Still a fever-dream of the ruling class. Albert Rhys Williams, witness-participant, and a marvelous writer, with an extraordinary vignette from ten years after the Revolution investigating the ruins of the Kochoobey estate.

‘Why the Palace was Burned’ by Albert Rhys Williams from New Masses. Vol. 3 No. 4. August, 1927.

But Kochoobey was rich and, proud
Not in his long-maned horses,
Nor the gold tribute of the Crimean Hordes
Nor in his fertile farms,
But in his beautiful daughter.

Thus Pushkin’s famous poem Poltava begins, recounting the glories of the famous Kochoobeys. My guide pointed out the great oak under which the old Mazeppa made love to that “beautiful daughter,” Maria. That is about all that remains intact of the great estate that lies on the edge of Dikanka Village. The rest is ruins.

A long tumbling brick wall; this was once the deer park. A stagnant pond out of which statues thrust up broken arms and legs; this was the lake once dotted white with swans. The butt of a palm tree crowning a cinder-heap; this was the orangery. A line of fire-gutted buildings; these were the stables of the long-maned racing horses. Some ring bolts in a pile of bricks; these chained the hunting pack whose cries one time wakened the countryside.

Beyond this desolation, past great green spaces stood the glistening, white portico of the palace, columns and walls so clean and straight it seemed the palace was intact. But it was only a white shell enclosing a burnt brick and tangled debris. After the fire came the spoilers, sacking it to the last bolt and window frame. Then came the treasure hunters. Last of all the vandals.

“Before and after the fire.” Thus local history is reckoned from that unforgettable night in the winter of 1919, when a red tongue of fire leaped out of the dark, climbed about the tops of the trees, grew into a pillar of flame, fountaining into the sky, mahogany, paintings, rugs and tapestries. Two nights and a day it frightened and fascinated the countryside for fifty miles round. A magnificent conflagration—the funeral pyre of feudalism.

One of the peasants told me how it happened: “A band of partisans rode out of the forest one day and camped on the grounds. At night we saw them suddenly saddle and gallop away. An hour later the palace was flaming.”

“Yes, that’s the way it started,” affirmed a second, “the partisans set it afire.”

Thus I heard the story from a score of peasants and so I would have recorded it had not the palace overseer one time in talking about the library remarked: “That’s probably where the fire began. Some boys playing there may have knocked a lighted candle into the papers.”

Both versions I related to a Poltava cattle-dealer. “Neither boys nor partisans,” said he, “It was the peasants themselves who fired the palace. They laid straw in the cellar and waited their opportunity. The partisans out of the forest gave it to them. As they rode away the peasants touched it off. So they escape responsibility, always saying, ‘The partisans did it!’” This I take to be the true version.

At any rate one thing is very clear. I never heard one peasant regret that the palace was gone. But why were they glad? And to what extent was it the sense of gratified revenge against the Kochoobeys?

Against the prince himself I could not find particular ill-will. He was hard-working, tramped around in worn-out shoes, greeted everybody affably, refused a Court Minister’s portfolio, saying “I can’t be always kissing ladies’ hands.” Quite a democrat. He was easy on his peasants, renting out his land for seven rubles a dessyatina when it was 12 elsewhere, in slack season keeping their horses busy hauling at four kopecks a pood.

For the son there was warm feeling. “Maybe you’ll meet him in London or Paris,” said a young peasant to me. “He was a good fellow and a wizard with the stringed instruments. Tell him to come back and we’ll make him chief commissar of our Balalaika Club.”

For the brother, a magnificent drinker, there was admiration. He drank himself fat and bankrupt, then took to wife Stolypin’s niece with a 7,000,000 ruble dowry.

It was on the Princess that the anger of the peasants converged. Evidence of this I found on a marble pillar in the big pasture. Out of a camp-fire some shepherd had drawn a lop-eared, three-breasted lady with a long spear-pointed tail. Below in strong Ukrainian “All Princesses! To hell with them!” Maybe this rustic artist had once been lashed off the place by the Princess’ tongue. Or he had not lifted his cap to her. Homage to caste and rank she demanded at all costs. Let the mujik be rolling drunk; let him beat his wife; but let him be deferential. Then all was forgiven. But damned forever was the wretch who once mistook her for the veterinary’s wife.

Terrorist and termagant, but a great lover of animals—a skilled horsewoman, a devotee to dogs, her affection particularly concentrated on a little white pet terrier, Looloo. The dog had her own cook, wardrobe, and servant. When Looloo died the griefstricken Princess had an island made in the lake, set with shrubs and flowers.

“There’s where the bitch buried her bitch,” said our peasant guide pointing to the lake below. “Looloo’s Island we had to call it. A whole island for a dog. And to us she grudged a crust of bread, a log of fire-wood, or even to put foot on her estate.”

“She-devil! Maybe now she would like a stick of fire wood herself. She’d have to ask for it. So Princess, you would like to walk through the estate?” His voice and manner were now in droll imitation of her. “Sorry tovarisch Princess, you’ll have to go back and get permission from the Soviet.”

The war, it seemed, softened or scared her and she took to giving presents to the conscripts. “When I was enlisted,” said young Cheiben, “she called me to the palace and gave me a ten ruble gold piece. ‘Brave boy,’ she said, ‘go fight for your fatherland and freedom!’”

“And sure enough,” continued Cheiben, “I got a certain amount of both. I’m going to curse the Soviet today about the taxes—that’s freedom. As for fatherland, I’ve got 1 5 dessyatines of the Kochoobey estate.”

Cheiben was vengeful, but ironically, pleasantly so. Bitter shrilled the vengeance in an old soldier describing the raid on the mausoleum of Sergius Victorovitch Kochoobey: “First we smashed the stone coffin, then the oak and the zinc.”

“Maybe it was the gold cross around his neck, the jewels and money you were after?” I suggested. “No!” said the old man scornfully. “I was after the old devil himself. He stole the land from my fathers. God curse his soul!” He screamed with hate-contorted face making a deep slashing stab with his crutch. “I put a knife through his chest.”

Vengeance against even the dead. Not blind, indiscriminate however, but directed against those who had injured them. The bones of Leo Victorovitch lie undisturbed; he gave the forest to the village. Sergius Victorovitch took the forest back; it was his tomb that was desecrated. It was into his ribs that this old soldier savagely thrust his knife.

Revenge played its part in the palace burning. But to my mind a small part. The fact remains that for two years after the outbreak of the revolution the palace was untouched. It was as if the peasants said to it: “Remember in the old days you have been a source of insult and injury to us. But for these sins of the past we will not punish you. We put you on good behavior.” Unfortunately the palace did not mend its ways. Indeed it became worse. With the return of the Whites, one time, came the former superintendent imposing a levy of 160,000 rubles on the peasants. To their remonstrations he replied: “Be thankful it is so little. Some day on your knees, at the gates, you will be begging a little bran to stop the gnawing in your bellies.”

Yes, such was the nature of the palace, now humiliating them, now threatening hunger and death. Here is the letter of a runaway landlord of Tula to his peasants:

“Brother Mujiks: Go on as have you begun. Divide all the furnishings of my manor-house. Take my cattle and the hay to feed them with. One thing I ask of you! Don’t chop down my lime trees. These I will need to hang you on when I return…

“When I return! Damn him!” Let there be nothing to return to. They hewed the lime-trees down.

So it was in Yurievskaya. When the landlord Kovalevsky fled, the peasants settled old scores with the manager and divided up the furnishings and live stock. Then came the Skoropadsky Government (the Whites) and an officer appearing before the Peasant Committee announced:

“Sheep, cows, beds, books, carpets–back to Sir Kovalevsky. He who has eaten the sheep, get into the skin and crawl back on all fours himself!” He led his finger twice around the face of his watch. “Twenty-four hours–the time limit! If one sack of corn, one spoon, one hen is missing…this!” The officer drew his finger across his throat. “And this!” He struck a match, meaning the village would be fired.

Dawn next day and over the long road leading to the estate stood great dust clouds, beaten up by the wheat and hay laden wagons, by the hoofs of the bleating, neighing, grunting, bellowing beasts, while through the tangle stumbled women with mirrors, old men with bird cages, boys with wagon-wheels, plows and vases. Everything and everybody, for the way was long, the time was short and the big guns were trained upon the village.

Forward they pressed to the gates from which two lines of soldiers stretched to the manor house. Down this lane of bayonets, the peasants passed, each to lay his loot at the feet of Kovalevsky.

“It was like the great Judgment Day,” said a peasant. “Each of us bringing his own sins, piling them on the heap. When the Whites left a second time we touched nothing. We burned the palace down.”

“Why didn’t you take the things again? There was no one to stop you.”

“Take them again,” he soliloquized. “Maybe give them back, again. Go through hell again? No, we couldn’t do that!”

In flames and smoke that blotted out the scene of their humiliation, their degradations of the past. More than that, by this act they were blotting out the humiliations that might be, the degradations of the future. Wiping them out forever.

So it was with the palace of the Kochoobeys standing above the village. Menacing, arbitrary, pregnant with evil. As Leo, the good Kochoobey, gave way to Sergius the bad, so the kindly prince might give way to the unbridled Princess, the Princess to someone worse. Then what new affronts, insults and injuries? The ruins of the palace were the assurance that these things should not be. In this guarantee of the future, more than in the sweet sense of gratified revenge for the past, lies the general peasant satisfaction over its destruction.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1927/v03n04-aug-1927-New-Masses.pdf