The True Memoirs of Little K

by Adrienne Sharp

  How long would the imperial family be at the mercy of the revolutionary soldiers who guarded them—the brothers of these men pillaging and vomiting in the streets below—as the Provisional Government struggled, despaired at the task, and then finally turned the country back over to Niki. Weeks? Months? For I was sure that was what would happen. The insolent soldiers who now stood guard in the park would be hanged along with all the mutinous troops. That couldn’t happen quickly enough for me. Surely they could not hold Niki prisoner that whole time in Tsarskoye. Could Niki have foreseen any of this out there on those tracks, without view of the mob gutting his city, when he wrote, Not wishing to part with our dear son, we hand over our inheritance to our brother, Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, and give him our blessing to mount the throne of the Russian state. And then I remembered how he had looked at Mogilev, at dinner, smoking between courses, his eyes turned inward, fatigued and stressed, his inattention to the conversation of the men around him politely disguised—did that mood fore-shadow this act of which I could not then conceive? Was he debating, Should I strive for action or remain inert? Perhaps he had returned to Peter to do the former and then halfway through had conceded to the latter.

  I put down the paper and rapped on the table to get Josef ’s attention and he turned from the window. What? It was then I told Josef what I had done, that Vova was not tucked away safely at Stavka with Sergei as I had said, but was being held with the imperial family at Tsarskoye Selo, and in my brother’s face I saw this was terrible for Vova, worse than I had thought. When I opened my arms along the table and put my head to its cloth, stained with droplets of jam, even I was surprised by the violence of my weeping. My brother paced the floor while I wailed. My crying grew so loud, eventually Josef ’s wife and daughter, Celina, five years old, clutching a doll in a purple dress—a little girl who would never be embroiled in an imperial misadventure but was to be safely ensconced at the Imperial Ballet School (and now in this new world what would that be called?)—came to the tall doors of the dining room and peered in at us. At the sight of them, my big brother grew calmer and with this calm, arm in arm, came reason. No one would touch the tsar at Tsarskoye, Josef said. He was safer there than in the capital while this new Russia was configured, and so were his family and Vova. If the tsar was not reinstated, the imperial family would surely be sent away to live out the rest of their years in comfortable exile. According to the report, Nicholas expected as much, commenting after he signed his document of abdication that he would retire to the country, adding, I like flowers. A lie, I am sure. But this must have been what the poet Mayakovsky was thinking of when he wrote in 1920 the verse primers by which the illiterate peasant soldiers on the southwest front learned to read.

  B—The Bolsheviks hunt the borzhui.

  The borzhui run a mile.

  Ts—Flowers smell sweet in the evening.

  Tsar Nicholas loved them very much.

  So, Josef said. We will have to wait and see.

  But of course I couldn’t wait. When have I ever been able to wait?

  The trains began running again by the end of the month, and so disguised as the new me, not Magnificent Mathilde, but Peasant Mathilde, I was able to travel in a second-class compartment the nine versts southwest to Tsarskoye Selo. I knew immediately the imperial family must be outside when I walked up from the village and saw the common people pressed to the park fence. I had heard when the family made a promenade of the palace park or, later, when the weather changed, broke ice in the canals or, desperate for some industry, worked on their kitchen vegetable garden, small groups of the curious would gather outside the black iron railings to gaze at the former tsar and the former tsaritsa in their former park, now their prison. In the past such access would have been unthinkable—the Cossack sentries would never have permitted anyone to gather and gawk, but the revolutionary guards had no such compunction. They let all who wished to come and stare. That day, the people were silent, though sometimes it was reported they jeered at the former tsar or balled up the greasy brown paper in which they had wrapped their lunch and hurled it into the park through the fence, a gift for the despot. When I arrived and stood a little apart from the crowd, I could see Niki alone of the family was in view, a soldier with a bayonet fixed to a rifle a few paces behind him, and at that sight I felt my bones turn to powder. The tsar stood on the summer landing pier, a long, wooden pole in his hand, jabbing at the ice to crack the frozen surface, so one could see the liquidity beneath it, the color, the movement, the variety of it, the very elements denied the tsar by his guards. When not harassing the family, the guards shot at the deer and the swans in the estate’s park because they were bored and because no one any longer had the power to forbid them to do so and because they believed, when the counterrevolution came from the old regime, they themselves would be hanged from gallows and the people pressed to these fences would jeer at their dangling bodies, and so why should they let anything, animal or man, live? I heard the guard call, What will you do come spring, Nicholas Romanov?, a remark that enflamed me but which Niki ignored. As the guard cackled at his own joke, a boy came into view, a boy too tall to be Vova and reed thin—Alexei, recovered now from the measles, but wasted by it. And so I continued to wait, for where there was Alexei, I figured, there would also be Vova, and so I stood, without moving, while onlookers came and went, and eventually, because I am so small and because I remained there so long and so motionless, I became a magnet. Nicholas was compelled to take note of me. He looked my way without giving any sign, but he stood still staring for long enough to attract the attention of the tsarevich, who stared where his father did and then said, Papa? I heard clearly the uncertainty and apprehension in that one question, and I knew from it that the guards must frighten and intimidate the children so used to the respect and servility which they were normally accorded. And sure enough, just as Alexei had feared, Niki’s stone-still posture drew the attention of the guard, who took a single menacing step, looked piercingly at the rabble at the fence and held up his rifle in warning, addressing Niki not as Gosoudar, Sire, but as Colonel Romanov! Niki turned away, casually, as if to show he had been looking at nothing in particular at all, but the guard, suspicious, advanced toward the crowd to see who among us had caught the tsar’s attention, who was a scout come to spring the family from their prison, for the only thing that frightened the guards more than the thought of a counterrevolution was letting their imperial prisoners escape, for which transgression they would be immediately shot by their own. As I found out later, they worried constantly about signals sent to the outside through parcels, through the turning on and off of lamps, through the single telephone line which the prisoners could use only in the presence of a guard, through the unsealed letters sent in and out and read by the commander at their ingress and egress.

  I moved closer to the others at the fence and lowered my eyes, bent my knees, and shrank down beneath my hat—I was so tiny I could impersonate a child!—and as the guard, practically a child himself, paced left and right, behind him I saw Niki put a hand out to Alexei to reassure him, and then wave to someone behind the bridge, someone indistinguishable from the dark trunks of the leafless birch trees. Another boy appeared soon after, a boy who took up his own wooden pole, and together with Alexei and Niki began to pound at the ice. The shadows of the birch trees swept across the white snow, but Niki, acting with the self-discipline he had practiced for the twenty-two years of his reign, never looked in my direction again. And so in this way Niki showed me my son.

  After that, Vova wrote short weekly letters to Sergei at Stavka—most likely, Sergei told me, to conceal his association with me and to prevent me from coming to Tsarskoye again and endangering them all. Vova’s letters always said the same thing, I am well. I embrace you warmly. Always yours, Vladimir—but Sergei said though the missives were short—for after all, they must pass through the censors—they were in Vova’s handwriting and so he and I must be reassured by this, for what other re
assurance did we have, and at least some communication with the outside world was allowed.

  Over the next months the streets of the capital grew shabby and unkempt—weeds found every crack in the pavement, no matter how slight, as if Nature had waited quietly all along to take back the versts Peter the Great had snatched from her. The snow turned yellow and then black and the windows of the buildings remained unpolished, a graffiti of streaks and smudges. The imperial statues and monuments the revolutionary crowds had deemed too large to topple had been covered in red cloth, bloodied spears stuck in the dirty snow, and along the iron railings of the Winter Palace wads of red cloth bound up the imperial emblems too difficult to remove. But for now, though this off-kilter world wobbled, it continued to turn, and so did the routines of the theater. The Imperial Theater Schools reopened and the governesses led their charges once again out to the parks. The ballet school had no hot water and the rooms of the school were cold, but soldiers were no longer shooting at the windows of Theater Street—why, little Alexandra Danilova had had to duck a bullet when she peeked over her dormitory windowsill—and classes could resume. There was no fuel to burn, so the governesses put the children into smaller dorm rooms and laid their cots close to one another, so that like animals in a barn, the heat of their bodies could warm them, and in the dressing room basins floated chips of ice. The Maryinsky Theater itself reopened March 15, and the children were now driven to the theater in long sleighs, for the school’s carriages had been confiscated during Glorious February, and the students now danced before the common soldier, who smoked his cigarettes and spit his seeds right there in the parterres and used his boots to stomp in time to the music. I heard from my old partner Vladimirov that the great oil portrait of Nicholas was taken down from the lobby wall and the double-headed eagles and crowns that ornamented the boxes and the thresholds were also pried from the plaster and discarded. The ushers no longer wore their uniforms with the epaulets that bore the crown monogram. The Provisional Government gave them gray jackets, and because in this new life of deprivation there was no way to clean them, the fabric grew greasy with use. The evenings’ programs were no longer embossed with the double-headed eagle but with Apollo’s lyre, the same as the pin the boys at the ballet school had for a century worn on the collar of their school uniforms. So the lyre of a Greek god was still acceptable to the new regime. But I was forty-five years old and I was a former, with a son whose father was a Romanov, so I myself was not acceptable. I could not appear on the stage. Nor did I want to.

  In May, the last class graduated from the great Corps des Pages, which my son had so wanted to attend but had never had the chance, and the school was closed—there was no need for pages if there no longer existed a court. And there was no longer any need either for the thousands of servants who had attended the imperial family or for the giant Abyssinians who in their white turbans and curved shoes had stood in majestic pairs outside the doors to any room that contained the emperor. They had all abandoned Tsarskoye Selo along with the courtiers who did not wish to remain with the Romanovs under house arrest. One day, on Nevsky Prospekt, I found myself facing one of those six-foot-tall Africans, now dressed in trousers and a tunic, a black-faced ghost, a relic, with no door to open for the tsar, no door to guard while the tsar busied himself behind it. Where are you going? I wanted to ask him. What tales of the Russian court will you take with you? I could have asked the same of almost everyone.

  Yet, the Petersburg palaces were not entirely emptied at this time. The streets were full of rough-looking soldiers, yes, for the revolution favored black leather jackets, backward-turned caps, and a swagger, and the old revolutionary leaders of 1905, Lenin, Trotsky, Chernov, yes, found their ways back to Peter and took up residence in or made offices of requisitioned homes—including mine, which had a view of the Troitsky Bridge and the embankment, a strategic view for anyone planning an uprising—and so I remained at my brother’s, in his daughter’s bedroom. But the nobility was still here. It was as if all the aristocracy were under house arrest along with the tsar, waiting to see how the Provisional Government of the old Duma and the new Soviet would rein in unruly Russia and deal with the formers. Would they be allowed to keep their palaces, their treasures amassed over generations? The former imperial family, it appeared, would receive reduced appanages. The grand dukes, Sergei’s brother Nicholas had heard, might receive 30,000 of their accustomed 280,000 rubles a year. Was that conspirator happy now that the tsar had been deposed, as he had wished? It appeared perhaps one of the Romanovs—Nikolasha, Kyril, or Niki’s brother Mikhail—would assume a figurehead position as tsar, as head of Duma, as president, as no, no, as nothing. Russia’s fate was evolving every day. In the spring of 1917 some former tsarist officials still served in the Duma and still led the army, but others of them, like the former minister of war, Sukhomlinov, were arrested—or in Sukhomlinov’s case, rearrested—and taken to the Peter and Paul Fortress for questioning, and still others slipped away, to the Caucasus or the Crimea or Kiev, where they gambled, drank Abram champagne, ate caviar and sturgeon, set the clock back one hour to Petersburg time, and waited there, as we did here, to see which Russia would prevail.

  Through all this, Sergei remained at Stavka on the advice of his brother Nicholas, who feared for his safety. There were no revolutionaries there at headquarters among the generals of the old regime—any unrest in the military was taking place among the infantry barracked in the cities and at the fronts. In his letters to me Sergei gave me news of the war. At the fronts, the soldiers were tired and refusing to fight, and though the new supreme commander, Brusilov, made a tour urging them to pull together for a fresh offensive, he met with men who didn’t care about Galicia or France and just wanted to go home. The men wanted peace so badly they would put the tsar back on the throne if he promised it to them. At the eastern front men had even begun to fraternize with the Germans, who lured the Russians over the Dniester with vodka and prostitutes. Only in the southwest, far from the big cities, were the soldiers still disciplined. But when the offensive ordered by the commanders began in June, the men advanced only two miles toward Galicia to retake all the ground they had lost in the Great Retreat before they refused to go any further and began to desert, looting and raping along the way in Volschinsk, Konivkhy, and Lvov. Sergei feared these disgruntled soldiers and their like would eventually find their way to Peter and meet up with the several thousand troops garrisoned on the Vyborg side of the city, troops who had helped bring about the revolution in the first place and who could overthrow the shaky Provisional Government, as well. The members of the Duma were at odds with the Kadets from the Constitutional Democratic Party, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the Anarchists, and the Social Democrats, the Bolshevik splinter of which had begun to agitate and arm the Red Guards, the workers’ brigades that had sprung up not only to protect the Vyborg factories that sat so close to the Vyborg regiments but the revolution itself against an imagined counterrevolution. And while the Provisional Government labored over the details of the perfect parliament to be elected in the fall, the Bolsheviks began to whisper in the streets, The Provisional Government itself has become a puppet of the counterrevolutionaries who plan to reinstate the tsar. The tsar and tsaritsa are plotting to reinstate the monarchy.

  Exhausted and overwhelmed, the prime minister of the Duma, Prince Lvov, resigned and was replaced by a new man, that Alexander Kerensky who had helped secure Grand Duke Mikhail’s abdication. Kerensky had served in the Duma as minister of justice and minister of war and now it seemed, in a ministerial leapfrog to rival Alix’s appointments, he would be installed as prime minister in charge of the country. Rumor had it Kerensky had moved himself into the Winter Palace, into the suite of Alexander III, into his very bed, and when he couldn’t sleep, he would pace the breadth of that grand room singing operatic arias, so giddy was he with his new power. He had once wanted to be an actor—his speeches were so impassioned that sometimes he would faint after delivering them—and
as a boy, he had signed notes to his parents, From the Future Artist of the Imperial Theaters, A. Kerensky. If his guards had been less ignorant, all Peter would know which arias Kerensky sang and from which operas. This Kerensky, Sergei said, had been talking of moving the imperial family to England or Finland for their safety, where they would live—perhaps permanently—and if that happened, we, too, would apply for permission from Kerensky to go abroad. The Romanovs in the English countryside, hunting pheasant and drinking tea in some grace and favor house when they had once ruled one-sixth of the world? In that case, Vova would no longer be of use to them, nor would I.

  So Sergei’s letters weren’t much comfort to me, nor were Andrei’s. He sent me letters care of the theater, which Vladimirov ferried to me like some postrevolutionary mailman. Andrei described the large whitewashed villa his mother had rented for them, guarded by a dozen Cossacks for hire, the dinners, teas, and card games they enjoyed with the Sheremetievs and the Vrontzovs, who had also left Peter for the Caucasus, and when I read his merry letters I thought, What is this strange mirror-world these people have found on the Black Sea, where the revolution cannot penetrate the quicksilver of that plane?