The Romanov Bride (2 page)

Indeed, none of us could have begun to think, let alone imagine, that this God-Anointed Tsar would ever, ever be pulled away.

I was full of hope when I was twenty, and for a short while not only did I have a beautiful bride but we were wonderfully happy.

Oh, Shura… my Shurochka. She was the eldest daughter of the village priest, and she had such a big smile, such straight teeth, and such eyes, so blue. Beautiful blond hair, too, that at night she uncoiled all the way down to her waist. And, oh, what soft parts! A real sweet bee! She was the most beautiful girl in our village-we both came from the same small place, a mere crossroad at the foot of the Urals-and I had always wanted to marry her, knew that I would. And I did! Yes, we got married in the fall of 1904. September. She was just eighteen and I just twenty, and not three days after the ceremony-her father performed it-we fled the countryside. My grandfather’s life had belonged to his master, and he basically died a farm animal, crushed in the mud. Years later, of course, my own father cut himself on his rusty plow and contracted tetanus… just heartbreaking. We had to hammer planks to the side of his bed to keep his quaking body from bouncing onto the floor, then we had to tie him down as his temperature rose… and next he passed from us. Granted, Papa was a free man but he left this world without so much as a single desyatina of land to his name, let alone a single ruble, and so I knew I would be leaving the province as soon as I could. To tell the truth, I didn’t want to doom a son of mine to a fate like Shura’s father, either-a poor priest with a big beard, totally dependent on handouts. No, the back of beyond of Mother Russia had not been kind to us, nor to anyone else in our village for that matter.

As my own dear babushka used to say, “Oi, things were better when we lived under the masters-at least then we didn’t have to worry where we would find tomorrow’s bread!”

And how did I do it, get the money for the train to the city? I stole it. I went to a nearby village and raided the hut of an old woman when she was out milking her only cow. But it turned out it was only enough for two tickets for me and my Shura to get as far as Moscow, which was a problem. Shura wanted to go to the capital. She wanted to go to Sankt Peterburg, the city of the tsars. Da, da, my Shurochka was the daughter of a priest and a true Believer, and she wanted to be nearer her Tsar, which was actually fine by me. Rumor had it that wages were higher in the capital, so I said to Shurochka, “Sure, let’s go.” But getting to Peterburg meant traveling through Moscow and then another night of travel, which was amazingly expensive, of course. And where was I going to get that kind of money, enough for two to travel so very far?

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.

It took me several weeks to find a job.

Every morning I went to the gates of the great Putilov Works, which was one of the largest metalworking plants in the entire world, making locomotives, tractors, railcars, artilleries, and employing some 13,000 hands. It was located in the south-west part of the Narva District, not too far from that nasty place where we were living, and each day I stood at the big gates and called out for a job, and finally one of the foremen came over and examined my hands, tops and bottoms. When he saw that my fingers were thick and calloused from the farm, he knew I was a good worker and so he took me as a smith, placing me at the very lowest rung and giving me 21 rubles a month. Even though the conditions of the factory were a kind of living hell, I was thankful for the start. Our incomes were just enough for food and rent each month and we were together, my Shura and I. And even though each night we were nearly dead from exhaustion, even though we had no privacy in our little corner of that cellar, somehow it happened.

My Shurochka became with child, much to our joy.

Yes, before long she even began to show, perhaps, I suppose, because she was no longer a plump country girl but had become so thin from working so hard.

For the Christmas holiday we had been staying at the Neskuchnoye Palace, which belonged to the Crown and was nestled in the suburbs along the Moscow River. But one night our good rest was broken in the late, late hours by heavy pounding on our bedroom door.

“Your Imperial Highness!” came a gruff voice.

Before I knew what to make of this, Sergei was up and out of bed, slipping on his silk dressing gown.

“What is it… what’s happening, Sergei?” I mumbled.

“Remain in bed-let me handle this!” he snapped as he made his way to the door.

He stepped into the hallway, shutting the door behind him. Sitting up in bed, I listened, for just outside I could hear two or three heavy voices, none of which sounded calm. Something serious had happened, of course, for Sergei was awakened only in dire emergency. So what was it now, had the strikers seized an official building? Had another minister been killed by the subversives? Or, dear Lord, had something happened to Nicky or Alix or, God forbid, to the children?

Suddenly Sergei started yelling, and I wanted to rush out there but didn’t dare. Of such things, I was allowed to know next to nothing. It was true, my husband showered me with jewels and gowns, but I understood this was my job to him, an adornment.

The door was flung wide, and my husband, his stern face flushed red, boldly strode across our bedroom. The fury burned on his face as brightly as a lamp.

“Sergei, what-”

“Get dressed, my dear!”

I looked at him-what did he just say?-and said, “But-”

“Don’t argue with me! Put on some clothes! We’re leaving!”

This made no sense, and yet I had never disobeyed, let alone rarely questioned, my husband. I rose from our bed and made for my dressing room. Immediately my thoughts turned to Maria and Dmitri, our young niece and nephew, whom God had seen fit to send to us and watch over as guardian parents.

“What about the children?” I asked.

“They’re being wakened and dressed by Mademoiselle Elena,” he said, referring to their governess. “They’ll join us in the hall downstairs.”

Sensing the gravity of the situation, I asked, “But where are we going?”

“The Kremlin. Now just do as I say, get dressed at once! And take nothing, our belongings will be brought later!”

One of my maids came in, and as she quickly dressed me my mind leaped at all the possibilities. It took no imagination. The Neskuchnoye was nestled not just in a beautiful park but near the factories and the neighborhoods of the poorest workers. Had the general uprising, which we had so feared, finally broken out? Was a band of revolutionaries ready to attack us here? For a few days now extra cavalry had been camped in the Palace yards, but I took small comfort in them, for I feared even their loyalty.

Dressed in plain walk-about clothing, I was downstairs within minutes, where Sergei and the children were already waiting. A fur cloak was thrown over my shoulders, and without word to us or farewell to our staff Sergei rushed us outside and into the cold. His big closed carriage stood out front with our ever-faithful Coachman Rudinkin perched atop the coach-box in a heavy blue coat. Four large black horses had already been harnessed, and Sergei hustled the children and me into the pale-gray silk interior. We were off at once, traveling full speed, the curtains drawn, the lamps mounted on the front of the carriage oddly darkened. Ahead and behind us I could hear the many horses of our escort charging along.

I of course knew the way to the Kremlin, and I soon realized that we were traveling by any but a direct route. Instead, still at racing speed, we were passing down small streets, through quiet neighborhoods, and across unknown bridges. None of us spoke, but glancing at the handsome, wide-eyed children, I saw that they were not afraid, just curious, even excited. Heavens, did they not sense what a crossroads Russia had come to?

Our coach slowed only when we finally reached the security of the Kremlin and passed through one of its gates. Driving through the quiet territories of the bastion, we soon arrived at the Nikolaevski Palace, where we were met by just two servants who helped us disembark and saw us up to the reception room on the first floor. Within a short time we were given tea, for the poor children were shivering-the long unused Palace was so very cold-and we four sat up for a good while, waiting first for my lady-in-waiting, the children’s governess, and my husband ’s aide-de-camp, and then for our servants who in time brought us just enough of our things to pass the night.

And even though the rumored attack upon our country residence did not materialize that night or any other, we never returned to Neskuchnoye. Such were the times that Sergei deemed it safer behind the thick fortress walls of the mighty Kremlin.