Adrienne Sharp: The True Memoirs of Little K

This White Army might be made up of volunteers, but these volunteers, well-schooled and well-trained generals and Cossack atamans and officers, not only won their first battle at Rostov but a next at nearby Ekaterinodov and they were joined in Siberia in the spring of 1918 by the Czechs and the Allies. Emboldened, the Whites moved north from the Caucasus into the Ukraine, where they reclaimed Odessa and Kiev and Orel, and then they then began their march farther north to Tula, with its great arsenal, and from there it was not far to Moscow, where the Bolsheviks were in a panic, preparing to evacuate once again, this time to their stronghold in the Urals. I wish I could have seen Lenin scamper about as the workers and peasants tore up their party cards and tried to curry quick favor with the Moscow borzhui before the White deluge. We heard that the Whites were simultaneously preparing a charge on Peter and that they had encircled Ekaterinburg in the east, and after that we heard on the radio that the imperial family had been rescued by the White Army and I told Vova that Sergei would soon be saved as well. Then we heard rumors that the tsar’s brother Mikhail had been shot, that Sergei had been freed by loyalist Cossacks, that he had been transported to another location, that two of his brothers had been executed in the courtyard of Shpaterraia prison, that the tsarevich Alexei had died, that the imperial family had been massacred, that the tsar had been hidden by the Pope in the Vatican, that the tsar had been seen on the streets of London, his hair snow white, that the imperial family were on a ship sailing ceaselessly on the White Sea, never touching the shore.

If Niki was alive, if Alexei or even Grand Duke Mikhail was alive, then the dowager empress had won. If not, then it would be Miechen’s victory, for the crown would pass to Kyril—if his own marriage to a divorcée and his mother’s overlate conversion to Orthodoxy did not disqualify him. In these special times, perhaps something as trifling as Miechen’s Lutheran womb would no longer matter. And so these two willful women refused to leave Russia until what was unknown became known. Minnie’s and Miechen’s sons and daughters, however, had had enough of this waiting. The dowager empress’s daughter Olga traveled by train, cart, and foot to the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. Sergei’s brother Sandro took his eldest son and left for England. Boris, for after all, he was never going to be tsar, left Russia for Paris. Kyril left Finland for his wife’s home in Coburg, of all places! But Andrei, unable to leave his mother, out of either duty or attachment—and I suspected the latter—stayed, and I stayed, as well, because Kislovodsk was where Sergei knew to find me.

Then, in April 1919, at King George’s urgent concern about the growing civil war, the dowager empress and the rest of the Nikolaevichi put down their dishes of rose-leaf jam, clotted cream, and hot honey cakes and left the Crimea on two British battleships, the Marlborough and the Lord Nelson —and then Miechen and Andrei and Vova and I were alone in the bottom of Russia in our two rented villas, Andrei running up and down the streets between them with news. If one flank of the White Army took Peter in the north and another pushed up from the Caucasus through the Ukraine and still a third came west from Siberia, Andrei said, then the Reds would be surrounded and crushed, and Peter would open itself to the Vladimirichi like the Fabergé coronation egg and Miechen would snatch up the egg’s golden stagecoach and put Kyril within it. But that was not what happened. Instead, the Red Army deserters returned to their regiments when the Whites moved through the countryside, for the peasants suspected, correctly, that a White victory would mean the loss of their land and the return of it to their old squires. And in Tula, Lenin hastily conscripted the factory workers to dig trenches and erect barricades and arm themselves to protect the arsenal against the Whites, who would grab the munitions and guns and cannons and run with them to Moscow. And when Peter was threatened, the Red Army swelled yet again to defend it , for Peter was the seat of their revolution and a symbol of it. And through all this Miechen paced, her pet spaniels and bulldog dumped from her lap as she pondered her empire. But there was no empire. The Whites were eventually outnumbered and outfought in all three theaters, and by the end of 1919, the White Army and the Cossacks had begun their long, ugly retreat, fleeing from Moscow, through the Ukraine, and down to the Black Sea ports, drinking and pillaging and killing along the way anyone they blamed for the destruction of the empire in an orgy of furious defeat. And the people closed their shops and cafés and patients crawled from their hospital beds and they all followed the army, knowing that anyone who had been a White sympathizer would be executed by the Bolsheviks when they retook their cities.

We ourselves had to flee Kislovodsk for Novorossiysk in January by train, Miechen’s personal car linked to the back of it, and Andrei rode with her there while Vova and I sat on our bags in a third-class car. I left a note with the postmaster for Sergei, telling him we were headed for the Black Sea port. The journey of three hundred miles, because of the stops and delays and searches, took an arduous two weeks, and at each small stop along the way, people’s faces and hands would appear at the windows and the doors, the hands and faces wrapped in rags and clinging to any pipe or railing or to the sides of the carriages, even after the train had begun once again to move. And my son, seeing this, shrank against me, his sullen bravado of the past year gone after the first ten versts. When we arrived, finally, at the port, we found many people had already set up camp on the embankments or on the piers or in the warehouses, had pinched themselves between the great cranes and winches that bent themselves in metal angles to the sky. Former tsarist generals, former counts, former princes, former grand dukes had moved with the retreating Cossacks and Whites toward this port, where they piled now into consulates or hotel rooms. On the shaky dock a hundred thousand officers, army men, Cossacks, ministers of the government, members of the former court, and ordinary people converged. Niki’s sister Olga, as irony would have it, also waited here with us for evacuation by whatever ship came into this popular harbor. But when Andrei called on her, she had no more news of Niki and Sergei than did I.

Everywhere I saw tents with bunches of garlic strung at the front flap, an old Rus amulet against epidemics, and this epidemic was typhus, the same illness that had nearly killed Niki so long ago right here in the Crimea. When the pharmacy ran out of medicine, it began to sell Orthodox medals to the most desperate, usually parents of young children. The rest of us hung garlic and held our breath when the ambulance trains brought the sick and the dead to the station, where we, for lack of anywhere else to go, remained in our railroad cars on the tracks. The general inspector, at Andrei’s prodding, found me a saloon car, with two beds and a lavatory, to live in. Of the living, I asked for word of Sergei Mikhailovich. Of the dead, I could ask nothing, but I looked into their faces to see if he was among them. From my compartment window each day I saw the corpses of the typhus victims lifted from the arriving trains, put unceremoniously on carts, and dragged to the cemetery. I chased after them like a ghoul, arm over my nose, for a peek. We tied the cuffs of our sleeves tight against crawling lice, we put kerchiefs over our mouths, and we waited for a ship to take us across the Black Sea. But every boat had a problem. One was too small to take more passengers. Another was going only across the Black Sea to Turkey, which the Bolsheviks had already declared as the Turkestan Soviet Republic and which was embroiled in various tribal uprisings. On another ship the voyagers already had typhus, and yet another asked for more than we could pay. We were trapped in the rail yard, which slowly, with the rain, turned into an enormous mud hole. It seemed the wind was wet with ice and, like the figure painted on a Maryinsky backdrop, filled its cheeks with the cold air and blew it down through the tracks, and we resorted to sawing up telegraph poles to burn for fuel. Each cold evening Andrei came from his mother’s first-class compartment to my tiny carriage to visit and sip tea or the occasional hot chocolate with me and Vova, who sat there silently, glowering, until, I swear, he seemed to wear the face of a muzhik grimacing at a borzhui . And we did look like peasants, for by now I had only two dresses left and my son one outfit and a coat. In the mornings, in the bleak light, I stepped out on the ice, my heels cracking the thin sheets that lay over the mud, and at the dark corners of the station the stray dogs emerged for the scraps from our dinner the night before. How they ran to me when I called them, thin, ribs visible beneath their fur, spots of mange covering their legs, their backs, even their faces. Yes, we were as ragged as those dogs, and I pitied them as I could not afford to pity us.