Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

So, on May 9, the tsar and the court rode the four miles from Petrovsky Palace to the Kremlin. Members of the Imperial Horse Guards, the Dragoon Guards, the Hussar and Lancer Guards, the Grenadier Guards, and the Life Guards Ulan Regiments stood in lines two men thick, the mounted Cossacks behind them and the Moscow police behind them , at the sides of the road all the way from the Tver Gate to the Nikolsky, all of them charged with protecting the life of the tsar—during his father’s coronation the police uncovered various assassination plots, one that even had bombs concealed in the caps of the terrorists, and so the tradition of throwing one’s cap in the air as the sovereign passed by was banned. But Niki’s father’s coronation had followed his own father’s murder and those times of unrest were long behind us now. Alexander III had died in an armchair, not in the street. The avenues had been hung with bunting to welcome Niki, and ribbons of blue, white, and red, the colors of our flag, dried slowly in the sun on their poles in the square. The buildings all along his route had been whitewashed just for him and clippings from pine trees had been strung, for good luck, over the doorways that faced the road, their scent stingingly, acridly fresh in the nostrils of those of us who waited, one million of us, flags in our hands, to see the new tsar and to be transported by the vision.

Yes, I was there, leaning out the window of my hotel, above the herds of peasant women who wore their kerchiefs knotted under their chins, the fabrics yellow or brightly printed or striped, above the smarter of the women who opened parasols against the sun, above the city girls, more fashionable, who wore hats with ribbons made to stand in fat bows or sprigs of flowers—I saw one woman in a pointed hat that made her look like a Pierrot—all of them as excited as if they were at a circus, and who doesn’t like a circus?

We could hear the parade long before it reached us—the twenty-one-gun salute that rang out at the commencement of the processional, the obligatory sounding of the church bells, hundreds of bells ringing Russian style, the ropes pulling the clappers to the bells, not swinging the bells against the clappers, and then the hurrahs of the crowd ahead of us, the thudding of boots and horses, the trumpets and drums of the court orchestra who strode with the costumed men. The Imperial Guard came by us first, in their golden helmets, then the Cossacks with their sabers, the Moscow nobility, the orchestra behind them, the Imperial Hunt, the master of the horse and the master of the hounds, various platoons of Asiatics in the costumes of their subjugated provinces, because after all, we are a vast people, we reach far east and far west, far north and far south—the court footmen in their white powdered wigs, the black Abyssinian Guards in their tasseled caps and embroidered tunics, the Petersburg court in full military regalia traveling in carriages or phaetons, then Niki on his gray charger, Norman, onto whose hooves had been nailed silver shoes that, like my little shoes, now stand in a museum as historical objects. Behind Niki rolled the grand dukes in their gilded carriages, Sergei among them, and then the red and gold carriage of Catherine the Great, a replica of her crown mounted to the top of it, pulled by eight horses, that ferried the dowager empress, weeping because only thirteen years ago it had been her husband’s coronation and her own. Behind her carriage, another one: the gold carriage of the Truly Believing Alexandra Fedorovna, her face stony and unsmiling, because the crowds grew silent and suspicious as she passed. Put up your hand and wave, you fool , I thought. Smile . Did she think she was the only one ever to perform before a hostile audience?—why, with all the intrigues at the theater and all the claques of the balletomanes who cheered their favorite dancers and booed the rest, I had learned long ago to smile into the faces of my enemies, to woo them into my camp. If only that had been me in that carriage. I would have stuck my arms out the windows and waggled my fingers. But Alix had not learned my lessons, and by the end of the procession at Cathedral Square, when she and Niki bowed to their people three times on the Red Staircase, Sergei told me she was openly weeping, the idiot. Behind her came the carriages of the other grand duchesses, who knew how to behave better, and then all the various foreign princes on horseback. A gang of princes , as Niki described them in his journal, princes from Germany, England, France, Greece, Italy, Denmark, Romania, Bulgaria, Japan, all there to witness what would be the coronation of the last tsar of Russia.

The processions were filmed, you know, for the first time in Russian history, by the two brothers Lumière of the Lumière Cinéma tographe, who cranked by hand their movie cameras. But the black-and-white film and photographs of the time cannot capture this event. Any grand moment is diminished by a photograph—all is small and brown and silent. But it was anything but silent or brown as the horses and carriages and regiments trooped past us in a shimmering undulation of red, purple, green, silver, and gold, so much gold that this must have been what it was like to gawk at the court of Louis XIV at Versailles. I wonder sometimes what happened to all of those steps, all of those programs, all of those costumes, all of those scripts spoken by the priests and the sovereigns. Are they packed away somewhere, diagrammed, preserved? No matter. They have not been needed again. That day the women below me raised their arms and cheered as Niki passed and men all along the route fell to their knees and called out, We would die for our tsar! They thought he belonged to them and their desire to die for him proved that. But I watched silently as he rode past my hotel window, a stranger to me, my face a pale cousin to his. He had no idea I floated above him. He gripped the reins in his left hand, right hand raised in a permanent salute to all and no one in particular. To symbolize his humility, as he entered the Kremlin and the formal beginning of his reign he wore his plain army tunic. He could play at being humble only because no one else and nothing else around him did, lest anyone mistake the new tsar’s humility for weakness. But he rode in the middle of a spectacle so vast, so gaudy, so proud, that I’m afraid a glint of it must have reached up to heaven and pierced the eye of God.

Yes, I was in Moscow for the coronation of the last Tsar, the last Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, Tsar of Moscow, Kiev, Vladimir, Novgorod, Kazan, Astrakhan, of Poland, Siberia, of Tauric Chersonese, of Georgia, Lord of Pskov, Grand Duke of Smolensk, of Lithuania, Volhynia, Podolia and Finland, Prince of Estonia, Livonia, Courland and Semigalia, Samogotia, Bialystok, Karelia, Tver, Yougouria, Perm, Viatka, Bulgaria, Lord and Grand Duke of Lower Novgorod, of Tchernigov, Riazan, Polotsk, Rostov, Yaroslav, Belozero, Oudoria, Obdoria, Condia, Vitebsk, Mstislav, and all the region of the North, Lord and Sovereign of the countries of Iveria, Cartalinia, Kabardinia, and the provinces of Armenia, Sovereign of the Circassian Princes and the Mountain Princes, Lord of Turkestan, Heir of Norway, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, of Storman, of the Ditmars and of Oldenbourg.

It would have been easier to list what he was not emperor of.

Of course, I was not among the two thousand guests invited to the Cathedral of the Assumption for the actual coronation itself, nor was I on the guest list for any of the breakfasts or luncheons or dinners or military reviews or balls. No, I watched the processions with the common crowd and with them pressed toward the Grand Kremlin Palace to see the spectacle of lights that evening. Great projectors sent beams of flashing white into the sky and across the balcony that overlooked the left bank of the Moskva River where Niki and Alix stepped out, so illuminated, to greet the crowd. The mayor of the city presented a bouquet of flowers on a silver salver to the new empress and when she took the tray from him a hidden switch sent its message to the Moscow power station which in turn sent its current back again to light up all at once the little bulbs of red, green, blue, and purple that had been strung along the steeple of St. John the Great and all the cupolas and roofs and ledges of the churches and all the trees in the courtyards and all the tall buildings within the Kremlin. I whooped with the rest of them, but really, it was an old trick. At Easter, the priests at St. Isaac’s laid a long oiled string across the tops of the dormant votive candles that lined the cornices and encircled the dome of the cathedral, all far above the congregation. At midnight, the string was lit at one end and a flame coursed about the church, lighting the wick of every candle in turn, the lighting of them an echo of the miracle of the Resurrection. Why was it arranged for Alix to perform a similar miracle? Why, to make her seem divine to a people who wished to believe she was so, to make it seem that it was her will that made the city sparkle, that from her palm alone blew the magic dust that turned Moscow into a fairyland. And what did she think, this German princess, when she looked out on the lit-up ancient capital from which the first Rus princes ruled this part of the world? Did she believe herself then truly Russian? Because she never would be.