But to be honest, what did I know of factories—of their capacity for production? I had thought it made no difference if this factory or that one made the bullets and so I had asked Sergei to offer the arms contracts to our friends, men we knew, the ones who came to Kronversky Prospekt with their gifts and their old-world manners. Better than strangers to have them, right? Who was better to trust? While I hid at Strelna, Sergei was forced to resign from the Artillery Department and was sent to Baranovichi, where stripped of his official duties he had nothing to do but grow a vegetable garden, smoke cigars with Niki, and putter about like an old man, taking long walks in the forest as if there were not a war on and this were not headquarters but some kind of sanatorium. Now Vova and I could not see him and my son wept himself to sleep. The unfortunate Sukhomlinov, who did not have the luck to be a cousin of the tsar or his former mistress, was arrested and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress. I sent him a note, which I’m sure he appreciated.
The country became obsessed with the idea of traitors and spies. German bakeries and schools were attacked. Those with German-sounding names came home to find their houses burned, the roofless walls blackened behind their iron railings. And who in Russia did not have a German-sounding name? Half the court was of German ancestry; why, their very positions at court derived their titles from their German counterparts—the Ober-Tseremoniimeister, the Ober-Gofmeister, the Kamer-Freilini, the Flag-Kapitan. And of course the country remembered that Empress Alexandra was German. Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt. The people began to call her Niemka, that German woman, and they were suspicious of her and her staretz, Rasputin, who they feared was a German spy. In Moscow, in Red Square, the crowd shouted that Rasputin should be hanged, the empress shut up in a convent, and Niki deposed.
To stem this great uproar over the despair about the Great Retreat, for that was what the ignominious backward march of men from the Carpathians toward Lublin and Lvov began to be called, the furor over the supply shortages, and the hysteria of the spy paranoia, the tsar shut down the Duma, replaced Nikolasha as commander in chief, and moved permanently to Stavka, which had to be moved, after the Great Retreat, two hundred miles east from Baranovichi to Mogilev, on the Dnieper River in the Ukraine to avoid being overrun by the advancing Germans. At Baranovichi, the generals and grand dukes had bunked in their own private luxury train cars at the railway junction, the cars pulled off the track and fanned out in the birch-and-pine forest, wood planks making walkways between them. But at Mogilev, the officers simply commandeered the house of the local governor and each took a room. Niki took two rooms for himself, one as a study, one as a bedroom—and prepared to be the country’s figurehead as the tsar-warrior. With that decision, and with his mother sitting out the war in Kiev, Petersburg was left to the empress. And Rasputin.
Let me explain how Rasputin crawled into Alexander Palace and into Alix’s lap. As always, it had to do with the health of the tsarevich. When Alexei had come in the autumn of 1915 to spend some months at Mogilev with his father, to sleep on a cot in his father’s bedroom in the governor’s mansion, Sergei told me, Alexei caught a winter cold and one sharp sneeze induced a nosebleed which could not be stopped. The doctors tried every bandage and nose plug in their flimsy black bags, while the boy’s body continued to pump scarlet blood out his nostrils. Eventually Alexei lost consciousness. In this condition he was brought by his father by train back to Tsarskoye Selo, and Alix met him there at the little station, expecting Niki to carry off the corpse of her son, and when she saw his white face and his limp body, she begged Niki to allow her to call Rasputin. And Rasputin, as you can imagine, making the most of this opportunity, swept into the boy’s room, made the sign of the cross over the boy’s body, and said, Don’t be alarmed. Nothing will happen. And the next day, Alexei was sitting up, bright-eyed, asking for his spaniel puppy, Joy, and for the cat he had left behind at headquarters.
Niki returned to Mogilev the next day, but it would take murder to dislodge Rasputin from Tsarskoye Selo. With Rasputin’s guidance, Alix argued for the country’s ministerial appointments to be given only to courtiers of the old school, men who worshipped the autocracy of the tsar, who believed the Duma a mistake, as she did, but most of all to men who were well-disposed to Rasputin. She was as charged with energy as she had been when Niki was sick with typhoid in Livadia and both times for the same reason—if the tsar was threatened, her son’s future was also threatened—and she wanted to secure the country for both of them. Almost every week, it seemed, I would open the gazeta to read the name of a new minister Alix had persuaded Niki to appoint. Over the next six months, Russia had four prime ministers, five ministers of the interior, three war ministers, three foreign ministers, four ministers of agriculture, and three of transport, and the country was thrown into such disorder by the incessant replacement of competence with incompetence and then incompetence with ineptitude that the government could barely function. Rasputin, of course, had had a hand in all those appointments, and sometimes for ludicrous reasons—when the court chamberlain, A. N. Khostov, pleased Rasputin with his loud bass singing at the Gypsy restaurant the Villa Rode one night, Khostov found himself appointed minister of the interior the next month. So many people came to seek Rasputin’s patronage, they had to line up on the stairway to the door of his third-floor apartment on Gorokhovaya Street, and the country seethed that among all those supplicants sat a German agent who listened to Rasputin bluster and blab about the confidential strategies and tactics the Russian army planned, tactics Niki confided to Alix and she then to Rasputin, for she craved his blessing on military maneuvers he understood nothing of. The crazed monk and the German woman were destroying Russia from the inside and out the people said, and as the war continued to go badly, the officers in their hopelessness began to take long, unauthorized leaves from the front; they appeared once again at the palaces and at the embassies and even at the bars of the Astoria and the Europa hotels, and once more uniforms and medals began to stud the stalls and boxes of the Maryinsky.
Why, Petersburg had a new song:
We only want to know, next day,
What ministers will be on view,
Or who takes who to see the play,
Or who at Cubat’s sat next to who
And does Rasputin still prevail
Or do we need another saint,
And is Kschessinska quite well
And how the feast at Shubin’s went:
If the grand duke took Dina home,
What kind of luck MacDiddie had—
Oh, if a zeppelin would come
And smash the whole of Petrograd.
Murders Will Follow
And so the plots began, and it was not only the Vladimirichi who schemed, but also the Mikhailovichi, the old Potato Club, who schemed with them—minus Sergei. In one plan, four Guards regiments would be sent to Tsarskoye Selo to capture the imperial family, dispatch Alix to a convent or a mental institution, arrest Rasputin, and force Niki’s abdication. It was not an original idea. In most coups, mutinous guards were used to overthrow the tsar—Catherine the Great had used them. Another plan would have the guards seize the imperial train as it traveled between Stavka and Tsarskoye Selo, the tsar forced to abdicate and Alix arrested or, in Miechen’s words, annihilated, and Rasputin hanged. Then, variously, depending on the conspirator, it would be Kyril installed on the throne or the tsarevich Alexei, with Nikolasha or the tsar’s brother Mikhail entreated to serve as regent. Grand Duchess Vladimir, her three sons, Niki’s ward Dimitri Pavlovich, the young Prince Yusupov who had married Xenia’s daughter, even Sergei’s brother, the now famous historian Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, met evenings at Vladimir Palace. Other plots fermented among officials of the Duma, and the plots eventually grew so multitudinous and were spoken of so openly that Sergei’s brother Nicholas finally felt compelled to write to Niki that if Alix didn’t stop her interference in matters of government murders will follow.
Rasputin’s assassins were those m
en who met at the Vladimir Palace: Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, Prince Yusupov, and Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovich. The Vladimirichi—Kyril, Boris, and Andrei—the residents of that palace, why, they stayed safely at home, hands unbloodied, but no less guilty for that. Sergei’s brother gave Sergei the details. They had lured Rasputin to the basement salon of the Yusupov Palace with the promise of meeting Yusupov’s wife—Xenia and Sandro’s daughter, Irina—famously the most beautiful woman in Peter. I’ve told you Rasputin had an eye for women. And while Rasputin waited for this beauty to appear, as the men assured him she shortly would, they served him cakes sprinkled with cyanide and wine into which the crystals of that same poison had been dissolved, hoping for an easy night. But the poison, apparently, amazingly, unnervingly, had no effect, and Yusupov, impatient and frantic, pulled out his revolver and shot Rasputin in the back. The staretz, eyes wide, crumpled, seemingly dead, and while the men conferred about the disposal of the body, inexplicably, the body rose from the floor of the salon and bolted across the courtyard to its iron gates, making for the street, and the men fumbled for their pistols and sent after him a spasm of bullets that once again brought him down. There on the cobblestones his panicked assassins kicked Rasputin’s body and clubbed his face, then bound him with rope, and for good measure rolled him up in a blue curtain they yanked, improvising, from a basement window rod. But, apparently, Rasputin survived even all of that, as well as his rough journey to the rustic Petrovsky Bridge, to the hole beneath it in the ice through which he was shoved, drowning, finally, in the freezing water of the Little Neva. When he was found, one hand was freed of the ropes.
That was December 16, 1916, and all of Peter said, sabakye, sabatchya smerte—a dog’s death for a dog. It was even rumored that the tsar’s daughter Tatiana dressed as a guard and had Rasputin castrated before her eyes as vengeance for his alleged attempt to violate her, that she helped push him into the river. What must he have thought about under the black ice? Battered, chained, his clothes saturated with blood and river water, one leather boot on his foot, the other on the surface of the frozen Neva, a murky shape above him on the white ice, the outlines of it made visible by the moon’s face, Rasputin reached out an arm. Was he reaching out his arm to his shoe, to the moon, to the ice shelf above him, the white marble slab of his sarcophagus? Was he lifting his arm to give a final benediction, a final prophecy? Or was he simply trying to untether himself, to crawl upside down along the ice in this black inverted world, to find the hole through which he had been pushed, to run, dripping water and ice, to the Alexander Palace, where, as he had screamed at his assassins on his dash through the Yusupov Palace courtyard, Felix, I will tell the tsaritsa everything!
She knew it soon enough.
When Dimitri Pavlovich entered his box at the Mikhailovsky Theater the night after the murder, the audience stood and applauded him. Penitents in Our Lady of Kazan Cathedral lit thick swatches of candles before the icons of his name saint. And the day after that, Andrei rode with his brother Kyril to Dimitri’s palace on Nevsky Prospekt to assure Dimitri that the Vladimirichi were behind him, to urge him to turn his regiments against the tsar. But luckily, unexpectedly, Dimitri demurred. He might have hated Rasputin, but he loved his tsar. Soon enough everyone knew the triple-tongued Andrei and Kyril had tried to pry open the gates of hell. Ah, the baby of the family, Andrei, turned out to be quite a Vladimirichi, after all.
Emperor Vladimir
If the Romanovs could kill Rasputin, it was possible that, encouraged, they might try to carry out the rest of their plots. And that is when I received a summons from Niki to come to Stavka with Vova.
The name of the provincial town Mogilev comes from the Russian word for a grave, you know, and the landscape we viewed from the train car all the way from Minsk looked foreboding enough. It was so cold that when I disembarked at one stop, within a few seconds I could not even wiggle my fingers. Vova was in high spirits at the thought of seeing Sergei again and he had insisted on carrying his present for him—a puppy—in his coat’s big pocket. He was so busy with the animal, making up names for it and asking me what I thought of each one—Nika, born on Sunday, Gasha, good, Kiska, pure—that he did not look out the compartment window as he would normally. I was glad of this, for what would he have seen but trees standing dark against the sky, their limbs split or sometimes pocked by artillery fire. We passed abandoned trenches, the mud walls fortified with wooden boards, barbed wire hanging in scrolls and loops along the surface. The roads were wet and muddy and bore the thick treads of tank and truck tires, water pooled and froze in any depression in the ground, and in the fields white crosses cut their way out of the graves they marked.
A rough wooden fence surrounded the governor’s house, and above the gate on a wooden arch cut in the shape of an Ionian dome was carved the word STAVKA. Sergei met us there. He had put on weight and he had gone almost completely bald, and, as if to compensate for this, he had allowed his beard to grow fuller and wilder than he normally wore it. And yet despite the extra weight and the denser beard there seemed something deflated about him—the disgrace, however unfair, and his resignation had made him uncertain. I could see it even in the way he moved, as if he might take a false step or lose his balance. He had defended me against all critics, including ones from his own family, writing his brother Nicholas, I swear on the icon that she does not have any crime behind her. If they accuse her of bribery, that is all lies. I was dealing with all her business, I can show whoever needs it accurate details about how much money she has and where it came from. He took the punishment for me, and now, because of it, he wore a plain brown tunic—for, having been forced to resign from the army, he could no longer wear his uniform.
Vova jogged ahead of me to greet him, oblivious to the great changes in Sergei, holding the puppy out to him happily in his two hands. The ribbon Vova had put around the puppy’s neck at the start of our journey was long unraveled and gone. It’s for you. To keep you company! You can call it Kiska. Vova grinned, offering up his most recent inspiration. Sergei embraced him and then inspected the black-haired puppy, a spaniel just like Alexei’s. When I reached him, Sergei kissed me, and I felt absurdly comforted by the heft of him, by his familiar scent of tobacco, oranges, and whiskey, and I put my arm through his while Vova took Kiska on a wild run around the frozen, muddy courtyard, which had in the center of it a round fountain. The spouts of the fountain were the open eyes of porpoises, and in the summer those spouts must shoot streams of water, but now Vova picked up a stick to thrust into the empty eye holes.
On the opposite side of the wooden fence, a few boys called to him, peasant boys on a trek back from the river. Vova ducked through a broken and leaning section of the fence to join them, the puppy yapping hysterically as he followed Vova’s stick. Sergei and I watched through the splintered planks as the four of them hurled Vova’s stick like a baton for the puppy to retrieve but Kiska hadn’t learned yet to return it, so inevitably the boys would give chase, laughing as the puppy avoided them with quick zigzags across the field. I’ve missed him, Sergei said. The whiskers under Sergei’s nose looked frozen. I’ve told my brothers everything I have should go to Vova when I die, and I said, Why are you talking about death? You’re not going to die. But Sergei didn’t answer me, calling out to Vova, It’s too cold, let’s go inside, and to me he said only, Niki wants to see you before dinner.
One of the commanders had given us use of his quarters, a two-room hut, and from there Sergei led us to the governor’s house, to the two rooms Niki had taken for himself. As we passed through the big dining room, I saw the long table was already being set for dinner, the round carved legs poking out from beneath a short white tablecloth, the rough planked floor and clapboard walls illuminated to the last splinter by the wall of windows at the far end of the room. Niki sat waiting for us in his study at an enormous mahogany desk, every inch of it etched and carved and ornamented. This room, after the brilliance of the dining hall, seemed blindingly dark�
��the stripes of the damask paper on the walls made a dull mirror; a lone dark chair crouched like a dwarf against the back wall. Niki rose to greet us, his face at first sepia, but then as he neared me, rosy, as if he were a photograph being painted over with color while I watched. Or perhaps I was that painter, and I felt myself color, too. He kissed my peach hand, shook Vova’s, now almost the size of his own, and asked him about his studies, Was he learning French and geography? And did he like his subjects? He put a hand on my boy’s shoulder as he listened, and now and then Niki looked over at me and smiled, and I thought, Do I look as old to him as he does to me? Because I was now forty-four, the age when a woman is well into her long, reluctant goodbye to the beauty she has worn as a right since she was sixteen.
Sergei stayed behind in the study when Niki showed us the other room in the house he had taken for himself, as if this next room, the carpeted bedroom, were too personal, too private for Sergei to enter, though we could, and he took from Vova the puppy. A camp bed had been placed by the great porcelain stove at the side of Niki’s own bed, and through the window opposite, half-open, we could see the windows of the city hall and hear the noise in the street below, voices, the occasional car or cart. This was a town, after all, not a battleground. The cot was made up with a striped cover, the pillows plumped at the head as if expecting a visitor, and beneath the cot lay a leather box which Niki gestured Vova should open. Within the box Vova found some colored marbles and lead soldiers—toys that must have belonged to Alexei and which he had left behind. Vova looked at the tsar and Niki nodded that he should play with them, and Vova glanced at me, uncomfortable. He was fourteen now, and except for planting soldiers on his battle map, he did not play with toys anymore. It was clear, though, from his nod, that Niki saw Vova as the twelve-year-old Alexei, still child enough to be engaged by the lead men. Vova looked down and then with a small smile, he took the box to the chair by the window and began to line the soldiers along the window ledge. Vova understood. If the tsar wanted him to be twelve, he would be twelve. Niki smiled as Vova made the marbles into cannonballs to fell the soldiers. Ah, if only our regiments could fight the Germans with that ease. Why, we had hoped to be in Berlin by Christmas 1914! All over by Christmas, everyone had said. Two years had passed since then.
The True Memoirs of Little K Page 26