Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

Exhausted and overwhelmed, the prime minister of the Duma, Prince Lvov, resigned and was replaced by a new man, that Alexander Kerensky who had helped secure Grand Duke Mikhail’s abdication. Kerensky had served in the Duma as minister of justice and minister of war and now it seemed, in a ministerial leapfrog to rival Alix’s appointments, he would be installed as prime minister in charge of the country. Rumor had it Kerensky had moved himself into the Winter Palace, into the suite of Alexander III, into his very bed, and when he couldn’t sleep, he would pace the breadth of that grand room singing operatic arias, so giddy was he with his new power. He had once wanted to be an actor—his speeches were so impassioned that sometimes he would faint after delivering them—and as a boy, he had signed notes to his parents, From the Future Artist of the Imperial Theaters, A. Kerensky . If his guards had been less ignorant, all Peter would know which arias Kerensky sang and from which operas. This Kerensky, Sergei said, had been talking of moving the imperial family to England or Finland for their safety, where they would live—perhaps permanently—and if that happened, we, too, would apply for permission from Kerensky to go abroad. The Romanovs in the English countryside, hunting pheasant and drinking tea in some grace and favor house when they had once ruled one-sixth of the world? In that case, Vova would no longer be of use to them, nor would I.

So Sergei’s letters weren’t much comfort to me, nor were Andrei’s. He sent me letters care of the theater, which Vladimirov ferried to me like some postrevolutionary mailman. Andrei described the large whitewashed villa his mother had rented for them, guarded by a dozen Cossacks for hire, the dinners, teas, and card games they enjoyed with the Sheremetievs and the Vrontzovs, who had also left Peter for the Caucasus, and when I read his merry letters I thought, What is this strange mirror-world these people have found on the Black Sea, where the revolution cannot penetrate the quicksilver of that plane?

There were no teas or dinners for me. Wherever I lived I was an embarrassment, and whomever I lived with I endangered. A pornographic movie was made about me that depicted me servicing one grand duke after another or two at a time in some revolutionary filmmaker’s fantasy of a mistress’s boudoir: The Secret Story of the Ballerina Kschessinska . I became the subject of many news articles—about the jewels and silver fleeced from my house: “16 Poods of Silver from the Palace of Kschessinska” about the war bribes: “Espionage and the Ballerina” about my long-ago affair with Nicholas: “Secrets of M. F. Kschessinska.” But the most frightening of all was the novel, The Tsarevich’s Romance , by Maria Evgenieva, which told the story that my early liaison with Nicholas had resulted in the birth of two sons, now grown, both of them spirited off to Paris after Glorious February. If only that were true, but my one son was not in Paris, he was here, just outside the city, right under their noses, sending off his letters to Sergei, a Romanov grand duke of the old regime—and therefore at peril. I am well. We are planting a kitchen garden. Alexei and I showed movies in his room. I kiss your hands, Vladimir .

My connections to the court, which once made me quite a prize to know, now made me a peril. At Vladimirov’s I hid my reticule of jewels at the bottom of a potted plant. The tsar’s signed photograph I had slipped between the pages of a magazine at Yuriev’s, afraid to tell Yuriev what I had done for fear of compromising him, and later I discovered he had, all unknowing, thrown away the magazine! I hid the bundle of the tsar’s letters with another friend for safekeeping, but she was arrested, her home searched and searched again, until finally, in terror, she burned all his letters to ash. Forgive me, divine creature, for having disturbed your rest , along with all the other lovely lines Niki stole from the greats or created for me of his own inspiration were gone. Even the lowest housemaid to Niki’s daughters, Elizaveta Nikolaevna Evsberg, felt compelled to burn the little notes the girls had left for her and that she had saved as keepsakes— Elizaveta, can you sew this button on for me, thank you, Tatiana —because it was too dangerous to have been even the exploited servant in the Winter Palace, too dangerous to know anyone who knew any Romanov at all. And I, of course, knew many Romanovs, and I had flaunted those connections.

M. Fabergé finally asked me to come and remove my valuables from his vaults, as with all the upheaval he could no longer guarantee their safety.

The Fabergé Building boasted red-brown granite pillars at its entrance. Into one of them was chiseled his name, the F , the A , the B of the Fabergé so straight and so tall, their edges so precisely beveled, they seemed the only bit of order left in the capital. But inside the building all was chaos. The showroom’s glass cases had been emptied, and through a door to the back I could see open crates and men bent over them stuffing valuables into sawdust to be shipped off—shipped off to where? Fabergé himself led me to my vault, the wisps of his white hair standing almost on end, as if alarmed, and his beard, when he turned to address me, shimmered as white and fine as spun sugar. Look, look at this , he told me, his voice cracking, and he halted at a wooden crate about to be hammered shut, thrust open the lid, and excavated from its shavings a luminous blue stone egg floating on a bank of clouds, the imperial Easter egg Niki had intended to give Alexandra that coming Easter of 1917.

Why he showed this to me I do not know, nor do I know what stone gave those clouds their milky opalescence, nor do I know what gleaming blue gem made up the egg itself, but Fabergé told me he had been working on this gift for a year and that it had been designed to honor the birthday of the tsarevich. Fabergé’s face flushed pink and he looked down through his delicate nostrils at me and at the egg as he extolled its virtues. The lines etched into the surface of the luminous blue, he said, sketched out the lines of the earth’s longitude and latitude, and the tiny diamonds embedded along those spokes winked like the constellations that shone in the northern hemisphere on the early August day the tsarevich was born. This egg marked the fortune of his birth, Fabergé said, and those stars spoke his fate—to rule one-sixth of the world. Fabergé suggested with his fingers the golden disk that like a ring of Saturn would have girdled this small planet, its thin surface also paved with diamonds. It would have been his most magnificent, his most poignant, his most meaningful egg yet presented to the tsar, and Fabergé’s eyes brimmed with tears at how the revolution had foiled the presentation of his masterpiece. Now his egg would be buried in this crate filled with sawdust, the lid hammered closed, the box shipped into oblivion, into the chaos of this godforsaken country, to end up on a train commandeered in the upheaval of some province, in the wet basement of some requisitioned municipal building, in the rough hut of some peasant, where it would wait to be rediscovered.

I did not say to him, My son was born in June. If the world rights itself, you will have designed the wrong constellations for the tsarevich.

Then in July, a crowd of fifty thousand Bolshevik sympathizers—Kronstadt sailors, Putilov workers in their blue factory tunics, and soldiers—surrounded the Tauride Palace where the Soviet met and tried to force it to seize power from the weak Provisional Government, crying, Seize power, you bastards! All Power to the Soviet! Then in frustration, when Trotsky and Chernov refused to do so, saying the time for a Soviet revolution had not yet come and certainly would not be decided by bayonets in the street, the mob ran through the city attacking the burzhui until a sudden rainstorm cleared the streets. The mob caused such a disturbance that Kerensky feared the monarchist right, indignant at this mayhem and the Provisional Government’s inability to control it, might bring in the armies from the front, after all, and move to reinstate the tsar and the civil order of that regime. And so Kerensky laid down a series of decrees—no public gatherings, death penalty to deserters and insubordinates at the front, no more soldiers’ committees. But it was his release of leaflets accusing the Bolsheviks of being traitors, their movement financed by German money with the purpose of overturning the revolution and all the new freedoms and forcing Russia into a humiliating peace treaty that finally turned the workers and the troops against them. Arrest warrants for the Bolshevik leaders were issued, and those who didn’t flee were jailed in the Peter and Paul Fortress alongside the corrupt loyalist officials from the old regime already there. This sudden wave of sentiment against the Bolsheviks, which meant perhaps the imperial family would also be released, worked unexpectedly in my favor. In this new atmosphere, the public began to agitate against the traitors who with their dirty boots and tobacco juice tromped their way through the house of a prima ballerina, even if that ballerina was the imperialist trollop Kschessinska. And so the Provisional Government sent eight armored cars and several batteries of artillery over the bridges to my house and turned the remaining Bolsheviks out.