The Russian Album (18 page)

In the hush after she finished, a general next to the boys began to sob. Officers and their ladies surged toward her and swept her out of the park. She was fair-haired and frail with a harrowed look in her eyes. Men were saying, ‘She is a Jeanne d'Arc! How she can speak! We must go! The first unit can be formed and leave in a couple of days!'

Next morning, the Kislovodsk papers referred to a regrettable incident at the bandstand, a hysterical outburst by a poor woman who needed rest and who should not have got mixed up in men's affairs. At noon that day, the orchestra played on and the officers and their ladies clapped as if nothing had happened.

For the oldest boy Nicholas, the scene at the bandstand laid bare the rotten core of the fruit. These generals who sobbed when she had finished, these Guardsmen whose uniform he had once dreamed he would wear, would not risk the crease in their tight leggings to defend their own country from the Germans. At the breakfast table, his father sipped his tea, sunk in his depression, saying nothing, adding to his son's disillusion by his silence. At night in secret, Nick began to fill his school notebook with earnest doggerel celebrating the dawn of the Revolution:

In the East, the leaden night

The orb of day repels

Over Russia Freedom's light

The night of gloom dispels.

In the autumn of 1917, Peggy Meadowcroft took a picture of young Nicholas sitting at his father's feet on the veranda steps, smiling and clutching his bare knees. Snow clings in wet clumps to the fruit trees in the foreground; in the background the hillside is white with snow. It is a bright day in late October. Paul is reclining in a deck chair, shrunken inside an overcoat, his face slack and puffy, the springs of energy in his body all run dry. He was slipping out of reach of his sons. If they asked him a question, it was minutes before he answered. He sat silently for hours, copies of his official reports to the Tsar on his knees.

In late October 1917, the local paper reported the storming of the Winter Palace, Kerensky's flight, the first decrees of the new Soviet power. In the last dismal hours, the only defenders of the frozen corridors of the palace had been the Women's Battalion, women like the one on the bandstand who had shouted through her tears in vain.

By the winter of 1918 Russia was plunged into civil war. White armies were in the field in Siberia, in the Crimea and in the north around Petrograd. But for the moment, the struggle was far away. For most of the autumn and winter the family went on as if the world beyond the green gates of their little house in Kislovodsk was still intact. The effects of the October Revolution did not reach the south Caucasus until a Soviet commissar, Kirov, proclaimed the advent of Soviet power from the balcony of the concert hall in the spring of 1918 and a Soviet of local workers replaced the old town council. But the lurid fears about what the Reds would do once they seized power did not materialize. The banks were nationalized but Paul managed to transfer his funds to a local cooperative society before his bank shut its doors for the last time. When the cooperatives were nationalized, he managed to withdraw his money and store it in an earthenware jar in the bathroom. Life kept on much as before. The boys began preparing for their gymnasium examinations with their tutors and managed to pass them in the spring. Paul kept up his routine of taking the waters though with no discernible effect on his health or his mood. Natasha ran the little troop of servants. The mountain people still brought their food to the Friday market.

By the early summer of 1918, General Denikin and General Wrangel's White armies were doing battle with Trotsky's Red armies in the north Caucasus, seventy miles away. Yet workers from Paul's factories near Moscow kept showing up in Kislovodsk, having traversed the zones of the civil war with letters from Paul's factory manager in their knapsacks and hard cash in their boots. Some of these messengers melted away into the civil war with their master's money, but most made it all the way. They would eat in the kitchen and sleep the night in the servants' quarters and then they would set off next day with their master's messages, to make their return crossing of a country cut in two by civil war.

One day in the spring of 1918, a disagreeable old soldier, Sergeant Yankevitch, with four St George's Crosses pinned to his tunic, arrived at the green gates with some frightened-looking Ukrainian serving girls in tow. Paul's sister, Mika, had despatched them on a thousand-mile journey from Kroupodernitsa with potatoes and corn in their sacks and money in their boots. Grumbling all the way, Sergeant Yankevitch had carried out his mission and now wanted a good hot meal and a bed. He was the last of the messengers from the vanished life in the north, the last bearer of tidings from Kroupodernitsa and Countess Mika. She was now alone on the estate in the path of the German army marching into the Ukraine.

Paul pasted the money the old soldier had brought from Kroupodernitsa inside the upright piano in Peggy Meadowcroft's room. In the earthenware jar under the floorboards of the bathroom he hid Natasha's jewellery and his reports to the Tsar. Nothing had happened, but rumours told them searches and confiscations were about to start.

In early June 1918 they heard firing in the hills behind the town, then the grumbling of artillery and the screech of Red armoured trains on the railway lines. They learned that a party of marauding Cossack irregulars, under the command of a Tsarist colonel named Andrei Shkuro, were making raids on the Red defences at the edge of town. One morning, the family awoke to the chattering of a machine gun. Jumping up to his bedroom window, Nick saw a body lying in the roadway and soldiers in khaki advancing up the street. When it was safe to go out, Nick went into the garden where he found spent cartridges and a bloody bayonet.

Shkuro's cavalry rode into the city. Tsarist officers donned their old uniforms and women held out money and clothing to the Cossack horsemen. Here at last, everyone thought, was the advance guard of White victory. But Shkuro did not have the troops to hold the town. He swept in to rescue his wife from a Red hospital and swept out again, leaving the Whites to repent of their rejoicing. As the Reds moved back into the city, servants betrayed their masters, and neighbours betrayed each other to the Red authorities. In the mountains the Red cavalry burned Cossack villages.

Food began to go short. The mountain people stopped bringing their produce to market, and on Fridays Tonia and Koulakoff returned with their shopping bags empty. Paul roused himself from his torpor and set to work digging a vegetable garden in the back yard. But he was too weak to keep it up: handing the spade to Vaclav, the Czech gardener, he limped back to bed clutching his back, the colour draining from his face.

In August, Natasha decided Paul should take the mud-bath cures at Essentuki, another spa town nearby. Savage battles were being waged between the Red and White armies only forty miles away, yet at Essentuki Paul spent a reflective week up to his neck in mud in the company of two old generals wondering what had happened to the Tsar and his family. By then they were almost certainly dead. Paul returned to Kislovodsk, still no better, in time for Natasha's birthday. Five days later, on 30 August 1918, the head of the Petrograd secret police was assassinated, while in Moscow a Socialist Revolutionary assassin tried and failed to kill Lenin. In reprisal, terror was unleashed across Russia. The blacked-out cars filled with men in leather coats began making their nightly roundups.

They came for Paul on 6 September in the hours before dawn, pounding with their fists on the green gate, rattling the handles of the back veranda windows and hammering on the front door. Natasha shouted to Paul and the boys to stay in bed and rose to open the door. They swarmed past her through the house, twenty-five of them in all, led by a seaman from the Black Sea fleet named Tursky with a large diamond ring on his finger and drug-blurred eyes. Natasha felt herself shaking from head to foot, but she brought her voice under control and demanded to know what they wanted. The seaman asked her who lived in the house and he wanted to know whether her boys were of draftable age. She insisted that Nick, a tall fourteen-year-old, was really only twelve.

Then Paul appeared in the hallway, his greatcoat over his shoulders, gaunt and composed. The sailor handed him a search warrant signed by the Bolshevik Extraordinary Committee. They emptied his desk, took his ministerial briefcase and searched the high Dutch-tiled stoves. They found Natasha's housekeeping money, but when she pleaded that if they took it the family would be destitute, they returned it to her. One of the search party was a student wearing a cap from Moscow University. Paul remarked quietly, ‘What a strange meeting, colleague,' and the student looked away. The leader of the search party then ordered his men to take Paul downtown for questioning. Paul kissed and blessed his children, and the men led him out into the street. Natasha dashed into the garden and called after them in the darkness, ‘When will I see him again?' As they loaded him into an automobile, she heard someone shout back, ‘Tomorrow morning early at the station.'

The car had only proceeded a short distance down the street when it stopped and the men went into another house to make a search. Paul sat in the car between two guards listening to the shouts and screams and banging of doors as the search party went about its work. After Paul had waited an hour outside, a soldier rode up to the car and ordered him to get out. Covered by a young soldier from behind, Paul walked the mile and a half down to the railway station through the silent streets. After half an hour, the soldier let Paul stop and rest. Sitting beside him on the curb, the soldier said he had been a student at the Technical Academy in Petrograd and had joined the Red Army because he had nothing to eat. Then he added in a whisper, ‘This number will not go through.'

When Paul reached the Kislovodsk railway station, the local trade-union guards lifted him up gently into the freight car. When the Red guards taking the roll got to his name, the sergeant muttered that there must be some mistake. He had been a student in the local primary school: he remembered the teacher had once asked the class to stand and sing a song in praise of Count Paul Ignatieff. Paul clung to these hopeful signs even when he heard shooting outside the railway car at dawn, and saw a Red soldier sliding his revolver back in his pocket and barking an order to bury bodies in the ditch behind the car.

At first light, Natasha was running along the tracks by the station. She found Paul at last lying with a few other prisoners huddled in his overcoat in a freight car that stank of motor oil. Natasha bullied the man standing guard until he allowed her to approach to within arm's length of her husband. Paul looked weak and exhausted. They only had time for a few words before the guard ordered her away.

Natasha returned with her son Dima that afternoon, carrying Paul's medicine for his angina, a syringe, some bandages and yoghurt in glass jars. The sentry rummaged through the bandages, driving Natasha into a passion of rage. Screaming that his filthy hands had contaminated everything, she seized the yoghurt from Dima's hands and hurled it into the ditch. Paul watched her from the open door of the freight car. He said, ‘Dearest, calm yourself, calm yourself.' Natasha returned to the railway siding at nightfall, but the car had been shunted some distance away and she wandered across the tracks looking for it in vain. Exhausted and desperate, she returned home again and informed the family that she was going to Bolshevik headquarters to protest at her husband's incarceration. The family pleaded with her to stay where she was: it was curfew, she risked being shot. A family friend named Professor Nechaev – who was collaborating with the Bolshevik Soviet in the running of the city's schools – had assembled a delegation to plead for Paul's life before the town Soviet. Natasha refused to listen, said good night to her children and took a cab down to Bolshevik headquarters in the Grand Hotel.

Through the long hours of that evening, she waited alone in the lobby for members of the Bolshevik committee to appear. Around midnight, a commissar named Atarbekov, a stout bull-faced man in a Cossack uniform with a red armband, passed through the lobby on his way to bed. She leaped up and demanded to know what he had done with her husband. He waved her away: he had just finished a heavy dinner and needed to sleep. Next there appeared the drugged sailor Tursky, who had been leader of the search party that had arrested Paul. He shouted that she risked being shot for being out after curfew, and Natasha replied that if she didn't find out what had happened to her husband, she didn't care if they did shoot her. Tursky then seemed to relent. He hinted that he might be able to do something next day. The former mayor of the town was in the lobby and appealed to Tursky to let her go home. One of Tursky's bodyguard accompanied her home, drunkenly recounting his ‘work for the great bloodless revolution'.

Natasha heard that the prisoners were being taken by train to the Bolshevik headquarters in the south Caucasus at Piatigorsk, a spa town about twelve miles away. The next morning she secured a pass from her friend Professor Nechaev to go to Piatigorsk, authorized as a schoolteacher sent to buy sheet music for the schools. After another fruitless exchange of insults with the Bolsheviks at the Grand Hotel, she walked to the station, where friends and acquaintances clustered around whispering that all the prisoners were being brought to the station to be liberated. Just then she saw her husband being led from a railway car. Accosting Tursky, who was strutting along the platform with his guard at his side, she asked him when her husband would be liberated. ‘He won't be liberated,' Tursky said with a smile.

She screamed at him, ‘How dare you cheat me! You promised to let him go free.'

‘I promised nothing.'

‘Then I will accompany him.'

‘You do not have a pass.'

‘Yes I do!' she shouted. Reaching into her bag she grabbed a piece of paper and waved it in his face. He took it, examined it and returned it to her with a smile. She snatched it back. It was a shopping list. Aghast, she dug into her bag, found the real permit and handed it to him.