Adrienne Sharp: The True Memoirs of Little K

After reading those letters, I dislodged the diamonds from a brooch given me in 1896 by Sergei’s father and the grand dukes Vladimir, Alexei, and Pavel Alexandrovich and used them for tuition for Vova at the local school, for what likelihood was there that we would return to Peter anytime soon? But Vova did not work hard at his studies, made certain by all the dreaming he overheard at our teas and card parties and dinners— Do you remember? and When will things be again as before? —that we would be back to Peter and to his real studies with his former tutors by Easter, and though he didn’t say this, perhaps he hoped also to be back in the bosom of the imperial family, as well. He spoke of them sometimes, wistfully, of how while working in the kitchen garden they had gleefully pelted one another with clods of dirt and Anastasia had drawn the word darling on his forehead with one muddy finger or of the riddles they had one evening made up, written down on slips of paper, and passed to one another to solve. Yes, Vova skipped his classes, spent his afternoons running wild through the hilly streets with some companions from the school as undisciplined as he, and when Vova did finally come in for dinner, he refused to do any schoolwork—not that he had brought home his books. He resented Andrei’s regular appearance each afternoon at our tea table, Andrei having been released by his mother for a few hours’ furlough. Who is he? Vova would say. He’s not my father , and so he would not listen to Andrei’s admonitions, nor would he sit with us, but, instead, stood hunched over his plate to eat his biscuit. Or worse, he took his plate to the kitchen, preferring the company of my plump, red-haired cook, sitting at her table, his long legs shoved beneath it, his coat torn, and his hair standing on end from his adventures up and down Vokzalnaya Avenue. At night he would come into my room to read over Sergei’s letters and only then would he ask for whatever news of the tsar and Alexei I had gleaned at tea from Andrei—who had heard it thirdhand from the tsar’s letters to his sisters or his mother, who then told friends who told friends who told the news to Miechen. Andrei knew only, I told Vova, that the family were in Tobolsk, several hundred miles east of the Urals, that the children had built a snow mountain in the yard, that the family chopped firewood for exercise by day and at night they embroidered or read aloud or played bezique—that it was as it had been before at Tsarskoye, except much farther east. Vova took all this in soberly and said, If I were there I would have a purpose, here there is nothing for me —and then he would stand, his long shape a rebuke. I know this day comes to all mothers, when one’s son steps away from the circle of her arms, but that knowledge made his actions no less painful. I consoled myself with the notion that when we returned to Peter or Sergei joined us here, then all would really be as before . In each letter to Sergei I begged him to join us, but he seemed determined to wait until the Provisional Government’s assembly in late October, which would decide how Russia would be governed, in which he and his brother Nicholas hoped to have a hand.

Then we heard that even before the All-Russian Soviet Congress could meet at long last after all their deliberations to propose a government in which all political parties had representation, the Bolsheviks decided to act. Lenin, who had sat at my son’s desk and whom Sergei had so easily dismissed with a crumpling of paper, had slipped back into Russia to stage another putsch , though a disorganized and scattered one, true, nothing like the great spontaneous eruption in July. But it didn’t have to be. For Kerensky, believing the Bolshevik party so small their party name nothing but an empty boast, the Majorityites , had not bothered to rout out or arrest what remained of their number. In fact, he crowed that he wanted them to show themselves so he could crush them. Meanwhile he planned to force the unruly peasant infantry the Bolsheviks had radicalized from their Petersburg barracks and off to the northern front to fight the Germans. But the regiments balked when the Bolsheviks assured them Kerensky was ridding the capital of them in order to shut down the revolution. Yes, Lenin was wily and Kerensky, without the army, was impotent—despite the absurdity of Lenin’s putsch . The rusted old cannons the Bolsheviks tried to fire from the Peter and Paul failed to go off, as they had not been properly maintained by the inept regime, and from the cruiser Aurora , shells fell far short, plopping, ridiculously, into the Neva. It was an uprising so pitifully small that the performance of Boris Godunov ground through its scenes at the Maryinsky and Chaliapin continued singing every bar of his arias in Don Carlo at the Narodny Dom, the people’s theater Niki built, where one could hear Chaliapin sing for twenty kopeks, the audiences of both theaters blissfully unaware of a counterrevolution. The streets were so quiet, even in the usually riotous Vyborg district, that only two drunks were reported arrested there. Sergei said he did not even know the Provisional Government had been overthrown until the next day when the newspapers told of it, declaring of the Bolsheviks, Caliphs for an Hour . The Bolshevik soldiers and armed workers had found entry to the Winter Palace from the cellar of the east wing and stumbled through the labyrinth of gates and doorways and passages into the palace proper. Despite the three thousand soldiers Kerensky had detailed there, sleeping at night on mattresses in the great halls to prevent this, the Bolsheviks marched the ministers of the Provisional Government from the palace right to the fortress of Peter and Paul. Kerensky did run, as I had predicted; he fled by car to summon his loyalist troops at the northern front and never returned. He ended up, I believe, in Finland, and from there he went, like so many of us, to Paris and then on to America. There he wrote and rewrote his story. His ministers had been arrested so abruptly they left with their pens still warm resting on the papers on which they had been scribbling plans and proclamations against the Bolsheviks and the upheaval they were newly creating— The Provisional Government appeals to all classes to support the Provisional Government! And the Bolsheviks, in a frenzy of occupation, ran about stuffing their pockets and hiding within their coats bottles of ink and clocks and swords and bedspreads with the imperial monogram and statuettes and leather cut from chairs, even cakes of soap, others shouting, No, comrades, this is for the people! When the soldiers discovered the cavernous palace wine cellar, a three-week orgy of drinking ensued, wine and vodka streaming through the gutters where people stooped to guzzle it, and women brought sacks and cases to catch it and haul it home and all night the drunkards sang Russian folk songs, Under the pine, Under the green pine, Lay me down to sleep , and no matter how many guards the Bolsheviks sent over to stop the drinking, they themselves joined in the orgy, which did not end until the supply finally ran out and men lay unconscious in the streets and broken bottles glittered on the pavement and the white snow had been tinted purple. And I wrote to Sergei, Get out. Get out of Peter .

We heard the Bolsheviks opened up all the bank vaults and at gunpoint forced the reluctant employees to hand over every kopek, every bar of silver, every piece of jewelry to finance their new government. So much for my boxes of silver at the Bank of Azov and Don and for all the receipts to them I had stitched into my underskirts. The Bolsheviks’ new motto was Looting the looters , and they encouraged the people to go from house to house and store to store, to grab everything the wealthy parasites had once hoarded, and the workers took rugs, furniture, china, paintings, and from churches their silver and wine, and building committees composed of former servants forced the wealthy from their rooms in their own homes and consigned them to their servants’ old quarters, and I thought, How quickly and with what pleasure my old housekeeper would have relieved me of my bedroom and my drawing room and my great hall, relegating me to her narrow bed off by the cloakroom . More ominously, we heard all the Romanovs had been ordered to register with the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, a new security force, the name of which stood for the All Russian Extraordinary Commission for Struggle Against Counterrevolution and Sabotage, and this Cheka then began to persecute and imprison even their old revolutionary comrades from the other political parties—the pigs and whores , I suppose, against whom Lenin had ranted in my son’s school notebooks. The registered Romanovs were forbidden to leave Peter, which meant Sergei was now trapped there with his brother, who wrote, We are marked for the gallows. The empty Romanov palaces had been requisitioned and turned into orphanages, hospitals, and schools. My house, no longer the headquarters of the Bolshevik Central Committee, became a clinic and then a home for retarded children and after that the clubhouse for the Society of Old Bolsheviks—if they lived that long.