Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

After that, Vova wrote short weekly letters to Sergei at Stavka—most likely, Sergei told me, to conceal his association with me and to prevent me from coming to Tsarskoye again and endangering them all. Vova’s letters always said the same thing, I am well. I embrace you warmly. Always yours, Vladimir —but Sergei said though the missives were short—for after all, they must pass through the censors—they were in Vova’s handwriting and so he and I must be reassured by this, for what other reassurance did we have, and at least some communication with the outside world was allowed.

Over the next months the streets of the capital grew shabby and unkempt—weeds found every crack in the pavement, no matter how slight, as if Nature had waited quietly all along to take back the versts Peter the Great had snatched from her. The snow turned yellow and then black and the windows of the buildings remained unpolished, a graffiti of streaks and smudges. The imperial statues and monuments the revolutionary crowds had deemed too large to topple had been covered in red cloth, bloodied spears stuck in the dirty snow, and along the iron railings of the Winter Palace wads of red cloth bound up the imperial emblems too difficult to remove. But for now, though this off-kilter world wobbled, it continued to turn, and so did the routines of the theater. The Imperial Theater Schools reopened and the governesses led their charges once again out to the parks. The ballet school had no hot water and the rooms of the school were cold, but soldiers were no longer shooting at the windows of Theater Street—why, little Alexandra Danilova had had to duck a bullet when she peeked over her dormitory windowsill—and classes could resume. There was no fuel to burn, so the governesses put the children into smaller dorm rooms and laid their cots close to one another, so that like animals in a barn, the heat of their bodies could warm them, and in the dressing room basins floated chips of ice. The Maryinsky Theater itself reopened March 15, and the children were now driven to the theater in long sleighs, for the school’s carriages had been confiscated during Glorious February, and the students now danced before the common soldier, who smoked his cigarettes and spit his seeds right there in the parterres and used his boots to stomp in time to the music. I heard from my old partner Vladimirov that the great oil portrait of Nicholas was taken down from the lobby wall and the double-headed eagles and crowns that ornamented the boxes and the thresholds were also pried from the plaster and discarded. The ushers no longer wore their uniforms with the epaulets that bore the crown monogram. The Provisional Government gave them gray jackets, and because in this new life of deprivation there was no way to clean them, the fabric grew greasy with use. The evenings’ programs were no longer embossed with the double-headed eagle but with Apollo’s lyre, the same as the pin the boys at the ballet school had for a century worn on the collar of their school uniforms. So the lyre of a Greek god was still acceptable to the new regime. But I was forty-five years old and I was a former , with a son whose father was a Romanov, so I myself was not acceptable. I could not appear on the stage. Nor did I want to.

In May, the last class graduated from the great Corps des Pages, which my son had so wanted to attend but had never had the chance, and the school was closed—there was no need for pages if there no longer existed a court. And there was no longer any need either for the thousands of servants who had attended the imperial family or for the giant Abyssinians who in their white turbans and curved shoes had stood in majestic pairs outside the doors to any room that contained the emperor. They had all abandoned Tsarskoye Selo along with the courtiers who did not wish to remain with the Romanovs under house arrest. One day, on Nevsky Prospekt, I found myself facing one of those six-foot-tall Africans, now dressed in trousers and a tunic, a black-faced ghost, a relic, with no door to open for the tsar, no door to guard while the tsar busied himself behind it. Where are you going? I wanted to ask him. What tales of the Russian court will you take with you? I could have asked the same of almost everyone.

Yet, the Petersburg palaces were not entirely emptied at this time. The streets were full of rough-looking soldiers, yes, for the revolution favored black leather jackets, backward-turned caps, and a swagger, and the old revolutionary leaders of 1905, Lenin, Trotsky, Chernov, yes, found their ways back to Peter and took up residence in or made offices of requisitioned homes—including mine, which had a view of the Troitsky Bridge and the embankment, a strategic view for anyone planning an uprising—and so I remained at my brother’s, in his daughter’s bedroom. But the nobility was still here. It was as if all the aristocracy were under house arrest along with the tsar, waiting to see how the Provisional Government of the old Duma and the new Soviet would rein in unruly Russia and deal with the formers . Would they be allowed to keep their palaces, their treasures amassed over generations? The former imperial family, it appeared, would receive reduced appanages . The grand dukes, Sergei’s brother Nicholas had heard, might receive 30,000 of their accustomed 280,000 rubles a year. Was that conspirator happy now that the tsar had been deposed, as he had wished? It appeared perhaps one of the Romanovs—Nikolasha, Kyril, or Niki’s brother Mikhail—would assume a figurehead position as tsar, as head of Duma, as president, as no, no, as nothing. Russia’s fate was evolving every day. In the spring of 1917 some former tsarist officials still served in the Duma and still led the army, but others of them, like the former minister of war, Sukhomlinov, were arrested—or in Sukhomlinov’s case, rearrested—and taken to the Peter and Paul Fortress for questioning, and still others slipped away, to the Caucasus or the Crimea or Kiev, where they gambled, drank Abram champagne, ate caviar and sturgeon, set the clock back one hour to Petersburg time, and waited there, as we did here, to see which Russia would prevail.

Through all this, Sergei remained at Stavka on the advice of his brother Nicholas, who feared for his safety. There were no revolutionaries there at headquarters among the generals of the old regime—any unrest in the military was taking place among the infantry barracked in the cities and at the fronts. In his letters to me Sergei gave me news of the war. At the fronts, the soldiers were tired and refusing to fight, and though the new supreme commander, Brusilov, made a tour urging them to pull together for a fresh offensive, he met with men who didn’t care about Galicia or France and just wanted to go home. The men wanted peace so badly they would put the tsar back on the throne if he promised it to them. At the eastern front men had even begun to fraternize with the Germans, who lured the Russians over the Dniester with vodka and prostitutes. Only in the southwest, far from the big cities, were the soldiers still disciplined. But when the offensive ordered by the commanders began in June, the men advanced only two miles toward Galicia to retake all the ground they had lost in the Great Retreat before they refused to go any further and began to desert, looting and raping along the way in Volschinsk, Konivkhy, and Lvov. Sergei feared these disgruntled soldiers and their like would eventually find their way to Peter and meet up with the several thousand troops garrisoned on the Vyborg side of the city, troops who had helped bring about the revolution in the first place and who could overthrow the shaky Provisional Government, as well. The members of the Duma were at odds with the Kadets from the Constitutional Democratic Party, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the Anarchists, and the Social Democrats, the Bolshevik splinter of which had begun to agitate and arm the Red Guards, the workers’ brigades that had sprung up not only to protect the Vyborg factories that sat so close to the Vyborg regiments but the revolution itself against an imagined counterrevolution. And while the Provisional Government labored over the details of the perfect parliament to be elected in the fall, the Bolsheviks began to whisper in the streets, The Provisional Government itself has become a puppet of the counterrevolutionaries who plan to reinstate the tsar . The tsar and tsaritsa are plotting to reinstate the monarchy .