The Russian Album (17 page)

The depression that had descended upon him following his dismissal by the Tsar now turned into a complete nervous collapse, accompanied by a recurrence of violent asthmatic attacks and pains in the liver and chest. It was as if the symptoms of a neurosis suppressed but not confronted in Charcot's sanitorium twenty years before now chose the moment of the revolution to step out of the shadows of his life.

The revolution also accelerated a reversal in relations between Paul and Natasha. She had been first in her mother's shadow, then in Paul's. Now she came into her own. As Paul wasted away in the bedroom upstairs, it was Natasha who held the family together and protected him from the soldiers' and workers' deputations which began banging on the gates. She would let them in and have a maid serve them cucumber sandwiches. Most were just hungry and cold and they departed quite tamed. Natasha could not protect him from other deputations. Workers from Paul's cotton and glass factories arrived and stood in the hallway, their caps doffed, warming themselves against the radiators, politely listening to her when she said the master was ill but refusing to go away until she showed them up to the darkened bedroom where he lay in bed, white and drawn. He was helpless, unable to refuse them anything, but their demands were modest and they soon filed out, wishing him a long life.

Soon the revolution was less polite. In late March, a detachment of soldiers came to requisition the cars. They pounded on the gates while Basil the chauffeur struggled under the hood of the Mercedes to remove the distributor cap. When the soldiers found it was immobilized, they seized the Renault instead. The older boys were watching from the downstairs schoolroom window as one soldier took a red handkerchief out of his pocket, blew his nose, and then stuck the handkerchief on the bayonet out of the car window as it careened down the driveway. Demian managed to retrieve the Renault, abandoned and much the worse for wear, a few weeks later.

Throughout the revolution, Natasha was protected by her certainties: the provisional government were contemptible weaklings; the women who demanded bread in the demonstrations were deluded, for shortages were imagined not real; the courageous police had been betrayed by officers who were half-witted and paralysed with indecision; the revolution was a crime and a blunder. What she watched from the window made her blind with anger. Years later, she wrote: ‘Till my death day will I have the same firm belief that it was only slovenly weakness and thorough absence of knowledge of the nature of Russian crowds that let go this first disorder. If only a strong man knowing the Russian nature had arisen with a nice stick or our wonderful Empress Catherine the Great had come to life (I always venerated her ever so much more than Peter the Great as he copied all just like the monkey copying the master and by that destroyed much of the genuine Russian). Our Catherine loving and understanding our country but with a stick would put back all in order at the first, not when things went dragging along from day to day getting worse from total absence of energy and authority.'

When she talked like that Paul would always say half soothingly, half impatiently, ‘Natasha, calm yourself, calm yourself!' He thought the truth was more complicated than her simple anger would allow. He had been in the very heart of the regime, he had seen the rottenness face to face; his disillusion was deeper than hers, and where she felt an anger that roused her to defence of her brood, he felt a despair that sapped him of the will to fight.

As for the children, the revolution was a wild street carnival they could not wait to get outside to see. The oldest boys were soon out in the street looking at the ruins of the courthouse and listening to the speeches on the steps of the Duma where a leaderless army had gathered to find leadership and absolution for its crimes. There was still a place for bourgeois boys like them at the fringes of a revolutionary crowd. Alec was eleven and was pissing against a wall near the Duma when a boy his age shouted, ‘
Bourgeois,
what are you doing?' and came towards him threateningly. An older worker shouted back, ‘Leave him alone, he's a kid like you.' The boys mingled at the edge of the crowds listening to the slogans, each contradicting the other, which echoed above the din in the forecourt of the Duma:

‘Fight Imperialist Germany!'

‘Workers have not overthrown the Tsar to die for Capitalist Exploiters!'

‘Secure the achievements of the Great Bloodless Revolution!'

‘Down with the Imperialist War!'

Some speakers wanted to send the soldiers home to their villages and others wanted to send them back to the front. The soldiers shifted from speaker to speaker muttering, ‘True! True!' now to one side, now to the other. The revolution debated its future, veering now this way, now that.

In the household on Fourstatskaya, the servants began to take sides. Demian, Koulakoff and Roman were active supporters of the revolution and while they continued at their posts there was a new edge in their relations with their masters. When Demian wanted a new suit, he pointed to one in Paul's cupboard and observed that it was worn out and needed replacement; he would then appear on his half day wearing it in the street. Koulakoff, the mild and inoffensive Cossack, acquired some backbone. When Monsieur Darier, the French tutor, observed that the bread was not a dirty grey colour in the house where his wife was governess, Koulakoff thumped another roll down on his side plate and told him what he could do with it if he didn't like it. Yet the same Koulakoff continued to wake the boys every morning, and supervise their washing and dressing; the stoveman kept piling the logs into the furnace; the serving girls kept bringing the dishes to the tables; and the milk churns from the Wassiltchikoff estate at Vybiti continued to arrive at the railway station and were picked up every morning by Basil the chauffeur. Even the bread eventually regained its old accustomed whiteness. There must have been moments in March and April when it was possible to believe the world outside would soon resume the measured order which had not skipped a beat inside the house on Fourstatskaya street. But April turned to May and June. Lenin entered the city and began piloting the Bolsheviks towards the revolution of October.

Through the spring of 1917, Paul's condition worsened, and on 7 May a telegram arrived from Kroupodernitsa announcing the death of his mother. Father Nicholas was hastily summoned and Paul sang the
pannihida
in a broken voice. Natasha and the boys left him alone in his bedroom still clutching the telegram and hurried to the Church of Christ Walking Upon the Waters, where they lit candles and prayed for the repose of their grandmother's soul. A few weeks later Natasha moved Paul to a rented
dacha
in Tsarskoe Selo in the hope that the country air and distance from the downward vortex of the revolution in Petrograd would do him good. But he continued to lie in bed gazing at his inner wreckage.

On the front lines the disintegration of the army gathered momentum. In the Petrograd of May and June, crises and resignations followed each other at the heart of the provisional government; Lenin moved from house to house to avoid arrest. He spent several nights at the headquarters of the Central Trade Union, twelve houses away from the family home on Fourstatskaya. One of the boys is convinced that he saw him in the street or heard him speak from a platform. It is more likely that newsreels viewed in exile have seeped into his memory.

The family were safely out of the way in Tsarskoe Selo on the night of 3 and 4 July when Fourstatskaya again filled with a torrent of armed soldiers from the Bolshevik First Machine Gun Regiment and metal workers from the Putilov factories and sailors from Kronstadt marching on the Duma. By evening troops loyal to the government had regained control of the city and put down the insurrection. For the moment the provisional government held together, but it was clear to Paul and Natasha that the situation in Petrograd was slipping out of control. Once late at night, listening outside his father's bedroom door, one of the boys heard his father whisper to Uncle Boria Wassiltchikoff, ‘I must get them out of here!' But when the children were assembled and told they were leaving for Kislovodsk, a spa town in the Caucasus mountains, five days by train to the south, the reason given was that their father needed to take a cure for his liver. Yet whatever she told her children, whatever she told herself, Natasha went to the bank and scooped up some of her jewellery from the safe-deposit box; she packed the volumes of her ancestor Karamzin's history of Russia and her photo albums of Doughino into the trunk she had bought in Nice for her trousseau.

The family was at the station two hours early, Paul looking gaunt and haggard, Natasha wandering around certain she had forgotten something and making jokes about her family's comic-opera migrations. Koulakoff ran around the platform like a sheepdog with his whiskers flying, piling cases into the compartments. It was an expedition on a grand scale: nannies, tutors, cooks, ladies' maids, seventeen people in all counting the boys and their mother and father. The first bell sounded, then the second. Last-minute checks of hand luggage were made. The family stood at the open windows and looked down at the platform: a mournful Demian left with the keys of the house on Fourstatskaya, Father Nicholas, the family priest, and a cluster of colleagues from the Ministry of Education who had come to say goodbye to their chief. The third bell sounded and the Caucasian express began to move out. Through the crowd burst an old man – a singer of folk tales who used to sing for the family – waving a birch stick which he passed up to Paul. On it there was a note saying, ‘Be of good spirits and be sure of the results of your labour, as it has grown from a deep root.' It was dusk, the train glided away, and they waved their last farewells. As the train gathered speed, they stared out at the fields in the summer light. The land itself seemed to comfort them with the message that Petrograd and the revolution were not Russia: in the Ukraine the harvesters were out in the golden fields bringing in an abundant crop; the white convents of Orloff shone still in the summer evening and the country lanes were speckled with light through the poplars. They passed through Orel, Kharkov, Rostov, five days on the train. The little ones – George and Lionel – leaned out of the windows at every station, imitating the singsong of the vendors who wandered up and down beneath the train windows selling apples and pretzels and a bread called
bubliki.
Enveloped in the calm of the countryside which passed their windows, it never occurred to the family to think they had left Petrograd for the last time.

SEVEN

THE CAUCASUS

The little spa town of Kislovodsk nestled in the foothills of the south Caucasus between the Caspian and Black seas. It had a Lilliputian railway station painted blue and white, a rotund concert hall and a scattering of rest-homes, villas and hotels clustered around the Narzan mineral springs, famous throughout Russia for their restorative effect on tired livers and digestions. The family rented a modest one-storey villa in the hills at the edge of town. There was a separate building for the servants and a large orchard of apple and plum trees. At first the summer of 1917 felt like all the other summers. The days in the Caucasus were hot and dry, the nights fragrant and cool. The boys played in the garden or went for hikes with Peggy in the hills. In her photograph album there are several pictures of the three oldest boys in Cossack caps eating sandwiches while perched on rocks in a steep canyon at the edge of town. But back at the villa, Paul sat slumped in a deck chair on the veranda locked in his depression. Once or twice a day he took a cab into town to sip the mineral waters. They had little effect.

The summer of 1917 was not like other summers. Kislovodsk was feverish, aglow like a tubercular patient. Oil barons from the Russian oil fields at Baku 200 miles to the southeast raced through the poplar-lined boulevards in their carriages, their drunken Caucasian guards firing revolvers in the air. The Grand Hotel overflowed with wounded officers sipping the Narzan waters and taking electrotherapy from society doctors. Up and down the trellis-covered walkways of the Vinogradnaya Alleya, the main promenade of the town, the strolling officers and their ladies pretended they were on holiday, not in flight. The arcades of the Narzan gallery, where Paul came to take the waters, were filled with Caucasian silver merchants and Armenian rug dealers and their wares. In the restaurants and outdoor cafés, waiters struggled to keep up with the custom; men in monocles and slicked-back hair snapped their fingers for service, ladies beckoned irately with their fans. On Fridays, the covered food market was full of Petrograd cooks and Moscow maids bargaining with Caucasian mountain people over melons and vegetables, tethered sheep and trussed chickens. Polite society kept up appearances, but on the quiet, it was starting to hawk its silver.

For the moment food was plentiful. The orchards and wheat fields of the south Caucasus were rich and bountiful. News of food shortages, pillaging gangs of deserters and clogged railways further north reached Kislovodsk as if from a distant planet. On the western front, the June offensive against the Austrians had ground to a halt and then turned into flight; the German army was closing in on Baku in the south and Riga in the north; yet in Kislovodsk none of the White officers seemed in a hurry to leave for the front.

Every day between eleven o'clock and noon, a Cossack band played martial airs at the bandstand in the main city park to an audience of officers and their ladies. One day in September, Dima and Nicholas, aged thirteen and fourteen, were there at the edge of the crowd when the music trailed off in a discord: someone had leaped onto the bandleader's podium and shoved the bandleader aside. From the back, the boys could see a slim figure in khaki standing on the conductor's podium and when they pushed closer they could hear a firm female voice. She shouted that she had just returned from the Riga front where the Germans had broken through and were sweeping everything before them. The soldiers had leaped from their trenches and had gunned down officers who tried to stop them. Then she turned on the crowd and shouted: ‘Have you no shame! No patriotism! No comradely feeling! You loll about here while your fellow officers are being shot down by their own men, while your womenfolk have taken your place! Save Russia! Save those heroes and heroines! Form Battalions of Death!'