The True Memoirs of Little K

by Adrienne Sharp

  We spent that first night in rooms Andrei had found for us, and when Vova had gone to sleep, Andrei reached for my hand. I withdrew it, and Andrei lowered his eyes. He understood. I am certain, though, he believed it was because he had no funds to keep us, being entirely dependent upon his mother, but that was not why I withdrew my hand. Since when had he not been dependent upon his mother? That I could abide, for wasn’t I myself dependent on the fortunes of the Romanovs? No, perhaps it was just that the opportunist in me no longer enjoyed her own reflection. Or perhaps it was that I no longer wished to kiss at this pale copy of the tsar. Or perhaps it was simply that Mathilde Felixovna Kschessinska had at long last fallen in love. So the next day I dug into the big reticule of jewels I had brought with me, among them the diadem of cabochon sapphires Andrei had Fabergé make for me long ago for the ballet La Fille du Pharoan, the emerald and diamond bracelet the tsar had given me while first courting me in 1891, the various-sized yellow diamonds from the number Sergei put in a little casket for my twentieth tribute in 1911, the walnut-sized diamonds from the tsar’s necklace, the one with which Nicholas had marked our consummation in 1892. I used first the jewel I liked the least—the great cabochon sapphire from the serpent brooch given me by the tsar and the empress for my tenth-anniversary tribute, and with it I rented the Beliaievsky villa—two and a half stories tall, white, with a green tile roof, the property rested on a tuft of a hill. From my windows I could hear all day long the muezzin chanting from a nearby minaret, calling the faithful to prayer. It was not my mansion on Kronversky Prospekt, but it had a pale charm, and there Vova and I lived together, for Andrei, of course, lived with his mother, who remained obstinately oblivious to the great social changes the revolution had wrought. I was to comport myself, as usual, out of her sight. Even in her reduced circumstances here, Miechen wielded her power. Her son Boris and his British diplomat friend had disguised themselves as workers and made two trips to Peter to smuggle out the jewels and rubles she had stashed in her secret bedroom safe at the Vladimir Palace. The men walked the treasure here in their boots, and some of it Miechen, big-bosomed and stout, squatted over here in Kislovodsk. The rest of it Miechen had couriered to the safe-deposit box of a British bank. One of Miechen’s tiaras is worn today by the English queen, Elizabeth II, did you know, bought on the cheap by George V’s consort, Queen Mary, at the great fire sale of Romanov jewels in the 1920s. But when Sergei asked the British ambassador, George Buchanan, for help in doing the same with the jewels I had left behind, the ambassador flat out refused—perhaps he was among the diplomats who watched in disbelief as the coal trucks unloaded their cache at my house, not theirs, on that cold day ten months before in Peter. If only Sergei had not mentioned my name!

  Sergei sent me daily letters, though they appeared irregularly, sometimes in batches of threes, with tales of his adventures in Petersburg—he had stashed my remaining furniture at Meltzer’s (as if that shop were some impregnable fortress). Kerensky had recently arrested his new commander in chief of the army, General Kornilov, suspecting him of being a counterrevolutionary. The infantry had begun killing their officers of whom they suspected the same. Many soldiers had deserted to help for the harvest and with the guns they took with them they were now helping the peasants not only harvest the crops but seize the land and kill the squires. The Bolsheviks had somehow managed to increase their share of representation in the city Duma elections. The dapper Trotsky had been released from jail. And out of the continuing governmental chaos the joke on the streets was, What is the difference between Russia today and at the end of last year?, and the answer was, Then we had Alexandra Fedorovna and now we have Alexander Fedorovich—Kerensky. I’ve told you Russians love wordplay. Sergei did not think Kerensky would last much longer: people were saying he was a Jew or that he dressed in women’s clothing or that he was addicted to morphine and cocaine. Though nobody liked Kerensky, nobody was prepared to get rid of him either—the feeling was that if the Bolsheviks did seize power they would soon enough ruin the country and the people would call for the return of the tsar, or if not that, perhaps the Germans would invade Peter and bring order with their tanks and machine guns, and I thought how long have the borzhui been pining for that? They’d been hoping a zeppelin might smash Petersburg to bits since that song of 1916!

  After reading those letters, I dislodged the diamonds from a brooch given me in 1896 by Sergei’s father and the grand dukes Vladimir, Alexei, and Pavel Alexandrovich and used them for tuition for Vova at the local school, for what likelihood was there that we would return to Peter anytime soon? But Vova did not work hard at his studies, made certain by all the dreaming he overheard at our teas and card parties and dinners—Do you remember? and When will things be again as before?—that we would be back to Peter and to his real studies with his former tutors by Easter, and though he didn’t say this, perhaps he hoped also to be back in the bosom of the imperial family, as well. He spoke of them sometimes, wistfully, of how while working in the kitchen garden they had gleefully pelted one another with clods of dirt and Anastasia had drawn the word darling on his forehead with one muddy finger or of the riddles they had one evening made up, written down on slips of paper, and passed to one another to solve. Yes, Vova skipped his classes, spent his afternoons running wild through the hilly streets with some companions from the school as undisciplined as he, and when Vova did finally come in for dinner, he refused to do any schoolwork—not that he had brought home his books. He resented Andrei’s regular appearance each afternoon at our tea table, Andrei having been released by his mother for a few hours’ furlough. Who is he? Vova would say. He’s not my father, and so he would not listen to Andrei’s admonitions, nor would he sit with us, but, instead, stood hunched over his plate to eat his biscuit. Or worse, he took his plate to the kitchen, preferring the company of my plump, red-haired cook, sitting at her table, his long legs shoved beneath it, his coat torn, and his hair standing on end from his adventures up and down Vokzalnaya Avenue. At night he would come into my room to read over Sergei’s letters and only then would he ask for whatever news of the tsar and Alexei I had gleaned at tea from Andrei—who had heard it thirdhand from the tsar’s letters to his sisters or his mother, who then told friends who told friends who told the news to Miechen. Andrei knew only, I told Vova, that the family were in Tobolsk, several hundred miles east of the Urals, that the children had built a snow mountain in the yard, that the family chopped firewood for exercise by day and at night they embroidered or read aloud or played bezique—that it was as it had been before at Tsarskoye, except much farther east. Vova took all this in soberly and said, If I were there I would have a purpose, here there is nothing for me—and then he would stand, his long shape a rebuke. I know this day comes to all mothers, when one’s son steps away from the circle of her arms, but that knowledge made his actions no less painful. I consoled myself with the notion that when we returned to Peter or Sergei joined us here, then all would really be as before. In each letter to Sergei I begged him to join us, but he seemed determined to wait until the Provisional Government’s assembly in late October, which would decide how Russia would be governed, in which he and his brother Nicholas hoped to have a hand.

  Then we heard that even before the All-Russian Soviet Congress could meet at long last after all their deliberations to propose a government in which all political parties had representation, the Bolsheviks decided to act. Lenin, who had sat at my son’s desk and whom Sergei had so easily dismissed with a crumpling of paper, had slipped back into Russia to stage another putsch, though a disorganized and scattered one, true, nothing like the great spontaneous eruption in July. But it didn’t have to be. For Kerensky, believing the Bolshevik party so small their party name nothing but an empty boast, the Majorityites, had not bothered to rout out or arrest what remained of their number. In fact, he crowed that he wanted them to show themselves so he could crush them. Meanwhile he planned to force the unruly peasant infantry the Bolsheviks had radicalized f
rom their Petersburg barracks and off to the northern front to fight the Germans. But the regiments balked when the Bolsheviks assured them Kerensky was ridding the capital of them in order to shut down the revolution. Yes, Lenin was wily and Kerensky, without the army, was impotent—despite the absurdity of Lenin’s putsch. The rusted old cannons the Bolsheviks tried to fire from the Peter and Paul failed to go off, as they had not been properly maintained by the inept regime, and from the cruiser Aurora, shells fell far short, plopping, ridiculously, into the Neva. It was an uprising so pitifully small that the performance of Boris Godunov ground through its scenes at the Maryinsky and Chaliapin continued singing every bar of his arias in Don Carlo at the Narodny Dom, the people’s theater Niki built, where one could hear Chaliapin sing for twenty kopeks, the audiences of both theaters blissfully unaware of a counterrevolution. The streets were so quiet, even in the usually riotous Vyborg district, that only two drunks were reported arrested there. Sergei said he did not even know the Provisional Government had been overthrown until the next day when the newspapers told of it, declaring of the Bolsheviks, Caliphs for an Hour. The Bolshevik soldiers and armed workers had found entry to the Winter Palace from the cellar of the east wing and stumbled through the labyrinth of gates and doorways and passages into the palace proper. Despite the three thousand soldiers Kerensky had detailed there, sleeping at night on mattresses in the great halls to prevent this, the Bolsheviks marched the ministers of the Provisional Government from the palace right to the fortress of Peter and Paul. Kerensky did run, as I had predicted; he fled by car to summon his loyalist troops at the northern front and never returned. He ended up, I believe, in Finland, and from there he went, like so many of us, to Paris and then on to America. There he wrote and rewrote his story. His ministers had been arrested so abruptly they left with their pens still warm resting on the papers on which they had been scribbling plans and proclamations against the Bolsheviks and the upheaval they were newly creating—The Provisional Government appeals to all classes to support the Provisional Government! And the Bolsheviks, in a frenzy of occupation, ran about stuffing their pockets and hiding within their coats bottles of ink and clocks and swords and bedspreads with the imperial monogram and statuettes and leather cut from chairs, even cakes of soap, others shouting, No, comrades, this is for the people! When the soldiers discovered the cavernous palace wine cellar, a three-week orgy of drinking ensued, wine and vodka streaming through the gutters where people stooped to guzzle it, and women brought sacks and cases to catch it and haul it home and all night the drunkards sang Russian folk songs, Under the pine, Under the green pine, Lay me down to sleep, and no matter how many guards the Bolsheviks sent over to stop the drinking, they themselves joined in the orgy, which did not end until the supply finally ran out and men lay unconscious in the streets and broken bottles glittered on the pavement and the white snow had been tinted purple. And I wrote to Sergei, Get out. Get out of Peter.

  We heard the Bolsheviks opened up all the bank vaults and at gunpoint forced the reluctant employees to hand over every kopek, every bar of silver, every piece of jewelry to finance their new government. So much for my boxes of silver at the Bank of Azov and Don and for all the receipts to them I had stitched into my underskirts. The Bolsheviks’ new motto was Looting the looters, and they encouraged the people to go from house to house and store to store, to grab everything the wealthy parasites had once hoarded, and the workers took rugs, furniture, china, paintings, and from churches their silver and wine, and building committees composed of former servants forced the wealthy from their rooms in their own homes and consigned them to their servants’ old quarters, and I thought, How quickly and with what pleasure my old housekeeper would have relieved me of my bedroom and my drawing room and my great hall, relegating me to her narrow bed off by the cloakroom. More ominously, we heard all the Romanovs had been ordered to register with the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, a new security force, the name of which stood for the All Russian Extraordinary Commission for Struggle Against Counterrevolution and Sabotage, and this Cheka then began to persecute and imprison even their old revolutionary comrades from the other political parties—the pigs and whores, I suppose, against whom Lenin had ranted in my son’s school notebooks. The registered Romanovs were forbidden to leave Peter, which meant Sergei was now trapped there with his brother, who wrote, We are marked for the gallows. The empty Romanov palaces had been requisitioned and turned into orphanages, hospitals, and schools. My house, no longer the headquarters of the Bolshevik Central Committee, became a clinic and then a home for retarded children and after that the clubhouse for the Society of Old Bolsheviks—if they lived that long.

  Worse, Russia no longer had much of an army to fight the kaiser’s army, for all this while the Great War still went on—so many men had deserted and so many officers had been killed by their men that when the Germans advanced toward Peter they swiftly took city after city with laughable ease, sending a few troops with machine guns by train or motorcar to sweep up our soldiers along the way, and when they reached Peter they planned to do the same thing there. So in a panic Lenin moved the capital to Moscow and to stop the advance he signed a peace treaty that surrendered to the Germans the Ukraine, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland—where my parents lay buried, now on German soil! Prince Lvov, the nobleman who had first headed the old Provisional Government right after the February revolution, became so distraught when he heard of this Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that he took to his bed and threatened to slit his own throat. We read that a general shot himself. But the treaty did not hold, for America entered the war and with her help the Allies defeated Germany within six months. Our poor Allies—trying to fight alongside a country that was fighting against itself! Democratic America was happy to see an emperor deposed. Did I mention I had been invited to dance in America in 1903, offered 40,000 dollars for just five performances in New York—and that was 40,000 dollars back then!—but I turned the offer down, for who in America knew anything about the ballet? Or about kings, emperors, or tsars, for that matter? Britain did, and as such, she, unlike America, halfheartedly supported the old regime, fearful that the disease of revolution was contagious. Let’s see. I’ve lost my place. Brest-Litovsk. Yes. This treaty, briefly as it lasted, doomed the imperial family, for as soon as Russia signed it, Lenin turned his attention that summer to the problem of what to do with all those dozens of Romanovs.

  We heard that four of them—Sergei’s brothers the grand dukes Nicholas and George among them—were taken to Shpaterraia Prison in Peter, but that Niki’s brother Mikhail was sent instead a thousand miles east to Perm. At this time Niki and his family were moved too, southwest from slow-paced Tobolsk to the grittier industrial city of Ekaterinburg, closer to the Urals, and there they were stuffed into the house of a merchant named Ipatiev, who was given twenty-four hours to pack up and get out, after which his home was rechristened, ominously, the House of Special Purpose. Half of Niki’s suite who had been able to visit him daily in Tobolsk was now put in prison in Ekaterinburg and the other half of his suite was expelled from the city entirely, and we heard through the children’s French tutor, Pierre Gilliard, before he left, that the family was confined to two bedrooms and that Alexei had had another hemorrhage from sledding in a tea tray down a staircase, that the guards from Tobolsk had been replaced and the new guards were hostile and deliberately, provocatively cruel, and that Niki’s beard was now gray and the family was entirely alone. And at this I despaired. Finally, word came of Sergei. He, too, had been sent east, first to Viatka and then over the Ural Mountains to Ekaterinburg near Niki, though neither of them knew the other was so close, and then Sergei was shuttled a little farther north to Alapayevsk, a few hundred miles from Mikhail in Perm. Sergei was imprisoned in an old schoolhouse along with Alix’s sister and three sons of Grand Duke Konstantin. And I thought, Why have they concentrated all the Romanov men there in the Urals? But I knew the answer—that area was militantly Bolshevik, radically a
nti-tsarist, the miners and workers having slaved underground so long that they erupted like their red-hot furnaces. We received one letter from Sergei in which he tried to reassure me—he and the others were allowed to plant a vegetable garden and they could take their exercise in town, he and the Konstantin princes were teaching the schoolchildren to play soccer, a sport new to Russia, and he would surely teach it to Vova when he saw him again. On rainy days, he said, they read aloud to one another from War and Peace.