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.30
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.31
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.32 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.33
Upon receiving a telegram with the news of the tsar’s abdication, Court Chamberlain Skadovsky purportedly dropped dead of a heart attack.34 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.”35 “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.”36 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.37
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.”38 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.”39
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.40 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!”241
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 he
lp 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.”42
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.43
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.44
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.45
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.46
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.47 Count Sergei was equally disturbed by the “disgraceful” behavior of Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich.48 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.
“When we meet again, where will Russia have got to? . . . Shall we meet again?” he asked.
“You are in a gloomy mood, Monseigneur,” the ambassador replied.
“How can you expect me to forget that I’m marked down for the gallows?” Grand Duke Nikolai had good reason to fear for his life. He was shot together with three other Romanovs—his brother Georgy and his cousins Dmitry Konstantinovich and Pavel Alexandrovich, the brother of Tsar Alexander III—in Petrograd in early 1919.49
The February Revolution took place in Petrograd, unbeknownst to the rest of the country. Yet as the news of the events spread, first to Moscow, then to other cities in Russia in the first days of March, the reaction was remarkable in its sameness. Joy and celebrations greeted word of the abdication everywhere; there was almost no violence and no resistance.50 The reign of the Romanovs vanished into the air like so much steam from a boiling kettle. Yelizaveta Rodzianko, the daughter-in-law of Mikhail Rodzianko, was thrilled when the news reached her in the south. Russia, she believed, was finally pulling itself from the “muck” and heading out onto a “bright path.”51 Across Russia, many nobles shared that initial feeling of relief and optimism, followed by apprehension at what the future held. A noble schoolgirl in Ukraine, Marie Kastchenko celebrated wildly the news of the abdication with her classmates; at home, her father scoffed at their happiness: “ ‘Bloodless Revolution,’ this is only the beginning.”52 In Kazan, Olga Ilyn, born into the noted Boratynsky family, was riding in a sleigh with friends to a wedding when they came upon a crowd bearing red banners. The finely dressed Olga and her companions drew their attention. The crowd spat cries of “burzhui” and then warned, “You won’t be driving around like this for much longer!”53
By the first of March word had reached the Davydoff estate of Sably in the Crimea that something serious had taken place in Petrograd, but no one knew what precisely. Finally, when he learned what had happened, Alexander Davydoff sat stunned at his desk for two hours, contemplating the enormity of the event and the unknown future it heralded. He wondered whether he should stay or flee to one of the towns but could not be sure what to do. “To answer this question I lacked one certainty, which was whether the peasants would, as in revolutions of the past, immediately kill the landowners, destroy their homes and loot the agricultural buildings, or would they wait and see if their old dreams could not now fail to be accomplished by legal means?” Davydoff decided it would be cowardly to flee, and so he chose to remain on the estate and, as he put it, “take part in the revolution, prevent its excesses as best he could and try, even in a minimal role, to preserve the economic strength of the nation.”54
Most of the Golitsyns were then in Moscow. Little Sergei Golitsyn, the mayor’s grandson, heard about the revolution while recovering in the hospital from an appendectomy. His mother was at his side when the surgeon burst into the room, yelling, “There’s revolution in Petrograd!” Sergei could not understand why the two adults were so happy at the news. “It seemed remarkable to me. How could things like that happen—the tsar, who had all those medals, and then they just got rid of him.” The change was apparent immediately. Sergei noticed on the way home that the tricolor tsarist flags that had ado
rned all the streetcars and houses when he had gone to the hospital had vanished and been replaced by red ones.55 Sergei’s father, Mikhail, was at work when the news of the abdication was announced. Everyone immediately burst into applause and let out cries of happiness.56
At home, the news split the family. While the mayor and his son Mikhail and Mikhail’s wife, Anna, supported the revolution, believing that now, finally, the war could be won, Russia would become stronger, and the peasants would live better and freer, the mayor’s wife, Sofia, and his brother Alexander cursed it. “My soul is troubled and worried,” Sofia wrote. “I can’t get used to the fact there is no more tsar and that he has been spurned and cast aside by everyone. And what will this so-called Freedom give us? The loss of our lands, destroyed estates, and all manner of violence.”57 Buoyed by a renewed sense of hope, Sergei’s parents threw themselves deeper into their work, Mikhail overseeing the city’s hospitals, Anna serving at the Society for the Protection of Mothers and Infants.58
Mikhail’s brother Alexander shared this optimism. Soon after the revolution, he left Moscow for the family’s Petrovskoe estate, where he spent much time talking to the peasants in the area about what the revolution meant and answering their questions. Alexander’s meetings with the peasants deepened his optimism for Russia’s future, and so he agreed to serve the new Provisional Government as the commissar responsible for helping reorganize the local Zvenigorod government. Like every other nobleman who tried to work with the new government and peasants, Alexander failed. Soon he had to flee the countryside and eventually Russia itself. Looking back, he wrote, “Revolution was not unexpected by us, we knew that it was inevitable, that the old rotten bureaucratic Government was too handicapped, was incapable of meeting the growing needs of the nation; but we did not expect it to come during the war and did not dream that it would come in this form. We all idolized too much the Russian people, and how we were mistaken!”59
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