Adrienne Sharp: The True Memoirs of Little K

Worse, Russia no longer had much of an army to fight the kaiser’s army, for all this while the Great War still went on—so many men had deserted and so many officers had been killed by their men that when the Germans advanced toward Peter they swiftly took city after city with laughable ease, sending a few troops with machine guns by train or motorcar to sweep up our soldiers along the way, and when they reached Peter they planned to do the same thing there. So in a panic Lenin moved the capital to Moscow and to stop the advance he signed a peace treaty that surrendered to the Germans the Ukraine, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland—where my parents lay buried, now on German soil! Prince Lvov, the nobleman who had first headed the old Provisional Government right after the February revolution, became so distraught when he heard of this Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that he took to his bed and threatened to slit his own throat. We read that a general shot himself. But the treaty did not hold, for America entered the war and with her help the Allies defeated Germany within six months. Our poor Allies—trying to fight alongside a country that was fighting against itself! Democratic America was happy to see an emperor deposed. Did I mention I had been invited to dance in America in 1903, offered 40,000 dollars for just five performances in New York—and that was 40,000 dollars back then!—but I turned the offer down, for who in America knew anything about the ballet? Or about kings, emperors, or tsars, for that matter? Britain did, and as such, she, unlike America, halfheartedly supported the old regime, fearful that the disease of revolution was contagious. Let’s see. I’ve lost my place. Brest-Litovsk. Yes. This treaty, briefly as it lasted, doomed the imperial family, for as soon as Russia signed it, Lenin turned his attention that summer to the problem of what to do with all those dozens of Romanovs.

We heard that four of them—Sergei’s brothers the grand dukes Nicholas and George among them—were taken to Shpaterraia Prison in Peter, but that Niki’s brother Mikhail was sent instead a thousand miles east to Perm. At this time Niki and his family were moved too, southwest from slow-paced Tobolsk to the grittier industrial city of Ekaterinburg, closer to the Urals, and there they were stuffed into the house of a merchant named Ipatiev, who was given twenty-four hours to pack up and get out, after which his home was rechristened, ominously, the House of Special Purpose. Half of Niki’s suite who had been able to visit him daily in Tobolsk was now put in prison in Ekaterinburg and the other half of his suite was expelled from the city entirely, and we heard through the children’s French tutor, Pierre Gilliard, before he left, that the family was confined to two bedrooms and that Alexei had had another hemorrhage from sledding in a tea tray down a staircase, that the guards from Tobolsk had been replaced and the new guards were hostile and deliberately, provocatively cruel, and that Niki’s beard was now gray and the family was entirely alone. And at this I despaired. Finally, word came of Sergei. He, too, had been sent east, first to Viatka and then over the Ural Mountains to Ekaterinburg near Niki, though neither of them knew the other was so close, and then Sergei was shuttled a little farther north to Alapayevsk, a few hundred miles from Mikhail in Perm. Sergei was imprisoned in an old schoolhouse along with Alix’s sister and three sons of Grand Duke Konstantin. And I thought, Why have they concentrated all the Romanov men there in the Urals? But I knew the answer—that area was militantly Bolshevik, radically anti-tsarist, the miners and workers having slaved underground so long that they erupted like their red-hot furnaces. We received one letter from Sergei in which he tried to reassure me—he and the others were allowed to plant a vegetable garden and they could take their exercise in town, he and the Konstantin princes were teaching the schoolchildren to play soccer, a sport new to Russia, and he would surely teach it to Vova when he saw him again. On rainy days, he said, they read aloud to one another from War and Peace .

And so I wrote him, daily, but that first letter was the only one I had from him until, months later, a last, in June, a telegram, wishing Vova Pazdravlyayu s dnem rozhdeniya —a happy birthday. And then a great silence. I brooded over this, locked in my hot bedroom, for the temperature was warmer here than in Peter in July, sending my thoughts to Sergei—Get out of that schoolhouse. Climb over the desks and through a window and come to me. Vova harangued me, See, they are all there together . But I could not tell him, It is not a good thing that they are all together in Siberia . He wanted me to travel there. One of the princes’ wives had followed this group of Romanovs to Alapayevsk of her own volition, the way wives and families of the revolutionaries exiled to Siberia for the last one hundred years had traditionally done, but this was a different Siberia, not the loosely monitored Siberia of the tsars, and within a few months, she was arrested and put in a Perm prison.

The capital we had already abandoned had now, with the exit of Lenin and the remains of the aristocracy, become a ghost town, with men and women ghosts floating slowly through the deserted streets looking for food or fuel. We heard the two hundred thousand beautiful horses of the city could no longer be fed and they died, often in the streets, where dogs ate at them if the people did not get there with their knives first. Trees disappeared. Then the houses, three thousand wooden houses—floorboards, wall panels, doors, window frames—anything that could be burned. We heard people burned their own furniture, their books, and they made light—there was electric current only a few hours each evening—with a bottle of fat and a wick, whose stinking smoke blackened the walls. We heard people piled their garbage on street corners and the rats ran to it. We heard the formers who weren’t killed and who had anything at all to sell sold it on the streets or took the trains out to the countryside, where they bartered their shoes and clothes for bags of food—those formers had a new name, bagmen . And I thought, Why could I not have been born in 1772 instead of 1872? For then I could have lived out my life peacefully in the Peter of the tsars.

Through all this, Miechen bided her time in the Caucasus. And the dowager empress waited in the Crimea—the two women who had once lived in rival palaces and had run rival courts now squared off across the Black Sea. For here in the south, in the fall of 1917, around the time I arrived, an incipient resistance was taking root. Two former commanders of the Russian army, generals Alexeev and Kornilov, had made their headquarters in Novocherkassk, just north of us, in the territory of the Don Cossacks, only some of whom were tsarist loyalists but all of whom hated the Bolsheviks. These men were slowly joined by landowners’ sons and students who had been made junior officers in the army and who hated this new regime and hated the common people who had expropriated their homes and burned their oriental carpets and the leatherbound books in their libraries and who with their axes had chopped up their chairs and consoles. These young officers wanted to rout the peasants out and send them back into their huts where they belonged. Why, they hated even the sight of the peasants’ grotesque rough faces and greasy hair as they sat side by side with them in the fourth-class compartment on the train to Novocherkassk. And more of the old regime followed, including the old Duma politicians who hated Lenin. Even the poet Tsvetaeva and her husband went south, and he joined the Volunteers, as this new group was first called, and she wrote verse about them all, White Guards: black nails / in the ribs of the Antichrist . In Novocherkassk, the men donned their old tsarist uniforms or formal frock coats to distinguish themselves from the revolutionary rabble, and as this army of men grew in size and ambition, so did the hopes of Miechen and the dowager empress. After the Volunteers had a major victory at Rostov, just north of us, Andrei announced he would travel to Novocherkassk to join the ranks of what had now been renamed, rather grandly, the White Army, but Miechen forbade him to do so—and so Andrei deferred his plans, and Vova laughed at the news, saying, Your suitor is a forty-year-old devushka! —a girl!