The Passion of Marie Romanov

by Laura Rose

  “Stand near,” Kharitonov advised Trupp. “The tsar could be torn apart when he tries to return home.”

  I almost fainted. I had feared for him. Surely, he would face a court trial, perhaps actual imprisonment, but torn apart? I cringed from completing the thought, but I knew my family history too well. Romanov blood had spilled all over Russia. My great-grandfather, Alexander II, had been assassinated right outside the Winter Palace, and my uncle Sergei as well. Both men had been blown to bits, disemboweled by bombs thrown at their carriages. I had grown up with the story of Papa’s visit to his grandfather’s death bed, when Alexander II lay, his entrails out, legs severed, in the Winter Place and Papa, then only a small boy, was brought in to kiss his grandfather farewell.

  But those deaths had been brought about by acts of terrorism; surely this new provisional government would show some restraint.

  “Perhaps exile?” Mama said. The civilized alternative to execution was exile. There were other former aristocrats who were relocated to distant countries. After all, Napoleon had not been beheaded but kept captive on Elba; many other world leaders were allowed to finish their lives in quiet isolation far from their homelands. I could not tell from Mama’s tone if she wished that being sent into exile might be the conclusion but I was soon to know her true feelings

  She said the words that perhaps sealed our fate— “I would rather die in Russia than live in exile.”

  And now as I write eighteen months later, perhaps Mama’s choice will be—what can I call it—fulfilled? The destinies of all seven of us brought to the inexorable conclusion such adamant decisions invite? I see the girl I was, standing on the rug in the Red Room, and I am, for the first time, outside myself.

  That our lives could change overnight did not seem possible, but they did. I looked at myself as if from a perch on the rococo ceiling, and saw this long-haired girl of seventeen, in a rumpled blouse and skirt, and I suffered uninvited premonitions that even now I dare not express. Voiced fear has an excellent chance to be realized, we all know that—it tempts the demons. It is best not to speak one’s terrors.

  “Our friend” taught us that everything can be predicted and perhaps I share his strange powers, if not his vices.

  Not me, I remember thinking. Surely not me. I will be spared.

  And there it was, my secret shame, that from the very beginning, I could not believe the ultimate horrors would be visited upon me, only on others, as the measles had spared me.

  And even then, I prayed—to be forgiven.

  FOOTSTEPS IN THE CORRIDOR

  The whispers became a wind. The empire was in the hands of the revolutionaries, and their soldiers were in the main rotunda of the palace. We felt the back draft; our battalions had defected to the rebel armies—some willingly, others by force and many servants had fled. The Romanov colors had been marched from the courtyard to who knows where? To ever fly again?

  Three hundred and four years of Romanov dynasty ended this way—with my father, the tsar, trapped in a train, miles away from us, and my family imprisoned in our palace. How long could the remaining uncertain line of soldiers prevent the revolution from invading our very rooms? That was the sickening unknown.

  When I last saw the Duma Chief Rodzianko, he was facing off with Mama in the Red Room. I had entered in the midst of their argument. Mama was saying, “It is out of the question. I cannot travel with the children; they are far too ill.”

  Again, he recommended that she leave with all of us. He raised the possibility that we would be reunited with Papa down the train line, but he also made no illusion regarding our condition—we were prisoners of this new “Provisional Government.”

  Then he used the word that would always be applied to this first revolution— “Bloodless,” the fat man said. “You are most fortunate. It could well have gone another way.”

  Standing there, I felt a prickle and saw, in my mind’s eyes, the tableau of Marie Antoinette upon the guillotine.

  “Bloodless indeed,” Mama said, undaunted, and I knew she conferred another meaning. “Who has so little concern for sick children? Why is the tsar not allowed to return home? We have expected him for a week!”

  Rodzianko leaned closer to her and lowered his voice. “Protect yourself, Madame Romanov, and never use the title tsar again. I say this for your own safety.”

  Mama appeared stunned, as if this was more than she could absorb.

  Seeing Mama lose her authority in this way made me lose my own composure. I darted back to the hallway, pursued and then preceded by my phantom. My body began to shake, almost like an epileptic’s, and I felt a need to wrap myself in the maroon draperies which cordoned off the hall. Lili Dehn came upon me and saw at once that I was in danger of a nervous collapse, if I had not already undergone such.

  “No, Marie,” she said, grasping me by both shoulders. “You cannot give in to this fear and sorrow. Your mother needs you; your sisters and brother need you. Your mother has told me herself how she depends on you now. ‘Marie is my legs!’ she said. You must continue to be under control, to assist her.”

  I am embarrassed to say that I wept on Lili Dehn’s bosom, clinging to the lady-in-waiting. From where did she get her strength, her iron will? How could she not collapse herself, so far from her young son?

  Lili Dehn did help me—there are moments when the embrace of another is the best cure, perhaps the only cure—and I gathered myself under control. “Of course, for Mama, for Shvybz, for the others, I must be strong.” I had only one more timid child’s question. “Will the soldiers break into our rooms?”

  Lili Dehn gripped me hard, her nails in my shoulders. “And if they do?”

  “I must be strong. But what if I can’t be?”

  “You are as strong as you need to be,” Lili Dehn said. “You are your mother’s daughter and you will draw on her power.”

  “I must believe that,” I said. It was all so terrible, so bizarre that our familiar rooms might be occupied by these uncouth rebels. I could now hear them, stomping boots in the halls, coarse voices shouting.

  There were sounds of the soldiers greeting one another, embracing our own defected guards. “Newborn citizens of freedom, we congratulate you!” was the loud cry that echoed through the halls, audible even within the Red Room.

  What would happen next? We closed the door to the Red Room. Without the lift, we could guard the single stair, the only access to the Children’s Wing.

  Our family apartment became the final bastion. Of course, we were helpless—women and children, elderly men, servants, tutors, dogs and cats and one parrot (in Papa’s bathroom). Popov, the giant grey parrot, shrieked a nonsense greeting in Russian. From her alcove downstairs, Anya Vyrubova whined and cried, “What about me? What about me?” She was as farcical and repetitive as the great bird.

  For the first time in my memory, Mama seemed paralyzed, unable to choose the next line of action.

  “They will take Alexei from me,” she kept saying. “They will take him from me.” That is the moment, as best I can recall it, that her legs most seriously failed her and she sank backward into her wheeling chair. From that day forth, Mama rose only under duress.

  Lili Dehn took charge of Mama and though her low voice was respectful as ever, the lady-in-waiting had a new insistence when she addressed us. “Burn your private papers before they can seize them.”

  “I shall be arrested then?” Mama asked, her voice as uncertain as a small child’s. I turned and looked at her—I had never heard Mama uncertain, ever. I began to shake again; her strength was my strength. I had the urge to hide under a settee but I remained firm on my promise to Lili Dehn.

  “I shall be arrested then?” Mama repeated.

  Lili’s silence was her answer.

  So, I thought, they are the new citizens of freedom, and we are the new prisoners.

  “Burn all the letters and journals before they are taken as evidence.” Mama repeated Lili Dehn’s instruction.

  Mama asked
to be wheeled into the Mauve Room to her great Heppelwhite desk and we returned with a stack of diaries and loose papers. She looked down as she read and I saw her lips move, almost as reverently as in prayer as she murmured aloud her old entries. “Soul of my soul,” she whispered, “love of my life.” She looked up, her eyes filling. “My diary as a girl; I was twelve when I met Papa.”

  For a moment, I saw my mother as a child. For the briefest bit of time, the twelve-year-old Alix of Hesse was in the room, the solemn girl who had stood at the sickbeds of her mother and sister and watched them die of diphtheria. Mama seemed to grow smaller before my eyes.

  “You must destroy as much correspondence as possible,” Lili Dehn urged.

  That was when we heard them come closer, louder—the footsteps in the corridor. They were heavy-booted, and the steps did not have the disciplined click-clack of our own officers’ routine patrols down the hall. Yet we knew we still had many guards devoted to us who, though now under the aegis of the revolution, would do their best to block the invasion of our private rooms. We tensed, listening. The boots paused and then went on.

  My mother returned to her body, grew back into her bones and skin and straightened. “Yes, of course,” she said and picked up her silk-covered diary and threw it into the hearth. With increasing speed, she began hurling papers, diaries, books into the fireplace.

  “Yes, of course, I must burn anything that they could hold against Papa. I must not look.”

  We spent that first day and night under “their” rule throwing as much of our personal papers as we could into the flaming hearth of the Red Room. Books are not easy to burn—the leather spines resist the fire. We worked hard ripping the bindings. I watched as letters, diaries were torn and tossed into the flames, which consumed them with a roaring greed and crackle. We were, in a sense, inhaling the smoke of memory and being warmed by the heat of our own destroyed lives.

  I look back, as I must, to survive my present situation (if indeed, that is possible). I can see that night marked the end of life as I knew it, and the start of this new, precarious existence.

  There was the scent of smoke and ash, the orange glow of the ravenous flames—and the sound of those marching boots in the corridors. Every time they passed, the steps seemed to come closer to the door. Inside, our motions accelerated, tossing the papers, burning, burning.

  When the footsteps did stop, they stopped at the door of the Red Room, and then came the pounding knock. Setting a precedent for late-night intrusion, it was ten p.m. The messenger announced that the minister of war for the Provisional Government, A. Guchkov, insisted on his audience with the former tsarina, and was on his way to the palace with General Kornilov and a party of twenty men who would make up the new municipality.

  My mother, no longer titled the tsaritsa or empress, now officially known only as Alexandra Feodorovna Romanov, or Madame Romanov, immediately called for Grand Duke Paul, but he had gone to bed. We waited in an agony of suspense for Grand Duke Paul to appear. We had no idea what the minister of war might do or order when he arrived at the palace. I was wondering at the semi formality of the messenger’s announcement when the door to the Red Room was forced open and the invasion was, at last, upon us.

  It was midnight and the revolution entered our private rooms.

  THE BLOODLESS REVOLUTION

  I learned so much that midnight. I think that was the hour my childhood ended, and along with it, my innocence or ignorance—depending on how one regards my prior lack of knowledge of what had been happening in our country. When the enemy marches across the red rug of your family salon, one wakes up quite quickly to the hard facts of reality and revolution.

  The Revolution arrived in the Red Room in the form of two men—Minister of War Alexander Guchkov and General Lavr Kornilov. They were hardly a pair; two men could not be less alike. Minister of War Guchkov, short and bearded, was grotesque as an insect, his eyes magnified by heavy yellow spectacles, too large for his thin face. General Lavr Kornilov was of the weathered, coppery-colored, lean warrior type I recognized from the Cossack Convoi. The Cossack Convoi was the military Imperial division, made up of Cossacks who were a mixed race, descended from the Asian Tatars of the Steppes, and famous as tribal fighters, adept at fierce saber and knife play. General Lavr Kornilov was half-Asian, a Cossack by his Tatar blood and military service. He had commanded an exotic and unusually fierce division from Kazakhstan. General Lavr Kornilov was fascinating to look at, I will say.

  That night, I hated and feared these two men. That night, Mama wished that she could have had them hanged. I could not know that in a few months we would have crueler “masters.” I would come to regard that first night, those early exchanges as highly civilized, compared with what followed and what we face now. And perhaps I was mistaken but I thought I detected a gleam of sympathy and interest in General Kornilov’s slanted eyes. Which side was he on? remained a question and his narrow gaze and moustached unsmiling mouth gave meaning to the word inscrutable. In our new existence, nothing was as it appeared to be—I could not tell who might protect my family and who might annihilate us.

  Revolution is just that—an upturning of the existing government. The forces which spearhead such a movement are not what one could expect; the process itself spawns the original iconoclast and unknown fighters. I was unprepared, as were Mama, Lili Dehn, and the members of our suite who remained, for what followed.

  Viewed beside Guchkov and Kornilov, I saw my great-uncle, Grand Duke Paul, through a different perspective. In my blissful past, I had always regarded the adults such as Grand Duke Paul as benevolent and all-knowing. Now, as my great-uncle stumbled, unshaven, tucking in his shirt and muttering his excuses, I saw him as something more dangerous.

  As Grand Duke Paul bowed, showing his bald pate to the intruders, I saw at once that while Grand Duke Paul might be milder mannered than Grand Duke Cyril or Grand Duke Nikolasha, who had forsaken us, he would not protect us. Count Benckendorff alone seemed to stand between Mama and the forces of the new regime. The silver-haired count kept his dignity as he recited his grievances and frustrations.

  “All of the envois we sent to you are arrested,” he said. “Anyone we send to speak with you vanishes. We cannot telephone. We have been living in constant dread and fear for two days and nights, unable to rest or properly care for the sick here in the palace, never knowing if we will be seized or forcibly moved.”

  At this moment, Mama resumed control and I was in awe of her once more. I knew how badly she needed to sit in her wheeling chair, but she forced herself to stand, holding the armrests. She had donned a fresh nurse’s uniform and stood, dressed in her crisp white pinafore, in the center of that red rug, confronting the representatives of the revolution. She spoke first as a mother.

  “My children lie sick upstairs, gravely sick.” Her level gaze did not seek sympathy; she said this in a flat tone, with her old authority. “It is crucial to their survival that the sick children not be disturbed. I ask that our troops who have chosen to guard us be allowed to remain.”

  The man to whom these complaints were addressed? Guchkov was the spokesman for this “delegation” and I found him odd, unresponsive. I saw Mama’s face reflected in Guchkov’s outsized spectacles and his eyes were obscured, but he must have been inwardly affected by my mother’s statement, for he said that both her remarks and Count Benckendorff’s were “well-founded.” Now, knowing he had been regarded as the enemy by Mama for so long, that he had been adamant against “our friend,” I have to concede that he was fair; he was a gentleman. He announced a truce of sorts—that he would send an officer who would be our intermediary between the palace and the Provisional Government. Guchkov’s politeness, though lacking any warmth, was reassuring. He asked if we had enough medical supplies for the invalids.

  Mama replied that we did and she also requested that the town hospitals of Tsarskoe Selo be provided with everything they needed.

  Guchkov promised that this should be done and
that he would give all the assistance he could, reminding us that he had been the head of the Red Cross (which was emblazoned on Mama’s pinafore). He took his leave by one a.m. and the entire visit took on the illogical aura of a dream. We were prisoners, I understood, yet we would be respected and unharmed.

  “Bloodless revolution” it did seem to be; but no sooner did we have contact than communications reached us that more of our dear friends were arrested and their homes burned. And it must be said that their blood, the hot blood of the revolutionaries, had been spilled on the snow. Uncounted rebels had died, shot by the Palace Guard. In the morning, I was startled to witness the first of “the Red Funerals.”

  Our governess, Sophie Buxhoeveden, who had rushed from Petrograd to rejoin us, was assisting in the nursing of the invalids when she happened to look out the hallway window. Her gasp alerted me to an arresting sight: a funeral procession was passing through the palace park. The rebels were carrying crimson-colored coffins; scarlet banners waved. The funeral procession snaked round the snow-packed trails like a river of blood.

  PRISONERS OF THE PALACE

  In those first days, our family imprisonment suffered most from suspense—we were concerned with the recovery of the sick children, the return of Papa, the measure of “punishment” or confinement we might be subjected to by this new regime. We were under orders that we would soon be forced to leave our home in the Alexander Palace, but as each day and night passed, the departure and destination continued to be a gnawing mystery, and at last, as is the human condition, we accepted each day as our way of life. And our routine, grotesque though it was, became just that—an accepted daily pattern, but no sense of well-being returned and we spent wakeful nights and worried days awaiting news of our fate.