I dreamed of my mother that night, for the first time. She died of a stroke in 1912, after having suffered an earlier one. She was eighty-two years old. For some weeks after the first stroke, she was confined to the bedroom she had once shared with my father in our old apartment on Liteiny Prospekt, and I would visit her there. In my dream I found the room unchanged, the same dark furniture, the same oil paintings of Polish landscapes in heavy gilded frames hanging on the wall from long loops of wire, the same patterned wall fabric, the same photographs of all of us, but my mother was not lying in the big bed. I found her in the big, dark ballroom where my father used to give his dancing lessons, her long yellow hair unbound, her eyes closed. When I approached her, she opened her eyes and her fingers reached for my wrist. Mala, she whispered, how you’ve neglected me.
Masquerade
So sleep brought no comfort, but the theater would. The next night I went to the Alexandrovsky, to see my old friend the actor Yuri Yuriev in his twenty-fifth-anniversary performance in Lermontov’s Masquerade. Ah, how we clung to our old rituals in the very face of their dissolution—the anniversary tributes with the requisite gifts from the tsar and the court. Inside the theater’s mustard yellow building, aristocrats were chockablock in the seats, having come to honor an imperial artist, to applaud a play set during the reign of Nicholas I, the Iron Tsar, a tsar Niki was now emulating with his own resolute behavior. Had he not cleared the capital of imperial malcontents? Was he not about to wash down the barnyard of the Duma? Would the Romanovs not reign another hundred years? On the stage the huge mirrors and gilded doors suggested the great ballroom of a great palace. It was the most elaborate set ever assembled on the tsar’s stages, yet it was assembled even as the real sets of that real world were dismantled forever on the streets outside.
For the next day the newspapers printed that bread would be rationed starting March 1, setting off a panic and protests. Two hundred thousand people coursed down the Neva over the ice after the police raised the bridges to block their way to Admiralty Island and the palace square, where it was traditional to march, to claim the streets from and the attention of the imperial authorities. By night the streets still weren’t completely safe. Many restaurants stayed dark, the rail lines were empty of trams and the streets of cabs, streetlights did not burn, and the beacon from the Admiralty lay like a white sword over the city. The next day, when the temperature, which had been as cold as in Lapland, suddenly rose to five degrees Celsius, it seemed the entire populace emerged from its dark hiding places into the sun to voice its misery, and by the afternoon, the crowd that had been shouting, Bread, bread, began shouting, Down with the tsar! And each day that week the police and brigades of Cossacks—reserve Cossacks new to Peter, not Niki’s Cossacks—their horses skittish on cobblestone and their hands empty of the whips with which the regiment was normally equipped, half heartedly tried to control the crowds. And then Niki, from faraway Stavka, ordered the Pavlovsky, Volynsky, and Semenovsky regiments, which had put down the uprisings of 1905, into the streets, where they shot dead fifty people in Znamenskaya Square, and it seemed after that the remorse of the regiments spawned a mutiny. These junior officers of humble backgrounds, unlike all the aristocratic senior officers who had been killed at the front, joined the crowds as they took over the Arsenal, the Peter and Paul Fortress, the telephone exchange, and the railway stations, and together with the crowds and the Cossacks, the mutineers fought the tsar’s police.
At midday, the mob breached the island and made its way across the Troitsky Bridge, and the chief of the 4th Petrograd Police District telephoned to tell me a large crowd was heading down the Bolshoi Dvorianskaya toward me. As I spoke to him, I saw a truck filled with elated soldiers, red flags flying, cross Kronversky Prospekt. By the time I hung up the phone, another truck. It seemed that all the city’s soldiers, the whole 170,000 peasant infantry billeted in the Petersburg garrison for training before being shipped to the front, had absconded with their guns and their trucks. But they were not at the front, they were here, and their enemies were not the Germans but their own officers, along with the regiments, the police, and the Cossacks who remained loyal to the tsar, the court, and the burzhui.
And the imperial family? Were they safe in Tsarskoye Selo? When I called my brother—who was back in Petersburg, having been by this time reinstated at the Imperial Ballet at my request—he relayed to me what he had heard all day from the isvozchiki, the cab men, as they drove back and forth on the riotous city streets. All day, he had heard, drunken soldiers had been looting the Pavlosk shops of wine, bread, and boots, and a mob had headed to Tsarskoye Selo. A department store in Tsarskoye Selo was attacked, in the mistaken belief that it was the palace, by peasants so ignorant they couldn’t tell one grand edifice from another. There were soldiers in the courtyard of Alexander Palace, regiments loyal to the tsar from the Garde Equipage who were used to protect the family at sea and on their yachts, standing in battle formation. So the rumors of the mob, if not the mob itself, had reached the palace.
The sound of a crowd is the sound of braying, unpredictable energy, and at the theater that sound coming from the audience is a sound of ecstatic adulation, a swell that rushes to one on the stage and seems to lift the dancers off their feet as it rises. The sound I heard from the street was not a sound to lift one up. Even if the mob didn’t know that my house was the house of Kschessinska, the double-headed eagles glittered on my gates and those eagles alone would provoke attack. What delusion drove me to put the imperial eagles there? I remember I sat down. I remember thinking in no place in the city was there someone to call. Sergei and Niki were at Stavka, the tsar hiding, the people said, in the bosom of his army. Even the disgraced Andrei had found himself, by accident rather than by design, safely in Kislovodsk—in fact, the most powerful factions of the Romanov family, because of Niki’s orders, were not even here. Grand Duke Vladimir and Stolypin were dead. And my family? My sister lived on the other side of Petersburg, on English Prospekt, my brother Josef on Spasskaya Ulitsa, also over the bridge. At least my son was safe. No one would be more protected than he. But I could not remain here. Yet my car, my Rolls-Royce, was too well known, for in choice of cars, as in all things, I copied the Romanovs, and I had heard from my brother that Grand Duke Gavril Konstantinovich’s Rolls had been commandeered by the crowd at will. To make my departure now I would need a different car. But when I called up the New Mikhailovsky Palace to beg for a car while the mob and the troops rioted their way down Bolshoi Dvorianskaya toward my house, I discovered Sergei’s brother Nicholas had left written instructions to the servants to refuse any calls from me, to stop all communication with the house on the Petrograd side of the city. The great historian wanted me to run through the streets, carrying my reticule with my jewels, through the streets! where anyone with so much as a fancy hat was being murdered as a borzhui. And this was not all that was happening in the streets, but the rest I will tell you later. Sergei’s family had always referred to him as my lap dog and thought I used him mercilessly, blamed me for his current disgrace and his virtual exile at Stavka, and now, even in Grand Duke Nicholas’s absence, as he had been sent to Grushevka, his orders were being followed and the family were having their revenge. I sat there, nonplussed, the phone in my hand. And then I thought of Yuriev. The party after his tribute had been held at his apartment on Kamennostrovsky Prospekt just a few blocks away. The Romanovs might not help me, but surely my fellow theater artists would harbor me, and at this distance I could escape on foot.