Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (14 page)

House searches were common in Petrograd as soldiers sought to arrest prominent officials and military officers and to take weapons out of the hands of anyone considered a foe of the revolution. Some apartments were searched as many as three times in one day.
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One night General Grigoriev was awoken by the sound of men pounding at his door. Realizing they had come to arrest him, Grigoriev, who happened to be alone at the time, put on his cook’s apron and white toque before opening the door. Acting the part of his cook, he then proceeded to take them from room to room in a futile search for General Grigoriev.
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Countess Kleinmichel was at home entertaining a small party of friends. Shortly after the butler announced that dinner was served, the doors flew open, and all the servants ran through the dining room, screaming, “Run! Run! The back door has just been broken in by a band of armed men!” Without bothering to grab their coats, the countess and her guests fled down the main stairs, out into the snowy night, and across the street to the house of one of her dinner guests. From there they could see what was happening back in her home. All the lights, even the chandelier in the ballroom, which had not been lit since the start of the war, were now ablaze. Gangs, armed with rifles, axes, sticks, and bayonets, were running about from room to room, tearing down all the curtains, and dragging more tables and chairs into the dining room. The party had not been canceled, although the guest list had been changed. The men sat down, and Kleinmichel’s butler appeared with
more dishes and cutlery; next he brought out the soup tureens and started to cover the table with bottles of wine. The sailors and soldiers were then joined by the countess’s servants, and she looked on as they all raised their glasses and started making toasts. She and her friends watched for hours, unable to look away, as the party went on late into the night and the new masters of her house emptied her wine cellar.

The countess dared go out only the next morning. She spent the next couple of nights with friends, though every night they were visited by gangs of soldiers, so she eventually sought protection at the Chinese Legation. It was there, again at dinner, that fifteen soldiers broke in the door and arrested the countess. Kleinmichel was held at the Duma for a time and then allowed to return to her home, which had been looted and turned into a sort of hostel for soldiers. Reduced to two rooms, which she shared with several of her servants, she spent two weeks listening to them making speeches, singing revolutionary songs, dancing wildly to tunes hammered out on her piano. The grand staircase was turned into a rifle range, large portraits of the Romanovs serving as the targets. They sliced a hole in the mouth of Empress Elizabeth, the daughter of Peter the Great, and stuffed it with a cigarette and cut out Catherine the Great’s nose. Louis de Robien, a young Frenchman from the embassy, visited to share her last bottle of French champagne. He found the countess calm and determined to hold her ground against the soldiers. She had armed herself with a pistol and told Robien she was ready to use it on herself if necessary. At the age of seventy-five, she commented, “one must know how to die.” She had sold all her possessions in order to survive, but as bad as things were, she refused to think of leaving Petrograd until the war was over because she was determined to prove that the talk of her as a German spy or sympathizer was groundless.
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Countess Kleinmichel was one of the fortunate ones in her family. All three of her late husband’s brothers were killed during the revolution. One of them, a Hussar Guards officer of twenty-five, suffered an especially wicked fate. According to the words of his orderly, first the soldiers ripped out one of his eyes and forced him to watch as they killed several of his fellow officers; next they took the other eye, broke his hands, his feet, and then tortured him for two hours by lifting him
up on their bayonets and beating him with their rifle butts until he finally expired. Two of the countess’s nephews were also killed: Nicholas, a former court chamberlain, at the hands of sailors in the Crimea, and a second by the Bolsheviks in the Caucasus.
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On March 2, 1917, at ten minutes to midnight in the city of Pskov, Tsar Nicholas II, having been convinced by his generals that this was the only hope to stop the tide of revolution destroying the army and raging in the capital, abdicated the throne in favor of his brother Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich. The fatal reign of the emperor was over. “All around me nothing but treason and cowardice and deceit,” Nicholas seethed as his train left Pskov an hour later. When informed the following day in Petrograd that his brother had abdicated in his favor, the grand duke did not take long to decide to reject the crown, in part, apparently, because he doubted whether his accepting it would reverse the situation and also out of fear for his own personal safety. With this, the three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty came to an end. But the grand duke did not completely give up on the idea of becoming tsar. He let the leaders of the Provisional Government know that he would be willing to accept the crown, but only if it were offered to him by the Constituent Assembly, a democratically elected body that would meet at a later date to determine Russia’s new form of government.
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With the news of the fall of the Romanovs, crowds in Petrograd, Moscow, and cities across the empire showed their joy by attacking tsarist symbols and insignia, toppling statues, defacing portraits, and burning double-headed imperial eagles.
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Upon receiving a telegram with the news of the tsar’s abdication, Court Chamberlain Skadovsky purportedly dropped dead of a heart attack.
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If this did indeed happen, then it was likely the only such death among the nobility. Many nobles did not share Princess Cantacuzène’s opinion that all levels of society greeted the news “with a thankfulness almost religious,” but most agreed with Baroness Meiendorff’s assessment that “[t]he old system was rotten, everyone knew that.”
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“Everyone has participated in the revolution,” rejoiced the Kadet prince Yevgeny Trubetskoy in the newspaper
Speech
on March 5; “everyone has made it: the proletariat, the military, the bourgeoisie, and even the nobility.”
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Princess Cantacuzène’s mother-in-law expressed great enthusiasm that the fall of the dynasty would at last mean “the destruction of all the old traditions.” The princess noted that the old lady’s coachman now sported a red ribbon as a sign of her political loyalties. Such overt expressions of support for the revolution by aristocrats were in fact common. Red banners and flags hung from palaces and mansions, and luxurious carriages bedecked with red bunting and ribbons ferried elegantly dressed ladies and gentlemen through Petrograd’s streets. Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich raised the red flag atop his house on Glinka Street. While for many these acts marked true support for the revolution, for others they functioned, in the words of Prince Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky, as “a kind of passport” to protect them from the rage of the crowds.
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Countess Irina Tatishchev found the generally positive response of her fellow nobles bewildering. “I did not understand, and I still do not understand,” she noted in her memoirs, “how they could not grasp that in cutting off the bough upon which they were seated they would themselves fall into the abyss.”
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Yelizaveta Issakov recalled finding members of the former Imperial Council gathered in her family’s apartment on March 3. Prince Georgy Lvov, prime minister of the new government, sat slumped in a chair, his head in his hands, whispering to himself, “Our sins, oh, our heavy, heavy sins.” Yelizaveta’s father turned to her, gravely observing, “We are on the way to anarchy.”
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Grand Duke Mikhail visited Count Sergei at the Fountain House soon after his decision not to accept the crown without the approval of the Constituent Assembly. The count found this wise, and he praised the grand duke for preserving the concept of the monarchy.
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In a letter to Grand Duchess Xenia he expressed hope for the future: “May God grant happiness to a renewed Russia, one that will not stop being Russia, no matter how much her external form may change. This is a new age—an interregnum before a rebirth. There have been examples of this before in our ancient past, and may a new Hermogen, new Minin and Pozharsky, and new Mikhails be found!”
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Yet in a letter to Count Vladimir Kokovtsov, the former minister of finance and prime minister after the assassination of Stolypin, also from the first week of March, Count Sergei was less optimistic:

Everyone must have foreseen this dizzying speed of events after the long and truly astounding patience shown by our exhausted and tormented Russia, the victim of a fateful course of criminal influences. The disappearance of a central, national figure now marks the completion of this progress, [. . .] still, many have a clean conscience. Every effort, every noble impulse, every warning was rejected. We were governed by “abnormality”!

Where will this lead? How far will this go without the help of the country’s best forces? I don’t wish to say aloud the thoughts that come to mind. I am ready to welcome everything that will aid and revitalize our country, but I cannot welcome base desires and the return of a “Pugachyovshchina.”
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To his daughter Maria in Kutaisi he wrote:

I don’t have the strength to express the feelings overflowing within me concerning the suicide of Russian statehood, for no one wrestled power away, rather they just picked it up as it lay impotently on the ground. The dizzying speed of events, unheard of in similar situations, offers proof of the power of the mounting indignation and burning resentment for all the criminal inaction. And now here we sit, left to the complete proizvol of the mob and unruly troops.
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Maria shared her feelings with her father:

I heard today that the emperor has abdicated the throne. It is hard to write in this moment of extreme agitation. [. . .] It is agonizing not to be in Russia at this time. Thank God nothing irreparable or terrible has happened. I thank God the emperor abdicated. Still, it torments my soul to witness the joy and the demonstrations. May the Lord help him. No emperor has done what he has, and in every similar instance they all have perished.
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And later that month:

Dear Father, I cannot express to you the feeling I had today when six of your letters were delivered to me. I thank God you are well.

Yes, that which was obvious and unavoidable has happened. If only from now on there will be no more bloodshed and everyone will work together bravely and harmoniously for the defense of the Motherland. Here events are unfolding as they are across all of Russia. We just recently joined the new government. Today he [Maria’s husband, Alik] took the oath. The streets are calm.

We truly had been stupefied by the suffocating gases in which we had lived for so long, such that now, sensing that truth has finally arrived, we are tormented with worry for it.

God grant that this unity, felt by us all now that everyone has come together to support the new government, will last, for in this lies our sole salvation and all our strength. Germany will not sit quietly at this moment. One can already feel that she is concentrating all her forces against us. The most decisive moment is approaching. [. . .] And I believe that everyone, from the lowliest to the most important, must understand the gravity of the hour [. . .]

If only Russia might remain strong and not debase itself by falling into anarchy. Dear Father, I want to bare my entire soul to you. May Christ in his infinite patience have mercy on our country. We were unable to escape the maelstrom into which we had been thrust by the demons of these terrible trials. May God grant us all the strength to withstand them with firmness and faith. If only the voices of love were louder now, the voices calling for forgiveness, and may they be victorious against those calling for vengeance.
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By the end of March, the relief Maria first experienced after being released from the “suffocating gases” had been replaced by apprehension over Russia’s future. She told her father in confidence that the Lord had been sending her visions of angels and burning crosses, which she took as signs of the Apocalypse. She had experienced visions before, and they had always proved prophetic. Shaken by what she believed had been foretold to her, Maria mentioned her wish to leave Kutaisi as soon as possible and join the rest of the family, perhaps at their estate of
Mikhailovskoe. At the same time, however, Maria and Alik were being warned of the danger of unrest in the countryside, leaving her unsettled and anxious.
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A similar mood filled the Fountain House, now being guarded by a special police detachment. Dmitry and Ira were depressed and scared and talked of leaving Petrograd as soon as possible for the relative calm of Moscow. Count Sergei considered such fear for their personal safety a stain on the family’s honor. Regardless, Dmitry and Ira, together with their children, left Petrograd by train that month.
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Count Sergei was equally disturbed by the “disgraceful” behavior of Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich.
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The grand duke, a grandson of Tsar Nicholas I, was the lone Romanov to openly endorse the revolution. Called Nicholas Égalité and the Red Prince, the grand duke had long held republican views. When the French ambassador Maurice Paléologue visited him at his palace on Millionaya Street on March 8, the grand duke told the Frenchman with all sincerity, “The collapse of the autocracy will now mean the salvation and greatness of Russia.” He tried to persuade his Romanov relatives to give up their lands to the new government and began making plans to run for a seat in the Constituent Assembly on the Union of Peasants and Landlords ticket. (The electoral commission, however, refused to allow him to run and even denied all the grand dukes the right to vote, out of fear of a restoration.) Yet when Paléologue went to pay a farewell visit to the grand duke in early May, all his optimism had gone, and he was quite candid about his worries.