The Russian Album (19 page)

Tursky watched this comedy impassively. ‘You won't go,' he said and turned his back on her.

At this moment, the doors of the station opened and the prisoners under guard were led to the train. Paul was among them; there were two Tsarist provincial governors she recognized and a party of Socialist Revolutionary opponents of the Bolsheviks who were carrying their bedding and singing revolutionary songs. Before Natasha and Paul could exchange a word the train moved out of the station towards Piatigorsk, which she knew had become a killing ground for White hostages. She felt like a stone dropped into a well.

Women on the platform comforted her, told her to be quiet, not to make a fuss. They told her to go home to her children. She did not go home to her children. All that day she sat in the lobby of the Grand Hotel, stunned and listless – half listening, half watching as the waiters passed to and fro in the lobby, as the Soviet committees argued behind the closed doors of the tea rooms and palm courts. Alone in her black dress and shawl, seated hour after hour of that long day, unnoticed by passers-by, she wondered in the unwounded part of herself how she would keep her sons alive now. She watched the September sun go down, distantly heard the shouts and clump of army boots in the marble hallway. Darkness roused her. She found a waiting cab and told the driver to take her home.

Her boys were all sitting in darkness: the electricity had been cut. In the silence and the darkness they sat together, stunned and motionless. To them, disaster had been a card always dealt to others. Everything their life had meant to that moment repeated the same reassuring message: you are immune. It will happen to others, but it will not happen to you. Now it was happening to them.

In the train to Piatigorsk, Paul was packed into the carriages with the Socialist Revolutionaries. As the blacked-out train crawled its way along the track, shunting around the edge of gunfire at the front, he sat muffled in his coat listening to the Socialist Revolutionaries sing the anthem ‘We fell victims to the fatal struggle', which he had heard as a governor from his office window and which he now heard as a fellow prisoner of the new power. He thought he was about to die. The Socialist Revolutionaries thought he was about to die too. But they were sure that the Bolsheviks would spare them as fellow revolutionaries. At Piatigorsk station, the platform was filled with Red Army soldiers who pushed towards the hostages threateningly. The Ukrainian trade-union guards surrounded Paul and their leader shouted, ‘The first one who moves towards us will be a dead man.' An old soldier from the Ukraine led him along the platform to a horse-drawn trolley. By this time Paul was scarcely able to walk. He leaned heavily on the soldier's arm. In the trolley that drew them along to the town prison, the old soldier, whispering, asked whether there was anything he could do to help. Paul just had time to reply: ‘Tell the schools.'

Paul and the other prisoners from Kislovodsk were taken to a room at the entrance to the prison. Mr Gueh, chairman of the Bolshevik committee in Piatigorsk, a suave little man with bright intelligent eyes and a goatee, entered and asked in perfect French whether he could speak to Count Ignatieff. ‘Citizen Ignatieff, you mean,' said Paul in Russian. Gueh seemed amused; the phone rang and Gueh went to answer it. Paul could hear a lady's voice inviting Gueh to tea and Gueh replying that he would be delighted to accept. Gueh excused himself and went back to the meeting to consider his prisoners' fates.

After a wash at the prison pump in the courtyard, Paul was led into a large room: provincial governors, Jewish merchants, judges, army officers, Serbs, Poles, Tsarists and Socialist Revolutionaries all lay against the whitewashed walls waiting. There was an old armchair in the middle of the room. The prisoners led him to it and sat him gently down.

Just before eight o'clock, the prisoners heard footsteps in the passage. The door opened and Atarbekov, the bull-like Bolshevik whom Natasha had accosted in the hotel lobby in Kislovodsk the night before, appeared with the prison superintendent and a guard. They pointed at citizen Ignatieff.

‘You are free. Leave the prison immediately.'

Paul said he would not leave without the others. Atarbekov pointed to two Tsarist former governors whom Paul had befriended in the railway car and said, ‘Take them quickly.'

‘You will give us a certificate that we are free?' Paul asked.

‘I have no office here and no stamp so I cannot give you any documents,' Atarbekov replied.

‘Then I shall not leave the prison. The town is under martial law, and I prefer to be shot in the regular way to being shot like a dog in a dark street corner.'

One of the prisoners was tugging at Paul's elbow urging him to make a run for it. But Paul was adamant. Why, he insisted, had he been arrested at all and why now was he being told to leave?

Atarbekov replied gruffly, ‘We did not know that you had been useful to national education.' One of the prison guards chimed in, ‘You may not know, but we knew.' In heavily accented Russian the guard explained that he had been a pupil at a textile vocational school in Lodz in Poland, funded and encouraged while Paul was minister. Paul said he would be willing to leave the prison with this man. He then demanded that Atarbekov phone the Kislovodsk Soviet to tell them he was free and to inform his family.

The Ukrainian trade unionists had done as Paul had told them: they had gone to the schools and had happened on a teachers' council in session. A local teacher named Oudariuk who had joined the Bolsheviks and helped them in map-reading in the Caucasus told the trade unionists to spread the word about the arrest of Count Ignatieff among the local schools. Soon teachers and students from all over town were gathered under the windows of the Bolshevik headquarters, standing silently in the autumn twilight. The Bolshevik teacher went into the meeting and demanded Paul's liberation. When Gueh began to protest, the teacher gestured to the crowd below and told him they would liberate the prisoner by force. The Bolshevik hold on the town was uncertain: the Whites were in the hills, and all available detachments were at the front. An uprising of the citizens of the town had just been suppressed. The only guards at Gueh's disposal were members of the Polish Legion and they had refused to do anything other than guard duty: they would not intervene against the crowd. Gueh's hand was forced. He ordered the immediate liberation of the prisoner. Paul owed his life to the capricious fortune of civil war, to some Ukrainian trade unionists and to a young Bolshevik geography teacher he had never met.

Back at the villa in Kislovodsk, the boys were lying awake in the darkness when the phone rang in the passageway. They heard their mother's excited voice, and before they could clamber out of bed, she rushed into their room: ‘He is free! He is free!' The thing seemed impossible – no one could sleep that night wondering whether to believe the news.

That night, Paul lay on the prison floor, listening to the tubercular coughing of one of the prisoners, wondering whether to believe that he would be free next day. Next morning, Atarbekov did produce a document certifying that the Ignatieffs could continue to live unmolested in Kislovodsk. With the prisoners whose release he had demanded as a condition of his own, Paul was freed and took the train back to Kislovodsk. In the late afternoon, after forty-eight hours of imprisonment, Paul returned to the family villa. Peggy Meadowcroft gave him a cigarette ‘to stiffen him up': it was the first he had ever smoked. His sons can still see their father, gaunt and haggard, standing in his greatcoat smoking that cigarette in the passageway of the darkened villa on Bayazetskaya street. It was – Dima says – the most important moment of his life.

Next day when Natasha was shopping in the Vinogradnaya Alleya she saw a man reading a newspaper with an expression of horror on his face. She went up and he pointed at a column of 140 names, the list of the White prisoners executed by the Red firing squad on the slopes of Mount Mashuk on the outskirts of Piatigorsk. Among the names were those of the two generals with whom Paul had shared the mud baths of Essentuki two weeks before; the Socialist Revolutionaries who had sung ‘We fell victims to the fatal struggle' in Paul's railway car; and nearly all of the frightened men who had offered him the only chair in the prison cell in Piatigorsk. Tsarists and Socialist Revolutionaries were tossed into the same shallow grave. Half way down the newspaper column, Natasha found Paul's name.

Two days after his release Kislovodsk changed hands. Colonel Shkuro's Cossacks rode back in from the hills. Nick was chopping wood in the front yard when an evil-looking Cossack whose uniform hung on him in tatters banged on the gate and asked if they had any shirts or trousers to spare. Nick did have a pair of new breeches made from khaki cloth sent from the family factories. He gave these to the Cossack, before realizing that he had left himself with only the knee pants he was wearing. While the Cossack stood at the gate spreading the breeches over his tattered legs, Nick asked him what kind of government they would set up when the White armies had taken Moscow. Would they restore the monarchy?

‘Monarchy, nothing! When we are through with these Bolshevik devils, we'll cut all the aristocrats' throats, the bloodsuckers!' He took the breeches and rode off.

Several weeks later, the oldest boys were out walking with Peggy Meadowcroft in the parched hills at the edge of town when they came across a party of Caucasian mountaineers who told them that the Reds were about to return to Kislovodsk. ‘What will happen then,' the boys asked. The men with their grizzled faces and shaggy hats smiled and drew a line across their throats with the point of their daggers. When Peggy and the boys got home everyone was safe but there was already a Red battery on Coffin Mountain pounding the outskirts of town and a White battery replying to the fire, sending columns of earth shooting up from the mountain's flanks. In the afternoon, Nick clambered over the garden wall and stole away up the hillside to get a better look. He lay on the parched grass, feeling the last autumn heat in the earth, and watched the eddying line of a battle on the grasslands above the town, six miles away. White puffs of smoke rose from cannon mouths, bodies ran and fell and lay still. It was like a painting in a museum.

The clatter of machine guns close by drove him back over the garden wall to the safety of the villa. Shrapnel was bursting over the roads near the house. The Reds were bombarding the railway station. Soon Hludovskaya street, the road at the bottom of the garden, was clogged with fearful White families fleeing to the hills. Natasha's brother Peter was among them, leaving his family behind while he went to join Colonel Shkuro's White Cossack forces.

Paul was too ill to move, and besides he put no faith in Shkuro or any of the Whites. So all that afternoon the family watched from the window as the silent, desperate column tramped past their window and disappeared in a plume of dust into the distance. By dusk, the White Cossack cavalry were retreating up the road from the advancing Red forces. From the veranda the boys could see the crimson puffs of shrapnel bursting over the fleeing White civilians. Paul and Natasha and their children settled down to dinner in darkness, in a town awaiting invasion. After dark, they heard the rumble of a Red armoured train arriving at the railway station and from the town below there rose the faint sound of a band playing the
Internationale.

The next months of Red occupation, from October 1918 to late January 1919, were a nightmare blur of searches, rumour, hunger and cold. Seventeen times armed parties ransacked the house searching for weapons, contraband, jewels, food and fuel. The family managed to hide some things in Peggy Meadowcroft's upright piano. She pinned a Union Jack to the door of her room and when they came to search she stood before the door and declared in Putney Russian that her room was British territory and they had no right to enter. Then she would sit down at the piano and pound out ‘It's A Long Long Way To Tipperary' to keep up family morale. Everything else that was precious, the jewels, the last of the money and the reports to the Tsar, were safely hidden in the earthenware jar under the floorboards in the bathroom, but after the sixteenth search books, icons, silver and linen were gone. Every time it seemed as if it was over, they would return, lock everyone in their rooms and start all over again.

When they had taken everything else, the ragged and hungry men came a seventeenth time and tipped the contents of the children's drawers and cupboards onto bed sheets, knotted them up and carried them off. Natasha insisted that they at least leave shoes for the children. One of the searchers looked at her and said the citizeness did not understand: his own children had never had any shoes.

Bit by bit, the old sustaining order of cooks and ladies' maids, footmen and butlers melted away. Koulakoff the butler became too openly Bolshevik in his sympathies: he was dismissed. The cook, in Natasha's words, ‘behaved ignobly' with Katia, the ladies' maid, and made her pregnant. The two of them were dismissed, though they continued to live in the town and Natasha continued to visit Katia to seek advice and help. When one of the tutors returned from a visit to the north of Russia and came back in Natasha's words ‘a regular wild man of the forest, dirty, all covered with hair, altogether a physical and moral bolshevik', he too was sent packing. Soon only a handful of the servants who had made the journey from Petrograd remained.

George, the youngest boy, lived throughout the revolution like a bird under the wing of his nurse Mania. She had raised him from infancy, steadied him when he took his first steps in the dark garden of the villa in Tsarskoe Selo, spread the white linen sheets in the train compartment to keep him from the soot of the journey south from Petrograd, dressed him up in a Cossack's uniform to be photographed and sat with him through the night they took his father away. She was a slight, brown-eyed Siberian peasant girl of implacable devotion who came to believe that George was really her baby.