One of the chapters in Moscow and Muscovites is set in the interior of the Sheremetev palace across the street, Count Sergei’s childhood home. When the Count was a young adult, the elegant mid-eighteenth-century palace became the City Duma, a parliament whose seats were increasingly occupied, as the nineteenth century progressed, not by noblemen, but by members of the merchant class. When the Duma moved out to purpose-built premises next to Red Square, the Sheremetev palace was let to the Hunting Club, whose previous accommodation had famously burned down one night around a group of wild and oblivious card-players.
Gilyarovsky describes how the ‘lordly chambers’ of the Sheremetev palace that the city administrators had left in tatty disarray were luxuriously renovated and transformed into the most prestigious private club in Moscow. ‘Bourgeois fast-livers of both sexes gathered for dinners, exhibitions, and masquerades,’ at which the prizes were of fabled extravagance, Gilyarovsky recounts. Wealthy Muscovites hosted intimate Sunday suppers in the great hall of the palace, at which choirs of young girls sang serenades. Gilyarovsky describes scenes from evenings at the Club, where exquisites in smoking jackets play baccarat and a hunting gentleman, a great lover of ‘cards, women, and horses’, has his hair slicked down in an ‘English parting’. A boisterous nouveau riche from the Volga region comes up to Moscow to play cards all night. A cool young gambler with the ‘manners of an Englishman’, whose face displays no expression, cannot endure the tragedy of losing.
In one vignette, Gilyarovsky describes a dark man, a gambler and celebrated raconteur, who spent all his money on cards and women. He had the ‘most beautiful beard in all Moscow’, and all the ladies at the Hunting Club desired him. The dark man places on the baccarat table an intriguing piece of treasure – a large gold snuffbox with a huge gleaming letter N chased across its lid – and tells the other gamblers that he paid an insane price in Paris for his little conversation piece. He shows them all a certificate of authenticity, proving that it had once been the snuffbox of Napoleon. Indeed, the dark-bearded gambler says, it is a snuffbox with an epic history. Napoleon had just snorted a huge pinch of tobacco from the beautiful gold box at the very moment his adjutant was making a battlefield report, and had missed what the adjutant was saying. On account of this, the great general moved his cavalry into an area where they were cut off from the foot-soldiers fighting on the plain. And so, Gilyarovsky muses, the world can be turned upside down by a pinch of snuff. Perhaps, he adds in one of his melancholy asides, the dark man had some foreboding of hungry days to come in Monaco or on the Riviera.
The Hunting Club was not just the setting for decadent card games and light-hearted masquerades. Every week the Society of Art and Literature would put on a show, and a group of amateur players, who would later become the Moscow Art Theatre, would perform. According to Gilyarovsky, the director Konstantin Stanislavsky’s company was somewhat too artistically sophisticated for the demi-monde that frequented the Hunting Club. The play they most enjoyed was The Drowned Bell, in which a hairy wood demon jumped over stones and ruts while a water sprite in the form of a huge frog croaked and paddled about in a brook.
On one ‘significant and never-to-be-forgotten day’ in September 1898, another of the actresses whose intimate lives are bound up with this street fell in love. It was at the Hunting Club that Olga Knipper first met Chekhov. ‘I will never forget the anxious palpitating agitation which overcame me when I was told that the great playwright would be attending our rehearsal of The Seagull’, the actress records, ‘nor the unusual state of mind in which I made my way, on that day, to the Hunting Club.’ It was there, she said, that the ‘fine and tangled knot’ of her life ‘began to lace itself’.
When Gilyarovsky wrote Moscow and Muscovites, the city he was describing had vanished into memory just like the pious feudal city of the Count. After 1917 the Sheremetev palace was occupied by a military academy and a museum of the Red Army and Navy. Next to the Kremlin Hospital pharmacy’s low doorway, a granite plaque cut into the side wing of the palace commemorates a speech that Lenin gave to the Red Army recruits in 1919 before they were sent to the southern front to fight the Whites. On May Day of the same year, Lenin stood on Red Square, his arm upraised in a pose that would be replicated in thousands of monuments all over the Soviet empire, and promised the crowd that their grandchildren would be unable to imagine that public buildings had once been someone’s property.
Lenin’s Revolution shone a new historical light on the treasures of the past. For two hot months in the middle of 1918, this investment property that the Sheremetevs had built between their palaces twenty years before became the centre of conspiratorial drama on which the fortunes of Russia turned. A secret war played out within the walls of No. 3 between the Bolsheviks and the would-be saviour of the Russian bourgeoisie, British agent Sidney Reilly, who found this a perfect setting in which to plot the counter-revolution.
That summer, when the large barometer next to the grand courtyard entrance was showing temperatures above thirty-five degrees Celsius, Lenin warned that the Bolshevik Revolution was in its ‘direst period’. Russia was in a paroxysm of class war. The Soviet republic had contracted to the size of the fifteenth-century Grand Duchy of Muscovy. The British had occupied the northern coast from Murmansk down to Archangel and Kem and proclaimed a ‘Government of Northern Russia’; the Germans held Pskov and Minsk, and occupied the Ukraine to the west; Czechoslovak forces controlled important cities along the Volga River and the length of the Trans-Siberian Railway, while Vladivostok in the farthest east was under the rule of the Japanese. To the south, in the Cossack domains around Rostov-on-Don, White forces were in command, the French had landed a naval garrison in Odessa, and the Turks were moving on the frontier of the Russian Caucasus. Closer to Moscow, counter-revolution was ascendant in Yaroslavl, Kostroma, Rybinsk and Nizhny-Novgorod.
In Moscow itself, only recently reinstated as the capital, the revolutionary struggle played out with particular symbolic intensity. The Revolution had ‘raised its flag in Moscow’, the Bolsheviks proclaimed, in order ‘graphically to manifest the link between Russia’s being and the fate of the whole world’. Moscow, the Party newspaper Izvestiya declared, was the ‘last sanctuary of the loose, lazy bourgeois spirit’ of the Russian past, a city of priests, merchants and idle nobility. ‘Knock the bourgeoisie out of their nests!’ ran the slogan. 1918 saw an extreme chiliastic rejection of all the institutions of private property, the spoils of exploitation. Owners were enemies of the future order. It was not just the exigencies of civil conflict but also revolutionary utopianism that led to ‘war communism’, the Bolshevik policy of extreme communisation of property, nationalisation of land, economic centralisation and compulsory requisitioning. In November 1918, Molotov, who was charged with nationalising the economy of the north, published an article admitting that the ‘expropriation of the expropriators’ was ‘in reality occurring less smoothly … than those who call themselves followers of Marx thought it would occur …’ After more than nine months of socialist rule, he said, the hour had ‘not yet struck for all the property of capitalists’. Inflation was encouraged as a way of ruinously destabilising any market economy. Trotsky’s principal economist ally, Evgeny Preobrazhensky, talked of the ‘machine gun of the commissariat of finance, attacking the bourgeois system in the rear and using the currency laws of that system to destroy it’. Banks were abolished and a plan to replace money with ‘labour units’ was devised. In an attempt to exert total control over the allocation of goods, all private trade was banned. To some, ‘war communism’ was a heroic period, a time of moral elation, when the ‘bourgeois had become a contemptible and rejected creature … a pariah, deprived not only of his property but also of his honour’.