The True Memoirs of Little K

by Adrienne Sharp

  If only I had thought to do what Countess Kleinmichel had done to save her mansion on Sergievskaya Street—put up a sign in my yard that shouted the lie: This property already requisitioned by the citizens! For within weeks, the Bolshevik division of the Social Democrats took over my house and desecrated it by hanging a red flag from my roof, and soon enough it became the headquarters of the Bolshevik Central Committee. That night, though, I locked up my house with my key, under the illusion that would be all it took to keep it secure—and I rushed the few blocks to Kamennostrovsky Prospekt to pound on the door of the great actor Yuriev.

  I stayed with him three days, hiding with his family in the hallways of his apartment from the stray bullets that ricocheted through the streets and sometimes punched their way through the windows. Outside, the crowds of workers, peasants, criminals sprung from prison, and soldiers who had mutinied fought the tsar’s police, who had mounted machine guns on the roofs of many of the district’s apartment houses. As Yuriev’s apartment was on the top floor of his building, desperate soldiers, their greatcoats unbuttoned and their caps turned backward to signal their allegiance to the revolution, periodically broke into his apartment in order to climb to the roof to search it. Yuriev was a big man, with a strong nose and thick jowls, and the soldiers did not bother him, and as they had no idea who I was, a little middle-aged woman in a ripped coat, they did not question me. And the phone—mounted to the wall and operated by a crank—rang and rang as people hiding in their apartments called one another just to hear a sane voice, to tell the tale of what was happening on their particular street. After the third batch of soldiers came through, Yuriev moved his chairs away from the windows, and his vases and statuettes also, lest any of it be mistaken by the hysterical mob below for guns and we for police snipers and therefore fired upon. And when I went to help Yuriev and his wife move these things we saw a group of soldiers who had reached the rooftop of the building opposite ours throw someone off it—a policeman—we watched the sail of his greatcoat spread wide as the wings of a great bird whose flight was short. When he fell to the pavement, a crowd gathered about him to beat at him with sticks.

  Mala, Yuriev said, this is madness. Where is the tsar? All they want is bread. There are no revolutionary leaders here—and it was true! All of them would slip back into the capital only later and we would learn their names later still—Lenin and Martov from Zurich; Trotsky from New York; Chernov from Paris; Tsereteli, Dan, Gots, and Stalin from Siberia—Stalin was nobody then—a pockfaced bank robber for the revolution who worshipped Lenin and sent him his stolen rubles hidden in bottles emptied of Georgian wine, sent them all the way to Europe! Yes, these men still sat in armchairs and cafés in their places of exile since 1906 and we would learn their names only later; the leaders of these mobs were therefore impromptu and improvised—students, workers, and low-ranking officers who had once had revolutionary sympathies and now found those sympathies reawakened. Their photographs were placed in store-window shrines over the next weeks with the phrase Heroes of the Revolution printed on them. The names of these men—Linde, Kirpichnikov—would soon be forgotten, but they were the ones in the streets, organizing the crowd busy commandeering cars and trucks. One of those trucks sped by while we watched, a banner hung on it: The First Revolutionary Flying Squad, and Yuriev said, What does that mean? For there was no real revolution here, as yet, only what Gorky later described as a peasant riot. Why does not the tsar bring in troops from the front to restore order? Yuriev asked, and I found out only later, from Sergei, that General Alexeev, who served as Niki’s chief of staff, feared that if he sent in his troops they would only lose all discipline and join in the mutiny and then all would be lost.

  All through the streets walked men with swords, bayonets, butcher knives, revolvers, sticks—and we, five stories above the mass of people, heard the thin ends of screams, gunshots, glass shattering. The chief of the Petrograd Military District had tried to send a regiment loyal to the regime to the Winter Palace, but after fighting their way through the streets they found themselves turned away by the liveried palace servants on the orders of Niki’s brother, Mikhail, who worried that the men in their dirty boots might muddy the palace floor and break the china; and so the troops, demoralized, simply joined the crowd. It was a comedy of errors, like an ill-rehearsed ballet, in which the dancers, unaccustomed to the sight of each other in their new costumes and unsure of their steps, bumped and waddled into one another and fell down.

  The three days I hid at Yuriev’s I never undressed but remained in the same clothes from the day I fled, and how quickly they grew soiled with sweat, dusty from the floors I squatted on, stained by bits of food, for we ate our meals sitting on the ground, hunched over our plates like animals. In our overcoats, our backs against the wall in the interior corridors of his grand rooms, we waited for news that the tsar was returning to the capital, that order was being restored, and at night we slept on mattresses we pulled to the floor. Yuriev’s wife said to me one night, How lucky for you your son is at Stavka with Grand Duke Sergei, and I said, Yes, how lucky. And secretly I comforted myself with the fantasy of my son at Tsarskoye Selo, sitting up now, I was sure, eating from a silver tray brought to his bed, making slow rounds in his robe and slippers about the green-carpeted playroom, perhaps splashing in the tsar’s big tub and talking to the parrot, Popov, which the tsar had inherited from his father and kept in his bathroom, the palace and park guarded by loyal Cossacks and the soldiers of the elite Garde Equipage. The rumors were that half the Pavlovsky regiment in Petersburg had mutinied, followed by some of the Litovsky and the Preobrazhensky—the Preobrazhensky!, the tsar’s most prestigious regiment—and that in the Astoria Hotel the rank-and-file soldiers had hunted down their senior officers with rifles and bayonets until the lobby floor was turned into a junkyard of mirrored glass and crystal beads, its revolving door spinning in circles through the blood. If I had known Kyril Vladimirich had the gall to return to Peter from the Arctic and call the men he commanded of the Garde Equipage away from the Alexander Palace, pin a red cockade to his cap and a red ribbon to his uniform, hoist a red flag on his roof, and march to the Duma to pledge his support for the revolution, to offer his services as tsar, I would have lost my mind. But I didn’t know it. And so, somehow, I kept my sanity.

  After three days at Yuriev’s, the streets grew calm enough for my brother Josef to come and retrieve me. As I had saved him once, he now saved me. It was good, I suppose, at this moment, to have Kschessinkys on both sides of the revolution. I gave Yuriev a pair of Sergei’s Fabergé cufflinks and we kissed each other’s cheeks and then I kissed his hands. He wore on one finger the ring the tsar had given him as his gift at Yuriev’s benefit. I heard that Yuriev wore that ring the rest of his life, even during the Great Terror, when he knew he could have been killed for it.

  Josef and I had to walk all the way from Petersburg Island across the Troitsky Bridge to his apartment on Spasskaya Ulitsa. The wind blew from the north down the Great Neva and pushed at us as we crossed the bridge. The coat I had snatched up three days before, when the weather had briefly warmed, was too light for the weather which had turned cold once again, and the wind threatened to knock us against the triple lampposts that dotted the bridge or send us flying over the balustrades. Against this wind I held down the fabric of my coat and I tugged my kerchief low over my brow. Siberia, I thought, could not be colder than this. When we reached the palace embankment, I lifted my head. This was why Josef said we had to walk. Hundreds of smashed cars bottled up the streets, stolen by young girls who had no idea how to drive and yet inspired by revolutionary fever had jumped behind the wheel and pressed the gas. Their cars shot forward only to smash into one another and into all those taxis whose drivers refused to keep to the left now that we are free!, and from there into the lampposts and walls and storefronts until finally the girls abandoned the cars altogether. Some of them were left with their tops down, frozen metal sculptures, creased and gouged and functi
onless, and among them, as if they didn’t exist at all, roamed the crowds. Small groups of people stood in circles around impromptu bonfires, and when we drew close enough I could see they were burning the wooden emblems they had stripped from the shops about us, emblems the shops used to advertise their imperial patronage, and on Nevsky Prospekt a great crowd busied itself with the same, the gray smoke like a puff from a giant hookah reaching two stories above a crowd wearing kerchiefs, fur hats, and, worst of all, caps with army insignia. The charred pile of trash looked like an animal and the people posed for a camera held by a comrade to record their great deed. The soldiers wore their coats and tunics unbuttoned, their caps backward, all deliberately against regulation in a city where a year earlier a soldier could be reprimanded for the incorrect salutation to his superior—why, a duel could be fought if an officer’s inferior did not walk on the left side of the street! Two women in men’s clothing walked by us. I suppose they, too, now were free—their arms locked about each other’s waists, while other women wandered, hatless, their hair frizzled and loosened. Everywhere I stepped there were bits of glass and I put my hand to my brother’s back and held on to him as I followed his shape through the streets. To the right of us a group of little boys threw loose cartridges into a fire and scattered at the intermittent explosions. In the window of one café stood a sign: Fellow citizens! In honor of the great days of freedom I bid you all welcome. Come inside, and eat and drink to your heart’s content. Three steps from that café, against the side of a building, a woman stood with her skirt raised while a man, his dirty fingers gripping the line of brick above her, took his pleasure, his breath coming in a series of short, barking grunts. Don’t look, my brother said, but how could I not look? Never was I so relieved that Vova was not with me. A man brushed by me dressed in women’s clothes, a skirt hanging beneath his greatcoat, big boots on his feet as he stomped past. A policeman, my brother said, trying to get away disguised. On his way to Finland Station, no doubt, to make his escape from a fate like the one who fell past the window of Yuriev’s apartment. Pharaohs, the crowd was calling the policemen now. Pigs. I stepped on a pair of smashed eyeglasses and I began to see the detritus of this uprising everywhere—a watch chain, a bit of patterned silk, a woman’s shoe with the heel snapped off, metal insignia, a fork, various signage reading By Appointment to His Majesty Tsar Nicholas, all bearing the double-headed eagles, waiting, next, to be burned, and in one gutter, a lace dress laid out as neatly as on a woman’s bed. But when we turned the corner I looked up and saw what I would never forget: the stone head of Alexander II held up like the severed head of Medusa by a peasant with the broad nose and lips of some Eastern province. Josef said, You should see what they’ve carved on the plinth of the statue of Alexander II in Znamenskaya Square: hippopotamus—and at that I began to laugh, crazily. Into the gutter a man vomited, cap in hand, and the liquid splattered his boots. Everywhere I smelled fire, and when ashes blew toward us, my brother said, That’s the Palace of Justice burning to the ground.

  My brother lived at No. 18, in a twelve-room apartment. The Bolsheviks remembered him and his revolutionary activity of 1905, and when they made all the formers share their houses and apartments, when servants took the rooms of their masters or stole their furniture and whatever else they could carry, my brother Josef was allowed to keep his twelve rooms all for himself. He would enjoy them until Stalin came to power, after which he was allowed the use of only two. Josef didn’t want to leave Russia even then. In 1924, after Lenin’s death, I arranged from Paris visas and tickets for Josef and his family so he could come dance once again for Diaghilev. But Josef wrote me, We artists have privileged positions here. I can’t leave a country to which I am bound by so many memories. We weren’t the only ones with memories. When Stalin launched the Great Terror in the thirties, Josef was dismissed from his teaching position at the old Imperial Ballet School simply for writing to me.

  He died, you know, of starvation, in 1942, during the siege of Leningrad, in the war after this one, and he was buried in a mass grave in the Piskarevskoe Memorial Cemetery.

  On my second day at my brother’s apartment, as Josef and I sat in his dining room and drank glasses of tea, some sweetened with sugar, some sweetened with jam, we heard the sound of singing in the street below. Josef stood and opened a window and I went and stood behind him. The crowd was singing their version of the “Marseillaise,” which the workers had appropriated from the French revolutionaries and then, pronouncing it the Marsiliuza, stuffed with their own lyrics,

  We renounce the old, old world

  We shake its dust from off our feet.

  We don’t need a golden idol

  And we despise the tsarist devil.

  Something has happened, my brother said, and he put on his coat and went down to the street. I paced the floor, going to the window every few seconds, and it seemed each time I looked out one more red flag appeared on one more roof and yet another banner was unfurled from the windows of a building; and then church bells began to ring, and not just from one church but, it seemed, from everywhere, from every church. Was the war over? Then Niki could bring all his troops home as he had in 1905 and then these animals would be put into cages or hung from the scaffolds. At last I heard my brother’s foot on the stairs and he rushed in clutching a handful of leaflets, the fronts of them printed with symbols we would soon see again and again—a chain broken into two bits, a sun emerging from the clouds, its rays spreading out from behind the mist, a throne and crown on their sides. The emblems of the revolution, though I didn’t know that then.

  What is this? I said to Josef. What does it mean?

  It means, he said, the tsar has been overthrown.

  I grabbed at his sleeve. What? What?

  We sat at my brother’s dining room table, reading the printed news, unable to speak, our fingertips blackening with ink as we turned the pages. The tsar had abdicated on March 2 on the train while it stood on the rails at Pskov, where he had been forced to stop on the way home to Peter, having gone east on a detour to give the direct route to troops being moved along that line. Once in Pskov, halfway between Stavka and Tsarskoye, he could not move, as the tracks ahead had been seized by revolutionaries. And Niki’s efforts to halt the revolution were as choked as his train. General Ivanov, whom Niki had charged with bringing troops to the capital and establishing a dictatorship, had arrived with his men too late. General Khabalov, already there in the capital, was too much a fool to think to bring in loyalist troops, and instead hid in the Admiralty and drank cognac. And General Alexeev, an even bigger fool, thought the liberals in the Duma would settle the city by political means and keep the monarchy intact, and so he held his troops at bay—and when he saw none of this settled the roiling capital, Alexeev gathered all of Niki’s leading generals to ask for the tsar’s abdication for the good of the country, the war, and the dynasty. This was what made Niki write in his diary that he saw all around him only cowardice and deceit.

  And so, ill-advised, Niki had handed the throne to his brother, Mikhail—Mikhail! whom Niki had allowed back into Russia only in 1914 at the start of the war! And I thought, Why? Why have you done this? What did they say to you on that train?, for I did not know any of this then. Oh, if only Niki had made it all the way home to Tsarskoye. Alix would never have let him abdicate on the advice of his beloved generals—he had always been too besotted by the military—and she certainly would not have let him shove the throne away from her son or mine! What had happened to the glorious greater Russia Niki had promised me for my son? Was he so tired that he allowed himself to be persuaded? At Mogilev, Sergei had told me the tsar’s doctors had begun to prescribe cocaine for Niki to stem his exhaustion and that they were worried he was headed for a nervous breakdown. Perhaps it was a relief for him to give Russia away to his fool of a brother who hadn’t even the courage to take the crown but instead had himself abdicated! When the mob had bellowed at this news of yet another tsar, Mikhail had hidden himself in
the mansion of the Princess Putiatina at No. 12, Millionaia and allowed the prime minister of the Duma, Prince Lvov, and one of the republican ministers, an Alexander Kerensky, to persuade him to refuse the crown, telling him they could not guarantee his safety. Frightened, Mikhail quickly scribbled his abdication manifesto in a school notebook in the study of the princess’s daughter, hunched over a child’s desk. Another of the documents of the revolution scribbled in a child’s practice book. Yes, Mikhail had broken the crown into little bits and distributed the fragments among the incompetent ministers and the disreputable men of the Duma Niki hadn’t had time yet to fix! For the country, the leaflet said, would now be run by a Provisional Government. Niki had given up not only being emperor but the whole regime—the grand dukes, the princes, the barons and counts. I felt like one of the peasants in the provinces, the old muzhiki, who when hearing the news cried, They have taken the tsar away from us. What will become of us now? I looked at my brother’s face to see if he was happy, for wasn’t this what he and his comrades had wanted all those years ago, and still wanted? But he didn’t look happy. Perhaps this was more than he wanted, too radical even for him?

  What is the tsar doing? my brother said, shaking his head. It’s not legal for him to hand over the crown to his brother! No. Josef was right. It was not legal. The throne should pass to the heir and Alexei was the heir. Niki knew this. I sucked at a strand of my hair. Perhaps this act of abdication was just a tactic of delay—Niki knew his brother would not have the character to succeed him—and by signing an illegal manifesto he was preserving the throne for his sons. It was a trick, a prevarication to give him time! As my thoughts stampeded from one end of my brain to the other, Josef read to me from the paper, which reported that Colonel Nicholas Romanov, as the tsar would now be known, had returned by train from Stavka to Tsarskoye Selo, where he, his family, and some of his retinue were now prisoners of the Provisional Government. I made him repeat that last part. He’s a prisoner in Alexander Palace? My brother nodded. Along with his court. At this, I took the leaflet from my brother to read it over myself. How could this be? How could this possibly be? The tsar under guard?