisnskaia’s Palace and is living there most comfortably,” one countess sneered).81 The middle class press began to describe the possession of the house as the end of private property, rewriting the house’s occupation as a forced seizure of the building by the Bolsheviks, from the hands of the innocent ballerina.82 The papers suggested that telephone operators, protesting the Bolshevik presence, had heard the

Bolsheviks, dialing out of the Kshesinskaia mansion, speaking of treasonous plots.83 The seizure of the house was said to be the start of forced socialization, and the history of the house rewritten to indicate the Bolsheviks had indeed been the ones to evict Kshesinskaia from her home.84 High school students protested Lenin’s presence; the Kadet press, led by Russkaia volia, rallied readers to agitate nearby; even a soldiers’ soviet even passed a resolution of “protection” from

Lenin and Bolshevik propaganda.85 Rabochaia gazeta asked what money had funded Lenin’s trip

79 Ibid., 59. Trotsky did concede that Lenin’s sense of irony probably did appreciate his position in the former tsarist favorite’s house. Trotsky, v. 2, 297.

80 Sorokin, 47, 59.

81 Skariatina, 141. Irina Skariatina also described Lenin as “bald and terribly ugly, like a college professor.”

82 Petrovskaia, in GMPIR.

83 Russkaia volia, no. 77 (23 April 1917), 6.

84 As an example, “Socialization has begun. The Bolsheviks have forcibly taken possession of the villa of the dancer Kshessinsky, the anarchists have seized the villa of Durnovo and other houses, the proprietors being summarily expelled.” See Sorokin, 44.

85 Sukhanov, 298, Pravda no. 31 (13 April 1917), and Bainton, 239-40.

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to Petrograd, and suggested he was a dictator in the making, a demagogue to those of culture.86

Even workers criticized the occupation, wondering aloud if the Bolsheviks inside were “fast asleep” instead of striking against Kerensky’s Provisional Government.87

The response to Lenin and the Bolsheviks was highly colored by political overtones.

General P.A. Polovstsoff noted the dangers of their presence from a government perspective: “A friendly interaction was growing up between the soldiers of the [Peter and Paul] garrison and the inmates of the Bolshevik stronghold, and I thoroughly disliked it.”88 As Trotsky noted, “The

Kadets…accused the Bolsheviks of undermining the pillars of morality and hawking and spitting on the polished floors of the palace of Kshesinskaia. The dynastic ballerina became a symbol of culture trampled under the hooves of barbarians.”89 The Kadet press knew “no limits to its indignation” against the seizure, agitating with brochures and essays alike on vandalism vs. the rights to private property.90

Yet the unspoken question through all of these complaints was how this had been allowed to happen, or continue to happen. Despite the public outcry about the seizure of the Kshesinskaia home, the Provisional Government did not act decisively to evict the Bolsheviks. The Ministry of

Justice had established that the Bolsheviks could not claim the home, because the right of private

86 Rabochaia gazeta no. 33 (16 April 1917), 1 and no. 68 (1 June 1917), 2.

87 Trotsky, v. 2, 9.

88 General P.A. Polovstsoff, Glory and Downfall: Reminiscences of a Russian General Staff Officer (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1935), 212. He also suggested the Bolsheviks were responsible for destroying the house: “If the charming owner could only have seen what the Bolsheviks had done to her cozy and elegant dwelling, she would have had a fit,” 253.

89 Ibid., 59.

90 Ibid., v. 2, 295.

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property had not been abolished.91 Still, to the detriment of the government’s reputation, nothing happened. As one professor in Petrograd recalled:

All efforts of the government to expel the intruders from this place have failed. The Durnovo Palace, taken by anarchists, as well as other villas illegally held by criminals, calling themselves anarchists or communists, are still in their possession. In vain, the courts have ordered the instructions to vacate and again in vain the Ministry of Justice has issued his orders. No results. Either the government has no forces at its disposal or it is afraid to act in this manner.92

The court saga confirms the professor’s assessment that something was very wrong with the Provisional Government’s ability to enforce its will. Indeed, the dismissal of the Ministry of

Justice Perverzeff was linked to the failure of the Government to enact the court rulings in this period.93 Legally, through these months, Kshesinskaia’s valid title to possession was determined.

The saga began at the end of the March. Despite its legal obligations, the government failed to uphold that title. At the end of March, Kshesinskaia’s agents went to the house with a regiment as bodyguards, demanding the house be vacated in twenty-five minutes.94 Although soldiers escorted some of the armed divisions off the property, a delay was negotiated between the lawyers to allow the Bolshevik organizations time to pack and move.95

91 Kleinmichael, 265.

92 Sorokin, 48.

93 Kleinmichael, 265.

94 A. Iu. Shavrov, letter in GMPIR, f. VI. The letter refers to going to the house with a “grand duke.” Based on his actions in securing her property, this was most probably her platonic friend, Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, and not her romantic partner Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich.

95 Shavrov, f. VI. See also Kusvili, 195.

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The Bolsheviks did not move, however, and Kshesinskaia, with her representatives, moved the issue into the courts, seeking to demand the resolution from the government. They began by initiating complaints against those who had participated in the original raid of the house.96 They requested additional searches and inventories of the house.97 In addition, after the officially agreed delay expired, on May 3, 1917, her lawyer filed a suit in the justice of the peace court (mirovoi sud) of the 58th ward, located on Bol’shaia Zelenaia street. The lawsuit carefully stipulated all who might have infringed upon the property: the Petrograd Committee; the Central

Committee; the Central Bureau of Professionals; Petrograd regional committee, the Bolshevik

Military organizations and soldiers’ club, the student G.O. Agababov (who had led the invasion of the house), the attorney S. Y. Bagdatsev (listed as an accomplice), and Lenin, listed by his pseudonym and birth name.98 This list of defendants was amended at the start of the trial, as the

Central Bureau of the Professionals announced it had moved from the property; to the great embarrassment of the Provisional Government, the Bolshevik representatives, M. Kozlovskii and

S. Bagdatsev, also argued successfully that Lenin, not living on the property, could not be charged with unlawfully abiding there.99

96 For reasons unclear, in these filings the lawyers refer to an Andrei Shatalov who was to have taken part in the original raids. These claims were disputed by Shatalov’s military superiors. See TsGIA, f. 489, d. 2829, l.3 and l.4. These notes, curiously, also refer to Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich as a co-plaintiff, although the house was not titled in his name.

97 TsGIA SPb, f. 487, op. 1, del. 2736, l. 9.

98 Aleksei Kulegin, “Sudebnaia povestka dlia Lenina: kak Matil’da Kshesinskaia sudeilas’ s bol’shevikami iz-za zhilploshadi,” Vechernii Peterburg, no. 200 (22 October 1997), 3.

99 Ibid. Despite the fact Lenin was no longer a central witness in the case, stories flew about whether he would appear or not in the courtroom. There is no reasonable testimony to suggest he was, in fact, in the courtroom. (Nor, for that matter, was Kshesinskaia herself.)

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For the verdict on May 5, the hall was packed with onlookers and security protected the doorways; the court, represented by Judge Chistoserdov, had received anonymous threats.100 The stakes were high, because the issue was not merely removal of intruders: Kshesinskaia demanded at least two million rubles from the Provisional Government for failure to evict the Bolsheviks and sought damages (for destruction and rent) and an eviction notice directed to the

Bolsheviks.101 The attorneys fired their volleys at one another. Her lawyer, Vladimir Sadvelovich

Khesin, argued in court that revolution did not supersede the right to private property. Since she had never waived her right to the house and since she wanted them to leave, the Bolsheviks could not remain within Kshesinskaia’s house.102 In response, the Bolshevik attorney M.

Kozlovskii spoke for twenty minutes. He offered a weak legal argument: in a time of revolution

(“when bullets whistled in the air and artillery cannons could be heard on the street”), “normal” laws did not apply; the far greater legal violation was what was being done to the workers.103

Khesin retorted that to deny the rule of anarchy, and confirmed again that, regardless of public suspicion of how she had funded her home, Kshesinskaia built it with the proceeds of her labor, not from public money.104

After 10 minutes, the court handed down its decision.105 Kshesinskaia’s lawyers won this round; an eviction notice was declared and the court sided completely with Kshesinskaia’s claim

100 Ibid.

101 Bobrov, 104, and Trotsky, v. 2, 69.

102 See Novaia zhizn’, no. 16 (6/19 May 1917), 270-271.

103 Kulegin, part II in no. 201 (23 October 1997), 3. The full text of Koszlovskii’s speech is reportedly held by RGASPI, but archivists could not confirm their possession of it. See also Kuzvili for text of the speech, 199-200.

104 Ibid.

105 See the 6 May 1917 issue of Rech’ and GMPIR, VC 11980. See also TsGIA SPb, f. 487, op. 1, d. 2736, l. 9.

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to the space. But despite their ruling on the side of Kshesinskaia, whose lawyer had held the

Provisional Government to task for not acting decisively on the seizure, the court also failed to inspire direct action to back up its ruling. The court, however, gave the Bolsheviks time (twenty days) to leave the premises, and this again allowed for criticism and delays. In Pravda, accounts declared how workers were protesting against the eviction of Bolshevik organizations from the house. They claimed (according to Pravda) to be defending the Revolution from the first counter-strikes by the counter-revolutionary conservative forces.106 Over ten factories emptied of workers, while sailors sent representatives to Petrograd Committee to offer military assistance against the court, if need be.107

Across the other side of the court room, Kshesinskaia’s defenders also resorted to extra- juridical activity, as it was apparent that, while winning the battle, she had yet to win the war of the house. While Kshesinskaia waited for the government to act in her favor, unofficial pressure was put on the Bolsheviks to leave. At 5 AM on the twelfth of May, two officers and an unknown civilian were seen attempting to destroy one of the Bolshevik uses for the structure.

These invaders set fire to the offices of the gazette, the Soldatskaia Pravda; their equipment was badly burned and papers meant to be sent to the front were destroyed.108 This was not the only violence directed toward the Bolsheviks; at least one memoirist recalled Bolsheviks being attacked on the streets, provoked by a press that was hostile to them.109

106 Pravda no. 56 (13 May 1917).

107 Kuzvili, 201.

108 See Soldatskaia Pravda no. 21 (13 May 1917), and A.F. Ilyin-Genevsky, From the February Revolution to the October Revolution, 1917 (New York: Workers’ Library Publishers, 1931), 56.

109A. Spiridovich, Istoriia bol’shevizma v Rossii ot vozniknoveniia do zakhvata vlasti, 1883-1903-1917 (Paris: Franko-Russkaia Pechat’, 1922), 354.

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On June 5th, 1917, Kshesinskaia’s lawyer returned with another military escort, this time to officially serve the court’s notice of eviction.110 While the members of the soldiers’ club

“Pravda” were willing to engage in conflict with the court representatives—even going so far as to contact the garrison in Peter and Paul fortress for reinforcements if necessary—all parties preferred a peaceful eviction.111 Y. M. Sverdlov, a member of the Central Committee, negotiated with the representative of the Ministry of Justice, N.P. Pereverzevyi, for yet another delay in the eviction, this time for an additional week. Sverdlov gave his word that the Bolsheviks would leave in that time.112 This would be followed by two further failed attempts by the court to enforce the eviction notice.

The court ruling challenged the Bolsheviks to either break with the law openly, inviting public attack, or to submit to the Petrograd court’s ruling. On June 5th alone, Kshesinskaia’s frustrated attorney, Khesin, had loudly declared that if the Bolsheviks did not live up to their promises, it meant “the political death of the party”—a final, decisive break with the rule of law.113 As they had since the start of their occupation, the Bolsheviks avoided flagrant violation of the laws, although they were perfectly well aware of how weak their legal position was.114

After their first clashes with Kshesinskaia’s lawyers, they had sealed up some of her property in

110 An official report to the court signaled out the soldiers’ club and their gazette, Soldatskaia Pravda, as still being in the house illegally. See TsGIA SPb, f. 487, op. 1, d. 2736, l.6.

111 Kulegin, part II.

112 Ibid.

113 Ibid.

114 Lenin himself reportedly admired the Kshesinskaia mansion on his first day back in Petrograd. He asked the workers who brought him there how they came to “take the liberty” to settle in the palace—and the workers told him, as it was built by Nicholas II’s money, it was the people’s property. See K. Gusakov, “Vospomananiia,” in GMPIR.

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rooms, claiming they were in fact guarding “the people’s property” from the mob.115 They returned to Kshesinskaia some of the property found in the house (like a gold wreath) and its outlying buildings (like her car).116 Now, aware that the eyes of the media were upon them, they they signaled again their intention to accept the rulings, even though since March, their legal actions had largely spoken otherwise. On May 15, the car division relented, giving Kshesinskaia their keys to the mansion, although the other organizations still remained within it.117 On May

25, the Executive Committee of the Bolsheviks declared they would submit to the courts’ decision “in the interests of the revolution.”118 By June 11th, the Petrograd Committee was packing to move to new quarters.119 As of June 12th, the Central Committee, the secretariat of the Central Committee, and the Petrograd Committee left the Kshesinskaia mansion. (The

Central Committee’s secretariat moved to the apartment of E.D. Stasovoi, and then on to a school at the corner of Kalomenskyi and Raz’ezzhaia streets.)120 The Petrograd Committee and the Bolshevik War Organization both relocated their headquarters officially to the Trubochnyi factory on Vasilievskii Island, although for days afterward the groups retained property and personages in the Kshesinskaia mansion.121

115 Petrovskaia, in GMPIR and Cherepekov. According to Kudvili, Pervyi legalnyi, the original armored car division made the choice to move her remaining belongings to a sealed room, to protect the goods of the people. See Kudvili, 190.

116 The car was sold for cash. Eleven boxes of property were stored in the Bank of Azov and a few others were put in the Society of Loan Credit. Bobrov, 104.

117 See Novaia vremia, no. 16 (6/19 May 1917).

118 Bobrov, 104, and Trotsky, v. 2, 69.

119 Cherepekov.

120 Bobrov, 105.

121 Ibid.

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The press took this slow evidence of a shift with some measure of glee. Trumpeting the

“liberation” of the mansion, they gloated over Bolshevik representatives offering the attorney

Khesin 1200 rubles to stay in the mansion longer.122 But it became obvious that the liberation was hardly complete. Many considered the Petrograd Committee and the Bolshevik War

Organizations to be in the process of moving back to the Kshesinskaia mansion, just two days after their public departure.123 As of June 12th, Kshesinskaia’s attorney Khesin had to go to the headquarters of the city militia, pointing out the War Organization still remained in the house, and other Bolshevik organizations might also retain property there. The militia commandant duly notified the military garrison to prepare to assist in the effort, projected to be on June 14th at 10 am in the morning.124 June 15th, the Minister of Justice Pereverzev telephoned the head of the

Petrograd military to prepare the order of eviction.125 By June 17th, the press, already aware of the failed efforts of the 12th, had caught wind of the story.126 On June 23, the court ordered the military to act out the eviction as of 8 AM in the morning of June 26.127 The press duly covered the event as a headline, noting that Kshesinskaia’s lawyers had to resort to the court system yet again to try to win back a house that the courts had already declared was hers.128

122 Russkaia volia no. 16286 (6/19 June 1917), 4. The author, sneering at the Bolsheviks’ housing dilemma, wondered why the Bolsheviks could not have afforded that 1200 rubles for rent prior to this time. Note it had become an issue of rent—an arrangement between two private parties—as if the government’s ability to evict the Bolsheviks was a moot point.

123 Cherepekov.

124 GMPIR, f. II, V 11821. The militia commandant also surveyed the house, scrawling notes to indicate the room uses and materials inside the house at the time of the eviction.

125 The official order is dated June 20th. GMPIR, f. VI, BC 119980 See also GMPIR f. 2, VC 11978, an order for the Petrograd militia to cooperate with the eviction (15 June 1917).

126 Russkaia volia no. 16284 (17/30 June 1917), 3, and no. 16280 (12/21 June 1917), 4.

127 GMPIR, f. VI, BC 11980.

128 Russkaia volia no. 1628 (13/25 June 1917), 4.

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July-Onwards

By July, it was apparent the Provisional Government had failed in its duty to defend and support the will of its legal system. Although the government had been formed with support of civil rights in mind, the government had failed entirely to ensure the right of the individual to define and use her own space. For four months, executive and judicial institutions had been informed of the occupation of the house by individuals who were not the property owner. For four months, despite warning after warning, the Bolsheviks had retained space in the building— even going so far as to move some organizations back into the house after appearing to follow the law, as noted.

The situation at the house—so obviously a symbol of dissent—had grown even more inflammatory. This was no minor legal matter, but a drama played out on the national stage, a stand-off in which the Provisional Government was increasingly found wanting in the face of a clear threat to private property and public order. The increasing distance between the Provisional

Government and the Bolsheviks was reflected in the growth of numbers at the house, and with them, the growth of angry rhetoric. Responding to discussions of Ukrainian home rule and the failed June Austrian offensive, workers and soldiers alike participated in the July Days eruption

(July 3- 7, 1917). At the hub of this rage, the Kshesinskaia mansion was even more prominent in the city. According to the July 3rd edition of Izvestia, regiments descended upon the house

“armed to the teeth with red banners and placards demanding the transfer of power to the

Soviets.”129 Workers actually booed members of the Bolshevik Military Organization, who

129 Trotsky, v. 2, 19-20.

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appeared on the Kshesinskaia balcony and appealed for quiet.130 The mob came to the house not to be quieted; according to Trotsky, the public (numbering into the “tens of thousands”) wanted

“instruction, leadership, and inspirational speeches.”131 The crowd roared as Bolshevik leaders appeared finally on the balcony.

Rumors fanned the interest in the house. It was said that Lenin intended a coup.132

Articles in the media spread the story of Lenin’s German connections.133 On July third, a machine gun regiment openly joined the Bolsheviks. Led by Ensign Semashko, who had been ordered to the front but refused to go, this regiment maintained links to the Military Organization of the Bolsheviks, headquartered in the Kshesinskaia house.134 More impromptu Bolsheviks turned up at the house in the following days, including members of the nearby Nardodnyi Dom acting troop.135

The Kshesinskaia mansion was a magnet for rebellion. Now, more than ever, it was a threat to the stability of the Provisional Government; the use of the house was no longer part of a question of property tug-o-war, but an element in rebellion against the government. The issue of restoring private property to its rightful owner was minor compared to the potential issue of facing off with a growing rebel bastion. According to one middle-class writer, it was imperative

130Robert Daniels, Red October: The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 (New York: Scriber, 1967), 38-39.

131 Trotsky, v. 2, 19-20. Another estimate has the crowd at 400,000, but the grounds of this figure are unknown. See T.P. Bondarevskaia, A.Ia. Velikanova, and F.M. Syslova, Lenin v Peterburge-Petrograde (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1977), 211.

132 The rumors were not based on fabrication. According to Sukhanov, he had been told by Lunacharsky that Lenin intended a coup on July 4th; the timing of the regiments, however, failed. See Sukhanov, 479.

133 Bainton, 139.

134 Robert Paul Browder and A.F. Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government, 1917 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), v. 3, 133-137.

135 Russkaia volia, no. 16318 (5 July 1917), 5.

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that the Provisional Government finally “clean up the wasps’ nest” at the mansion.136 The need to evict the Bolsheviks, to support the court’s ruling, provided the excuse for the government to

(at long last) act. As Trotsky put it,

Thus a disproportionately large place in the struggle against the Bolsheviks was occupied by the question of the seizure by Lenin of the Palace of Kshesinskaia, a court ballerina famous not so much for her art as for her relations with the male representatives of the Romanov dynasty.137

On July 4th, the Provisional Government began its response. On that day, the cabinet authorized the Petrograd Military District to send soldiers to forcibly remove the Bolsheviks. On the morning of July 6th, between three and five in the morning, a multi-layered force was dispatched to the mansion: led by A.I. Kumzin, it included eight armored cars from the

Petrogradskaya regiment, and companies from the Preobrazhesnky, Semenovsky, and Volynsky guard regiments. In addition, it incorporated sailors from the Black Sea fleet and a cadet detachment of heavy artillery.138 This government army encircled the house in a formation signaling the intent for imminent conflict. The surrounding streets were blockaded, and the nearest bridges, the Troitskii and Liteinii, were closed. Telephone lines to the house were cut.

Despite this extent of preparation, the actual meeting of the Bolsheviks and the

Provisional Government forces was a debacle. Again the Provisional Government failed abysmally in its own task. The government forces bungled the signal to move together in seizing the house, while the Bolsheviks, aware of the imminent arrival of the troops, were in a state of

136 Ibid., v. 2, 58.

137 Ibid.

138 Rabinowich, 36-27.

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internal chaos. Ultimately, while some of their representatives signaled to the Provisional

Government forces that they would not resist the eviction, the others fled with what revolvers and money they could grab.139 Through the course of the night, only a handful of Bolsheviks

(approx. 130) were arrested for further questioning and held in the chambers of the Petrogradskii commandant. The remainder, including the most notable, fled to the Peter and Paul Fortress.

Lenin was among them; Kshesinskaia’s attorney, on the premises to observe the eviction and lead a search of the building afterwards, claimed he fled the building in the outfit of a sailor.140

The Bolsheviks themselves groused about the loss of their property in the attack. “We lost just about everything—our documents, accounts, quarters—literally everything,” an Executive

Member remembered.141

The Bolsheviks had been evicted, but the public was not ready to applaud the Provisional

Government for finally acting (if in a clumsy manner). Despite ejecting the Bolsheviks from the house, the matter was not closed. As of July 7th, the press was erupting with news of what had been found in the house: potentially dangerous documents, mass publications, flags, and even the soldiers’ pornography.142 The threat of the Bolsheviks was justified in a new court case. In subsequent days, the arrested Bolsheviks were interviewed about their participation in the affairs

139 Serge Obolensky, One Man in His Time (New York: McDowell, 1958), 174, and Alexander Rabinowich, Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 183. See also N. Tankhilevich-Bogoslovskaia, Znamia: Letopis; Velikogo Oktiabria (Moscow: 1958), 132, and Russkaia volia no. 1510 (7 July 1917), 4.

140 Petrogradskaia gazeta (7 July 1917)

141 See Vtoria I tretia petrogradskie obshchegorodski konferentsii, p. 62, quoted in Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks, 26-27. They also lost the use of two cars abandoned during the events of the 6th. It is unclear if those cars were originally Kshesinskaia’s or simply parked in her garage by the Bolsheviks. See Russkaia volia no. 159 (7 July 1917), 4.

142 Petrogradskaia gazeta no. 156 (7 July 1917), 3. The paper noted that the documents were handed over to the counter-intelligence division, hinting they included links with Lenin’s German benefactors.

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at the house.143 On July 22, 1917, the prosecutor N.S. Karinskii of the Petrograd Court of

Appeals informed the press of the case against the Bolsheviks.144 By August 8th, the court filed a report on what had been found in the house, including six packets of Bolshevik literature, notes from the newspapers, and Bolshevik poetry.145 The case would be underway through September

1917 and the Kornilov affair, when the Provisional Government violated its own principles again by turning to the Bolsheviks for support against the right wing.146

The people of Petrograd thus saw by July 1917 that their government failed to defend the civil rights for which it stood, and that it could not ensure private property. It failed to do so despite months of obvious threats to the public peace, even to the government itself, from

Lenin’s mobs. Worse, this government appeared to no longer even give lip service to civil rights.

The house, despite months of legal wranglings and the ultimate use of force to eject the

Bolsheviks, was not returned to its owner. A bicycle battalion was put into the building immediately after the departure of the Bolsheviks; their installment was intended to prove that domestic forces had reclaimed the house.147 Kshesinskaia, aware that she had exhausted her legal ability to reclaim her home and believing (correctly) that her government could not defend her rights, left Petrograd in mid-July. The actions of the government after her departure gave no

143 RGASPI, f. 4, op. 3, d. 41, l. 45.

144 Rech’ no. 170 (22 July 1917), 5. Lenin dismissed the prosecutor’s case as a fairy tale (Rabochyi Soldat no. 3, 4 (26-27 July, 1917), but said he would “of course” take responsibility for the Central Committee’s activities.

145 RGASPI, f. 4, op. 3, d. 43, l. 19.

146 TsGIA SPb, f. 489, op. 1, d. 2829, l.5-6; see also f. 487, op. 1, d. 2736, l. 16.

147 As a general explained it, Kerensky’s goal was to “show that [the reclaiming] had been done without any help from the outside. When the train arrived with the cyclist battalion, I allocated them for quarters the House of Kshesinskaia. If they were able to settle quietly in the house where the enemy’s headquarter had been, no one could say that the troops sent from the front had defeated the Bolsheviks.” See General P.A. Polovtsoff, Glory and Downfall: Reminiscences of a Russian General Staff Officer (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1935), 255.

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reason to rethink that decision. The government made no offer to return the building to her, and in fact, requisitioned the home of her partner, Grand Duke Andrei, for the Minister of

Agriculture at the end of August. Meanwhile, the Provisional Government forces actively occupied the house until October 1917, at which time, a battalion briefly used the house as its base during the October street fights.148

Conclusion

To the end of her life, Kshesinskaia asked guests, “Who lives in my private residence in

St. Petersburg?”149 Like many Russian citizens in 1917, she believed in the right of private property, and refused to acknowledge alternate claims—whether from the Bolsheviks or the

Provisional Government—to her home. In flight from Petrograd in 1917, she, like many other

Russians as well, believed the Provisional Government was not up to the job of governing

Russia.

This was the damning legacy of the Kshesinskaia court case. Before the eyes of the public, the building was unlawfully seized by a street mob and turned over to new, entirely illegal, and extremely visible occupants. After repeated warnings and rulings from the police and the courts alike, this group not only stayed in the house, but continued, quite maddeningly, to dodge efforts to remove them from the property, making a mockery of the court system. This situation was most visible in the Kshesinskaia mansion but apparent elsewhere: the other famous private building taken over by the mobs, the Durnovo dacha, was turned over to the public as a

148 Pravda no. 17/105 (31 October 1917), 4. The paper suggested the battalion was composed of “conspirators.”

149 Quoted in Coryne Hall, Imperial Dancer: Mathilde Kchessinka and the Romanovs (London: Sutton Publishing, 2005), 268.

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hospital for tuberculosis patients.150 The combined forces of the executive and judicial sides of the government could not remove the Durnovo anarchists; a deal had to be cut with them instead.

This failure of the Provisional Government to uphold and defend an individual right, private property, led it to transgress against that very right. Private space became public space in their hands, contrary to their own founding mission. Negotiating with the Durnovo anarchists, they were willing to acknowledge others had a claim to a citizen’s home. Worse, as the

Provisional Government became more desperate to settle the matter of the furious Bolshevik oratory from the Kshesinskaia balcony, it showed its willingness to usurp that right itself. Well before the Bolsheviks pronounced the end of private property in Russia (October 1917), the

Provisional Government overran that principal as well—by keeping the home of Mathilde

Kshesinskaia for their own property, even though the court saga had been pursued in the name of the owner’s rights. By the fall of 1917, it was clear that the Provisional Government—claiming to represent the individual—could not defend individual rights, and was doubtful in its support of them at all.

The saga of the Kshesinskaia mansion in 1917 demonstrates, via a study of a court case, the decline of the Provisional Government: its inability to maintain a monopoly on power, its inability to enforce its own laws, its inability to uphold its own principles. While the Provisional

Government was formed in a surge of optimism about Russia’s new path, like Kshesinskaia’s white bird, those dreams flew away during the course of the contest over Kshesinskaia’s mansion.

150 Lovell, 121, n. 8.

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The Users

The Hydra: Local Initiative in Public Space, 1917

“The people” is a pet phrase of many revolutions and 1917 was no different in that regard. As noted, the Provisional Government defined the people as a modern republic defined by guaranteed civil rights. They failed to defend and uphold this vision, but it was nonetheless the core of their idea of modern, post-revolutionary Russia.

The Bolsheviks would share that concept of modern society and actually uphold it better than the Provisional Government did. Contrary to later assessment, the Bolsheviks were hardly the single-minded army of a single would-be dictator. In fact, it was central to their vision of modern Russia that society be organized through local initiative, in quest of service to the community. As the events of 1917 in the Kshesinskaia mansion suggest, the Bolshevik party pursued an extreme if chaotic attempt at participatory democracy; property usage was linked here to immediate public needs, not preservation of rights. The Bolsheviks took over city property and created, through their physical arrangements, a reputation as accessible and open to citizen interest. And they did so through an entangled assortment of leaders and organizations that asserted leadership roles as they desired. Rather than being the elite, highly organized, marching army that Lenin would have preferred, the Bolsheviks in the first half of 1917 and into the 1920s were more akin to the many-headed hydra of myth. This would be their vision of modernity: one in which power was distributed broadly, allowing for mass participation.

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Although Lenin’s shadow lies across every work on the Russian Revolution, historians have increasingly credited the power of the people in 1917. Social historian Marc Ferro, for example, argued that the activities of February 1917 onwards were spontaneous eruptions of civic spirit, although he agreed October was a coup brought on by a dictator.1

Of all the historians, it is Alexander Rabinowitch who is closest to the mark: In addressing the mobility and flexibility of the Bolsheviks in 1917, we should not ignore other significant characteristics of the Bolsheviks’ success. Rabinowitch, who seeks to show the

Bolsheviks rose out of genuine popular action, aptly sums up their organizational style as flexible: Whatever happened, the many-headed hydra of the Bolsheviks could adjust, even at times when their spiritual leader (Lenin) was immobilized.2

Rabinowitch however presents a broad view, seeking to show a city-wide movement of

Bolsheviks in Petrograd. This chapter will narrow that vision to the actual headquarters of the

Bolsheviks for spring and summer 1917. An examination of the Kshesinskaia mansion between

March and July allows for a reconsideration of their organizational behavior would have given them an advantage in the struggle to define post-revolutionary Russia. The mansion, occupied in the original days of the February revolution, became the Bolshevik operating center in Petrograd, and one of the first major sites on which the Bolsheviks projected their vision of how modern

Bolshevik Russia should operate.

1 Marc Ferro, The Russian Revolution of February 1917, translated by J.L. Richards (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1972).

2 Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 4. See also his 1976 The Bolsheviks Come to Power: the Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd and the 1968 Prelude to Revolution: the Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising, in which he reiterates these themes of popular involvement and organizational flexibility.

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The First Days of the Revolution

On March 1st (Feb. 26), the day that Kshesinskaia fled, Petrograd was in an “Easter mood,” according to one former SR.3 Up became down, as rowdy street mobs and leaderless soldiers roamed the streets, sacking hastily abandoned homes like the Kshesinskaia mansion.

Driving through the streets of Petrograd with five unites of his armed machine gun regiment,

Bolshevik M.K. Eveev slowed as he passed the Kshesinskaia mansion. Recognizing

Kshesinskaia’s maid as a friend, Eveev and his cohort entered the property, and began what would become a habit for the Bolsheviks: taking over private property for public purposes. In his memoirs, Eveev boasted that Kshesinskaia had generously left a “big samovar” and her library behind for public use.4

Without consulting any additional authority, the men decided spontaneously to move into the house. (Their original quarters in the Mikhailovsky Fortress). As initial commander of the house (with M.V. Lukin), Eveev oversaw the dispatch of delegations to the Central Committee

(March 8/11), inviting them to join the armored car division at the house.5 On March 13, the

Petrograd Committee of the Bolsheviks agreed to become housemates too. A flurry of other organizations joined them in the next weeks: the Bolshevik Military Organization, the soldiers’ club Pravda, the editorial board of Pravda, the Professionals’ Society of the Bolsheviks, and

3 Victor Shklovsky, A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917-1922, translated by Richard Sheldon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970),18.

4 GMPIR, f. VI, l. 8 (Eveev). Please note the Otdel Fondov of GMPIR uses a variety of cataloguing methods. I have listed here the complete cataloguing information for each item. In addition, in the event the archival catalogue is reorganized for the sake of consistency, I have included the author’s name to assist with location of items.

5 The machine gun division also helped with the physical labor of moving the Central Committee’s belongings.

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other groups as well.6 For all of these movements, even for the minor societies, the same pattern held: the organizations did not consult a superior authority, but simply decided of their own authority to move, occupying space in the headquarters and justifying it by their sense of public need.

This was the Kshesinskaia mansion as it existed between March and July 1917: a building that was to be deemed the people’s mansion, with every open room dedicated to public functionality. Outside, red flags draped over the building, which was lit and guarded even through the night. Orators railed down at the people from a second floor balcony and from the iron summer house in the yard. Around the property, street entrepreneurs hawked posters and brochures, both about the Bolsheviks and about alleged ritual murders covered up by the government.7 During the early days of the February Revolution, the building had been subjected to the typical rough treatment of the mobs (“troops who have occupied an enemy city…like to use the abandoned property in their own way; to stuff a broken window with a good rug or to use a chair for kindling wood,” as one witness recalled8), but once the Bolsheviks decided to move in, the need to utilize the site as a functioning headquarters put an end to the sacking of the house. In keeping with the view that the house was the property of the people, the majority of

Kshesinskaia’s easily portable furniture and property was stacked and sealed up in two rooms on

6 19 March 1917 (No. 13) Pravda, quoted in Bol’sheviki, 69.

7 RGASPI, f. 4, op. 3, d. 41, l. 56, l. 78, l. 117. There is no mention of anti-Semitic images in these cards about ritual murder, as one might expect from the time period. It is potentially relevant that in Kshesinskaia’s files (RGALI, f. 2602, op. 1, ed. xp. 4) there is a blank anti-Semitic postcard; if anti-Semitic literature was on the property, the card might have been the property of one of these first Bolsheviks, not Kshesinskaia herself.

8 Shklovsky, 35.

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the second floor.9 Instead, roughly made furniture was brought into the house, to serve the needs of the people.

As Nikolai Sukhanov, a member of the Petrograd Soviet, recorded:

The apartment of the famous ballerina had a rather strange and inappropriate look--the exquisite ceilings and walls were all out of harmony with the unpretentious furnishings. The primitive tables, chairs, and benches set casually about as required by business. There was very little furniture. Kshesinskaia’s movable property had been put away somewhere and it was only here and there that the remains of former grandeur were visible in the display of flowers, and a few examples of artistic furniture and ornament.10

As the “organizational center of the party,” the house was the site of a “continuous mass of people” between March and July 1917.11 The organizations that moved in the house—their independent missions and conduct—demonstrate the extent to which, at its very heart, the

Bolshevik Party was a many-faceted organization, joined by an umbrella of ideas of citizen outreach, but lacking a singular core. In their use of physical space, they demonstrated this. Only a few simple divisions indicated any kind of hierarchies within the organization, and all of the rooms were kept open, dedicated to public use.

Inside the House: March-July

The Petrograd Armored Car Division: The Garage and First-Floor Rooms

9 By June, only three rooms were said to be still furnished with items from Kshesinskaia, and throughout the house, other missed items (silver, statues, portraits) were still found. See Petrogradskaia gazeta no. 137 (15 June 1917), 2, and the June 13 statement of the court official to the Minister of Justice, GMPIR, f. II, d. 11978.

10 I.G. Tsereteli, Krizis vlasti (Moscow: Luch, 1992), 136, and Nikolai Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution 1917, edited and translated by Joel Carmichael (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), 278.

11 Trotsky, v. 2, 60.

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As of March 1st, the Petrograd armored car division had moved into the house. Newly returned from the front, with an active Bolshevik cell guiding them since 1908, they took great pleasure in claiming the garage for their use and the cars in it as well.12 Within the house, they set the original rules: in the name of the people, they would take up space on the “public” first floor, distributing rooms on a needs basis. The second-floor rooms, given their more prestigious and personal nature, were to be sealed off.

For this reason, the armored car division, upon moving into the first floor, locked up

Kshesinskaia’s items for posterity. This was the only property not accessible to the public, as it was considered “the people’s” and in need of protection until a final decision about its use could be determined.13 Emphasizing their role in this policy of protection, these “soldiers of the

Revolution” believed themselves to be the first guards of “the people’s house.” They provided security and appointed the first commandant of the Kshesinskaia house, V. V. Elich.14 While setting aside room for the Petrograd Committee, whom they invited to occupy the household, they used other space in the house for their own activities, intended to act out the needs of “the people.”15 M. K. Eveev remembered that they took over five of the downstairs rooms for their purposes, including the downstairs library and the drawing room.16 According to K. Gusakov, a

12 Z.S. Sheinis, Soldat’ Revoliutsii (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1978), 190, and GMPIR f.VIII, d. 886 (N.N. Cherepekov). Other sources indicate these soldiers used the cars to escort Bolshevik orators to off-site events. See E.H. Wilcox, Russia’s Ruin (London: Chapman and Hall, 1919), 241: “Money Lenin had in abundance and the smartest motor-cars in Petrograd carried his army of orators into the remote working class districts on the rim of the city.”

13 GMPIR, f. VIII, d. 886 (Cherepekov).

14 He was the first man from the household to greet Lenin upon his return to Petrograd. GMPIR, f. VI, ed. xp. 45, 8- 639 (Podvoiskii). See also f. VI, ed. xp. 45, d. 639 (Elin).

15 A.P. Konstantinov, editor, Bol’sheviki Petrograda v 1917 godu: Khronika revoliutsionykh sobytii v Petrograde, Mart-Oktiabr’ 1917 g. (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1957), 153.

16 GMPIR, f. XVII (Eveev).

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metal worker affiliated with the division, there was a “red corner” with gazettes, journals, and books for the study of the Bolsheviks’ ideals.17 The space was made entirely to be functional; the building served as an outreach center to the rest for the military. It was a magnet for soldiers throughout the day: “Soldiers of the division loved to come there to listen to good speakers and party agitators.” Soldiers frequently moved between the house and meetings in the Circus

Moderne located nearby on Kronverskii Prospekt; they maintained a regular discussion with the garrison located at the Peter and Paul Fortress, keeping the house at all times occupied by soldiers milling about.18 From the first organizations in the house, then, the building had been made into a public space, for the assistance of the public.

The Petrograd Committee: The First Floor

The soldiers of the armored car division provided the first security for the house but they were not, by far, the only voice within it. In the first days of their occupation of the house, one of their associates, Vladimir Nikolaevich Zalezhskii, suggested they dispatch invitations to the

Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party and the Petrograd Committee.19 Zalezhskii and armored car division member Petr Vasileivich Dashkevich carried the invitation to the Petrograd

Committee, then squeezed into two tiny rooms in the Petrograd Business Exchange on

Kronverskii Prospekt (49).20 After lively discussion in which the leaders pointed out both the proximity of the Peter and Paul Fortress garrison and workers’ apartments as pluses for the site,

17 GMPIR, f.VI., d. 9 (Gusakov).

18 Ibid. See also the Petrogradskaia gazeta of 13 July 1917; there is a file photo of soldiers loitering in the hallway, 8.

19 Sheinis, 191.

20 GMPIR, f. VIII, d. 886 (Cherepekov).

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the Committee reached an unanimous decision.21 Under the cover of night, the machine gunners’ cars carried the goods of the Committee back to the house.22 Again, just as with the other institutions, the Petrograd Committee saw themselves as active bonds to the people of Petrograd and Russia as a whole. Representing over 2,000 members, the Petrograd Committee of the

Bolsheviks functioned as a propaganda organ (distributing literature, writing articles, and providing orators). For example, member V.A. Shelgunov went daily to factories, operating in tandem with worker (and Bolshevik since 1885) E.A. Afanschev.23 The Petrograd Committee served as well as the umbrella organization which synchronized the communications of the groups within the house, including the machine gun regiment.24 They saw themselves as equal to the other groups. As a result, they did not take any room that indicated prestige over the other first-floor occupants. Once again, a Bolshevik organization acted on its own initiative and remade a public space, this mansion, to fit social needs (here, propaganda).

The Petrograd Professional Society: First-Floor Rooms

One of the societies affiliated with the Petrograd Committee was Profsoiuz, the Central

Bureau of the Petrograd Professional Society. The Petrograd Committee had chartered the group originally as an agitational cell, meant to reach out to professional societies, like groups for teachers, lawyers, and medical experts. They were formed, according to their original charter, on the premise that immediate destruction of the professional classes would be harmful to all

21 V. Zalezhskii, Iz vospominanim pod pal’ssheika (Zhar’kov: Proletar, 1931), 172. See also N.A. Petrovskaia, Deiatel’nost’ Peterburgskogo Komiteta RSDRPb v osobniake Kshesinskoi (1979), held by GMPIR.

22 Ibid., 171.

23 Petrovskaia in GMPIR.

24 GMPIR, f. VIII, d. 886 (Cherepekov)

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workers; it was far better to utilize the professionals and weave them into the workers’ movement.25 By focusing on issues of interest to these groups, like managing food rationing in the war, Profsoiuz had grown dramatically during 1917. By May, it represented almost 200,000 members and thirty affiliate organizations. Although centered in Petrograd, groups from Kiev,

Omsk, and even foreign countries also sent delegations to Profsoiuz.26 This group had applied to the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks for assistance in locating housing and had, in fact, originally been offered the Anichkov Palace on Nevskii Prospekt.27 But the deal fell through, and instead, as of March 20, they were granted rooms that neighbored those of their parent organization, the Petrograd Committee.28 Although originally chartered by the Petrograd

Committee, however, this group was independent and maintained its own, occasionally unpopular, stances on issues of the day. An anecdote of one member sums up their position: V.

Popov, a worker for Narpit, the food service union, visited the house in April. All around him, he heard cries of “Lenin! Lenin!” Annoyed, as he felt the orators on the balcony were not speaking to the pressing challenge, how to feed the population through wartime starvation, he left shortly thereafter.29 Where the majority of the Bolsheviks were busy paying homage to Lenin, Popov, as a member of Profsoiuz, was focused enough on his causes to be willing to disagree with the majority. The theme of the organizations in the mansion—local initiative—did not translate into lacking autonomy.

25 Protokoly Petrogradskogo Soveta profesessional’nykh soiuzov za 1917 g. (Leningrad, 1927), 5.

26 Molchanova, 176.

27 Leningradksie profsoiuzy za desiat’ let, 1917-1927 (Leningrad: Leningradskyi Gubprofsoveta, 1927), 42. See also the 19 March 1917 issue of Pravda, which notes they applied to the Petrograd Soviet for permission to move in.

28 They originally asked for three rooms, but were eventually compressed into one room. See RGASPI, f. 7865, op. 1, d. 14, l. 1., and E.E. Molchanova, V. Agapitov, editors, Pervyi Istoriko-revoliutsionnyi: Materialy konferentsii, posviashennoi 70-letiiu muzeia (Leningrad: Lenuprizdata, 1989), 174.

29 Ibid., 238.

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Soldiers’ Club “Pravda”: First Floor Rooms

Just as Profsoiuz was meant to infiltrate the white-collar professions, the Soldiers’ Club

“Pravda” was intended to reach out and spread the word of Bolshevism amongst the soldiers.

From within their rooms in the Kshesinskaia mansion, they reached out, creating a series of links between the public and the societies within the house. As a vehicle of propaganda, they offered texts and speakers on themes like “War and Revolution,” “Who Wins and Who Suffers in

War?”, the eight-hour working day, and the agrarian question.30 They published a newspaper,

Soldatskaia Pravda, for distribution at the front; according to its first edition, it was published to

“consolidate forever the brotherly society between soldiers and workers.”31 Although editors included career Bolsheviks like A. Ilyin-Genevsky, who had actually gone into exile at Geneva

University during the imperial era, it had over 200 volunteer soldier correspondents.32 With

50,000 copies published, published daily after it was begun (April 15), Soldatskaia Pravda was reputed to be a favorite of soldiers.33

In addition to their literary overtures, the Soldiers’ Club “Pravda” stressed face-to-face links between the organization and its members, with weekly concerts for club members, featuring songs of rebellion.34 Active leaders of the club included Bolshevik stand-outs like N.I.

Podvoiskii, M.S. Kedrov, G.V. Elin, M.K. Evseev, and others, like soldier K. A. Mekhonoshin

30 N. Ia. Ivanov, Petrogradskie bol’sheviki v trekh revoliutsiiakh (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1966), 247.

31 N.I. Podvoiskii, God 1917 (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1958), 40.

32 A. F. Ilyin-Genevsky, From the February Revolution to the October Revolution, 1917 (New York: Workers’ Library Publishers, 1931), 50-56.

33 N. Mutovskin, ‘Soldatskaia pravda’ v Oktiabrskoi revoliutsii (Moscow: Gospostizdat, 1952), 6. See also RGASPI f. 4, op. 3, d. 4, l. 220.

34 M. Sulimova, “Stranitsa revoliutsioi borby,” Oktiabria (2 February 1957): 188-199.

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and career Bolshevik S.N. Sulimov.35 They held workshops for reading analysis and maintained in the house a hospital room/sleeping quarters for soldiers in need of assistance. In addition, they sponsored constant discussion in the grand white ballroom, including their own conference, the

June 16-23 All-Russian Conference for Frontline and Homeland Military Bolshevik

Organizations. Five hundred delegates, representing 26,000 members of artillery regiments, attended this event.36

With its stress on popular contact and mass participation, the Soldiers’ Club “Pravda” typified the experience of the Bolsheviks in the Kshesinskaia mansion, combining public space and public service. It was one of the most popular organizations inside the house. By the start of

May, they counted almost 4,000 direct members, including regular appearances by delegates from provinces and the front.37 Management of their paperwork required the assistance of at least four non-Bolshevik workers, like twenty-two year old Anna Aleksandrovna Chasovitina, who worked for 175 rubles/month as an account and cashier, or Mil’da Kriianovna Gater, a former charity worker who took a job in their offices as an assistant book keeper.38 Open daily from 7 to

10 PM, their offices were filled with “throngs” of soldiers seeking lively debates and, on occasion, clarification of understanding of Bolshevik ideology.39 The club featured regular

35 Molchanova, 140.

36 Ivanov, 321.

37 GMPIR, f. VIII, d. 72 (Zacharov). See also Krasnoarmeets: iubileinyi nomer 1917-1919, 35.

38 RGASPI, f. 4, op. 2, d. 41, l. 35. In interviews with the Petrograd City Prosecutor’s Office after the July Days, one of these office workers, A. Punkusovna Eidel’man, revealed how she got her job: a friend’s reference. Ultimately, a job in the Kshesinskaia mansion was no different from any other—just a job.

39 Ibid., 247.

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lectures, article readings, meetings, and packaging of revolutionary literature for the front.40

Public hostility towards the Soldiers’ Club indicated its success: Of all the organizations inside the Kshesinskaia mansion, it was theirs that was targeted by outside forces. In the early hours of

May 13, 1917, the editorial offices were doused with gasoline and set ablaze by civilians critical of their message.

The Military Organization: First Floor and Second Floor Rooms

The parent organization of the Soldiers’ Club was the Military Organization, which was a section of the Central Committee. So closely were they linked that many members of the

Soldiers’ Club were also members of the Military Organization. For example, Alexander

Nikolaevich Zakharov, the commandant of the house, who edited and wrote for Sol’datskaia

Pravda, served in the Military Organization as well.41 Membership overlapped because their missions were so similar. They operated as propaganda outlets, although the Soldiers’ Club focused more specifically on members of the military.

The Military Organization, like the Soldiers’ Club, was a sizeable force in the

Kshesinskaia mansion. They had over 4,000 members, a leadership of nine members, and little hierarchy within.42 (Pressed for his title, member Konstantin Aleksandrovich Mekhanoshin floundered to describe his job within the organization; the best he could do was say he was a

“kind of secretary.”43) The Military Organization claimed official responsibility for distribution

40 Krasnoarmeets, 35. Soldiers frequently wrote to request free literature, like S. Medvedev of the Siberian regiment, who received 10 copies of Soldatskaia Pravda in May 1917. RGASPI, f. 1, no. 637.

41 GMPIR f. VI, d. 73 (Zacharov).

42 Molchava, 123.

43 RGASPI, f. 4, op. 3, d. 41, l. 23.

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of propaganda to all members of the military system, and had sub-committees dedicated to resource collection, agitation, publication, library resources, and the encouragement of club formations.44 Ultimately, like the armored car division, the Military Organization assumed responsibility for the security of the mansion as well. From their initial occupation of their quarters (March 10), they had plans for security. In the July Days, members of the Military

Organization maintained telephone discussion with the Peter and Paul Garrison for defense of the building.45

The Military Organization functioned significantly within the household and to the

Bolshevik organization at large. Daily, the Military Organization sent speakers to military factories; the documents they left in the house (on stationary customized with the Military

Organization’s address in the house) after the July Days show detailed lists of affiliated regiments (nicknamed “Kshesintsi,” from the Kshesinskaia Mansion’s name) and the assignment of specific propaganda contacts for each.46 Several of their speakers were featured orators on the famous Kshesinskaia balcony, addressing the Bolshevik faithful (and the streetside curious).47

The Military Organization was a lively force under the roof the Kshesinskaia mansion, where they claimed the right side of the large first-floor hall in which the soldiers’ club “Pravda” also worked.48 Within the center of the Bolshevik headquarters, it served as an important point

44 RGASPI, f. 4, op. 3, d. 41, l. 23. See also Molchava, 123.

45 RGASPI, f. 4, op. 3, d. 41, l. 29.

46 RGASPI, f. 4, op. 3, d. 41, l. 28, and G. Sobolev, Petrogradskii garnizon v bor’be za pobedu Oktiabria (Leningrad: 1985), 148.

47 RGASPI, f. 4, op. 3, d. 41, l. 23.

48 Later on, they also gained a foothold in the rooms of the second floor. RGASPI, f. 145, d. 132, l. 7; see Molchava, 121. See also A. Il’in-Zhenevskii, Ot Febralia k zakhvatu vlasti (Leningrad, 1927), 49.

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for public access to the Bolshevik ideals. Interviewed by the Petrograd prosecutor after the July

Days, Alexander Nikolaevich Nikolai recounted how he came to be stranded without gasoline on

July 4th.49 His friend, Grigorii Andreevich Zimenov, shared his advice; as a member of the artillery, he knew the Military Organization would help soldiers. He therefore advocated they go to the Kshesinskaia mansion, get a voucher from the Military Organization for free gasoline, and possibly “find news of the state of things in Petrograd.”50 Although Nikolai had his doubts, opting to wait with the car, Zimenov successfully entered the house and received a voucher for free gasoline. Meanwhile, Nikolai had his first experience of listening to the Bolshevik orators.

Like the other Bolshevik occupants of the Kshesinskaia mansion, the Military Organization used their space in the house to maintain a job of public communications and contact.

Miscellaneous: First Floor Rooms

Walking within the first floor hallways of the mansion, therefore, one could find members from the Military Organization, Soldiers’ Club, armored car division, and the Petrograd

Committee. Other, smaller organizations also made space within the Kshesinskaia household, all acting independently, all acting for the same outreach mission, all dedicated to ideas of public service. For example, the Petrograd Committee’s women’s division took up its own space under the leadership of V. K. Slushkaia, a party member since 1902. This branch of the Bolsheviks, specifically chartered to expand propaganda efforts to the city’s women, published a newspaper,

Rabotnitza, from May 10th onwards.51 Although small, the women’s division was not a minor

49 RGASPI, f. 4, op. 3, d. , l. 39.

50 Ibid.

51 Rabotnitsa was the third paper published in the Bolshevik headquarters, following Sol’datskaia Pravda and Pravda itself.

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presence in the house; active Bolsheviks like A. M. Ulosianova-Elizarova, L.N. Stalo, K.N.

Salolava, and A.I. Kollontai all participated in the women’s division.

Another smaller organization in the house, open to both men and women, also served a propaganda purpose. At the end of May, a society dedicated to “proletarian” artists, writers, and musicians was founded. Ultimately named the “Society of Proletarian Artists,” it had only twenty people at first, but did not fail for publicity: it was documented extensively in both

Pravda and Novaia Zhizn’, with members including V.V. Maiakovskii.52

The Servants’ Rooms

The Bolsheviks were not the only individuals who worked daily in the Kshesinskaia mansion. One of the smaller stories beneath Kshesinskaia’s roof was the work of her servants, who were largely kept on by the Bolsheviks. If the Kshesinskaia mansion was to be both headquarters and a representative of the new people’s house, then it needed to be administered to suit the people. Therefore, the Bolsheviks engaged, where possible, professional assistance in maintaining the basic features of the home.

These servants were intended to keep “the people’s house” in a manner befitting its public status. Professionals were preferred for the housekeeping jobs. The ballerina’s housekeeper, P.O. Rubtsova, for example, chose to stay in the house after her mistress fled in

February. It was, as she told the prosecutor’s office in July, simply a job in a city where such

52 See A. Lunacharskii’s article, “Kul’turnye zadachi rabochego klassa,” in Novaia Zhizn’ (11 June 1917): 46, and Pravda (4 and 11 June 1917), no. 73 and 77, and V.P. Lanshin, Khudozhestvennaia zhizn’ Moskvy i Petrograda v 1917 godu (Moscow: Sovetskii Khudozhnik, 1983), 137-138.

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elite serving jobs were few.53 She maintained her position as senior housekeeper, along with several other servants.54 Her kitchen staff, Pelagee Perensevoi and Ekaterina Smirnovaia, carried on after the initial champagne-guzzling orgies of the February mobs, setting dining tables for the

Bolsheviks, all under the instruction that not even the most high-ranking Bolshevik should eat better than the others. (Dinners were “no better or worse than [the one for] the Central

Committee.”)55 Beneath the glittering crystals of the still-swaying chandelier, the kitchen workers set a long mass table with a “proletarian supper” for whatever sixty Bolsheviks might be under the roof at any meal time.56 Butler M. Denisov, while operating as an agent for

Kshesinskaia, remained within the house as well.57 All reported to N. Podvoiskii of the Military

Organization for security issues and N. Zakharov, of the Soldiers’ Club and the Military

Organization, for the keys to any cabinets/chests in the building. Again, the people’s property was not to be dispersed frivolously, so the valuables were kept under lock and seal.

The Central Committee: The Nursery, Boudoir

Upstairs from the servants and the teeming public organizations of the Bolsheviks, the

Central Committee held the most prestigious rooms in the house and sole access to the best venue for public statements. No other organizations had second floor rooms; from the start of

March, in fact, two upstairs rooms were used as a sealed repository for Kshesinskaia’s

53 Even if other aristocratic householders were hiring senior housekeepers, it is unlikely Kshesinskaia would have written her a positive reference. According to her autobiography, she believed the housekeeper had actually invited the February street mobs into the house. See Kshesinskaia, 160.

54 RGASPI, f. 4, op. 3, d. 41, l. 151.

55 Sukhanov, 278.

56 N. M. Podvoiskii, God 1917 (Moscow: Gospolitizdat’, 1957), 248.

57 According to Kshesinskaia, he stole items from the house for her. See Kshesinskaia, 178. See also RGASPI, f. 4, op. 3, d. 41, l. 157.

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belongings, safely away from temptation. Upstairs with the most expensive, most personal, and potentially politically inflammable, property in the house, therefore, the Central Committee occupied a choice position. They held the emptied nursery and boudoir for their use, and for

Pravda. In the nursery, where a border of doves had once looked down on the sleeping infant son of the royal ballerina, the Central Committee gathered around a working table, a small lamp desk, and a writing desk with typewriter. Other members of the Committee gathered on a couch, arm chair, and stools dragged into the room from other parts of the house.58 Specific elements in the room were allocated to individual members. Lenin’s corner of the former nursery, for example, amounted to a desk near the corner window, surrounded by chairs.59 An adjoining room had been converted into a secretarial office for the main Committee members, whose staff included Vera Rudol’fovna Menzhinskaia, Tat’iana Aleksandrovna Slovatinskaia, Vera

Leonidovna Pavlova, and even ultimately N. K. Krupskaia as well.60

Working from these rooms, the Central Committee dictated policy for the entirety of the

Bolshevik organization. On “quiet” days, they worked from 10 AM to 9 PM, according to L.R.

Menzhinskaia.61 When court investigators went through the papers abandoned in the house after

July 1917, their findings painted a portrait of the Committee’s daily activities. Scrawled notes left behind official statements (i.e., that the Provisional Government “appears to be the voice of

58 See the photograph in N. Ivanova, “Stab v Osobniake.” Sovetskii Muzei 4 (1997): 14-18.

59 Ivanova, 16. See also K. Nazarov, “Ugolok Ilyicha,” in Krasnaia gazeta no. 7 (1923).

60 N. Cherbinskaaiia, and N Sergeevna, editors, Zhizn’ v bor’be. Po vospominaniiam sovremennikov o V. I. Lenine (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1975), 269-70. See also K.T. Sverdlova, Deiatel’nost’ Ia. M. Sverdlova v 1917 godu (1956), no. 6, 6.

61 L. Menzhinskaia, Iakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov v period Fevral’skoi revoliutsii (1926), 87.

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the capitalists, that it will never serve the people, that it is on the side of the bourgeoisie.”62)

Papers on the desk included the announcement that the war effort was hostile to the interests of the people, undersigned by the Central Committee, the Petrograd Committee, the Military

Organization, and the editors of Pravda and Sol’datskaia Pravda. Propaganda—handsheets for the peasants, explaining Bolshevik visions of the Orthodox Church, and revolutionary poetry— was stacked up in piles. A list of leaders dispatched to speaking engagements, like Podvoiskii’s trip to the Kronstadt soldiers, was let behind.63 Management paperwork was also found: Booklets documenting the rules and rights of Bolshevik organizations as well as the publications created within the house (Rabotnitsa, Pravda, Sol’datskaia Pravda, and random brochures). In addition, on the tables was literature for the Central Committee’s review—a chart of the points agitational speakers should stress, a packet of Petrograd Committee posters for approval.64 On the desks of the secretariat, the investigators discovered financial papers, the accounts of the Central

Committee.65 Committee members did not simply sit around the desks and manage this paperwork. It is clear from the evidence they left that they organized and participated in lectures at the house.66

In addition to their work attending to the written outreach materials for the Bolsheviks, the Central Committee controlled the best communication point in the house, the balcony. This

62 RGASPI, f. 4, op. 3, d. 43, l. 22.

63 Ibid.

64 Ibid.

65 For example, according to their meeting of May 30, 1917, featuring Lenin, they took in 4500 rubles; at a meeting with a lecture of A. M. Kollontai, they received 835 rubles and 65 kopeks. See V.V. Anikeev, Deiatel’nost’ Sekretariata TsK RSDRP(b) v 1917 godu (Moscow, 1974), 138.

66 Apparently, they had enough time to meet regularly with lowlier Bolsheviks. Field hospital worker Mikhail Ivanov Malorissiianov said in his free time that he liked to go to meetings and lectures with the Central Committee. See RGASPI, f. 4, op. 3, d. 41, l. 27.

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balcony was prime territory, located near the street intersection for easy public access, and symbolically rich with meaning. The speaker on the balcony could point directly across the Neva to the Winter Palace, or to his left, to the garrison at the Peter and Paul Fortress. Eager to use the balcony to full advantage, the Committee ushered in a daily parade that included M.M.

Volodarskii, A.V. Lunacharskii, A.M. Kollontai, L. Trotskii, Zinoviev, and eventually Lenin himself.67 The speakers used the house to explain that the mansions of the rich were now the property of the people.68 To a crowd that included both the working class and more elite observers, they hammered on themes like the wastefulness of the Provisional Government, paying for the pensions of imperial favorites like Kshesinskaia.69 They suggested, again and again, the need to end the war (to “arrest 100 of the biggest capitalists” was the solution Lenin proposed to the crowds).70 They answered questions about their policies and (in the case of

Lenin) responded to specific crowd challenges.71 And they repeated the refrain of “All Power to the Soviets!” On the very stage they created, the mansion, they therefore repeated the vision of modernity which they were acting out: public, participatory, based on local group initiatives.

Although the balcony was the most famous and certainly most prized center for speakers, it was not the only area on the grounds for public instruction. Every inch of the house, including the grounds, was dedicated to utilitarian needs. In the corner of the garden, again near the

67 RGASPI, f. 4, op. 3, d. 41, l. 45.

68 See F.A. Shaliapin, quoted in Elena Ignatova, Zapiski o Peterburge: Ocherk istorii goroda (Saint Petersburg: Kul’tinform Press, 1997), 531.

69 V. Rosolovskaia, Russkaia kinematografiia v 1917: Materialy k istorii (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1937), 95, and I.V. Gessen, Arkhiv Russkoi Revoliutsii (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1991), t. 1., 35.

70 Alexander Kerensky, The Catastrophe: Kerensky’s Own Story of the Russian Revolution (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1927), 215.

71 Trotsky, v. 2, 60.

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streetside, Bolsheviks lectured to crowds on a daily basis: “From a kiosk in the garden, inflammatory harangues were delivered daily to open-mouthed crowds of workmen and soldiers in the street on the other side of the palings.”72 Although no one Bolshevik organization laid claim to the summer house (as the Central Committee did over balcony access), members of the

Central Committee and Military Organization alike had most frequent dominion there: Ia.M.

Sverdlov, K.E. Voroshilov, V.I. Nevskii, N.P. Podvoiskii, and others all came to the summer house to have open meetings with the crowds.73

Conferences: The Ballroom and Winter Garden

The Central Committee, the Military Organization, and the lesser organizations that used the summer house all worked heavily in the area of public relations, emphasizing their vision that modern society should be based on mass movements. The Kshesinskaia house offered them more than just a balcony, an iron garden structure, and a headquarters for discussion of their platform.

Where once nobles had danced, demonstrating the delicacy of their class and their cultural superiority, the Bolsheviks set up practical lecture units, demonstrating their superiority via the participatory society they were creating through space dedicated to practical, public usage. For example, the Central Committee’s lectures were held in the grand ballroom on the first floor.

This marble-decorated room, the largest in the house, was also the site of all conferences the

Kshesinskaia mansion hosted in brief career as the Bolshevik headquarters. Three main conferences were held in the ballroom and surrounding social rooms, including the Winter

Garden. Between April 3-4, the Seventh All-Russia Conference of the Bolsheviks was staged

72 E.H. Wilcox, Russia’s Ruin (London: Chapman and Hall, 1919), 241.

73 Bobrov and Kirikov, 102.

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there, hosted by the Central Committee. N. Podvoiskii of the Military Organization remembered

Lenin speaking to a smaller assembly in the Winter Garden, amid the white furniture and large palms.74 Between April 14-22, the city conference followed; both of these conferences were so popular that passes had to be issued to allow the proper representatives access to the building.75

Additional tickets were sold to delegates’ guests at the cost of sixty-three rubles, eighteen kopeks each.

Of similar popularity, two months later, between June 16-23, the Soldiers’ Club “Pravda” hosted the All-Russian Conference for Frontline and Homeland Military Bolshevik

Organizations. Five hundred delegates crammed into Kshesinskaia’s ballroom to meet with members of the Club and the Military Organization associated with it.76 These numbers, along with the numbers from the other conferences, suggest that the house was truly a site of public activity and not just “the people’s house” in Bolshevik theory.

The Head of House?

The array of individuals seen in the summer house and on the balcony complicated later efforts to pinpoint the leadership of the Bolsheviks through July 1917. Although there were commandants of the house, responsible for its military defense, no single Bolshevik was in charge of the entire building and the organizations.77 The Provisional Government’s court eventually abandoned efforts to identify a single individual as the leader, targeting eighteen

74 Podvoiskii, 17.

75 RGASPI, f. 4, op. 3, d. 41, l. 27 and l. 176.

76 Ivanov, 321.

77 None of them actually lived there, either, for all of the 24-hour use of the household. Kshesinskaia’s lawyer would be frustrated in his efforts to sue Lenin for occupation of the house, for example, because the court established that Lenin actually lived in his sister’s apartment, going to the Kshesinskaia palace daily as his office.

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individuals instead as instigators of the July events (Lenin, Zinoviev, Trotskii, Kollontai,

Lunacharskii, and thirteen others).78 They did so because the witnesses of the period simply did not agree on a single leader. In each witness account, different leaders were listed: a nurse on-site told investigators that Lenin, Kollontai, and Zinov’ev were the primary Bolsheviks, while

Denisov, Kshesinskaia’s old butler, identified Podvoiskii and a soldier named Paubov.79 Other non-Bolshevik servants in the household, like the housekeeper Rubtsova, claimed alternately ignorance of the Bolshevik proceedings or contact with only specific Bolsheviks, like Zacharov and Podvoiskii. 80 There was simply no agreement on who was in control of the household of the

Bolsheviks, for the simple matter that nobody was, in fact, in control. The Bolshevik organizations coordinated their actions around the broad themes set forth by the Central

Committee, but they each acted autonomously, even in the shared rooms of their headquarters.

Within the house, Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov of the Central Committee, for example, appeared often in memoirs as a leader: “it was he who reviewed the gigantic parade of tens of thousands of armed men as they tramped past Kshesinskaia’s balcony, he who gave the marching detachments their fighting slogans,” Anatoly Lunacharsky remembered.81 It was Sverdlov who greeted Kshesinskaia’s attorney, Khesin, and members of the militia at the doorway of the

78 RGASPI, f. 4, op. 3, d. 41, l. 45.

79 RGASPI, f. 4, op. 3, d. 4, l. 56. Denisov claimed Paubov was responsible for financial matters. No other source mentions such a soldier, which suggests perhaps Denisov simply did not remember the name accurately.

80 Even if other aristocratic householders were hiring senior housekeepers, it is unlikely Kshesinskaia would have written her a positive reference. According to her autobiography, she believed the housekeeper had actually invited the February street mobs into the house. See Kshesinskaia, 160.

81 Anatoly Vasilievich Lunacharsky, Revoliutionary Silhouettes, translated by Michael Glenny (London: The Penguin Press, 1967), 104.

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mansion, arguing over the court orders to take control of the house.82 Sverdlov was the one who managed to get the Minister of the Justice on the telephone to order a stay of the eviction order against the Bolsheviks.83 Sverdlov as well successfully ordered the Military Organization, which was determined to fight physically for the house, to stand down.84 Another party member recalled Sverdlov “with a grin” always underfoot in the house.85 But Sverdlov had no specific charter to do any of those things and he was not recognized as the exclusive leader of the

Bolsheviks, just one amongst many.

None of the witnesses singled out Lenin as the sole leader of the Bolsheviks, or for that matter, the Kshesinskaia mansion. Even non-Bolshevik witnesses, who as part of their rage against the take-over of the mansion saw Lenin as a German agent, admitted he was not solely in charge of the activities at the house. From his initial arrival in Petrograd, his function as the public representative of the party was clear. He arrived in April as part of a larger public relations event for the Bolsheviks, as thousands of Bolsheviks came to the Finland Station to meet him. It was nearly dark on April 3/16 when he arrived, but he participated in the planned parade nonetheless, riding an armored car with his wife Krupskaia as a military band played their way through the city streets.86 Arriving at the house, he was greeted by a large crowd chanting slogans outside and about the building. Entering the building, he met on the first floor nearly one hundred Bolsheviks, and proceeded to the second floor balcony to make his first speech, a short

82 Vera Vladimirova, Revoliutsiia 1917 goda-khronika sobyti, v. 3 (Petrograd: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1923), 29.

83 Pervyi legal’nyi PK Bol’shevikov v 1917 g. (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe, 1927), 222.

84 Ibid.

85 P. Arskii, “Vo dvortse Kshesinskoi,” in God 1917 Rossiia v Petrograde: Ocherki, staty, vospominaniia, edited by G.L. Sobalev (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel’, 1987), 83-87.

86 N.K. Krupskaia, Vospominaniia o Lenine (Moscow, 1932), 348.

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indictment of the Provisional Government and a generic statement in support of revolution.87

(“Capitalist pirates,” he called the members of the government.88) Only then did he return inside the house to meet and dine briefly with the gathered party members, organization delegates, and provincial representatives.89

This was Lenin’s job on a daily basis: to meet, to discuss, to disperse the message of the

Bolsheviks. As one of just many members of the Central Committee, he held his own desk space in the upstairs nursery; it was there, again assigned a spot no different from any other

Bolshevik’s, that he finished the drafts of his April Theses.90 He continued to use his office in the

Kshesinskaia mansion to write; documents on his desk after the July Days included an article on war and revolution and a list of discussion points for approaching the subject with peasants.91

More famously, he took frequently to the balcony and the grounds of the Kshesinskaia mansion to share his views. The Princess Cantacuzéne recalled that “daily, Lenin and his aides preached their fiery sermons from the little corner of the summer house,” even distributing brochures personally to curious on-lookers outside the house.92 Every day, he spoke on the balcony, up until his last day there, July 4th. He appeared at major conferences, like the city-wide conference

87 Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, Na boevykh postakh: Febral’skoi i Oktiabr’skoi revoliutsii (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1931), 174.

88 Sukhanov, quoted in Moynahan, 249.

89 Lenin’s first meal upon his return to the city consisted of light snacks and tea. F.F. Raskol’nikov, Iz moikh vospominanii (Moscow: Rabochaiia, 1926), 56.

90 Bobrov and Kirikov, 130-132. Lenin, contrary to popular myth, did not have the power to snap his fingers and order his will be done. When he presented his April Theses to the Central Committee between April 6-10, his proposals were not greeted warmly. Pravda, indeed, had originally refused to publish the Theses, and Mensheviks like V.V. Voitinsky outright challenged him as out of touch with the Russian reality. See Richard Pipes, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1995), 117.

91 RGASPI, f. 4, op. 3, d. 41, l. 169, 170.

92 Cantacuzéne, 220. To be fair, her view of his behavior was certainly negative; she referred to the house as a “citadel of disorderly conduct,” 220.

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of the Bolsheviks in April at the Kshesinskaia house. He also traveled off-site to meet with potential ally groups. For example, according to a worker, Anatoli Vasiliev Sosobov, Lenin had been scheduled to appear at a regional Bolshevik organization; when business kept him from making that appointment, Kollontai went in his stead.93

Lenin’s function in the house (and outside of it) was therefore to convey the ideas of the

Bolsheviks to the people. In all the memoirs of the Kshesinskaia house at this time, there is only one source that mentions actively Lenin consulting with another member of the Bolsheviks about the house itself, a brief comment that he had been seen discussing the July plans with

Lunacharskii.94

Lenin was the face of the Bolsheviks, not the dictator of the household. In the memoirs of the soldiers and workers at the house, Lenin was the magnet that pulled them to listen to the orators on the balcony. N.A. Demidov, a young factory worker, went four times to the house,

“burning with enthusiasm” to see Lenin, along with his friends; “all the workers there wanted to see him.”95 While Lenin spoke (“countless short speeches”), Demidov lowered his head reverently, not daring to “glance at his face.”96 The workers flocking to see Lenin on the balcony is a motif of this literature. On his first night, speakers on the balcony were heckled inside the house by a mob insisting on seeing Lenin. “Enough with you, it’s not necessary [to speak],” members of the crowd told an unfortunate warm-up speaker. “Listen to what Vladimir Ilyich

93 RGASPI, f. 4, op. 3, d. 41, l. 27.

94 RGASPI, f. 4, op. 3, d. 41, l. 69.

95 N.A. Demidov, Iunost’ v bor’be (Moscow: Dneproletrovskoe Knizhnoe Izdatel’svo, 1963), 50-2.

96 Ibid.

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says!”97 “More than once, workers and soldiers stood silently, lost in thought, forgetting to applaud. Then, as Lenin disappeared within, a sort of low roar would sound,” a New York

Evening Post correspondent wrote.98 F.F. Raskol’nikov, a Bolshevik liaison between the

Kronstadt sailors and the house, observed large groups of workers and soldiers listening to

Lenin’s speech on world revolution.99 The poet Mayakovsky depicted Lenin in his poem, “Dom

Kshesinskoi,” as a blacksmith, forging a new Russia from the workers ardently listening to him.100 Noble Pyotr Shilovsky lamented that even his cook had taken off to the Kshesinskaia mansion to listen to Lenin.101

This was the iconic image of Lenin in the Kshesinskaia mansion, the figure on the balcony, the “central face” of the party.102 Witnesses recorded him in a few other settings, all emphasizing his spiritual leadership of the Bolsheviks. His first words in Petrograd were a warm greeting to those who had massed at his train station: “Welcome, soldiers and workers!”103

Members of the Red Guard, for example, had the opportunity to lunch with Lenin; he inquired about one soldier’s experience at the front and appeared at ease, indeed “fascinated,” with the soldier’s story, despite the staring crowd around them.104 In another tale, Lenin approached a

97 Bonch-Bruevich, 17-18.

98 Albert Rhys Williams, Journey into Revolution: Petrograd, 1917-1918, edited by Lucita Williams (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), 52.

99 Raskol’nikov, 56.

100 Vladimir Maiakovskii, Stixotvoreniia i poety (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1979), 176.

101 Quoted in Moynahan, 201.

102 From the testimony of G.M. Goleninsshev-Kutuzov, a member of the War Organization, to the Petrograd prosecutor’s office. RGASPI, f. 4, op. 3, d. 41, l. 78.

103 A.N. Zakharov, GMPIR, f. VI, d. 73.

104 A.I. Nemchinov, in Petrograd v dni velikogo Oktiabria: Vospominaniia uchastnikov, edited by V.E. Mushtukov (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1967), 82-83.

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crowd of workers and shook hands with them. When one mechanic, in embarrassment, explained his hand still held the grease of work on it, Lenin insisted on shaking his head, commenting that his grip was “never more comfortable.”105 A car worker who greeted Lenin in his first day in the mansion remembered Lenin asking workers in astonishment how they “took the liberty” to settle in the house, and applauded their initiative when they told him the house had been bought with the people’s money and therefore was public property.106

These stories suggest something about the inner workings of the house: Lenin was the front man of the Bolsheviks, the man responsible for conveying Bolshevik ideas to the populace, the most successful of all the Bolsheviks for their joint task: outreach. But despite his success in his role of public communications, he was not a puppet-master for the organizations in the house, which acted independently of him. Indeed, the July Days and the final seizure of the house by the

Provisional Government is an example of the Kshesinskaia mansion beneath the Bolsheviks’ control: chaotic and marked by multiple leaders acting on their own authority.

The July Events

In the first days of July, events unfolded that saw the Provisional Government acting with force against the Bolshevik headquarters. At every step of these events, just as in the months before, the Bolsheviks in the house reacted as autonomous units in determining their occupation of this space, and how best to serve public needs. They were influenced by shared principles but not ruled by any one single leader.

105 Sh.S. Ogan’ian, quoted in Cherepekov, GMPIR, f. VI.

106 See the testimony of M.K. Eveev, GMPIR, f. VI.

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The matter that framed the July Events was the court-ordered eviction against the

Bolsheviks. On May 5, the Petrograd court had complied with the request of Kshesinskaia’s lawyer to demand the Bolsheviks’ removal from the household; twenty days were given for the

Bolsheviks to remove themselves from the house. Once more demonstrating independent leadership, the organizations began to leave the premises. Just before, the armored car division was first to move, retreating to their original garage and handing over their keys to

Kshesinskaia’s lawyer on May 15th .107 Five days later, the Central Executive Committee of the

Bolsheviks agreed to submit to the eviction order “in the interests of the revolution.” As of June

11th, the Petrograd Committee had arrived at the same decision.108 A day after that, the Central

Committee began to send its belongings to another location; they left by the end of June. The

Central Committee’s secretariat moved to the apartment of E.D. Stasovoi, and later to a school at the corner of Kalomenskyi and Raz’ezhaia streets; they ultimately ended up at the former elite girls’ school, the Smol’nyi Institute.109 They were followed once more by the Petrograd

Committee, which chose the Trubochnyi factory on Vasilievskii Island.

Confirming the push for local initiative within the Bolsheviks, these organizations moved without consulting one another or looking for shared quarters again. Indeed, some chose not to move at all. The Military Organization, the Soldiers’ Club “Pravda,” and assorted smaller organizations remained within the house; the Military Organization officially straddled the

Trubochnyi factory and the Kshesinskaia mansion locations. Despite having located alternative

107 See Novaia vremia, no. 16 (6/19 May 1917).

108 Bobrov, 104, Trotsky, v. 2, 69, and Cherepekov.

109 Bobrov, 105.

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quarters, the Central Committee still functioned within the household as well.110 The individual responsibility of the Bolshevik organizations helped to create a sense, as before, that the

Bolsheviks were truly a party of the people, their members, and responsible to the membership’s desires and public demand. This sensibility led to the first major movement in the July Days.

On July 6th, Ensign Semashko of the First Machine Gun regiment of Petrograd informed his regiment that they had been ordered to the front and that he refused to follow these orders.111

Led by Semashko, the regiment began preparations for an uprising against the Provisional

Government; friendly with the Military Organization, their leaders decided to ask the organizations in the Kshesinskaia house to lead this movement.112 At approximately ten in the evening, again, without any authorization from the Central Committee or any single leader in the house, members of the regiment marched in formation with a military orchestra to the

Kshesinskaia mansion, acknowledging the mansion as the head of “the people.” They did not come with peaceful intent. They were “armed to the teeth,” even according to friendly reports.113

Two delegates raced on ahead, bursting in on members of the Central Committee, and attempted to follow up on the promises made by the society that occupied the mansion—creating a dialogue between the public and governing body. According to Stalin’s report, the two explained that the Provisional Government was trying to “disband” members of the opposition and that

110 By all evidence, they appear to have moved out and then gradually moved back into the household, apparently sensing it was “safe” to return.

111 Rech’ no. 170 (22 July 1917), 5.

112 See the testimony of L. Krassin in The Bolshevik Revolution: 1917-1918, Documents and Materials, edited by James Bunyan and H.H. Fisher (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1934), 15.

113 Izvestia (3 July 1917).

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they, the soldiers/workers, “cannot wait any longer” to strike back.114 The rapidly forming mob outside the house held the same opinion. The first Bolsheviks on the balcony, including Ya.

Sverdlov, attempted to send the regiments back to their barracks. Instead of obeying, however, the crowd roared, “Away with them!”

The Bolsheviks, bowing to their constant focus on their public, were forced by popular pressure to act. The Central Committee issued a “special appeal” for peaceful demonstrations and fell back to its role of communications, dispatching members to different parts of the city, to spread the word.115 They attempted to settle the crowd by sending out their best speaker, Lenin.

He appeared on the balcony to thousands of cries of “Hurrah!” and “Privet, Lenin!”116 Despite the warmth of the crowd’s greeting, Lenin issued a brief speech that managed to reflect the mob’s desires and his own. He encouraged them to go to the Tauride for a peaceful demonstration and to wait there for Central Committee orders.117 One soldier, engineering officer

Ivan Mikhailovich Kuzhetsov, later paraphrased his speech: “The demonstration was not to seize power, but in fact a peaceful demonstration with the goal of recognizing the wishes of the turn over of power to the Soviet.”118 Lenin was followed by Lunacharskii, who offered a speech critiquing the government, but again asked the mob to break up.119

114 Report quoted in Vladimirova, v. 3, 307-308.

115 Izvestia no. 108 (17 July 1917).

116 Russkaia volia no. 163 (5 July 1917), 18.

117 RGASPI, f. 4, op. 3, d. 4, l. 29.

118 RGASPI, f. 4, op. 3, d. 41, l. 91. More than one writer linked the Bolsheviks to the street events, suggesting they were spurring on the movement deliberately. Lunacharskii told Sukhanov later that Lenin had, in fact, planned an early July coup, but a lack of organization within the regiments he wanted to use led him to abandon the idea. The street protests were therefore spontaneous and not the product of Bolshevik manipulation. See Sukhanov, 479.

119 RGASPI, f. 4, op. 3, d. 41, l. 80-91.

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Over the next days, demonstrations would occur at the Kshesinskaia house (to take lead of the movement) and at the Tauride (to argue for the Provisional Government to cede power).

Because they lacked a single center of focus, and because they had always acted as independent organizations, the Bolshevik operatives in the mansion had no single answer to the question of joining the movement. While Zinov’ev and Trotskii met with the Provisional Government to work on plans to pacify the demonstrators, at the All-City Conference of the Bolsheviks, held inside the Kshesinskaia house, a motion passed demanding that Petrograd Bolsheviks demonstrate alongside the street protestors.120 The Military Organization likewise supported the protest movement. By contrast, on the night of July 5th, the Central Committee decided together to refuse to join in the demonstrations, and to insist that the demonstrators disperse.121 Lenin himself refused to join soldier protestors going from the Kshesinskaia house to the Tauride, but other Bolshevik activists, like F.F. Raskol’nikov, did.122

The chaos within the mansion reflected the chaos on the street and indeed, in the politics of the capital itself. As the Bolsheviks danced a fine line between officially inciting rebellion and entirely disavowing themselves from the movement, they awaited the final act of the drama. The

Provisional Government, aware that the Kshesinskaia house was the focus of the July street protests, served notice of its intention to move against the household with force. And again, the

Bolsheviks had no single plan, no single leadership, as the government finally turned its forces against them.

120 Ibid.

121 Ibid.

122 Ibid. One soldier complained that he “gave us words,” not leadership.

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During the day of July 5th, the government began to enact the order to move on the house.

Mobile machine gunners and light artillery under the command of General Polovtsev crossed the

Trinity Bridge in front of the mansion and began setting up blockades for the streets surrounding the building. By 6 AM, it was surrounded by Petrograd troops under government authority, including a bicycle battalion, awaiting the order to fire.123 The telephone lines and electricity for the building were both, ominously, cut.

Inside the house, aware that a final stand-off was underway, the remaining Bolsheviks again reacted independently. On the day of July 5th, while the Military Organization began to move its belongs outside the building, F.F. Raskol’nikov, a member of the organization, was named commandant of the house, responsible for its security.124 This was on top of his other major responsibility, acting as a liaison between the Kronstadt troops and the Bolshevik household; he had escorted 6,000 trips to the house on July 4th, to hear Lenin speak.125 Although rumor had him sneaking off to the safety of the Peter and Paul Fortress, Lenin himself left the city in the next twenty-four hours, allegedly due to illness.126 Meanwhile, Raskol’nikov, with Ia.

Sverdlov and Podvoiskii both in the building, observed the massing of the Provisional

Government forces outside the building. The remaining occupants readied a haphazard defense for the house. Soldiers milled out about the building, sleeping in the halls, ready for an imminent

123 Birzhvoi vedomosti no. 156 (7 July 1917).

124 O.N. Znamenskii, Iiul’skii krizis 1917 goda (Leningrad: Nauka, 1964), 64.

125 RGASPI, f. 4, op. 3, d. 4, l. 41-45.

126 Rabochyi soldat’ no. 2-4 (26, 27 July 1917). See also Petrogradskaia gazeta (7 July 1917), which recorded the rumor of his escape to the garrison.

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assault.127 They peered out the windows at the Peter and Paul Fortress, looking for flags that would signal the garrison was ready to be a safe haven, or a possible counter-movement by the

Peter and Paul regiment soldiers on behalf of the mansion’s occupants.128 They built scaffolding frames to create more defensible windows.129 In the rooms around them, tables were turned over as makeshift barriers and papers were strewn around the floor; other soldiers ran through the rooms, shouting for the members to grab what they could (money, papers) and flee.130 None of this, according to the interviews given after the fact, was directed by a single authority in the

Bolshevik household; as it had been throughout 1917, it was every organization, every person, for him or herself.

Conclusion

At 2 AM of the 7th of July, 1917, General Polovtsev on behalf of the Provisional

Government sent down the final order to invade the Bolshevik headquarters. It took two full days to capture the house, as the government arrested nearly one hundred and thirty individuals and seized scores of Bolsheviks papers in the building.131 While Lenin himself managed to flee to

Finland, other major Bolsheviks, including Trotskii and Lunacharskii, were located and arrested as well.

127 Birzhvoi vedomosti no. 161 (13 July 1917). See also Rech’ no. 157 (8 July 1917), which described the chief vestibule onwards as in a state of utter devastation.

128 A.F. Shonn-Zhenevskii, “Kontrrevoliutsiia nastupaet,” Krasnaia letopis’ no. 3/8 (1926): 43-57.

129 Vladimirova, v.3, 213.

130 N. Tankhilevich-Bogoslovskaia, Znamia: Letopis’ Velikogo Oktiabria (Moscow: 1958), 32.

131 Birzhvoi vedomosti no. 156 (7 July 1917).

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The eviction of the Bolsheviks from their headquarters, the loss of their papers, property, and presses, and the mass capture/exile of their leadership should have been a devastating blow to the party. Yet just over three months later, the Bolsheviks would manage not just to re- assemble as a national party but to take over Russia itself. A similar situation would occur just seven years later, when Lenin would be lost permanently to the Bolsheviks, dying on January

21st, 1924. And yet again the Bolsheviks (then Communists) would bounce back.

How, with the loss and incapacitation of their major leaders, could they have carried on and, indeed, succeeded?

They could do so, as seen here, because their method of operation had always been based on multiple centers of power, public interaction, and organizational flexibility. While Lenin remained the face and spiritual focus of the Petrograd Bolsheviks, throughout the spring of 1917, the organizations which shared a roof with him acted independently, never waiting for the orders of a superior organization or, indeed, a superior personality. Striking the center of the party did not “kill” the party any more than lopping off a single hydra head would kill the beast. Bereft of their arrested leaders, bereft of a central headquarters, the different elements within the

Kshesinskaia mansion carried on through their different locations, continuing to engage the public and encourage their participation, continuing to work for the day of a proletarian uprising in the name of equality. Because their social vision was not predicated on a single leader, cutting down the Bolshevik leadership had no effect on them. Although Stalinism’s vision of Soviet society would be very different from the early Bolshevik views, the Bolsheviks offered the

Russian society a vision of modern society in which space was defined by functionality, equality, and accessibility.

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The Founders

Architects and Experts: Building the Modern Civil Society

After 1917, the Bolsheviks were in position to put in place their definition of civil society. In studying the Kshesinskaia mansion and the field of architecture, as represented by the junior architect of the house, we see that the model used was that of the Bolsheviks in 1917: space was to be defined by the needs of the public, and to be controlled by social servants.

I. The House

In the struggling years of Bolshevik and later Communist Russia, the 1917 template for space—defined by public usage, commandeered by local groups acting on their own initiative— held true. The ballerina’s mansion became a revolving door of minor organizations all dedicated in some way to the public good and public outreach. First into the house, in 1918, was a short- lived set of administrative programs: offices from the Petrograd Soviet and Proletkult.1 Proletkult

(an acronym for the Proletarian Cultural-Education Organization) in particular was in desperate need of space, as by 1920 it had almost a half-million members and three hundred branches nation-wide.2 In Petrograd, they had already received a prestigious nobles’ club located off

Nevsky Prospekt; members renamed the building the “Palace of Proletarian Culture,” and the street it was on became the “Ulitsa Proletkulta.”3 The choice of the Kshesinskaia mansion as a

1 V.V. Mayakovsky reportedly scorned his work there, saying it was “not about art.” See Bobrov and Kirikov, 130.

2 Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), ix.

3 Dekrety sovetskoi vlasti, v. 1 (2 February 1918): 380-381. 191

secondary location fit with this deliberate use of formerly elite space as the people’s arena; indeed, the majority of early Proletkult offices were stationed in noble mansions.4 These elite buildings were intended as part of a national campaign of propaganda, ordered by Lenin in the spring of 1918.5

There was little difference between Proletkult’s occupation of the Kshesinskaia mansion and the original Bolshevik take-over of it. Both argued that elite buildings were the possessions of the people and should be used as such; the new post-revolution society should be based on public use of property. In Novaia zhizn’, a proponent put forth their argument, that culture should be the fourth form of the working class movement, alongside political parties, unions, and cooperatives.6 Amidst the budget crises of the early NEP years, the government frowned on its insistence that cultural work, to create a new order, was as significant as politics, and that

Proletkult should be independent from the Communist Party. Krupskaia herself worried that their autonomy was a distraction, and potentially an invitation to the expression of anti-Soviet views.

It is against this backdrop that we can see the eviction of Proletkult from the house and a new mission mapped out for the building.7

Rather than the political organizations first in the building, now the institutions in the building were re-oriented to purely social needs, increasingly distanced from active political

4 Mally, 44.

5 See Victoria Bonnell’s article, “Iconography of the Workers in Soviet Political Art,” in the volume edited by Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Ronald Grigory Suny, eds. Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class, and Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 341-375. See also Vladimir Gorbunov, Lenin on the Cultural Revolution (Moscow: Novosti Press, 1969).

6 Novaia zhizn’ 21 June 1917, quoted in Mally, 25.

7 Proletkult as a movement would fade out after the organization left the house. As socialist realism rose as an ideology, proponents argued that a socialist world had been already formed. For that reason, Proletkult, which meant to pave the way for a classless society, was not necessary. See the discussion in Mally, 250-51.

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participation, although an emphasis was still put on utility and service. First, in the early 1920s, the house was renamed the Petrograd Regional House of Enlightenment in Honor of Comrade

Lenin; it served as a propaganda distribution point. By 1926, it was transferred into the ownership of Gubzdravotdel’, a government branch dedicated to public health. This organization declared itself the servant of the working class, with a particular mission to guard their physical health. Physicians and experts serving in Gubzdravotdel’ focused on topics like restricting the spread of germs on public transport, optimal caloric breakdown in a struggling society, and what should be served in school lunches.8 At this time, under Gubzdravotdel’s management, the

Kshesinskaia mansion operated as a specialty clinic for gastro-intestinal ailments, with rooms set aside for dietary education. It also contained an ambulance unit.9 Many of these functions, including the ambulance unit, were carried on when the house’s ownership changed hands again; three years after Gubzdravotdel’ claimed the building, now it was part of Narpit, serving as an

Institute of Social Dining, complete with cafeteria.10 Like Gubzdravotdel’, Narpit focused on the three major goals of Soviet medicine, as originally stated by N.A. Semashko in 1918: unification of the Soviet health bureaucracy, free treatment by professional health workers, and a heavy emphasis on sanitation and hygiene amongst the poor.11

8 See the articles in Voprosy Obshestvennogo pitaniia sbornik materialov Leningradogo NII obshestvennogo pitaniia (Leningrad, 1934).

9 Ibid. See the telephone guide at rear.

10 Narpit’s records throughout St. Petersburg are held by TsASPb, f. 9156, op. 4. Neil B. Weissman speaks to the effort of the Soviet government to consolidate health organizations in his article, “Origins of the Soviet Health Administration: Narkomzdrav, 1918-1928,” in Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia, edited by Susan Gross Solomon and John F. Hutchinson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990): 97-120. See also Christopher Williams, “War, Revolution and Medicine: The Case of the Petrograd doctors, 1917-20,” in Revolutionary Russia no. 4, issue 2 (December 1991): 259-287.

11 See Weissman, 97.

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Although public health certainly includes a link to public policy, the pathway of the

Kshesinskaia mansion moved farther from the circles of mass political discourse, but remained dedicated to ideas of public utility. In the next years, Nina Tikhonova, a dancer who lived across the street from Kshesinskaia’s house, described it as a state-run boarding institute for mentally handicapped children. Tikhonova saw children running wild on the terrace, swinging off the famous fencework. The boarders were said to have hacked up the grand piano with axes. They reputedly threw the remaining white statuary against the walls, and to have, in general, destroyed the already tattered interior of the house.12

Possibly due to the destruction they wreaked on the house, the children were transferred to a different location. Still, the pattern of ownership held: the new inhabitants were social services intended to serve the people. Between 1931-1935, the house was given over to the

Society of Old Bolsheviks. According to the Society’s paperwork, they held eight goals, which may be divided into two groups: goals for the nation, and goals for their membership. In terms of the Soviet Union, the Old Bolsheviks intended to support “every sort of use of revolutionary work” in aid of the Communist Party and the Central Committee. They intended to reach out to younger Communists, “in the spirit of old comrades.” They desired to become a venue for the exchange of opinions on the questions of modern society and revolutionary work. They wanted to serve as an archive for historical and revolutionary material, focusing particularly on the memoirs of the participants of 1917.

In addition to these labors on behalf of the Soviet society, the Old Bolsheviks held a specific charter of tasks for their own members. They stated their intention to keep funds on hand

12 Nina Tikhonova, Devushka v sinem (Moscow: ART, 1992), 92. Tikhonova suggests the walls were studded with bullet holes predating the children’s arrival.

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for members in need, and their families. They also desired their buildings to become houses of education for members, providing journals, leaflets, lectures, and concerts there. Looking beyond the doors of the house, the Old Bolsheviks claimed their mission was to protect the quality of life of senior Bolsheviks, studying their needs, and providing a center that could offer them both areas for relaxation and easy, minor medical care. Photographs of the Kshesinskaia mansion during this period underscore its social function, with elegantly suited veterans waiting to greet their peers amidst the greenery of the winter garden and first-floor salon.13

This was one of the longer stays in the house, but even it was not permanent. The house lay empty, registered in the national trust, until July 1936. At that point, the fourth jurisdiction of the trust of famous houses passed on the building again, this time to the Gorky regional soviet and Lensoviet. New plans were formed, to remake the building as the home to the Museum of

S.M. Kirov. The era of active engagement, of service to the future of society, had ended.

II. The Architects

The Bolsheviks were engaged in bringing to life their definition of civil society: accessible, participatory, and part of a state that was meant to serve. In this, they were helped by a group that predated the Revolution: the architects. While the Bolsheviks had their own architects, a solid amount of the first architects of the Revolution came from the profession as it existed before 1917, when these individuals served a much more conservative audience.

These architects assisted the Bolsheviks because their vision of modern society overlapped with the Bolsheviks’. While the noble vision fell to the side in 1917 and the lawyers’

13 GMPIR, f. IX, d. p-4346.

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liberal concept of civil rights was abandoned, the architects’ pre-Revolution vision of themselves as professionals, able to and charged with molding society, remained. As humanity went on after

October 1917, so did all the impulses attached to the professionalization of the architects: the use of education to gate-keep the profession, personal mentorships, publication, organization, and an avowed interest not just in building structures, but frames for human lives. While the ways in which their vision was expressed was now most specifically defined by the government’s taste, in reality, this meant only tailoring the work to a very specific client rather than a diverse array of public and private clients, as before. Unlike the aristocrats, the architects had found a way to keep their vision of their role in modern society functioning, like the Kshesinskaia mansion itself.

Their role was crucial in making the new Soviet nation. Civil war damage and massive human migration during the Revolution and early 1920s inspired the young Bolshevik government to turn to architects to make the new Soviet world. By 1924 alone, a half-million people had resettled in Moscow, and another 300,000 had flooded the war-torn St. Petersburg. 14

Lenin himself called for a policy on reconstruction suited to a new Bolshevik society, including major city/town planning projects in order to improve overall living conditions.15 Some architects openly embraced this call for action, seeing it as an improvement over the imperial government’s conservative city planning and building policies: “If before the war and

Revolution, we tried new ideas, the last few years have shown that it is much easier for us to go forward when all are facing in the Soviet direction,” recalled Moisei Ginzburg, one of the early

14 A. Ikonnikov, Arkhitektura sovetskoi Rossii (Moscow: Stroiizdat, 1987), 75.

15 Kommunisticheskaia partiia Sovetskogo Soiuza, 8 konferentsiia (1919: Moscow, Russia) (Moscow: Institut Markiszma-Leninizma), 56.

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stars of Soviet architecture.16 H.G. Wells, visiting Soviet Russia, commented on both the high idealism of the architects and their limited impact in the immediate period surrounding the

Revolution:

The professional mentality had come to regard architecture as a force above society, dictating its own laws to society and not vice- versa. The gap between utopian goals and the actual social impact of the architects’ work had become an indelible future of modern architecture.17

The architects, whether they immediately influenced the look of daily life in the Soviet

Union or not, answered the obvious need for their services eagerly. They did so also with the exact same professional avenues as before the Revolution: organizations, education, and publication. Despite willingness in the years of the Revolution to experiment wildly with social solutions (like projects for communal housing), what really changed during the Revolution was that now service to the state was exclusive. In the rest of the profession, however, the architects’ world had been relatively untouched by the shock of transitioning into the Soviet system.

By the early 1920s, in addition to the early architectural journals and organizations, new professional vehicles were launched to confront the issues of the post-revolutionary architectural world. At this time, in much the same way the modern had split the pre-revolutionary architects, two distinct groups had emerged. The rationalists, led by the likes of N. Ladovsky, were formed from an early union of painters, sculptors, and architects (Zhivskulptarch, 1919), all dedicated to utilitarian potential in architectural work. By 1920, this group had founded the Institute of Art

16 See his 1924 memoirs, reprinted as Moisei Ginzburg, Style and Epoch, translated by Anatole Senkevitch, Jr. (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 1982).

17 H.G. Wells, Russia in the Shadows (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1921), 17.

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and Culture; despite the lofty name, the practical goal of the Institute was to support working architects. By 1923, the Institute was superseded by ASNOVA, the Association of New

Architects. This association balanced support of new art forms with a quest to best employ new materials in construction work.18

The rationalists were balanced in the field by the emergences of the constructivists, who declared themselves against formalism in the field and sought, according to one architectural historian, “to look again at how to make architecture actively serve a building’s function.”19

Constructivism’s goals included the most radical efforts to remake humanity. One architect,

Alexander Vesnin, argued constructivism’s ultimate goal was to “enter into actual life, work in order to organize life, remember that the architect is the shaper of life; he is the appointed builder of socialism.”20 Architect Ginzburg saw in constructivism greater attention to the demands of the future: architects “approach the…problem with maximum consideration for those shifts and changes in our way of life that are preparing the way for a completely new housing,” seeking collaboration with the proletariat on “building…a new way of housing.”21 Ginzburg and Vesnin, in their journal, Sovremennaia arkhitektura, tried to preach the platform of the constructivists.

“Constructivism is a method of work that seeks to find the best and surest way towards a new form which will meet all of the demands for the new socialist way of life.…The architect must do all he can to try to raise the standard of the dwelling,” they argued.22 These architects formed

18 S.O. Khan-Mahomedov, “Soviet Architecture and Town Planning of the 1920s,” from Art in Revolution, 30-47.

19 Ibid., 35.

20 Quoted in Ginzburg, 14. See also Ikonnikov.

21 Quoted in Anatole Kopp, Ville et revolution (Paris, Éditions Anthropos, 1967), 99-100.

22 See M. Ginzburg and A. Vesnin, “Sovremennaia arkhitectura,” in Sovremennaia arkhitektura no. 5 (1928): 43-45.

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the OSA (Union of Contemporary Artists) in 1925; by 1928, the OSA, which brought together the works of architects, artists, and engineers, sponsored national conferences. By 1926, their journal had become a prominent publication, running until 1931, when the constructivist trend had cooled.23

Both the OSA and ASNOVA led to spin-off organizations. These included VOPRA (the

Union of Proletarian Architecture), formed in 1938. VOPRA emerged from OSA, arguing that prior organizations had failed to address the aesthetic environment of the city. Meanwhile,

ASNOVA spawned ARU (the Association of Urban Architects), founded in 1928 by a leader of

ASNOVA, N. Ladovsky.24

The formation of these organizations suggests the existence of a lively professional field, where the chief debate was how far the architects should go in making the homes of the new socialist order. Their journal publication extended the discussion arena created by the face-to- face meetings of the architects in their organizations. For example, in a 1930 edition of

Sovremennaia arkhitektura on “The Scientific Organization of the Life Style,” Nikolai Kuzmin of Tomsk attempted to define break down daily life as a series of processes; he started his map of the day at 6 AM and had scheduled the “normal day” down to its minutes.25 Minor publications showed the health of the field: in addition to the older journals and newer works like

Sovremennaia arkhitektura, there were interdisciplinary publications like LEF and Novyi Lef

(1923-1925; 1927-1928). These journals represented the Left Front of the Arts, a mix of avant-

23 Shvidkovsky, 26.

24 So. Khan-Mahomedev, 92, and Ikonnikov, 104. RGALI, f. 965, op. 1, d., 4, ed. xp. 441.

25 Ikonnikov, 132.

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garde artists, critics, and architects, and were edited by avant-garde poet/artist Vladimir

Mayakovsky and writer/playwright Sergei Tretyakov.26

As the publishing foundation of the architects remained after 1917, so too did the educational framework put in place before October’s triumph. The older education sites continued to function and continued to be the chief schools of architecture in the Soviet Union.

New schools were also added to the mix; the People’s Commissariat had under it a committee known as the Painting, Sculpture, and Architectural Commission. Its crowning achievement was

VKhUTEMAS (the Higher Art and Technical Studio), established in Moscow in 1920 as a state art and technical institute, authorized by Lenin himself. 27

III. Portrait of the Artist as a Young (and Old Man): the Architect after the Revolution

We can see the relative stability in the professional sphere of the architects, prior to and after the Revolution, through the lives of the architects who lived through the period. If the face of the pre-Revolutionary architecture was Alexander von Gogen, it would be useful here to turn to the life of his assistant on the Kshesinskaia project, Alexander Ivanovich Dmitriev, to show architecture’s healthy professional state after 1917.

Dmitriev, a graduate of the Institute of Civil Engineering, had achieved a successful career prior to the Revolution. His most notable early project was the Kshesinskaia mansion, of which he played an enormous part. If von Gogen’s stamp was on the exterior of the building, it

26 Khan-Mahomedev, 8. See also Camilla Gray Prokovieva’s introduction to Art in Revolution, 9-12.

27 Khan-Mahomedev, 37, Ikonnikov, 83, and the work of the Painting, Sculpture, and Architectural Commission (under the People’s Commissariat for Education), 1919-1920. Note, VKhUTEMAS became, as of 1926, VKhUTEIN, as the school was renamed the “Higher Art and Technical Institute.” See the VKhUTEMAS archive, series I and II, held by the Getty Research Institute (GRI), accession number 950052.

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was Dmitriev who did the majority of the work on the interior, including overseeing decoration.

From this project, his status within the architectural field rose rapidly. He wrote extensively for his field. 28 He was on the editorial commission of Izvestiia Obshestva Grazhdanskikh

Inzhenerov, and represented the St. Petersburg architectural society at national meetings. He also served as an educator; from 1905-1908, he was a lecturer on architectural history and he served as an expert on iron-work in structures.29

In the years after the Revolution, Dmitriev’s life did not change radically. He remained, like the architectural profession broadly, dedicated to the cause of creating a new, modern Russia through his particular set of skills. In this sense, Dmitriev—the heart of the Kshesinskaia mansion—matched the foundation his mentor von Gogen had provided, participating in a profession designed for public service. At the state’s invitation, he rebuilt the Novo-

Kramatorskyi car plant, won a 1925 design contest for a Palace of Culture honoring Gorky, and turned out a Palace of the Worker in Kharkov (1927-32).30 Just as prior to the Revolution, architects debated the modern’s impact on the national image, Dmitriev designed and created buildings that would describe the new nation’s identity. The chairman of the committee for the

Kharkov building, G.I. Petrovskii, gave a speech at the first dig on the site. “Old Russia,” he argued, was known for its churches, but “the new proletarian society would be defined by its clubs.”31 The Palace of the Worker, decorated with faceted glazed tiles to suggest a classic

28 A. Dmitriev, “Sovremennoe dekorativnoe iskusstva,” Zodchii no. 39 (1903), 455, and “O nekotorykh zagranichnykh khudozhestvenno-arkhitekturnykh tekhicheskikh zhurnalakh,” Izvestiia Obsshestva Grazhdanskikh Inzhinerov no. 4 (1902), 6.

29 See Kirikov, 129, and the Dmitriev archive held by Kirikov.

30 Bobrov and Kirikov, 58.

31 V. Pozhektor, Za 1931 god, 29.

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origin, inside featured rooms for communal activities, like a large stage and even a gymnasium hall.32 His workers’ club for the Kramatorskyi region was similarly toasted. In the journal, SSSR na stroike, the editors referred to it as “the pride” of the area.33 Memoirist N.F. Monakhov praised it in his 1934 book: “It was here that there was a decent auditorium, a sufficiently equipped stage, and the service accommodations for it.”34

While Dmitriev’s projects followed after the Revolution, his professional life in the sphere of architects continued on as well. As von Gogen inspired him, he called out to the architects’ special ability to help the population. He advocated for human needs; for this reason, he participated as an advisor to a plan of development for Leningrad under the management of A

Il’in.35 He continued to publish his own writings and provide comments for architectural journals.36 He wrote for and edited the architectural yearbook, Ezhegodnik leningradksogo otdelieniia soiuza sovetskikh arkhitektorov (1934-1939). He worked with colleagues on these projects. O.R. Muntz, his frequent collaborator, wrote extensively on his own, providing not just meditations on recent work experiences but larger commentaries, like his article on the place of classicism as a style within the anti-class Soviet society.37

32 G. Gorvits, Iz istorii tvorcheskikh sviazei arkhitektorov Leningrada (Moscow: 1976), 336.

33 SSSR na stroike no. 7-8 (1931). See also Ezhegodnik Obsshestva Arkhitekturov Khudozhniki, vyp. XIV (Leningrad: 1935), 52.

34 N.F. Monakhov, Povest’ o zhizni (Leningrad: 1961), 251. It was apparently a special project for Dmitriev, who admitted, upon hearing the Nazis had blown it up, that he grieved as if he had lost a relative. Quoted in Kirikov, Dmitriev, 317.

35 Mastera sovietskoi arkhitetkury ob arkhitekture, t. 1 (Moscow: 19750, 282.

36 A. Dmitriev, “Novaia eliktricheskaia stantsiia Donbassa,” in Stroitelnaia promyshlennost’ No. 4 (1929), 354-357.

3737 O.R. Muntz, “O Klassicheskom i klassitizme,” rukopis’ (1926). NBA RAX, f. 11, op. 1, d. 75.

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As indicated by the geographic breadth of his work within the USSR, Dmitriev cultivated a national architectural community and continued to reach out to the international sphere as well.

Dmitriev submitted a proposal in a 1929 competition for a lighthouse in Haiti to commemorate

Christopher Columbus.38 He submitted to international journals as well, including Berlin’s

Wasmuth’s Monasthsefte and the Manchester Evening News.39

For all that the architects’ choices were framed by the Stalinist government’s needs and propaganda desires, it was architects like Dmitriev who continued to lead architecture as a professional sphere operating independently of the heavy-handed state. Dmitriev, for example, railed against the weakness of architects in engineering techniques.40 A decade after the

Revolution, Dmitriev did what his mentor on the Kshesinskaia mansion, A.I. von Gogen, had done: He cultivated a life of professional service in addition to overseeing the development of specific projects. He maintained bonds, via writing and organizational work, with architects across the Soviet Union, encouraging them to think of their work as service of national significance. He worked extensively with students, molding assistants as his own mentor had done for him. And he maintained—despite the suspicion with which his government viewed other governments—the need to dialogue with an international sphere of architects.

Just as the original Bolshevik vision of the house—a zone to demonstrate their commitment to public participation and equality—had lived on in the 1920s, so too had the idea of the architects, that through their work, they served the ultimate client, the community. In both

38 Dmitriev’s submission was titled, “Towards a World October.” Bobrov, Dmitriev, 362.

39 See also his work, “Zeitgenossische Bestrebungen in der russischen Baukunst,” in Wasmuth’s Monatshefte fur Baukunst no. 8 (1926): 331-336, and in 1945, “Charkow Plans for Future,” Manchester Evening News, no. 23 (1945), 792.

40 Arkhitektura i stroitelstvo No. 19-20 (1956), 52.

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cases, the Bolsheviks and architects alike, they imagined a society made modern by its devotion to public needs and its management in the hands of civil service experts. Although under Stalin, the Soviet government might rethink the autonomy of these local experts, the idea they had contributed to the birth of modern Russia was already in place: that the state should be like a home with an open front door, accessible to the public and intended to serve their needs.

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Conclusion: the Constructors

The Secret Garden: Politics, the Past, and the House of Participation

The story of the Kshesinskaia mansion, like the Russian matryoshka doll, offers historians nesting insights into the period and our methodology. In particular, the biography of this house tells us about modernity, about the Russian revolutionary era, and about the methodological value of analyzing space.

The Space

Any child leaning over a dollhouse knows that spaces tell stories. The walls and furniture we put about us are set-pieces, designed to reflect and restate the narratives we have chosen.

In recounting the biography of a house, we can access a multitude of stories that give insight into the people who walked those floorboards. We can find out not just how they lived, but what they believed in, what they prioritized, what they thought of the world about them. A house’s story can therefore be both a powerful tool to look at micro and macro history both, leading us from the smaller, immediate subject of the home to a larger vision of the world around it.

This dissertation has been premised one the story of one particular house which offered quite possibly the best “stage” on which to see the actions of the revolutionary era. The home of

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an imperial socialite and the workspace of one of the world’s most famous revolutionaries, the

Kshesinskaia mansion offers us a unique vantage point for examining this era.

But within the brick and marble walls of the Kshesinskaia mansion, we can discover more than the inhabitants’ stories: We can initiate a discussion of how they organized their lives through their organization of space. In particular, we can place this reworking of their world into a larger context, that of Russian urban modernity on the eve of the Revolution and through the early Soviet period.

The Modern

The Kshesinskaia mansion, in addition to being a model story for historical works, is also a model of the artistic style known as the Style Moderne. If the building exemplified the artistic movement, how did what happen under that roof show modernity itself? Under the roof of this building, we can see that Russian modernity played out, leading us to a number of conclusions about modernity itself.

1.) Multiple modernities

There was no one idea of modernity. Until the years of high Stalinism, the Kshesinskaia mansion was a representation of the elite urban culture of Russia and mass sentiment about its modern direction. It was a stage on which was enacted not one, but many, visions of modern life: led by a naturally cultured elite; built by international experts sensitive to social as well as cultural needs; played out in the press as a matter of mass consumption; to be molded and defended by a court system founded on civil rights; inspired by local group initiatives, chaotic and participatory. In the year of revolution, all of these visions crumbled but for the last, as the

House of the People became the literal center of the revolution. 206

2.) Modernity and space

In contrast to Luce Iragaray’s imagery, or even Michel Foucault’s vision of modernity as purely internalized, the biography of this one house has illustrated that the flow of modernity is bound up with the story of spaces. While use of space is key to every element of modernity: defining past versus present, public versus private, government versus the citizen, industrial technology versus earlier technology. Stephen Kotkin engaged these ideas in Magnetic

Mountain, arguing that the creation of the Stalinist city of Magnitogorsk showcased the modern socialist society, but I would go further than his conclusions. Our use of space—even down to the story of a single house—reveals the multiple meanings we give to our world and how we read our own modernity. We need to attend to the structures around us and the choices we have made for them. Our brick and mortar buildings reflect our efforts to define and manage our society. Space and structure, rather than being a minor element of the modern (if that), are key to our understandings of the modern.

3.) The service state

Scholars have argued before that the twentieth century state is a creature of social service bureaucracy. Mark Mazower traced the history of the welfare state across Western Europe in

Dark Continent.1 Modris Eksteins saw it as born in the crucible of World War I.2 Localized studies have similarly positioned modernity after World War I, peaking by World War II, as we

1 Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Random House, 1999).

2 Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth Of The Modern Age (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989).

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see in works from David Horn’s study of early twentieth century Italy to Zygmunt Bauman and

Aly Götz’s claims that the humanities enabled the Holocaust.3

What my work does is show that service was an idea held broadly before World War I.

While the institutions of the welfare state might have flowered after World War II, the idea that the state should serve its people existed well before then, as each group that presented itself as social leaders stressed their ability to serve. Most tellingly, the group that best articulated the use of public property so suit the needs of the people—the Bolsheviks—would win the day.

In 1917, only the Bolshevik vision of modern life, promising participation and public service, managed to speak to enough Russians to become the foundation of a new Russia.

Although that vision changed through the 1920s, emphasizing less political participation and more social service, at its core, this was the foundation promise of the Soviet modernity, and the third conclusion for modernity here. Modernity is fragmented, linked heavily to the use of space, and fundamentally concerned with the rise of the service state.

The Russian Revolution

The story of the Kshesinskaia building, a dancer’s home and a people’s mansion, is a study of how the majority of urban Russians, between 1900 and the end of the experimental

3 David G. Horn, Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), and Aly Götz, “The Planning Intelligentsia and the Final Solution,” in Omer Bartov (ed.), The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath (2000), pp. 92-105.

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Bolshevik years in the late 1920s, disputed the shape of modern Russian society, until the rise of the Soviet official interpretation of it.

The essence of the Russian Revolution is well-known and very well covered. From

Rabinowitch’s mammoth trilogy on the Petrograd Bolsheviks to the swelling literature of the civil society, historians have looked at this era from a number of perspectives, from the earliest organizational studies of the Bolsheviks and Lenin, to the social histories of the workers, to the cultural studies of the middle and lower classes. All have suggested that somehow, each of these groups offered a unique element to the revolutionary mix, helping to break down the Russian

Empire. For example, James West’s article in Merchant Moscow puts forward the idea that the bourgeoisie were so dynamic before the Revolution that they were able to do more than link modernity with their capitalist lifestyles; they were able to generate alternate ideas of capitalism.4

What my work asks of us, however, is something new: how did all parts of Russian urban society create an ongoing dialogue that destabilized the society, thus encouraging

Revolution? How did their visions of modern society overlap, if at all? And ultimately, which of those concepts of modernity survived the Revolution?

What we see through the story of the Kshesinskaia mansion is that prior to and weaving through the Revolution, five fundamentally incompatible visions of society existed. The nobles imagined a modern society in which they could continue their role as cultural leaders. While some nobles were willing and able to adapt to the demands of industrial society, the majority could not, however, easily change their rituals and ways to lead a life where conspicuous display

4 James West, “Visions of Russia's Entrepreneurial Future: Pavel Riabushinsky’s Utopian Capitalism,” in Merchant Moscow: Images of Russia’s Vanished Bourgeoisie, edited by James L. West and Iurii Petrov (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992): 161-172.

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was not key. The architects, along with the other imperial professionals, increasingly saw themselves as the ones who had the power to quite literally make the modern nation. The middle class liberal elites, represented ultimately by the Provisional Government, felt that society should be founded on civil rights, handed down and supported by the government. Beneath them, the street press, as it slipped its leash of imperial censorship, saw itself as the true guardians of the nation, charged with the duty of pointing out individuals who were destructive for the national society. And alongside them, the Bolsheviks and their urban followers imagined modern Russia as one that flowed from popular action and equality.

On only one point did all of these visions of modernity overlap, and this determined the outcome of the Revolution. All agreed fundamentally that the modern state was one in which the elites used their political and cultural power to serve the many: the modern state was to be the service state. Only one of these visions articulated service to the people as their supreme priority, the Bolsheviks. It was because of their evident dedication and successful articulation of that cause that the Bolsheviks were able to fold other groups, like the professionals, into their movement. This helps us to understand the Revolutionary Dreams of which Stites wrote: all of those dreams he described, all of that popular energy, like the early Soviet state itself, were premised on an agreement that the modern state existed to serve its people.

The Garden’s Secrets

In 2001, Constantine Sevenard, a member of the Russian Duma, presided over an exhumation in the yards of the Kshesinskaia mansion. Sevenard, the descendent of Mathilde

Kshesinskaia’s brother, was after what one writer called the “golden myth”: treasures supposedly

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hidden by the former imperial mistress on the grounds of her St. Petersburg mansion, just before the outbreak of the Revolution.

Sevenard never found his secret cache of jewels. (By more than one account, the entire adventure was a well-crafted publicity bid by both the museum and the politician.5) But for the historian, the story of the house itself serves just as well, offering a diamond prism through which to study the years leading up to the rise of Stalinism, and in particular, the hopes and visions of those inside the last imperial capital. From the first cracks in the façade of imperial

Russia in 1905, this building and its uses represented a discussion, an ongoing effort to imagine, what modern Russia should be—a nation led by an elite marked by ideas of culture and noblesse oblige; a forward-thinking, scientific nation that fit into a world of international scholars; a self- critical nation, marked by bourgeois values, in which all matters were fit for public consumption and critique; a nation of laws and civil liberties; or a nation in which the need for mass participation and service to the people was the foundation. As the imperial government fell to the

Provisional, as the Provisional then toppled before the Bolsheviks, the last dream as the one that held, marking the cornerstone of the Soviet Union.

The contests over this space ask us larger questions, too. To what extent was the Russian

Revolution a distinctly urban revolution, led by urban notions of social organization and space usage, versus rural concepts of space and society? We have had of course historians, such as

Orlando Figes, who uncovered how the Revolution played out in the rural lands of Russia, but how did the urbanity of the Revolution’s founding concept of what modernity meant define what the Bolsheviks did, and how their messages were received? To what extent would that (the

5 See also Oleg Varenik, Istorii Strel’ny: Klad i liubov Matil’dy Kshesinskoi (Sankt-Peterburg: Musei Morskaia Strel’na, 2001).

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urbanity of a leadership vision ruling over a largely rural populace) influence Soviet policies in the next seventy years? And to what extent did their initially hostile vision of these buildings, like Kshesinskaia’s, as “the past” determine the direction to which they would go in the future?

All of these questions emerge from the story of a house, a structure part cement, part iron, part brick, and part ourselves. Above all, the story of the Kshesinskaia mansion tells us the story of how material structures and their uses intersect with the shape of our lives. When we build our buildings, we also build our modernity.

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