Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

My brother lived at No. 18, in a twelve-room apartment. The Bolsheviks remembered him and his revolutionary activity of 1905, and when they made all the formers share their houses and apartments, when servants took the rooms of their masters or stole their furniture and whatever else they could carry, my brother Josef was allowed to keep his twelve rooms all for himself. He would enjoy them until Stalin came to power, after which he was allowed the use of only two. Josef didn’t want to leave Russia even then. In 1924, after Lenin’s death, I arranged from Paris visas and tickets for Josef and his family so he could come dance once again for Diaghilev. But Josef wrote me, We artists have privileged positions here. I can’t leave a country to which I am bound by so many memories . We weren’t the only ones with memories. When Stalin launched the Great Terror in the thirties, Josef was dismissed from his teaching position at the old Imperial Ballet School simply for writing to me.

He died, you know, of starvation, in 1942, during the siege of Leningrad, in the war after this one, and he was buried in a mass grave in the Piskarevskoe Memorial Cemetery.

On my second day at my brother’s apartment, as Josef and I sat in his dining room and drank glasses of tea, some sweetened with sugar, some sweetened with jam, we heard the sound of singing in the street below. Josef stood and opened a window and I went and stood behind him. The crowd was singing their version of the “Marseillaise,” which the workers had appropriated from the French revolutionaries and then, pronouncing it the Marsiliuza , stuffed with their own lyrics,

Something has happened , my brother said, and he put on his coat and went down to the street. I paced the floor, going to the window every few seconds, and it seemed each time I looked out one more red flag appeared on one more roof and yet another banner was unfurled from the windows of a building; and then church bells began to ring, and not just from one church but, it seemed, from everywhere, from every church. Was the war over? Then Niki could bring all his troops home as he had in 1905 and then these animals would be put into cages or hung from the scaffolds. At last I heard my brother’s foot on the stairs and he rushed in clutching a handful of leaflets, the fronts of them printed with symbols we would soon see again and again—a chain broken into two bits, a sun emerging from the clouds, its rays spreading out from behind the mist, a throne and crown on their sides. The emblems of the revolution, though I didn’t know that then.

What is this? I said to Josef. What does it mean?

It means , he said, the tsar has been overthrown.

I grabbed at his sleeve. What? What?

We sat at my brother’s dining room table, reading the printed news, unable to speak, our fingertips blackening with ink as we turned the pages. The tsar had abdicated on March 2 on the train while it stood on the rails at Pskov, where he had been forced to stop on the way home to Peter, having gone east on a detour to give the direct route to troops being moved along that line. Once in Pskov, halfway between Stavka and Tsarskoye, he could not move, as the tracks ahead had been seized by revolutionaries. And Niki’s efforts to halt the revolution were as choked as his train. General Ivanov, whom Niki had charged with bringing troops to the capital and establishing a dictatorship, had arrived with his men too late. General Khabalov, already there in the capital, was too much a fool to think to bring in loyalist troops, and instead hid in the Admiralty and drank cognac. And General Alexeev, an even bigger fool, thought the liberals in the Duma would settle the city by political means and keep the monarchy intact, and so he held his troops at bay—and when he saw none of this settled the roiling capital, Alexeev gathered all of Niki’s leading generals to ask for the tsar’s abdication for the good of the country, the war, and the dynasty. This was what made Niki write in his diary that he saw all around him only cowardice and deceit.

And so, ill-advised, Niki had handed the throne to his brother, Mikhail—Mikhail! whom Niki had allowed back into Russia only in 1914 at the start of the war! And I thought, Why? Why have you done this? What did they say to you on that train? , for I did not know any of this then. Oh, if only Niki had made it all the way home to Tsarskoye. Alix would never have let him abdicate on the advice of his beloved generals—he had always been too besotted by the military—and she certainly would not have let him shove the throne away from her son or mine! What had happened to the glorious greater Russia Niki had promised me for my son? Was he so tired that he allowed himself to be persuaded? At Mogilev, Sergei had told me the tsar’s doctors had begun to prescribe cocaine for Niki to stem his exhaustion and that they were worried he was headed for a nervous breakdown. Perhaps it was a relief for him to give Russia away to his fool of a brother who hadn’t even the courage to take the crown but instead had himself abdicated! When the mob had bellowed at this news of yet another tsar, Mikhail had hidden himself in the mansion of the Princess Putiatina at No. 12, Millionaia and allowed the prime minister of the Duma, Prince Lvov, and one of the republican ministers, an Alexander Kerensky, to persuade him to refuse the crown, telling him they could not guarantee his safety. Frightened, Mikhail quickly scribbled his abdication manifesto in a school notebook in the study of the princess’s daughter, hunched over a child’s desk. Another of the documents of the revolution scribbled in a child’s practice book. Yes, Mikhail had broken the crown into little bits and distributed the fragments among the incompetent ministers and the disreputable men of the Duma Niki hadn’t had time yet to fix! For the country, the leaflet said, would now be run by a Provisional Government. Niki had given up not only being emperor but the whole regime—the grand dukes, the princes, the barons and counts. I felt like one of the peasants in the provinces, the old muzhiki , who when hearing the news cried, They have taken the tsar away from us. What will become of us now? I looked at my brother’s face to see if he was happy, for wasn’t this what he and his comrades had wanted all those years ago, and still wanted? But he didn’t look happy. Perhaps this was more than he wanted, too radical even for him?

What is the tsar doing? my brother said, shaking his head. It’s not legal for him to hand over the crown to his brother! No. Josef was right. It was not legal. The throne should pass to the heir and Alexei was the heir. Niki knew this. I sucked at a strand of my hair. Perhaps this act of abdication was just a tactic of delay—Niki knew his brother would not have the character to succeed him—and by signing an illegal manifesto he was preserving the throne for his sons. It was a trick, a prevarication to give him time! As my thoughts stampeded from one end of my brain to the other, Josef read to me from the paper, which reported that Colonel Nicholas Romanov, as the tsar would now be known, had returned by train from Stavka to Tsarskoye Selo, where he, his family, and some of his retinue were now prisoners of the Provisional Government. I made him repeat that last part. He’s a prisoner in Alexander Palace? My brother nodded. Along with his court . At this, I took the leaflet from my brother to read it over myself. How could this be? How could this possibly be? The tsar under guard?