When the Bolsheviks finally secured a permanent hold on Minsk in 1920, Sergei von Mohrenschildt could have fled to Poland, where he and his wife had an estate, but he elected to stay. For his loyalty and his liberal views, and because he could still be of use to them, the Bolsheviks rewarded him with an appointment to the Belorussian Commissariat of Agriculture. For several months “we lived more or less happily,” George de Mohrenschildt remembers, although like everyone else the family was afflicted by famine.
But Sergei von Mohrenschildt’s outspokenness soon got him into trouble again. He opposed the antireligious policy of the Bolsheviks and was arrested, tried, and sentenced to live out his life in Siberia with his wife and younger son, George. Dmitry, the older son, was already under sentence to be shot. While the mother went about the country looking for influential friends who could help them, ten-year-old George was left to run wild. “I remained on the street making my own living somehow.”
In jail in Minsk, Sergei von Mohrenschildt fell ill. Miraculously, he was once again saved by Jews he had helped—this time, the prison doctors. They told him to eat very little and appear as sick as possible. They then advised the government that he might die and suggested that he be allowed to go home until such time as he recovered his health and could survive the journey to Siberia. The government agreed, and Sergei von Mohrenschildt, his wife, and George made their escape to Poland in a hay wagon. (Dmitry was released in a prisoner exchange with Poland.) But the three wayfarers contracted typhoid on the difficult journey, and the mother died. It was 1922; George was eleven years old.
Father and son struggled to their feet in the town of Wilno, Poland, just across the border from Russia. The family estate of six thousand heavily wooded acres in Polesie, near Wilno, had been taken over by the peasants. But Sergei von Mohrenschildt regained ownership and sold the land back piecemeal to the peasants, so that he and his son were not, as many Russians in Wilno were, penniless refugees. And he became head of the Russian-language gymnasium, or high school, in Wilno, which was run for the children of refugees.
George de Mohrenschildt grew up close to his father, lived with him until the age of eighteen, emulated and adored him. While his older brother, Dmitry, left for the United States, earned degrees at Columbia and Yale, and became a professor at Dartmouth College, George graduated from the gymnasium at Wilno, attended the Polish cavalry academy, and left for Belgium at the age of twenty to attend the Institute of Higher Commercial Studies in Antwerp. He spent five years there, was awarded a master’s degree, then earned a doctor of sciences degree in international commerce from the University of Liège. Throughout his seven years in Belgium, he made frequent trips to Poland to see his father. With a girlfriend he became part owner of a successful ski clothing boutique. But in 1938 de Mohrenschildt, aged twenty-seven, broke with the girlfriend, dissolved their partnership, and left for America.
He carried with him to the New World certain assumptions, certain ways of looking at things, which he had acquired during his storm-tossed early years in Russia. He had, first of all, the aristocratic assumption of privilege and second, a sunny resilience and an optimistic conviction that even in the worst of circumstances, he would always know someone “at the top” who would come to his rescue. But he had also learned that life is like a yo-yo, that one can plummet from top to bottom in no time and must, accordingly, learn to live by one’s wits and make the accidents of fortune work for one. George de Mohrenschildt, a man of devastating charm, was to do just that in America.
And yet he had other qualities that were to stand in the way of his success. His was an outlook predicated on privilege, on the possession of sprawling, poorly tended estates that yielded just enough income to send the owner off on long, leisurely visits in Moscow and St. Petersburg now and then before returning to carry on some enlightened but ill-fated experiment with the peasants. The Mohrenschildts were landowners no longer, yet George still had habits that were rooted in possession. He was not a riotous spender, but a certain ease of living became him. It suited him not to think about money. Something in his upbringing, his aristocratic forebears perhaps, had endowed him with an enduring lack of interest in making money, and nothing, not all the burgher institutes of Belgium, could imbue him with a motive that was not really there. He needed to be able to take an income for granted. Lacking one, it was more congenial for him to marry than to make one.
Along with his aristocratic way of looking at things, his easy way of mingling, as one friend put it, with the rich, the highly placed, the “top men in any form of government,” George de Mohrenschildt had a liberal set of opinions and was often extraordinarily outspoken in expressing them.[3] Thus he had a strong feeling for the freedom of the individual and a hatred for anything that interfered with it. He loathed oppressive government; he loathed restrictions of any kind. Some felt that he hated all authority, that he was a perpetual rebel, a sort of one-man revolution, all in himself. He was high-spirited and irrepressible, so much so that one could say of him what was said of the famous Russian anarchist Bakunin: that for his courage and his qualities of leadership he would be invaluable on the first day of the revolution, but on the second he would have to be shot.
Many of George de Mohrenschildt’s opinions, and certainly his forthrightness in expressing them, could be traced to his father. But there was a crucial difference. Sergei von Mohrenschildt had, after all, been living through his country’s greatest crisis. It was a requirement of history that he speak out. He was a Don Quixote, in a sense, and amid the chaos of revolutionary Russia his actions had been as efficacious as a puff of smoke. But he had his existence in a genuine historical setting, and he did what a constitutional liberal of his time and place had to do. His son was not to be so lucky. Where the father had been pitted against society—a rotten czarist society first and a ruthless Bolshevik society afterward—the son came to be pitted merely against “society,” the moneyed families of New York and Long Island, of Philadelphia, Denver, and Dallas. These were the people who, in the New World, were to clasp him to their bosoms time and again for his charm, only to throw him out for his unconventional political opinions—and his outrageous behavior. Again and again he was on the “inside,” again and again he was tossed out.
The son had, it seemed, mastered his father’s experience all too well. Time and again his father had been on the inside, first of the czarist, then the Bolshevik, government, and time and again he had been driven out, until ultimately he was driven from the country altogether. Four times when he was between the ages of five and ten, George looked on as his father plummeted from a position of influence, down into danger and disgrace. The sight seems to have impressed him very much, for it was to become the central dynamic of his own life. But George’s “exiles” were only parodies, mindless reenactments of his father’s early, unforgettable odysseys into disgrace. The historical setting had been lost, the model was gone (Sergei von Mohrenschildt died in an air raid in Germany in 1945), and George’s friends, to say nothing of his wives, were at a loss to understand why he had to shock people so.