Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

But to be honest, what did I know of factories—of their capacity for production? I had thought it made no difference if this factory or that one made the bullets and so I had asked Sergei to offer the arms contracts to our friends, men we knew, the ones who came to Kronversky Prospekt with their gifts and their old-world manners. Better than strangers to have them, right? Who was better to trust? While I hid at Strelna, Sergei was forced to resign from the Artillery Department and was sent to Baranovichi, where stripped of his official duties he had nothing to do but grow a vegetable garden, smoke cigars with Niki, and putter about like an old man, taking long walks in the forest as if there were not a war on and this were not headquarters but some kind of sanatorium. Now Vova and I could not see him and my son wept himself to sleep. The unfortunate Sukhomlinov, who did not have the luck to be a cousin of the tsar or his former mistress, was arrested and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress. I sent him a note, which I’m sure he appreciated.

The country became obsessed with the idea of traitors and spies. German bakeries and schools were attacked. Those with German-sounding names came home to find their houses burned, the roofless walls blackened behind their iron railings. And who in Russia did not have a German-sounding name? Half the court was of German ancestry; why, their very positions at court derived their titles from their German counterparts—the Ober-Tseremoniimeister , the Ober-Gofmeister , the Kamer-Freilini , the Flag-Kapitan . And of course the country remembered that Empress Alexandra was German. Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt. The people began to call her Niemka, that German woman , and they were suspicious of her and her staretz , Rasputin, who they feared was a German spy. In Moscow, in Red Square, the crowd shouted that Rasputin should be hanged, the empress shut up in a convent, and Niki deposed.

To stem this great uproar over the despair about the Great Retreat, for that was what the ignominious backward march of men from the Carpathians toward Lublin and Lvov began to be called, the furor over the supply shortages, and the hysteria of the spy paranoia, the tsar shut down the Duma, replaced Nikolasha as commander in chief, and moved permanently to Stavka, which had to be moved, after the Great Retreat, two hundred miles east from Baranovichi to Mogilev, on the Dnieper River in the Ukraine to avoid being overrun by the advancing Germans. At Baranovichi, the generals and grand dukes had bunked in their own private luxury train cars at the railway junction, the cars pulled off the track and fanned out in the birch-and-pine forest, wood planks making walkways between them. But at Mogilev, the officers simply commandeered the house of the local governor and each took a room. Niki took two rooms for himself, one as a study, one as a bedroom—and prepared to be the country’s figurehead as the tsar-warrior. With that decision, and with his mother sitting out the war in Kiev, Petersburg was left to the empress. And Rasputin.

Let me explain how Rasputin crawled into Alexander Palace and into Alix’s lap. As always, it had to do with the health of the tsarevich. When Alexei had come in the autumn of 1915 to spend some months at Mogilev with his father, to sleep on a cot in his father’s bedroom in the governor’s mansion, Sergei told me, Alexei caught a winter cold and one sharp sneeze induced a nosebleed which could not be stopped. The doctors tried every bandage and nose plug in their flimsy black bags, while the boy’s body continued to pump scarlet blood out his nostrils. Eventually Alexei lost consciousness. In this condition he was brought by his father by train back to Tsarskoye Selo, and Alix met him there at the little station, expecting Niki to carry off the corpse of her son, and when she saw his white face and his limp body, she begged Niki to allow her to call Rasputin. And Rasputin, as you can imagine, making the most of this opportunity, swept into the boy’s room, made the sign of the cross over the boy’s body, and said, Don’t be alarmed. Nothing will happen . And the next day, Alexei was sitting up, bright-eyed, asking for his spaniel puppy, Joy, and for the cat he had left behind at headquarters.

Niki returned to Mogilev the next day, but it would take murder to dislodge Rasputin from Tsarskoye Selo. With Rasputin’s guidance, Alix argued for the country’s ministerial appointments to be given only to courtiers of the old school, men who worshipped the autocracy of the tsar, who believed the Duma a mistake, as she did, but most of all to men who were well-disposed to Rasputin. She was as charged with energy as she had been when Niki was sick with typhoid in Livadia and both times for the same reason—if the tsar was threatened, her son’s future was also threatened—and she wanted to secure the country for both of them. Almost every week, it seemed, I would open the gazeta to read the name of a new minister Alix had persuaded Niki to appoint. Over the next six months, Russia had four prime ministers, five ministers of the interior, three war ministers, three foreign ministers, four ministers of agriculture, and three of transport, and the country was thrown into such disorder by the incessant replacement of competence with incompetence and then incompetence with ineptitude that the government could barely function. Rasputin, of course, had had a hand in all those appointments, and sometimes for ludicrous reasons—when the court chamberlain, A. N. Khostov, pleased Rasputin with his loud bass singing at the Gypsy restaurant the Villa Rode one night, Khostov found himself appointed minister of the interior the next month. So many people came to seek Rasputin’s patronage, they had to line up on the stairway to the door of his third-floor apartment on Gorokhovaya Street, and the country seethed that among all those supplicants sat a German agent who listened to Rasputin bluster and blab about the confidential strategies and tactics the Russian army planned, tactics Niki confided to Alix and she then to Rasputin, for she craved his blessing on military maneuvers he understood nothing of. The crazed monk and the German woman were destroying Russia from the inside and out the people said, and as the war continued to go badly, the officers in their hopelessness began to take long, unauthorized leaves from the front; they appeared once again at the palaces and at the embassies and even at the bars of the Astoria and the Europa hotels, and once more uniforms and medals began to stud the stalls and boxes of the Maryinsky.

Why, Petersburg had a new song:

And so the plots began, and it was not only the Vladimirichi who schemed, but also the Mikhailovichi, the old Potato Club, who schemed with them—minus Sergei. In one plan, four Guards regiments would be sent to Tsarskoye Selo to capture the imperial family, dispatch Alix to a convent or a mental institution, arrest Rasputin, and force Niki’s abdication. It was not an original idea. In most coups, mutinous guards were used to overthrow the tsar—Catherine the Great had used them. Another plan would have the guards seize the imperial train as it traveled between Stavka and Tsarskoye Selo, the tsar forced to abdicate and Alix arrested or, in Miechen’s words, annihilated , and Rasputin hanged. Then, variously, depending on the conspirator, it would be Kyril installed on the throne or the tsarevich Alexei, with Nikolasha or the tsar’s brother Mikhail entreated to serve as regent. Grand Duchess Vladimir, her three sons, Niki’s ward Dimitri Pavlovich, the young Prince Yusupov who had married Xenia’s daughter, even Sergei’s brother, the now famous historian Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, met evenings at Vladimir Palace. Other plots fermented among officials of the Duma, and the plots eventually grew so multitudinous and were spoken of so openly that Sergei’s brother Nicholas finally felt compelled to write to Niki that if Alix didn’t stop her interference in matters of government murders will follow .