Yury Yakovlevich Azarevich, a lieutenant and a large landowner coming from hereditary noblemen of the Penza province, was born on February 21, 1883 in Moscow. He graduated from the Imperial Alexander Lyceum (1904); after that he was elevated to the rank of titular counselor of the 9th class and was recruited to the Ministry of Agriculture and State Property. In May 1904 Yury Azarevich was enlisted as a cadet in the 18th naval depot; he participated in the inland navigation on the battleship ” Ne tron menya (Don’t you dare touch me),” the cruisers “General-Admiral” and “Duke of Edinburgh”. On October 10 of the same year he was commissioned midshipmen and enlisted in the 7th naval depot as commander of the 14th machinery company. Since April 1906 Yury Azarevich served as a company commander on the 127th torpedo-boat destroyer. In September of the same year he was discharged and transferred to civil service in his native province. For several years Yuri Yakovlevich served as the land captain of the 4th section of the Mokshan district. He was described as “a diligent worker and honest person”. He was awarded the Order of Saint Anna of the 3rd class (1912). On February 12, 1913 Yuri Yakovlevich tendered his resignation.
From his mother Olga Nikolaevna Kalachyova he inherited estates in Mokshan district (2297 dess.) and in Gorodishche district (1035 dess.).
In his estate in the village of Mikhailovka in Mokshan district Yury Yakovlevich took up the farming which he had a great inclination for. He only occasionally left Mikhailovka traveling once abroad and to Petersburg to meet with the lyceum students. With the outbreak of the First World War Azarevich was called up to fleet from the reserve and participated in transportation of Russian troops by water to France and Thessaloniki. In 1916 he was commissioned lieutenant and was soon awarded the Order of St. Vladimir of the 4th class. Around this time he married a Princess Olga Lvovna Golitsyna (Drutskaya-Sokolinskaya in her first marriage).
After the Bolsheviks seizure of power Yury Yakovlevich attempted to arouse opposition in Mokshan district and even led a counter-revolutionary organization. His wealthiest estate in the village of Mikhailovka in Novo-Kutlino volost was nationalized by the Soviet authorities and eventually plundered.
In the State Archives of Penza region there were filed the acceptance documents of Mokshan estate belonging to Azarevich. The amount of property items in the inventory is truly amazing. Some of the entries are dated as early as August 1917 whereas the actual transfer of the estate was completed by September 1918. Since Yury Azarevich and his wife were keen on farming, the estate became a well-organized homestead with a farm and an agricultural school. The center of the estate was a wooden house on a stone foundation with an attic storey, around which there were various outbuildings: kitchens, laundries, stables, cold-storage houses, sheds, coach houses, smith shops, workshops, and mills. A large number of horses and livestock were specified by name. Vast lists of furniture, household goods and farm implements are amazing. A total area of 3452 dess. of land was used for plowing or occupied by orchards and forests, apart from 64 dess. of land unsuitable for cultivation. The entire economic unit was serviced by a staff of 29 people under the supervision of the manager Evgeny Aleksandrovich Mayorov. Apparently, the Azarevich homestead provided work for its residents as well as for the entire peasant population of Mikhailovka and surrounding villages. In addition, the estates in the villages of Muratovka and Yulovo of the Mokshan district and the one near the village of Arishka in Gorodische district were assigned to the Azareviches.
Being unable to protect the estate and fearing arrest Yuri Yakovlevich fled to Siberia to Admiral Kolchak. In February 1919 Azarevich went to Moscow to fulfill the assignment of the Supreme Ruler of Russia but he was not able to return from there. He served in the North-Western army, immigrated to Baltic region and then to Poland where he became a member of the Russian Emigrants Board of Trustees. In 1921 Azarevich moved to Berlin where his wife Olga Lvovna also managed to come together with their daughters. In Germany he was a member of the Mutual Aid Association which helped former sailors of Russian Navy. In 1929 Azarevich was in Italy and then moved to France. In Paris he became a member of the Maritime Assembly and the Association of Former Students of the Imperial Alexander Lyceum. Here, in the cultural capital of Europe the Azareviches kept something like a cafe or a canteen thus making their living.
Yuri Yakovlevich’s wife, a Princess Olga Lvovna was born on December 21, 1875 (according to other sources February 3, 1876) in St. Petersburg in the family of a Prince Lev Lvovich Golitsyn and Maria Mikhailovna Martynova. In her first marriage she got a family name of Drutskaya-Sokolinskaya and in her second marriage, Azarevich.
In the first years of Soviet power here in the Penza province Olga Lvovna passed through terrible physical and moral ordeal. After their estates were plundered she only had some possessions on her that they managed to hide and could not get support from her husband who was away. Olga and her daughters rented apartments in Penza suffering hunger and cold and being every day under risk of catching typhus. Here, on December 16, 1919 Olga was arrested by the provincial Cheka (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Profiteering and Corruption) with regard to the case of the Orthodox Christian Brotherhood. Some of her relatives had already been executed by the Soviet punitive agency and now she was within a hairbreadth of death herself…
From the materials of the investigation: Azarevich, nee Golitsyna Olga Lvovna, 43 years old, f.(former) nobleman of the Saratov province. Place of Residence: Penza, ul.Peshaya 32, apt.1. Occupation is housekeeping. Marital status: married (had a mother and two daughters). When asked about the property status, she answered that she had no property. Member of no party. Family education. Place of residence before the war of 1914: Muratovka estate in the Mokshan district of the Penza province (with her husband). Place of residence before the February Revolution of 1917 – the same. Place of residence before the October Revolution of 1917 – the same. From the October Revolution until her arrest she lived in Penza and was engaged in housekeeping. No previous convictions.
From the transcript of interrogation: “In response to the charge of Orthodox Christian Brotherhood’s Council membership and participation in the counter-revolutionary activities of the said brotherhood, I can testify the following: I have never been part of the Brotherhood Council and have never done any work as its member; and I heard for first time about the existence of this brotherhood just after my arrest in the Commission. I do not take any part in religious or political life at all but I am engaged solely in housekeeping and raising my daughters. I can also assure you that my mother has not participated in the Brotherhood, either because she is an atheist with regard to religious issues. My husband Yuri Yakovlevich Azarevich, a former chairman of the Mokshan District Council Administration, left Penza for Moscow in July, 1918 to come after a situation. I received the last letter from him before Christmas last year and after that I have had no news from him. I have a brother Vladimir who lives in Moscow and serves at the Moscow Evacuation Point. The other brother lived in Saratov, but after a bomb was dropped in Leontiev Lane in Moscow he was shot as a hostage. (This is an explosion organized by anarchists on September 25, 1919 in Leontiev Lane in Moscow to kill the leaders of the RCPb (the Russian communist party of the Bolsheviks). This act instigated a new round of red terror – S.Z.). The list of the members of the espionage-monarchist organization, who were shot, was kept by my mother in order to read to friends if they were interested. As for the people in the list, I used to be familiar with Topornin, Ladyzhensky, Kormilitsin, Ermolaev, Saburov, Arbenev and Ellis. I have nothing to add.”
Evidently, Olga Lvovna did not inform the investigator that her husband Yuri Yakovlevich went to Moscow by order of Admiral Kolchak, so the same day she was released after giving a written undertaking not to leave the place. Under the circumstances she had the courage for a real act of heroism: she managed to break free from the Penza province aflame with the revolution and flee abroad. Moreover, Olga helped some other representatives of the nobility to escape. On the way she met her husband and together with the children they immigrated to Italy. The destination of the Azarevich family from Mokshan was the French Nice. For a long time Olga Lvovna and Yury Yakovlevich earned a living by running a small catering business. Yuri Yakovlevich died on November 11, 1956, two years before the death of his wife.
From the memoirs of a writer Roman Gul:
“I remember meeting Olga Lvovna Azarevich (in her first marriage – a Princes Drutskaya-Sokolinskaya, a nee Princess Golitsyna) in Penza during those cursed days. She lost everything; there was no money left in the bank even by pure accident. And they had possessed a lot to bother about losses: the estate in Muratovka of three thousand dessiatinas in area, a distillery, sheep breeding business, a lot of horses, cows, and whatnot. Everything was plundered and despoiled. She only managed to hand over some valuable paintings to the Penza Art College Museum so that they would not perish. But O.L. did not fall into despair about it. “Well,” she said,” Lord giveth, Lord taketh away.” I am a pretty far cry from the idea that God has ever had anything to do with distribution of latifundia and much less with stripping somebody of their possessions by the hands of frenzied, wild, drunken soldiers. But such unbound attitude to ‘loaves and fishes’, to my mind, is wonderful. And this is a very Russian feeling; I often watched it in the propertied classes. Russians do not make their life conditional on their land.
No one ever heard a word of complaint from Olga Lvovna, any kind of lamentations about lost “silver and gold” even though they had had this in plenty. But in her life as well as in life of many other people there was something else that is always much more valuable than “gold” and “silver”.
Sources: State Archives of the Penza Region, f. 54, op. 2, d. 3; f. 196, op. 2, d. 98a; f. 158, op. 3, 2837, 3706, 3693; p-309, op. 1, 199; Archive UFSB for the Penza region, d. No. 7727-p, l. 146-146 about; http://www.dk1868.ru; history / gul1_1.htm; http://russianestonia.eu.
