The Last Tsar (32 page)

“10 March. Slept well, despite the conditions we now find ourselves in. The thought that we are together gladdens and consoles me.… Looked through papers, put them in order, and burned them….

“11 March.… In the morning received Benckendorff, learned from him that we shall be staying here quite a while. A pleasant thought. Continued burning letters and papers.”

Did he assume the possibility of his diary’s confiscation? Undoubtedly. But he did not stoop to concealment.

He “burned papers”—that was it!

Indeed, soon after, a portion of their papers would be taken away by the Provisional Government’s Special Commission.

“14 March.… Now plenty of time to read for my own pleasure. Although also enough time to sit upstairs with the children.”

A peaceful life in their beloved Tsarskoe Selo. But the life of prisoners.

“March 21.… This afternoon Kerensky, the current minister of justice, came quite unexpectedly. Walked through all the rooms, wanted to see us, spoke with me for about 5 minutes, introduced the new commandant of the palace and then left.… He ordered poor Anya put under arrest and taken to town along with Lili Dehn.”

A parting of friends. The valet Alexander Volkov brought Alix in a wheelchair. She and Anya managed an embrace and practically had to be torn apart. But Sana managed to tell her friend something sublime:

“There”—she pointed to the sky—“and in God we are always together.”

A car took Anya away to Petrograd, to prison.

She kept looking back at the palace disappearing behind the trees. Tsarskoe Selo’s park, the white statues, St. Feodor’s Cathedral—all would become a dream. The house of this family.… For twelve years it had been her home as well. She would recall the large semicircular window, the sovereign’s study. That was how she would now refer to Nicky. Sana too would disappear and remain the empress who had bestowed friendship on modest, devoted Anya. There she was, a little girl, catching a glimpse of the empress at Ilinskoe: tall, with thick golden hair to her knees. And there was the empress in the first days of their friendship—dressed in dark, fur-trimmed velvet and a long pearl necklace. An Abyssinian in a white turban was at the table. And there was the war. And the tsaritsa’s face in the kerchief of a Sister of Mercy—thin lips pressed, gray eyes sorrowful.

Meanwhile, events were unfolding.

Nicholas’s diary:

“27 March.… Kerensky came and asked me to limit my meetings [with Alix] to mealtimes and to sit separately from the children. As if he needed this to keep the famous Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies quiet. Forced to obey to avoid any kind of violence.”

Their correspondence and personal papers were gathered up for the “Special Commission of Inquiry examining abuses of the ministers of the tsarist government and other high officials of the overthrown regime.”

The commission was supposed to respond to the persistent rumors current in society about the tsar’s family’s treason and dealings with Germany.

All this time the commission was slaving away. As secretary of the commission, the great poet Alexander Blok went every morning to the Fortress of Peter and Paul to record interrogations. The fortress’s cells made him think of the brilliant receptions at the Winter Palace. It was as if all of Petersburg society had moved into the fortress: prime ministers, department heads, the war minister, secret service chiefs.

At night the poet was writing his
Notebook
.

“Manasevich-Manuilov is loathsome, undersized, and smooth-shaven.… Prime Minister Sturmer is a large, melancholy ruin, old man’s rubber-soled boots.… The other prime minister, Goremykin, is an utter wreck, quite feeble—about to die. The director
of the Police Department, Beletsky, has stubby fingers and greasy hands … an oily face, talkative.… Unusual eyes—narrow, as if tear-filled—a steady glimmer.”

Blok also gave a portrait of Anya in her cell.

“We went to see Vyrubova in her cell. She was standing by the bed with a crutch propped under her broad (misshapen) shoulder. She had done something with her chamberpot—broken it or thrown papers into it perhaps. She was still speaking helplessly, shooting pleading glances at me. She had all the givens for a Russian beauty, still, somehow distorted, irreparably and long ago, hackneyed.”

“Helpless”? “Pleading”? While “helpless Anya” had managed to set up a correspondence from the fortress with the most dangerous woman in Russia, the empress?

Blok recorded her interrogation as well.

“Chairman: ‘And did you know that Rasputin was a degenerate and nasty man?’

“Vyrubova: ‘That is what everyone said. I personally never saw anything. Perhaps he was afraid in my presence. He knew that I was close to the court. Thousands of people came with many many petitions about him, but I never saw anything.’

“ ‘And you yourself never were involved in politics?’

“ ‘Why would I be involved in politics?’

“ ‘Do you mean you never tried to place ministers?’

“ ‘No.’

“ ‘But you brought the empress together with ministers?’

“ ‘I give you my word of honor. There was never anything of the kind.’

“ ‘You can give no better than your word of honor.’”

Thus Anya mocked them.

But what did the Special Commission finally say about the tsar’s case?

Romanov (another bearer of that name), a member of the commission’s presidium, wrote: “The only thing the sovereign can be accused of was his inability to take men’s measure.… It is always easier to mislead a pure man than a bad one capable of deception. The sovereign was indisputably a pure man.”

In the interests of the family, however, the commission did not publish these thoughts—about the pure man—so as not to fan already inflamed passions and avoid a collision between the government and the Soviet. A month later Nicholas was simply allowed to
be together with his family again, and Kerensky declared: “Thank God, the sovereign is innocent.”

No one made any effort to let society hear that, though. The Romanovs were much too unpopular!

That is why the famous actress Vera Leonidovna Yureneva was so surprised when, that same year, they decided to do Konstantin Konstantinovich’s play
King of the Jews
at the Nezlobin Theater and she was offered the role of the Christian Anna. The play had been performed once at the Hermitage Theater. Nezlobin, an entrepreneur, had bought the whole luxurious set for peanuts. Three young men came to each performance, K. R.’s sons: Ioann, Konstantin, and Igor. The extras in the performance were people with magnificent posture, “formers”: officers who had fled Tsarskoe Selo. Now they exchanged their brilliant uniforms for the costumes of theatrical slaves of the first century of our era.

At this time something terrible happened to Alix at Tsarskoe Selo: there was a rumor that soldiers searching for jewels had found Rasputin’s grave under the chapel. The garrison ordered Rasputin’s corpse removed from Tsarskoe Selo. Poor Alix did the impossible: the head of the guard, Colonel Kobylinsky, got in touch with the Provisional Government and asked them to prohibit the grave being dug up.

She was on the brink of hysteria, and Kerensky, who sympathized with them more and more (a common feeling of revolutionary rulers toward genuine tsars) sent a tank to guard the ill-fated grave—but it arrived too late.

The coffin with Rasputin’s body was already on the truck. The lid was lying on the ground by the wheels, and the holy man’s awful made-up face and disheveled beard were looking up at the sky.

A meeting was being held beside the coffin, and a soldier was speaking. To the delight of those gathered, he showed them a small wooden icon that had been removed from the coffin. Inscribed on the back were the initials of the tsar’s entire family.

Later the truck with the coffin set out from Tsarskoe Selo. At a deserted spot on the Vyborg road where the luxurious mansion of Rasputin’s friend, the Tibetan doctor Badmaev, had once stood (an angry mob had burned the mansion down), the truck came to a halt. An enormous fire was laid, into which they threw the zinc coffin and
Grishka’s gasoline-doused body. The salvaged icon was sent to the Petrograd Soviet.

The Soviet’s voice was being heard more and more.

Soon after the holy man was incinerated, Alix had a dream—much more terrible than the one with the amputated arm she had once written about to Nicky.

Grigory came to her, and his entire body was covered in terrible wounds. “They will burn you all in bonfires. All of you!” he shouted. Immediately the room was set ablaze. He beckoned to her to run and she rushed toward him, but it was too late. The whole room was lit up in flame, and the fire had already enveloped her—when she woke up, choking on her scream.

The Provisional Government was weakening. The voice of the new world was growing louder and louder, the Petrograd Soviet stronger and stronger.

In April 1917, Lenin and about three dozen Bolsheviks left Switzerland and traveled through a Germany that was at war with Russia—the émigrés were hastily returning to Petrograd.

Germany was allowing them to cross its territory in a sealed train car. Later Karl Radek, a passenger on that train, wrote that the car was not sealed at all—they were simply obliged not to leave it, and two German officers sat inside. For all this there remained the train’s puzzling delay of many hours on German territory.

From quiet Switzerland Lenin would land in turbulent Russia. At the beginning of the year he had still not believed in the possibility of any kind of revolution in Russia in his generation’s lifetime. Scarcely having set foot on Petrograd soil, however, Lenin proclaimed the path to a new, socialist revolution. Power must transfer from the hands of the Provisional Government to the Soviets. Lenin talked about a peaceful transfer of power, a peaceful revolution. But he was taken from the station to Kschessinska’s mansion—Bolshevik headquarters—by a tank of armed sailors.

In July, to demonstrate the Bolsheviks’ strength, the sailors of Kronstadt entered the city.

From her prison fortress, Anya observed this new calamity with horror: “No one slept that night, parades of sailors marched down our street toward the Tauride Palace. It felt terrible, disastrous. They marched by the thousands, dusty, tired, with horrible, brutalized faces, carrying enormous placards: ‘Down with the Provisional Government,’ ‘Down with the War.’ The sailors, including women, were riding in trucks with set bayonets. General Belaev and the imprisoned naval officers were rushing around the house of detention in horror. Our head guard announced that if the sailors approached the prison, the guard would go out to meet them and surrender their arms, since they were on the Bolsheviks’ side.

Although the government put down this July demonstration, one could already catch a glimpse of the future in this ominous element.

But no one did.

A peaceful life. He “cultivated his own garden,” as Rousseau taught. He cleaned paths, sprinkled ditches, and burned downed trees. A return to childhood. As he had once worked in the garden with his father. Only now his children were working alongside him.

“6 May. Turned 49, not far from half a century.”

But the new world’s hatred kept breaking through the palace fence more and more often.

“3 June.… Sawed up some tree trunks. That was when the incident with Alexei’s bayonet happened: he was playing with it, and the riflemen walking in the garden saw it and asked an officer to take it to guard quarters.… Fine officers who lack the nerve to refuse the lower ranks!”

In Petrograd rumors were going around that the tsar and his family had fled.

A representative of the Soviet, Socialist Revolutionary Mstislavsky, appeared at Tsarskoe Selo wearing a dirty sheepskin coat (as revolutionaries are supposed to show up at hated tsarist palaces) with a revolver poking out of his holster. He took out a warrant and demanded to be allowed to hand it personally to the emperor, for rumors about the flight of Nicholas the Bloody was called now more and more often) were alarming the worked soldiers.

The guard was indignant: “Do you think we’re guarding empty rooms?” But Mstislavsky was implacable. He needed this revolutionary theater: let the tsar stand before him, the emissary of the revolutionary workers and soldiers, as arrested revolutionaries once stood at checks in his tsarist prisons.

They yielded to the Soviet. It was decided to take Mstislavsky
into the inner rooms; he would stand at the intersection of two corridors, and Nicholas would walk past.

In the inner corridors the same three-hundred-year-old life continued: Abyssinians in gold-embroidered crimson jackets and turbans, footmen in tricorner hats, lackeys in frock coats. And among them Mstislavsky, the new world, with his dirty sheepskin coat and his automatic pistol. The door bolt clicked and Nicholas appeared wearing the uniform of the Life Guard Hussar Regiment. He pulled at his mustache (as always when he was nervous), walked past, and looked indifferently at Mstislavsky. But the next moment Mstislavsky saw Nicholas’s eyes ablaze with fury. The man who had ruled Russia for twenty-two years had yet to learn humility.

Newspapers, those reliable scandalmongers, were spreading rumors about their escape. In fact, all these months of their confinement so near to Petrograd, there was not one authentic plot, not a single attempt to liberate them! There were boasting, drunken conversations of young officers—but that was all.

On July 4, E. A. Naryshkina, the empress’s lady-in-waiting (Madame Zizi, as Alix called her), wrote in her diary: “Princess Paley [Grand Duke Paul’s wife] just left. She told me in confidence that a group of young officers has devised an insane plan to take them away at night by motor to one of the ports, where an English ship would be waiting. I am unspeakably worried.”

Why worried? Why was the plan insane? Because both Zizi and Paley knew that feelings about the family were such that they would never make it to any port—they would be captured and killed en route. Fortunately, these were all cock-and-bull stories. There was no English ship, nor would there be one.