Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

Mala , Yuriev said, this is madness. Where is the tsar? All they want is bread. There are no revolutionary leaders here —and it was true! All of them would slip back into the capital only later and we would learn their names later still—Lenin and Martov from Zurich; Trotsky from New York; Chernov from Paris; Tsereteli, Dan, Gots, and Stalin from Siberia—Stalin was nobody then—a pockfaced bank robber for the revolution who worshipped Lenin and sent him his stolen rubles hidden in bottles emptied of Georgian wine, sent them all the way to Europe! Yes, these men still sat in armchairs and cafés in their places of exile since 1906 and we would learn their names only later; the leaders of these mobs were therefore impromptu and improvised—students, workers, and low-ranking officers who had once had revolutionary sympathies and now found those sympathies reawakened. Their photographs were placed in store-window shrines over the next weeks with the phrase Heroes of the Revolution printed on them. The names of these men—Linde, Kirpichnikov—would soon be forgotten, but they were the ones in the streets, organizing the crowd busy commandeering cars and trucks. One of those trucks sped by while we watched, a banner hung on it: The First Revolutionary Flying Squad , and Yuriev said, What does that mean? For there was no real revolution here, as yet, only what Gorky later described as a peasant riot. Why does not the tsar bring in troops from the front to restore order? Yuriev asked, and I found out only later, from Sergei, that General Alexeev, who served as Niki’s chief of staff, feared that if he sent in his troops they would only lose all discipline and join in the mutiny and then all would be lost.

All through the streets walked men with swords, bayonets, butcher knives, revolvers, sticks—and we, five stories above the mass of people, heard the thin ends of screams, gunshots, glass shattering. The chief of the Petrograd Military District had tried to send a regiment loyal to the regime to the Winter Palace, but after fighting their way through the streets they found themselves turned away by the liveried palace servants on the orders of Niki’s brother, Mikhail, who worried that the men in their dirty boots might muddy the palace floor and break the china; and so the troops, demoralized, simply joined the crowd. It was a comedy of errors, like an ill-rehearsed ballet, in which the dancers, unaccustomed to the sight of each other in their new costumes and unsure of their steps, bumped and waddled into one another and fell down.

The three days I hid at Yuriev’s I never undressed but remained in the same clothes from the day I fled, and how quickly they grew soiled with sweat, dusty from the floors I squatted on, stained by bits of food, for we ate our meals sitting on the ground, hunched over our plates like animals. In our overcoats, our backs against the wall in the interior corridors of his grand rooms, we waited for news that the tsar was returning to the capital, that order was being restored, and at night we slept on mattresses we pulled to the floor. Yuriev’s wife said to me one night, How lucky for you your son is at Stavka with Grand Duke Sergei , and I said, Yes, how lucky . And secretly I comforted myself with the fantasy of my son at Tsarskoye Selo, sitting up now, I was sure, eating from a silver tray brought to his bed, making slow rounds in his robe and slippers about the green-carpeted playroom, perhaps splashing in the tsar’s big tub and talking to the parrot, Popov, which the tsar had inherited from his father and kept in his bathroom, the palace and park guarded by loyal Cossacks and the soldiers of the elite Garde Equipage. The rumors were that half the Pavlovsky regiment in Petersburg had mutinied, followed by some of the Litovsky and the Preobrazhensky—the Preobrazhensky!, the tsar’s most prestigious regiment—and that in the Astoria Hotel the rank-and-file soldiers had hunted down their senior officers with rifles and bayonets until the lobby floor was turned into a junkyard of mirrored glass and crystal beads, its revolving door spinning in circles through the blood. If I had known Kyril Vladimirich had the gall to return to Peter from the Arctic and call the men he commanded of the Garde Equipage away from the Alexander Palace, pin a red cockade to his cap and a red ribbon to his uniform, hoist a red flag on his roof, and march to the Duma to pledge his support for the revolution, to offer his services as tsar, I would have lost my mind. But I didn’t know it. And so, somehow, I kept my sanity.

After three days at Yuriev’s, the streets grew calm enough for my brother Josef to come and retrieve me. As I had saved him once, he now saved me. It was good, I suppose, at this moment, to have Kschessinkys on both sides of the revolution. I gave Yuriev a pair of Sergei’s Fabergé cufflinks and we kissed each other’s cheeks and then I kissed his hands. He wore on one finger the ring the tsar had given him as his gift at Yuriev’s benefit. I heard that Yuriev wore that ring the rest of his life, even during the Great Terror, when he knew he could have been killed for it.

Josef and I had to walk all the way from Petersburg Island across the Troitsky Bridge to his apartment on Spasskaya Ulitsa. The wind blew from the north down the Great Neva and pushed at us as we crossed the bridge. The coat I had snatched up three days before, when the weather had briefly warmed, was too light for the weather which had turned cold once again, and the wind threatened to knock us against the triple lampposts that dotted the bridge or send us flying over the balustrades. Against this wind I held down the fabric of my coat and I tugged my kerchief low over my brow. Siberia, I thought, could not be colder than this. When we reached the palace embankment, I lifted my head. This was why Josef said we had to walk. Hundreds of smashed cars bottled up the streets, stolen by young girls who had no idea how to drive and yet inspired by revolutionary fever had jumped behind the wheel and pressed the gas. Their cars shot forward only to smash into one another and into all those taxis whose drivers refused to keep to the left now that we are free! , and from there into the lampposts and walls and storefronts until finally the girls abandoned the cars altogether. Some of them were left with their tops down, frozen metal sculptures, creased and gouged and functionless, and among them, as if they didn’t exist at all, roamed the crowds. Small groups of people stood in circles around impromptu bonfires, and when we drew close enough I could see they were burning the wooden emblems they had stripped from the shops about us, emblems the shops used to advertise their imperial patronage, and on Nevsky Prospekt a great crowd busied itself with the same, the gray smoke like a puff from a giant hookah reaching two stories above a crowd wearing kerchiefs, fur hats, and, worst of all, caps with army insignia. The charred pile of trash looked like an animal and the people posed for a camera held by a comrade to record their great deed. The soldiers wore their coats and tunics unbuttoned, their caps backward, all deliberately against regulation in a city where a year earlier a soldier could be reprimanded for the incorrect salutation to his superior—why, a duel could be fought if an officer’s inferior did not walk on the left side of the street! Two women in men’s clothing walked by us. I suppose they, too, now were free —their arms locked about each other’s waists, while other women wandered, hatless, their hair frizzled and loosened. Everywhere I stepped there were bits of glass and I put my hand to my brother’s back and held on to him as I followed his shape through the streets. To the right of us a group of little boys threw loose cartridges into a fire and scattered at the intermittent explosions. In the window of one café stood a sign: Fellow citizens! In honor of the great days of freedom I bid you all welcome. Come inside, and eat and drink to your heart’s content . Three steps from that café, against the side of a building, a woman stood with her skirt raised while a man, his dirty fingers gripping the line of brick above her, took his pleasure, his breath coming in a series of short, barking grunts. Don’t look , my brother said, but how could I not look? Never was I so relieved that Vova was not with me. A man brushed by me dressed in women’s clothes, a skirt hanging beneath his greatcoat, big boots on his feet as he stomped past. A policeman , my brother said, trying to get away disguised . On his way to Finland Station, no doubt, to make his escape from a fate like the one who fell past the window of Yuriev’s apartment. Pharaohs , the crowd was calling the policemen now. Pigs . I stepped on a pair of smashed eyeglasses and I began to see the detritus of this uprising everywhere—a watch chain, a bit of patterned silk, a woman’s shoe with the heel snapped off, metal insignia, a fork, various signage reading By Appointment to His Majesty Tsar Nicholas , all bearing the double-headed eagles, waiting, next, to be burned, and in one gutter, a lace dress laid out as neatly as on a woman’s bed. But when we turned the corner I looked up and saw what I would never forget: the stone head of Alexander II held up like the severed head of Medusa by a peasant with the broad nose and lips of some Eastern province. Josef said, You should see what they’ve carved on the plinth of the statue of Alexander II in Znamenskaya Square: hippopotamus —and at that I began to laugh, crazily. Into the gutter a man vomited, cap in hand, and the liquid splattered his boots. Everywhere I smelled fire, and when ashes blew toward us, my brother said, That’s the Palace of Justice burning to the ground .