I shut the notebook. It was certainly one of my son’s school composition books. I opened the cover again. On the inside cover the writer had signed his name, one word, Lenin. The handwriting was large, graceful, almost the handwriting of an older woman lying at her case on her chaise, but these words, this Theses, as the document was titled, had not been written by some bourgeois but by some maniacal anarchist who sat hunched here at my son’s desk composing these stark sentences. Actually, I was correct in my assessment of the two sides of the man, though I couldn’t know it then. Lenin was Vladimir Ilyich Ul’ianov, a hereditary nobleman whose father had slowly earned enough chin as inspector of schools to be addressed as Your Excellency and whose mother had inherited her father’s country estate at Kokushkino, where Lenin strutted about like any good squire, sniffing the fragrance of its lime trees, strawberries, raspberries, and hay, and where, in 1891, during the great famine, he had the gall to sue a starving peasant neighbor for damaging a fence. That was one side of Lenin, but the other side had seen his older brother, Alexander, hanged for plotting to kill Alexander III. And when Lenin later arrived to study law at Kazan University as had his brother, he joined the same neo–People’s Will groups that his brother had joined, and Lenin was expelled for taking part in a student demonstration—if only they had hanged him like his brother! But, no, Lenin survived a prison sentence, a three-year Siberian exile imposed by the tsar, and then a further exile of his own in Europe, before the war had done to this country what all his treatises could not. Lenin had been a revolutionary for twenty years now, and a man like that was not going to give up just because Kerensky had put out a paper warrant for his arrest. Not that I knew this then—but this ugly writing foretold that if it were up to this Lenin, the Provisional Government would have it no easier governing than had the tsar. And would meet, perhaps, the same fate.
I was still sitting there with that notebook when I heard Josef call out my name, Mala, Mala, and I went to the top of the staircase. Josef and Sergei stood at the bottom and Josef said tightly, Sergei’s just heard from his brother, and I thought, why is he speaking for Sergei? When I looked to Sergei he said, Niki and the family are being moved at midnight tonight, and then I understood. Josef had meant to prepare me for bad news.
They were being moved? Moved where? My fingers curled themselves around the notebook and I started down the stairs. Did Kerensky fear the loyalists would put Nicholas back on the throne? Or did he worry the Bolsheviks would try to stage another putsch and that this time there would be none of the meteorological luck which in July had brought the heavy rain to put out the chaos? Nothing this time to keep back the crowd that had shattered the windows and splintered the doors of the Tauride Palace and had almost lynched the Social Revolutionary leader Chernov in his black frock coat right in the street before his comrade, the Menshevik Trotsky, intervened, giving one of his impromptu speeches to the crowd from the bonnet of a car? Pride and Glory of the Revolution, you’ve come to declare your will and show the Soviet that the working class no longer wants to see the bourgeoisie in power. But why hurt your own cause by petty acts of violence against casual individuals? And thus having hypnotized the crowd, Trotsky announced, Citizen Chernov, you are free! Was Kerensky afraid that this month or next month at the Tauride or Tsarskoye or the Winter Palace, the crowd would drag out the tsar, the ministers of the Provisional Government, possibly even Kerensky himself and beat them all to death or string them up in the trees? I looked into Sergei’s face, trying to guess what he thought of this news. I could already tell what Josef thought, what Josef always thought: anything to do with the Romanovs was a bad idea.
Where are they moving them? I asked Sergei. Sergei shook his head. They were told only to pack warm clothes.
Warm clothes? Niki’s mother, sisters, cousins were now all in the south, in the Caucasus and the Crimea. Niki would not need warm clothes there.
But they were going south, to Livadia Palace, I said.
There’s too much unrest along that route, Sergei told me. The steppe is empty. They are probably taking them east. And at the look on my face, he said, Kerensky promises the family can come back by the fall, once the Constituent Assembly has met, and Niki will be free to go where he wishes.
I looked at Josef, who was shaking his head, and then at Sergei. I took the notebook I was carrying and put it into his hand. Look, look at this. And I opened it to the page that said,
We fully regard civil wars, wars waged by the oppressed class against the oppressing class, slaves against slave owners, serfs against landowners, and wage workers against the bourgeoisie, as legitimate, progressive, and necessary.
Sergei read the lines and then tore the page out of the notebook, crumpled the paper in his fist, and threw it down. I pointed to the paper ball. They want a civil war.
Sergei smiled. Where is this writer now? Chased out of your house so quickly he didn’t even have time to take his big speech with him.
But the writer had gotten into my house. In 1905 he had not gotten this far. By 1918 he might be writing on manuscript paper instead of schoolbooks, issuing his own ukazy from the tsar’s desk in the Winter Palace where Kerensky now sat. I thought, Only you Romanovs cannot imagine a Russia without you. While the Romanovs left in Peter were dreaming, in Siberia, with the droves of mosquitoes in summer and the cold so extreme in winter only reindeer skins could help a man withstand it, Niki and his family would be shrunk into such tiny figures on the horizon eventually they would be not even seen, this former tsar, with his former sons. In the outlier of Siberia their guards, drunk on vodka and far from the moderating reason of Kerensky, could turn surly from the boredom of their inglorious posts, and no one from the capital or the old court, no Vladimirichi, no Mikhailovichi, no Alexandrovichi, would hear the imperial family cry out if they were suffering. And how would I hear my son’s cry as it flew over the Urals, across thousands of miles of empty steppe, from whatever small town Kerensky saw fit to stash the family? I could see already the Tura and Tobol rivers, the endless versts, a meadowland in this season but an ice sheet soon enough. And so I said to Sergei, Take me to Tsarskoye. Vova cannot go with them to Siberia.
Halfway to the Alexandrovsky Station near Tsarskoye Selo, our train, which had left the Warsaw Station in Petersburg at 8:00, with plenty of time to reach Tsarskoye before midnight, inexplicably slowed to a stop in the middle of nowhere. All trains to Tsarskoye had been temporarily halted, our conductor said. We would wait. One hour slipped into two, before Sergei and I realized that our train was being held back purposely: the secret of the tsar’s departure, Kerensky’s great secret, was no longer a secret, and the radicalized railroad workers all along the Warsaw line, hearing the rumors, suspicious, must have decided to refuse to allow any trains into Tsarskoye, no doubt to keep any friends of the Romanovs away until the train chosen to carry the family away had set out. And at this, I began to paw at the sleeve of Sergei’s tunic.