Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (12 page)

The summer of 1916 found Ivan Bunin in the countryside at a cousin’s estate. “This is our Rus’,” he wrote then in his diary. “The thirst for self-destruction, atavism.” Being close to the narod, he sensed danger:

The rye’s on fire, the seed’s all dead,

But who will save it and risk his head?

The smoke wafts high,

The alarm bell shames,

But who will put out the flames?

An army of madmen has broken loose,

And like Mamai, they’ll scourge all Rus’ . . .
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With millions of peasants off at the front instead of working the fields, the threat of food shortages loomed in late 1916. In cities across Russia, labor unrest grew. Unlike in years past, the police were becoming reluctant to use violence against the protesters. Instead of firing on them, soldiers now began to join the strikers in the streets, to fall in behind banners crying “Down with the War,” and to add their voices to the “Marseillaise.”
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On a dark afternoon in that last winter of the Romanov dynasty a group of boys chased the automobile of the tsar’s sister Grand Duchess Xenia through the streets of Petrograd, pelting it with snowballs and yelling, “Down with the dirty bourgeoisie!”
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When Prince Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky returned to Petrograd at the end of 1916, the city struck him as a “lunatic asylum,” filled with a “poisonous” atmosphere and “profound despondency and fear.”
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On the night of December 16, a small group of men led by Prince Felix Yusupov murdered Rasputin in Petrograd in a desperate attempt to free Russia from his harmful influence.
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Profoundly shaken by the murder, Nicholas and Alexandra retreated into seclusion and sought consolation in reading, music, and card games. Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich could not believe what he was seeing. “This cannot go on for long,” he warned Nicholas. “Discontent is mounting rapidly and, the further it goes, the more the abyss deepens between you and your people.” The British ambassador George Buchanan encouraged Nicholas to do whatever possible to regain the people’s trust before it was too late. The emperor found the idea preposterous. “Do you mean that
I
am to regain the confidence of my people, or that they are to regain
my
confidence?” One of the grand dukes warned that Russia was living through the most dangerous moment in its history, to which Empress Alexandra replied, “You are exaggerating the danger. When you are less excited, you will admit that I knew better.”
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To nearly everyone else, however, the danger of revolution seemed real and growing.

On December 29, 1916, the overseer at Kuskovo wrote to wish Count Sergei Sheremetev and his wife in Petrograd a merry Christmas. It was cold and snowy, he noted, and all was quiet now that the soldiers billeted there for much of the year had left for the front. Everything would be “just fine,” the overseer added, if only there were enough food. They all were waiting for the government in Petrograd to come together and solve this problem for good.
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Elements within the state apparatus, however, were raising the alarm that it might already be too late. A report of the Petrograd Okhrana to the department of police that autumn marked “top secret” painted a frightening picture of Russia on the brink of catastrophe. The dire shortage of food and daily necessities combined with inflation of 300 percent made imminent a dangerous rebellion on the part of the lower classes. Talk throughout the city that “Russia is on the verge of a revolution” could no longer be discounted as the product of German agents. The country stood on the brink of a “hungry revolt,” after which would follow “the most savage excesses.”
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PART II

1917

Arise, lift yourselves up, Russian people,

Arise for battle, hungry brother,

Let the cry of the people’s vengeance ring out—

Onward, onward, onward!

We’ve suffered insult long enough,

And submitted too long to the nobles!

Let us straighten our powerful backs

And show the enemy our strength . . .

Altogether now, mighty army,

Let’s plunder the palaces of the rich!

Let’s take back Mother Russia,

And be done with paying rent.

So arise, brothers, arise and be bold,

And then shall the land be ours once more,

And from the bitter aspens shall we hang

Every last lackey of that Vampire-Tsar.

—“The Peasant Song” (1917)

5

THE FALL OF THE ROMANOVS

On the morning of Thursday, February 23, 1917, more than seven thousand women workers from the textile plants in Petrograd’s Vyborg District put down their work and walked out into the streets. The fact that it was International Women’s Day had little to do with their decision. Rather, their motivation to act was summed up by the single word they cried as they marched: “Bread!” The food shortages and ever-rising prices in early 1917 had devastated the city’s workers and left them hungry, cold, and desperate. The first two months of the year had seen a surge of strikes and protests in the capital and cities across the empire in response to the mounting crisis. As they marched through the streets, the women were joined by workers flooding out of the factories. By ten in the morning, twenty thousand more had fallen in; by noon more than fifty thousand were marching, and before the day was over, as many as ninety thousand had taken to the streets.

As the day wore on, the calls for bread were joined with chants and banners proclaiming “Down with the War!” and “Down with the Tsar!” Marchers started smashing the windows of bakeries and breaking into food shops. Nonetheless, the authorities managed to restore order by the end of the day, and no one seemed to take special note of this latest episode of unrest. Minister of the Interior Protopopov noted in his diary, “In general, nothing very terrible has happened,” and none
of Nicholas’s ministers bothered to report the disturbances to him at headquarters in Mogilev. The revolution, however, had begun.
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Throughout the night workers planned further strikes and a march to the city center. On the morning of the twenty-fourth, tens of thousands made their way from the outlying workers’ districts. They were met by several hundred Cossacks and soldiers at the Alexandrovsky Bridge. At first it seemed there might be a confrontation, but the Cossacks held back and allowed the workers to cross the Neva River and make for Nevsky Prospect and the heart of Petrograd. Along the way they encountered mounted police detachments, but the size of the crowds (as many as two hundred thousand) and the multiple directions from which they converged on the center overwhelmed the police. The numbers flooding Petrograd’s fine inner-city neighborhoods doubled that of the previous day and presented a sight that had not been seen since the Revolution of 1905. As the authorities in the city met to come up with an appropriate response, strike organizers stoked the momentum building in the factories and streets. Some of the soldiers sent out from the garrison to restore order joined the protesters. By Saturday, February 25, the workers’ numbers had climbed to as many as three hundred thousand, and their cries had progressed from “Down with the War!” to “Long Live the Revolution!”
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That evening Nicholas was finally informed of the disorder in the capital. Unaware of the severity of the crisis, he drafted a terse message to General Sergei Khabalov, commander of the Petrograd military district, ordering him to end the disturbances the following day. The order stunned Khabalov. The only possible way to settle the matter in a single day was through violent confrontation, an act of war against the Russian people itself that he was loath to carry out and that he feared might well only incite further unrest or push his forces over to the side of the protesters. If he had been granted more time, Khabalov believed the tense situation might possibly be diffused. Left with no choice, however, Khabalov issued the order to fire on large demonstrations after three warnings.

Before the dawn of the twenty-sixth, posters forbidding street gatherings and warning residents that the authorities were prepared to confront any unrest with force went up throughout the city. That morning Cossacks patrolled the city center, machine guns sat at the ready to defend key intersections, and special detachments had been positioned
to keep protesters from reaching Nevsky Prospect. The capital was an armed camp. As in the previous days, the marchers poured into the city, but this time they were met with gunfire. Dozens of marchers were shot and killed. But the blood spilled in the streets caused some of the soldiers to pause, and as the day wore on, the troops’ resolve wavered. Men of the Pavlovsky Guards grabbed their guns and went to battle the police, and then on Monday the twenty-seventh members of the Volynsky Regiment, no longer willing to shoot unarmed civilians, turned their rifles on their commander and shot him dead. Mutiny spread among the soldiers, who spilled out into the streets to join the insurgents.
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As their world dissolved around them, the Sheremetevs were preoccupied with a family crisis. In the middle of February Count Pavel Sheremetev returned to Petrograd after a visit to Grand Duchess Xenia’s Crimean estate at Ai Todor. The family noticed immediately that Pavel was not well and had suffered a severe emotional collapse. Doctors were called to the Fountain House to examine Pavel, and it was determined that he was suffering from “paranoia” and a nervous disorder of a “romantic” nature.

The cause of Pavel’s suffering was a woman by the name of Irina Naryshkin. He had first met Irina at Mikhailovskoe in 1899 and fallen desperately in love with her, yet Irina had refused him for Count Illarion Vorontsov-Dashkov, the brother of Count Dmitry Sheremetev’s wife. They had five children before the marriage broke apart. Pavel believed he had a second chance to win Irina, and again she rejected him, this time for Prince Sergei Dolgoruky. This marriage too collapsed, and Pavel professed his love to Irina yet again at Ai Todor in early 1917. Rejected for a third time, Pavel fled for Petrograd by train together with Grand Duchess Xenia and suffered a mental breakdown along the way. Count Sergei found the entire affair humiliating (“It’s a rare thing to be a child at age forty-five,” he wrote his daughter Maria. “I’ve always found this embarrassing”), but he saw to it Pavel got help. As chaos spread in the streets of Petrograd, doctors came and went from the Fountain House, and plans were made to send Pavel to the Kryukov sanatorium for nervous disorders outside Moscow.
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On February 27, Count Sergei wrote Grand Duchess Xenia to thank her for the concern she had shown for Pavel. He ended his letter with
mention of the recent street disturbances, observing, “Something very murky is taking place.”
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That day he wrote in his diary: “There have been gunshots along Nevsky Prospect and in other places, the crowd is growing as are the red flags. [. . .] But no one knows where our government is at the moment or who is in charge of reestablishing order.”
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He also wrote to his daughter Maria, then living in Georgia, where her husband was serving as the governor of Kutaisi, “Things are very unsettled here in the city, the dissatisfaction is growing, at first people just wanted bread, but now other less clear demands are being made. [. . .] I cannot get to the Imperial Council since Nevsky Prospect is entirely filled with people and the streetcars have all stopped and there are no cabs to be had.” In closing, he expressed his fear that some sort of “provocation” could lead to even greater unrest.
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