And as the only thing safe to be at this time was a worker, this is what I did: I disguised myself as one, scissoring an ermine collar off an otherwise plain cloth coat, tying my maid’s kerchief about my head like a peasant woman. I took with me my jewels that were not in storage at Fabergé, Niki’s letters, the photograph he inscribed to me all those years ago, my father’s icon and the ring of Count Krassinsky, a photograph of Vova at age five—an odd ménage, I know, but when one runs from a burning house, only the most valuable items run with you, and you learn quickly what you value most. Believing my servants to be safe, I left alone. But the next morning, when my housekeeper opened the gate to the mob and called out to them, Come in, come in, the bird has flown—have I told you I had been described in Peter as a jeweled bird?—the mob came in bellowing for me, Kschessinska! Where is Kschessinska? and not finding me, seized my porter instead and stood him up against a courtyard wall as if to execute him, whereupon his wife died from shock before the crowd spied the Cross of St. George my porter had earned for valor in the war and released him. Over the next weeks my furniture disappeared from my home, as did my silver, my crystal, my Fabergé objets, my clothing, my furs, even my car, the car I had been so afraid to drive! My house had become a free market—all goods for the taking. No other house in the city was so looted as the mansion of the tsarist concubine Kschessinska, unless it was the mansion of the minister of the court, Baron Freedericks, dispenser of the tsar’s punishments and favors. Yes, the minister and the trollop were famous in Peter, and I’m aware it is for my scandalous private life that I am still best known. Why, just this year, 1971, when Kenneth MacMillan created the ballet Anastasia for London’s Royal Ballet, I was made a character in it, appearing in Act II to perform at a Winter Palace ball given in honor of the tsar’s daughter Anastasia in a costume that befitted my reputation, my neck belted with diamonds, the décolletage of my black tutu split practically to the waist. As that, I live on.
If only I had thought to do what Countess Kleinmichel had done to save her mansion on Sergievskaya Street—put up a sign in my yard that shouted the lie: This property already requisitioned by the citizens! For within weeks, the Bolshevik division of the Social Democrats took over my house and desecrated it by hanging a red flag from my roof, and soon enough it became the headquarters of the Bolshevik Central Committee. That night, though, I locked up my house with my key, under the illusion that would be all it took to keep it secure—and I rushed the few blocks to Kamennostrovsky Prospekt to pound on the door of the great actor Yuriev.
I stayed with him three days, hiding with his family in the hallways of his apartment from the stray bullets that ricocheted through the streets and sometimes punched their way through the windows. Outside, the crowds of workers, peasants, criminals sprung from prison, and soldiers who had mutinied fought the tsar’s police, who had mounted machine guns on the roofs of many of the district’s apartment houses. As Yuriev’s apartment was on the top floor of his building, desperate soldiers, their greatcoats unbuttoned and their caps turned backward to signal their allegiance to the revolution, periodically broke into his apartment in order to climb to the roof to search it. Yuriev was a big man, with a strong nose and thick jowls, and the soldiers did not bother him, and as they had no idea who I was, a little middle-aged woman in a ripped coat, they did not question me. And the phone—mounted to the wall and operated by a crank—rang and rang as people hiding in their apartments called one another just to hear a sane voice, to tell the tale of what was happening on their particular street. After the third batch of soldiers came through, Yuriev moved his chairs away from the windows, and his vases and statuettes also, lest any of it be mistaken by the hysterical mob below for guns and we for police snipers and therefore fired upon. And when I went to help Yuriev and his wife move these things we saw a group of soldiers who had reached the rooftop of the building opposite ours throw someone off it—a policeman—we watched the sail of his greatcoat spread wide as the wings of a great bird whose flight was short. When he fell to the pavement, a crowd gathered about him to beat at him with sticks.
Mala, Yuriev said, this is madness. Where is the tsar? All they want is bread. There are no revolutionary leaders here—and it was true! All of them would slip back into the capital only later and we would learn their names later still—Lenin and Martov from Zurich; Trotsky from New York; Chernov from Paris; Tsereteli, Dan, Gots, and Stalin from Siberia—Stalin was nobody then—a pockfaced bank robber for the revolution who worshipped Lenin and sent him his stolen rubles hidden in bottles emptied of Georgian wine, sent them all the way to Europe! Yes, these men still sat in armchairs and cafés in their places of exile since 1906 and we would learn their names only later; the leaders of these mobs were therefore impromptu and improvised—students, workers, and low-ranking officers who had once had revolutionary sympathies and now found those sympathies reawakened. Their photographs were placed in store-window shrines over the next weeks with the phrase Heroes of the Revolution printed on them. The names of these men—Linde, Kirpichnikov—would soon be forgotten, but they were the ones in the streets, organizing the crowd busy commandeering cars and trucks. One of those trucks sped by while we watched, a banner hung on it: The First Revolutionary Flying Squad, and Yuriev said, What does that mean? For there was no real revolution here, as yet, only what Gorky later described as a peasant riot. Why does not the tsar bring in troops from the front to restore order? Yuriev asked, and I found out only later, from Sergei, that General Alexeev, who served as Niki’s chief of staff, feared that if he sent in his troops they would only lose all discipline and join in the mutiny and then all would be lost.
All through the streets walked men with swords, bayonets, butcher knives, revolvers, sticks—and we, five stories above the mass of people, heard the thin ends of screams, gunshots, glass shattering. The chief of the Petrograd Military District had tried to send a regiment loyal to the regime to the Winter Palace, but after fighting their way through the streets they found themselves turned away by the liveried palace servants on the orders of Niki’s brother, Mikhail, who worried that the men in their dirty boots might muddy the palace floor and break the china; and so the troops, demoralized, simply joined the crowd. It was a comedy of errors, like an ill-rehearsed ballet, in which the dancers, unaccustomed to the sight of each other in their new costumes and unsure of their steps, bumped and waddled into one another and fell down.