Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

Each day Vova pestered Sergei for news of the war and Vova had me wash his first-year cadet uniform daily, for that was all he would wear. But I gladly had it washed, glad he was at home with me and not at the military school where we had planned to send him this fall had the war not interrupted our plans. I was sorry about the war, but not sorry to have Vova home. Perhaps, like my father, who wanted to keep his children close, I, too, wanted my child at my side, where I could pet and cosset him and where I could perpetuate his undiluted love for me, having so little of it, even diluted, from the tsar. But there were other reasons to keep Vova near. Because of the loss of so many officers at the northern front, graduates of the military schools were being commissioned early and sent to replace them. Though our officers allowed their men in the infantry to crawl along the ground as they moved forward under machine gun fire, their Russian pride would not allow them to do the same, and so in their colorful uniforms the officers strode into battle and were easily gunned down, still gripping the lances and sabers and bayonets they never lived to use. So new officers, teenagers fresh from school, replaced them, and the infantry of the Second and Third armies replaced the soldiers of the First, and these men were barely trained—some did not even know how to hold their rifles—and the worst of them were garrisoned in our cities to protect us from the Germans. And when the war dragged on and revolutionary sentiment was reawakened, these barracked soldiers turned on us—as the men in the field turned on their young, inexperienced officers. But not yet—this was still to come.

What was it like to live in Peter during the war? At first it was not so different. The cannons at the Peter and Paul Fortress still marked the noon hour; the swans still skimmed the waters of the canals along the Champ de Mars. Tea parties marked name days and at christenings babies were baptized, the leaves turned first yellow and then gold, and after they fell, children fought with snowballs before the backdrop of a pink winter sky. Long carriages still ferried the little theater students to the Maryinsky in the evenings, and the tsar’s theaters still presented their seasons, for theater to us was like opium, though we at the Maryinsky returned now to the comfort of the old classics, pulling from the storage vaults our costumes, reminding ourselves of the choreography created by Didelot, Johansson, and early Petipa and Ivanov, divertissements we had almost forgotten how to dance, steps that dated back to tsars Alexander II and III, when the world we knew was comfortably secure, where one could find, in the words of an elderly court official, order, punctiliousness, symmetry . The opera company sang Boris Godunov and Don Quixote , and the Imperial Ballet danced Sylvia and La Fille du Pharaon , ballets about long-ago and faraway civilizations—ancient Greece and Rome and Egypt, once great civilizations now vanished. It’s ridiculous to point out the irony, yes? So I won’t.

But by the late fall of 1914, only a few of the young Guards who had walked our prospekts and danced at our balls still sat in the stalls of our theaters. There were no more rows of military tunics in the parterres and boxes, no medals gleaming in the footlights, and there were fewer shimmering jewels and evening dresses as their wearers also occupied themselves otherwise, running hospitals and forming charities. At the intervals when the houselights came on the audience demanded national anthems—at first just our own, but then also the French and the British as each country became a Russian ally, and our intervals soon became interminable, even by Russian standards. When the little students of Theater Street now looked out their windows onto the Maryinsky Theater Square, they saw recruits with bayonets at practice stabbing at dummies—uniforms stuffed with hay. The infantry marched in columns down Nevsky Prospekt to depart from Warsaw Station, and the men leaving were not only young men, but also men of thirty years or more, their wives trailing them until fatigue or grief made them give up and stop and simply stare after their husbands. The imperial family went to serve, as well, not because they were particularly gifted leaders, but because that was what their positions in the family demanded of them. The tsar’s brother Mikhail was called back to Russia only to be sent to the southwestern front to fight in Galicia, in a battle productive but horrible, a hundred versts piled high with the Russian dead and not enough living to clear the ground of their bodies. Niki’s older cousin Nikolasha continued to serve as commander in chief of the army. Vladimir’s three sons also served. Andrei went to the northwest front to headquarters, or Stavka, an old Russian name for the camp of a military chief, at Baranovichi, but I didn’t have long to miss him for the stress of the war made him ill with bronchitis and he soon came home. One would think living with Miechen would have prepared him better for battle, but since he was never able to stand up to her, this was just one more instance of overwhelming force inspiring Andrei to retreat. His brother Boris served as commander of the Ataman Cossacks. Kyril commanded the naval Garde Equipage. Sergei’s brother George went to Kiev to supervise evacuation of the wounded. Sergei, suffering from arthritis, remained in Petersburg to run the Artillery Department as inspector general, and the tsar himself moved between Tsarskoye Selo and Stavka, sometimes taking Alexei with him to see the spots Vova only looked at on his map—Galicia, Reval, Odessa—until a nosebleed in December 1915 nearly killed the tsarevich. I will tell you more about that later. And then, of course, inevitably, the dead and the wounded began to be returned to Peter, the dead put into rough, wooden coffins and the wounded into makeshift hospitals. Alix transformed the golden Armorial Hall at the Winter Palace into a huge ward, removing the glass cases of silver trophies and placing in their stead hundreds of hospital cots. And she turned a hall in Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo into yet another hospital, as well as two palaces in Moscow, and even a portion of the Feodorovsky Gorodsk at Tsarskoye Selo was made over into a lazaret. But for every man who called for the empress to hold his hand, there were a dozen others embarrassed to have her see them so vulnerable and ruined and a dozen more than that who were openly rude as the war went on. Not only she, but every woman of means opened a hospital, served as a nurse, or packed boxes to send to the front. Why, even I funded a hospital, though I did not nurse there, being no good with blood and amputations, but I visited the convalescing, helped them write letters home and performed for them my Russian dance, my ruskaya , and the men called me radouchka , bringer of joy, which I was! What could my enemies criticize about that?

By the beginning of 1915 the army began to run short not only of munitions, of bullets and rifles, but also of overcoats and uniforms and boots, and men could not shoot until the men in front of them were shot and they could snatch up their rifles. Eventually whole regiments of gunners could not even return fire, and they were stuck in the Carpathians without the means to fight their way down the other side into Hungary. By the summer, the Germans had quietly assembled in southern Poland and in May they began to bombard our men, who fought back with no cartridges or shells, but with their bare hands and bayonets, the Germans pushing us east, from Galicia and back out of Poland, our men running away in their fur caps and greatcoats and empty hands in a bloodbath that massacred 180,000 men, and Sergei feared the Germans might make it all the way to Moscow. At this Vova put his soldiers back in his box—there weren’t many left standing, anyway—rolled up his map and stashed it away, and the country exploded, looking to place the blame, not yet at the tsar—though the proverb says, A fish begins to stink from the head —but at everyone around him. Petersburg blamed for these disasters the inspector general of the Artillery, Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich; the war minister, Vladimir Sukhomlinov; and even, in its desperation, the imperial concubine, Mathilde Kschessinska. Yes, there were rumors that I took bribes of money and jewels to convince Sergei to throw business to friends, the Petersburg arms contractors and munitions factory owners and providers of matériel who came to my parties and who could not possibly fill all the orders they took, while the munitions factories in the provinces sat idle and eventually went bankrupt from lack of business. Articles appeared in the press saying I used artillery documents and privileged information from Sergei to better negotiate a price for my bribes—how else did I pay for my house?—and the president of the infernal Duma spoke out against me, against the thieving gang operating under cover of the grand duke’s name . Sergei’s brother Nicholas demanded Sergei break off all relations with me, accusing me of exploiting him for profit. I was greatly affronted! And all these rumors tingled the ears of the empress, who scribbled a note to Niki about them— There are very unclear, unclean stories about her and bribes which all speak about —a note I’m sure she purred while writing. Lewd poems about me and unflattering caricatures made the rounds of the capital—I, planted naked in bed with a bevy of grand dukes; I, surrounded by mounds of diamonds and rubies, fat munitions manufacturers laughing behind my sable-coated back while an army private shook his empty rifle in despair. As if I could be happy about this, about Warsaw, where my father and grandparents were buried, rotten with Germans! The uproar around me grew so great I had to leave for Strelna in May and could not return to the capital until late fall.