Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

At midday, the mob breached the island and made its way across the Troitsky Bridge, and the chief of the 4th Petrograd Police District telephoned to tell me a large crowd was heading down the Bolshoi Dvorianskaya toward me. As I spoke to him, I saw a truck filled with elated soldiers, red flags flying, cross Kronversky Prospekt. By the time I hung up the phone, another truck. It seemed that all the city’s soldiers, the whole 170,000 peasant infantry billeted in the Petersburg garrison for training before being shipped to the front, had absconded with their guns and their trucks. But they were not at the front, they were here, and their enemies were not the Germans but their own officers, along with the regiments, the police, and the Cossacks who remained loyal to the tsar, the court, and the burzhui .

And the imperial family? Were they safe in Tsarskoye Selo? When I called my brother—who was back in Petersburg, having been by this time reinstated at the Imperial Ballet at my request—he relayed to me what he had heard all day from the isvozchiki , the cab men, as they drove back and forth on the riotous city streets. All day, he had heard, drunken soldiers had been looting the Pavlosk shops of wine, bread, and boots, and a mob had headed to Tsarskoye Selo. A department store in Tsarskoye Selo was attacked, in the mistaken belief that it was the palace, by peasants so ignorant they couldn’t tell one grand edifice from another. There were soldiers in the courtyard of Alexander Palace, regiments loyal to the tsar from the Garde Equipage who were used to protect the family at sea and on their yachts, standing in battle formation. So the rumors of the mob, if not the mob itself, had reached the palace.

The sound of a crowd is the sound of braying, unpredictable energy, and at the theater that sound coming from the audience is a sound of ecstatic adulation, a swell that rushes to one on the stage and seems to lift the dancers off their feet as it rises. The sound I heard from the street was not a sound to lift one up. Even if the mob didn’t know that my house was the house of Kschessinska, the double-headed eagles glittered on my gates and those eagles alone would provoke attack. What delusion drove me to put the imperial eagles there? I remember I sat down. I remember thinking in no place in the city was there someone to call. Sergei and Niki were at Stavka, the tsar hiding, the people said, in the bosom of his army. Even the disgraced Andrei had found himself, by accident rather than by design, safely in Kislovodsk—in fact, the most powerful factions of the Romanov family, because of Niki’s orders, were not even here. Grand Duke Vladimir and Stolypin were dead. And my family? My sister lived on the other side of Petersburg, on English Prospekt, my brother Josef on Spasskaya Ulitsa, also over the bridge. At least my son was safe. No one would be more protected than he. But I could not remain here. Yet my car, my Rolls-Royce, was too well known, for in choice of cars, as in all things, I copied the Romanovs, and I had heard from my brother that Grand Duke Gavril Konstantinovich’s Rolls had been commandeered by the crowd at will. To make my departure now I would need a different car. But when I called up the New Mikhailovsky Palace to beg for a car while the mob and the troops rioted their way down Bolshoi Dvorianskaya toward my house, I discovered Sergei’s brother Nicholas had left written instructions to the servants to refuse any calls from me, to stop all communication with the house on the Petrograd side of the city . The great historian wanted me to run through the streets, carrying my reticule with my jewels, through the streets! where anyone with so much as a fancy hat was being murdered as a borzhui . And this was not all that was happening in the streets, but the rest I will tell you later. Sergei’s family had always referred to him as my lap dog and thought I used him mercilessly, blamed me for his current disgrace and his virtual exile at Stavka, and now, even in Grand Duke Nicholas’s absence, as he had been sent to Grushevka, his orders were being followed and the family were having their revenge. I sat there, nonplussed, the phone in my hand. And then I thought of Yuriev. The party after his tribute had been held at his apartment on Kamennostrovsky Prospekt just a few blocks away. The Romanovs might not help me, but surely my fellow theater artists would harbor me, and at this distance I could escape on foot.

And as the only thing safe to be at this time was a worker, this is what I did: I disguised myself as one, scissoring an ermine collar off an otherwise plain cloth coat, tying my maid’s kerchief about my head like a peasant woman. I took with me my jewels that were not in storage at Fabergé, Niki’s letters, the photograph he inscribed to me all those years ago, my father’s icon and the ring of Count Krassinsky, a photograph of Vova at age five—an odd ménage, I know, but when one runs from a burning house, only the most valuable items run with you, and you learn quickly what you value most. Believing my servants to be safe, I left alone. But the next morning, when my housekeeper opened the gate to the mob and called out to them, Come in, come in, the bird has flown —have I told you I had been described in Peter as a jeweled bird?—the mob came in bellowing for me, Kschessinska! Where is Kschessinska ? and not finding me, seized my porter instead and stood him up against a courtyard wall as if to execute him, whereupon his wife died from shock before the crowd spied the Cross of St. George my porter had earned for valor in the war and released him. Over the next weeks my furniture disappeared from my home, as did my silver, my crystal, my Fabergé objets , my clothing, my furs, even my car, the car I had been so afraid to drive! My house had become a free market—all goods for the taking. No other house in the city was so looted as the mansion of the tsarist concubine Kschessinska, unless it was the mansion of the minister of the court, Baron Freedericks, dispenser of the tsar’s punishments and favors. Yes, the minister and the trollop were famous in Peter, and I’m aware it is for my scandalous private life that I am still best known. Why, just this year, 1971, when Kenneth MacMillan created the ballet Anastasia for London’s Royal Ballet, I was made a character in it, appearing in Act II to perform at a Winter Palace ball given in honor of the tsar’s daughter Anastasia in a costume that befitted my reputation, my neck belted with diamonds, the décolletage of my black tutu split practically to the waist. As that, I live on.

If only I had thought to do what Countess Kleinmichel had done to save her mansion on Sergievskaya Street—put up a sign in my yard that shouted the lie: This property already requisitioned by the citizens! For within weeks, the Bolshevik division of the Social Democrats took over my house and desecrated it by hanging a red flag from my roof, and soon enough it became the headquarters of the Bolshevik Central Committee. That night, though, I locked up my house with my key, under the illusion that would be all it took to keep it secure—and I rushed the few blocks to Kamennostrovsky Prospekt to pound on the door of the great actor Yuriev.

I stayed with him three days, hiding with his family in the hallways of his apartment from the stray bullets that ricocheted through the streets and sometimes punched their way through the windows. Outside, the crowds of workers, peasants, criminals sprung from prison, and soldiers who had mutinied fought the tsar’s police, who had mounted machine guns on the roofs of many of the district’s apartment houses. As Yuriev’s apartment was on the top floor of his building, desperate soldiers, their greatcoats unbuttoned and their caps turned backward to signal their allegiance to the revolution, periodically broke into his apartment in order to climb to the roof to search it. Yuriev was a big man, with a strong nose and thick jowls, and the soldiers did not bother him, and as they had no idea who I was, a little middle-aged woman in a ripped coat, they did not question me. And the phone—mounted to the wall and operated by a crank—rang and rang as people hiding in their apartments called one another just to hear a sane voice, to tell the tale of what was happening on their particular street. After the third batch of soldiers came through, Yuriev moved his chairs away from the windows, and his vases and statuettes also, lest any of it be mistaken by the hysterical mob below for guns and we for police snipers and therefore fired upon. And when I went to help Yuriev and his wife move these things we saw a group of soldiers who had reached the rooftop of the building opposite ours throw someone off it—a policeman—we watched the sail of his greatcoat spread wide as the wings of a great bird whose flight was short. When he fell to the pavement, a crowd gathered about him to beat at him with sticks.