The Russians Collection

by Michael Phillips

  Yuri Sergeiovich Fedorcenko (Christinin)—elder son of Anna and Sergei

  Andrei Sergeiovich Fedorcenko (Christinin)—younger son of Anna and Sergei

  Countess Mariana Dmitrievna Remizov—daughter of Katrina and Dmitri; adopted daughter of Anna and Sergei

  Stephan Alexandrovich Kaminsky—friend of Mariana

  Daniel Trent—American reporter; friend of Mariana

  Archibald Trent—Daniel’s father; American industrialist

  Count Dmitri Gregorovich Remizov—Mariana’s father

  Count Karl Cyrilovich Vlasenko—son of Cyril

  George Cranston—manager of the Register’s Russian office

  Louis and Ludmila Durocq—boardinghouse landlords

  Helen Westchester—boardinghouse resident

  Emil Zorav—boardinghouse resident

  Alla Gittelmacher—boardinghouse resident

  Dr. Aleksei Petrovskij—boardinghouse resident

  Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin)—revolutionary; friend of Paul

  Countess Eugenia Pavlovna Remizov—Dmitri’s mother; Mariana’s grandmother

  Peter—Viktor Fedorcenko’s valet

  Jacob Woyinsky—Viktor’s accountant

  Princess Marya Nicolaievna Gudosnikov—Fedorcenko family friend

  Oleg Chavkin—friend from Katyk

  Dmitri Sipiagin—Minister of the Interior

  Raisa and Talia Sorokin—mother and daughter; friends of Anna and Sergei

  1

  (1881–1894)

  An old Russian fable tells of the mythical Tsar Dadone. In his warlike youth he was the terror of all the neighboring countries, invading the regions and making constant war upon them. But in his old age he grew weary of war, and his enemies, perceiving this change as weakness, took the opportunity to retaliate against Dadone. Thus his realm knew no peace and incurred heavy losses from all its enemies.

  “How can this continue?” the tsar raged. “I am losing my empire, piece by piece!”

  After many sleepless nights, he called for help from his friend, a eunuch who was a sage and wise counselor. The eunuch presented a gift to the tsar, a golden cockerel.

  “Just place this cockerel on the weathervane of your highest tower,” he advised. “He will be your protector. When there is a threat of war, he will sound an alarm. But if there is no danger to your country, he will remain still and quiet.”

  “Oh, thank you, my true friend!” exclaimed the tsar. He rewarded the eunuch with bags of gold and promised him, “Because of what you have done, I will grant you your dearest wish.”

  “Thank you, Your Majesty. I will give much consideration to your offer before acting upon it.”

  The years passed and the cockerel served the tsar well, constantly foiling the attacks of his enemies until no one dared to provoke him again. Peace reigned in Dadone’s kingdom. The cockerel was silent. And Dadone took his leisure and spent his waning years at rest.

  Then one day a loud “Cockadoodledoo!” rang through Dadone’s capital. Dadone raised an army, led by his eldest son, to ride in the direction the cockerel had pointed. Peace settled once more over the capital and Dadone assumed that the danger had passed.

  Suddenly the cockerel crowed again. The tsar sent out yet another army, this one led by his second son. Again, days passed with no word from this second army, and the tsar and all the people wondered what could have become of them.

  “Cockadoodledoo!” cried the golden cockerel a third time.

  A third army was sent to the rescue, with the tsar himself in command. They traveled toward the east for many days, crossing a treacherous mountain pass. Finally, in the distance on the top of a grassy knoll, they saw a brightly colored pavilion. But as they made their way to the tent, they came upon the remains of the first two armies, surrounded by vultures picking at the bones of the brave soldiers. In the midst of this carnage the tsar found his two sons, both dead, each felled by the other’s sword.

  “Oh, what a dark day this is!” wailed the tsar. “Both my sons are dead—what good is my own life!”

  As he grieved, a young woman appeared from inside the pavilion. She was more beautiful than the richest treasure, lovelier than the glow of springtime. The sight of her made Dadone forget all about his dead sons and his grief. She introduced herself as the Princess Chamakhan and bid the tsar to enter her pavilion. He gave in to her wishes and spent a whole week reveling in her bewitching charms.

  Finally he returned to the capital, taking the beautiful princess with him. At the gate he saw his friend the eunuch beckoning to him.

  “Ah, my friend and counselor,” greeted the tsar. “Is there something you wish of me?”

  “Your most exalted Excellency, I do indeed have a request to make. If you recall, many years ago you promised that for my services you would grant me a wish. I would now like to avail myself of that boon.”

  “And what is your wish?” asked Dadone expansively.

  “Give me the Princess Chamakhan!”

  The tsar gaped in astonishment at this most unexpected request. “You must be crazy, man! That’s asking too much. You may have anything else, even to half my kingdom,” he shouted, “but you cannot expect me to give up my princess to you!”

  “I want nothing else.”

  The tsar began to rage with fury, and when the eunuch stood his ground, Dadone raised his scepter and swung it at his friend, striking him dead. Mounted on her white steed, the princess watched the confrontation, and seeing the eunuch struck down, she began to laugh.

  The tsar rode on. As he entered the city gates, the sound of fluttering wings overtook him. The golden cockerel left his perch and landed on top of the tsar’s head. With a single lethal motion, the animal pecked Dadone’s skull and split it open so that he instantly bled to death. And with that the Princess Chamakhan disappeared. Many people wondered if she had ever really existed. Others swore, however, that the tinkling sounds of feminine laughter filled the air for many days afterward.

  2

  The ancient Russian tale warns against protection gone awry. The mythical Dadone lived in peace while the cockerel stood guard, sounding a loud “Cockadoodledoo!” to warn of the approach of enemies. The mighty tsar had a fine rest, depending more and more on the magical bird. And, in the end, inaction rather than incompetence led to his final demise.

  Perhaps the story of Dadone rose up in the thoughts of the masses of Russians as they watched the grim funeral procession of their batiushka, their “Little Father,” who had been brutally murdered in the streets of their capital in March of 1881. Alexander II had been close, so very close, to initiating sweeping reform. But he had hesitated, reluctant to concede the ancient traditions of the tsardom.

  Tsar Dadone was finally deceived not by armies but by the beautiful and mysterious Princess Chamakhan. So caught was he in the power of her evil mystique that he did not recognize that she had murdered his sons or perceive that the cockerel’s cries warned him of her. When the eunuch discerned her evil spell and demanded her as his payment, the tsar killed his faithful friend rather than give up the princess.

  Similarly, the last tsars of Russia clung to the beguiling spell of their own power, and those who raised a voice of reason and warning were destroyed rather than honored.

  But following the death of Alexander II, it seemed that those prophets of doom might have been mistaken after all. By all appearances the cockerel still stood sentinel. The reign of the murdered tsar’s successor, Alexander III, seemed tranquil enough, almost as if some magical force were indeed overseeing the affairs of the mighty Russia. For thirteen years Russia was free from major wars and the paralyzing strife caused by terrorists and revolutionaries.

  The people, however, could not see that the pervading peace was obtained by a heavy fist, not a benevolent heart. Under a thin veil of tranquility, the disenchanted and discontented still existed, even if in obscurity. Lenin and Trotsky and Kerensky, still boys at the ascension of Alexander III, had yet to raise thei
r voices of radicalism. Peace reigned. The cockerel was silent.

  Alexander III could have been the leader Russia had been waiting for. A towering six and a half feet tall, he liked making a show of his physical power with strong-man antics such as bending iron rods and horseshoes. Once, at a dinner party, the subject of trouble in the Balkans had arisen, and the Austrian ambassador had hinted that his country could mobilize two or three corps. Alexander responded by calmly taking a fork in his hands, twisting it into a knot, and tossing it onto the ambassador’s plate. “That is what I intend to do about your two or three corps,” he said.

  The tsar was a private man, seldom appearing in public. When he did, looking like the definitive Russian bear itself, he made an excellent show of it. But in the modern age, nearing the advent of a new century, physical prowess in a ruler was not enough. People expected initiative, vigor, and imagination—qualities that Alexander III sadly lacked.

  His reign commenced with a manifesto that, to a government poised on the brink of constitutional reform, amounted to a slap in the face.

  “We are constrained by the voice of God commanding us to continue the task of governing with resolve and fortitude, relying on Divine Providence, with unwavering conviction in the strength and truth of autocratic power, of which we have been called upon to preserve and protect for the good of the people.”

  He immediately lost Loris-Melikov, who had been only a heartbeat away from initiating drastic reform in Russia. Melikov resigned straightaway. Others among the more forward-thinking government servants soon followed—including General Dmitri Milyutin, who had almost single-handedly wrenched the Russian army from its archaic disorganization.

  Government influence seemed to be left in the hands of men like the utterly fanatical reactionary Constantine Pobedonostev, who had been Alexander III’s tutor. The key position of Minister of the Interior was bestowed on Count Ignatiev, the avowed Panslav who had distinguished himself during the Balkan crisis of 1877.

  The one true visionary to rise to influence in Alexander III’s court was Count Sergius Witte, but his crude, pompous craftiness earned him as much derision as applause. Under Witte, however, Russian railway construction peaked with the near-completion of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Industry began to expand and the nearly bankrupt Russian economy started to show signs of revitalization.

  An utterly new phenomenon began to rise in Russia—a working class. This concept was so alien in Russia that once when Witte happened to mention it to Pobedonostev, the old imperial tutor replied: “I have never heard of anything in Russia called a ‘working class,’ Sergius Yulevich.” Pobedonostev sneered contemptuously. “Russia is its peasantry if it is anything, and that forms ninety percent of the population. A small number of these happen to be employed in factories, but they are peasants just the same. You, my dear count, are attempting to create something that is totally alien to Russia. And I must say, Sergius Yulevich, that you are flirting dangerously with socialism.”

  Witte sighed. He had seen it before—this narrow-mindedness that plagued the dreams of the new Russian visionaries.

  Meanwhile, Alexander III encouraged a fervent nationalism. Despite his own German ancestry, he had a passion for all things Russian. During his reign, non-Russians in the empire suffered more than they had under any other tsar. Even Russian-born citizens of differing religious beliefs were swept into the net of persecution. Russian Muslims were harassed and persecuted, but not nearly as much as Christian sects that had spurned Orthodoxy. Baptists, Mennonites, Uniats of Western lands, and above all, Catholics were treated as heretics, with little hope of finding mercy at the hand of the patriarch of the Orthodox Church, old Pobedonostev himself. But the Jewish population received the harshest lash of the nationalistic whip. These so-called “murderers of Christ” became the victims of sanctioned violence and organized pogroms.

  “Although I have no sympathy for the Jews when they receive beatings,” Alexander admitted, “nevertheless we cannot permit this practice.”

  But it was permitted.

  And the revolutionary movement began to swell with a new element—the Jewish population. Before the reign of Alexander III, they had not been deeply involved in the radical movement, even though they had often been accused of radical fervor. But persecution upon persecution drove them at last into the arms of the revolution.

  Although the repression of revolutionary activities gave a false appearance of national stability, the revolutionary ranks nevertheless began to expand in many new directions during Alexander III’s reign. Many rank and file Russian citizens, particularly the growing working classes whose existence Pobedonostev had so vehemently denied, were becoming disenchanted with the government, especially the autocracy. A growing contingent of the liberal-minded noble classes also began to align themselves with radical movements.

  After devastating crop failures and accompanying famine in the nineties, staunch peasant loyalty to the tsar also seriously eroded. Only the firm resolve and iron fist of the unbending tsar held the country together. And given a few more years, it might have been enough.

  But only thirteen years into his reign, the powerful Tsar Alexander III, the image of virility and strength, suddenly fell ill. On a dark November day, he died.

  The death of the sovereign at age forty-nine was a shock to the entire country, but most of all to his son and heir. Nicholas Alexandrovich, only twenty-six, had dreaded this moment all his life.

  To his brother-in-law, Nicholas lamented, “What am I going to do? What is to become of us now, Sandro? I never wanted to be tsar, and I am not prepared to be one. I don’t even know how to talk to the ministers.”

  Was Nicholas destined to fulfill the role of the mythical Dadone—constrained within a power structure for which he was not suited, committed to crumbling traditions without the ears to hear the cries of warning, or the courage to heed them?

  But whatever the so-called fates might mete out to him, Nicholas II was bound not only to tradition but to his own inner sense of sacred duty as well. He was called to do what every Romanov heir had done for nearly three hundred years. He must take up the crown and rule. . . .

  1

  The month of May stretched a benevolent springtime hand over the Russian landscape. Upon the broad steppes new shoots of grass pushed through the muddy earth to wave in the brisk, pleasant air. Peasant farmers began the arduous task of plowing the rich black loam, preparing it to receive the seeds of autumn’s harvest. Farther north, in the vast forests, wildflowers bloomed through the snow as warmth penetrated the thick mesh of branches and leaves. Even the icy tundra took on a different appearance, welcoming new green shoots and brief, dazzling signs of life.

  But in the heart of true Russia, in the ancient city of Moscow, the newness of spring led to the welcoming in not of a season but of a new ruler.

  The year of mourning for the dead Alexander III was over. His heir was about to be crowned.

  Even a pragmatic and cynical man could not deny the singular honor of this occasion. To Cyril Vlasenko, riding in the coronation procession with the ranking Russian nobility was the crowning achievement of his career. This ought to impress even the likes of his haughty cousin Prince Viktor Fedorcenko.

  Mounted astride his spirited charcoal stallion, obtained at no small expense from a famed Cossack horse breeder, Cyril felt he had finally arrived. He was decked out in the stunning blue-green uniform of the Preobrajensky Guard—he had purchased a commission in the prestigious regiment, also at no small expense. But he knew every kopeck had been well spent when he learned that the tsar would be garbed in the regalia of the Preobrajensky for the coronation ceremony. Gold braid hung from Cyril’s shoulders, and across his ponderous chest he proudly sported the blue sash of the Order of St. Vladimir. He had actually earned this honor—though mostly by ingratiating himself by any means possible to ministers and other important government officials. He might not have the shimmering rows of jeweled medals across his chest like many of
the nobles accompanying him, but he was satisfied enough with his other gains in the last fifteen years.

  He glanced around at the mobs of spectators lining the four-mile route of the Imperial procession. Thousands upon thousands had poured into the city for the great event, and the squadrons of Cossacks had their work cut out keeping the excited people in tow. Cyril swelled within at the boisterous cheers almost as if they were being offered for him alone. It never occurred to him that if it were he alone, the crowds would be more inclined to attack than cheer him. His past association with the police had not made him especially popular with the people.

  Cyril Vlasenko, however, cared less than nothing for the “people,” that overly glorified symbol of the Russian spirit.

  What had always mattered to Cyril in the past, what continued to drive him even now, was the acceptance by the men who this moment surrounded him—men of power and influence and wealth. He had striven for their acceptance, fought, lied, cheated, and stolen for it. He had earned it.

  He thought about the last fifteen years. In hindsight, he congratulated himself on his great wisdom during the reign of Alexander II, when he had chosen to curry the favor of the tsarevich instead of the tsar. He had not openly alienated the tsar—heaven forbid! But since the tsarevich’s conservative political stance aligned more closely to Cyril’s, it had been natural to lean toward his camp.

  When Alexander II had been assassinated, Cyril had mourned with as much shock and grief as anyone. But down deep he was exhilarated. The new tsar, Alexander III, would not forget his past friends when he ascended the throne. And Cyril was thus carried closer to the coveted inner circles of power.

  First, he had been promoted to Assistant to the Supervisor of the state police. He had contributed to the writing of “The Statutes for the Protection of State Security and Social Order,” in which nearly every manner of political action was effectively banned. In later revisions, the document gave governors-general immense latitude in overriding the law, thus offering them potential for great individual power. This provision worked greatly to Cyril’s advantage when he had been elevated to the governor-generalship of a small Ukrainian province.