The Russian Album (16 page)

I beg you to believe, my Sovereign, that I am forced to petition you for this gracious act, by the traditions inherited from my ancestors, tried by centuries of faithfulness to the immemorial principles on which the might of the Russian State was founded and which has rested on the union of the Tsar with his people.

Even when separated from a direct share in the conduct of affairs in accordance with the principles and examples set by my father, I shall remain the same loyal servant of your Majesty, the throne and the fatherland.

Your Imperial Majesty's loyal subject and servant Equerry Count Paul Ignatieff.

After a moment of silence, the Tsar lifted his eyes and said, ‘Do not be agitated. Go on with your useful work. Your petition will remain with me in my desk.' With these words he opened a drawer in the table and put the petition into it.

That evening Paul learned from a newspaperman friend that he had been replaced as minister. He made the final round of the ministry. His subordinates assembled in the great hall and they exchanged words of deep feeling. They asked him to speak, but the words would not come and he stood in silence, blinking. He could recall only a line from a poem: ‘Friends, row hard, row hard.' They carried him on their shoulders down the steps of the ministry to his car.

He was summoned to Tsarskoe Selo for a farewell audience. Rasputin's body had been found floating in the Neva that morning. The Tsar scarcely seemed to be listening to him when Paul said, ‘It was the mercy of God.' Awakened from his reverie, the Tsar looked at him sharply: ‘You mean, the will of God.' ‘No, your Majesty, I mean the mercy of God. It might have finished worse.' Paul said he wished he could have remained to continue the work he had started, to which the Tsar replied, ‘Do not be afraid. I stay here and guard all that you have done.' He then added in a quiet distant voice: ‘You told me the truth,' and after a pause, ‘as you saw it.' With these words the Tsar clasped him in his arms, and said, ‘Go to your mother now; take a rest, restore your health and return to go on with your work.' In tears, Paul answered, ‘Your Majesty, something tells me that I shall never again be in this room. May God protect you.'

SIX

REVOLUTION

‘Go to your mother' had been the Tsar's last words. After his final audience with the Tsar, Paul travelled down to Kroupodernitsa to be with his mother. In the crypt of the village church they sang the
pannihida,
the memorial service for the dead, on the anniversary of his father's death. They stood together, mother and son, in the low vaulted crypt lit by the icon lamps, and on the black basalt tomb the inscription ‘Peking and San Stefano' gleamed like a scar.

Paul had been a liberal constitutional monarchist, his father a defender of autocracy: both had gone under, at fifty, at the height of their powers, cast away by a regime they had tried to serve. They were too much alike, too much of one flesh, for Paul to escape the same fatal unwinding, the inner dissolution that had befallen his father. The coils of energy, will and motive wound tight for fifteen years began to unravel.

While the wind whistled across the bare fields, Paul sat with his mother on the sofa in the sitting room at Kroupodernitsa, opening more than 3000 letters and telegrams which arrived at the estate once his dismissal was announced. The
zemstvo
movement told him his work would not be forgotten and teachers' unions from Smolensk to Vladivostok sent him messages of support.

The church choir had prepared a performance of extracts from Glinka's
A Life for the Tsar,
and they asked Paul to sing a solo part. The concert was given in the sitting room of the big house. His mother, matriarch of the village, swathed in white shawls, sat by the fire with Paul's sister Mika beside her. Around them were ranged the village elders, the head of the fire brigade and the priest, and against the walls stood the servants who had taught Paul to ride and hunt and fish – Mitro, Sessoueff, Rudnitsky and Vassilieff, together with their wives and children. Still more villagers stood outside, their faces against the veranda windows. Everyone sang the patriotic choruses, and then they listened while their master sang the solo, which they cheered and made him repeat. It was called ‘In The Storm'.

Paul stayed with his mother for six weeks and returned to the capital in mid-February 1917. On his way back from the station in Petrograd, he passed detachments of Siberian Cossacks on their small shaggy ponies, champing and pawing the frozen ground of the private courtyards in the streets near his home. Machine-gun nests were going up on the rooftops of public buildings.

By then the family had moved into a big house on Fourstatskaya street, a block away from the Tauride Palace where the Duma held its sittings. It was in a leafy and substantial district where the fashionable regiments had their barracks and fashionable people had their mansions. Theirs was a three-storey edifice with Corinthian columns around the windows and large iron gates guarding the driveway. Built as the Spanish embassy in the 1890s, it was decorated in the florid style of Spanish baroque. After Paul bought it in 1915, builders were brought in to tone down some of the Spanish extravagance and to take the fountain out of the sitting room. In December 1916, the family moved from the rented
dacha
in Tsarskoe Selo in a chaotic procession of motorcars and trucks. Paul, by then at the end of his tether, left Natasha, herself exhausted from the birth and death of her baby, to supervise the move.

It was a coldly official residence that defeated Natasha's efforts to make it a family home. There was a doorman standing at the mahogany doors and two little messenger boys in blue coats waiting in the marble hallway outside the master study, a gloomy leather sanctum to which the children were not admitted. The hallway, laid out in black and white marble squares, led between two marble pillars to a chandelier-lit double stairway that curved upstairs to the ballroom, sitting room, dining rooms and bedrooms. These heavy formal rooms, with their
trompe l'oeil
cherubs and grey and white plaster mouldings, were not the place for toys, for hide-and-seek or for card games on the carpets. Family life withdrew upstairs to the warren of little white rooms where the children slept and the servants had their quarters.

Twenty-eight people slept under that roof in February 1917: Paul and Natasha and their five boys; two nursery maids; Roman, the Polish footman; three serving maids; Koulakoff, the Cossack butler; Demian, Paul's valet; Natasha's maid, Katia; the yardman, or
dvornik,
and the stoveman; the two errand boys and the doorman; Basil, the chauffeur; a charlady; two Ukrainian scullery maids and a large placid cook; and, in rooms of their own at the back, Peggy Meadowcroft and the boys' French tutor, Monsieur Darier.

The rhythm of the household was measured and quiet, cocooned in warmth and comfort. In the cellar, the stoveman stoked the furnace; Basil fetched the milk churns from the station every morning and the yardman rolled them to the pantry door; the ladies' maids took up the breakfasts on trays; Koulakoff woke the eldest boys and supervised the washing of their hands and faces; Demian handed his master his clothes; Darier paced the downstairs classroom and the older boys did dictations from the pages of Anatole France or Sainte-Beuve while the younger ones, swaddled in furs, were taken out in their perambulators; Roman pulled on his white gloves and served lunch; the scullery maids peeled the potatoes; the doorman opened the door to let the boys in with their toboggans from the Tauride Park; the little messenger boys waited outside the study door for their master's messages; and at night the hooves of the Cossack ponies pawed the packed snow of the courtyard across the street. Natasha tossed in her bed trying to sleep and upstairs Nicholas, her eldest son, sat by his bedroom window watching the northern lights in the sky.

On a bright morning in late February, the boys were having their lessons when they heard a truck swerve past the house, followed by another and still another. When they peeked through the curtains, soldiers and women were standing in the back of the trucks shouting and waving guns. Monsieur Darier stopped his dictation and joined the boys at the window. He heard a wisp of a song caught on the winter air. ‘The Marseillaise!' he cried. ‘The Marseillaise. Hurrah!' he shouted, looking more excited than they had ever seen him. He thought the troops in the trucks were celebrating a victory on the western front.

When the firing began in the neighbouring streets, they thought it might be just the police putting down some strikes. But then, like a river bed overrun by a flash flood, the street filled with a grey-coloured torrent of soldiers, streaming out from the barracks in the neighbouring streets, singing and waving red flags. Paul's valet Demian was a reserve officer in the Preobrajensky Guards and he dashed out to his barracks around the corner to find out what was happening. He returned full of excitement: the Volynsky regiments had stormed into the Preobrajensky drill yard, killing an officer who tried to stop them and seizing weapons. From his study window, Paul could see, among the waves of soldiers, in their sand- and ash-coloured overcoats, the shoulder insignia of the Preobrajensky Guards. That mighty regiment, whose colours his grandfather had carried down the Champs Elysées in 1815, whose songs he knew by heart and in whose service the family had been raised to their place at their watching windows, was now breaking to pieces in front of his eyes. He watched them streaming past, half listening as former Cabinet colleagues phoned in with confident predictions that the disturbances would be put down. By the end of the afternoon, they were phoning in search of places to hide. He himself did not hide. He stayed where he was, watching the flood tide of revolution surging past his window.

The other Petrograd, the frozen people whom the Ignatieffs used to see from their car windows trudging homewards to their tenements, were coming towards them at last, scrambling across the Neva ice shouting, ‘Bread! Bread!' and singing the Marseillaise. They carried blocks of ice in their hands, bolts, nuts and spanners, here a pistol, there an iron bar. As they scrambled up the embankment at dusk, the unthinkable thing finally happened: the Cossacks sheathed their sabres and let them pass. They surged on down the Liteiny Prospekt and met the advancing tide of leaderless soldiers. In the winter darkness, workers and soldiers together poured down Fourstatskaya street and the other streets that led to the Duma, bayonets bobbing and strips of red banner dancing over the heads. The Ignatieff family gazed out at them too astonished to be afraid.

Suddenly there were flag-decked barricades everywhere manned by soldiers and women muffled to the eyes. Suddenly there was shop glass and blood mixed with snow on the street corners; suddenly the old bearded policeman on the street corner who doffed his cap and wished them good health had vanished. In the forecourts of the Duma at the end of Fourstatskaya street, soldiers were milling around in their thousands; inside the corridors were piled with heaps of guns, sacks of barley and flour, the carcass of a pig, the corpse of a soldier with a bullet hole in his temple. Soldiers, students and workers were shouting, ‘Where is the new power? Where is the new government?'

At an upstairs window in the house on Fourstatskaya street, Natasha parted the curtains with disdain. The scene below was ‘atrocious, ignoble, shameful, never to be forgotten'. Who were these disreputable women, these animal-like men? The boys must not watch. It was not a show, not a theatre.

The lace curtains were pulled shut, the lights were turned off, the nurses and tutors were despatched to keep the boys back from the windows. But against orders, they crept along the darkened halls and, standing in the shadows, they watched the street below. All evening the muddy torrent of soldiers in uniform with red scraps of linen on their bayonets, students in green and light blue caps, workers in blue-visored hats, women in scarves and heavy coats, poured by, making for the Duma. That first night of the revolution the boys sat up in their bedrooms at the top of the house and watched the courthouse burning two blocks away. Ash tumbled through the night sky, settling on the pavements, staining and smudging the snow. In the livid panes of the upper-storey windows opposite, they could see the reflected glow from the courthouse pyre and a black plume of smoke vanishing upwards into the dark.

In the days that followed there were excited phone calls from the provisional government offering Paul the governorship of Finland and other unspecified advancement in the new regime. He refused everything except the presidency of the Russian Red Cross. The provisional government sent a commission of inquiry to interview him and told him his work at the ministry had been an island of reform in a sea of reaction. The new Minister of Education paid him a call and told him that when he had come to the department to make the revolution, he found it had already begun. When it became safe for bourgeois to be seen in the streets, friends came to see him and talked hopefully about piloting the bark of constitutional democracy across the seas of a workers' and soldiers' uprising. He would have none of it. His despair gave him a lucidity which saved him from the Micawberish self-deceptions of his liberal friends. It was all finished, he would mutter again and again, biting his lips, running his hands distractedly through his hair.

I have my grandfather's diary for the year 1917. It is a pocket-sized leather-bound volume with all the printed information a gentleman of Petrograd would want to know: the Orthodox saints' days, the cycles of the moon and the Neva tides, the train timetables to Moscow, Paris and Berlin, and the four-digit telephone numbers of restaurants, hotels, ministries and Court departments. On a few days in late February, Paul has noted down his appointments; in early March there is a rather agitated calculation of family finance scribbled in faint purple pencil. After that, the fine cream pages of the diary are completely blank.