Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy by Douglas Smith Page B

reason, this is as it must be. They must keep running until the end, and should the springs of tears and blood run dry, then a knee will be placed down hard into the living—much more can be squeezed out.
    —Mikhail Prishvin,
    diary entry, July 1930

EPILOGUE
    In July 1983, the brothers Mishka and Lariusha (now Mikhail and Illarion, grown men) took a trip to the town of Sviyazhsk. The area had changed since their father, Vladimir, had been brought there in 1941; a dam on the Volga had flooded the land around Sviyazhsk, turning it into a small, steeply sided island reachable only by motorboat from Kazan. The town on the island was still little, no more than a few dozen buildings and houses, a church, and the monastery ringed by a brick wall. A narrow path led along the monastery’s outer wall. Before falling away down to the Volga, the ground beyond the path was riven by several large, uneven depressions covered in tall weeds. These were the camp’s common graves. They were unmarked, and there was nothing to communicate to the unknowing eye the reason for this odd geographical feature. Here, in one of these graves, lay their father.
    The labor camp was gone, and the monastery now housed an insane asylum. Mikhail and Illarion were admitted through the main gate into the courtyard. Before them, enclosed in a large metal net, were dozens of inmates, all shaved bald and dressed alike in work clothes. Many sat in odd poses; others were standing still or walking about the ground, now packed down and devoid of grass from their ceaseless wanderings. To Mikhail, the faces appeared expressionless; he found them terrifying. Yet maybe, he thought, these inmates, unaware ofwhere they were and what had happened to them, were happy in their own way.
    As he looked upon them, his mind raced back forty years to a time when the monastery held an entirely different group of prisoners. These men and women had known exactly where they were and what had happened to them, if not always why. He could see before him in the crowd his father: “tall, handsome, but very thin. He was looking through the bars at the church cupolas, at the monastery walls, beyond which flowed the Volga and that near yet distant freedom that he never experienced again.” 1
    Vsevolod Azbukin, the man in charge of the restoration work at the monastery, led Mikhail and Illarion about the island. He took the brothers to one of the houses and called the woman living there to come out. She was old and round and had what Mikhail described as a “friendly Russian face.” She had been a guard at the camp during the war, and Mikhail was convinced she must have seen their father.
    “There were no men then, so they put rifles in our hands,” she told them upon learning the reason for their visit. “We were just sixteen-year-old girls, and they ordered us to guard the prisoners.”
    Mikhail asked, “Do you happen to recall a tall man, an artist with a limp?”
    She thought for a minute, and then said: “No, I don’t remember. There were so many of them . . .”
    There were many indeed. At the beginning of 1941, the NKVD’s corrective labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons held almost 2,500,000 prisoners. By the time the war broke out six months later, the number of persons caught up in the numerous divisions of the gulag likely reached 4,000,000. How many of these poor souls perished and were dumped in unmarked graves like Vladimir will never be known. 2
    I met Nikolay Trubetskoy on a clear afternoon in September 2010 outside Moscow’s Frunzenskaya subway station, named in honor of the Bolshevik civil war hero Mikhail Frunze. Nikolay, a nephew of Mikhail and Illarion’s and a grandson of Vladimir Golitsyn’s, had agreed to meet and tell me what he knew about his family’s history. We walked upstairs to the TGI Friday’s above the station, where we might sit and have some lunch. For the next two hours, over chicken caesar saladsand bottles of Perrier and under the