“Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy”, by Douglas Smith

496 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN-13: 978-0374157616

Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy by Douglas Smith attempts to fill a gap in the history of post-revolutionary Russia through the second World War about the fates of all those grand and noble families who once ruled the Russian Empire; he has thus provided an invaluable book. As Smith points out, while the Russian Revolution and the fall of the Romanov Dynasty have received extensive coverage, there is little information about the fate of the Russian aristocracy after the Bolshevik victory. Smith does try to present an unbiased story, however, he clearly is sympathetic to the aristocratic class and, indeed, their sufferings were extreme and horrible being marked by expropriations, exile, constant fear of arrest and arbitrary executions – that is, those same fears held by other, non-noble Russians, but perhaps worse for these Former People as they represented that which the Bolsheviks claimed to want to destroy.

It is also clear, however, that these people who lived lives of great luxury and privilege prior to the Revolution did so by cruelly exploiting the peasant class who were treated abysmally even after Tsar Alexander II freed the serfs. The aristocracy lived lives of indolence and their rent rolls provided the basis for their many country estates and unparalleled luxury. Few ever worked in any meaningful way and were therefore almost incapable of survival after the Revolution. As Smith points out, the living conditions of the peasants did not improve after serfdom was abolished, so there existed a situation in which a brutalized underclass wreaked revenge on the fallen aristocracy whom they viewed as blood suckers. The Bolsheviks clearly understood this hatred and capitalized on it to remain in power using the fallen aristocracy or former people as scapegoats for all manner of events, although they – and other Russians, besides – clearly did not deserve their awful fates. The book clearly shows what a tragic empire Russia was.

Although Smith tries to focus the book on the fate of two of the great aristocratic families – namely the Sheremetevs and the Golitsyns – many other families are included in the book because of their ties by marriage to the two main families. After a while, I found it difficult to determine who-was-who despite the provision of a list of principal figures and two family trees. Only a couple of family members stood out as real people – the others were just names or statistics and their individual fates are recounted in exhaustive detail. Thus, Former People functions as a kind of is an oral Guernica, but the endless listings of the endless horrors becomes a linear bog. The author perhaps attempted to tackle far too many individual stories that go on and on and that are finally, oft fatally, predictable and, unfortunately, numbing. I cannot say how the book might have been more cohesive; the stories are all real, but, again, endless. Picasso’s Guernica did what no book could do, the very tired and tried truism; the painting tells a story that simply cannot be told in words.