Robert Alexander: The Romanov Bride

In the end it wasn’t so difficult. I just had to steal more money. And this is what I did: me and a pal walked overnight to another village and snuck into three different huts. And that second time we made out pretty good. When the villagers were at church we stole a pile of money, and my half was enough for two tickets all the way to Sankt Peterburg and even enough to pay for our first few weeks in the capital. Oh, I didn’t tell my Shurochka where I really got the money. No, she would’ve killed me on the spot. So I just told her my rich uncle in a nearby village loaned it to me. Even then she was hesitant, but soon enough she was all right, she was, when I told her that Dyadya Vanya expected to be repaid within a year, no more.

And so we packed bread and some dried fish, two meat pies from Mama, a few clothes, then kissed everyone goodbye and got a blessing from Shura’s Papa, the priest, and set off. Oh, I’ll never forget when, a few days later, our train pulled into the Nikolaevski Station in Peterburg. So many people! So many fine carriages! So many people on the streets selling meat pies and fruits and nuts and… and everything was, well, so exciting! The capital back then was amazing, a glittering heart of golden palaces right in the center and a great ring of smoking factories in the surrounding suburbs. At first it was so exciting because we were in the city of the tsars and we were young and, why, we had real… hope! Da, da, da, for the first time even I felt it, too, something good about the future. For the first time in the history of Mother Russia we were not bound to the land and our destinies were not controlled by our masters, and there we were, thousands of us flooding the cities, hope dangling right before us like a big carrot. It was unbelievable. I didn’t understand it then, couldn’t name it, but we were part of a new class of people, a new generation freed from serfdom, now able to seek a better life in the city, and we were known as the proletariat.

I suppose I first began to realize that things were beginning to pull apart in that autumn of 1904.

It was widely said that the mood of society had not been so bad in several decades, which I did not doubt. We were in that horrible war with Japan and as a consequence I was busy with my workrooms, organizing so many hundreds of women to roll bandages and pack medicaments. Determined to reach out to those in need, I even had my own ambulance trains to see after as well. However, this was Russia, a country ever so slow in awakening, which is to say I was shocked by the confusion, how poorly my instructions were obeyed and how such carelessness caused our help to arrive so slowly in the far east of the Empire. Heavens, there was such terrible, terrible waste as well.

Early that December, Kostya-Grand Duke Konstantin-came to us for dinner. He was so distressed, as were we all, at the strikes and upheavals throughout the nation, and he went on and on.

“Good Lord in Heaven,” said the stately man, who was widely known for his wonderful poetry, “it’s as if a dam has suddenly broken, flooding our Holy Mother Russia with the utmost turmoil.”

“You speak the truth,” agreed my Sergei. “ Russia has been seized with an incredible thirst for change!”

I looked upon my husband, so tall and thin, his narrow face so tight. It’s quite true, Sergei had a very severe belief of the way things should be, an opinion with which I didn’t necessarily agree. But of course I said nothing, for in Russia it was said that a husband was the head of a wife as Christ was head of the church. Upon politics I was therefore not allowed to comment, particularly amongst mixed company.

“Everything is being talked about with such squabble,” continued Kostya. “The cities of Kaluga, Moscow, and Peterburg have unanimously adopted motions asking for every freedom. It’s just absolutely awful. Revolution is banging on the door. Even a constitution is being openly discussed… how shameful, how terrifying.”

Sergei nodded. “A constitution would be madness, sheer madness. I’m afraid our Russia is too backward for such reforms, that our people are neither ready nor mature enough for such things. The so-called parable of equality is just that-a simple story. Freedom and equality would only make the masses drunk and sick, and it would be the ruin of the nation, of that I’m quite sure.”

“Absolutely,” said Kostya enthusiastically. “Democracy is practical only in small countries like France or Britain, not in our huge Russia with our multitudes of different peoples, from Great Russians to Mohammedans.”

Given Sergei’s firm belief in the autocratic principle, it was small wonder that he did not approve of Nicky’s steps, however tentative, to introduce reforms as the most stable course for Russia. But perhaps Sergei was right, perhaps it was as they said: God was Autocrat of All the Universe, and the Tsar was Autocrat of All the Russias. This was, of course, all quite contrary to what I’d been taught by my mother, who believed that liberalism was the best antidote to violence. Then again, this was Russia, an Empire ever so much more Oriental than Occidental.

With all this weighing on Sergei’s mind, and fearful, too, that the government had lost its way, it came as no surprise that after fourteen years of service my husband submitted his resignation as Governor-General of Moscow. The two of us quite looked forward to retiring to our country estate, Ilyinskoye, where I planned to paint and read and host entertainments such as concerts and tableaux vivants.

Then we were hit by a terrible lightning bolt, two bolts, actually. First came the horrible news of the surrender of Port Arthur to the Japanese-imagine, and we had all firmly believed that Russians never surrendered!-and then in January came the awful strikes in Peterburg, which grew and grew by the moment, spreading all the way down to us in Moscow.

Lord, how painful it all was.

After we arrived in the capital my Shura found work within a few days, which was of course good, even though the pay was so low, some 16 rubles a month, though that depended on her output. She found a job at a textile factory, not the big Stieglitz Works but a smaller one, and the trouble started when on her first morning there the manager, this fancy Mister Foreman with his squeaky big leather boots-and I was sure he’d paid extra for that squeak just to impress us with their newness-insisted that she live at the factory. The normal working day for her was supposed to be eleven and a half hours, but the factory had received government permission to work fourteen, even fifteen, hours each weekday and ten on Saturday. There was to be only one day off-Sunday, of course. And that’s why Mister Foreman wanted Shura to spend the night at the factory-to be more efficient. He said she would make more money too because she was paid by the piece and the rate was very low, so he said that if she slept on a plank bed by her workbench she would be able to work more and make more, too. And at first Shura agreed to that. After all, she was a good girl from the countryside, devoted to Tsar and Motherland, submissive, and without a political thought in her dear, sweet head. Da, da, da, she wanted to obey her manager, but I said no.

“You are my wife!” I said to her. “I will not be separated from you! I will not agree to meet you just one day a week!”

And I won, and so we became “corner” dwellers. We found a place way out in the Narva District in the cellar of a building that cost us 4 rubles each a month, which seemed like a lot, particularly since all we got was a bed in one part of the cellar, a corner that was partitioned off by a dirty curtain. Three other families lived down there, all of whom, like us, had just arrived from the countryside. Children in makeshift cradles hung everywhere from beams, and it was all so uncomfortable and smelly, but that was all we could afford. Rents were very high… why, an apartment with its own bedroom in a sensible neighborhood cost 25 rubles a month, which of course was more than Shura would make in a month. So there we were in that dark cellar, packed like herring in a barrel. There were armies of cockroaches running this way and that, and the plaster was peeling from the ceiling in great scabs. And it was so cold, so incredibly cold. We shared the kitchen with seven other families, and the toilet, too, which was so dangerous that children weren’t allowed to go there by themselves. Frankly, the stench of the toilet was so thick you could cut it with an axe.