The Russian Album (14 page)

Everyone in Petersburg expected the new heir to take his retirement from the Ministry of Agriculture and become an industrial baron. But to the family tradition, trade and industry were interesting hobbies but not serious vocations. State service remained the only conceivable path. Paul established a limited company and appointed a Baltic German named Schlippe to run the place in his name.

There had always been money in the Ignatieff family, but now for the first time there were real riches. Nothing dramatic or ostentatious was done with the money: Prince Demidoff had the capital, and besides, ostentation was frowned upon. Still, a
dacha
could be rented in fashionable Tsarskoe Selo so that the boys could escape the summer fevers of Petersburg and play in the royal parks; there was a new Renault to take Paul on the hour-long journey between Tsarskoe Selo and his office; a search began for a new house; and most of all, family honour could be rebuilt: father's debts could be paid off. With black humour and inimitable timing, Fortune had decided to shine on the family at just the moment everything was about to be swept away.

In August 1914, the family was at Vybiti, the country house of Natasha's older sister Sonia and her husband Boria Wassiltchikoff, two hours' drive from Petersburg. The house rang with the sounds of children. Nick, Dima and Alec played with their beautiful Galitzine cousins from Novgorod. In the photographs the girls are all wearing bright floral pinafores and floppy white hats against the sun. The boys are in sailor suits with short pants and straw boaters. The hot August fields of Vybiti stretched on to the curve of the horizon line. The poplars lining the long drives flickered with sunlight. At the top of the curve of a gravel driveway stood the great house, a dark green vine twined around the columned entrance. The photographs from that holiday are full of small happy faces out of focus. The little girls are beautiful, their long hair twined in lustrous braids tied with little blue ribbons. Of all those August afternoons Dima and Alec remember the one when they sneaked away from their sleeping parents and crept through the high grass, to lie crouching by the riverbank where they could see the girls splashing knee-deep and unaware in the brown river stream, their hats and pinafores strewn on the grass bank.

Then suddenly the boys' tutors were standing on the porch reading the day's papers to crowds of villagers gathered in the driveway: news about the death of an archduke in a Bosnian street, exchanges of diplomatic notes and sombre declarations from important statesmen with foreign names. The peasants with memories of the Russo-Japanese War grumbled while their sons hurried to enlist. Natasha and her sister Sonia handed sweets and small packets of money to the recruits who assembled in companies on the driveway in front of the big house. They watched as they marched off, their ‘brave elastic step' raising a cloud of summer dust down the long poplar alleys.

When everyone had gone, when the nursemaids and tutors had gathered up all the children and had taken them back to Petersburg, Natasha stayed alone at Vybiti and had the echoing sunny rooms to herself. She savoured that lingering September, gripped by a presentiment that she would never enjoy such peace again.

By the time she returned to the capital, its name had been changed to Petrograd to give it a more Russian, less German sound. The wounded were beginning to be brought from the front to the hospital ward established by her husband's department in one of the exhibition halls of the Petersburg agricultural museum. Twice a week, she took the train down from the family's rented
dacha
in Tsarskoe Selo to type letters for the soldiers. With a black Imperial portable poised on her knee, she would sit beside the men and ask them what she should type. The peasants all began their letters with ‘endless sorts of bows and salutations' to the village elders, the priest and their relations. But when it came to what they should say about their wounds or their hopes the men would look up at her and say, ‘Write what you think best.' They asked her for little things: Bibles, harmonicas, a pair of gloves for a girlfriend. One blind boy wanted a concertina to play now that he could no longer see. She sat and watched the life slip away from their waxen faces.

Paul's sister Katia was running a hospital train on the Polish front somewhere near Lodz; Aunt Mika had turned a wing of the house at Kroupodernitsa into a hospital for recruits from the village; Paul's brother Kolya was leading the Preobrajensky Guards into battle on the Polish plains; another of Paul's brothers, Leonid, was a Cossack general on the southwestern front. The war began drawing the family towards its hearth.

In January 1915, Paul was requested to present himself at Nicholas II's residence at Tsarskoe Selo. The Agriculture Minister, Krivoshein, in search of liberal allies in the Cabinet, had proposed to the Tsar that Paul be chosen to replace a reactionary Minister of Education who had just died. Paul presented himself to the sovereign and was surprised and flattered to hear Nicholas recalling the conversation they had had together, nearly twenty years before, over coffee in Paul's tent at Gatchina during regimental manoeuvres of the Preobrajensky Guards. Did Count Ignatieff recall what he had said about the autocracy of the scribe, the clerk, the policeman, the governor, and even the minister, the Tsar asked evenly. It was a disarming gambit and Paul, who had been approached once before for ministerial office and had declined, left the interview as Minister of Education.

The Tsar's eerie feat of memory fostered the illusion in Paul that the sovereign would always heed the words of honest men. This illusion drew Paul into the heart of a regime that both right and left circles in Petrograd regarded as beyond help. At the salons of his aunt, the widow of his uncle Alexis, the assassinated governor of Tver, the talk was openly contemptuous of Nicholas II's weakness and vacillation, while among Paul's friends in the Kadet Party, men like Vladimir Nabokov believed the only salvation of the country lay in the establishment of a democratic republic. Yet Paul himself, aware as anyone else of Nicholas's feeble intelligence and puppyish dependence on his wife, retained a mystical reverence for the office of Tsar as spiritual father of his people. Here he let himself be betrayed by the Slavophile family traditions, by the belief that if the bureaucratic wall dividing Tsar from people could be broken down Russia could chart a middle course between despotism and republicanism in its encounter with modernity. It was on such traditions of service that his very identity was built. Family traditions made him and family traditions drew him under.

He set out to make the Russian school curriculum less remote and scholastic, closer to the needs of agriculture and industry, and instead he found himself struggling to maintain teachers' ranks despite the steady haemorrhage to the front; he wanted to create a single unified system of popular education open to all with advancement based on merit; and he found himself arguing with Cabinet colleagues over whether Jewish children chased out of the western Pale by military authorities could enrol in Gentile schools. He wanted the school to be the centre of village life, to be a community centre rather than a barracks; instead, as the terrible retreats of 1915 began, he was organizing the use of schools as dormitories for refugees. He wanted to free the schools from the grip of useless examinations and to enlarge vocational training; with each succeeding month more school districts in the western provinces had to be evacuated. He sought to defend the autonomy of the universities from government interference and found instead that the Tsarina insisted on making appointments to the Petrograd University staff.

The Cabinet, chaired by I. L. Goremikin, a man he regarded as a senile incompetent, was so bitterly divided that some members left the room when others began to speak. It had no jurisdiction over military matters, no collective policy, not even a shared doctrine of Cabinet responsibility. Each minister was responsible to the Tsar alone; like the others, Paul put on his court uniform every month or so and journeyed out to Tsarskoe Selo to make a personal report to the sovereign; and like the others he was free to criticize – and often did so – the decisions taken collectively at Cabinet. At the same time, Cabinet decisions were often reversed by the Tsar. As the months passed, Paul came to understand with increasing despair that the institution of autocracy itself was incapable of running a modern war.

He tried as a minister to secure the cooperation of the Russian parliament, the Duma, going to its sittings at the Tauride Palace in person to present and defend his estimates against the attack from the right wing only to find that other ministers refused to recognize the Duma's authority. As an old veteran of the
zemstvo
movement, Paul took the
zemstvos
into his confidence and then had to listen in Cabinet while his colleagues talked about them as if they were subversive organizations. Above all, he was aware that power was slipping away from the Cabinet table – to military headquarters at Mogilev, to the Empress's suite in Tsarskoe Selo, and worst of all to the Petrograd salons presided over by the sexually rapacious and mentally disordered monk Grigori Rasputin. It was galling to know that one of these salons was held in the house of his aunt, wife of his assassinated uncle Alexis. There the monk enjoyed his visions in the company of reactionary hysterics.

Paul sat silently through Cabinet discussions which took on an increasingly grotesque and surreal character. As the Russian army fell back, driving before them the wretched
shtetl
Jews of the northeastern plains of Poland and Russia, the Cabinet spent hours debating whether to abolish restrictions on Jewish settlement in towns just as the brutal arbitrage of war consigned the paraphernalia of restriction to oblivion. Minister after minister accepted as part of their mental universe that the international Jewish banking elite had imperial Russia at its mercy: some thought it best to abolish the restrictions to placate the bankers, others thought it indecent that the autocracy should have to bow to Jewish money. Paul kept silent during these fantastic discussions but went privately to the Tsar to plead that restrictions on Jewish admission to schools outside the Pale be removed. The Tsar refused, allowing him only to establish all-Jewish private schools for evacuees from Pale areas. Occasionally he was able to put a spoke in the wheel of prejudice. When the police arrived at the officers' hospital in Tsarskoe Selo to take custody of a decorated veteran because he was a Jew and thus not allowed to recover outside the Pale, he enrolled the boy in Petrograd University, thus granting him the right to remain in his hospital bed.

As the western front collapsed, as peasant recruits armed at times only with bayonets crawled out of their trenches and retreated back through Poland, the War Minister told his colleagues, ‘I rely on impassable spaces, on impenetrable mud and on the mercy of St Nicholas, the patron of Holy Russia.' From his brother Kolya, Paul heard about the rout at Tannenberg, and the Cabinet began to understand how fatally wrong they had been to suppose the war would last no more than a year. He himself remembered Cabinet meetings when the Finance Minister had rejected plans to build domestic munitions factories on the grounds that foreign supplies would be adequate. Now the troops at the front lacked cartridges, shoes, blankets, even uniforms. The scandal cost the War Minister his job. In Paris, Paul's cousin Alyosha, the Russian military attaché, was frantically buying arms from the French munition plants at Le Creusot.

Then the war struck home. Paul's sister Katia contracted an infection while kneeling in the filthy straw, nursing soldiers in a hospital train near Lodz. A blood clot formed and passed into her lungs. In two days she was dead. Paul went by ministerial train to Warsaw to collect the body. He accompanied it across Russia to the little station near Kroupodernitsa, where the peasant elders unloaded the coffin from the train and took turns bearing it down the two miles of muddy road to the crypt beneath the village church. There, her mother watched as her daughter was laid to rest in the family vault.

At Easter 1915, Paul brought the whole family down to Kroupodernitsa to be with his mother, to draw on her strength and reassurance. When the Kiev–Odessa express with the minister's private sleeper pulled up at the little family station, carriages were waiting for the family down a long flight of wooden steps from the railway embankment. Grooms were standing at the top and bottom of the steps with flaming pitch torches to light their way. They sped off, the coachmen snapping their whips and the horses galloping into the darkness. As they drew up before the house, grandmother Ignatieff was waiting for them on the veranda, swathed in a white shawl. She held each of her grandchildren's faces in her hands and kissed them on their foreheads.

At the Easter midnight service the church was packed with villagers in sheepskin coats which gave the air a pungent acrid smell. Grandmother Ignatieff made sure her grandchildren stood up straight and poked them sharply if one of them slouched or leaned against a pillar. The church was dark and sombre until the moment when the verger lit the first candle in the chandelier. The light coursed along the network of braided wicks until the whole church was ablaze with tiny flames and the walls resounded with the cry, ‘Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!' Everyone carried his own lighted candle too, and as the villagers dispersed back into the night, they shielded their candles with cupped hands, and the fields and lanes were aglow with hundreds of departing figures etched in fragile light.

Peggy Meadowcroft's album is full of pictures from that Easter at the estate: the thatched cottages of the village, the family retainers, Sessoueff and Rudnitsky, standing stiffly beneath the tree in the dusty village square with their children and barefoot wives ranged around them; Vassilieff, the groom, with two new foals; a giant pair of oxen in the paddock; young Nicholas astride his favourite mare, Narzan; a choir feast outdoors in the woods after the Easter services, the trestle tables piled with braided bread, wooden spoons and soup, the men singers at one table, the women in costume at another, and grandmother Ignatieff and Paul strolling from table to table. There are many photographs of grandmother Ignatieff, always wreathed in shawls, with her grandchildren at her side. There is a serenity about her now. She seems less austere and formidable than she had been when Natasha first knew her. Her grandchildren crowd around affectionately: she smells sweet, her hands are gentle. In the garden, holding Lionel on her knee, she smiles benignly, the melancholy beauty who had caught Disraeli's eye now entering her seventy-third year.